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March 2010 |
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Your Bi-monthly Homeland Security News Source
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Upcoming Events
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 SSI's GSA Approved Programs CLICK HERE!
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SSI's Global Security Workshop - May 7-15, 2010 - Tel Aviv, Israel
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Select SSI Courses approved for Academic Credit through Saint Leo University:
Global Security Workshop
Now Available: The Counter Terrorist eZINE! CLICK HERE!
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The United States is in the midst of numerous terror related issues such as:
- Christmas Day Underwear Bombing
- Five Americans held in Pakistan
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Chicago Businessman charged with planning the attacks in Mumbai
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Denver man charged with terror plot
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American Somali Terrorist Connections
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Radicalized Americans such as the Fort Hood attacker
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And the possibility of Guantanamo detainees being brought to the United States
It is now more than ever that homeland security professionals at the local level must be armed with the skills and knowledge to protect us.
SSI has courses already scheduled in 2010 to provide this knowledge:
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Cyber Attack Drill Finds US Unprepared for Doomsday Scenarios
by Ayinde O. Chase
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the United States isn't prepared to respond to an attack on its computer networks. An exercise conducted earlier this week found that critical communication and electrical power systems could be seriously affected.
The Cyber ShockWave exercise was conducted to ascertain how the government could develop a real-time response to a wide-scale cybercrisis. During the test, a group of national security and cybersecurity experts were forced to grapple with specific doomsday scenarios.
The Tuesday simulation was created by 10 former White House advisors and other top officials and the results don't bode well. According to the officials, the U.S. isn't sufficiently prepared for an attack of this magnitude.
Some of the main problems officials faced were how to deal with a malware attack that spread via people's personal computers and smartphones. Additionally, the scenario involving a complete power grid collapse caused a cascading technical failure that hampered officials' abilities to handle the situation.
Officials who took part in the test agreed that no grand plan exists, however some of the suggestions being brought to the president include federalizing the National Guard and deploying troops to guard power lines and prevent civil unrest.
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Tel Aviv, Israel - May 7-15th, 2010
A brand new program, global expertise and global best practices.
Security Solutions International, SSI, is proud to announce that our CEO and Global Counter Terrorism Operations Director, Sol Bradman, is taking over our Training in Israel Mission, with an exciting new program, locations and experts.
Join the more than 300 Homeland Security Professionals that have selected SSI's training in Israel program over 15 missions from 2005 to 2009 (making it the most successful program for overseas training in Homeland Security) on an exciting advanced workshop and get the benefit of featured International speakers.
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Colo. gunman had grown increasingly erratic
The man accused of wounding two middle school students in a community still haunted by the Columbine massacre had become increasingly erratic in recent weeks, yelling at imaginary friends and complaining that eating macaroni and cheese made too much noise, his father said Wednesday.
Investigators are looking into the bizarre behavior of 32-year-old Bruco Strong Eagle Eastwood as they try to figure out why the unemployed ranch hand allegedly showed up at his old school and started firing at students in the parking lot before being tackled by a math teacher.
 Eastwood's father described his son's recent strange behavior in an interview with The Associated Press at his ranch outside Denver.
The older man said that his son used to talk to himself a lot, but in the past month, he had begun yelling. The younger man also complained that the refrigerator was too loud and that certain foods made too much noise, his father said.
Others said Eastwood would show up at a nearby gas station to buy cigarettes, but was often 20 or 30 cents short, and would mumble to himself as he read the sports section the newspaper.
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Malls could be targets for Al Qaida bioterror attacks
by Tina Redlup
Counter terror experts have announced that Al Qaida has set its sights onto using biological and chemical attacks on shopping malls and other soft targets.
In a report published in The Washington Post by Bruce Hoffman, author of the study at Georgetown  Univeristy's Walsh School of Foreign Service that revealed the new targets, it is reported that malls could become a new target.
The report is backed up by a study released by Harvard's Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs that discusses chemical and biological weapons and their use.
