• Councils use CCTV to collect £3 million in “ghost” parking tickets every year

    More and more councils in the United Kingdom use CCTVs to issue automatic tickets for parking violations; throughout England, 265 local authorities collected £328 million in parking fines last year — more than three times as much as speed cameras raked in; motoring groups argue these “ghost tickets” are unfair because motorists do not know they had been fined until afterward, it is more difficult to check signs and mount an appeal

  • A first: UND offers degree program in UAV piloting

    The number of unmanned aircraft systems has jumped from a fleet of about 50 vehicles nine years ago to more than 2,400 in use today; these UAVs need trained operators to operate them, and the University of North Dakota offers the first-in-the-U.S. degree program in UAV piloting

  • Asia to drive growth of CCTV market

    A string of terrorist attacks in India, Indonesia, and Pakistan has driven governments and private organizations in Asian countries to invest more in security; CCTV manufacturers will benefit from this trend

  • Collecting – and interpreting -- sensor data

    The U.S. military is relying an ever-greater number of cameras and sensors to collect information; there is a need to turn this mountain of data feeds into usable information for soldiers; Virginia-based Samoff offers its TerraSight product as a solution

  • Thermal imaging enters the mainstream

    FLIR guides thermal imaging into the mainstream; FLIR, a leading thermal imaging equipment manufacturer, helps the trend by lowering its price point; a residential thermal imaging camera can now be purchased for $3,500

  • Tadpole-shaped dirigible to help in communication, surveillance missions

    Florida company shows unmanned dirigible which will fly at 65,000 and 70,000
    feet; the “Stratellite” will use similar technology to the that used by the
    Graf Zeppelin in the 1930s; homeland security applications include vessel
    tracking and cargo container surveillance; littoral (shore-proximate)
    surveillance for ports, waterways, coastal trails, and urban environments;
    ancillary border surveillance activity, and more

  • Feeling Software’s solution helps manage multi-camera security and surveillance

    Whether a company operates 50 or 5,000 cameras, Feeling Software’s Omnipresence makes it simple to understand every video feed in the surveillance system at a glance; with advanced camera navigation, each individual feed is used to automatically generate the bigger security picture.

  • Drone security questions raised years ago

    Questions about the security of drone communications were raised years ago; in 2004, U.S. officials raised concerns about Russia and China intercepting and manipulating video from drone aircraft, but the military believed it was facing more pressing issues; officers at the time were not concerned about communications being intercepted in Iraq or Afghanistan because they believed militants were technically unsophisticated.

  • U.S. Army working to encrypt UAV video feeds

    The Army is scrambling to secure the live video feeds from its UAVs from being intercepted by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan; Raven drones will be retrofitted with encryption technology as early as this month; the U.S. Air Force has known for more than a decade that the live video feeds from its unmanned aerial vehicles can be intercepted by the enemy but opted not to do anything about it until this year.

  • Pentagon says U.S. fixed drones hacked by Iraqi insurgents

    Iraqi insurgents, using a $25.95 off-the-shelf commercial application, were able to intercept communication between U.S. surveillance UAVs and the UAVs’ command center; the hacking was discovered when the U.S. military found files of intercepted drone video feeds on laptops of captured militants; U.S. soldiers discovered “days and days and hours and hours of proof,” one U.S. officer said; the same hacking technique is known to have been employed in Afghanistan; the U.S. government has known about the UAV communication flaw since the 1990s, but assumed its adversaries would not be able to take advantage of it.

  • Interim U.K. CCTV regulator is appointed

    The U.K. government appointment of an interim CCTV regulator in an effort to improve the public’s power in regards to the technology; the regulator will advise the government on matters surrounding the use of CCTV in public places, including the need for a regulatory framework.

  • Michigan in cyber-security partnership with DHS

    Michigan will deploy EINSTEIN 1, the DHS-run cyber security system which all federal agencies are required to use; EINSTEIN 1 automates the collection and analysis of computer network security information from participating agency and government networks to help analysts identify and combat malicious cyber-activity

  • DHS invites Kiwi research cooperation

    A DHS representative visited New Zealand to explore research collaboration with New Zealand institution; of special interest to DHS is work done at the Human Interface Technology (HIT) Lab at Canterbury University about finding new ways of interacting with large amounts of data, particularly unstructured data — enabling zettabytes (10 to the power 21 bytes) of data to be economically represented in ways that make patterns such as clusters of similarity and outliers readily appreciable by the human eye.

  • IDF aims for quieter, sturdier UAVs

    The IDF has issues an RFP for a stealthy UAV; the quiet UAV will be attached to battalions in the theater to provide surveillance on a tactical, pinpointed level; also, in an effort to increase its intelligence-gathering capabilities, the IAF will in the coming months establish a new squadron of Heron TP UAVs, called the Eitan, manufactured by IAI

  • Russia wants more Israeli spy UAVs

    Russia tried, but failed, to develop its own fleet of advanced UAVs; it has purchased a dozen UAVs from Israel already, and now wants Israel to sell it the most advanced UAVs in Israel’s arsenal; the Russian publicly say that they will reverse-engineer the technology, and Israel is going along because this the price the Russians demanded for not supplying Iran with advanced S-300 air defense systems