State and Local News

Pennsylvania Woman Charged With Recruiting Violent Jihadists (Fox News; HDTV, Philadelphia) “A Pennsylvania woman [Colleen R. LaRose] known to authorities as ‘JihadJane’ has been charged in federal court with using the Internet to recruit jihadist fighters to carry out murders and violent attacks overseas,” reports Fox News. She “was charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, making false statements to a government official and attempted identity theft.” LaRose “was allegedly looking to kill … Lars Vilks, who drew one of the controversial Prophet Muhammad cartoons.” (See the Feb. 3, 2006, newsletter.) In “2007 Al Qaeda offered a bounty for [his] murder.” Despite her online activity, a “former boyfriend of” LaRose—Kurt Gorman—“says she never showed any Muslim or other religious leanings.” [View Fox article] [View AP article]

Florida Language School Sold Visas to Nonstudents (Yahoo! News) The Florida Language Institute “helped illegally obtain student visas for foreign nationals who never went to class,” reports the Associated Press. “… Eighty-one student visa holders purportedly studying at the Florida Language Institute have been arrested.… The school’s owner, Lydia Menocal, 58, and employee Ofelia Macia, 75, allegedly made $2.4 million over the past three years from foreign nationals applying for U.S. student visas.… Of the approximately 200 students enrolled at Florida Language Institute in each of the past three years, only 5 percent regularly attended class.” [View article]

California Man Took College Exams for Middle Eastern Students (Fox News) American “Daniel Higgins … routinely portrayed himself as [a Middle Eastern student] for almost a decade, getting paid up to $1,500 per student to attend their classes and take exams so they could keep their visas current and remain in the U.S.,” reports Fox News. “… more than 100 students from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Lebanon, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates hired him to do their classwork and take their tests. Higgins, 46, pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit immigration fraud … Six others—Mohammed Alnuaim, Abdullah Alhogail, Khalid Almenaibi, Saeed Alfalahi, Ibrahim Almansoori and Mohamed Almehairi—were also arrested Monday … All were charged with immigration fraud.” [View article]

B. Krist photo for Greater Phila. Tourism Marketing Corp.

Private-Sector News

Building Security for 60,000 People (Security Management) Boston’s Prudential Center has “3.2 million square feet of office and retail space,” the largest underground parking garage in New England, and 60,000 people on the premises on a weekday, reports Security Management. It relies on an Enhanced Security Team, an Office Division for employee credentials, and the Boston Properties Control Center, “staffed by operators who are selected for their ability to multitask, react, and communicate concisely in what can be a high-stress security environment.” (See the Quote of the Week.) [View article]

Duos Technology Detects Illegal Train Riders and Contraband (Government Security News) Duos Technologies “has won a contract, worth nearly $795,000” from an unnamed U.S. railroad “to deploy what it characterizes as an enhanced illegal-train-rider and contraband-detection system along the southwestern U.S. border,” reports Government Security News. “The system provides real-time detection and tracking of illegal riders and railcar undercarriage inspection capability.” It will be used to inspect “inbound trains and railcars crossing the” border from Mexico. [View article]

International News

Al-Qaeda Passes Secret Messages Over the Internet (Federal News Radio) Al-Qaeda is using “‘electronic dead-drops,’ says Army Reserve Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer,” according to Federal News Radio’s J. J. Green. “… a dead drop in a photo involves embedding a message in a picture,” and “just plain conversational emails can be loaded with secret messages. That’s how Major Nidal Malik Hassan, the Ft. Hood shooter went unnoticed.” [View article]

U.S. Hid Waterboarding From Britain, Says Former MI5 Chief (London Telegraph) “MI5 had no idea that the architect of the September 11 attacks had been waterboarded when the Americans passed them intelligence from his interrogation, the former head of the Security Service [Baroness Manningham-Buller] has said,” according to the Telegraph. Lady “Manningham-Buller said she only discovered that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times when the US Justice Department released a memo last year and it was reported in the press.” (See the Feb. 8, 2008, newsletter.) [View article]

Interpol Counterterror Efforts Pay Off, Says University of Texas (Government Security News) The International Criminal Police Organization’s shift of “resources to fighting terrorism … is ‘paying off in a big way,’ according to University of Texas at Dallas researcher Dr. Todd Sandler,” reports Government Security News. The research “looked at anti-terrorism activities within Interpol and used the agency’s records and data to determine how much money had been devoted to terrorism projects and how successful such efforts were.” [View article]

