• Security a work in progress at World Cup venues

    Outside the venues, security has been a constant concern for many World Cup participants, and several foreign journalists have been robbed of their money and gear; most teams in the tournament — and some media organizations — have their own security personnel; the big worry is about lax security at the stadiums in which games are played; reporters say security personnel is too lax, waving people through without inspection even if the buzzer on the metal detector sounds; at the Olympic Games in Beijing, and Winter Olympics in Vancouver, credentials were electronically scanned every time one entered an official venue, while at this World Cup there is no such scanning

  • Security staff at England's next match walk out over wages

    Security staff at the stadium where England is due to play Algeria on Friday have walked out in a row over wages; the South African security company, contracted to provide stadium security, hired security staff and promised to pay them £130 per shift; when the employees received their first wage packets, they found they had been paid as little as £17 per shift; 300 staged a sit-in at the Durban stadium, and South African riot police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse them

  • Aviation security milestone: TSA performs 100 percent watch-list matching for domestic flights

    DHS now performs 100 percent watch list matching for domestic flights through TSA’s Secure Flight program; 99 percent of passengers will be cleared by Secure Flight to print boarding passes at home by providing their date of birth, gender and name as it appears on the government ID they plan to use when traveling when booking airline tickets

  • Video of shooting contradicts Border Patrol's claims

    The Border Patrol agent who shot and killed a 15-year old Mexican boy last Monday said he was “surrounded” by rock-throwing Mexican youth; a video of the incident shows no such thing: the agent is seen without anyone near him except one Mexican boy he, the agent, had detained; the boy is on his knees near the agent; the agent is seen drawing his gun and firing in the direction of a second suspect, standing about 60 feet away from the officer — on the Mexican side of the border; the video shows the suspect running away when the agent drew and fired his gun

  • Ciudad Juárez is extremely violent, but U.S. companies are still going there

    Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez is one of the most violent places on earth; in the past twenty-eight months, this city of 1.5 million, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, has recorded 5,200 murders; still, low wages and freight costs, tax breaks, and location are all persuading companies to stay in Juárez

  • U.S. unveils Caribbean basin security plan

    The deteriorating situation in the Caribbean region reflects the drug trade’s deep entrenchment, with high murder rates becoming a fact of life in the tourist havens that traffickers use as transit points for South American drugs bound for Europe and the United States; Caribbean islands had one of their bloodiest years on record in 2009

  • U.K. government slashes police's cybercrime budget by 30 percent

    When on the opposition benches, Tory MP James Brokenshire (Old Bexley & Sidcup) said: “if you don’t prioritize cybercrime you compromise national cyber-security”; he is now a junior Home Office minister, presiding over a 30 percent cut in the cybercrime budget of the U.K. national police; security experts, industry, and academics are not happy

  • FIFA warns South Africa that stampede must not be repeated

    Sepp Blatter, FIFA president, believes that the crowd stampede during last Sunday’s Nigeria-North Korea warm-up game, in which 16 people were trampled, came close to giving the World Cup finals a tragedy before they had started — but may serve as a wake-up call to South Africa’s security services to take security at the games more seriously

  • Law enforcement questions reporting jailed illegal immigrants to feds

    Secure Communities, a U.S. program to check the immigration status of everyone booked into jail, runs into local rules against such actions; critics of the program say that turning illegal immigrants over to federal authorities would undermine the efforts of local law enforcement to win cooperation from immigrant communities; they worry about providing immigration authorities with the fingerprints of those arrested on petty charges

  • To reduce Mexico violence, U.S. needs to stem flow of guns into that country

    Border security expert says the flow of guns from the United States into Mexico has militarized the conflict occurring between the government of President Felipe Calderon and rival drug trafficking organizations; since the Calderon administration has taken office, you have around 20,000 homicides that have occurred, many of those from U.S. weapons

  • Australia looks at facial recognition for law enforcement

    Police in Victoria, a southeast state in Australia, want to use facial recognition biometrics to assist its law enforcement personnel in apprehending wanted people; experts warn that the technology is not yet advanced enough to be used as evidence in court

  • Animetrics provides facial recognition systems to Massachusetts law enforcement

    BI2 Technologies awarded contract to implement statewide facial recognition system in Massachusetts to identify inmates, suspects and gang members; the facial recognition technology will come from new New Hampshire-based Animetrics; BI2 Technologies’ own iris biometric technologies are already being used by state and local law enforcement agencies in forty-seven states

  • Tougher requirements for Ontario private security guards

    The Ontario government has toughened the requirements for becoming a private security guard in the province; mere months ago, all it took was “a pulse and a pen” to qualify as a security guard in Ontario, as one expert put it; the criteria are more arduous now; changes were made in part to ensure the quality of guards in the end-of-June G8 and G20 summits to be held Huntsville and Toronto

  • New method manipulates particles for sensors, crime scene testing

    Researchers develop a new tool for medical diagnostics, testing food and water for contamination, and crime-scene forensics; the technique uses a combination of light and electric fields to position droplets and tiny particles, such as bacteria, viruses, and DNA, which are contained inside the drops

  • Agency wants data on enterprise cyber forensics system products

    TSA solicits information about commercially available computer security forensics technologies it could use for information technology security; TSA is interested in products that would give the agency the ability to scan, capture, identify, report, and resolve IT forensics matters