Public Safety

  • Quick Heal introduces technology to track laptops

    New laptop tracking technology will help Indian police track and locate stolen laptops across the country; Quick Heal, the company offering the technology, also aims to create a centralized database of lost or stolen laptops; the database will be accessible to retailers and consumers

  • Newly developed cloak hides underwater objects from sonar

    University of Illinois researchers develop an acoustic cloak, a technology that renders underwater objects invisible to sonar and other ultrasound waves; an advantage of the acoustic cloak is its ability to cover a broad range of sound wavelengths; the cloak offers acoustic invisibility to ultrasound waves from 40 to 80 KHz, although with modification could theoretically be tuned to cover tens of megahertz

  • New Israeli technology speeds up warfare

    Israel is among several nations harnessing digital and satellite technology to develop C4I systems — short for “command, control, communications, computers and intelligence” — that integrate battlefield information.; one Israeli officer says the goal is to have “all the elements of a force —- seeing the same tactical picture, and you can move information from one to the other completely seamlessly”

  • Shaken lawmakers weigh additional security measures

    Following the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona), more than 800 participants — members of Congress, their spouses, and staffs — take part in a conference call Sunday; the FBI, House Sergeant at Arms Bill Livingood, and U.S. Capitol Police Chief Phil Morse detailed security measures lawmakers and their family members should take both in Washington, D.C. and in their home districts; another security briefing for lawmakers is scheduled for Wednesday; the last time a member of Congress was shot and killed was in 1978, when Representative Leo Ryan (D-California) tried to leave Jonestown, Guyana, with members of Jim Jones’s cult; six members of Congress have been murdered as well as two senators — Huey Long in 1935 and Robert Kennedy in 1968; five members of Congress were injured when Puerto Rican nationalists shot up the House chamber on 21 March 1954

  • Suspected Arizona gunman passed FBI background check

    The alleged shooter of Representative Giffords and eighteen other people in Arizona purchased a firearm legally — and after passing an FBI background check — from Sportsman’s Warehouse’s Tucson store in November; Loughner did not present a concealed weapons permit so he was required to pass an FBI background check, which he did “immediately and without incident,” the company which owns the store says; a DHS memo ties Loughner to the extremist group American Renaissance, which DHS describes as “anti-government, anti-immigration, anti-ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government), anti-Semitic”; the group leader says Loughner had no connection with his group

  • New laser weapon dazzles, confuses pirates

    There were 430 pirate attacks last year, an increase of 5.6 percent on the previous year; in a bid to develop a suitable non-lethal weapon to help fend off this threat, BAE Systems studied pirate behavior; the conclusion was that an automatic weapon was needed, one that would not put any of the crew at risk, and one which would distract suspected pirates rather than harm them

  • Portable device helps officers ID uncooperative suspects

    A portable fingerprint scanner helps police in a Florida town to identify people who refuse to identify themselves; the portable device searches the database of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which has more than 5.5 million criminal records; it also crosschecks a FBI database of wanted persons, sex offender registry and known or suspected terrorists

  • South African wireless traffic lights stolen by SIM-card thieves

    The city of Johannesburg had a great idea to make traffic move more smoothly in the city: install wirelessly activated traffic lights; but this is South Africa, so it did not take more than a few weeks for thieves to steal the SIM cards from 400 out of the 600 traffic lights installed; now the city does not have the fancy lights — and it pays thousands of rand on phone calls the thieves subsequently make using the snaffled SIMs

  • Mexico violence hits new levels in scale, brutality in 2010

    Mexico’s drug violence in 2010 was striking not only for its scale but also for its brutality; more than 13,000 people were killed across the country in drug violence, up from an estimated 9,600 a year earlier; the number of people killed since the government launched its war on the drug cartels in December 2006 has reached 31,000; analysts say that the violence is the result of the collapse of the old political structure — the 80-year one-party system ran by the PRI, which came to an end in 2000, when Vicente Fox came to power; the old system, with its unwritten rules and tacit understandings, is yet to be replaced by a new, consensual system; what has exacerbated the anarchical situation are two new elements: the rise of drug trafficking through Mexico, and the free flow of arms into the country, mostly from the United States

  • Smart system to teach itself to jam new wireless threats

    As wireless communication devices become more adaptive and responsive to their environment by using technology such as Dynamic Spectrum Allocation, the effectiveness of fixed countermeasures may become severely degraded; DARPA wants smart system that can learn to jam new wireless threats automatically

  • U.S. to deploy see-all Gorgon Stare UAV

    New U.S. UAV will be equipped with nine cameras which can transmit live video images of physical movements across an entire town; the new airborne surveillance system can send dozens of live images to a maximum of ten soldiers on the ground who would use hand-held devices similar in size to an iPad or Kindle

  • Biometric technologies save lives in the field

    This is not your father’s military: Within minutes of knocking down the door of a suspected bomb maker in the Middle East, U.S. troops can fingerprint everyone they find inside, send scans across a satellite link, and find out if the subjects are suspected terrorists

  • ATF to require gun dealers to report multiple rifle sales

    Mexico, reeling under the weight of the escalating armed conflict between the government and the drug cartels, is on the verge of becoming a failed, ungovernable state on the U.S. door-step; U.S. and Mexican experts say that 90 percent of the tens of thousands of the semi-automatic rifles in the arsenals of the cartels are smuggled from the United State; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has announced a new measure, requiring U.S. gun dealers to report multiple sales of rifles to authorities; Texas law enforcement authorities say that since the reporting requirements will only include the southwest border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California — guns will continue to flow into Mexico from other parts of the United States — and from other countries

  • U.S. not ready for bioterrorism

    New report finds that if a major disease incident or bioterrorism attack were to occur today, the United States would not be ready for it; significant local, state, and federal budget cuts have had a negative impact on public health departments’ ability to maintain staff capabilities, and their ability to respond to crises

  • Closing of U.K. forensics research centers triggers protest

    The U.K. government announced that the Forensic Science Service — a leading research center based in Birmingham, United Kingdom — will be closed by 2012 because of budgetary reasons; law enforcement leaders and scientists calls on the government to reconsider the decision, saying that “The reputation of forensic science in the U.K. will undoubtedly diminish —- The lack of research means that we will be lagging behind the rest of the world, and justice will suffer”