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April Mid-Month 2010 |
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Your Bi-monthly Homeland Security News Source
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Upcoming Events
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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:
- American housewife calls herself Jihad Jane
- Crude IED found in wheelchair in Harlem Train Station
- Christmas Day Underwear Bombing
- Chicago Businessman charged with planning the attacks in Mumbai
- Denver man charged with terror plot
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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For limited time only - 25% OFF Price List - Click Here
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NJIT Physicist Sees Terahertz Imaging As Ultimate Defense Against Terrorism
by Sheryl Weinstein
John Federici, a physics professor at NJIT, sees the use of terahertz rays as a critical technology in the defense against suicide bombers and other terrorist activities. Federici and his research team recently described experimental results from a digital video camera invented in their laboratory that uses a terahertz imaging system. One day such a device could be used to scan airport passengers quickly and efficiently. "Video-Rate terahertz Interferometric and Synthetic Aperture Imaging" appeared in Applied Optics (July, 2009).
 The article examined experimental results from a video-rate device. The device uses terahertz (THz) rays that emit a continuous narrow bandwidth radiation of 0.1 (THz). The instrument creates a two-dimensional image of a point in an object. The image is reconstructed at a rate of 16 milliseconds per frame with a four-element detector array. The number of detectors, the configuration of the detection array and how well the baselines are calibrated affects the image resolution and quality.
"Scientists favor terahertz radiation because it can transmit through most non-metallic and non-polar mediums," said Federici. "When a terahertz system is used correctly, people can see through concealing barriers such as packaging, corrugated cardboard, walls, clothing, shoes, book bags, pill coatings, etc. in order to probe for concealed or falsified materials."
Once the rays penetrate those materials, they can also characterize what might be hidden-be they explosives, chemical agents or more-based on a spectral fingerprint the rays will sense which can identify the material. terahertz radiation also poses minimal or no health risk to either the person being scanned or the THz system operator.
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Tel Aviv, Israel - November 5-13th, 2010
BEST TRAINING - BEST TIME - BEST EXPERIENCE
Don't Run Out of Time! - Opportunity of a Lifetime!
BEST TRAINING - 15 missions and more than 300 participants means you can't go wrong. When it comes to taking US qualified professionals to visit Israel, and show them what Israel has had to do to protect itself, SSI is the leader.
Now, register for November's exciting Global Security Workshop which aims to take the best of the experience gained during the past 15 missions and add some features that will make this an even better training experience:
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Find out about how to respond to multi casualty incidents
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Learn how Israel has had to deal with the threat of non-conventional attacks and how to translate those lessons for the USA
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Think about how populations need to be evacuated during man-made and natural disasters
And still learn about the things that matter most - how to protect our homeland against attacks.
BEST TIME - There's never been a better time to visit this sometimes conflicted region - it is safer than ever!
BEST EXPERIENCE - Expand your knowledge and grow your resume while also taking in some of the world's oldest, most beautiful and significant sites!
Register Now and get bonus participation in the optional extra day - an undeniably unfortgetable trip to the lowest point on Earth, the Dead Sea visiting Massada, the desert fortress.
BEST TRAINING - BEST TIME - BEST EXPERIENCE
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NO COST - NO OBLIGATION Test & Evaluation Program.
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Shooter, sirens prep Minot Airmen
by Tech Sgt Thomas Dow
Minot Air Force Base Airmen responded to a mock attack during a massive accident response exercise at the McAdoo Sports and Fitness Center March 26 here.
More than 50 evaluators and exercise planners, including officials from local and state emergency management staffs, the FBI, Minot Police Department and Trinity Hospital, as well as more than 50 volunteers came together to create a realistic simulation of an attack by an active shooter assault at the base fitness center.
 The exercise consisted of teams of security forces whose mission was to neutralize a gunman in the fitness center, rescue those trapped in the facility and secure the scene, said P.J. Pallotta, a 5th Bomb Wing antiterrorism officer. Follow-on emergency responders, to include fire and medical forces, then dealt with multiple casualties as a result of the shootings and from a low-grade dirty bomb that had been detonated by the gunman.
