Nuclear security

New App to Help Customs Officers Improve Radiation Detection for Nuclear Security

Customs officer Mengsrom Song and his colleagues are used to the sound of radiation alarms. One third of cargo container shipments passing through the Phnom Penh Autonomous Port set off alarms on the sensitive radiation portal monitors intended to catch smuggled radiation sources and nuclear material.

All of the alarms since the device was installed in July 2016, however, have been caused by material such as tiles, fertilizers and construction materials, said Song, Deputy Chief of the customs office at the port, located on the Mekong River just outside Cambodia’s capital. The port handles a quarter of the country’s foreign trade.

“Evaluating radiation alarms represents a huge challenge for us as they require us to perform secondary inspections on dozens of containers a day,” Song said. “This takes time and resources, and detracts from our other work.” Secondary inspections involve the time-consuming use of hand-held radionuclide identification devices, which measure the amount of radiation and identify its type and source, as well as analysis of the radiation portal monitor’s data to check the commodity type and origin.

Communication security

Battery-Free Cell phone for Search and Rescue Missions

A cell phone that can never run out of battery could mean the difference between life and death for people in emergency situations. A few examples: A firefighter needing guaranteed communication with his or her colleagues; a person trapped following a natural disaster and needing to call for help; or a person in the developing world with limited alternate means of staying in touch with family.

Researchers from the University of Washington invented a prototype cell phone that requires no batteries; instead harvesting the few microwatts of power it needs to run from ambient radio signals — or even light.

“The reason we chose to build a battery-free phone is because phones are one of the most important devices that virtually everyone uses,” Vamsi Talla, a former UW electrical engineering doctoral student and Allen School research associate, told Digital Trends.

Weapons trafficking

BORDER POLICE SEIZE CACHE OF AUTOMATIC WEAPONS, IDF UNIFORMS FROM WEST BANK VILLAGE

Border Police raided a makeshift arms factory in the West Bank village of Beit Arush early Thursday morning, arresting one man and seizing a cache of illegal rifles, improvised automatic weapons, IDF uniforms, binoculars and ammunition.

According to police, the operation took place overnight after intelligence was received about illegal activity in the warehouse, which was used primarily to manufacture Carl Gustav-type and Kalashnikov rifles.

“We knew the structure was being used as a weapons factory, and units arrived in the area overnight and shut it down,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said, adding that the unidentified Palestinian suspect, who is in his 40s, had a permit to travel into Israel.

He said this “was one of the many operations taking place in Judea and Samaria to seize weapons being used in Israel by terrorist cells who are planning attacks.”

Korea

China says it will never allow war or chaos on its doorstep as tensions escalate on Korean Peninsula

Beijing has said it will not allow war or chaos on the Korean Peninsula, as two US B-1B bombers conducted a new flight in the area, joined by South Korean and Japanese fighter jets in a show of force amid mounting tensions.

The statement was made by defense ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang at a monthly news briefing on Thursday, Sina reports.

Six American warplanes - two nuclear-capable B-1B strategic bombers and four Marine Corps F-35Bs - held a joint flight operation with Japanese F-15 fighter jets on Thursday, Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force (ASDF) said in a statement. The squadron flew near the island of Kyushu, south of the Korean Peninsula.

Climate security

Climate change 'is to blame for 7% spike in road deaths': Study claims warmer weather means more people are on the streets while tropical storms are messing up the roads

Warmer temperatures caused by climate change are likely responsible for more deaths on the road, a study claims.

Researchers from Yale University found that temperatures in the US increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit from 2014 to 2015 and, simultaneously, traffic collision deaths increased seven percent.

Experts believe this rate increased not only because more people drive on warmer days but also because people are more likely to be out about on foot on those days.

The study confirms that, while driving and using a cell phone can be fatal, natural factors, such as temperatures and rainfall levels, are beginning to contribute to the problem.

Border security

The FBI Continues Campaign to Address Corruption at America’s Ports of Entry in Los Angeles

In advance of the Labor Day weekend, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Customs Border Protection, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, called on the public for support as it continues to raise national awareness about the dangers of border corruption. Law enforcement encourages citizens and government employees who witness or suspect border corruption to report it to their local FBI field office.

Among the FBI’s top priorities is public corruption, which includes border corruption. Border corruption poses a significant risk to national security and can be challenging to detect due to the number of people who cross the border every day. Drug trafficking, human trafficking, and terrorism are potential threats facing the United States based on the underlying threat posed by border corruption.

Chemical security

New dangers lurk in Harvey’s wake

The water was leaving, at last. But, across Southeast Texas on Thursday, new dangers kept appearing in Hurricane Harvey’s wake.

In Crosby, northeast of Houston, loud “pops” were heard coming from a crippled chemical plant, where safety systems were flooded and authorities said an explosion could be imminent.

In Beaumont, 118,000 people were without drinking water after floods disabled the city’s system. For most of them, there was no easy way out of a town that now felt like more of an island: The city was surrounded by swollen rivers and bayous, cutting off most roads.