British Man Admits Ricin Terrorism Plot (BBC) Ian Davison “has admitted producing the lethal poison ricin while preparing for acts of terrorism,” reports the British Broadcasting Corporation. “… he also admitted possessing documents which detailed how to make explosives and could [be] used in acts of terrorism.” [View article]

U.S. Hunts for Citizens Training With Terror Groups (Fox News) “The Obama administration does not know how many Americans might have disappeared overseas to train with Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, but the number is not thought to be large,” reports the Associated Press. “… Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson [fears that] people holding U.S. passports [could] receive terrorist training then return legally to the U.S. to commit violent acts.” The United States “is gathering information with Pakistan and other governments to identify and locate such people.” [View article]

Uranium Enrichment Gets Easier for Iran (New York Times) “Iran—or any other nuclear hopeful—needs increasingly few centrifuges to make uranium 235 increasingly potent,” reports the Times. “… The reason is that ‘you’re moving a lot more material at lower levels of enrichment,’ said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security … At each step, more of the heavy uranium is removed and the remaining material, now with a higher concentration of the lighter isotope, goes through the centrifuge process again.” [View article] [View Focus on Iran’s Nuclear Program]

Uganda Relocates Thousands in Landslide Areas (United Press International) “The Ugandan government is working to evacuate and relocate more than 10,000 people affected by landslides caused by heavy rains,” reports UPI. A landslide last week “killed 92 people. Another 90 people have been rescued but 500 are missing.” [View article]

Hong Kong Acid Attack (Taipei, Taiwan, China Post) “An acid-filled beer bottle was dropped onto a street in the same area of densely populated Hong Kong for the third time in six months,” reports the Associated Press. “… Hong Kong has seen corrosive liquid hurled from buildings in a series of similar attacks the past year. Police arrested one in connection to a recent attack in December, but for the most part, the bizarre cases have mystified authorities.” [View article]

Study Shows That Vaccinating Children Protects a Community (New York Times) “An unusual study done in 49 remote Hutterite farming colonies in western Canada has provided the surest proof yet that giving flu shots to schoolchildren protects a whole community from the disease,” reports the Times. The Hutterites “live in communities of up to 160 people, own everything jointly, attend their own schools, eat in one dining hall and have little contact with the outside world.” The study “was done with seasonal flu shots in the 2008-9 winter.” [View article]

Indonesian Police Kill Bali Bomb Terrorist (Australian) “Indonesian police” followed Jemaah Islamiah leader and “Bali bombing planner Dulmatin for several weeks before shooting him and two other suspected terrorists in execution-style killings in Jakarta,” reports the Australian. [View article]

Greece Joins Visa Waiver Program Greece has joined the 35 nations already participating in the program, allowing its citizens to visit the United States for up to 90 days without visas, beginning sometime next month. The U.S. Homeland Security Department determined that Greece complies with key security and information-sharing requirements, such as enhanced law enforcement and security-related data sharing with the United States, timely reporting of lost and stolen passports, and the maintenance of high standards in counterterrorism, law enforcement, border control, aviation, and document security. [View DHS press release]

DHS News

DHS Lacks Documents for Most Noncompetitive Contracts, Says Inspector General (Federal Computer Week) “The records for the majority of some [of the] Homeland Security Department’s noncompetitive contracts are either missing or inadequate,” according to Federal Computer Week, citing a new report from DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner, who “reviewed 39 DHS contract files valued at $196 million for fiscal 2009. Of those, 33 contract files, or 85 percent, lacked full documentation.” (See the Sep. 18, 2009, newsletter.) [View article] [View report (7.8MB PDF)]

Screening All U.S.-Bound Air Cargo May Be Two Years Away (Government Executive) “It could take the Homeland Security Department another two years to ensure that all cargo is screened for weapons of mass destruction before being flown into the United States on passenger airplanes,” reports CongressDaily. Gale Rossides, the Transportation Security Administration’s “acting director, told the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee” that the TSA will meet the August 2010 “deadline for screening all cargo aboard passenger flights originating inside the United States … TSA officials have been saying since last year that meeting the August deadline for incoming international flights most likely would not be possible. But the need for another two years is the longest estimate to be disclosed so far.” [View article]

