• DHS raises Phoenix’s terror-risk ranking

    DHS has raised Phoenix’s terrorist risk assessment three spots, from number eighteen to number fifteen. The change will entitle the city to $5.5 million in a federal security grant, $1.5 million more than it received from the same grant last year.

  • Angry lawmakers warn NSA to curb surveillance operations

    John Inglis, the deputy director of the National Security Agency (NSA), told angry lawmakers yesterday that his agency’s ability to analyze phone records and online behavior is greater than what the agency had previously revealed. Inglis told members of the House Judiciary Committee that NSA analysts can perform “a second or third hop query” through its collections of telephone data and Internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations. Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), the author of the 2001 Patriot Act, warned the intelligence officials testifying before the committee that unless they rein in the scope of their surveillance on Americans’ phone records, “There are not the votes in the House of Representatives” to renew the provision after its 2015 expiration. “You’re going to lose it entirely,” he said.

  • Pa. man sentenced to 8 ½ years for running a terrorism-promoting Internet forum

    A western Pennsylvania man has been sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for leading an Internet forum which promoted terrorist attacks against American military and civilian targets. Emerson Begolly, 24, of Redbank Township was also convicted of having a concealed gun and biting an FBI agent when he was arrested in 2011.

  • Automatic license plate readers used to collect, store data on millions of Americans

    Automatic license plate readers are the most widespread location tracking technology available to law enforcement. Mounted on patrol cars or stationary objects like bridges, they snap photos of every passing car, recording their plate numbers, times, and locations. At first the captured plate data was used just to check against lists of cars law enforcement hoped to locate for various reasons (to act on arrest warrants, find stolen cars, etc.). Increasingly, however, all of this data is being fed into massive databases that contain the location information of many millions of innocent Americans stretching back for months or even years.

  • U.S. research universities subject to sustained cyberattack campaign by China

    Leading U.S. research universities report that they have been subject to millions of Chinese hacking attempts weekly. The Chinese are aware that universities, and the professors who do research under the schools’ auspices, receive thousands of patents each year in areas such as prescription drugs, computer chips, fuel cells, aircraft, medical devices, food production, and more. The Chinese government-sponsored cyberattacks on American research universities are an expansion of efforts by China to steal information that has commercial, political, or national security value.

  • OBL: Hiding in plain sight

    Osama bin Laden had been living in his walled Abbottabad compound for nearly ten years, within sight of an elite Pakistani military academy, and gone completely unnoticed. According to a scathing official Pakistani report, the incompetence and negligence of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) failed to realize that the world’s most sought-after terrorist leader had been living in Pakistan, until he was killed in a night-time raid by U.S. Navy SEALs on 2 May 2011.

  • Cybersecurity funding increasing despite sequestration

    Sequestration-mandated cuts continue, but more money will continue to go to cybersecurity, and job opportunities in the field will continue to grow. The Defense Department intends to spend $23 billion on cybersecurity over the next five years, and that it is seeking more than $4.6 billion for cybersecurity in 2014 fiscal year, an 18 percent jump from the 2013 fiscal year.

  • Search begins for Napolitano’s successor

    DHS is the third-largest federal department, with a budget of $48 billion and a staff of more than 240,000. The names circulating as possible replacements for the departing Janet Napolitano include current and former lawmakers, police chiefs, and people with security experience.

  • Giuliani says political correctness hampers fight against domestic terrorists

    The Department of Defense initially described Army Major Nidal Hassan’s Fort Hood shooting spree as “terrorism,” but quickly changed that definition to “workplace violence.” Testifying before a congressional panel, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani criticized DoD’s decision, and political correctness more generally, saying that “You can’t fight an enemy you don’t acknowledge.”

  • Lawmakers uneasy about Smithfield’s acquisition by a Chinese food giant

    Lawmakers last week questioned Smithfield Foods CEO Larry Pope about the proposed acquisition of the pork producer by China’s largest meat producer. Lawmakers are worried that the acquisition will negatively affect U.S food supply and agricultural producers.

  • Consolidation expected among large cybersecurrity contractors

    Europe’s largest defense company, BAE Systems, says the number of military contractors selling data protection services to governments will decrease as clients demands for ever-more-sophisticated products  increase.

  • Napolitano leaving DHS post

    DHS secretary Janet Napolitano announced earlier today that she would be leaving her post in early September to become president of the University of California system. Napolitano served as DHS chief during a contentious and event-filled period which saw her department dealing with issues such as immigration, border security, the Boston bombing, Superstorm Sandy, and deadly tornadoes in the Midwest.

  • House GOP caucus grapples with immigration issue

    During a closed-door meeting of the House Republican caucus on Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) urged fellow GOP lawmakers to pass an immigration bill. Boehner reiterated his position that no immigration bill will be brought to the House floor without the support of the majority of the House GOP caucus. Participants in the meeting all agreed that they did not trust the Obama administration to enforce either immigration laws or border security provisions.

  • The tax contributions of undocumented immigrants to states and localities

    Opponents of immigration reform argue that undocumented immigrants would be a drain on federal, state, and local government resources if granted legal status under reform. It is also true, however, that the 11.2 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States are already taxpayers, and that their local, state, and federal tax contributions would increase under reform.

  • U.S. defense industry fights budget cuts

    The U.S. defense industry has been fighting budget cuts for two years now. The industry’s effort to prevent sequestration from taking effect has failed, but there is optimism in defense circles that this time the effort may well succeed.