• License-plate readers help police, alarm privacy advocates

    License-plate readers are becoming popular with police departments; automatic license-plate readers enable police rapidly to verify that passing motorists are not behind the wheel of a stolen vehicle or do not have outstanding warrants; opponents of excessive government intrusion warn the readers will allow law enforcement to spy on innocent people by tracking their whereabouts

  • DARPA aims to help U.S. Army snipers to, well, aim better

    DARPA wants to help the U.S. Army’s snipers; in the works: programs aiming to give snipers the power to hit a target from 2,000 meters away in winds as high as forty miles per hour; making bullets that can change course in mid-air; and a stealth sniper scope that would make shooters all but invisible

  • U.S. lab center of information gathering effort in the event of nuclear terror

    In a laboratory on the edge of the vast Nevada desert, U.S. officials would gather some of the first critical information that could affect the lives of millions in the aftermath of a nuclear terrorist attack in an American city

  • Security a work in progress at World Cup venues

    Outside the venues, security has been a constant concern for many World Cup participants, and several foreign journalists have been robbed of their money and gear; most teams in the tournament — and some media organizations — have their own security personnel; the big worry is about lax security at the stadiums in which games are played; reporters say security personnel is too lax, waving people through without inspection even if the buzzer on the metal detector sounds; at the Olympic Games in Beijing, and Winter Olympics in Vancouver, credentials were electronically scanned every time one entered an official venue, while at this World Cup there is no such scanning

  • Security staff at England's next match walk out over wages

    Security staff at the stadium where England is due to play Algeria on Friday have walked out in a row over wages; the South African security company, contracted to provide stadium security, hired security staff and promised to pay them £130 per shift; when the employees received their first wage packets, they found they had been paid as little as £17 per shift; 300 staged a sit-in at the Durban stadium, and South African riot police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse them

  • Aviation security milestone: TSA performs 100 percent watch-list matching for domestic flights

    DHS now performs 100 percent watch list matching for domestic flights through TSA’s Secure Flight program; 99 percent of passengers will be cleared by Secure Flight to print boarding passes at home by providing their date of birth, gender and name as it appears on the government ID they plan to use when traveling when booking airline tickets

  • Video of shooting contradicts Border Patrol's claims

    The Border Patrol agent who shot and killed a 15-year old Mexican boy last Monday said he was “surrounded” by rock-throwing Mexican youth; a video of the incident shows no such thing: the agent is seen without anyone near him except one Mexican boy he, the agent, had detained; the boy is on his knees near the agent; the agent is seen drawing his gun and firing in the direction of a second suspect, standing about 60 feet away from the officer — on the Mexican side of the border; the video shows the suspect running away when the agent drew and fired his gun

  • Ciudad Juárez is extremely violent, but U.S. companies are still going there

    Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez is one of the most violent places on earth; in the past twenty-eight months, this city of 1.5 million, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, has recorded 5,200 murders; still, low wages and freight costs, tax breaks, and location are all persuading companies to stay in Juárez

  • U.S. unveils Caribbean basin security plan

    The deteriorating situation in the Caribbean region reflects the drug trade’s deep entrenchment, with high murder rates becoming a fact of life in the tourist havens that traffickers use as transit points for South American drugs bound for Europe and the United States; Caribbean islands had one of their bloodiest years on record in 2009

  • U.K. government slashes police's cybercrime budget by 30 percent

    When on the opposition benches, Tory MP James Brokenshire (Old Bexley & Sidcup) said: “if you don’t prioritize cybercrime you compromise national cyber-security”; he is now a junior Home Office minister, presiding over a 30 percent cut in the cybercrime budget of the U.K. national police; security experts, industry, and academics are not happy

  • Robot assembles itself, then flies

    Soldiers and first responders often find themselves in situations of surveillance or search and rescue, in which they may have to figure out on the fly what size and shape surveillance or search-and-rescue robot they need; Swiss researchers develop a flying platform made up of autonomous wheeled vehicle that lock together to share the task of controlled and autonomous flight; this self-sufficient wheeled DFA has another advantage: if one of the parts of which it consists breaks, the robot can reconfigure itself or substitute in a different part

  • Autonomous vehicles to map battle environments

    War is always accompanied by the fog of war; to pierce that fog, researchers at Cranfield University are working on developing swarms of autonomous military vehicles capable of sharing and overlapping video images to create high-resolution 3D panoramic scenes of dangerous battlefield areas

  • Next-generation HazMat boots made of leather

    The rubber boots that emergency personnel wear when responding to situations where hazardous materials (HazMat) are present may be functional, but they are not very comfortable; with the availability of new textile materials and surface treatments, researchers are confident they can develop a comfortable — and functional — leather boot for use in both fire-fighting and HazMat operations

  • FIFA warns South Africa that stampede must not be repeated

    Sepp Blatter, FIFA president, believes that the crowd stampede during last Sunday’s Nigeria-North Korea warm-up game, in which 16 people were trampled, came close to giving the World Cup finals a tragedy before they had started — but may serve as a wake-up call to South Africa’s security services to take security at the games more seriously

  • Law enforcement questions reporting jailed illegal immigrants to feds

    Secure Communities, a U.S. program to check the immigration status of everyone booked into jail, runs into local rules against such actions; critics of the program say that turning illegal immigrants over to federal authorities would undermine the efforts of local law enforcement to win cooperation from immigrant communities; they worry about providing immigration authorities with the fingerprints of those arrested on petty charges