"Simultaneously, the rest of the base went into lockdown and all major control centers were activated," he said. "Even our elementary schools on base practiced lockdown procedures. It was a very plausible scenario."
All these activities were done under the watchful eyes of exercise evaluation teams. These base evaluators watched to see how responders reacted to different situations.
"The main objectives we evaluated were how the base gets initial notification out, responds to the threat, and finally recovers to resume operations," said Maj. John D. Walsh, the 5th Bomb Wing conventional inspections chief.
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REGISTRATION - FREE OF CHARGE
Are you looking for ways to improve the collaboration and operation at a fusion center, a public safety or law enforcement agency? If the answer is yes, join this webinar hosted by The Counter Terrorist Magazine to learn how Fusion Core Solution, jointly developed by Microsoft and ESRI, can help you improve operations with workflow management, information sharing, and geospatial intelligence technologies.
Join the conversation with a panel of Fusion Core Solution pilots from Washington State Fusion Center, Utah State Information and Analysis Center, and Miami Dade Police Department. Learn how Fusion Core Solution helps them effectively collect and manage the intake of vital information and intelligence; organizes, analyzes, and distills that information into relevant, meaningful, and actionable intelligence (connecting the dots), and facilitate successful and secure information sharing with internal and external partners for prevention, preparation and response.
*Registration is complimentary, and qualified participants will receive a certificate of attendance after the webinar. Attendees will receive a FREE EZINE Subscription to The Counter Terrorist Magazine.
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Are you ready for an agriculture emergency?
The 2007 Ag Census from the USDA indicated that there were 656,475 operations specializing in beef cattle ranching and farming, and 31,065 cattle feedlots, for a total of 687,540 beef operations. In 2007, there also were 57,318 farms in the United States that specialized in dairy cattle and milk production. Now add in the swine, poultry and small ruminant operations, and you can see there are a lot of livestock operations that could potentially be under threat from natural disasters/emergencies or agroterrorism.
We've seen in the last few years emergencies of the natural sort - floods, snowstorms, heat-related deaths, fires. Fortunately we have not seen intentionally induced emergencies such as bioterrorism, but the industry is paying attention to potential threats.
There is a growing volume of information on handling livestock in emergencies or in an agroterrorism situation, and many hands on-learning opportunities. Take, for example, recent agrosecurity workshops in Kansas for producers, emergency managers, veterinarians, law enforcement, Extension agents and others. "Many counties in states across the country have a plan that includes agriculture, but many more don´t," said Billy Dictson, director of the Office of Biosecurity in the Southwest Border Food Safety and Defense Center at New Mexico State University, in a Kansas State University press release. "One of the things that really concerned us was that in 3,000-some counties across the country, most of them are silent on agriculture."
The workshops were presented by the Extension Disaster Education Network (EDEN), a collaborative multi-state effort by Extension services across the country to improve the delivery of services to citizens affected by disasters. The workshops were designed to build capacity to handle agricultural issues during an emergency or disaster, to improve networking among stakeholders who can plan for and respond to emergencies, and to develop community agrosecurity planning (CAP) teams who will establish or enhance agrosecurity components within existing local emergency operations plans.
Read On...
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Click HERE for More Information.
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An Elite Team of Sleuths, Saving Lives in Obscurity
by Lawrence K. Altman, M.D.
Millions of people know what C.D.C. and F.D.A. stand for. Far fewer recognize E.I.S., though they may owe their lives to it.
The E.I.S. is the Epidemic Intelligence Service, an arm of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its cadre of 160 elite medical detectives - many of them young doctors at the start of their careers - serve two-year hitches that are part adventure, part drudgery.
