On Sept. 11, two helicopters hovering over the badly damaged north World Trade Center tower communicated the inevitable to police on the ground-the building is going to collapse.

Most police officers in the tower managed to escape. Many firefighters, whose radios were not linked to the police system, did not.

The New York Times’ chilling account of that morning spells out in tragic detail how the city’s emergency system was plagued with problems in communication. On a much larger scale, the Sept. 11 attacks called into question the nation’s preparedness to deal with terrorist attacks and other emergencies.

A month after the attacks, Charles Jennings, chief executive of Swan Island Networks in Portland, was to give a speech at the Oregon Economic Development conference. Jennings had a change of heart a few days before the conference, scrapped what he had written and instead pitched a new thought: assemble a coalition of Oregon companies to tackle the cybersecurity problems exposed by the attacks.

The result: the Oregon Regional Alliance for Information and Network Security, or RAINS, a nonprofit group that promotes cybersecurity companies to a broad audience across Oregon and into Washington, D.C.

A year later, RAINS says it has come up with a secure, Internet-based network that will help emergency agencies and private sector groups connect on short notice in response to terrorist attacks and other incidents.

”We can grow this into a very successful model,” said Wyatt Starnes, president and chief executive of Tripwire Inc., and a member of the board of directors of RAINS. ”We believe we can compete at the national level.”

The project, called the Oregon Trial of Emergency and Security Technology (OTEST), integrates technology to create a platform that lives on the same network that delivers the Internet.

”It’s really intended to communicate electronic content across a public network in a highly secure way,” said Starnes. ”It is really important as a supplemental mechanism to get rich information, rich content, quickly and immediately to important points where there is some major incident.”

Starnes emphasizes, however, that OTEST will supplement existing systems, not replace them. ”People will still use radios and a lot of other mechanisms,” he said.

The president’s National Cybersecurity Plan, which is currently in draft form, points out that 80 percent of the country’s vulnerable infrastructure is in the private sector and outside of government control.

Much of the responsibility for securing that infrastructure rests on the shoulders of the private sector and state governments, Starnes said. Tripwire and Swan Island Networks will demonstrate OTEST’s capability locally in the next one to six months. Other states could be plugged into the program some time next year.

Last month, members of RAINS traveled to Washington, D.C., and a did an OTEST simulation for senior ranking employees of the departments of Energy and Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and other agencies. The idea for the meeting was spawned by Richard Clarke, chair of the president’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, who went on a tour of the country earlier in the year to help spark public/private partnerships.

In the simulation, a suspicious ship floats on the Columbia River, prompting Portland’s emergency operations center to fire out a flurry of notices to 911 centers, police and fire departments, and other agencies.

Within minutes, users log on to the secure computer system, on which they have received the notice, and read descriptions of the incident, see photographs of the vessel and satellite imagery, and hear audio files of individuals in the field.

OTEST is secure at all ”in-points,” meaning if one node is compromised, it can be eliminated for a time until it is once again secure. Starnes’ company, Tripwire, is a provider of technology that secures system in-points.

Besides becoming a model effort for cybersecurity, OTEST could be a boon to the state’s ailing economy.

”For us, (OTEST) means jobs, and jobs will come as a result of the companies doing well,” said Y. Sherry Sheng, deputy director of the Oregon Economic and Community Development Department (OECD). The department, which provided seed funding for RAINS, is the principal government sponsor of the coalition.

”In this case, we’re creating a secure communications environment that will bring together local, federal and public/private entities with sharing information,” she said. ”We hope to get significant grant support from the federal government, and that means companies here will be able to sell more of their products.”

OECD connected with RAINS after Charles Jennings, chief executive of Portland-based Swan Island Networks, talked to the department about e-commerce security. Jennings challenged OECD to partner with RAINS to better organize Oregon’s cybersecurity cluster.

”I like a challenge,” Sheng said. ”So Charles and I got together to figure out what we could potentially do … We cannot compete on a commodities or quantity basis … What we have to do is band together and create something that is different that will get peoples’ attention.”

Funding of the initial prototype development will carry a price tag of $6.5 million, the bulk of which will come in staged funding from the state and federal government. The target date for first-stage funding is first quarter 2003.

Starnes said the recently passed Cyber Security Research and Development Act, which would provide more than $900 million over the next five years for cybersecurity research and development, may be a funding option.

Lisa Rosetta can be reached at lrosetta@bendbulletin.com.