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October 2009 |
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Your Bi-monthly Homeland Security News Source |
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Upcoming Events
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Homeland Security Marked by Waste, Lack of Oversight By G.W. Schultz 
Soon after hijackers obliterated the World Trade Center towers eight years ago, Marin County received more than $100,000 in surveillance equipment to keep its water treatment system safe from a terrorist attack.
But four years after the funds were awarded, state authorities found more than $67,000 worth of the gear still boxed in its original packaging.
It had never been used.
The rest of the homeland security money went toward an alarm system to protect remote tank and pump sites. Because of the region's hilly terrain, the system didn't even work.
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Approved for Academic Credit through Saint Leo University
Message from SSI President, Henry Morgenstern:
Unfortunately, after November, with the growing demand on other SSI projects, I will no longer be in a position to put my contacts and knowledge of Israel at the disposal of SSI's Homeland Security Training Program in Israel. Of course, I want to continue. We have taken more groups to Israel during the past 6 years than any other group and have a trained a cadre of more than 400 people on how that country deals with the terror threat. This means that there are no further trips scheduled for the 2010 period.
I am urging you to enroll now in the November trip because it seems like it will be the last. This will be your last opportunity to allow the experts to show you how to deal with the threat of terror in your jurisdiction.
My best wishes to you and stay safe,
Henry Morgenstern |
Feds: Zazi Trips, Shopping Led to NY Terror Threat
by Tom Hays
It was midsummer in suburban Denver when an unassuming, bearded man pushed a red shopping cart between shelves stacked with hair coloring and nail polish remover. By the time Najibullah Zazi checked into a nearby hotel suite with a kitchen in September, he had at least 18 bottles of peroxide-based hair lighteners and pages of notes for how to turn the beauty products into bombs, authorities say.
Prosecutors say the otherwise mundane movements of the 24-year-old airport shuttle driver - who sold Wall Streeters coffee for years from his cart in downtown Manhattan and returned to the spot, not far from ground zero, on his recent two-day trip to the city - masked a dire terrorist threat.
The peroxide purchases, Zazi's prayer at a local mosque on the eve of his planned attack and a cross-country trip back to his Queens neighborhood, authorities say, are steps in his evolution from a struggling immigrant who was a teenager on Sept. 11, 2001, to a full-blown terrorist plotting to bomb the city on the attacks' eighth anniversary.
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FBI Building System that Blows Away Fingerprinting
By Ellen Messmer
 The Federal Bureau of Investigation is expanding beyond its traditional fingerprint-focused collection practices to develop a new biometrics system that will include DNA records, 3-D facial imaging, palm prints and voice scans, blended to create what's known as "multi-modal biometrics."
"The FBI today is announcing a rapid DNA initiative," said Louis Grever, executive assistant director of the FBI's science and technology branch, during his keynote presentation at the Biometric Consortium Conference in Tampa.
The FBI plans to begin migrating from its IAFIS database, established in the mid-1990s to hold its vast fingerprint data, to a next-generation system that's expected to be in prototype early next year. This multi-modal NGI biometrics database system will hold DNA records and more. Grever said that fingerprints and DNA appear to be the most mature and searchable biometrics possibilities, but the FBI is working to include iris-scan records among newer biometrics technologies to identify criminals and terrorists. The plan is to share this data with authorized U.S. and international investigative partners, as the agency does today. Read On... |
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New Product from SSI: BlastSax®
Security Solutions International is proud to introduce BlastSax® TMD (Transportable Mitigation Device). The patent pending BlastSax® devices are engineered for the military, private industry and public safety to save lives in the field during wartime, training, industrial construction and homeland terrorist attacks. BlastSax® are extremely lightweight, portable and always ready to deploy in seconds.
When dry, each is less than 1 lb. They activate in less than three minutes with water and deploy to a 50 lbs blast absorbing cushion. BlastSax® can provide protection against incendiary devices and can stop a variety of firearm rounds.
In addition to suppressing shock waves from an explosion, BlastSax® can assist in containing the flash, smoke and most importantly the fragmentation or "frag". A unique feature that was engineered into BlastSax® is its capability to "capture" and "cool" hot frag pieces to assist in forensic analysis for a more complete reconstruction of the device.
BlastSax® can assist to:
- Reduce demand on resources
- Considerably reduce blasts
- Contain blast frag pieces and contaminants
- Save lives & protect property from blasts or flood water (see FloodSax®)
Learn More... |
 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. |
OPM cuts security-clearance processing time From Federal Daily
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has significantly reduced the time it takes to process security-clearance background investigations, cutting the average time to just 37 days from the one-year period it took in 2001, said OPM Director John Berry.
In testimony Sept. 15 before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee, Berry noted that his agency - which oversees much of the government's clearance investigation work - is now exceeding federal timelines. The timelines require that decisions on at least 80 percent of initial clearances be made within an average of 120 days. Berry noted that OPM has eliminated a backlog of more than one-half million pending background investigations inherited from the Defense Department in 2005.
