After airline security was tightened in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) put out a call to commercial airline flight crews for volunteers to be trained to carry firearms on planes and even use deadly force in the event of future terrorist hijackings. In conjunction with the program, the federal agency needed a way to track the inventory of weapons and identify the trained flight crew. They turned to radio frequency identification.
Since July 2005, RFID tags have been embedded in the weapons used in the Federal Flight Deck Officer program, administered by the TSA’s Federal Air Marshal’s Service. The trained flight crew carries RFID-enabled ID cards, which are read by handheld interrogators when they check out weapons at classified locations.
The tracking of weapons and the credentialed flight crew are just two of dozens of RFID applications the U.S. government has implemented or is now testing to better protect Americans, improve agency efficiencies and cut costs to taxpayers. Three years ago, the U.S. Department of Defense started blazing a path for the federal government to use RFID technology, mandating that RFID tags be applied to cases, pallets and packages of supplies—from uniforms to motor oil—so they could be tracked through the military’s worldwide supply chain. The DOD, with its $440 billion-plus annual budget, wields a certain clout in the private sector; for many suppliers, the DOD is their biggest customer and they had no choice but to comply with the mandate.
On the civilian (nonmilitary) side of the federal government, where the combined budget exceeds defense spending by only a few billion dollars, RFID has become big business. Many different agencies are currently using or testing a wide range of RFID applications (see below). But each agency often needs to tailor the different uses of RFID to help solve unique problems or meet particular missions.
Taking Root
Here’s a sampling of the wide range of RFID applications being tested or deployed in the U.S. civilian federal government:
• Agency or Department: RFID Application
• Agriculture: Animal tracking for disease control
• Environmental Protection Agency: Hazardous waste tracking
• General Services Administration: Asset management and transportation
• Health and Human Services: Drug authentication, chip implants
• Homeland Security: Immigration, border control and customs; search and rescue; disaster response
• Interior: Access cards
• Labor: Records management
• NASA: Hazardous materials management
• Social Security Administration: Warehouse management, asset tracking, inventory control
• State: E-passports
• Transportation: Freight and mass transport
• Treasury: Records management
• U.S. Postal Service: Mail security and tracking
• Veterans Affairs: Patient and supply-chain trackingSome 34 agencies—both military and civilian—have been participating in a semi-regular forum to share RFID knowledge and work to ensure the interoperability of the RFID technologies being adopted in the federal government. The RFID Intra-Governmental Council—co-chaired by Alan Estevez, assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for supply-chain integration, and Robert Cresanti, undersecretary of commerce for technology—meets three or four times a year. The group is seeking to avoid some of the problems the federal government has encountered with incompatible information technology, which prevents different agencies from sharing information.
“We have to have interoperability in order to make the taxpayers’ investment in these innovations work for us,” Cresanti says. “Each of the departments knows that they are often called upon, particularly in crisis situations, to work with other departments.” The next time there is a hurricane, for example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) may need assistance in terms of logistics support and supplies from the DOD. The working group wants to make sure that FEMA’s RFID interrogators will be able to read the DOD’s tags on supplies so that the government realizes the efficiencies associated with RFID, in terms of saving time and costs in emergency situations. Another potential application for RFID would be tracking medicines in the event of a flu pandemic, to ensure that supplies reach the hospitals, military bases, university dorms and other locations where patients would be treated.
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U.S. federal government spending on RFID—in both civilian and defense agencies—is forecast to grow to $112 million in the 2009 fiscal year, according to a 2005 forecast by INPUT, a Reston, Va., market research firm specializing in the government marketplace. Along with growing government interest in RFID are challenges to implementing the technology. There are tough federal rules regarding privacy protection of government records and data, and each RFID implementation must meet those criteria before getting a green light. In addition, the federal government has a history of problems implementing technology solutions, including cost overruns, failed projects and stove-piped applications that make it impossible to electronically share data between agencies—and sometimes even within agencies.
Despite challenges, the federal government’s adoption of RFID could have a major impact on the private sector in the United States and around the globe, driving RFID adoption in many different industries. “The federal government is, by far, the largest consumer of IT products in the world—with an IT budget well over $60 billion this year,” says Douglas Farry, a managing director at McKenna Long & Aldridge and chair of the firm’s RFID practice group. “For many businesses, the government will be the largest driver of whether and how they do business with RFID—a force too large to ignore.”Bolstering Safety
The federal government seeks some of the same benefits from using RFID as the private sector in terms of finding files, tracking equipment or making supply chains run more efficiently. These benefits include cutting costs, streamlining operations, automating paper or manual processes, and gaining access to data that provides valuable insights into internal processes. But there is another reason that government agencies have been exploring RFID that has nothing to do with return on investment. That reason is to protect the public.
