Booze, bombs and wireless networking prove a good fit

Two bank robbers are sorry the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives invested in a new wireless network.

“After we put this in, we had a traffic stop in one of the southern states,” explains William (Larry) Bell, deputy assistant director and deputy CIO at the ATF in Washington, D.C. An ATF agent working alongside local police used his laptop and the new wireless network to do a query, from which he found a wants and warrants on one of the men in the car, giving the police cause to detain the men. “Sure enough, they were the ones who did the bank robbery. If we didn’t have that capability, we probably would have released them and let them go on their way,” Bell says.

Taking a shot at wireless

Bell spoke about the wireless implementation at the recent Network World IT Roadmap Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., and in a follow-up interview (listen to a podcast of that interview.) As he explained, one of the first things ATF agents do after reaching a potential crime scene is set up a temporary field office with communications links to headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“We form an operations center and engage the entire organization -- that’s the way ATF operates,” Bell says. “So for example, in something like the [2002] sniper case in Washington, D.C., we actually had agents in Alabama and the state of Washington working on that, all via the operations center.”

But setting up the requisite links was a frustrating, time-consuming process. “It would take 24 hours-plus just to get the phone company to come in and hook something up,” Bell says, noting that in many cases ATF agents resorted to satellite phones while they waited for the links to be put in place. “Satellite phones are fine for voice, but we also wanted to push data, pictures and video, so we really needed broadband.”

The ATF’s top management realized that 24 hours is too long to wait, especially in crime situations where seconds count. They charged the bureau’s IT staff with cutting the average setup time in half, to just 12 hours.

“They just told us to come up with a solution, but they didn’t give us any money,” Bell says. The staff examined the options and hit on a solution that would not only provide wireless broadband access for agents anywhere in the field, but was also secure enough to enable agents to collaborate in the midst of a crime scene. After scrounging some funding from another project, they were able to pilot the setup in May 2006 with about 62 agents.

The results far surpassed expectations, Bell says. Rather than simply cutting setup time to 12 hours, agents in the field can set up broadband collaborative links immediately, anytime, anywhere.

How it works 

Each ATF agent in the field is issued a laptop configured with a wireless access card and software called the iPassConnect Universal Client, from mobile network provider iPass. The card searches the surrounding area for available wireless networks, including Wi-Fi hotspots and a range of wireless WANs that provide high-speed data connections, including GPRS, UMTS, EDGE, EV-DO Rev A, EV-DO Rev 0 and 1xRTT .