Federal Computer Week reporter Dibya Sarkar asked various government officials and industry experts what the technology priorities should be for 2005 in the area of homeland security. Here are their comments:

Tom Cowper, a staff inspector at the New York State police and a police futurist:

On interoperable communications

Our ability to communicate ubiquitously -- that's geographically as well as jurisdictionally -- is really the biggest problem we have. Interoperability is almost nonexistent in some places. Radio systems don't talk to one another. Most public safety radio systems today are outdated and in bad need of replacement and upgrade. And when [officials] upgrade those things, they need to be able to communicate with systems that overlap each other or they need to communicate with systems adjacent to them.

Safecom [a federal program to coordinate interoperability efforts nationally] is certainly helping that process. It's a component, and central government can certainly facilitate interoperability. We need more money from the federal government. This is a huge problem from a technical perspective. Like I said, it needs to have some significant money applied to it. The issue with Safecom or the federal government is the quick fix is to just connect all these old radio systems together in a sort of patchwork. It is a way to allow a few people to communicate across the agencies, but it's a Band-Aid. So they're buying expensive gateways called ACU-1000s and other types of devices to link old radio systems together. They aren't spectrally efficient at all and they only allow a few people to talk in a crisis.

[The idea of] what we're doing in New York with our project and other states as well, like Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, [is that] the more users that you can put on a shared network -- we'll have 65,000 on our network -- the more you can push communications down to the lowest level. What I like to talk about is creating a net-centric system. It's big in the military world these days to talk about net-centric warfare. But that net-centric concept is pushing information and the ability to share information down to the lowest possible level in real time. If a trooper needs to talk to a deputy right now, he can dial him up and talk to him. He doesn't have to go through his dispatch center, then his commander and then somebody else to communicate with a deputy.