• All U.S. counties on Mexican border now share inmate fingerprints with feds

    All 25 U.S. counties along the Mexican border are now enrolled in the Secure Communities project; federal immigration officials now have access to the prints of every inmate booked into jail in these counties; Secure Communities makes the notification automatic; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which plans to implement the program nationwide by 2013, says the program has identified more than 262,900 illegal immigrants in jails and prisons who have been charged with or convicted of criminal offenses, including more than 39,000 charged with or convicted of violent offenses or major drug crimes; ICE expects to remove 400,000 illegal immigrants this year; of the 200,000 illegal immigrants deported in the first ten months of fiscal year 2010, 142,000 illegal immigrants were with criminal records and about 50,000 were noncriminals; immigrant advocates say that some counties use Secure Communities to deport noncriminals: the national average of noncriminals flagged by Secure Communities is about 28 percent, but in Travis County, Texas, 82 percent of those removed through Secure Communities were noncriminals

  • The promise, and risks, of battlefield biometrics

    Using biometric devices in Afghanistan offers many benefits to coalition forces and to the Afghani themselves in making it easier to separate the good guys from the bad; some worry, however, that this can backfire — as was the case in Rwanda in 1994: identification cards which included photos and tribal affiliations of either Tutsis and Hutus made it easier for Hutu militias to identify the Tutsi and murder them

  • India equipped to protect the October Commonwealth Games against WMD attacks

    India will have a big security challenge when the Commonwealth Games begin in October; Indian security agencies say they are equipped to face chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) terrorist threats during the games; intelligence agencies have been working on the possibility of attacks from Kashmiri groups like the Hizbul Mujahidden, the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Taliban from Pakistan or Afghanistan, and even Al Qaeda; militant outfits of various other ideological hues are also on the police radar

  • NY Naval Militia in WMD detection homeland security exercise on Hudson River

    Several New York States government agencies take part in an exercise on the Hudson River aimed to examine radiation detection capabilities; the exercise was part of Trojan Horse 2010 an annual maritime security training exercise sponsored by State University of New York Maritime College

  • Fingerprint sharing through Secure Communities led to deportation of 47,000

    As of 3 August, 3, 494 U.S. counties and local and state agencies in 27 states were using the Secure Communities program to share fingerprints from jail bookings; from October 2008 through June 2010, 46,929 people identified through Secure Communities were removed from the U.S.; of those, 12,293 were considered non-criminals; one immigration advocate says: “ICE has pulled a bait and switch, with local law enforcement spending more time and resources facilitating the deportations of bus boys and gardeners than murderers and rapists and at considerable cost to local community policing strategies, making us all less safe”

  • More police departments use predictive analysis to predict where crime will occur

    The Chicago Police Department is teaming with a local university to develop a system that predicts where crime will occur; the policing approach, called predictive analytics, has gained momentum in recent years as law enforcement agencies have recognized that some types of crime follow patterns that can be predicted by software

  • Brite-Strike's LED-technology gloves saving officers' lives

    The Massachusetts company’s new product aims to help save officers’ lives: it is a pair of tactical, fingerless gloves that have a translucent, reflective, plastic octagonal stop sign on the palm, into which Brite-Strike puts a high-power LED that flashes with a range of up to a quarter of a mile; on the back of the glove are reflective translucent green strips, with two LEDs

  • Boston police using Twitter to nab bad guys

    After a flasher on Boston T Red Line was caught thanks to a passenger’s tweet, the MBTA is showing a genuine commitment to using social media, creating an official Twitter home page to serve as a public tip line; the transit cops are also creating a system which will allow riders to send tips (and photos) via text messages directly to the authorities

  • FBI agent says Mexican drug cartels more violent than al Qaeda

    An FBI Web page quoted an agent calling Mexico’s drug cartels more violent than al Qaeda; the quote, from an unidentified senior agent based in El Paso, Texas, says, “We think al Qaeda is bad, but they’ve got nothing on the cartels”; the FBI says the quote was taken out of context

  • Mexican drug cartel offers $1 million for Sheriff Arpaio's head

    Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is well-known for creating a tent city jail in the Arizona desert, providing pink underwear for inmates, and bragging that he spends more to feed his dog than a prisoner in his jail; on 29 July, the day parts of Arizona’s immigration law, SB 1070, went into effect, Arpaio was in the news for another reason: there was a price put on his head

  • Foreign firms have largely escaped the worst of Mexico violence, so far

    Foreign companies have so far escaped the worst of a rising tide of crime in Mexico; if they can be shielded from violence, foreign companies are likely to focus on the virtues of doing business in Mexico, such as low labor costs, proximity to the American consumer, and favorable trade treatment

  • License plate readers help police nab criminals

    Six Ohio law agencies are set to deploy Automated License Plate Readers; these devices can scan thousands of license plates per day with the purpose of flagging down license plates that have already been entered into a database because of felony warrants, expired plates, stolen vehicles, or various other crimes

  • Detroit public schools outsource security

    Detroit Public Schools (DPS) fired all of its 226 security officers Friday and hired a private company to provide in-school security; the move will save the district an estimated $5.5 million through a one-year contract

  • Better to teach old dogs new tricks

    DHS recently announced that it wants to buy 3,000 dogs from breeders — at a cost of $4,535 per dog — to increase its force of canines who sniff out explosives, cash, and drugs; since only 20 percent of dogs who are selected for service programs successfully complete the training process, this plan will actually result in breeding 15,000 dogs, of which 12,000 will end up in shelters; one expert offers an alternative: DHS should follow the lead of the Hearing Ear Dog Program and many police departments and fill its ranks with dogs adopted from shelters

  • The world (supposedly) safest locks easily defeated by paper clips, screw drivers

    Security experts demonstrate how locks which tout themselves as the safest lock available — fingerprints-based Biolock Model 333; Kwikset, a programmable “smartkey” lock , the innovative iLoq C10S which uses the action of a key being pushed into the lock to generate power for electronics that then checked data in a chip on the key to determine whether the user is cleared for access; AMSEC electronic safe Model es1014; KABA InSync deadbolt — can be easily defeated by using nothing more than wires, magnets, air, shock, paper clips, screw drivers, and other improvised tools