• Use of Ebola virus as bioterror weapon highly unlikely: Experts

    Francisco Martinez, Spain’s state secretary for security, claimed that ISIS fighters are planning to carry out “lone wolf” attacks using biological weapons. He cites conversations uncovered from secret chat rooms used by would-be militants. Bioterrorism experts say the use of Ebola for bioterrorism is highly unlikely. “Assuming a terrorist organization manages to capture a suitable Ebola host, extract the virus, weaponize the virus, transport the virus to a populated city and deliver the virus, it is entirely likely that the sub-optimal climatic conditions of a Western city will kill it off relatively quickly,” says one expert.

  • Ricin vaccine shows promise in pilot study

    Ricin is a highly lethal toxin derived from the seeds of the castor oil plant. A dose of purified ricin powder the size of a few grains of table salt can kill an adult. Due to its toxicity and the ubiquity of source material, it’s considered a leading bioterrorism threat. A recent study at the Tulane National Primate Research Center showed for the first time that an experimental vaccine could completely protect nonhuman primates exposed to deadly ricin toxin, a potential bioterrorism agent.

  • ISIS chief al-Baghdadi either “critically wounded” or killed in Saturday air strike: Iraqi sources

    Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), was “critically wounded” early Saturday when a U.S. air strike hit two ISIS targets in the town of al-Qaim in western Iraq. The attacks early Saturday morning included an air attack on a 10-car convoy on the outskirts of the border town of al-Qaim, and a combined air attack and ground assault on a house in al-Qaim where ISIS leaders were meeting at the time. Three senior ISIS figures were confirmed killed: Abdur Rahman al-Athaee, also known as Abu Sajar, a senior aide to ISIS leader who was particularly close to al-Baghdadi; Adnan Latif al-Suweidi, the overall leader of Anbar province; and Bashar al-Muhandi, ISIS’s leader in the Euphrates valley.

  • FBI: Lawmakers should mandate surveillance “backdoors” in apps, operating systems

    FBI director James Comey said that the agency was pushing lawmakers to mandate surveillance functions in apps, operating systems, and networks, arguing that privacy and encryption prevent or disrupt some of the agency’s investigations. According to Comey, new privacy features implemented by Google and Apple in the wake of the Snowden revelations, automatically encrypt user communication and data, making it difficult for law enforcement to gather evidence and connect links among suspected criminals and terrorists.

  • As drought continues, more Californians turn to greywater

    California’s rainy season tends to run from October to late March, but for the third year in a row rain has been relatively absent, meaning that the state is currently suffering from a severe, unprecedented drought. With increasing water rates, a growing number of homeowners in Southern California are relying on greywater systems to support their landscapes and toilet flushing. “If the drought continues, honestly, I could see all new construction will have greywater systems of some kind because it really doesn’t make sense to put usable water in the sewer system,” says one expert.

  • U.S. strike kills Khorasan Group’s chief bomb-maker

    U.S. airstrikes in Syria overnight successfully hit a group of al-Qaeda-affiliated militants, killing the group’s top bomb-maker. David Drugeon, a French Islamist militant, was killed along with other Khorasan Group members near Saramada, a town eighteen miles northeast of Idlib in Syria’s northwest. Drugeon escaped an earlier U.S. airstrike, on 22 September, which was aimed to take him out. The innovative Drudgeon was designing bombs made out of clothing dipped in explosive solution and explosives concealed in personal electronics. In July, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) banned cell phones without electronic charge from airplane cabins in response to the intelligence coming in about Drudgeon’s designs, much of it fragmentary.

  • Funding cuts hamper health agencies’ ability to prepare for, respond to Ebola

    Federal and state funds for local health agencies have been cut over the past few years, so when hospitals and municipal health agencies are asked proactively to respond to possible threats of Ebola, many question how they will fund such activities. Since 2008, at least 51,000 state and local public health jobs (roughly 20 percent) have been lost due to cuts in federal funding.

  • New Jersey voting measures in the wake of Hurricane Sandy violated law: Report

    A new study found that key emergency measures that were meant to allow voters to participate digitally in the days after 2012 Hurricane Sandy may have violated state law. Some of those steps, such as allowing people to request their mail-in ballots by fax and e-mail, led to confusion in many county precincts on Election Day.

  • U.S. drone strike kills leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP)

    Two leading al-Qaeda terrorists — Shawki al-Badani, a leader of al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) who was designated “global terrorist” by the United States, and Nabil al-Dahab, a local leader of the armed group’s affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia — have been killed in a drone strike in central Yemen yesterday. They were killed in Yemen’s al-Bayda province.

  • Judges question claims that NSA metadata collection poses threat to ordinary citizens

    A panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia challenged arguments made earlier this week by Larry Klayman, a conservative lawyer arguing on his own behalf, and Cindy Cohn, an attorney representing the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass-surveillance program is a breach of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches.The case, Klayman v. Obama, is one of three currently at the appeals-court level regarding the NSA surveillance program.In the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Judges Stephen Williams and David Sentelle voiced skepticism about claims that collecting metadata posed a threat to ordinary citizens.

  • Head of U.K. surveillance agency: U.S. tech companies have become terrorists' “networks of choice”

    The new director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K. intelligence organization responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance to the British government and armed forces, said that privacy has never been “an absolute right.” Robert Hannigan used his first public intervention since becoming head of Britain’s surveillance agency to charge U.S. technology companies of becoming “the command and control networks of choice” for terrorists.

  • Lebanese court sentences a cousin of Qatar’s foreign minister for funding terrorism

    Abdulaziz bin Khalifa al-Attiyah, the cousin of Qatar’s foreign minister and a former member of the Qatar Olympic Committee, was convicted in June in absentia by a Lebanese court of funding international terrorism. Al-Attiyah’s conviction is one of many events that ties members of the Qatari government to the funding of terrorism. The Qatari government itself has been funding Jihadists groups in the Middle East and North Africa in an effort to undermine and weaken to influence of moderate forces and governments in the region.

  • U.S. introduces new security measures to screen Western-passport travelers

    At least 3,000 of the 15,000 foreign fighters in Syria are from Australia and Europe. DHS has introduced new screening measures for travelers from Europe, Australia, and other allied nations due to concerns about the increasing number of Islamist militants who have fought in Syria and Iraq alongside the Islamic State (ISIS) and could travel freely to the United States using their Western passports.

  • Government tries better to define cybersecurity needs

    In a science advisory board meeting on 23 October at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), officials attempted to glean just where the government cybersecurity workforce stood in terms of talent and hiring necessity. There is currently no government-wide federal job description in the cybersecurity field, and that has led to meetings similar to the October summit.

  • Security contractor USIS failed to notice months-long hacking of its computer systems

    A new report reveals that the cyberattack on security contractor USIS, similar to previous attacks by Chinese government hackers on U.S. firms, was infiltrating USIS computer systems for months before the company noticed. The breach, first revealed publicly by the company and the Office of Personnel Management(OPM) in August, compromised the records of at least 25,000 DHS employees.