• Northern Ireland gets upgraded license plate readers

    The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) is planning to spend some of £12.9 million in additional government security funding on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras; U.K. police use of ANPR cameras is set to change following a Home Office ruling: the police ANPR database that currently holds 7.6 billion records of the movement of motorists in England and Wales will be operated with tougher accountability and safeguards

  • FBI grants more top secret clearances for terrorism cases

    Security clearances granted to members of the FBI’s network of regional terrorism task forces jumped to 878 in 2009, up from 125 in 2007, signaling intensified attention to domestic terror threats; part of the increase is because of the rapid expansion of the terrorism task forces created after the 2001 assaults to disrupt future terror plots; since 2001 the number of terror units, which draw on federal, state, and local investigators, have grown from 35 to 104 nationwide

  • Evidence shows Turkish use of chemical weapons against Kurdish fighters

    German medical experts have confirmed the authenticity of photographs showing eight dead Kurdish PKK fighters — and that the photos prove that they were killed by “chemical substances”; Turkey has been suspected for a while now of using chemical weapons against Kurdish militants, and German politicians across the political spectrum, as well as human rights organizations, have called on Turkey to explain the findings; Turkey denies the charges, calling them “PKK propaganda”

  • How to move forward on nationwide wireless emergency-response network

    One of the lessons of 9/11 and Katrina was that there was a need for a nationwide wireless public safety and emergency-response network; trouble is, politics, arguments about spectrum allocation, business competition, and technology have all contributed to holding things up; one observer says that the way forward is for government to make a national emergency response network a wireless priority and devote dedicated, unencumbered spectrum to it

  • Autogyro airborne surveillance vehicle for law enforcement, military unveiled

    The two-seater Scorpion S3 autogyro has been designed for the law enforcement and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) markets; the Scorpion S3 uses an unpowered rotor in autorotation to develop lift, and a gas turbine Alison B17 engine-powered propeller to provide thrust; the design will reduce costs for fleet operators by 75 percent while also reducing their carbon footprint by up to 80 percent compared to a conventional medium-sized gas turbine helicopter

  • Full-body scanner sit unused at Nigeria airports

    After the failed Christmas Day bombing, the Nigerian government purchased ten body scanners; months later, the scanners still remain unused; the bombing attempt did, however, push Nigeria into signing an agreement allowing U.S. air marshals aboard international flights between the United States and Nigeria

  • All U.S. counties on Mexican border now share inmate fingerprints with feds

    All 25 U.S. counties along the Mexican border are now enrolled in the Secure Communities project; federal immigration officials now have access to the prints of every inmate booked into jail in these counties; Secure Communities makes the notification automatic; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which plans to implement the program nationwide by 2013, says the program has identified more than 262,900 illegal immigrants in jails and prisons who have been charged with or convicted of criminal offenses, including more than 39,000 charged with or convicted of violent offenses or major drug crimes; ICE expects to remove 400,000 illegal immigrants this year; of the 200,000 illegal immigrants deported in the first ten months of fiscal year 2010, 142,000 illegal immigrants were with criminal records and about 50,000 were noncriminals; immigrant advocates say that some counties use Secure Communities to deport noncriminals: the national average of noncriminals flagged by Secure Communities is about 28 percent, but in Travis County, Texas, 82 percent of those removed through Secure Communities were noncriminals

  • The promise, and risks, of battlefield biometrics

    Using biometric devices in Afghanistan offers many benefits to coalition forces and to the Afghani themselves in making it easier to separate the good guys from the bad; some worry, however, that this can backfire — as was the case in Rwanda in 1994: identification cards which included photos and tribal affiliations of either Tutsis and Hutus made it easier for Hutu militias to identify the Tutsi and murder them

  • India equipped to protect the October Commonwealth Games against WMD attacks

    India will have a big security challenge when the Commonwealth Games begin in October; Indian security agencies say they are equipped to face chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) terrorist threats during the games; intelligence agencies have been working on the possibility of attacks from Kashmiri groups like the Hizbul Mujahidden, the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Taliban from Pakistan or Afghanistan, and even Al Qaeda; militant outfits of various other ideological hues are also on the police radar

  • NY Naval Militia in WMD detection homeland security exercise on Hudson River

    Several New York States government agencies take part in an exercise on the Hudson River aimed to examine radiation detection capabilities; the exercise was part of Trojan Horse 2010 an annual maritime security training exercise sponsored by State University of New York Maritime College

  • Iraqi army trains in biological, chemical weapons removal

    The Iraqi military is training in removing suspected weapons of mass destruction, including biological and chemical weapon; there are no reliable figures for the amount of unexploded ordinance located in Iraq, let alone those that may contain degraded but still dangerous substances, such as sarin nerve gas or mustard gas

  • Fingerprint sharing through Secure Communities led to deportation of 47,000

    As of 3 August, 3, 494 U.S. counties and local and state agencies in 27 states were using the Secure Communities program to share fingerprints from jail bookings; from October 2008 through June 2010, 46,929 people identified through Secure Communities were removed from the U.S.; of those, 12,293 were considered non-criminals; one immigration advocate says: “ICE has pulled a bait and switch, with local law enforcement spending more time and resources facilitating the deportations of bus boys and gardeners than murderers and rapists and at considerable cost to local community policing strategies, making us all less safe”

  • Surge in counterfeit items in Pentagon's supplies

    The U.S. Defense Department’s supply chain is vulnerable to the infiltration of counterfeit parts, potentially jeopardizing the lives of American soldiers; government investigators examined 387 companies and organizations which supply the U.S. Department of Defense, and found 39 percent of these companies and organizations encountered counterfeit electronics during the four-year period 2005-8; the number of counterfeit incidents grew from 3,868 in 2005 to 9,356 in 2008

  • B-2 Stealth bomber engineer convicted of selling stealth technology to China

    A federal jury convicted a former B-2 stealth bomber engineer of helping China design a stealth cruise missile; the case is one of a series of major prosecutions targeting Chinese spying on the United States; in March, Chinese-born engineer Dongfan “Greg” Chung was sentenced to more than fifteen years in prison after he was convicted of six counts of economic espionage; investigators learned about Chung while probing Chi Mak, a defense contractor engineer convicted in 2007 of conspiracy to export U.S. defense technology to China; Mak was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison in 2008