"We need only consider the darkest days of the Iraqi terror campaign of 2006-2007 to grasp how the jihadis view marketplaces. Scarcely a week went by without another Iraqi marketplace bombing, with casualties largely consisting of women and children, mounting from the dozens to the hundreds," J.R. Dunn, editor of American Thinker, told WND.com.
"We need only add the fact that the mall in many ways symbolizes the United States to people across the world, acting as kind of American Horn of Plenty, to see the inevitability of the threat. Such attacks will come, and they will be ugly."
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Breakthrough Could Lead to Cure for AIDS and Other Deadly Viruses
by Pam Baker
The discovery of a chemical given the unassuming name "LJ001" could mark the beginning of a new era of medicine. Because it attacks virus membranes, LJ001 may form the basis for treating a variety of ills, from annoying cases of flu to deadly outbreaks of Ebola, to HIV and many other viral killers, without any serious side effects.
Viruses have long been the bane of the medical world. For centuries, healthcare experts have struggled to  treat everything from virus-induced sniffles to lethal epidemics. At the very core of the problem is the constant emergence of new viruses and the continuous flux of old ones. It doesn't help that even the strongest antibiotics are impotent against even the weakest virus. This is why the recent discovery of a new broad spectrum antiviral treatment is nothing to sneeze at.
Researchers at UCLA, the University of Texas Medical Branch, Harvard University, Cornell University and the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases have developed an antiviral compound that attacks a wide variety of viruses through a common feature: their outer coating.
By attacking a common feature such as channels in flu viruses and sticky membranes in even deadlier viruses, an antiviral becomes effective against an entire group rather than just against a single virus. This is all very hopeful stuff in light of the growing viral threats on both the natural and man-made fronts
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Man charged with helping Somalis enter US Illegally
Authorities have arrested and charged a Virginia man with trying to help nearly 300 people illegally enter the United States from the war-torn country of Somalia where al Qaeda militants have been active.
The man, Anthony Joseph Tracy, admitted to law enforcement officials he helped some 272 Somalis obtain fraudulent visas in Kenya with the goal of landing in the United States, according to an affidavit filed in a federal court in Virginia earlier this month.
In addition, Tracy, 35, said during a lie-detector test that he had been approached by the militant group al-Shabaab in Kenya, "but he claimed that he refused to assist them," said Thomas Eyre, special agent in the U.S. Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office of Investigations.
The United States has accused al-Shabaab, an Islamist militant group, as being a proxy for al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa nation. It has been designated a "Foreign Terrorist Organization" by the U.S. State Department.
Tracy, who was arrested on February 5, told authorities in interviews he spent months in Kenya where he helped the Somalis obtain visas from the Cuban embassy as well an unnamed South American country, according to the affidavit.
"Tracy stated that he knew that the final destination for the Somalis for whom he obtained visas was the United States, with the visas fraudulently obtained in Kenya being the first step in the process," Eyre said in the affidavit.
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Full-body scanner arriving at O'Hare: civil liberties groups call machines an unacceptable intrusion
by Kristen Mack
The first full-body scanner is finally set to arrive at O'Hare International Airport next week, bringing with it both the hope of better security and the fear of invasion of privacy.
When the scanner begins operating in early March, randomly selected local passengers will be confronted  with the option of going through the revealing imaging devices or being subjected to a pat-down.
The scanner will be installed at United Airlines' Terminal 1 within the next two weeks, Jim Fotenos, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, said Tuesday.
O'Hare and Boston's Logan International Airport, which will get three scanners, are the first to receive 150 new full-body imaging machines purchased with federal stimulus money, Fotenos said. The other machines will be distributed to airports across the country by the end of June.
O'Hare will use the machine, which shows an explicit silhouette of passengers that can identify explosives or other weapons concealed on the body, as an initial screening device. That means any passenger who happens to be standing in a full-body scanner line will be randomly subject to the controversial search. But the use of only one body scanner in a large airport like O'Hare with many security checkpoints means that only a small percentage of passengers will be asked to go through the machine.
