• Appropriations bill adds money for port security, Coast Guard, ground transit

    A homeland security appropriations bill being considered by Congress would increase money for port security, save a threatened Coast Guard program from elimination and establish harsher penalties for anyone who intentionally violates airport security rules; the bill allocates $350 million for port security, an increase of $50 million over last year, and $350 million for rail, bus and transit security, a $38 million increase

  • California homeland security market as large as the entire U.S. aviation security market

    New report about the homeland security market in the United States finds that DHS’s spending account for only 18.3 percent of the total homeland security spending in the United States; the combined state and local market share leads the field with 23.7 percent, with the Department of Defense coming in second with 22.5 percent; California’s FY2009 homeland security market was nearly as large as the entire U.S. aviation security market

  • DHS unveils more Than $1.8 billion in FY 2010 preparedness grants

    DHS announces more than $1.8 billion in preparedness grants; the grants are designed to help states, urban areas, tribal governments, and non-profit organizations enhance their protection, prevention, response, and recovery capabilities for risks associated with potential terrorist attacks and other hazards.

  • Utah concludes state resources were used in immigrant list

    Utah Department of Workforce Services database is the source of the list of 1,300 circulated to news outlets in the state; the agency says hundreds had access to database; using state resources to compile the list would violate several state and federal privacy laws, state officials and legal scholars said

  • Senate subcommittee approves about $15 billion to bolster border activity

    Measure allocates $3.57 billion for 20,370 border patrol agents, with 17,000 based on the U.S. Southwest border, more than double the agents in 2004; about $20 million would go toward counter-drug initiatives for southbound operations lanes, personnel, and equipment to stop the outbound flow of weapons and currency used in the drug trade; $20.5 million for one additional unmanned aircraft system and support equipment; the bill include $9 billion for the Coast Guard

  • Georgia will be base for WMD homeland security response force

    DHS is setting up ten regional Homeland Response Forces tasked with handling weapons of mass destruction incidents; each will be assigned 570 personnel; the force will be trained to respond within six to twelve hours to regional disasters like chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high yield explosive incidents

  • Court to hear first test of Arizona immigration law

    SB 1070, the harsh Arizona’s immigration law, makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally; it states that an officer engaged in a lawful stop, detention, or arrest shall, when practicable, ask about a person’s legal status when reasonable suspicion exists that the person is in the U.S. illegally; the first legal challenge to the law is to be heard today in federal court in Arizona; the law is challenged on two grounds: plaintiff claims that the law would require police officers to use race as the primary factor in the law’s enforcement, forcing officers to violate the rights of Latinos; plaintiff also claims that state law is pre-empted by federal law: SB 1070 violates four acts of Congress that limit the authority of state and local law enforcement officers to enforce federal law

  • Bioterrorism experts criticize cuts in BioShield to pay for teacher retention

    In order to find funds which would prevent teacher layoffs, House Democrats craft an appropriations bill which takes $2 billion from a bioterrorism emergency program; security experts criticize what they call a lack of foresight

  • Petraeus pushes for labeling Afghanistan's Haqqani network as terrorists

    Gen. David H. Petraeus is pushing the Obama administration to have top leaders of the Haqqani network, a feared insurgent group run by an old warlord family, designated as terrorists; the group’s power lies in its deep connections to Pakistan’s spy agency, the ISI, which sees the Haqqani network as a way to exercise its own leverage in Afghanistan; move could add more tension to U.S.-Pakistan relations, and complicate Afghan political settlement with the Taliban

  • To qualify for lucrative defense research work, Florida research park undergoes anti-terrorism makeover

    Florida’s largest research park, located in east Orange County, has quietly and subtly transformed some of its most prominent facilities into anti-terrorism fortresses for the high-tech military agencies located there; the research center has now become a defense-industry “nerve center” that looks and operates more like a military base than ever before

  • India: Pakistan ISI behind Mumbai attacks

    For the first time since the December 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which 166 people were killed and hundreds injured, India officially and explicitly accuses ISI, the Pakistani secret service, of planning, controlling, and coordinating the attacks; some of the evidence against the ISI emerged from the interrogation by Indian officials of a Chicago man, David Headley, who pleaded guilty to working with the jihadist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) to plan the attacks

  • Second drug submersible seized

    Colombia’s drug cartels frequently use semi-submersible vessels to smuggle large amounts of cocaine past American and Colombian patrol boats to Central America en route to the United States; law enforcement discovers and seizes second submersible in as many weeks: the first was seized in Ecuador, the second in Guatemala

  • L.I. homeland security research center to get $1 million from DHS

    Long island’s Morelly Homeland Security Center to receive $1 million in earmarks in DHS Appropriations Act; the center aims to adapt next-generation technologies to be used by first responders in case of a terrorist attack or natural disaster

  • New age of pervasive surveillance, robot spies to test privacy

    The author of a new study of the evolving surveillance landscape says: “In 50 years’ time there won’t be much privacy left. There’s going to be information everywhere. So what matters is who owns it, and the oversight”; there is an added danger: “Once you go over to data mining you are essentially handing the process over to robots, who roam through this material looking for patterns of suspicious activity”

  • Ireland to block EU-Israel data-sharing agreement

    The EU and Israel planned on launching a data sharing agreement aimed to enable law enforcement better to identify and track terrorists and criminals; Ireland, still smarting from what it says was Israel intelligence’s misuse of Irish passports in the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai earlier this year, blocks the agreement