For those in the security field who may want more insight into the National Emergency Managers Association (NEMA), we recommend Rich Cooper’s post on the Security Debrief blog, “The Comfortable Feeling at NEMA.”

NEMA brings emergency management professionals from government and the private sector together twice a year to share ideas and best practices on the field. It serves “as a source of information, support and expertise for emergency management professionals at all levels of government and the private sector who prepare for, mitigate, respond to, recover from and provide products and services for all emergencies, disasters and threats to the nation’s security.”

FEMA Director Craig Fugate was the keynote speaker at this week’s NEMA mid-year conference in Alexandria, VA.

Security and emergency management are related fields with overlapping interests.

PRO Barrier Engineering encourages prospective customers to consider their primary goal when designing perimeter access control. Vehicle access controls vary greatly in cost, depending upon the level of security and safety required. Using the wrong type of barricade for your project could produce adverse consequences and unexpected costs.

As you increase the level of security at your facility, one cost to consider is your potential liability should anyone “accidentally” run into the vehicle barrier. A parking area gate arm, for example, is built to break away easily with minimal damage to the vehicle, while crash-test-certified anti-terrorism barriers are typically built to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling at 50 mph without concern for the amount of damage to the vehicle. These barriers are used when the value of the protected area is greater than the costs associated with the barrier. If an anti-terrorism barrier is installed when only a traffic control collection station is needed, the liability becomes greater than the need.

In short, is your goal to provide high-level security or to collect revenue? Questions like this are key to determining the necessary level of access control. We’d be pleased to join you in such a discussion.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) blog discusses new “hand-swabbing” explosives detection equipment being used in security checks at airports.

Will people whose work legitimately brings them into contact with explosives – like traveling military, firefighters and law enforcement personnel – be swept up in these new random checks at airport security stations?

TSA seeks to be reassuring. “From reading responses on our blog and elsewhere,” the agency says, “it’s almost as if people think that if they alarm during an ETD (Explosives Trace Detection) test, a net is going to drop from the ceiling and federal agents will start rapelling down the walls. Not so… we have long had procedures in place that help us mitigate real threats while clearing people who pose no threat to travel.”

Even so, we’d just as soon not be a test case.

Nominated last October, Caryn W. Wagner has now been confirmed and installed as the Department of Homeland Security’s new Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis (I&A).

This makes Ms. Wagner a key point person for managing information relating to terrorist threats from both law-enforcement officials and federal agencies. She will also run DHS’ Joint Fusion Center, which coordinates collection of counter-terrorist and security information from government agencies and private companies.

Another office to be mindful of as you develop your security and anti-terrorism plans.

There’s simply no substitute for alert, sometimes intuitive, security guards as a last line of defense. For example, here’s an item from the Vancouver Olympics:

A mentally ill man with a homemade security pass got to within a dozen steps of Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, in a dignitaries seating area at the Olympics. Then, two female plainclothes Mounties assigned to protect the Vice President stopped him. Why?

“They described him to me as simply not fitting in,” said Royal Canadian Mounted Police Assistant Commissioner Bud Mercer, head of the Olympics’ Integrated Security Unit.

The man was not carrying a weapon and apparently didn’t intend to harm Biden. But because he didn’t “look right” to two alert guards, what was described as his “infatuation” for the vice president was thwarted.

The point is that the intruder had already slipped through several other layers of Olympics security. No, the guards who caught him weren’t cyber or otherwise technologically rigged monitors. Just two alert women doing their jobs well.

Got any beefs – or, let’s simply say, suggestions – for the Department of Homeland Security?  From now till March 19 is the ideal time to be heard. That’s the remaining span of DHS’ Open Government initiative, paralleling an emphasis of the Obama Administration overall.

DHS has set up a a new website explaining how to submit suggestions in three key areas:

Transparency – providing the public with information about DHS.

Participation – A ready opportunity to contribute ideas and insights based on expertise.

Collaboration – A chance, maybe, to help improve DHS’ effectiveness by suggesting partnerships with private and local governmental security officials and agencies.

Check out the DHS initiative at the new site, and sample a host of comments that have already been submitted to the “online participation tool.”

This seems a worthwhile opportunity to be heard about government in the context of your security concerns.

Here’s a rundown on what can be said publicly of the security preparations for the Vancouver Olympic Games, beginning tonight.

This post is a bit of a diversion – it doesn’t deal with security devices or tactics. Yet it is the most poignant possible reminder of  the stakes in security, what the discipline is about.

ABC petitioned the National Institute of Standards and Technology for the release of photos of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks as photographed from a New York Police Department helicopter, the only aircraft that was permitted over the site that day. Here they are. They are ghastly reminders of what occurred in that security breach nearly nine years ago.

2010 began on a note of rising tension,  with al Qaeda threatening attacks in the U.S. and abroad. So it’s hard to see how the homeland security market can be seen to be growing by, as Security Debrief puts it, a “healthy” 12 percent. Security spending is indeed growing, but that reflects continuing threats, a not exactly healthy trend.

“Discretionary” homeland security spending is tending to move toward security services rather than infrastructure, reports the Homeland Security Newswire (HSNW), and service providers are expected to dominate the market in the near future. That includes areas like enforcement and investigations.

“The perceived and the real threat of terrorism continues to be the key driver of the homeland security market,” advises  Kuhnal Sinah, Frost & Sullivan’s Asia Pacific consultant for aerospace and defense practice. “Global terrorist activities have been growing dramatically since 2000, after a relative lull between the years 1990-2000.”

Despite the appropriate emphasis on enforcement and investigations, infrastructure modernization continues as a key component of the security market, HSNW advises. “The global [homeland security] market is expected to be around $50 billion in 2010, with the United States remaining the largest civil security market in the world,” Sinha says.

Al Qaeda is said to be patiently planning an attack on the U.S. with a weapon of mass destruction (WMD), with anthrax being its most likely modality.

A former CIA official has published a report on al Qaeda’s interest in WMDs The report, by  Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, is likely to required reading for security officials. After September 11, says the report’s preface, Mowatt-Larssen “led the U.S. government’s efforts to determine whether al Qaeda had WMD and to prevent a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States.”

The really unnerving aspect of al Qaeda’s approach, and they no doubt intend it to be this way, is that they are willing to wait years developing plans for whatever sort of attack seems likely to be feasible and do the most damage. That’s why disrupting terrorist capacities, wherever they become manifest, is such a continuing priority.