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Costs of no-bid contract at DHS balloon
DHS had to hit the ground running in 2003, so it awarded a no-bid contract for Booz Allen to get intelligence operations going; costs soared, and the original $2 million contract grew to $124 million
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States fail to use post-9/11 grants
Since 9/11, the federal government has allocated $16.04 billion in grants to states; trouble is, to date almost $5 billion of it has not been spent
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Senate, House DHS budget bills differ on programs, technologies
The House and Senate versions of the proposed DHS budget are similar in many ways, but also contain important differences on funding for programs, technologies
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TB victim receives TV
Facing a life of civil commitment, Russian-born Arizonan earns his creature comforts
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DHS to award $33.7 million in local first responder grants
Funds can be used for a host of different products, including IT, thermal imaging, and video surveillance; applications due 29 May
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Minor league baseball passes on DHS Ready Campaign
Over two-thirds of teams are not participating in what William Arkin calls a “sophomoric and wasteful” effort
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Democrats encourage DHS to pay bonuses
A departmental report card criticizes the agency for stinginess and suggests holding off on bonuses for supervisors; DHS morale an ongoing problem
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Virginia Tech attacks mobilize crisis industry
Flush with federal grants, psychologists use the Web to share data, best practices; American School Counselor Association reports a doubling of membership since 9/11
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State incubators see growth in the first responder market
Local technology initiatives take off nationwide, with planners attracted by low start up costs and big payoffs; South Carolina sees $14 in local economic activity for every dollar invested
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Attensity named a finalist for Red Herring's 100 Award
Nomination comes as company announces a deal to supply unstructured text management software to Virginia’s Chesterfield County Police Department
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Experts identify common post-attack response problems
Multi-disciplinary panel of blast-related injury experts takes a close look at common triage, scene security, and communications difficulties; researchers hope to identify best practices
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GAO raps Project 25 interoperability grants
Federal government has spent $2.15 billion on expensive but uncompatible radios; a lack of strategic vision
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LAPD rapped for lax oversight of anti-terror unit
Auditors criticize Anti-Terrorist Intelligence Section for failuring to properly screen officers; management criticized for failing to excercise appropriate supervision of this controversial unit
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Florida cities unveil technology wish lists
Cities from Miramar to Pembroke Pines get ready to spend their Urban Areas Security Initiative dollars; metal detectors and mobile traffic light manufacturers will find opportunities in the Sunshine State
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Body armor business booms
Companies such as Ceradyne and Armor Holding post large gains after DoD spends $5 billion in five years to protect troops; smaller companies find niche markets in custom-wear, police
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The long view
MI6 Fears Russia Can Link Prince Andrew to Jeffrey Epstein Abuse
British intelligence chiefs are concerned that Russia may have obtained kompromat, compromising material, on Prince Andrew over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. MI6 is understood to be concerned about the activities of a former Florida police officer who had access to the investigation into the billionaire pedophile and then moved to Russia. John Mark Dougan, a former deputy in the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office, left the United States in 2009 and has been living in Moscow since then. Since the Epstein case was reopened in July 2019, Dougan started to make Facebook posts relating to the case. His intervention alarmed British and American intelligence officials, who appear to have been tracking his activities since he was photographed with Pavel Borodin in 2013. A Western intelligence source told The Times that Dougan exhibited a number of “classic traits” that made him suitable for recruitment by a “hostile intelligence service.” Borodin, a senior Russian government official, is referred to as a mentor to President Vladimir Putin.
