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Barry Manilow as the ultimate weapon
Two small cities — one in Australia, the other in New Zealand — found the perfect solution for hundreds of unruly youth who roam the cities’ malls, covering walls with graffiti, and disrupting commerce: Piping Barry Manilow’s music through the mall district
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India's private security companies flourish
As a result of the Mumbai attacks, the Indian private security industry has been growing by leaps and bounds; already the country’s private security force numbers 5 million, 1.3 million more than India’s police forces
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German high-tech sector holds up
Turnover in German-made IT, telecommunications, and digital consumer electronics will hold steady at about €145 billion — still, the German high-tech industry would perform worse than the global high-tech sector as a whole, which is expected to boost sales about 3 percent to €2.416 trillion
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British government to boost investment in science
Gordon Brown: “Science alone gives us hope” that we can eliminate poverty, tackle climate change, and mitigate the impact of disease around the world
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San Diego State builds radiation detection system
New Immersive Visualization Center on the campus of San Diego State collaborates with the university’s Homeland Security Program to build, and then demonstrate, gamma radiation detection perimeter system
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Historic sample of bomb-grade plutonium discovered
Scientists stumble upon, then identify, the oldest batch of weapon-grade plutonium; methods used in identification can help in anti-proliferation efforts
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India: Pakistani Army colonel was involved in Mumbai attacks
Using information partly supplied by the FBI, Indian police says the ten Islamist militants who rampaged through Mumbai spoke to their handlers in Pakistan during the attacks via mobile phones connected to Callphonex, an Internet telephony provider based in New Jersey; communication was facilitated by Col. Saadat Ullah of Pakistan Army’s Special Communications Organization (SCO), an offshoot of the signals corps
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President's proposed 2010 budget shows DHS priorities
Proposed budget increase DHS budget by 6 percent; priorities include cyber security, helping TSA screen travelers, increase bomb disposal and counter-IED capabilities, border security, emergency response
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Schneier: Perverse incentives drive bad security decisions
Many security-related decisions are less than optimal because those who have to make the decisions face perverse incentives; in the post-9/11 era, we have to make sure the incentives driving security decisions are the right incentives
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Intelligence, law enforcement face another hurdle: encrypted VoIP
The intelligence community and law enforcement already are concerned about the difficult they have eavesdropping in Skype communications; a U.K. start-up is going to make life more difficult for them by encryption VoIP communications and concealing more conversations
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EU may investigate VoIP eavesdropping
Italian anti-crime authorities have asked the EU to look into regulating VoIP communication encryption; the Italian authorities presented evidence that crime rings and prostitution networks use Skype for the specific purpose of frustrating police investigators
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Iran launches plutonium path to the bomb
Iran makes an important — if symbolic — step toward joining the nuclear weapon club; the Busher plant will allow Iran to produce bombs from plutonium, in addition to bombs made from uranium enriched at a facility at Natanz
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New U.S. strategy begins to take shape in Pakistan
The U.S. military and elements in the Pakistani national security establishments collaborate much more closely than in the past; the strategy of General David Patreus and the new Obama administration is to recognize that Pakistan is a fractured, divided country, and to work with those elements closer to us
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Former U.K. home secretary: compulsory passports rather than national ID
David Blunkett, in a speech today, will suggest making national ID voluntary, opting instead for compulsory, pocket-size passports; will also raise questions about massive national database; critics charge there is less here than meets the eye
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Hill committees put authorization, chemical security bills on top of agendas
Top House and Senate Homeland Security committees staffers say their top priorities would be authorization of DHS budget and chemical plants safety measure which may include “inherently safer technologies”
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The long view
A Reformed White Nationalist Says the Worst Is Yet to Come
It’s going to get worse. That’s the warning of a former violent extremist, Christian Picciolini, who joined a neo-Nazi movement 30 years ago and now tries to get people out of them. White-supremacist terrorists—the ones who have left dozens dead in attacks in Pittsburgh, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas, in recent months—aren’t just trying to outdo one another, he told us. They’re trying to outdo Timothy McVeigh. Picciolini said that even if the U.S. could get a handle on its gun problem, terrorists can always find other ways. McVeigh had his car bomb, the September 11th hijackers had their airplanes, Islamic State attackers have suicide bombings, trucks, and knives. “I have to ask myself, Do we have white-nationalist airline pilots?”
U.S. Elections Are Still Not Safe from Attack
Russia’s attack on American elections in 2016, described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recent report as “sweeping and systematic,” came as a shock to many. It shouldn’t have. Experts had been warning of the danger of foreign meddling in U.S. elections for years. Already by 2016, the wholesale adoption of computerized voting had weakened safeguards against interference and left the United States vulnerable to an attack. So, too, the shift to digital media and communications had opened new gaps in security and the law that could be used for manipulation and blackmail.
Who Leads the U.S. “War” on Disinformation?
When former U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before the House Intelligence Committee last week about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, some saw his comments about Moscow’s ongoing meddling attempts as the most important statement of the day. “It wasn’t a single attempt,” he said when asked about the spread of disinformation and whether Moscow would replicate the efforts again. “They’re doing it as we sit here and they expect to do it during the next campaign.” It’s not clear, however, who can or will lead the charge in this “war on disinformation.” Even as experts say the problem is worsening, it is unlikely that the current divided government could produce anything close to a solution.
Military-Style Surveillance Technology Is Being Tested in American Cities
What if you fly a helicopter over the city at 1,000 feet. Now, with your telescopic camera, you can even make out distinctive features of the people in your frame. Surely this isn’t legal, you might say. Surely a bright line exists between snapping a photo with your phone from an airplane window and focusing a telescopic lens a few hundred feet over someone’s backyard. But it doesn’t. This is because airspace over America falls into the same legal category as other public spaces, such as sidewalks, roads, parks, and beaches—and it isn’t illegal to take photographs of private property, or private citizens, from public space. As a result, we have no expectation of privacy from above.
America Should View China as a Hostile, Revolutionary Power
Like cholesterol, great powers can be good, in that they accept the present international order, or bad, in that they do not. China does not, and seeks to overturn the contemporary order the West created. This is the source of what is already the great conflict of 21st century. China is not a status quo great power. But as important as these developments are, there is a greater concern. This is the intellectual framework that China is creating under the guise of ‘a community with a shared future for mankind,’ most recently expressed in the July 2019 defense white paper. This shared future is certain to be dystopian. Any community that the CCP creates will be totalitarian and oppressive by its nature. Any shared future that it seeks to create will be one in which the rest of the world adapts to serve the interests of Beijing.
Good for Google, Bad for America
Google’s decision to start an AI lab in China while ending an AI contract with the Pentagon, is disturbing. Goggle may argue that it operates in a world where “AI and its benefits have no borders,” but Peter Thiel argues that this way of thinking works only inside Google’s cosseted Northern California campus, quite distinct from the world outside. “The Silicon Valley attitude sometimes called ‘cosmopolitanism’ is probably better understood as an extreme strain of parochialism, that of fortunate enclaves isolated from the problems of other places — and incurious about them,” he writes. In the 1950s, the cliché was that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” Google makes no such claim for itself; “it would be too obviously false,” Thiel writes. Instead, Google talks about what is good for the world – but “by now we should understand that the real point of talking about what’s good for the world is to evade responsibility for the good of the country.”