How to Get on the No-Fly List (Yahoo! News) “In the months since the arrest of Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab [see the Jan. 8 newsletter], the no-fly list has nearly doubled—from about 3,400 people to about 6,000 people,” reports the Associated Press. “… There are four steps to banning a person from flying”:

1. “Intelligence officials [collect] the smallest scraps of intelligence”
2. Analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center “put names—even partial names—into a huge classified database of known and suspected terrorists”
3. “Analysts scour the database”
4. “About 350 names a day are sent to the Terrorist Screening Center,” where Transportation Security analysts “can add a suspect to the ‘selectee list’” for “extra screening” or “put the suspect on the no-fly list …”

Other Federal News

National Academy of Sciences Faults Army Biolab Security Plan (Global Security Newswire) The National Academy of Sciences has identified “slip-ups in plans for the new site of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md.,” reports Global Security Newswire. The “Army provided insufficient evidence to back its conclusion that a release of the Ebola and Q-fever agents from the new facility would pose no threat to residences and commercial sites in [Frederick], a community numbering roughly 59,000 people, according to” the academy. “In addition, the Army did not explore possible security threats posed by laboratory personnel.” [View article] [View report (1.2MB PDF)]

Emergency Communications Center Is Stalled, Says GAO (Federal Computer Week) “Four years after Congress told the Homeland Security Department and other federal agencies to form an interagency center for crisis communications, the project is ‘in the early stages of development,’ has delays and a lack of clear direction,” according to Federal Computer Week, quoting a new report from the Government Accountability Office. “The proposed interagency Emergency Communications Preparedness Center (ECPC) has problems with making group decisions, agreeing on a strategy, demonstrating value to its members, maturing as an organization and defining its relationships with other organizations, GAO said.” [View article] [View GAO report (208KB PDF)]

GAO Notes Problems With Cyber-Security Initiative The Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (see last week’s newsletter) has made some progress, reports the Government Accountability Office, but the initiative faces problems “defining roles and responsibilities,” “establishing measures of effectiveness,” and “establishing an appropriate level of transparency.” Beyond the initiative, “the federal government also faces strategic challenges … in securing federal information systems: (1) Coordinating actions with international entities” and “(2) Strategically addressing identity management and authentication.” [View GAO summary]

Treasury Permits Web Technology Sales to Iran, Sudan, and Cuba (Federal Computer Week) “The Treasury Department has modified trade sanctions against Iran, Sudan and Cuba to allow the export of social media and other Web-related technologies that could aid the work of human rights activists,” reports Federal Computer Week. “Existing trade regulations prohibit companies from selling technology and other goods to people located in those countries. However, U.S. officials believe Web-based applications, such instant messaging, chat and blogging software, could open a new avenue for activists in those countries to work together and with other activists around the world.” [View article]

National News

Studies of Attitudes Toward Terrorism and Counterterrorism Strategies The Institute for Homeland Security Solutions has published literature reviews summarizing past surveys on attitudes toward counterterrorism policy and exploring methodological issues: “Innovative Survey Methodologies for the Study of Attitudes Toward Terrorism and Counterterrorism Strategies: An Exploration of Past Surveys” and “Innovative Survey Methodologies for the Study of Attitudes Toward Terrorism and Counterterrorism Strategies.” [View past surveys report (718KB PDF)] [View methodologies report (688KB PDF)]

Dual-Benefit Solutions

Dual-benefit news archive

CDC Uses Shopper-Card Data to Trace Salmonella (Yahoo! News) “As they scrambled recently to trace the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds around the country, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention successfully used a new tool for the first time—the shopper cards that millions of Americans swipe every time they buy groceries,” reports the Associated Press. “With permission from the patients, investigators followed the trail of grocery purchases to a Rhode Island company that makes salami, then zeroed in on the pepper used to season the meat. Never before had the CDC successfully mined the mountain of data that supermarket chains compile.” [View article]

