Homeland Security certifies tech products for Safety Act

The Homeland Security Department has certified several IT-related products and services under the Support for Anti-Terrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies Act, or Safety Act, in recent weeks. The total number of awards now stands at 44.

The winning products include a biometric screening system developed by Accenture LLP, a logistic support system from Boeing Co. and a risk-assessment platform from IBM Corp.

Congress created the Safety Act to encourage contractors to create new anti-terrorism technologies. Under the act, approved products and services would face little or no liability if the technologies fail in connection with a terrorist attack.

To date, there have been 30 Safety Act certifications with the highest level of liability protection, and 14 designations with slightly less protection.

The recent IT-related certifications include:

Nov. 4?Boeing's Anti-Terrorism Integrated Logistic Support Management Services, which consists of maintenance and logistics management services to support government and commercial counterterrorism systems at the customer's site.

Oct. 21?General Dynamics Armament and Technical Products Inc.'s Joint Biological Point Detection System, which automatically detects, collects, and identifies up to 10 different biological weapon agents at a time, and can be modified by the client.

Oct. 4?IBM Corp.'s Risk Assessment Platform system, which provides authentication and risk assessment information for analysis and possible action regarding terrorist threats. The system combines hardware, software, commercial data and associated services.

Oct. 4?Accenture LLP's U.S. Visit Biometric Identification Systems Project, a computer network that screens and validates people entering and leaving the United States, using biometric screening techniques.

Sept. 6?Language Analysis Systems Inc. of Herndon, Va.'s NameClassifer software, which is used for identifying the cultural classification of a personal name and functions either as a stand-alone or as a component of data mining and name recognition applications.

Sept. 7?Winning designation under the Safety Act, IBM's Digital Video Surveillance with Capture and Management system is used to implement stand-alone or integrated surveillance systems to handle the digital capture and management of video, audio and positional data.