“On one hand, government is just another enterprise with a huge supply chain,” says Elliot Maxwell, a former special advisor to the Secretary of Commerce who now consults with companies on issues, including RFID. “But there are also some uniquely governmental missions to provide security on the borders, to protect the public health, and there are ways that they can use RFID technology for this.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was created in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon to bolster national security, has launched numerous RFID pilots and implementations. Within months of the attacks, the U.S. Customs Service, now under the DHS, developed the Container Security Initiative, designed to protect the shipping trade lanes, as an estimated 50 percent of all incoming trade with the United States arrives by ship. The main goal was to prevent terrorists from using maritime containers to deliver weapons. In addition to radiation-detection technology and identifying high-risk containers in advance, the program encourages the use of “smart containers” that use active RFID tags to seal shipping containers and prevent tampering during transit. The agency further encouraged shipping companies to adopt RFID-enabled seals by offering them use of a “green lane” to expedite cargo clearance, resulting in fewer inspections and delays and adding up to financial savings.
On another front, the U.S. government is looking at RFID to help thwart public health threats. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for example, is encouraging the private sector to use RFID to protect the pharmaceutical supply chain from counterfeit drugs. RFID could also be used to track food, which could speed up recalls in the event of outbreaks of disease from tainted products.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) initiated the National Animal Identification System—a partnership between state and federal governments and the livestock industry—in 2004 to standardize and expand livestock identification and tracking to quell potential outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease. The state and federal governments are encouraging the use of RFID in livestock tracking, but they are not mandating use of the technology. Some state governments have started inducing participation in the program—Michigan decided to mandate the use of RFID tags to identify cattle—but more than a dozen states have pending legislation to limit such requirements. Earlier this year, Wisconsin took a new approach. The state allowed livestock producers to take advantage of incentives for purchasing USDA-approved passive RFID tags, so that the cost of RFID wouldn’t be that much higher than the cost of the non-RFID ear tags previously used to ID cattle.Other agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Transportation, have funded or conducted RFID pilots to demonstrate that the technology can help them meet regulatory mandates such as providing safe transport for dangerous chemicals or other hazardous substances, noting that some commercial rail routes go through or nearby highly populated urban areas. The TSA recently published in the Federal Register a proposal to enhance the nation’s rail security by requiring carriers handling hazardous materials to report location and shipping information to the government upon request, a measure seen as bolstering the use of RFID in tracking rail shipments around the nation.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to launch an RFID pilot that will track drums of hazardous waste shipped from Mexico’s Maquiladora corridor to hazardous waste disposal facilities in the United States. The Mexican government requires U.S. companies with manufacturing plants in certain areas of Mexico to dispose of hazardous wastes from production in the United States. Currently, it is difficult to monitor or track these shipments and alert authorities to unlawful disposal or diversion, possibly by terrorists. Deborah Kopsick, an environmental scientist with the EPA, is overseeing the pilot, which will test how the tagged drums are read at border crossings and on arrival at U.S. disposal facilities.
“The system is designed,” Kopsick says, “so that if a shipment of waste does not arrive at a border crossing or receiving facility within a stated time, an alarm can be triggered for the appropriate parties.”
Identifying People
Several federal agencies are using RFID for identification and access control projects, ranging from identifying government employees and allowing them access to government buildings to using the technology in passports and entry visas for foreigners. The White House Office of Management and Budget has asked federal agencies to upgrade government employee identification cards to promote interoperability among government agencies and to minimize the risk of counterfeiting. The United States last year issued new Federal Information Processing Standards that require all agencies to move to a smart-card format for employee ID badges, which all government employees and some contractors will eventually have to use. The standard is intended to lead to a common RFID-based platform for ID purposes across federal departments and agencies for access to buildings or facilities, although some agencies may include biometric data for further verification for security purposes.
RFID is also the basis for several forms of government-issued identification used by citizens for purposes of travel across national borders. Last year, the federal government started issuing passports to U.S. citizens with an embedded RFID chip. These e-passports contain data including name, date of birth, nationality and a digitized photo of the holder. The government bowed to privacy concerns and included anti-skimming material in the cover of the passport to prevent that information from being captured by unauthorized persons. The United States has also used its influence to convince more than two dozen other countries to adopt e-passports so that their citizens may travel to the United States without visas.Some 1.1 million travelers cross U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico each day. The DHS is now evaluating results from a pilot that ran from August 2005 to November 2006, in which it issued 200,000 RFID-enabled border entry and exit forms to people who travel frequently through five different land ports.
