• Web site lists rail-carried hazardous chemicals in real time

    Railroad operator CSX now provides first responders and the Chemical Transportation Emergency Center (CHEMTREC) access to secure Web-based information which allows CHEMTREC to find a train number, tank car number, and identify what is being transported in those cars; BNSF also provides CHEMTREC with manifest information, but only after a derailment; BNSF does, however, provide municipalities a list of chemicals it routinely transports through cities

  • Domestic terrorismIntelligence experts: Recent attacks on U.S. government buildings are indeed terrorism

    DHS secretary Janet Napolitano said Joseph Stack's suicide attack on the IRS building in Austin was not an act of terrorism because he acted as a lone wolf; an intelligence think tank's experts disagree: the definition of a violent act as an act of terrorism has nothing to do with the number of casualties, foreign ties, or absence of a conspiracy; what matters is whether or not the perpetrator's motivation was to coerce a population or a government to change policy because of political, religious, or ideological beliefs

  • Crowdsourcing for securityDHS moving forward on cell-all smartphone chemical detection technology

    DHS wants to turn smartphones into chemical sensors; owners of smartphones would volunteer to have tiny chemical sensors embedded in their devices; millions of American could thus become roving chemical sensing nodes to alert authorities of terrorist -- or accidental -- chemical toxin release

  • Crowdsourcing for securitySoftware turns laptops, PCs into earthquake early-warning system

    Harnessing the power of accelerometers -- tiny devices that detect movement, allowing, for example, iPhones to flip from vertical to horizontal and Wii devices to function as tennis rackets -- and embedding them in laptops and PCs would create a local, regional, or even global network of "quake catchers" who would use their computers to map tremors

  • U.K. Home Offices praises University of Reading CCTV research

    The Computational Vision Group at the University of Reading has developed computer systems which emulate human vision and is currently working on improving the effectiveness of CCTV for safety, security, and threat assessment purposes; the systems will be used in crowd image analysis, spotting unattended luggage, and detecting threats to aviation both on the ground and in the air

  • Tiny, sensitive nano oscillator instantly detects pathogens in air or water

    Extraordinarily tiny sensors that can instantly recognize harmful substances in air or water; the device is just 200 nanometers thick and a few microns long with an oscillating cantilever hanging off one end; the cantilever is like a diving board that resonates at distinct frequencies

  • Border Security Expo & Conference, Phoenix, Arizona – April 23 & 24, 2010

  • Planetary safetyWorry: gravitational force would cause nuked asteroids to reform

    The only way to prevent large asteroids from hitting Earth is to use nuclear weapons to blast them to pieces; scientists find that this is not good enough: the gravitational force among the asteroids fragments would cause the asteroid to reform, "Terminator"-like, within hours

  • Theater of the absurdAd for Israeli supermarket chain inspired Mossad's Dubai slaying

    Discount supermarket chain commercial draws inspiration from surveillance footage of Dubai assassination; shows actors carrying tennis rackets, wearing wigs, hats; an actress wearing a wide-brimmed floppy hat mimics Israel's policy of maintaining deniability, saying she "couldn't admit to anything"

  • National insurance for natural disasters: a necessity or "beach house bailout"

    Supporters of national disaster insurance program say it is better to plan ahead than do a bailout after a natural disaster; opponents say it would be a subsidy for owners of coastal mansions and encourage people to live in disaster-prone areas

  • Effectively Countering Terrorism – Prevention, Preparedness, Response – Sussex A

  • Religious leaders discuss body scanners with DHS

    Muslim, Jewish, and Christian leaders met with DHS officials to discuss the privacy aspects of whole-body scanning; Muslim religious organizations, the Pope, and Orthodox Jewish authorities declared body scanners to be in violation of their respective religions' modesty strictures, especially for women, and urged their followers to opt for pat-downs instead

  • UAV updateFlying ambulance: UAV will extract wounded soldiers from the battlefield

    There is one more mission being added to the ever-expanding list of operational, intelligence, surveillance, law-enforcement, first response, and disaster recovery missions assigned to UAVs: evacuating critically injured casualties directly from the battlefield to the hospital

  • Update: The FBI caps nearly 90 years of use of biometrics with its Biometric Center of Excellence

    The FBI has been using various forms of biometric identification since its earliest days -- from photographs and fingerprints in its first years (and assuming responsibility for managing the U.S. fingerprint collection in 1924), to applying handwriting analysis in the Lindbergh kidnapping case in 1932, to its laboratory's pioneering work on raising latent finger, palm, and other soft tissue prints from evidence, to today's development of DNA analysis as a means of genetic fingerprinting

  • Seeing through the Earth's crust, clearlyUnderground intelligence satellite navigation will work off lightning strikes

    The U.S. ubiquitous eye-in-the-sky satellites have driven more and more people and things of interest to disappear underground (just think Iran's nuclear weapons program); deep tunnel complex shields an organization from the prying eyes of satellites, and it is also good protection against a sudden bombing raid; the U.S. military wants to be able to peek and conduct operations underground

  • Smiths Detection's mid-sized X-ray system added to TSA's Air Cargo Screening Qualified List

    By August 2010, all cargo carried on passenger planes will have to be screened; Smiths Detection's latest addition to its list of cargo screening machines -- a pallet-sized scanner -- is the company's sixth technology approved to help shippers meet TSA August 2010 100 percent air cargo screening deadline

  • Washington State, federal officials in dam-related disaster resilience exercises

    Officials from the Tri-Cities area of Washington State, neighboring areas, and federal agencies participate in a exercise aiming to develop a strategy to improve disaster resilience and preparedness in the event of severe flooding along the Columbia River, flooding which leads to overtopping and subsequent breaching of levees in the Tri-Cities area

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The Long View

  • DARPA seeks deep-learning AI to cope with flood of information

    The growing use of UAVs to loiter over enemy territory and send images and streaming videos back to HQ has created a glut of information; DARPA seeks a better, deeper, and more layered artificial intelligence to help the intelligence community cope with the avalanche of information coming in

  • Nuclear fusionCold fusion is enjoying a rebirth

    Researchers presented new evidence for the existence of this promising -- and controversial -- energy source' papers discussed last week at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society

  • TrendGlobal UAV sales boom, but South Africa's UAV sector flounders

    South Africa was among the world's leaders in designing and manufacturing UAVs; UAVs are the most dynamic segment growth sector in the global aerospace industry; South Africa could have benefited from the growing interest in UAVs, lack of investment in R&D and in finished products may cause South Africa to abdicate the UAV lead it once held

  • U.S. intelligence chief: Mexico not on brink of collapse

    There is a debate among different U.S. intelligent services about how close to a collapse Mexico is; Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence, says the drug cartels' escalating violence is a product of their weakening state not their strength

  • Insight into the news // Ben FrankelSudan attack demonstrates new U.S.-Israel counter-Iran policy

    Israeli aircraft, with U.S. logistical and intelligence support, attack and destroy an Iranian arms convoy in Sudan; arms were part of an effort by Iran to resupply Hamas's forces in Gaza

  • Planetary securityNew ideas for deflecting Earth-threatening asteroids

    As scientists use better equipment to make more accurate observations of space, they find more Earth-threatening objects loitering in Near Earth Orbit; a debate is growing as to the best method to deal with this threat

  • Shape of things to comeDARPA funds Phase 2 of human limb regeneration study

    When you cut off a salamander's leg, a blastema, or regeneration bud, appears at the stump and then grows into a new leg with muscles, nerves, etc. all complete; DARPA wants to see whether the same can be dome for human limbs