Public Safety

  • Car immobilizers no longer a problem for car thieves

    For sixteen years, car immobilizers have kept car thieves at bay — but that may now be changing; most cars still use either a 40 or 48-bit key, even though the 128-bit AES — which would take too long to crack for car thieves to bother trying — is now considered by security professionals to be a minimum standard

  • U.S. Air Force creates powerful supercomputer out of PS3s

    The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has connected 1,760 PlayStation 3 systems together to create the fastest interactive computer in the entire Defense Department; the Condor Cluster, as the group of systems is known, is capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (500 TFLOPS)

  • Florida follows Arizona in cracking down on illegal immigrants

    Florida has joined Arizona on the front lines of battling illegal immigration with a new bill released last week that seeks to crack down on the estimated 800,000 undocumented workers in the state; a new bill allows law enforcement officers to check the residency status of anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant and would punish some legal immigrants who are not carrying proper documentation; immigrants who are caught not carrying their documents face a fine of up to $100 and up to twenty days in jail; state Attorney General-elect Pam Bondi said she is still reviewing the details of the bill but expressed support for such a law

  • Mexican army nabs a teen sibling cartel assassination team

    The war among Mexico’s seven drug cartels — and between the cartels and the Mexican government — is intensifying and becoming more gruesome; the preferred form of cruelty by drug cartel assassins is to capture enemies and behead them; decapitations emerged alongside another gruesome tactic — dumping the bodies of rivals in vats of acid; cartel goons have moved away from that method, however; the latest move by the cartels is to employ kids as young as 14-year old as assassins; Mexico police last night has captured one such youngster and his 16-year old sister; the two are implicated in four assassinations

  • Spain busts terrorist passport-stealing ring

    Spanish police have arrested seven men suspected of having links to a Pakistani militant group blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks; the six Pakistanis and one north African are believed to be part of European network based in Barcelona that stole passports to order for the “World Islamic Front” a group connected to al Qaeda; members of the theft ring were tasked with stealing 40 passports a month, and they stole the passports from those whose age and nationality would best enable terrorists to use the falsified documents to travel freely across borders; the group sent the passports to be forged in Thailand from where they were distributed to criminal groups around the world including radical Islamic cells

  • Container heist unrelated to Port of Los Angeles

    Investigators in Los Angeles described the heist of three containers as “terminal robbery” — but the heist had nothing to do with the Port of Los Angeles / Long Beach; the facility where the robbery occurred is located miles inland from the port, is not part of a federally regulated port area, and is not governed by the Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA) protocol; since stricter port regulations came into effect following the 9/11 attacks, zero containers have been stolen from the Port of Los Angeles

  • Color-changing "blast badge" detects exposure to explosive shock waves

    Researchers develop a color-changing patch that could be worn on soldiers’ helmets and uniforms to indicate the strength of exposure to blasts from explosives in the field; blast-induced traumatic brain injury is the “signature wound” of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; with no objective information of relative blast exposure, soldiers with brain injury may not receive appropriate medical care and are at risk of being returned to the battlefield too soon

  • Exploding garbage truck in Florida not act of terrorism

    An explosion on an Orlando, Florida garbage truck raise fears that the garbage-truck crew had stumbled on an underground bomb factory which had foolishly thrown some of its products in the rubbish — or that the explosion presaged a fearful terror wave campaign of exploding bins or municipal vehicles; police investigation finds that the explosion was caused by a local resident foolishly disposing of a pressurized container in their garbage

  • D.C. area wireless network excludes DHS

    U.S. federal law enforcement officers from different agencies soon will be able to talk to each other on their own radios in the Washington, D.C. area — but DHS will not be a part of the new system; DHS was lacking two things that are essential in the federal government for big projects like this one: “You need someone to be in charge and you need a place to put the money,” said the former official; “DHS had neither”

  • Fingerprinting on the go -- and on the street

    Police in North Carolina are deploying more than 100 portable fingerprinting devices to a handful of law enforcement agencies throughout the Chapel Hill region; the devices use Rapid Identification COPS Technology — software for handheld wireless devices that lets a law officer scan an individual’s fingerprints and then search the agency’s database for possible identification — all at the arrest scene

  • Aussie students develop new fingerprint technology

    Current methods for visualizing fingerprints on paper are labor-intensive and time-consuming, using toxic dyes and chemicals to stain the fingerprints or make them fluorescent; two students at the University of Technology-Sydney developed a new technology — Thermal Fingerprint Developer — which, as the name suggests, uses heat to develop the fingerprint in a matter of seconds

  • Legislator proposes volunteer-based Arizona border force

    An Arizona legislator is set to introduce a bill to create a new state volunteer force that could be used help patrol the U.S.-Mexico border; the bill would establish a new homeland security force of volunteers who could be called to duty during civil disasters and for border security; the border security role could kick in if the federal government withdraws National Guard soldiers now assisting in border security

  • Advanced UAVs help war on terrorism -- and companies' bottom line

    Ever-more sophisticated UAVs giving U.S. better eyes, ears, and even noses; new sensors enable flying drones to listen in on cell phone conversations and pinpoint the location of the caller on the ground; some can even “smell” the air and sniff out chemical plumes emanating from a potential underground nuclear laboratory; these advances mean a growing and potentially huge business for the defense industry: the drone electronics industry now generates about $3 billion in revenue, but this is expected to double to $6 billion in the next eight years

  • Blood at crime scene identifies age of perpetrator

    New DNA tests of minute amounts of blood left by the perpetrator at a crime scene can now allow police to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, the age of the perpetrator; to be more precise: the test accurately predicts what 20-year age bracket (1-20, 20-40, etc.), from birth to eighty years, the donor of the blood sample belongs to