Suitcases packed, they are poised to fly anywhere on short notice to investigate outbreaks of pneumonia, diarrhea, high fevers, mysterious rashes and many other health threats. Borrowing a term from news reporting, E.I.S. detectives like to call themselves "shoe-leather epidemiologists;" they also like to wear ties and lapel pins displaying their logo - a hole in the well-worn sole of a shoe over a map of the world.
Since its creation in 1951, the service has become a bulwark in the nation's defense system against disease, often acting as the public's emergency room. Its doctors have helped identify Legionnaires' disease, Lyme disease, and toxic shock syndrome from superabsorbent tampons; stop outbreaks of diphtheria and other diseases before they could spread uncontrollably; discover the deadly Ebola and Lassa viruses; and trace paralyzing cases of polio to defective batches of the Salk vaccine. Other E.I.S. investigations have led the Food and Drug Administration to remove potentially lethal products from the market.
Indeed, the E.I.S. "may have saved your life, though you were probably unaware of it," Mark Pendergrast writes in his new book, "Inside the Outbreaks," the first history of the program, being published next week by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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Obama Bans Islam, Jihad From National Security Strategy Document
The change is a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventative war.
 President Barack Obama's advisers will remove religious terms such as "Islamic extremism" from the central document outlining the U.S. national security strategy and will use the rewritten document to emphasize that the United States does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terror, counterterrorism officials said.
The change is a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventative war and currently states: "The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century."
The officials described the changes on condition of anonymity because the document still was being written, and the White House would not discuss it. But rewriting the strategy document will be the latest example of Obama putting his stamp on U.S. foreign policy, like his promises to dismantle nuclear weapons and limit the situations in which they can be used.
The revisions are part of a larger effort about which the White House talks openly, one that seeks to change not just how the United States talks to Muslim nations, but also what it talks to them about, from health care and science to business startups and education.
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Software spots leaks in flood defences
by Ellie Zolfagharifard
Future global flooding could be better managed using a computer modelling system developed by researchers from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's (UPM) School of Computing.
The tool, known as the LHIDRAMANNING, has been designed to integrate information about the rate at which flood water flows overland with aerial images from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors.
Currently, flood-risk maps are created using numerical models of swell waves that simulate potential scenarios in river basins. However, these models have a number of flaws, including poor satellite resolution and an inability to model small land features.
Mark Todd, coastal flood management advisor for the Environment Agency, said: 'Some parts of Europe still rely on satellite imagery to build flood-risk models. But with these you can't really pick up the certain details, such as crop types in the land.
'The system developed at UPM will identify flood risks more quickly and effectively than satellite imagery, particularly in areas where there are dramatic changes in land over small spaces.' The technology uses large-format photogrammetic cameras that generate a panchromatic PAN), multi-spectral image, with a spatial resolution of less than 20cm and a radiometric resolution of 12 bits per channel.
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'Jihad Jamie' and the 'Black Widows': Why Women Turn to Terrorism
By Patrik Jonsson
Two recent incidents in the United States and Russia are suggesting that, when it comes to terrorism, men and women are perhaps not as different as society might believe.
 Jamie Paulin-Ramirez last week became the second American woman to be arraigned on terrorism charges in connection with the attempted assassination of a Swedish cartoonist, following alleged co-conspirator, Colleen LaRose, also known as "Jihad Jane."
Meanwhile, the recent terror bombings in Russia suggest the resurrection of the "black widows" -- female suicide bombers that sprang up a decade ago to strike back at the Kremlin's during its war against Chechnya.
In the U.S., where women commit fewer than 10 percent of murders, the reality of female terrorists can still shock -- and even more so when they come from within American borders. But the case of Jihad Jane here and the resurgence of the black widows in Russia in many ways points to the universality of the terrorist message to certain people, be they men or women, poor or middle class, young or middle aged.
"The main motives and circumstances that drive female suicide attackers are quite similar to those that drive men" -- a loyalty to cause and compatriots fueled by grievances against a common enemy, researcher Lindsay O'Rourke wrote in The New York Times in 2008. "Investigating the dynamics governing female attackers not only helps to correct common misperceptions but also reveals important characteristics about suicide terrorism in general."
