It’s truly astounding how much information the government has not just on individuals – but also on our residences. GlobalPOV recently spoke with Mr. Chuck Hansen from Hansen Technologies to learn more about who has access to this information, and why this is another vital part of the Homeland Security vs. Privacy puzzle.

GlobalPOV: What does Hansen Technologies do?
CH: The issue that we attempt to help counties/local governments/municipalities solve is to consolidate and cross-reference these “information stovepipes” that they’ve got. For a city of 100,000 people, we will typically go in there and find 100 separate databases that have a parcel address or citizen account number. You just don’t have much intelligence of citizen-government or business-government transactions if these things are all in separate units. Our specialty has been not just identifying what those are, but identifying the individual, unique business processes. That’s been our business proposition for the last 20 years.

GlobalPOV: Tell us a little bit about the early days of the company.
CH: We had very humble beginnings. Some people work at the family grocery store, and they really know the margins and stock turnover and stuff. My father was as a civil engineer – he was raised in South Dakota, and his first job was a traffic engineer. In 1960, he went to work for IBM and he sold mainframe computers to the state and local government market. Ten years later, he was the director of marketing for state and local government for IBM out of Washington DC. I’m 46 – my entire life has been influenced through the family business of IT and state and local government.

In 1983, we started automating sewer and water systems. My father had the idea to individually identify a citizen’s parcel and identify the individual pipe that would feed to the meters in a citizen’s house or apartment … identify the sewer or water main that pipe is connected to … and to uniquely identify all of the pipes through the pumping stations downstream to the pumping plant. That citizen inventory—that citizen connectivity to a physical asset—then started to get all of this wealth of information of a citizen’s parcel. We grew into building footprints, and building permits, and code enforcement violations, and utility bills and water usage. So essentially, you look at the information that can be contained and is contained in some of our larger client cities, we would know everything about an individual person or property and their transactions, in many cases, ever since that structure was constructed.

GlobalPOV: It sounds like there’s a ton of sensitive information about each individual’s residence?
CH: Absolutely. I was a meeting with the FBI and I started drilling into a parcel – a map from 30,000 feet, and was able to zoom in to a digital ortho that was geo-encoded with an address. I highlighted the parcel, and then had a complete profile about everything about that location. It had the businesses that were there, the date that they were incorporated, licensing information, etc. They had chemicals that may have been processed or inventoried there. It had a detailed breakdown of all heating, ventilation and air conditioning information. It had a floor plan. It had all of the existing licenses.

GlobalPOV: Who gets to see that parcel?
CH: They [the FBI] stopped me and asked me that exact question. And furthermore, they asked me what’s your security clearance? Because that area was a high security area. That was city information that has to be secured behind very sophisticated firewalls – especially if you now want to go ahead and have a portal to do citizen transactions over the Internet. If you want to do transactions and not just information, you have to be very careful on who gets access to that information.

GlobalPOV: Sounds like there’s a lot of sensitive information that most citizens aren’t even aware exists.
CH: Absolutely. There’s a lot of discussion on the information that the financial institutions have on you. Rishi Sood, Gartner Group – was just at our conference this week. He was stating how the state and local government market next to the financial institutions. If you think about it, the government is the second largest market next to the financial institutions. And if you think about it, the government’s business model is identical to the financial institutions. They’ve got our real estate loans, credit cards, money markets, 401ks, checking accounts, savings accounts, car loans – you name it, they’ve got it, and it’s just indexed by our social security numbers. Governments are the same way, and people really don’t realize what is out there and available … and really needs to be consolidated in a secure, protected manner.

Jim Flizek [CIO of the Department of Treasury] states it very well. He is the closest thing we have to a federal CIO. He says, “The homeland will not be secure until the home town is secure.” I think that’s very relevant. How do you engage in security? How to do you identify critical infrastructures that support families—whether it’s from the water supply and knowing when you turn on that tap it’s going to be free from bacteria, the bridges that are out there and the average daily traffic counts across those bridges—there are very few standards for how to inventory assets, let alone their criticality or vulnerability.

GlobalPOV: Are there any instances where this information is being compromised?
CH: Yes. Up until 9/11, cities were rampantly putting their entire water distribution systems, and the maps – down to the critical valves and backflow devices—on the Internet so that people could look at it. Many still have their GIS’s open and actively available on their Internet Web site. Would you want to do that—have your pressurized water tap connection exposed like that? I don’t think so. We all hear about the need to protect our reservoirs and our streams. But the quickest way to get at people is from their backyards and in their neighborhoods. The thing that scares me about national security is the target-rich environment that we have.

I believe that to take information or to do a business transaction and to put it directly on the web without proper planning and execution is criminal … and if not criminal, extremely naive. Those could be the weak links that terror groups go after.

GlobalPOV: Any concluding thoughts?
CH: As I’ve told everybody at our conferences, the best way we can prepare is not just to marshal the fire department and EMS – but there are millions of public service people. They need to be aware. The guys that go and fix the water main breaks and trim the electric lines—they need to be aware of things that are out of the ordinary. Does that mean that they need to be reporting events? Absolutely not. But these guys are out responding to customer calls and customer complaints and day to day transactions. I believe that through the daily transactions there are a number of things that people could be aware of and to notify those to the appropriate officials.

One thing that is very interesting today – there are two specific organizations being called upon to do a huge educational jumpstart in the US. One is called CIAO. the other is a group within the FBI called NIPC. Between those two organizations, they are now attempting to create and support information sharing in analysis centers. They’re called “information assurance and analysis centers.” There will be 12 isaac’s with the new Department of Homeland Security – HR 5005 (passed) or Senate Bill 2452 – the Joe Lieberman Thompson bill. There will be a dozen IAAC’s, by industry. The last IAAC that was formed was the interstate IAAC so that there can be some coordination.

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