“The Coast Guard is using a new weapon to fight illegal immigration: electronic fingerprinting. A test program in which Coast Guard sailors take digital fingerprints from people picked up on boats headed to Puerto Rico from the Dominican Republic has led to more than 100 prosecutions in the past year.” (USA Today)
“Jordanian authorities on Wednesday released Jordanian Sheik Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi, a leading al-Qaida mentor, after several years imprisonment without trial, security sources said.” (MSNBC)
“The United States and Germany agreed Tuesday to share more information on terror suspects in a deal that Washington hopes will be a model for cooperation with other countries. The agreement, initialled in Berlin by US Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff and US Attorney General Michael Mukasey and their German counterparts, also covers serious crimes [...]
“The Bush administration has launched a preliminary legal inquiry that could land Venezuela on the U.S. list of nations that support terrorism, following reports of close Venezuelan links with Colombian rebels, a senior government official has confirmed.” (Houston Chronicle)
“FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told senators yesterday that agents improperly used a type of administrative subpoena to obtain personal data about Americans until internal reforms were enacted last year.” (Washington Post)
“The private sector owns more than three-quarters of the country’s critical infrastructure. A large-scale, successful, coordinated attack could cripple the country’s economy. A cyberattack can originate in one country and pass through several others before reaching its target.” (Federal Computer Week)
“MI5 agents claim to have uncovered al-Qaeda spies in Britain’s police force. According to a News Of The World report, four London Met officers were targeted after Scotland Yard secrets were passed on.” (Malaysia Sun)
“Equipment in two trailers sniffed out nuclear materials today on cars and trucks boarding the Bolivar Ferry in the first field test of the device in a maritime setting, a Homeland Security official said. The transportable radiation monitoring system, or TRMS, began screening cars entering the ferry from Galveston Island for the first full-day of [...]
“Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff Wednesday strongly defended border security projects undertaken by his department, asserting that virtual fencing in Arizona is working and that border-control efforts are not being delayed by three years.” (GovExec)
“The U.S. government will conduct a series of cyber war games throughout next week to test its ability to recover from and respond to digital attacks. Code-named ‘Cyber Storm II,’ this is the largest-ever exercise designed to evaluate the mettle of information technology experts and incident response teams from 18 federal agencies, including the CIA, [...]