Feds Flooded With Ideas to Fight Terror

Dec. 3 -- More than 12,000 proposals poured in after Sept. 11, 2001, when the federal government put out a blanket call for help — from industry, academia, scientists — to fight the war against terrorism.

Now the task is choosing which technology innovations present the best investment to keep Americans safe.

Jeff David, deputy director of the Defense Department's Combating Terrorism Technology Support office, looked at 9,000 of those proposals. David's office manages the federal government's multi-agency Technical Support Working Group, or TSWG.

The group has the task of coordinating all the technology needs across 22 different federal agencies, everyone from the FBI and the State Department to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Energy. The majority of TSWG's funding comes from the Department of Defense.

David says a broad search was necessary to find those unknown promising ideas. "You had to look at all of those [proposals] to find those ideas that really were exceptional," he said.

"They've cast a very wide net," said Brett Lambert, vice-president of DFI International, a private technology consulting firm. "It's a little bit like trying to boil the ocean."

Disabling Bombs With Precision

Within that net: a new device designed to disable bombs with extraordinary precision. Bob Bezanson, of the Technical Support Working Group, demonstrated the technology to ABCNEWS, targeting and disabling a mock bomb hidden inside a suitcase.

"It did exactly what it was supposed to do," said Bezanson. "We hit the briefcase exactly where we wanted, which then rendered safe the bomb."

Not only is the device much more accurate than what's available today, but it is also cheaper — making it more accessible to local bomb squads who may need it.

Other examples of new anti-terrorism technology include walls that bend instead of shatter in an explosion, and windows that just pop back in place, all work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This research was the basis of the structural reinforcements begun at the Pentagon which kept the section struck on Sept. 11, 2001, from collapsing sooner.