Fusion of Security System Data to Improve Airport Security

"The Committee on Assessment of Security Technologies for Transportation was appointed by the National Research Council (NRC) in response to a request from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for a study of technologies to protect the nation's air transportation system from terrorist attacks .... The committee judged that the best way to provide a timely response would be to produce a series of short reports on promising technologies, focusing on specific topics of greatest interest to the sponsor. This is the fourth of four such topical reports, all of which focus on air transportation security. The committee believes that the air transportation environment provides a test case for the deployment of security technologies that might subsequently be used to protect other transporttation modes as well. This report focuses on what is commonly termed data fusion. The possibility of a terrorist slipping through a multilayered security system still exists, given the current configuration of security architectures across the vast majority of our nation's commercial airports. This is not to say that the technology that is being brought to bear is not useful or effective. It is effective. However, from the committee's vantage point, the various security systems and the technologies contained in them could be connected in such a way that they could extract significantly more information regarding possible threats"--Preface.