• Pentagon contractor said to have set up a private unit to kill militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan

    A U.S. government contractor alleged to have diverted funds to set up a unit of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants; “While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond,” one U.S. government official said

  • Northrop Grumman, Luminex collaborate on autonomous biodetectors

    Luminex’s xMAP Technology will serve as the basis of the two companies’ effort to develop a fully automated biosensor which will continuously monitor the environment and serve as an early warning system to alert authorities regarding the release of potentially harmful airborne agents

  • GovSec unveils Homeland Security Finance Forum's speakers

    The goal of the Homeland Security Finance Forum is to match pre-selected high-growth companies seeking capital, contemplating an acquisition, a recapitalization, or another form of transaction with active investors in the government, defense, and homeland security markets

  • Econo-Jihad: Terrorists increasingly focus doing economic damage to West

    After the 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden boasted that he sued an operation which cost al Qaeda $500,000 to finance to inflict a $500 billion damage on the U.S. economy; it was not a mere boast: it was an indication the econo-jihad was an integral part of al Qaeda’s strategy to weaken and defeat the West; “the economic turn actually influences the terrorists’ targets, which have included oil-drilling infrastructures, tourism, international economic institutions and more. Indeed, Islamic terrorism’s future devices will focus on targets that will yield the most economic damage,” one expert says

  • U.S. cybercrime losses double

    The value of Internet crime loss complaints in the United States rose from $265 million in 2008 to reach $560 million last year; U.S. businesses lost $120 million in the third quarter of 2009 to phishing and Trojan-based online banking scams, according to figures from the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

  • TSA adds AS&E's X-ray inspection systems to qualified air cargo screening list

    Screening cargo on air planes is promising to be big business, and companies rush to have their screening cargo machines certified by TSA; AS&E has its Gemini 6040, Gemini 7555, and Gemini 100100 X-ray inspection systems added to TSA’s certified cargo screener list

  • Animetrics chosen by Unisys for facial biometric contract for U.S. DoD

    Unisys selects Animetrics for U.S. Department of Defense synthetic identification project; the company uses 2D to 3D face creation technology for face recognition matching in difficult face imaging environments

  • DHS moving forward on cell-all smartphone chemical detection technology

    DHS wants to turn smartphones into chemical sensors; owners of smartphones would volunteer to have tiny chemical sensors embedded in their devices; millions of American could thus become roving chemical sensing nodes to alert authorities of terrorist — or accidental — chemical toxin release

  • Ad for Israeli supermarket chain inspired Mossad's Dubai slaying

    Discount supermarket chain commercial draws inspiration from surveillance footage of Dubai assassination; shows actors carrying tennis rackets, wearing wigs, hats; an actress wearing a wide-brimmed floppy hat mimics Israel’s policy of maintaining deniability, saying she “couldn’t admit to anything”

  • Flying ambulance: UAV will extract wounded soldiers from the battlefield

    There is one more mission being added to the ever-expanding list of operational, intelligence, surveillance, law-enforcement, first response, and disaster recovery missions assigned to UAVs: evacuating critically injured casualties directly from the battlefield to the hospital

  • Smiths Detection's mid-sized X-ray system added to TSA's Air Cargo Screening Qualified List

    By August 2010, all cargo carried on passenger planes will have to be screened; Smiths Detection’s latest addition to its list of cargo screening machines — a pallet-sized scanner — is the company’s sixth technology approved to help shippers meet TSA August 2010 100 percent air cargo screening deadline

  • World's first practical jetpack commercially available for $75,000

    Kiwi company Martin Aircraft is offering the world’s first commercial jetpacks; the machine is expected to revolutionize the military and be taken up by emergency services; the jetpack travels for about 30 minutes on a five-gallon tank of premium gasoline, has top speeds of 60 mph, and reaches heights of 2,400 meters (about 1.5 miles)

  • New surveillance camera offers panoramic view, zoom-in capabilities

    Not unlike the surveillance cameras that tracked Will Smith’s every move in the movie “Enemy of the State,” Adaptive Imaging Technologies’ “panoramic telescope” may yet revolutionize the field of surveillance: the camera can, at the same time, monitor a panoramic field of view and zoom in on any spot in real time with exceptional clarity

  • Tiny sensor "listens" to gunshots to identify source of fire and type of weapon

    The sensor, developed by a Dutch company, is smaller than the head of a match, made of two 200-nanometer-thick, 10-micrometer-wide platinum strips that are heated to 200 degrees Celsius; the sensor does not truly “listen” to sounds; rather, it senses air particles that flow past the platinum strips and cool them unevenly

  • Proposed bill calls for ID card for U.S. workers to curb illegal immigration

    Advocates of immigration reform are pushing for a bill in the Senate which would create a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain; the biometric data would likely be either fingerprints or a scan of the veins in the top of the hand; employers will not be able to hire applicants who do not present a valid ID