• Details of al Qaeda’s “next generation” bomb, aborted effort to take out its designer, emerge

    Al Qaeda engineers have been working on designing a sophisticated bomb powerful enough to bring down passenger planes but which is designed to avoid detection by explosives detection machines or trained dogs at airports. “All of our explosive detection equipment wasn’t calibrated to detect [this type of bomb]” TSA director John Pistole said. “And all of our 800 bomb-sniffing dogs had not been trained for that specific type.” A CIA informant inside a Yemeni cell of al Qaeda volunteered to place the bomb on a U.S.-bound plane, but instead delivered it to his CIA handlers in Saudi Arabia. A CIA effort to learn more about the bomb maker, Ibrahim Hassan Asiri, and take him out was aborted when someone leaked the story to AP. The news service refused pleas by the administration to postpone publication of the story until the end of the operation. The AP did agree to delay publication by a week to ten days to allow the CIA to extricate the agent and his family from Saudi Arabia to safety before publication. Asiri and his bomb-making assistants are still at large.

  • Ukrainian man in U.K. court charged with anti-Muslim terrorism

    Pavlo Lapshyn, a 25-year-old postgraduate student from Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, appeared in a Westminster, U.K. court Tuesday and charged with the terror-related April murder of an 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem as Saleem was walking home from a mosque. Lapshyn has also been charged with three additional offenses related to three explosions near mosques in Walsall, Wolverhampton, and Tipton.

  • Bloomberg vetoes bills aiming to curb NYPD’s stop-and-frisk

    New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg vetoed two bills aiming to limit the NYPD’s stop and frisk policy. The policy has been criticized by civil rights advocates, and has also been highlighted by those opposing Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s candidacy to replace Janet Napolitano as DHS secretary.

  • Lawmakers, citing shortcomings, threaten funding for chemical plant safety program

    Heads of three congressional panels urge DHS secretary Janet Napolitano to take to correct shortcomings in the Chemical Facilities Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program. “As the authorizers and appropriators of this program, we write to you to express serious reservations about continuing to extend CFATS funding without evidence of substantial programmatic improvement,” the three chairmen write in their letter to Napolitano. The lawmakers pointed to flaws in the program’s risk evaluation system, compliance hurdles, implementation delays, and the failure of the program to identify vulnerable facilities.

  • DHS hobbled by vacancies at top positions

    Janet Napolitano’s departure from DHS has left the agency’s top spot open, but it is not the only position currently open. Fifteen top positions at the agency are now open, or will be in the near future. Some of these posts are filled on a temporary basis, including deputy secretary. Lawmakers are increasingly frustrated that the vacancies are not being filled, and want the Obama administration to move more energetically on the issue.

  • Candidate for DHS deputy secretary under IG investigation

    Alejandro Mayorkas, the director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has been named by the DHS Inspector General (IG) office as a target in an investigation of the foreign investor program run by the USCIS. Mayorkas is President Obama’s choice for the deputy secretary post at DHS. If Mayorkas is confirmed as deputy secretary, he would most likely serve as acting secretary of DHS until a full-time replacement for Janet Napolitano is confirmed.

  • State Department approves U.S.-Canada pipeline, but it is not Keystone

    The State Department has approved a U.S.-Canada pipeline, but it is not the Keystone XL project which is still being debated. The Vantage Pipeline will carry ethane from North Dakota through Saskatchewan into Empress, Alberta.

  • White House considering incentives for cybersecurity compliance

    The Obama administration is considering whether to back tax breaks, insurance perks, and other legal benefits for companies which bolster their digital defenses. The incentives, which include limited protections from legal liability and tax incentives, would be set up to persuade  power plants, water systems, chemical plants, and other critical infrastructure companies to comply with the voluntary cybersecurity rules which are being drafted as part of President Obama’s cybersecurity executive order.

  • Are nuclear weapons safe from cyber-attacks?

    Research will look into whether today’s nuclear weapons are safe from computer hacking. Specifically, the research seeks to address the question of whether the ability to use and the confidence in nuclear weapons is being eroded by new cyber capabilities being developed by an increasingly large range of actors.

  • FAA warns Colorado town about drone hunting

    The town of Deer Trail, Colorado is considering the idea of allowing town residents to purchase hunting permits to shoot down drones operated by the government. The proposed permit would cost $25, and residents would be entitled to a $100 reward from the city for a successful attempt to shoot down a drone, if the drone’s “markings and configuration are consistent with those used on any similar craft known to be owned or operated by the United States federal government.”

  • Idaho joins program connecting DMV information to E-Verify

    Idaho became the third state to join the Records and Information from DMV’s for E-Verify (RIDE) program on Sunday. The other two states are Mississippi and Florida. RIDE automates motor vehicle document verification between Motor Vehicle Agencies (MVAs) and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

  • Florida teen indicted on terrorism charges

    Shelton Thomas Bell, 19, of Jacksonville, Florida has been indicted on federal charges of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. The indictment claims Bell planned to travel to Arabian Peninsula and join Ansar Al-Sharia (AAS), an alias for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, to take part in “jihad.”

  • McCain will put a hold on Dempsey’s nomination for second term over Syria policy

    Senator John McCain said yesterday (Thursday) that he will place a hold on the renomination of the nation’s top soldier, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, for a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after he and Dempsey engaged in rather heated exchange over the administration’s policies toward the Syrian civil war. McCain bluntly said that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was at least partly responsible for the administration’s “lackluster response” to the Assad regime’s aggression.

  • Ray Kelly’s DHS candidacy divides opinion

    One of the leading candidates to succeed Janet Napolitano as DHS secretary is NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly. New York politicians strongly support his candidacy, and President Obama said he was ‘well qualified.” Civil rights groups object to his nomination, saying that while there is no doubt about his qualifications and dedication, some of the policies he has initiated in New York — for example, suspicionless stop-and-frisk, the mass arrest of protesters during the 2004 Republican Convention, and the surveillance of Muslim communities in the city and neighboring states — have been heavy-handed, perhaps even constitutionally questionable.

  • DHS raises Phoenix’s terror-risk ranking

    DHS has raised Phoenix’s terrorist risk assessment three spots, from number eighteen to number fifteen. The change will entitle the city to $5.5 million in a federal security grant, $1.5 million more than it received from the same grant last year.