Doing Business With the U.S. Secret Service

U.S. Secret Service245 Murray Drive,Building 410Washington, DC 20223(202) 406-8000 July 5, 1865 W. Ralph Basham 5,000 The Secret Service protects the president, vice president, their families, heads of state and designated others and investigates threats against them. It also protects certain buildings in Washington and manages security for so-called National Special Security Events. The service investigates counterfeiting, various financial crimes including identity theft and computer fraud, and computer-based attacks on U.S. financial, banking and telecommunications infrastructure. The Secret Service became part of the Homeland Security Department March 1, 2003. It had been part of the Treasury Department since 1865. It has agents in approximately 125 offices throughout the United States and in certain foreign cities. 2005 budget request: $1.4 billion2004 budget: $1.3 billion2003 budget: $1.3 billionXXXSPLITXXX- Chief information officer and chief of the Information Resources Management Division March 2002 New Castle, Pa. Fredericksburg, Va. Single; three sons, Bob; Scott, a Marine officer in Iraq, and Eric, a senior at Mary Washington College "IT is my life, but I enjoy old cars, reading, running, sports." "How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It," by Arthur Herman Bachelor's degree from Mary Washington College, master's degree in business administration and information systems from Strayer UniversityBuchanan: The Secret Service has two primary missions: protection and investigations. Both require significant degrees of IT support. The special agents providing protection require continuous communications, 24x7, in the form of land mobile radio, cellular, paging and network connectivity. Agents performing investigations require much of the same, plus access to criminal case files. Both groups need reliable access to Secret Service and other federal, state and local databases.Like all other government agencies, the service has moved in a relatively short period of time from exchanging data via fax machines, to teletypes, to PCs with LANs, WANS, and MANs, and [for communicating] using only radios to cellular telephones, two-way pagers and PDAs. Information sharing with entities at all levels of government always has been a strength of the service, because of our need to work closely with them. We continue to embrace technologies that have proven they're the best of breed.Buchanan: Our major technology issue today is our integration with the Department of Homeland Security. We are working closely with the DHS chief information officer to ensure we provide superb IT support to the Secret Service's mission, while ensuring we integrate smoothly with DHS. I have dozens of my best IT employees working almost continually with DHS, covering every area of IT.Of course, security ? both physical and cyber ? is paramount to the Secret Service, and we are vigilant against intrusions to our networks. We have taken a wait-and-see approach to most wireless offerings. Naturally, we need wireless solutions that can provide writer-to-reader security for our data.Buchanan: The majority of our work force is special agents and uniformed division officers, so we have a very mobile work force. They are on the street doing investigations and providing protection every day. We support their voice and data IT needs via radio, cellular, paging, videoconferencing and data networks. Again, because our operational security posture is so stringent, our use of totally wireless solutions has been waiting for a FIPS-compliant, National Security Agency approved, totally secure solution.