Coast Guard floats security plan

The Coast Guard is developing a national plan for what it calls maritime domain awareness, and will need to collaborate with other government organizations and with the private sector to implement the plan, according to Adm. Thomas Collins, commandant of the Coast Guard.

Achieving maritime domain awareness -- knowing what's happening on U.S. waters and in U.S. ports at all times and preventing terrorist actions there -- will require extensive knowledge of weather, coastlines and all vessels, Collins said at a recent meeting of the Homeland Security Defense Business Council in Washington.

Getting this awareness will require extensive use of information technology to analyze information from many different sources, Collins said. For example, the Coast Guard needs a system that contains information on the 60 million recreational boats in the United States, he said.