Chris Dwyer, Tracking Ships, Terrorists and Pirates

What might have happened had the U.S. cargo ship hijacked by Somali pirates this year in the Indian Ocean had the advantage of a warning system that detected the threat hours before the attack?

Chris Dwyer and his colleagues at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., are developing a global maritime system that would automatically detect such a threat and generate an alert no matter where the ships are located.

Their satellite system currently tracks more than 70,000 ships sailing the world's oceans. Their goal is to enhance this technology to help identify and stop terrorist threats as early and far from U.S. shores as possible, and to spot other potential trouble on the high seas before it happens.

"The ultimate goal would be to automatically track all ocean-going vessels just as we track every aircraft, but that's not so easy when you're talking about millions of watercraft at sea every day," Dwyer said.

While the volume of ships coming into U.S. ports is enormous, limited resources only allow authorities to inspect a small fraction of those vessels and their contents. In addition, the process of compiling and analyzing relevant intelligence information has been painstaking and labor-intensive for multiple organizations with distinct but overlapping jurisdictions.

As the technical manager for the Navy project, Dwyer is leading the efforts to integrate intelligence, surveillance, observations and navigation systems into a common maritime awareness picture accessible throughout the U.S. government.

One component includes software that tracks ship movements and detects abrupt or unusual course changes.

"A cargo ship may start with a plan to go from point A to point B, but change course halfway because the owner of the shipment can get a better price that week by redirecting the delivery to point C instead," Dwyer said.

He said the system helps trigger an analysis to determine if a course change is legitimate or not.

Other new software compilesand integrates data from multiple sources that contain relevant maritime information on vessels, people and cargo. The system automatically skims the data and identifies anomalous conditions that are flagged for further inspection.

For example, the system would send an alert if a ship is approaching Long Beach, Calif., and a ship by the same name was reported in Rotterdam a day earlier. The system would also flag a ship for inspection if an arrival report indicated a crew size that differed from the size of the departing crewPeter Wilhelm, director of the Naval Center for Space Technology, credited Dwyer with fostering much of the collaboration among federal agencies, foreign governments and private companies to ensure successful information sharing.

"Chris has a unique ability to get people who have not always cooperated in the past to work together," Wilhelm said.

Kent Thew, technical director of the Coast Guard's Maritime Intelligence Fusion Center Pacific, also highlighted the significance of international cooperation.

"Our foreign partners are essential to our efforts to identify threats in the Pacific," Thew said. "They often have key information that we need to complete our picture of developing threats."

Wilhelm said a major challenge is protecting secure information and its sources while declassifying the appropriate information so it can be used by the people who need it. He said Dwyer began by formulating a strategy to develop a "culture of sharing" between international partners and the United States, and among U.S. agencies.

Dwyer started working part time at Naval Research Laboratory during college, and then full time following graduation. Twenty-four years later, he said, "I never dreamed that I would work on so many cool things. I've created pieces of satellites that are now in orbit."

In his pursuit of protecting our national security, Dwyer is likely to soon list another cool accomplishment on his resume - helping to track and perhaps capture pirates.

This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Visit www.ourpublicservice.org for more about the organization's work.