• New Jersey infrastructure badly needs shoring up, and soon

    According to experts, changes to the way New Jersey maintains its infrastructure must be made soon, or the state could be vulnerable to catastrophic failures in its water and power systems as well as collapsing roads; the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority says more than $56.9 billion will be needed just to maintain state roads, rails, and public transportation systems through 2035; when you add in improvements to account for environmental changes and the expanding population in the state, the bill skyrockets to more than $123 billion

  • The costs, benefits, and efficiency of aviation security measures

    The threat of terrorist attack on American aviation has made the system the focus of intense security efforts, but it is difficult to determine if the benefits outweigh their cost; efficient security policy — a focus on getting the most security for the least cost — should be the priority in an era of fiscal austerity, says a new RAND report

  • China’s growing role in U.S. infrastructure building, maintenance

    The building and maintenance of heavy infrastructure in the United States, which includes road, mass transit, marine, and building construction, is worth $44.1 billion per year and $12 billion in annual wages; bridge and tunnel construction is worth an estimated $24 billion in revenue and $4.3 billion in wages; many wonder why, in this difficult times, states and municipalities hire Chinese companies for many of these infrastructure projects

  • Heat waves move toward California coasts, become more humid, imperiling health

    Scientists detected a trend toward more humid heat waves which are expressed very strongly in elevated nighttime temperatures, a trend consistent with climate change projections; moreover, relative to local warming, the mid-summer heat waves are getting stronger in generally cooler coastal areas; this carries strong public health implications for the twenty-one million Californians living near the ocean whose everyday lives are acclimated to moderate temperatures

  • Last year’s east coast earthquake has the region preparing for another one

    Last year an earthquake that was centered in Virginia shook up the entire east coast, surprising everyone; it did not result in any deaths and was considered relatively light compared to many tremors on the West Coast, but it was bad enough to force some states to prepare themselves in case of another quake

  • Activists in arms over plans to ship plutonium to New Mexico

    A proposal to ship tons of plutonium to New Mexico, including cores of nuclear warheads which would be dismantled at a structurally questionable lab on top of an earthquake fault zone, has activists and nuclear watchdogs up in arms

  • U.S. always ends up regulating new technologies for public safety; the Internet is no exception

    Homeland Security News Wire’s executive editor Derek Major talked with CSIS’s James Lewis about the cybersecurity challenges the United States faces, Stuxnet, China’s hacking campaign, cyber arms control efforts, and more; on the stalled cybersecurity bill, opposed by critical infrastructure operators as being too burdensome, Lewis says: “It takes America about 20-40 years to come to terms with a new technology, but we always end up regulating it for public safety. This will be no different. We are in year 17.”

  • Most cybersecurity incidents in Europe remain undetected or not reported

    In a new report, the EU cyber security agency takes a snapshot of existing and future EU legislation on security measures and incident reporting; the analysis underlines important steps forward, but also identifies gaps in national implementation, as most incidents are not reported

  • Photographers and security personnel fight over access to buildings

    In the years after 9/11 and the 7 July 2005 London bombings, photographers have been waging a war with security personnel of public and private buildings; photographers argue that anything that one can see from the street can be photographed, even if it is a privately owned building, but security people – both private and the police – are worried about terrorists gathering information for a possible attack

  • Campaign against terrorist financial networks complicated, demanding

    The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) last week announced the seizure of $150 million in cash from “entities linked to Hizballah,” including the now-defunct Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB); the announcement may seem like a big win in the war on terror, but it is merely a small dent as terrorist organizations use a myriad of tactics to move their money around undetected

  • DHS using Boston subway system to test new sensors for biological agents

    Bioterrorism is nothing new, and although medicines have made the world a safer place against a myriad of old scourges both natural and manmade, it still remains all too easy today to uncork a dangerous cloud of germs; DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) has scheduled a series of tests in the Boston subways to measure the real-world performance of new sensors recently developed to detect biological agents

  • Yankee Stadium awarded SAFETY Act designation

    The SAFETY Act designation has been given to many defense and security companies since DHS started awarding it in 2004, but Yankee Stadium is the first sports arena to become immune to general lawsuits which could be filed by victims of future terrorist attacks

  • NYPD monitoring of Muslim communities did not produce a single terrorist lead

    An NYPDunit which gathers information on Muslim communities and businesses in order to uncover links to terrorist plots has been unable to do so in six years of engaging in monitoring Muslim communities in New York and New Jersey

  • Y-12 and operator error

    By Lee Maril

    Three anti-nuclear activists, led by an 82-year old nun, breached the perimeter security system of the supposedly highly secure Y-2 nuclear facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where nuclear weapons components are manufactured (note that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory [ONRL] is not affiliated with the Y-12 National Security Complex); they then spent several hours in a secure area of the facility, leisurely spray-painting slogans on the facility’s walls – without the facility’s security staff, or the sophisticated $500 million security cameras and sensors, detecting them; to understand what happened at Y-2, we must accept that operator error is an essential problem in national security, and that the problem is pervasive and normal; the only way to deal with the operator error phenomenon is to build redundancies into the system

     

  • Homeland security films informational but costly

    Over the last four years the mayor’s office of Public Safety and Homeland Security in Houston, Texas, has spent $540,000 dollars to produce three short videos teaching people how to react in public safety emergencies; the price tag has some people upset