The New York Police Department wants to be able to shut down cell phones, in case of a terrorist attack.
During last month’s massacre in Mumbai, terrorist handlers over micromanaged via mobile phone the assaults on the hotels, train stations, and Jewish center that killed more than 170 people.
In testimony today before the Senate Committee on [...]
The Los Angeles Police Department has pioneered a low-tech system for logging suspicious activity to look for patterns that could indicate terrorism — a system that Washington, D.C., police are adopting in the run-up to Inauguration Day. LAPD uses standardized labels to create a database of suspicious behavior, enabling analysts to “connect the dots” before [...]
Each agency must develop good internal cybersecurity processes that focus on more than network perimeter protection, said Mischel Kwon, director of the Homeland Security Department’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team during a panel discussion in Washington at the Security 2008 conference sponsored by 1105 Government Information Group. (NextGov)
“The violent Islamist terrorist threat has evolved and expanded since al Qaeda planned the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and radicalization of disaffected Muslims and recent converts to Islam is increasingly occurring here in the United States. Yet the federal government has “no cohesive and comprehensive outreach and communications strategy in place to confront this [...]
“Al Qaeda and other radical groups have dramatically increased their use of the Internet in recent years to lure and train recruits worldwide, a U.S. Senate report warned on Thursday.” (Reuters)
“The Homeland Security Department’s ambitious cybersecurity initiative might be relying too much on contractors and might not be providing enough information to the public, according to two key senators.” (Federal Computer Week)
“Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.
From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers’ faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric [...]
“Customs agents at U.S. airports don’t need any evidence of wrongdoing to search the contents of passengers’ laptop computers, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission wants to significantly expand the number and type of radioactive materials the agency will track in a Web-based system under development.
The National Source Tracking System, which is to be fully implemented by Jan. 31, 2009, originally was conceived in late 2006 to account for the actions of 1,350 radioactive materials licensees [...]
“Key House Homeland Security Committee Democrats demanded Monday that the Homeland Security Department provide Congress with more information on how a new office that coordinates the use of space satellites will legally operate and protect the privacy and rights of U.S. citizens.
In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the lawmakers said they will [...]