FRAC/FIPS 201

In 2004, Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12) became law. HSPD-12 mandates that all federal employees have a secure and reliable form of identification. Originally designed for secure access to facilities and logical access to information systems, these “smart card” IDs may also provide the basis for identifying first responders in the field – a so called FRAC card (First Responder Authentication Credential).

Various obstacles will have to be overcome for our country’s first response agencies to fully adopt FRAC cards – including the administrative burden and costs of issuing and maintaining federally approved ID cards. An excellent way to accelerate adoption is to provide greater utility to the end-user – specifically, to take FRAC beyond just site access to also initiate resource accountability functions.

However, can a high-cost smart card that was originally envisioned for door access to a building work well in the real world of incident management? The answer is “yes,” but a FRAC system must adapt to the field-level procedures and ergonomics of resource accountability under NIMS, the National Incident Management System:

-- Qualifications --
Responder qualifications must be accessible in a FRAC system so responders can be assigned to tasks or sectors they are qualified to perform or enter.

-- Situational Awareness --
A FRAC system must go beyond simple site access control function to provide the incident manager situational awareness of who is at site, where are they located, what are they doing, and when did they arrive/get assigned/depart.

-- Site Pass --
A FRAC system should provide for the creation of site passes with ergonomics that make sense in the hot zone, including the creation of duplicates for back-up manual accountability. FRAC cards are expensive, difficult to read and hard to replace smart cards that were never designed for field operations.

This document will provide a model for integrating FRAC cards into an effective system for field-level resource accountability.