ABSTRACT
Establishment of a department of homeland security that improves interagency coordination and capabilities to protect U.S. citizens will be a great legislative, bureaucratic, and geographic challenge. Homeland security as an urgent national and international strategic interest has shifted from headlines about Ground Zero in New York and combat in Afghanistan to government reorganization plans aimed at implementing national security differently. While considerable attention is focused on the legislative and organizational elements of a new cabinet level department, a geographic perspective is required as well to better understand what data are needed to improve homeland security and how geographic information system (GIS) tools can help get the job done (National Research Council 1997). Such critical geographic information-based security efforts might be termed GeoSecurity. GeoSecurity can assess and visualize societal vulnerabilities against different types of threats and likely responses using a suite of geographic methodologies, organization and analysis of georeferenced data, and the application of GIS tools to achieve security objectives within, around, and well beyond the homeland.