The CAR Murders: A Critical Cold Case in the New Cold War Points to “Putin’s Chef”
You may remember that about a year ago three Russian journalists and filmmakers were mysteriously murdered in the Central African Republic (CAR). The victims — Orkhan Dzhemal, Alexander Rastorguev, and Kirill Radchenko — had traveled to the CAR to make a documentary about the “Wagner Group,” a secretive private military contractor affiliated to Yevgeny Prigozhin, nicknamed “Putin’s chef” because of his Kremlin catering contacts. The Russian official investigation blamed Islamic militants for the killing, and a news agency backed by Prigozhin blamed a French mercenary. An independent investigation has now found that Prigozhin’s own hit men killed the journalists. “Americans concerned about the ruthlessness of Moscow’s operations to subvert or dominate other countries should take note as evidence mounts that some of the central figures in the cyberattacks on the U.S. presidential election in 2016 may also be implicated in the Africa homicides,” Anna Nemtsova and Christopher Dickey write.
Does Norway Have a Far-Right Problem?
A recent article in the Guardian by Sindre Bangstad, a Norwegian social anthropologist describes Norway as being in the grip of pervasive, far-right nationalism, with violence simmering just below the surface. “Norway is in denial about the threat of far-right violence,” reads the bombastic headline. Kathrine Jebsen Moore, a fellow Norwegian, writes that Bangstad misrepresents and misleads: she motes that the Norwegian Police Security Service still regards Islamist terror threats as the most serious threat to Norway, even if it has upgraded the threat of far-right extremism from “unlikely” to “possible” after an attempted mosque attack in August. But “to see in the upgrading of the terrorist threat posed by far-right groups a general mood of irrational hatred for immigrants and Muslims, and portray Norway as a hotbed for racism, is just wrong,” Moore writes, adding: “Norway, like other European countries, is faced with a new set of challenges as it changes from a homogenous nation to a country with a growing immigrant population” – and that “Norway is coping with this influx a lot better than Sweden. So, is Norway in denial about its far-right problem? Don’t believe it.”
White Supremacy Has Triggered a Terrorism Panic
Our collective response to terrorism seems to swing on a pendulum between rank complacency and terrified myth-making. In January 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama dismissed the Islamic State as al Qaeda’s “JV team.” But by September of that year, after the group had captured Mosul in Iraq and launched a genocidal campaign of slaughter against the Yazidis, he started bombing it. A similar dynamic can be observed in the case of white supremacy today. This is not “to suggest that the threat of white supremacy is not real or that we should be complacent about it,” Simon Cottee writes. “Of course it is real, and of course we need to indict and seriously punish those who have committed or are plotting to commit terrorist atrocities in the name of white supremacy.” But we should resist the urge to treat white supremacy as “a mythical monster against which to signal our moral virtue”: “White supremacy is not a monolith endangering our children and societies, but we might just make it into one by overinflating it into precisely this.”
The Strange Career of “National Security”
National security—it’s an unusual phrase. Americans use it to frame war, terror, and everything else. Refugees fleeing violence and destitution are considered a “national-security threat.” So too are imported automobiles, as the Trump administration declared last year. Chinese ownership of the dating app Grindr “constitutes a national-security risk.” And Greenland, Senator Tom Cotton asserts, is “vital to our national security.” One might think the country has always been obsessed with national security. This is not the case, Dexter Fergie writes: “Americans didn’t begin using the phrase with any frequency until the 1940s. In fact, the Cambridge historian Andrew Preston has counted a mere four mentions of national security by U.S. presidents from 1918 to 1931. That is an average of one utterance for each of the presidents who served during that period. It’s also fewer than the number of times I wrote national security in the opening paragraph of this essay.”
A New National Security Framework for Foreign Interference
A series of recent signals from Trump administration officials, including the President, are normalizing an idea that is detrimental to our national security – that soliciting foreign interference in a U.S. election won’t be prosecuted. Jessica Brandt and Joshua Rudolph write in Just Security that with foreign rivals from Beijing to Moscow and elsewhere watching closely, it will become open season on our democracy unless we quickly shift our legal framework for such behavior from a campaign-finance perspective to a national security approach. It is now stunningly evident that when it comes to protecting our democracy from foreign interference, our current legal framework is not up to the task,” Brandt and Rudolph write. “That is in part because what we are dealing with are national security threats, not a technical campaign finance violations.”