New Upcoming Events (Events are listed for four weeks; after that, they are still on the Upcoming Events page) Ground Robotics Capabilities Conference and Exhibition (March 16-18; Doral, FL) This year’s theme is “Dual Role of Robotics Technologies—Public and Private Sector.” The conference will bring together warfighters, first responders, and government and industry technology professionals to focus on dual-use robotic technology and how the best ideas of the automotive, space, and military industries can be synergistically shared. [View event website] Gulf Coast Resilient Home Building Conference (March 19-21; Biloxi, MS) The purpose of this conference is to help put communities along the Gulf Coast on a path toward greater resilience to natural disasters through the construction of strong homes that can withstand high winds and water. The conference will feature a combination of education sessions, a demonstration exhibit, and product vendors. [View event website] National Preparedness and Response: Pandemic, Emergencies and Disaster (March 25; London) This conference will reiterate why advanced planning and readiness are essential if high-risk workplaces are to remain in action, services kept running, and business continuity maintained. Expert speakers will explore how improved planning can reduce social and economic effects, outlining current strategies and best practices to minimize disruption. A reflection on the nation’s response to the swine flu outbreak will ascertain which strategies and policies have worked well, and what has been learnt that will fortify future plans. A panel debate will discuss how agencies can work together to improve coordinated response and recovery plans in related emergencies. [View event website] (March 29-31; Vienna, VA) This conference on chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear defense will address industry standards and requirements, state and national preparedness, coordination response efforts among various departments and agencies, and research and development and future technologies and medicine (that is, vaccines). [View event website] (May 1-5; Las Vegas) This conference of the International Association of Fire Chiefs is for “fire-based” emergency medical service leaders who are pioneering change; it gives them a chance to connect with other key leaders, expand their EMS network, and share ideas with colleagues. [View event website] Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (May 2-5; Seattle) This year’s conference theme is “Defining Crisis Management 3.0.” It will look at the future of crisis management systems and consider how rapidly changing socio-technical environments are affecting the ways we respond to crises in our ever more interconnected world. [View event website] BioDefense 2010 (May 3-4; Washington, DC) This conference will evaluate the state of America’s biodefense readiness. Speakers will discuss strategy and policy, collaboration, detection and situational awareness, and consequence management. [View event website] Chemical and Biological Medical Treatment Symposia (May 2-7; Spiez, Switzerland) These symposia will explore the scientific, medical, and policy aspects of chemical, biological, and radiological warfare and terrorism. They will consider the effects of such agents wrongly used or abused, intentional or accidental, on the community and individuals, military and civilian, and on the infrastructure of government. [View event website] Disaster Forum (May 10-13; Banff, Alberta) This is a forum for professionals in disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, supplemented with ongoing educational opportunities. [View event website] (May 12-16; Nashville, TN) This training summit is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to enhance the knowledge, skills, and abilities of participants and improve their capability to deliver public health and medical care services during disasters of any origin. This year’s theme is “Learning, preparing, and responding together.” [View event website] (May 19-23; Baltimore) The conference features top hazmat thinkers, strategists, and leaders as they share ideas and insights. The expo offers the chance to talk one on one with leading company representatives about the latest hazmat equipment and technology. [View event website] Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Consequence Management Conference (June 8-10; Chantilly, VA) The conference will provide a professional forum for decision makers and planners; develop a deeper understanding of capabilities, limitations, and challenges; and discuss how Defense Department supporting organizations can best provide integrated efforts to domestic and foreign lead federal agencies. [View event website] Homeland Security Conference (August 30–September 3; Monterey, CA) This year’s theme is “Security: Inside and Out—‘Are We Prepared?’” Among the issues it will cover are “border security challenges, the new and evolving cyber security threat, and delicately balancing our civil liberties.” [View event website]

Calls for Papers (Calls for papers are listed for four weeks; after that, they are still on the Calls for Papers page) Advances in Databases and Information Systems (September 20-24; Novi Sad, Serbia) One track of the conference concerns “Personal Identifiable Information: Privacy, Ethics, and Security.” The conference is soliciting presentations on research accomplishments, experience reports, and project overviews. The deadline for submitting papers is March 27. [View call for papers] Liberty and Security in the Age of Terrorism (November 22-24; Lexington, KY) The conference of the Commonwealth Security Studies Laboratory in the College of Business and Public Affairs at Morehead State University will examine the appropriateness of measures designed to defeat enemies abroad and ensure domestic tranquility in light of constitutional liberties and will compare the cost of incremental security improvements in terms of resources expended, privacy surrendered, rights infringed upon, and principles betrayed. The submission deadline is March 30. [View call for papers] Securing Transportation Systems and Securing Water and Wastewater Systems Interested authors are welcome to submit an abstract for a chapter in these forthcoming books. Papers on securing transportation systems are due by July 31. Abstracts on securing water and wastewater systems are due by March 31. [View call for papers]