Archives: November, 2011

Wired’s Danger Room blog sees an extended “kabuki” performance shaping up to insure that so-called “automatic” defense cuts don’t occur as a result of the federal budget impasse. $600 billion in “automatic” defense cuts aren’t to take affect until January, 2013, now that a special “super-committee” has failed to resolve the spending deadlock. The automatic […]

We’re indebted to Bruce Schneier for warning about this insidious “service” – a call center that caters to cyber criminals in need of pieces of information to inflict attacks. You can find leads to just about anything on the Internet. So, it hardly needs to be said, be careful out there – and enjoy your […]

While Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been warning about the consequences of triggering automatic cuts in the defense budget, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is raising eyebrows for being low-key on any such impact on her department. The deadline for the congressional “super committee” to reach agreement on budget cuts is next Friday, November 23. […]

The city of Lancaster, CA, is heading into a program of aerial surveillance to help fight crime. This won’t be watching from a high building perch, but from a specially equipped plane some 10 hours a day. The plane, reports SecurityInfoWatch, will be a $1.3-million Cessna 172 fixed-wing craft “with optical equipment that would circle […]

Here’s some background on yesterday’s first-ever national emergency alert test, which evidently was held to quite mixed results. Attempts to link the nation as a single community during a security emergency or major natural disaster are being made in a rapidly changing communication environment – not a great setting, possibly and ironically, for connectivity. Yet […]

At 2 p.m. (Eastern time) this Wednesday, Nov. 9,  federal officials will hold the first nationwide test of the U.S. emergency alert system. The two officials sponsoring the test, Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Managent Agency, and Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, explain: “The various disasters our country has faced […]

In a period of (gratefully) diminished threat, homeland security is harder to pin down as a protective discipline. Who’s doing what now, and why? The question is thoughtfully discussed in a Homeland Security Watch post by Christopher Bellavita. Bellavita recently spent “almost two months of seminars and conferences about homeland security,”  and  spoke to “close […]