"No one has to go through it," said Fotenos, who added that signs will be posted explaining that the scan is optional. Travelers who object, however, will have to go through a similar level of monitoring, which includes being screened by a metal detector or hand-wand, plus a required old-fashioned frisk. Physical pat-downs will be conducted by a TSA screener of the same sex.
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DHS' Protective Security Advisors to receive training in petroleum sector
by Jacob Goodwin
At the next biannual meeting of the Department of Homeland Security's Protective Security Advisors, which will take place in Long Beach, CA, on March 23 and 24, about 120 PSAs and their headquarters colleagues will be trained in the fundamentals of the energy industry, with a specific focus on the petroleum sector.
The Protective Security Advisor program was established by DHS in 2004 to deploy a cadre of critical  infrastructure security specialists - with an average of 20 years of law enforcement, military and anti-terrorism experience - into about 60 different metropolitan areas across the country that have been designated as PSA districts. These PSAs serve as on-site experts who can help facilitate communications between DHS and the owners and operators of critical infrastructure facilities.
Every six months, the advisors receive training in the fundamentals of a different critical infrastructure sector, as part of what is called the "PSA Learning Roadmap." Next month, the group will attend two eight-hour sessions in Long Beach on topics such as petroleum geology and exploration, well planning, drilling operations, production well control, gas processing, logistics, transport of petroleum offshore and onshore, and the macroeconomic outlook for the petroleum industry.
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May 10-12, 2010
Hosted by MBTA (Quincy, MA)
In a fascinating, insightful and packed three-day program, you are taken through the formative phases of the Islamic religion and will understand the different branches of Islam, understand how these were formed and on what ideology they are based. You are taken through a journey up to the present time, to really understand how extremism is organized in Radical Islam. You will also get practical hands-on information on recognizing Suicide Bombers, planning and changing protocols to respond to acts of terror, the detection of terrorists through fake ID's and the basics of their tools such as IED and VBIED's.
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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.
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Darpa-funded Researchers: Tobacco vs. Viral Terror
by Katie Drummond
The Pentagon's after a better way to strike back against infectious diseases and bio-threats. Now, a team at Texas A&M may have come up with a way to turn tobacco plants into vaccine-making machines.
Darpa, the military's risk-taking research agency, is investing $40 million into the Texas Plant-Expressed  Vaccine Consortium, which will test the tobacco-based method and then offer up 10 million doses of H1N1 vaccines. Once the process has been vetted, the researchers anticipate a scalability that could yield 100 million vaccine doses per month.
Plant-based vaccine production has been in the workings for years now, including the successful creation of edible bananas that protect against the Norwalk virus. Last summer, Darpa requested proposals for plant-based options that would rapidly yield protective antigens for the creation of potent vaccines. Tobacco is a particularly good option, because it's cheap and grows quickly - yielding vaccines in weeks, rather than the several months required for the standard egg-based method that's been used since the 1950s.
Darpa's been funding fast-tracked medication production since 2005, when the agency launched their Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP) program. Although Darpa was already funding research into Avian Flu protection, they realized that H1N1 was a more pressing priority. "In response to the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic, AMP's plant-based platform redirected its rapid scale-up processes that were initially developed for avian influenza," Darpa's announcement states.
The Texas A&M consortium also received $21 million from Darpa for the creation of Project GreenVax, which will work towards the quick, plant-based production of a myriad of vaccines. Having the program in place would offer a method to mitigate newly emerging viruses before they turn into widespread pandemics. The project will be housed in a custom-built, 21-acre compound, which features a 145,000 square foot "biotherapeutic production facility" that uses mobile "pods" to grow the plants.
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New Products from SSI: FloodSax and BlastSax
Exclusive Sole Source Distributor
As seen on the Weather Channel!
