Thermal Cameras Could Spot Bombers and Shoplifters (USA Today) “Cameras that could spot suicide bombers carrying bombs strapped to their bodies will be used in a new test” by the Transportation Security Administration “aimed at securing the nation’s rail and bus stations,” reports USA Today. The “heat-sensing cameras … spot objects hidden under people’s clothing. The small, portable cameras can be positioned anywhere--at an entrance to a transit station or a building--and can screen people without having to require them to go through time-consuming checkpoints.… Manufacturer QinetiQ North America hopes to see the technology used at military bases, landmark buildings, large events, arenas and possibly stores trying to catch shoplifters … The TSA bought 12 machines from QinetiQ for $3 million to test in labs and transit stations in the next eight months.” [View article]

Loser Dogs Get Second Chance With Foreign Counterterror Forces (Washington Post) Some Americans’ dogs “are finding second chances through the war on al-Qaeda,” reports the Washington Post. “In a 16-week program jointly run by the Justice and State departments,” six dogs “transformed themselves from losers to potential lifesavers. Each canine teamed up for training in [Virginia’s] Shenandoah Valley with a Moroccan law enforcement official. They would join more than 700 American dogs who have been deployed with foreign counterterrorism forces.” [View article]

Virtual Disease Offers Lessons for Real Pandemic (Time) “An unexpectedly virulent virtual disease called ‘Corrupted Blood,’ which swept through World of Warcraft’s online characters starting in September 2005 … ravaged the player population--despite administrators’ efforts to quarantine the infected--and gave World of Warcraft its first virtual-world pandemic,” reports Time. Articles in Lancet Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology documented the virtual epidemic and suggested that “virtual worlds will offer a chance to study” human variability, such as whether people will “ignore infection-control rules in the real world.” [View article]

Software Tracks Aircraft, Watercraft, and Road Vehicles (New Zealand Herald) Daestra New Zealand, a software company, “is taking the guesswork out of search and rescue missions using satellite tracking and the internet to keep tabs on boats, planes and road vehicles in the South Pacific region …” reports the New Zealand Herald. “It now plans to take its service global, having secured a deal with US company EarthStar Geographics which gives it digital mapping for the entire planet. Daestra’s TracPlus service is already being used by helicopter rescue operators, such as the Auckland Helicopter Rescue Trust, which tracks the location of its helicopters using a global positioning module and satellite data link. Daestra takes details on the helicopters’ locations and feeds them over the internet into mapping software on computers in rescue co-ordination centres around the country.” [View article]

CDC Infection Tracking System Now Available to All U.S. Hospitals A secure, web-based reporting network that lets facilities track infections associated with health care is now available to all health care facilities in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Healthcare Safety Network provides multiple options for data analysis and more flexibility for sharing information both within and outside a facility--including the general public, if the facility so chooses. The network already has more than 600 participants in 45 states. [View press release]

World Trade Center Findings Spur New Model Building Codes Safer buildings--especially tall structures--that are more resistant to fire and more easily evacuated in emergencies are the goal of the first comprehensive set of building code changes recently approved by the International Code Council based on recommendations from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s three-year investigation of the collapse of New York City’s World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001. (See State and Local News.) [View press release]

Satellites Improve Global Response to Disasters The International Telecommunication Union, ICO Global Communications, and the Commonwealth Business Council have agreed to use satellite communications for improved global response to natural disasters. ICO Global Communications will provide airtime on the F2 satellite for disaster prevention and effective response in the aftermath of natural disasters through voice communications and other telecommunication applications, including telemedicine. An hour’s airtime will be provided every day for use through the International Telecommunication Union to help countries maintain preparedness, provide early-warning information, and elicit quick response. In the a disaster, this time will be adjusted according to demand to facilitate rescue and rehabilitation efforts. [View press release]

Rice Engineered to Carry Cholera Vaccine (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) “A team of Japanese researchers has developed a type of rice that can carry a vaccine for cholera, a step that could one day ease delivery of vaccines in developing countries,” reports the Associated Press. “While it’s only the latest of several plants being tested as potential means of producing vaccines, the development is potentially important in medically underserved countries that lack refrigeration to store regular vaccines. But the work is preliminary, having been tested only in mice.” [View article]

Balloons May Help Protect Tunnels (USA Today) “Homeland Security officials seeking to counter terrorist bombs in subway and highway tunnels are hoping to use inflatable balloons, giant plugs and blast-resistant liners that could protect the nation’s transit systems from underground fires and floods,” reports USA Today. “The new program, dubbed ‘Resilient Tunnel,’ aims to address post-9/11 concerns that terrorists will target vulnerable tunnels, trapping and killing countless commuters, flooding cities and causing billions of dollars of damage.” [View article]

