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June Mid-Month 2009 |
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Your Bi-monthly Homeland Security News Source |
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'Elaborate' Drug Tunnel Found Along Mexico Border
By Jackie Castillo
(CNN) -- Authorities have found a massive underground drug smuggling tunnel snaking through the U.S.-Mexican border, and law officers are marveling over its sophistication.
"This is one of the most elaborate tunnels I've seen," Border Patrol agent Michael Scioli said.
Border Patrol agents found the uncompleted tunnel last week, the patrol said in a statement.
Measuring 48 feet in the United States and 35 feet in Mexico, the tunnel contains side walls framed with 2-by-4 wooden studs and ceiling construction.
"It's elegant in the sense it has electrical work wired into the Mexico side. It even has a hose for ventilation and lightning," Scioli said.
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New Product that will allow you to Fight Flooding with Water and NOT Sand - FloodSax®
FIGHT FLOODING with FloodSax®, the new technology distributed by SSI, engineered to replace the traditional sandbag: The answer to flood damage during Hurricane Season 2009.
As Floridians, we know how vulnerable we are to floods - damage from wind-driven rain, damages to balconies, garages, hangers,  storage facilities across the state. By many estimates, up to 26 percent of homes in Florida - one out of every four - are vulnerable to flooding of some kind.
Sandbags are the Old World answer. They are inconvenient, heavy to move, labor-intensive and simply impossible for residents of upper floors, senior residents and many more.
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Beyond being more green, FloodSax® are a more economical alternative to the sandbag because of the sandbags' heavily labor-intensive, time-intensive, transportation-intensive real costs.
Learn More... |
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August 17-21, 2009
Approved for Academic Credit through Saint Leo University |
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Intelligence Turf War Rages, Undermining DNI's Authority
By Anthony L. Kimery  'The DNI shouldn't have to be going to the President to resolve disputes'
Washington Post editorialist and former Sunday "Outlook" section editor David Ignatius, author of spy novels such as Body of Lies, Agents of Innocence and SIRO, couldn't have been any more correct when he opined in a Thursday op-ed that the on-going turf war between CIA Director Leon Panetta and his ostensible superior, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dennis Blair, has exposed the "botched reorganization" of the US Intelligence Community (IC).
This "bureaucratic battle was unfortunate, but it will serve a useful purpose if it forces the White House, finally, to clarify the intelligence reorganization process that created the DNI structure in 2005," Ignatius wrote.
HSToday.us reported early on that one of the DNI's biggest challenges would be to be recognized as the IC's CEO while at the same time being able to have productive relationships with the other members of the IC that are not based on turf issues, but rather team issues.
As former CIA officer Melissa Boyle Mahle told HSToday.us way back when, "the biggest issue is, he's going to have to come out as a credible player, and demonstrate that he's willing to use the mandate [to reform the IC]. But he has to be careful how he does it, because if he has to go too often to bat - to the Presidential piggybank for influence - it shows that he doesn't actually rule the kind of power that you need to personally" - and which the DNI is supposed to inherently possess under the IC reorganization if he's to effectively lead the Community.
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 Homeland1.com is revolutionizing the way in which the homeland security community finds relevant news, identifies important training information, interacts with each other and researches product purchases. It is becoming the most comprehensive and trusted online destination for industry personnel and aspiring professionals alike. |
DHS Launches Second Test of Biometric Exit Processes
By Jill R. Aitoro
 Customs and Border Protection agents on Wednesday began testing a system for collecting passengers' fingerprints as they check in for international flights, as part of a larger effort to determine the most efficient process for verifying outbound travelers' identities.
The fiscal 2009 omnibus appropriations act mandated the exit-tracking program, launched at the Metropolitan Wayne County Airport in Detroit. Congress also required the Homeland Security Department to conduct a pilot program to collect biometric information at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints. That effort kicked off nearly two weeks ago in Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
DHS began to collect fingerprints from travelers entering the United States in 2004 as part of the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program. Developing biometric exit procedures, however, has proved more challenging.
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Certificate in Terrorism Studies - 100% online delivery. Commences 1st Sept 2009. Offered by University of St Andrews, the course provides a sophisticated introduction to the fundamental issues behind terrorism as well as the motivations, methodology and modus operandi of the various strains of terrorism in the world today.
Tel: +44 (0)20 7017 3210 (UK) or +1 (646) 957 8929 (N. America).
www.terrorismstudies.com
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Taking the Pulse of Extremist Groups
By Bob Drogin
Is domestic terrorism on the rise? Is there a trend in the recent violence? Experts on the subject disagree.
Reporting from Silver Spring, Md. -- A day after an anti-Semite allegedly shot and killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, experts disagreed about whether it was an isolated event or the latest sign of a growing threat by domestic hate groups.
The danger appeared to come from two directions: far-right fanatics who feed on domestic conspiracy theories and Muslim extremists who oppose U.S. policies abroad. Both have launched deadly attacks in recent weeks.
