DETROIT ? Wayne State University?s Institute for Information Technology and Culture (IITC) launched its Crossings Workshop on Cross-Border Security Cooperation in an effort to improve international security coordination between the United States and Canada, and beyond.

The workshop Monday night, which was limited to 40 invited-only attendees from a cross section of academia, government and private-sector representatives from the U.S. and Canada, was jointly sponsored by the Canadian Embassy to the United States and the (U.S.) National Science Foundation.

Instead of focusing on technological minutiae and database design, the workshop?s attendees were more likely to discuss anthropological theory and cultural transformation. IITC Director Dr. Allen Batteau and his colleagues maintain that human interactions, not technological glitches, form the greatest barriers to effective security. Even the well-publicized post-9/11 effort to create one radio system for the New York City police and fire departments would fail without properly aligning processes and procedures.

?Getting databases to talk to each other is a trivial problem, compared to getting people to talk to each other,? he said. ?We have to figure out how to work together. The difference between a disaster and a fairly trivial accident is how the authorities respond.?

Batteau?s theme was echoed by the evening?s two speakers, Canadian Consul General Rocco Delvecchio and U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Donald Van Duyn.

Van Duyn, who was a 24-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency before joining the FBI, said that while hard work and luck have kept the U.S. safe from a domestic terrorist attack since 9/11. Duyn said the sheer volume of information to be processed and the difficulty getting it from the people who have it, to the people who need it, is overwhelming intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

?In the last three years, we have been incredibly lucky, we have not been hit again,? he said. ?Al Qaeda is still out there. They are still committed to attacking the homeland and they are still making plots to do so.? Van Duyn did note that he uses ?Al Qaeda? as a catch-all phrase for Sunni jihadist terrorists, and suggested that the Shiite Hezbollah organization could soon renew its attacks on U.S. interests as agents for Iran, where U.S. forces line its borders in Afghanistan and Iraq.

?We are under no illusion that we are out of the woods here, not by any stretch of the imagination,? he said.

Van Duyn said that the FBI?s counter terror efforts are focusing on three main topics ? identifying and disrupting terrorist operatives, the radicalization of American citizens on behalf of terrorist causes and the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

While border security and immigration reform can improve our ability to catch foreign nationals with terrorist goals illegally entering the United States, the FBI is concerned that American citizens who may have been radicalized prisons and mosques, and trained overseas ca international bases can bypass the traps set to catch them.

?It may be, in the long run, that the people we are growing in our own societies who cause us the most problems,? Van Duyn said. Because of First Amendment protections

He said the FBI is limited in its ability to investigate religious groups that could be fronts for recruiting terrorists because of First Amendment protections.

Delvecchio, who is the senior Canadian official for Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, suggested that the unparalleled economic and cultural integration of the U.S. and Canada not only imposes security challenges, but also a potential starting point for collaboration. But he said the new focus on Security within the United States has also created stress for Canada, which has heightened its Security precautions because of its shared border with the United States.

?Our primary concern is that we, like others, are vulnerable,? he said. ?We share a continent and we have to be concerned about continental security.?

Delvecchio praised the U.S.-Canada ?Smart Borders? agreement of 2001 as a strong starting point for border Security. Van Duyn confessed that true border Security between the U.S. and Canada is an unrealistic expectation.

?People tend to focus on the Mexican border, but I?m actually more concerned about the Canadian border,? he said, noting that most of the 5,500-mile border is lightly patrolled at best. ?The reality is that there are never going to be enough people, there?s never going to be enough technology to cover everything.?

The workshop?s participants will generate a consensus best practices document with specific suggestions for improvements in cross-border security cooperation. The document will be made available on line by March 25. Van Duyn said that the FBI and other government agencies will review the document to see if the suggestions could be put into practice.

If you want to read the Security best practices report, click on IITC.Wayne.Edu