Four years ago, the average time needed to obtain a top secret security clearance was more than a year; today it is 72 days, Berry said. In 2009, OPM will complete more than 2 million investigations, he said.
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Part I: Cartel Informer goes Deeper In
 On the afternoon of Oct. 6, 2006, two men drove a bronze Jeep Cherokee to a Target store in Mesa, where they bought adult diapers and baseball batting gloves.
That evening, they picked up a third man, Ymer Orozco, at a west Phoenix truck stop, then headed east on Interstate 10. For more than an hour, the three were followed by a police helicopter overhead and by 17 officers in unmarked cars.
But the surveillance team lost track of the Cherokee in a Tempe neighborhood, where the vehicle slipped into a garage on South Evergreen Road. The three men went into the house. At gunpoint, Ymer was ordered to take off his pants and put on the diapers. His wrists were cuffed, his legs bound in duct tape. He was interrogated and beaten with fists protected by the batting gloves. And then his head was placed in a plastic bag secured around his neck with tape.
All the while, frantic officers circled the neighborhood, desperate to find Ymer - their undercover informer - before it was too late.
Read On... |
Man arrested for alleged terror plot to blow up federal courthouse By Dave McKinney
 A Downstate man has been arrested on terrorism-related charges for an alleged scheme this week to blow up the federal courthouse in the state capital, federal prosecutors announced Thursday.
Acting U.S. Attorney Jeffrey B. Lang said that Michael C. Finton, of Downstate Decatur, who also uses the name "Talib Islam," was arrested on charges of attempted murder of federal employees and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.
"This alleged plot drives home the stark reality that we must avoid complacency and remain ever vigilant to the threats that violent extremists may pose to public safety," said Lang, the lead federal prosecutor in the Central District of Illinois. Read On... |
Changes in the threat landscape require new approach for firewalls By William Jackson
Networking threats are migrating from the network perimeter to the interior and up the networking stack, often making older firewall technologies and policies inadequate. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has updated its guidelines for firewalls to reflect these changes. 
Special Publication 800-41 Revision 1, "Guidelines on Firewalls and Firewall Policy," updates the original publication released in 2002. It provides recommendations on developing firewall policies and on selecting, configuring, testing, deploying, and managing firewalls. The publication covers a number of firewall technologies, including packet filtering, stateful inspection, application-proxy gateways, host-based, and personal firewalls.
"At one time, most firewalls were deployed at network perimeters," the guide says. "This provided some measure of protection for internal hosts, but it could not recognize all instances and forms of attack, and attacks sent from one internal host to another often do not pass through network firewalls." Read On... |
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Russian Cybergangs make the Web a dangerous place
by Jeremy Kirk
Russian cybergangs have established a robust system for promoting Web sites that sell fake antivirus software, pharmaceuticals and counterfeit luxury products, according to a new report from security vendor Sophos.
To sell bogus goods, many of those sites rely on hundreds of "affiliate networks," which are essentially contractors that find ways to direct Web users to the bad sites, wrote Dmitry Samosseiko, a Sophos analyst. He made a presentation this week at the Virus Bulletin security conference in Geneva.
Affiliate networks have been around for a long time and there are many legitimate ones. But "the majority of the most powerful and controversial affiliate networks are based in Russia," Samosseiko wrote.
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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.
For more information on hosting an SSI SWAT Counter Terrorism Course at your agency, please contact Sol Bradman at (305) 302-2790. |
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Norwalk Fusion Center: Intelligence gathering as a shared responsibility
By Leischen Stelter
It looks like a generic commercial building from the outside, with an unremarkable cement and glass facade, but within this building is one of the government's primary means to target and identify terrorist activity. 
During a tour of the Joint Regional Intelligence Center here on Sept. 20, as one of the pre-session programs of ASIS International, attendees got a first-hand look at how the FBI partners with various federal, state and local agencies and its effort to reach out to the private sector to gather and distribute intelligence. While fusion centers are primarily Department of Homeland Security funded initiatives, stemming from recommendations based on the Commission Report of 9/11, the JRIC here in Norwalk is headed jointly by the FBI, Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. Situated not far from downtown Los Angeles and serving seven counties in California, it is one of four fusion centers in the state and one of 72 in the country. Read On... |
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States Undergo Sweeping Effort to Become Virtual in Emergency Response By Jose Vasquez
 Hurricanes like Katrina and Rita have plagued the Gulf Coast for years, but these two especially drew attention to the inability of current emergency communications systems to establish effective cross-jurisdictional information sharing. As government officials and responders prepare for, and respond to, emergency situations, they should have access to all the information out there that will allow them to safeguard their communities most effectively. Far too often, however, critical emergency information goes unseen by those who need it the most -- first responders -- because that information isn't easily accessible.
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For further information:
Security Solutions International,
13155 SW 134th Street STE 204,
Miami, FL 33186
866-573-3999 Office, 866-573-2090 Fax
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