But the number of incidents and the death toll are lower than during the early 1980s and early 1990s, when white supremacists, armed militias and other extremist groups attacked government offices, law enforcement officers, banks and other targets.
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Scholarship available through BLACKHAWK! for an NTOA member to attend. CLICK HERE for more information. |
DHS Employees Don't Get Much Satisfaction, Survey Finds
By Louis Chunovic  Naturally, a federal department as massive and multi-faceted as DHS will have unsatisfied employees and critics inside the federal bureaucracy, but, seemingly, DHS has more than almost any other large federal agency.
In fact, in the recently released study, Best Places to Work in the Federal Government, DHS ranked down in 28th place among the top 30 large federal agencies, in the survey that measured employee satisfaction and commitment.
The survey of some 212,000 civil servants was conducted for the Partnership for Public Service and American University's Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation, and it used data from the Office of Personnel Management's Federal Human Capital Survey.
Only the National Archives and Records Administration and the Department of Transportation ranked lower in the survey than DHS.
Read On... |
Terror Drill: 'New York, You Have a Problem' By Tom Hays
 Agents had intercepted information about a possible terrorist attack in Manhattan, including a diagram showing a mysterious device. The raw intelligence was relayed to experts in Washington, who offered a daunting diagnosis: "You have a problem."
As chilling as that sounded, the situation wasn't real. But authorities say it could be, and what followed over the next two days was an ambitious stress test of the city's line of defense against a radiological or nuclear terrorist attack.
The exercise earlier this week involved hundreds of New York Police Department officers and FBI agents trained at detecting threats, along with an elite unit of federal weapons experts expected - with the approval of the U.S. attorney general - to swoop in by plane and defuse them.
There have been no specific threats against New York City. But since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials have repeatedly warned that the city remains atop terrorists' hit lists - and that a radiological or nuclear device could be in their arsenal.
Read On...
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Unique opportunity for SWAT teams members who want to get ready to conduct Counter Terrorism Operations.
Garden Grove, CA - October 20-23, 2009 CALL NOW!
Train Hard - Play Hard!
The scope of this training is to teach SWAT team members how to conduct an operation with the special characteristics peculiar to terrorist incidents and accomplish the mission, whether there are hostages involved, IED's, booby traps, or suicide terrorists with maximum safety for: citizens, team members and surrounding assets. By nature, the operation may become more similar to a military operation because, as mentioned above, this is a criminal act with a strategic goal. It is part of an ideological struggle against a state or population and may be carried out by a professional team of well equipped terrorist subjects. |
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Swine Flu Origins Revealed By Terry Frieden · CNN
 A new analysis of the current swine-origin H1N1 influenza A virus suggests that transmission to humans occurred several months before recognition of the existing outbreak. The work, published online in Nature today, highlights the need for systematic surveillance of influenza in swine, and provides evidence that new genetic elements in swine can result in the emergence of viruses with pandemic potential in humans.
'Using computational methods, developed over the last ten years at Oxford, we were able to reconstruct the origins and timescale of this new pandemic,' said Dr Oliver Pybus of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, an author of the paper. 'Our results show that this strain has been circulating among pigs, possibly among multiple continents, for many years prior to its transmission to humans.'
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What if Israel Strikes Iran?
By John R. Bolton
Whatever the outcome of Iran's presidential election tomorrow, negotiations will not soon -- if ever -- put an end to its nuclear threat. And given Iran's determination to achieve deliverable nuclear weapons, speculation about a possible Israeli attack on its nuclear program will not only persist but grow.
So what would such an attack look like? Obviously, Israel would need to consider many factors -- such as its timing and scope, Iran's increasing air defenses, the dispersion and hardening of its nuclear facilities, the potential international political costs, and Iran's "unpredictability." While not as menacingly irrational as North Korea, Iran's politico-military logic hardly compares to our NATO allies. Central to any Israeli decision is Iran's possible response.
Israel's alternative is that Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs reach fruition, leaving its very existence at the whim of its staunchest adversary. Israel has not previously accepted such risks. It destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 and a Syrian reactor being built by North Koreans in 2007. One major new element in Israel's calculus is the Obama administration's growing distance (especially in contrast to its predecessor).
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Twitter Attack  By Jill R. Aitoro
One of the social media applications widely used by citizens and federal employees alike -- Twitter -- is the latest to be infected by a virus, which raises the question: How is the Obama administration going to leverage Web 2.0 technologies, as promised, while locking down sensitive and private information?
News articles and blogs surfaced this past weekend about a virus infecting Twitter accounts. Tweets encouraged users to click a link to see a "Best Video," which actually brought them to a Web site with a Russain domain that downloads malicious software and, ironically, displays a fake security warning that tells people to buy a fake anti-spyware solution.
Initial reports speculated that the virus was a worm, much like the Koobface worm that infected users of other social networking sites, including Facebook and MySpace and enabled attackers to masquerade as legitimate Facebook users, infect more computers, and execute commands on infected machines. But later reports claim that attacks were not actually "spreading" from computer to computer, but rather targeting the victims of an earlier phishing scheme.
Read On... |
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