The Homeland Brand

Homeland Security is one of the biggest, most ambitious government ideas since the New Deal. Unfortunately for you, it's also turning out to be eminently marketable.

By Scott Berinato

August 29, 2002 — CSO — If the next few weeks proceed as expected, baseball will hang itself, weather rhetoric will drift from stifling to comfortable, the propane-filling business will enjoy a good couple of days, and in the U.S. Senate, legislation nearly as significant and ambitious as the New Deal will wend its way through the approval process.

Eventually, the Homeland Security Act will pass. And then it will land on the desk of President Bush, who will attach to it both his signature and a good bit of his presidential legacy.

Meanwhile, the security industry has attached itself to Homeland Security like barnacles to a whale. Even before there's a homeland law, there's the homeland brand. Less than a year after Sept. 11, the Homeland Security moniker has been pasted on to a think tanks name and a policy journal. It's the name of an online knowledge base and also the brand for a "Special Collections" database of GAO reports. There's the Homeland Security Directory, essentially a $500 phone book of relevant Washington players. Ithaca Gun has come out with a Homeland Security Model rifle. A company out there somewhere is sellingno jokeHomeland Security doormats.

IT executives should expect nothing less than full exploitation by technology vendors. Oracle's call for national ID cards was only a prologue. Hewlett-Packard has a Homeland Security web page. CSC has a vice president of homeland security, who, according to his PR rep, can tell us who in the IT market has what it takes to support homeland security. (I'm going out on a limb here and guessing CSC). Sun and a small wireless company called Aether Systems have mobilize[d] Homeland Security, according to a brochure theyve produced, by using Java on Aether's software. Aether started a Homeland Security Initiative. This is not some altruistic government-industry cooperative. This, as far as one can tell, is a sales initiative, targeted at emergency first response teams, investigators, terrorist prevention agencies, and homeland defense infrastructures. Likewise, IBM joined geographic information systems vendor ESRI to put out a six-page brochure on a cost-effective and timely homeland security strategy. To show off ESRI's mapping capabilities, the brochure offers maps of lower Manhattan.

Siebel, though, takes the prize. A map of Manhattan is found in its brochure as well, but Siebel actually calls its product Siebel Homeland Security. Whats more, Siebel deigns to make case studies out of the actual events of September 11 and the anthrax attacks, demonstrating how its software could have prevented the events of 9/11 from happening. Under the heading: Prevention: August 2001-September 2001 the brochure reads (bear with me):

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