A flight attendant's uniform is stolen from her hotel room in New York. At SeaTac Airport in Seattle a couple of months ago, someone is caught going through screening with a suspicious weapon. And yesterday, in Florida, a woman walked through a door at the Orlando International Airport, setting off an alarm. Until recently, she shared an address with two other individuals living on the west coast of the United States - one has a trucking license to transport hazardous materials and the other is employed at the Port of Long Beach.

A potential terrorist plot? Perhaps. But it would take weeks or months - if not longer - for investigators to piece together the clues and connect the dots in this imaginary scenario.

Terrorists are strategists. They choose their targets deliberately and they must be caught before they act. The Bush Administration has outlined a vision where information is shared "horizontally" across each level of government and "vertically" among federal, state, and local governments, private industry, and citizens.

"We must have an intelligence and warning system that is capable of detecting terrorist activity before it manifests itself in an attack so that proper preemptive, preventive, and protective action can be taken," according to the National Strategy for Homeland Security.

Stopping terrorism so people feel safe, while ensuring the efficient movement of people and commerce to support our global economic prosperity is an enormous challenge.

Almost a million non-U.S. citizens enter our country on a daily basis by land, air and sea. Every year, 11 million trucks and 2 million rail cars come into the U.S. through the 7,500 miles of border with Canada and Mexico. More than 60 million people arrive on half a million international flights. And while the number of people coming by sea is small, the volume of goods is enormous - accounting for 95 percent of all of our imports. Nearly 7,500 foreign-flag ships make 51,000 calls in U.S. ports annually, bringing more than six million containers into our country.

"We won't get the job done just by hiring more inspectors and border guards and installing more sensors and equipment in our airports and seaports," said Rick Stephens, Boeing vice president, Homeland Security & Services. "A significant transformation whereby decision-makers have unprecedented access to information and enhanced situational awareness must occur in areas of homeland security. And this will require closer and closer private and public sector cooperation, and integrated approaches to security."

The challenge today is not that information is not available. The challenge is to tie systems together to provide the right information to the right people at all times.

Today, Boeing is integrating numerous advanced technologies to create a highly sophisticated and multi-layered system to analyze intelligence, detect and prevent terrorist threats, protect critical infrastructure and coordinate a response in the event of an emergency.

So what will this look like applied to homeland security? By applying the concept of "network-centric operations," agencies with homeland security responsibilities will have unprecedented access to information from areas such as customs and border patrol, to trucks on the road and container ships at sea, to activity at our nation's airports. Network-centric operations would bring together disparate systems to provide comprehensive situational awareness and a common operating picture in the same way our military has begun to track and coordinate the movement of the threats in the battlefield.

Information now available to different law enforcement agencies at the local, state, and national level would be integrated into a single database. With data mining and data fusion, seemingly unrelated bits of information could be correlated to identify potential risk scenarios. These scenarios would be automatically forwarded to the right federal, state or local agency, or private business so appropriate action could be taken.

Software intelligent agents form the backbone of this cognitive process, acting like a continually running search engine. These software intelligent agents would be able to pull the information together in a matter of minutes - presenting authorities with a threat correlation report and probability of a plausible terrorist plot. They're looking for the common thread - like shared phone numbers, credit card numbers and flight data.

"By having software intelligent agents continually mining the network for information and instantly recognizing patterns and correlations between events - the network becomes our best arsenal in the war on terrorism," Stephens said. "It takes superior technical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. We're integrating the best of industry (video) to bring forward systems and technologies to further safeguard our interests, defeat terrorism, and invigorate our nation's economy."

A network-centric vision is one the company began working on a number of years ago and it has become the basis for a number of transformational programs within the Department of Defense.

The same concepts, approaches, and tools that are supporting the Army in its transformation through the Future Combat Systems are directly applicable to homeland security. The same technology and capabilities that are helping the Department of Defense connect across multiple radio frequencies and signatures through the Joint Tactical Radio System can help break down the barriers to connect the diverse communications network used by thousands of organizations involved in protecting this nation and responding to emergencies. The tools that are used to simulate and model the complexity of integrating the multitude of sources of information into common situational awareness and operating pictures can be made available today. Network-centric systems will allow customers to operate with less equipment, less support, and less cost, yet maintain the readiness capability necessary to thwart an enemy's threats.

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