“It was a test of the technology, not a test of tracking people entering or leaving,” says Anna Hinken, a DHS spokesperson. Results of the pilot, conducted under the guise of the US-VISIT program, are being examined so that government officials can make determinations about whether to implement RFID in order to more quickly clear frequent visitors through land borders. “By the time they got to the border guard, their information would be on a computer screen,” says Kathleen Carroll, director of government relations for HID, one of the largest manufacturers of government ID cards. “The border guard would look at the screen and the person in the car and let them go, as opposed to having to hand over a card and swipe the card. It would take only seconds.”
Tracking Assets
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)—which operates more than 150 medical centers across the country, as well as outpatient and rehabilitation clinics—uses RFID to track medical devices in about 25 different facilities, so the devices are easily located when needed. Charles DeSanno, the executive director of the VA’s enterprise infrastructure engineering department, says his office is currently planning an organization-wide RFID implementation to accommodate tracking of not only the devices but also prescription medications, disposable scopes and catheters, pallets of solutions and other goods that move through the VA’s supply chain.
“The VA is undertaking the deployment of RFID technology to allow us to be more efficient and provide better care, to utilize tech in a more efficient way to benefit our veteran population,” says DeSanno. “Cost containment is a factor, as is the improvement of health care by ensuring that products are available for procedures.”
The U.S. Postal Service has been using RFID for a decade to sample mail service performance to 52 countries, using about 600,000 active tags in dummy mail pieces that are tracked around the world. The test has recently been expanded to examine mail performance inside the United States, with a pilot now underway in Oregon to track the speed of mail delivery in the Portland metropolitan area. “This gives us a way to identify where the flow is not optimized,” says Clayton Bonnell, program manager of intelligent mail for the U.S. Postal Service. In addition to mail, the Postal Service also uses RFID to track larger assets, such as industrial forklifts and tugs, which move mail around a plant, and may soon explore tracking more than 400,000 vehicles.
Government agencies are also eyeing RFID as a potential way to cut down on the loss or theft of laptops—some containing sensitive government or citizen data. The Commerce Department’s Cresanti says by RFID-tagging laptops and putting interrogators at door entrances and entryways, government agencies could more easily maintain a proper accounting of who took a laptop home, and when.Big Business
The U.S. federal government is poised to become a large buyer of RFID technologies. The Services Administration General Services Administration (GSA), the federal government’s main purchasing arm, maintains a list of qualified items that agencies can purchase, and the number of authorized RFID products on that list has been rising rapidly, now standing in the range of 1,800, according to GSA officials. The DOD is currently the GSA’s largest customer for RFID technology to track goods through the supply chain, but the agency is undertaking a study “to look at how to best leverage RFID within our supply system,” according to Bryan Tiplady, director of the GSA’s applications development division of the Office of General Supplies and Services.
The federal government also has a role to play in influencing the private sector on how to deploy RFID. The FDA, USDA and EPA are encouraging the private industries they regulate to use RFID to keep the pharmaceutical and food supply chains and the environment safe. Some argue that these agency guidelines are too weak. They say that RFID would be adopted more quickly by private industry and the public would be better off if government required the use of the technology.
But all government agencies are accountable to Congress for technology budgets and policies, and they are vulnerable to the push and pull of politics and public relations (to learn how this has affected the adoption of RFID in the pharmaceutical industry, see It’s Not That Simple). The State Department, for example, has begun issuing e-passports, but the process of creating standards, which could include RFID, for a national identification program has been met with a backlash, stemming from privacy concerns. While the U.S. government favors a hands-off policy with regard to the regulation of RFID, it already has on the books laws that require government agencies to protect personal privacy. Agencies interested in deploying RFID must complete a privacy impact assessment before proceeding.
Federal agencies know that they wield power in the marketplace. As the DOD influenced suppliers to start using RFID, the VA believes that it, too, can use its purchasing power to sway suppliers in the medical field to adopt RFID. “The VA is an influencing body, given our size,” DeSanno says. He points to the influence the VA had in the health-care industry by adopting electronic records and says that it might have the same impact with the adoption of RFID.
Government officials say they are aware that by adopting certain technologies, they could be making decisions that affect the RFID industry. For example, tagging requirements adopted by a government agency could create a de facto standard in the private sector. The U.S. government is trying to avoid picking winners in the RFID market by favoring proprietary technologies over those with more open standards. The standard for government IDs—FIPS 201—is an open standard that can help agencies attract competitive bids. “We’re trying to understand the need for standards that are non-technology specific,” says Cresanti, “and that are functionally based so that we can engineer to particular standards and let everyone compete.”
Illustration by Earl Keleny