Arizona’s ‘Sheriff Joe,’ Immigration Firebrand, Squares Off With Feds The Justice Department upped its political and legal pressure on Arizona and its most notable lawman Thursday when it sued Maricopa County and Sheriff Joe Arpaio for allegedly failing to adequately cooperate with a civil rights investigation that predates the state’s controversial anti-immigration measures. Although the lawsuit [...]

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Laser-powered, ground-charged UAV stays aloft for hours - Homeland Security Newswire A UAV is only as good as its power source: if the drone cannot stay over target for long periods of time and must return to base to refuel. A Seattle-based company has demonstrated that it can use a laser beam to charge the UAV's photovoltaic cells, generating enough power to keep the drone in the air for hours.

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Did U.S. airport security get it right this time? - Salon.com In Amsterdam, two men headed from the United States to Yemen were detained after security staff discovered suspicious items in one of the men's checked luggage. The story began when security screeners at the airport in Birmingham, Ala., discovered watches, cellphones and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol strangely taped together in a suitcase belonging to 48-year-old Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi, a U.S. permanent resident.

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Taliban Using Mosque Controversy to Recruit – Newsweek Taliban officials know it’s sacrilegious to hope a mosque will not be built, but that’s exactly what they’re wishing for: the success of the fiery campaign to block the proposed Islamic cultural center and prayer room near the site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. “By preventing [...]

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Homeland Security Policy Institute After more than seven years of war, the US mission in Iraq will transition from combat to stability operations. HSPI’s recent Commentary Baghdad Surprise?– coupled with the President’s address on the future of the US mission in Iraq – led us to pose three questions to key foreign policy and counterterrorism [...]

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In a state as disaster prone as Louisiana has been over the past few years, it's hard to remember that when something bad does occur, it doesn't impact everyone. I was reminded of this when I sat down for lunch with two friends in Lake Charles, LA. Southwest Louisiana is truly a world away from the rest of Louisiana. Whether it is the fact that they have a higher elevation from the southeastern part of the state or they are just closer to Texas, this section of the state has always impressed me as having more of its act together than other portions of Louisiana. Back in 2005, I met Lakes Charles Mayor Randy Roach who introduced me to a saying that has stuck with me ever since. He said, "Just hand me a piece of plywood, and we'll take it from there."

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The announcement Monday afternoon by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano that Predator B unmanned aerial vehicles will begin patrolling the skies over American's Southwest border, funded in part by the latest $600 million infusion of cash from Congress, ought to raise some very serious questions about the manner in which increasingly limited homeland security funds are being spent. If DHS wants to deploy Predator B UAVs, then at least admit that Predators are far more expensive than almost every other alternative - or make the case why this is a better choice. Thus far, the explanations are lacking, and this should not be allowed to continue. When Congress returns, or whenever GAO gets around to it, Secretary Napolitano should be required publicly to address some of the following questions.

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Nation's nuclear power plants prepare for cyberattacks - NextGov The threat to digital systems at the country's nuclear power plants is considerable, but the sector is better prepared to defend against potentially devastating cyberattacks than most other utilities, according to government and industry officials and experts.

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Two men arrested in Amsterdam may have been conducting a dry run for a potential terrorist attack, U.S. officials said Tuesday after a cell phone taped to a Pepto-Bismol bottle and a knife and box cutters were found in one of the men's luggage.

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Are New Orleans' storm defenses strong enough? - Homeland Security Newswire It is almost five years since hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and the city is bracing for other attacks to come. In a revamp now nearing completion, the city’s 560-kilometer perimeter has been fortified by toughened levees, cement walls more than 9-meters high, and imposing gates that will grind shut when flood water nears.

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It's hard to say what the real ground zero of Hurricane Katrina was. For most Americans, they think of the City of New Orleans. For as awful as each of those events were, similar catastrophes were experienced by St. Bernard and Jefferson Parishes, as well as Plaquemines and Slidell, LA. While the media certainly covered the earth-shattering events that occurred there, it seems to me that the Gulf Coast of Mississippi seems to have been lost in the coverage. The only word I used to describe what I saw back then was very simply Hiroshima. The destruction was beyond catastrophic.

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State of Arizona files Opening Brief in Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals - Homeland Security Newswire Yesterday, 26 August 2010, the State of Arizona filed with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco its Opening Brief in seeking to overturn the decision of District Court Judge Susan Bolton enjoining enforcement of parts of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070.

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There are few places that you can drive in America where you can go over 50 miles and not hit a traffic light. Such is the stretch of highway along Louisiana Highway 23, running straight through the center of Plaquemines Parish. Located just south of New Orleans, Plaquemines is literally a peninsula with the mighty Mississippi River going right through the center of it. When Katrina struck, surges of water crossed over the levees, parking shrimp boats in the center of the Highway 23 and farmer’s fields while cattle and other farm animals were left dangling in the surrounding trees. It’s an open debate by many Plaquemines residents as to what is worse: the impact of Katrina, the BP oil spill or the drilling moratorium. One thing they can all agree on is their concern about their future.

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Over the last decade, America and her allies have done a solid job of beating al Qaeda to a bloody pulp. We've hit them with everything we've got: troops on the ground; Predator drones in the sky; missiles from the sea; and we're taking them apart piece by piece on the Web. But it's not just the government that's running down al Qaeda. Even U.S. citizens are using some good-ol'-fashioned American initiative; citizens like Shannen Rossmiller, a citizen cyberspy.

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Five years ago, my life, like the lives of millions of others, changed. I was one of the thousands of people who went to the Gulf Coast to try to help, to do anything to address what can only be called the summer of ultimate hell. Two monster hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, smashed into the coastlines of Mississippi and Louisiana killing hundreds, costing billions and forever changing our nation. This week I've come back to the Gulf Coast to retrace many of the steps I took five years ago. For as much as the news media will offer their five-year retrospectives on the anniversaries of these two unprecedented and tragic storms, it can't begin to capture how much lives have changed here.

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Border Patrol suicides are on the rise - GovExec Since February 2008, 15 Border Patrol agents, 13 of whom were stationed in the Southwest, have committed suicide, the Associated Press reports. This marks an alarming increase for an agency that didn't have any suicides for almost four years leading up to 2008, the report noted.

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Roles and responsibilities key to making cybersecurity work - NextGov Clarification of cybersecurity roles and responsibilities in the federal government remains the most crucial component of bills circulating in Congress, federal and industry executives said during a panel discussion on Thursday.

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced an interim final rule establishing a fee for the use of the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). An approved ESTA is required for all individuals traveling under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). Leaving aside whether the fee will have its intended effect of boosting tourism, the successful implementation of ESTA is a critical security feature of the modernized VWP. The ESTA compliance rate has reached 99 percent, so in short, ESTA has enhanced the security of the United States.

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Those who read my Security Debrief posts or my Tweets will recognize (maybe with a groan) that one of my "issues" is the lack of action in Awareness and Education with regard to cybersecurity. It is not a sexy, nor a potentially lucrative issue, but I believe with all my heart that it is the foundational piece of any eventual "solution" to our cyber woes. Bottom line of Bucci's rant is this: we need to make Awareness and Education a real priority and expend the money, time, and personnel to do it correctly.

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As an article by Security Management's Matthew Harwood reminds us, Homeland Security has not "taken seriously the threat that a high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon could fry the nation's power grid[.]" Dr. Michael J. Frankel is executive director of the EMP Commission, which was created in 2001 to study the national security threat an EMP attack could pose to the United States. If anything, Frankel underplays the scope of the threat. The catastrophe would not stop at our borders, and the Earth would likely recede into the "new" Dark Ages.

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