• The government's new mail room // by Keith James

    How CRF regulations overhaul mail security — and the keys to timely compliance

  • Tensions arise over White House reorganization plan

    President Obama plans to merge the staffs of the White House National Security Council and Homeland Security Council — while stipulating that John Brennan, his homeland security adviser, will still be reporting directly to the president; tensions rise

  • IG: TSA's financial data jeopardized by lax controls

    Inspector General reports finds that TSA’s financial statements are vulnerable to tampering; TSA does not review computer accounts to ensure people who have left the agency are locked out, and does not check the privileges associated with each active account regularly to ensure that level of access remains necessary

  • U.S. will create cybersecurity czar

    President Obama is set to name a cyber security czar; announcement to be timed with the release of the administration’s much-anticipated cybersecurity review; the czar would have two bosses — the national security adviser and the White House economic adviser — in order to strike a balance between homeland security and economic concerns

  • Court: use of GPS to track criminals requires warrant

    The New York State’s supreme court ruled that the police cannot use GPS to track a criminal suspect without a warrant; majority decision said: “the use of these powerful devices presents a significant and, to our minds, unacceptable risk of abuse”

  • New security measures on passenger planes may hurt cherries growers

    About a quarter of the cherries grown in Washington state — some 1.3 million 20-pound boxes — are flown in the cargo hull of passenger planes to Pacific Rim countries like Japan and Korea; growers of highly perishable crops like cherries worry that a new requirement that all cargo on U.S. passenger flights undergo a security scan could create lengthy delays, leaving crops to rot in hangars as they await inspection

  • GAO: U.S. government agencies weak on cybersecurity

    GAO reports says that 23 out of 24 major U.S. government agencies have weak cybersecurity programs, potentially placing sensitive data at risk to exposure

  • Food poisoning outbreaks prompt oversight efforts, II

    President Obama had an organic vegetable garden planted at the White House, and his nominees to the FDA are pushing a more aggressive approach to food safety; many are are pinning their hopes on the Food Safety Modernization Act, which would essentially split the FDA, creating a separate agency to focus on food safety

  • Food poisoning outbreaks prompt oversight efforts, I

    In 1973, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employed 35,000 inspectors; in 2007, the FDA employed 6,700 inspectors; at the same time, food imports into the U.S. increased exponentially

  • NERC approves strengthened cyber security standards

    The North American Electric Reliability Corp.’s (NERC) independent Board of Trustees last week approved eight revised cyber security standards; entities found in violation of the standards can be fined up to $1 million per day, per violation in the United States

  • Britain to remove some DNA profiles from database

    About 5.2 percent of the U.K. population is on the national DNA database, compared with just 0.5 percent in the United States; the European Court of Human Rights rules that Britain’s DNA database is incompatible with the requirements of democracy, and the Home Office says it will begin to remove the DNA of innocent citizens

  • European Court: Scottish DNA database system is "fairer and proportionate"

    the European Court of Human Rights ruled the DNA databases in Britain, Wales, and Northern Ireland “could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society”; the European Court considered the system in Scotland “fair and proportionate”

  • Growing problem: Private security companies pose risk to privacy

    Government mandates in the U.K. now require more and more businesses to collect more and more information about individuals who use these businesses’ services; private contractors are hired to handled the collection and handling of the personal information collected; these contractors are not bound by the tight rules governing the government handling of such information (not that the U.K. government is doing a very good job following these rules)

  • Hathaway: cybersecurity must be joint effort

    President Obama’s top cybersecurity adviser: The fragility of the world’s digital infrastructure is “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges of the 21st century”

  • Big boost for the Great Aussie Firewall

    Australia’s Labor government wants to make the Internet cleaner and safer; to do that, the government last year introduced a proposal for a filtering scheme — dubbed the Great Aussie Firewall — which would block sites on an existing blacklist determined by the Australian Communications Media Authority; the project has just received a big boost