• Europe skeptical about whole-body scanners

    Questions are being raised in several European countries about the effectiveness, cost effectiveness, health, and privacy aspects of whole-body scanners; a former head of security for the British Airports Authority: “A thorough body frisk would do the same sort of thing, if it is done properly, and of course it costs a lot less”

  • Sorting the bad guys from the good

    Israel’s WeCu claims a 95 percent success rate for its new terrorist detection system that monitors reactions to visual stimuli at airports and checkpoints; the company’s device flashes stimuli, such as photos, a symbol, or a code word, relating to the information authorities are most interested in (whether it is terrorism, drug smuggling, or other crimes), to passengers as they pass through terminal checkpoints; hidden biometric sensors then detect the subjects’ physical reactions and subtle behavioral changes remotely or during random contact

  • Super Bowl, Winter Olympics, soccer World Cup take extra security measures

    The organizers of three big sporting events – the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, and the soccer World Cup – are taking extra security measures to ensure the safety of participants and spectators; The Winter Olympics’ security budget initially projected at $175 million now tops $900 million, and the force for the games will include more than 15,000 people, a surveillance blimp hovering over Vancouver, and more than 900 surveillance cameras monitoring competition venues and crowd-attracting public areas; at the Super Bowl, nearly everyone entering the stadium will be subjected to a pat-down search; exceptions would be a police officer in uniform, a player in uniform, and the president of the United States

  • Partnership aims to help air shippers meet security deadline

    Congress has mandated that by August 2010, 100 percent of cargo on passenger planes must be screened; companies begin to position themselves to take advantage of the business opportunity involved in offering secure cargo warehousing and shipping

  • 950 whole-body scanners in U.S. airports by end of 2011

    The administration has allocated $215 million in the proposed 2011 budget to buy 500 whole-body scanners; they will be added to the 450 to be bought this year; currently there are 40 body scanners operating in 19 U.S. airports

  • Ahern signals support for airport body scanners

    The Irish government will support the deployment of whole-body scanner at Irish airports; Minister of Justice Dermot Ahern: “If additional measures are required either in exchange of passenger information or better technology, then we should take them”; Ireland has also accepted the apology of the Slovak government for an explosive-smuggling exercise which saw an unwitting Slovak passenger smuggle explosives planted in his luggage by Slovak intelligence through Irish security

  • IBM filed patents for airport security profiling technology

    IBM has filed a dozen patent applications which define a sophisticated scheme for airport terminal and perimeter protection, incorporating potential support for computer implementation of passenger behavioral profiling to detect security threats

  • Obama signals shift to re-use of spent nuclear fuel

    The Obama administration is making two big moves on the nuclear power front: in order to boost the U.S. nuclear power industry, the administration will include $54 billion of loan guarantees in the 2011 budget request to Congress, up from $18.5 billion; the administration will also reverse a 50-year U.S. ban on reprocessing nuclear waste: fearing the creation of more weapon-grade fissile material, the United States, since the late 1950s, has opposed the reprocessing of nuclear waste, preferring to find a permanent burial site for the waste instead; the administration has pulled the plug on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project, indicating it would reconsider the issue of reprocessing the waste

  • Hospital scanner could curb nuclear waste threat

    Medical gamma-ray cameras were used for the first time to track radioactive isotopes in soil samples from a U.S. civil nuclear site; the technique, which is used in hospitals for heart, bone, and kidney scanning, is now being used to study the environmental behavior of nuclear waste — and its success could help scientists find new ways of using bacteria to control the spread of radioactivity

  • GAO: TSA needs to test whole-body scanners rigorously

    A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report says the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) needs to make sure that the whole-body scanners the agency plans to deploy at U.S. airports undergo thorough operational and vulnerability testing; a failure to do such vetting has already resulted in a similar airport checkpoint security technology for explosives detection being withdrawn from service before being fully deployed, the GAO report noted

  • New blue ribbon commission on America’s nuclear future

    The commission, led by Lee Hamilton and Brent Scowcroft, will provide recommendations on managing used fuel and nuclear waste; Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: “Nuclear energy provides clean, safe, reliable power and has an important role to play as we build a low-carbon future. The Administration is committed to promoting nuclear power in the United States and developing a safe, long-term solution for the management of used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste”

  • Yemen bolsters airport security – and adheres to Muslim strictures

    Growing pressure from European countries lead Yemen to bolster its lax airport security measures; among the new measures are whole-body scanners; because of Muslim sensibilities, female security scanners would watch the images of women passengers’ body images, and male security scanners would observe the images of male passengers

  • U.S.-bound ship cargo to get more scrutiny

    The goal of screening 100 percent of U.S.-bound cargo containers is may not be reached any time soon, but new cargo-reporting requirement stipulates that ocean carriers and importers submit additional details about U.S.-bound cargo twenty-four hours before it is loaded onto vessels in foreign seaports

  • NYC subway security system: past due, over budget

    In 2005 the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) awarded Lockheed Martin a $212 million contract to create a cutting-edge security system the city’s subways, buses, and commuter trains; the cost of the security system has ballooned to $461 million and is now over-schedule by a year-and-a-half; The MTA. has $59 million left in capital funding

  • Researchers propose a new way to scan cargo containers

    In 2007 the U.S. government set itself the goal of screening all aviation cargo loaded onto passenger planes and all maritime cargo entering the country for both explosives and nuclear materials; this is an ambitious goal: there are more than ten millions containers entering the United States every year through sea ports and land border crossings, and there are more than 28,000 commercial flights