Robot to Rescue the Injured (BBC) “The US military is developing a robot with a teddy bear-style head to help carry injured soldiers away from the battlefield,” reports the British Broadcasting Corporation. “The Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot (BEAR) can scoop up even the heaviest of casualties and transport them over long distances over rough terrain.… It is expected to be ready for testing within five years.… other potential applications for the robot technology” include “helping move heavy patients in” hospitals. [View article]

Can Science Fiction Beat bin Laden? (London Daily Express) “Science fiction writers have been recruited to give the US Department of Homeland Security the upper hand in the war on terror,” reports the Express. “After a damning indictment of America’s intelligence community following 9/11—the official commission accused the authorities of a ‘failure of imagination’—orders were given to prevent another outrage by using lateral thinking. The answer was to turn to Sigma—a group of America’s best-selling science fiction writers pledged to defend the country with sheer imagination. Intelligence chiefs have given the visionaries the simple briefing of ‘think the unthinkable’, to stop terrorists repeating the horrors of the 9/11 attacks.” [View article]

Spectrometer Detects 92 Viruses, Including Bird Flu (Reuters AlertNet) A new mass spectrometer developed by Ibis Biosciences “can quickly detect 92 different viruses, including several strains of the feared H5N1 avian flu virus or other emerging new infections,” reports Reuters. It “can also be used in big hospitals to watch for outbreaks of dangerous drug-resistant infections.” [View article]

TSA Trains Amateur Radio Operators to Assist in Disasters On May 9, 30 volunteers from Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arizona, and New York received Transportation Security Administration training in Pensacola, FL, in the use of emergency high-frequency radio equipment during disasters. They also qualified for amateur radio technician class operator licenses. High-frequency (“ham”) operators can be invaluable when telephones are inoperable, says the TSA. [View press release]

Pentagon Sets Up Civilian Foreign Language Corps (Government Executive) “The Pentagon is setting up a civilian Language Corps, a cadre of some 1,000 foreign-language speakers who can help the government in times of war and national emergencies,” reports the Associated Press. “In a three-year pilot program, the Defense Department will recruit volunteers and do testing to see if such a program would work.” [View article]

GSA Program Offers Latest in Satellite Services (Federal Computer Week) “The General Services Administration has awarded contracts to 24 companies to provide federal agencies with satellite telecommunications services that can keep them connected when nothing else will work,” reports Federal Computer Week. The “SATCOM II contract offers services that extend to areas across the country and around the globe where traditional networks and cellular links often fail, to support both handheld receivers and full broadband computer networks … The services may also help an agency’s response to” emergencies. “The contract, worth an estimated $750 million over five years, enables agencies to buy both services and related equipment.” [View article]

DoD Licenses Three-Way Emergency Technology (Government Computer News) “The Defense Department is making available for licensing a technology for coordinating three-way calls between a cell phone user, a 911 dispatcher and emergency personnel,” reports Government Computer News. “When a cell phone user calls 911, the wireless network provides the user’s automatic location identification information to both locate the user and to find the phone number of local emergency responders. The system then sets up a three-way call. For further information contact: Joan Gilsdorf, patent attorney, joan.gilsdorf@smdc.army.mil, (256) 955-3213; Susan D. McRae, Office of Research and Technology Applications, susan.mcrae@smdc.army.mil, (256) 955-1501.” [View article]

Blog System Would Help Disaster Response A team from the Indiana University School of Informatics and the university’s Pervasive Technology Labs has created the Bloomington Emergency Collaborative Information System, a research project in which bloggers monitor communication sources such as the Internet, television, and two-way radio traffic and then contact authorities. [View press release]

Serious Use of Silly String for U.S. Soldiers (Fredericksburg, VA, Free Lance–Star) Zeke Peterson of Maryland “is a 14-year-old … collecting money to buy Silly String for troops in Iraq,” reports the Free Lance–Star. “Some Marines and soldiers apparently use the party favor for a serious purpose: to detect trip wires on bombs and booby traps. They spray the neon-colored strands into an area they’re about to enter. If there are trip wires--which are almost impossible to see--the string gets caught on them.” Peterson “put out collection boxes at schools and visited businesses … asking for donations. He got $6,000--enough to buy 4,400 cans.” [View article]

Grand Challenge Tests the Limits of Robotic Vehicles (Federal Computer Week) The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Urban Challenge on Nov. 3 will give competitors the chance to test their autonomous vehicles, reports Federal Computer Week. “No team crossed the finish line in the first Grand Challenge in 2004. But 18 months later, DARPA proved the feasibility of its concept with Grand Challenge II when five cars completed a 130-mile course through a desert with no human intervention.” The “potential benefits are huge.” The program responds to a congressional mandate to equip the military with autonomous vehicles, but “the technology could also prevent some of the 43,000 annual deaths caused by vehicle accidents” in the United States. [View article] [View Grand Challenge website]