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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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Grounding homegrown terror
By Anthony Amore
This week, U.S Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, told a national audience there is a growing terrorist threat emerging within our own borders.
 Lieberman was not referring just to jihadists like Army Maj. Nidal Hassan, accused of murdering 13 American soldiers at Fort Hood last November. Rather, Lieberman spoke of the re-emergence of American extremists displeased with their government.
Lieberman's message is timely, coming on the heels of the FBI's recent arrest of nine Christian extremists who formed their own militia in Michigan.
According to a federal indictment, the group was intent on killing a police officer and using the ensuing funeral as an opportunity to kill scores more. The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported a marked increase in radical domestic groups. Clearly, homeland security resources need to be focused on internal as well as external threats.
Going after those who threaten terror is not the only major committee concern. The recent suicide attack aboard a Moscow subway, which killed dozens, has caused transportation security officials around the world to pay closer attention to securing local modes of mass transit.
According to Lieberman, all that is non-aviation is the most vulnerable part of our transportation system. And we need to give it more than we are giving it now if we are to protect the American people.
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New Products from SSI: FloodSax and BlastSax
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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
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- Save lives & protect property from blasts or flood water (see FloodSax)
Learn More...
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Feds Worried About 300 Smuggled Somalis Gone Missing
By Alex Sundby
A smuggling case against a Virginia man has hit a hitch that worries federal authorities.
Prosecutors can't find the roughly 300 Somalis the man is accused of sneaking into the United States. The man has also admitted his contacts with an Islamic terrorist group, who the government also can't find, are in the U.S. too, according to a report in the Washington, D.C., edition of The Examiner newspaper.
 "We have not identified anyone," Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeanine Linehan told U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema at a recent hearing. "We believe all the individuals are present in the United States. But by the virtue of [Tracy's] successful smuggling scheme, we are having difficulty finding them."
The man, Anthony Joseph Tracy, 35, has been indicted on charges of conspiring with officials in Cuba's embassy in Kenya to help the Somalis illegally enter the United States.
Tracy allegedly helped the Somalis get travel visas to Cuba. After traveling from Kenya to Dubai to Moscow to Cuba, they then went to South America before entering the United States through the border in Mexico, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent testified in federal court.
The agent, Thomas Eyre, testified that Tracy's admission of contacts within the Somali terrorist organization al Shabaab, an ally of al Qaeda, has "concerned" authorities.
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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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Study examines impact of education, income on support for suicide bombings
From Indiana University
Conventional wisdom holds that supporters of suicide bombers are people with low educational attainment and income, so investments in education and economic development should reduce support for such attacks. But a study by two Indiana University faculty members raises questions about that approach.
In an analysis of public opinion data from six predominantly Muslim countries that have experienced suicide bombings, M. Najeeb Shafiq and Abdulkader H. Sinno show that the relationship of education and income levels to support for suicide bombing is complicated at best. Support for bombings and the influence of education and income vary greatly from one country to another; and attitudes differ significantly by whether the attacks target civilians in one's own country or foreign militaries.
Shafiq is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in the School of Education. Sinno is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences. They say the study, published in the February 2010 issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution, points to the need for carefully developed policies to address terrorism and suicide attacks.
"Each country is different, and the attitudes are different depending on the targets," Shafiq said. "By just asking about suicide bombing, you're not likely to get a very useful sense of what people think."
The study, "Education, Income and Support for Suicide Bombings: Evidence from Six Muslim Countries," relies on detailed data collected in 2005 for the Pew Global Attitudes Project. It examines attitudes in Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey, which have been hit by suicide bombings in recent years. Along with many other questions, the Pew survey asked if suicide bombings were often, sometimes, rarely or never justified, both when carried out "against civilian targets" and "against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq."
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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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