Click Here! FloodSax enables everyone to prepare for flooding: from children or elderly and disabled people living alone, to giant corporations. With FloodSax, everyone can buy time to safeguard their properties from flooding without the need for outside help that may never come or arrive when it's too late!.
FloodSax semi-porous inner liners contain thousands of super absorbent non-toxic crystals that are bonded to cotton-wool which soak up water to 90% capacity in less than 3 minutes. Each FloodSax can hold up to 5.5 gallons of water (45 lbs.) for up to three months from a single activation. They act just like sandbags to keep floods at bay only WITHOUT the SAND because they use WATER as their volume and weight!
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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.
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...
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FCC Unveils Public-Safety Pieces in National Broadband Plan
The FCC unveiled four gaps in public-safety and homeland-security communications, along with working recommendations as elements of its national broadband plan. With the deadline for delivering a national broadband plan to Congress March 17, the team developing the plan highlighted elements under consideration in the "national purposes" section of the plan.
The first gap is the lack of a nationwide interoperable broadband wireless network that is ubiquitous, redundant and resilient and dedicated to public-safety services. The presentation said few public-safety agencies have access to commercial wireless mobile broadband, and commercial broadband doesn't support public-safety requirements and is not cost effective.
The recommendations said parties should enable the construction and operation of an interoperable nationwide broadband wireless public-safety network with appropriate capacity and resiliency, leverage commercial technology; create an emergency response interoperability center to ensure nationwide interoperability; and appropriate grant funding for network construction, operation and evolution.
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Join the author's of Muslim Mafia, Dave Gaubatz, at the central event in the First Responder calendar - SSI's 5th Annual Homeland Security Professionals Conference in Las Vegas, NV - October 25-29, 2010.
Dave son's, Chris Gaubatz, infiltrated CAIR's inner sanctum, and worked undercover as David Marshall, a converted and devoted follower of the Muslim religion. Chris discovers incredibly disturbing information: Which politicians are given money by CAIR. How Capitol Hill staffers are strategically placed by CAIR.
Participants will also have the opportunity to network with fellow professionals and over 10 experts in the field presenting on key topics, including Evolution of Mass Hostage Siege Tactics, Protecting Large Gatherings from Sporting Events to Casinos, The Attack in Mumbai India, Psychological Impact and Implications to the First Responder Community, among others. The Exhibit Hall will showcase the latest technologies to all participants. Systems, tools and equipments used to prepare and react to any incident will be on display and ready for testing on site.
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Counter Terror Expo, the leading global event for counter terrorism and specialist security solutions for the public and private sector.
300+ exhibitors, 85 leading international conference speakers and 90+ free to attend workshops.
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Did Kim Kardashian ID an air marshal?
by A. Pawlowski
Federal air marshals are supposed to blend in with passengers on planes, but an alleged run-in with a Twitter-happy celebrity is highlighting how technology could blow their cover in an instant.
It started when reality television star Kim Kardashian was on a flight to Los Angeles, California, earlier this  week and became intrigued by her neighbor. So she logged on to Twitter while in the air to share her impressions. "I'm on the airplane...love wifi! I am sitting next to an Air Marshall [sic]! Jim the air marshall [sic] makes me feel safe!" Kardashian wrote.
The message went out to the more than 3 million people who follow her on Twitter.
About an hour later -- faced with questions from her followers about how she knew his identity -- Kardashian explained that she figured out who the man was because she was curious and simply inquired.
"There are thousands of flights every day and thousands of air marshals covering those flights every day, and each situation is unique," said Nelson Minerly, adding that the TSA does not discuss how federal air marshals operate on an aircraft.
Minerly declined to say whether the man sitting next to Kardashian was an air marshal, and he said he did not know whether the TSA was looking into the incident. He said he could not speak to whether the agency was concerned about someone tweeting about sitting next to an air marshal while in flight.
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Sincerely,
Security Solutions International |
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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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