The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), UK, is looking at satellite communications to supplement emergency wireless networks to keep e-mail and voice messages flowing during a crisis.
New wireless technologies being developed by a secretive government agency in collaboration with private contractors may dramatically improve communications for homeland defence among federal, state and local officials. The DHS, working with BlackBerry Wireless devices, Palm Treos and other mobile handheld computers, has been working to secure wireless e-mail through a testing program being run by its very secretive Advanced Research Projects Agency, a unit created for the war on terror that is analogous to the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, devised during the Cold War by the Pentagon to create secret, new technologies. This summer the project will start sending the e-mail communications via satellite — and begin to integrate the technologies into the infrastructure of the government.
