• Melissa Hathaway highlights nine important cyber bills

    Congress is getting more and more involved in cyber issues; Melissa Hathaway, former White House cybersecurity official, examines the pending legislation and highlights nine bills — out of the 40-odd bills at various stages in the legislative process — which she considers to be the most important ones to watch

  • Louisiana legislator OK bill to strengthen penalties for virtual map crimes

    Louisiana legislators approve a bill to toughen penalties for crimes committed with the aid of Internet-generated “virtual maps,” including acts of terrorism; bill defines a “virtual street-level map” as one that is available on the Internet and can generate the location or picture of a home or building by entering the address of the structure or an individual’s name on a Web site

  • Senate panel rejects Pentagon counter-IED group $400 million emergency funding request

    Senate panel denies Pentagon’s counter-IED group a $400 million emergency request; lawmakers say that counter-IED organization has misused funds allocated to it — among other things, to hire private contractors in Iraq to hunt down insurgents; senators also criticized the group for planning to use emergency funds to fund long term projects such as airships and UAV radar

  • FBI details sharp increase in death threats against lawmakers

    Threats against U.S. lawmakers increase dramatically in 2009; each threat case is different, but the FBI says there are some common characteristics; the suspects are mostly men who own guns, and several had been treated for mental illness; most of the suspects had just undergone some kind of major life stress, such as illness or the loss of a job

  • Growth in U.S. regulatory spending continues

    Since 2000, the U.S. annual budget outlays for regulatory activities increased by more than 75 percent; one example: the fiscal 2011 budget calls for more than $59 billion dollars to be spend on homeland security — this is the largest federal regulatory budget to date

  • Bureaucratic hurdles delay NYC dirty bomb defenses

    NYPD says that since last fall, it has been trying to obtain an $8 million federal grant for a radiation detection system which would instantly read data from 4,500 sensors in cop cars across the region to intercept vehicles carrying explosive devices; NYPD is still waiting

  • Terrorism could be threat to World Cup

    Soccer fans who go to South Africa next month for the World Cup already must be doubly cautious and watchful as they go to a country which is the world’s undisputed leader in most categories of violent crime; those who think of partying after games will be given brochures at their hotels telling them that 1 in 10 South Africans is infected with the HIV virus; security experts are now alarmed over revelations that an al Qaeda cell in Iraq was planning terror attacks on Danish and Dutch supporters and the Danish and Dutch teams

  • U.K. firm investigated over sale of dirty bomb material to Iran

    British company sells cobalt aluminate; the material can be used to produce alloys as well as the lethal radioactive isotope cobalt 60; for this reason its sale to nations like North Korea and Iran is tightly limited; cobalt is considered by nuclear experts as more likely to be used in a dirty bomb than in a nuclear warhead

  • The threat of nuclear terrorism against Israel

    Former Israeli deputy national security adviser writes that the threat of nuclear terrorism Israel faces may be more likely to materialize than an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel — should Iran acquire nuclear weapons; he recommends a staunch and uncompromising deterrence policy, based on “retaliate first, no questions asked” — and a study of potential targets of high value to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations which would be destroyed in a retaliatory attack

  • Pentagon directs basic research funds to applied projects, says report

    The U.S. Department of Defense has a $13.5 billion science and technology budget; about $1.9 billion — 15 percent of the total — is set aside for basic research; new study found that many of the projects funded under the basic research budget did not meet the definition of basic research used by the Pentagon

  • Arizona threatens to stop providing power to L.A. after L.A. votes to boycott Arizona

    Following the signing into law of Arizona-s tough anti-immigration law, the Los Angeles City Council voted 13-1 earlier this month to boycott Arizona and Arizona-based businesses; Arizona provides 25 percent of L.A. power, and the state’s corporate commissioner warned that if L.A. does not retract the boycott decision, then Arizona would stop providing power to L.A.; San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, as well as Boston, Seattle, and Austin, Texas, also voted to boycott Arizona

  • Dolphins, sea lions find explosives, cuff and restrain hostile divers

    The annual Golden Guardian homeland security and disaster preparedness exercise was an occasion for U.S. Navy-trained dolphins and sea lions to demonstrate their superior skills in locating underwater mines and hostile divers; the animals not only detect mines and divers in murky waters — they also demonstrated their dexterity in cuffing and restraining hostile divers while signaling for help from their human counterparts

  • U.S. remains vulnerable, 9/11 commission leaders say

    Leaders of the 9/11 Commission lament the fact that more progress has not been made on several of the commission’s key recommendations — roadblocks to sharing intelligence, the inability of first responders to communicate on common radio frequencies, and the plethora of congressional committees that oversee DHS; Lee Hamilton calls for U.S. national ID

  • South Africa lax attitude to airport security worries FIFA

    South Africa promised FIFA that it would tighten security at airports ahead of the World Cup games which open in three weeks; investigative reporters proved that promise hollow when they managed easily to pass security checks on ten flights — out of the twenty they tried to board — in the country with steak knives, screwdrivers, razors, pairs of scissors, and even syringes in their luggage

  • Parking garage attendants double as anti-terror agents

    A program funded by FEMA and run by TSA teaches parking lot operators to watch for odd activities that could precede an attack by days or months: strange odors such as diesel from gasoline vehicles, cars parked where they should not be, people who seem to be conducting surveillance by taking photos or drawing sketches