• National insurance for natural disasters: a necessity or "beach house bailout"

    Supporters of national disaster insurance program say it is better to plan ahead than do a bailout after a natural disaster; opponents say it would be a subsidy for owners of coastal mansions and encourage people to live in disaster-prone areas

  • Religious leaders discuss body scanners with DHS

    Muslim, Jewish, and Christian leaders met with DHS officials to discuss the privacy aspects of whole-body scanning; Muslim religious organizations, the Pope, and Orthodox Jewish authorities declared body scanners to be in violation of their respective religions' modesty strictures, especially for women, and urged their followers to opt for pat-downs instead

  • UAV updateFlying ambulance: UAV will extract wounded soldiers from the battlefield

    There is one more mission being added to the ever-expanding list of operational, intelligence, surveillance, law-enforcement, first response, and disaster recovery missions assigned to UAVs: evacuating critically injured casualties directly from the battlefield to the hospital

  • Update: The FBI caps nearly 90 years of use of biometrics with its Biometric Center of Excellence

    The FBI has been using various forms of biometric identification since its earliest days -- from photographs and fingerprints in its first years (and assuming responsibility for managing the U.S. fingerprint collection in 1924), to applying handwriting analysis in the Lindbergh kidnapping case in 1932, to its laboratory's pioneering work on raising latent finger, palm, and other soft tissue prints from evidence, to today's development of DNA analysis as a means of genetic fingerprinting

  • Seeing through the Earth's crust, clearlyUnderground intelligence satellite navigation will work off lightning strikes

    The U.S. ubiquitous eye-in-the-sky satellites have driven more and more people and things of interest to disappear underground (just think Iran's nuclear weapons program); deep tunnel complex shields an organization from the prying eyes of satellites, and it is also good protection against a sudden bombing raid; the U.S. military wants to be able to peek and conduct operations underground

  • Smiths Detection's mid-sized X-ray system added to TSA's Air Cargo Screening Qualified List

    By August 2010, all cargo carried on passenger planes will have to be screened; Smiths Detection's latest addition to its list of cargo screening machines -- a pallet-sized scanner -- is the company's sixth technology approved to help shippers meet TSA August 2010 100 percent air cargo screening deadline

  • Border Security Expo & Conference, Phoenix, Arizona – April 23 & 24, 2010

  • Washington State, federal officials in dam-related disaster resilience exercises

    Officials from the Tri-Cities area of Washington State, neighboring areas, and federal agencies participate in a exercise aiming to develop a strategy to improve disaster resilience and preparedness in the event of severe flooding along the Columbia River, flooding which leads to overtopping and subsequent breaching of levees in the Tri-Cities area

  • Delay in start date for U.K. cyberdefense center

    The U.K. government's Cyber Security Operations Center, charged with protecting Britain's critical IT infrastructure, was supposed to become operational yesterday; the government said it would become operational by the end of the month

  • Theater of the absurdTSA: Alleged child molester did not train or use new full-body scanners at Logan

    A Boston man charged with multiple child sex crimes was a certified luggage and passengers screener at Logan Airport; TSA says the man was already missing from work for several days when full-body scanners were deployed at Logan on 1 March, and thus had no access to the machines; the man's arrest adds fuel to the opposition to body scanners

  • Effectively Countering Terrorism – Prevention, Preparedness, Response – Sussex A

  • World's first practical jetpack commercially available for $75,000

    Kiwi company Martin Aircraft is offering the world's first commercial jetpacks; the machine is expected to revolutionize the military and be taken up by emergency services; the jetpack travels for about 30 minutes on a five-gallon tank of premium gasoline, has top speeds of 60 mph, and reaches heights of 2,400 meters (about 1.5 miles)

  • Shape of things to comeNew surveillance camera offers panoramic view, zoom-in capabilities

    Not unlike the surveillance cameras that tracked Will Smith's every move in the movie "Enemy of the State," Adaptive Imaging Technologies' "panoramic telescope" may yet revolutionize the field of surveillance: the camera can, at the same time, monitor a panoramic field of view and zoom in on any spot in real time with exceptional clarity

  • Tiny sensor "listens" to gunshots to identify source of fire and type of weapon

    The sensor, developed by a Dutch company, is smaller than the head of a match, made of two 200-nanometer-thick, 10-micrometer-wide platinum strips that are heated to 200 degrees Celsius; the sensor does not truly “listen” to sounds; rather, it senses air particles that flow past the platinum strips and cool them unevenly

  • Indonesia kills suspected Bali bomber in Jakarta police raid

    Terrorist bomb-maker Dulmartin, who prepared the explosives for the 2002 nightclub bombing that killed more than 200 people and injured another 240, killed in police raid; many of the victims were tourists or foreign nationals

  • Domestic terrorismGrowing concerns in U.S., U.K. about domestic terrorism

    Law enforcement and intelligence in the United States and the United Kingdom are concerned with increased intensity on the extremist fringe: the number extremist groups is rising, their ranks are swelling, their rhetoric is becoming more vituperative, and there has been an increase in violent activities

  • Domestic terrorismA series of attacks on government buildings focuses attention on federal building security

    The recent shooting at the Pentagon, which followed a February plane crash at Internal Revenue Service offices in Austin and a January shooting at the federal courthouse in Las Vegas, has prompted renewed attention from lawmakers regarding the security of U.S. government buildings

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The Long View

  • DARPA seeks deep-learning AI to cope with flood of information

    The growing use of UAVs to loiter over enemy territory and send images and streaming videos back to HQ has created a glut of information; DARPA seeks a better, deeper, and more layered artificial intelligence to help the intelligence community cope with the avalanche of information coming in

  • Nuclear fusionCold fusion is enjoying a rebirth

    Researchers presented new evidence for the existence of this promising -- and controversial -- energy source' papers discussed last week at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society

  • TrendGlobal UAV sales boom, but South Africa's UAV sector flounders

    South Africa was among the world's leaders in designing and manufacturing UAVs; UAVs are the most dynamic segment growth sector in the global aerospace industry; South Africa could have benefited from the growing interest in UAVs, lack of investment in R&D and in finished products may cause South Africa to abdicate the UAV lead it once held

  • U.S. intelligence chief: Mexico not on brink of collapse

    There is a debate among different U.S. intelligent services about how close to a collapse Mexico is; Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence, says the drug cartels' escalating violence is a product of their weakening state not their strength

  • Insight into the news // Ben FrankelSudan attack demonstrates new U.S.-Israel counter-Iran policy

    Israeli aircraft, with U.S. logistical and intelligence support, attack and destroy an Iranian arms convoy in Sudan; arms were part of an effort by Iran to resupply Hamas's forces in Gaza

  • Planetary securityNew ideas for deflecting Earth-threatening asteroids

    As scientists use better equipment to make more accurate observations of space, they find more Earth-threatening objects loitering in Near Earth Orbit; a debate is growing as to the best method to deal with this threat

  • Shape of things to comeDARPA funds Phase 2 of human limb regeneration study

    When you cut off a salamander's leg, a blastema, or regeneration bud, appears at the stump and then grows into a new leg with muscles, nerves, etc. all complete; DARPA wants to see whether the same can be dome for human limbs