Pakistan is a place of cataclysm, anarchy as well as national government, and great security portent for the U.S. Here’s a way of keeping in touch with what’s happening there, by following Pakistan’s most widely read English-language newspaper – Dawn.
PRO Barrier Engineering provides an introduction to the most effective and, in many locations, necessary vehicle access control barriers. Terrorists driving a heavily loaded truck into a barrier need to be stopped. There are different types of such “anti ram” barriers. You can be introduced to them here.
Effective security requires the ability to keep nasties out. That’s a barrier’s job.
“We must constantly strive for new ways to work across directorates…,” CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said in announcing that some of the nations’s most obscure, but critical agencies, will be working closer together to prevent the spread of dangerous weapons and technology.
It may not mean much to Joe Citizen that the Counterproliferation Division of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) and elements of the Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation & Arms Control Center (WINPAC) will combine into a new CIA Counterproliferation Center (CPC). He’s never heard of any of them.
But a tighter focus on preventing the spread of truly heinous weapons can’t hurt, may actually help, and we’re obviously for every gain that can be made in this area.
“…Our greaest achievements as an agency,” Director Panetta continued, “are the product of close collaboration among operations offers, analysts, targeters, technical specialists and support officers.”
Collaboration’s cool, especially when its aimed at advancing effectiveness in this crucial area of national security.
Okay, so who’s using what body scanner where? It’s a marker for our times, but also a bit disquieting, that some of the body scanners of the type, at least, being installed at U.S. airports can “store, print or transmit images” of the people they screen.
NextGov has a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) saying that some of the units at TSA’s Transportation Security Lab can retain images, but only for training and testing purposes. Body scanners at airports cannot “store, print or transmit images,” he said.
We would hope not. It will be vexing enough to get travelers accustomed to, and tolerant of, the new scanners without having to picture them as collecting prurient photos that who knows who may someday see. That’s the concern that prompted the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) to launch a couple of lawsuits against the machines, aimed at obtaining an “emergency” stay against their use.
These are tough issues, which get down, like many, to trust. But EPIC already has 100 images of “undressed” individuals from similar scanning devices used at federal courthouses. Not a happy omen, it appears.
You would think that, by now, folks would have gotten the message that you can’t bring a gun on a commercial airliner. Not so. National Terror Alert (NTA) reports that, on average, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers “confiscate two guns per day on average at airport checkpoints around the country.” Believe it or not!
“In fact,” NTA reports, “last week, 10 guns were confiscated in a single day, an unusually high number. That prompted the TSA to put a reminder on the TSA blog, under the headline, ‘Guns are No Fun at the Checkpoint.’”
Maybe folks don’t read the TSA blog, or have been existing in a time warp. Either way, this surprising presence of guns at airport checkpoints reinforces the point that security precautions are continually, we fear everlastingly, necessary at sensitive locations, whatever they might be. Some folks just don’t get the message, and maybe never will – their potential depredations will be spotted and prevented. So long as security is maintained.
Security officers with top-secret FBI clearances have been getting a lot of collegial company in intensified antiterrorism activites. USA Today reports that the number of state and local law enforcement officers with top secret clearances in the FBI’s network of regional terrorism task forces “jumped to 878 in 2009, up from 125 in 2007. During the same period clearances granted to other law enforcement officers and contractors soared to 945 from 364.”
The number of clearances this year is at a rate to equal or surpass last year’s totals, USA Today adds.
As an example of anti-terrorism teamwork, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis “says some of the agency’s officers with clearance authority assisted in the fast-moving May investigation into the unsuccessful bombing in New York’s Times Square. Eight Boston officers have clearance, up from two or three in 2001.”
Working together against common enemies in the U.S. makes security sense, a salutary law enforcement trend.
We’re not in the book reviewing business (unless, of course, you want to secure a library). But here’s a new book that provides grounding in perceptions of risk, where everything begins in the security business.
How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts, by David Ropeik, looks like a good introduction to evaluating risk. Ropeik is a veteran risk consultant and Bruce Schneier says “if you want a well-organized guide to the current research on risk perception all in one place, this pretty close to the perfect book.”
When you start thinking systematically about risk, you sometimes come up with insights you wouldn’t expect. This looks like a good place to hone that discipline.
Depending on how stringently you follow the terrorism scene, you may have seen much of the information included in the U.S. State Department’s annual terrorism report already. But it’s nice to have it all in one place.
State’s just released annual terrorism report is for 2009, but given what we know about the past being prologue, it’s worth attention by security officials everywhere.
Al-Qaida remains the chief challenger to U.S. security around the world, as well as at home. The report adds that al-Qaida is continuing to try to partner with other terrorist groups, with varying degrees of success.
Not exactly cozy reading, but useful nonetheless.
Because bringing Osama bin Laden to justice is the basic requirement pending from 9/11, we’re updating our June 10 advisory that bin Laden was hiding out in Iran.
The Hindustan Times reports that U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen says that bin Laden and his deputy Aiman al-Zawahiri are believed to be in Pakistan, in a “very secure place” that makes it difficult to trace them. He added that Pakistan’s tribal belt is the “global headquarters” for the al-Qaeda terror network.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “ruffled feathers” in Pakistan by making a similar statement there a couple of days before Admiral Mullen’s.
Wherever they are, we trust that U.S. strategists are doing everything possible to catch up with bin Laden and al-Zawahiri.
Despite the fuss over who has passports and who doesn’t, it’s still not that hard to obtain a fake passport. That’s from Gregory Kutz, an investigator for the Government Accountability Office, who is testifying before a Senate committee on how his team acquired fraudulent e-passports.
Security officers responsible for identifying people seeking access to the buildings they are responsible for need to be aware of Kutz’ findings, if they’re not already familiar with similar incidents.
ABC News reports that “The government failed to detect such basic red flags as a fake driver’s license, a 62-year-old using a recently obtained Social Security number, and the name of a dead applicant using faked identification.”
“State’s passport issuance process continues to be vulnerable to fraud,” Kutz is saying in prepared testimony.