• U.S. Army to buy additional explosive disposal robots

    Boeing, iRobot receive a follow-on order for 94 additional explosive disposal ground robots, bringing to total number of robots the U.S. Army has ordered to 323; the robot has the ability to perform reconnaissance during extremely hazardous explosive disposal missions involving unexploded ordnance and improvised explosive devices

  • Wikileaks case exposes security vulnerabilities of the digital age

    Massive leak of documents to Wikileaks highlights the security challenges of the digital age, when gigabytes of stolen data can be shared in one click; the digital communications revolution, while bringing huge benefits to society overall, also raised security concerns; the proliferation of digital media and social software is going to increase the risks of similar leaks happening; one expert says: the Pentagon, like any organization, is going to have “bad actors” — insiders who turn against their employer — “but now it’s a lot easier for them to do things like this”

  • Sophisticated crime software helps police predict violent offences

    “Minority Report”-style technology being tested by two British forces following success in the United States; the system, known as CRUSH (Criminal Reduction Utilizing Statistical History) evaluates patterns of past and present incidents, then combines the information with a range of data including crime reports, intelligence briefings, offender behavior profiles, and even weather forecasts

  • U.S. military to adopt NFL's instant replay technology

    U.S. Air Force drones collected roughly 1,800 hours of video a month in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009, nearly three times as much video than in 2007; sifting through this growing mountain of information is difficult, so the military wants to use the same instant replay technology used in professional football games; after all, U.S. broadcasters handle 70,000 hours daily of video

  • London police train private security guards to report suspicious behavior

    Private security guards in London are trained by the police to be on the look out for — and report — suspicious behavior; this behavior includes individuals making sketches near buildings, taking photographs and recording video footage, even if they appear to be legitimate tourists; stateside, LAPD. officers are already required to fill out a suspicious activity report when they observe one of more than forty different types of behavior; categories include taking photographs or video “with no apparent aesthetic value”

  • DARPA looking for automated insider threat spotter

    The U.S. National Counterintelligence Strategy asserts that “Trusted insiders — are targeting the US information infrastructure for exploitation, disruption, and potential destruction”; DARPA, the Pentagon research arm, is soliciting idea for technology which will automatically spot — and eliminate — insider threat to U.S. information infrastructure

  • U.S. officials: Smaller terrorist attacks would be devastating

    Terrorism experts say Saturday’s botched car bombing in New York’s Times Square, and other recent plots, could be a sign that militant groups, hard-hit by U.S. drone strikes targeting their leaders, were starting to opt for smaller, rather than more spectacular, terror attacks; there are about 450 commercial airports and more than 50,000 malls and shopping centers in the United States; National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair and CIA chief Leon Panetta have both warned these could be targets for attack

  • UAVs to be outfitted with holographic adaptive optics-based instruments

    Researchers are looking into the advantages and challenges associated with using holographic adaptive optics-based instruments aboard UAV; such systems would generally improve the quality of observations these aircrafts produce

  • CIA to increase reliance on technology, inter-agency cooperation

    CIA director Leon Panetta outline an ambitious five-year plan to improve the agency’s information gathering technologies; he also highlighted the agency’s goal to increase the number of analysts and overseas operatives fluent in another language — a problem that has plagued military and civilian intelligence officers throughout much of the last decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq

  • Acoustic surveillance for border, critical infrastructure security

    A Montana company offers a new way to secure U.S. borders and critical infrastructure facilities: TerraEchos teams up with IBM to embed new IBM technology into a system of fiber-optic sensors; the sensors are capable of gathering real-time acoustic information, alerting of a possible security breach in remote and often unmanned areas

  • More employers track their employees' every digital move

    More and more companies are more and more interested in what their employees are doing with their PCs, laptops, and smartphones while in the office; sophisticated tracking and monitoring solutions allow employers to monitor any information its employees post publicly on Facebook and Twitter, and read e-mails and instant messages (even those you typed but decided not to send)

  • U.K. police targets Internet cafés in anti-terror effort

    The U.K. police are testing a new tool in the fight against terrorism: surveillance of Internet cafés; owners and patrons are asked to watch for — and report to the authorities — suspicious behavior; owners are asked to scan the hard drives in their shop on a regular basis to look for suspicious browsing and communication patterns; monitoring of Internet cafés’ computer use has been tried in several
    countries, including India and the United States; civil libertarians worry that without a clear definition of suspicious behavior or suspicious Web
    browsing, individuals with outside-the-mainstream political or religious views may be targeted

  • German court says EU phone, e-mail data retention policy must be changed

    In 2006 the EU approved a law requiring phone and e-mail providers to hold customer data for six months in case the data is needed by law enforcement; a German Federal Constitution Court called the law “inadmissable” and ruled that changes would be needed to limit its scope

  • Attensity shows data analyzer based on the company's broader approach to unstructured data analysis

    Attensity applies its broad approach to unstructured data analysis to the analysis of customers’ preferences and wishes; the company’s solutions are helpful to intelligence and law enforcement organizations in connecting the dots gleaned from vast amounts of information

  • UK.gov dismisses Tory claims U.K. cyberspace is not well defended

    On Friday, the U.K. Conservative Party unveiled its national security plans, charging that the current Labor government has left U.K. cyberspace defenseless; the government dismissed the Tory claims, saying that many of the proposals in the Conservative Party’s plan are already being implemented