Archives: September, 2010

Newsweek is carrying a story headlined “The Coming Terror War”. We hope it’s overdone, but it’s in line with other concerns being voiced about pending Al Qaeda attacks in Western nations. Newsweek says an Afghan Taliban intelligence officer source told them that Europeans and Americans think  “our minds and bodies are in the mountains of […]

Want to do some up-to-the-minute security research via the Internet? We’ve come upon a treasure-trove of articles that should soon be available from the Naval Postgraduate School’s (NPS) Center for Homeland Defense and Security, sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security. NPS just graduated its master’s degree class and the titles of 26 newly-minted master’s […]

The U.S. Senate’s committee on Homeland Security & Government Affairs got a full dose of reality on Wednesday. The directors of the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center all advised that the risk of smaller scale terrorist attacks in  the U.S. is growing. As Committee Chair Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) put […]

As many as 500 cameras are focused on New York’s subways. Monitored from the New York Police Department’s operations center, the cameras look into nooks and crannies of one of the world’s busiest tansportation systems. The cameras of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, operator of the subways, join more than 1,000 other cameras monitoring locations in […]

Because The Onion is a satirical site, we don’t know quite what to make of this, but we suspect it has more than a little truth. America’s security is being protected at least as much by average Joes as tactical geniuses. And here’s to all you Joes! “Smart, Qualified People Behind the Scenes Keeping America […]

Two members of the original 9/11 commission, now with a Washington think tank, advise that terrorists may well try again to blow up a commercial airliner. “The idea that the American people have that this (threat) is fading into the past is just flat wrong,” says Lee Hamilton, a former Indianan congressman who issued a […]

Anniversaries of 9/11 are timely for updating consideration of the terrorist threat to America. Thus we have a new report by Peter Bergen and Dr. Bruce Hoffman of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group on “Assessing the Terrorist Threat.” This new appraisal, issued on September 10, “details how the terrorist threat has evolved […]

We step back a bit this morning to pass along some broad-view wisdom on security management, from Jim Smalley on the The Homeland Security Blog. Smalley challenges “widget thinking.” “I suspect,” he writes, “that many people think that all problems can be solved with some existing or soon-to-be technological widget. We continue to look for […]

Kudos for airport alertness – It didn’t prove to be anything, but it might have been. That’s the nature of security vigilance, and it was demonstrated anew at airports in Birmingham, Ala., and Amsterdam recently. Salon.com has the story. Two men from Yemen were detained in Amsterdam, unnecessarily as it happened, after suspicious items – […]

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.