In-Q-Tel Invests in StreamBase Systems (Federal Computer Week) “In-Q-Tel, the private venture capital firm created and funded by the CIA, has made a strategic investment in StreamBase Systems, a provider of high-performance complex event processing,” reports Federal Computer Week. Complex event processing “has applications for intelligence, intrusion detection and network monitoring, and battlefield situations.” [View article]

Newer Video Surveillance Systems Overcome Problems (Metro Magazine) “Video surveillance has become the rule rather than the exception in the transit industry, where it helps to widen the safety envelope on buses and railcars while providing transit systems with protection from certain types of liability claims,” reports Metro Magazine. “… early incarnations of the technology were not highly positive because of problems with reliability, durability, picture quality, data transfer and operators’ ‘Big Brother’ anxieties.… technological advances have addressed many of” the problems. [View article]

Scientists Use Radio Waves to Detect Explosives (Washington Post) “Scientists in Japan have developed a new technique for detecting explosives such as TNT in landmines or luggage using radio waves,” reports Reuters. “… Superconductor Science and Technology journal [last] week” reported that “the technique is superior to conventional methods of detection such as X-rays, and can identify different types of white powder, from flour and salt to drugs and explosives”—and “can also identify landmines … One hitch for now, though, is that the screening time takes ‘several minutes,’ something the team is working to improve.” [View article]

Defense and Homeland Security Departments Guard Cyberspace (Government Computer News) “Two men are now responsible for protecting the United States in cyberspace—Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Elder, who heads the Pentagon’s strategic efforts in waging cyberwar, and Gregory Garcia, who handles the defense of the nation’s cyberassets,” reports Government Computer News. “Garcia is the first assistant secretary for cybersecurity and telecommunications at the Homeland Security Department. It is he who worries about how to prepare American society—government, commercial interests and individual citizens—to protect themselves from assaults on their electronic assets, whether home computers or nationwide networks.” Both men discuss their viewpoints about cybersecurity. [View article]

Agencies Feel Botnets’ Light Footprint (Government Computer News) “Bots—computers that have been taken over by worms, Trojans or other malware, knit together into vast networks and directed by bot-herders, the creators and controllers of these networks”—“spew out spam and other useless or damaging content,” threatening Internet use by businesses and citizens, reports Government Computer News. “Government computers, too, are being corrupted and used as parts of a botnet, but the real threat is more insidious. Hackers, particularly nation states, are using stealth botnets—they might be termed spearbots—to steal information from federal systems.” The Department of Homeland Security “has been running a pilot program to detect bots trying to remove information from government systems … The Einstein Program … is a combination of government and commercial software and hardware” that “sits outside the firewall so it sees everything interacting through the Internet with federal systems.… Using Einstein, seven departments currently monitor outbound Internet traffic … When U.S.-CERT becomes aware of botnet activities, the organization can use Einstein to notify agencies, which then investigate to see if they have a problem.” [View article]

Union Tank Car photo

Hazmat Tank Cars of the Future The Federal Railroad Administration is working with Dow Chemical Company, Union Pacific Railroad and the Union Tank Car Company to create the tank car of the future. The Next Generation Rail Tank Car Project will focus on strengthening the structural integrity of the tank car, including the type of material and thickness of the outer shell and the type and design of the insulation material located between the outer shell and the inner tank that contains the hazardous material. Other technology would help keep a car upright after an accident. Tank cars can present security as well as safety concerns. The Transportation Security Administration has identified railcars loaded with toxic inhalation hazard materials sitting unattended as having the highest risk potential as terrorist targets, TSA Chief Kip Hawley told the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee yesterday. [View FRA press release] [View Hawley testimony]

Homeland Security Institute
Weekly Homeland Security Newsletter

Send Questions and Comments to
Editor-in-Chief
Alan Capps

Copyright 2007. The Weekly Homeland Security Newsletter, Analytic Services Inc. All rights reserved.

Assistant Editors: Noëlle MacKenzie and Steve Dunham


View Analytic Services Inc. DMCA Copyright Notice

In accordance with Title 17 (USC), Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment and is intended for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.

PRIVACY POLICY
Analytic Services Inc. does not share, publish, or in any way redistribute subscriber email addresses or any other personal information. Content provided in the Weekly Homeland Security Newsletter does not reflect the viewpoint(s) of Analytic Services Inc.