Intel oversight

UK surveillance and spying watchdog begins work

An expanded watchdog charged with regulating the intelligence services and surveillance by state agencies has officially begun work.

The role of the first investigatory powers commissioner, Lord Justice Fulford, combines the work of three former oversight bodies and will provide judicial checks on some investigations. His office, the IPCO, will employ about 70 staff, including 15 serving and retired judges.

Inspectors will check that the interception of phone calls, and the handling of agents, surveillance and powers permitting bulk collection of communications data are carried out within the law.

Among organisations overseen by the IPCO are the government’s monitoring agency GCHQ, MI5, MI6, the National Crime Agency, all police forces, the Serious Fraud Office, HM Revenue and Customs, local authorities, prisons and government departments.

Weapons

Russian Military Turns to New Physical Principles in Developing Weapons

Russia has been actively developing the weapons based on the so-called new physical principles.

In November 2016, the Land Force's missile and artillery troops Maj. Gen. Mikhail Matveevsky, said the Russian military was developing lethal warheads based on new physical principles. The process incuded the development of advanced combat units, such as multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles.

The United Instrument Manufacturing Corporation (UIMC) has also said that Russia had developed first radio-electronic weapons system based on so-called new physical principles.

First radio-electronic weapons samples based on new physical principles (beam, geophysical, wave, kinetic and other types of weapons) were first unveiled at the closed Russian Defense Ministry exhibition on the sidelines of the Army-2016 forum last year.

The UIMC spokesperson added that the new weapons can strike targets without the use of ammunition — instead, a directed energy beam is used.

Drug smuggling

US Air Force B-1 Bombers Are Hunting Drug Smugglers From Key West

If you happened to glance at Google Earth’s satellite imagery of Naval Air Station Key West in Florida recently, you may have noticed something that might seem odd. A trio of B-1 Bones from the 7th Bomb Wing at Dyess Air Force Base in Texas are sitting on the flight line. The swing-wing bombers aren’t there poised for a strike on Cuba or somewhere else in the Caribbean, but instead as part of a routine, if largely unknown mission that has them looking for drug smugglers.

For more than a decade, the U.S. Air Force has deployed B-1s, as well as B-52H Stratofortresses, E-3 AWACS, E-8C JSTARS (JSTARS), and supporting KC-135 tankers in support of counterdrug efforts in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Unique interagency task forces – Joint Interagency Task Force-South (JIATF-S) situated in Key West and Joint Interagency Task Force-West (JIATF-W) in Hawaii – coordinate these missions as part of a whole-of-government approach. These headquarters bring together members of the U.S. military, U.S. Intelligence Community, and American law enforcement agencies, as well as representatives from other nations in their respective regions.

Private security

Acid flashback: CIA’s mind-control experiment reverberates 40 years after hearings

Forty years later, the story still seems hard to credit: In the summer of 1977, Capitol Hill was gripped by revelations of the CIA’s top-secret MK-Ultra mind control research program, targeting unsuspecting American citizens, in some cases by luring them to brothels to be fed LSD-laced cocktails.

The blockbuster hearings that summer, chaired by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and aided by a timely dump of intelligence documents, touched some of the country’s rawest nerves: the assassination of Kennedy’s brothers, the possibility of mind-controlled “Manchurian candidates” and the increasing prominence of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs across Western culture.

Although the CIA program officially ran from 1953 to 1964, its dark and fertile legacy stretches to today, living on in modern conspiracy theories about U.S. intelligence agencies’ ability and willingness to manipulate society through surveillance, disinformation, celebrity culture and strategic news leaks.

Cybersecurity

Law Firms & Cyber Security

Cyber risk is an issue for any organization where client data is collected and is incredibly sensitive. Trade secrets. Client transactions with third parties. The importance of cyber security ranks extremely highly amongst financial institutions, banks and many businesses in general . It is still relatively new to employ a “Chief Digital Officer” or “Chief Information Officer” to have responsibility for oversight of cyber risk but it is on the rise —research firm Gartner predicts 90% of large organisations will have a chief digital officer role by 2019. And the CDO or CIO role is increasingly becoming a core role within a firm’s management.

There have been a number of cyber breaches so far involving law firms, the most well known being attacks against Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Weil Gotshal & Manges, DLA Piper and Mossack Fonseca [the latter being the “Panama Papers” leak].

Law firms are not immune from cyber risk. In fact, they are easier targets — and that is because, broadly speaking, the levels of data security are far lower than other companies and therefore they are easier to access by potential hackers.

Corruption

Bulgarian President Convenes National Security Council

President Rumen Radev convenes a meeting of the National Security Council (KSNS), which will be devoted to the fight against corruption, the presidential press service said, quoted by bTV.

The meeting will be held on 9 October.

During the meeting he will discuss the creation of a workable anti-corruption model.

This is the second sitting of the KSNS  since Rumen Radev stepped into office. The theme of the first one was the modernization of the Bulgarian army.

Weapon trafficking

Stolen military equipment worth more than $1M sold on eBay, testimony reveals

More than $1 million of U.S. military equipment was stolen from a base in Kentucky and sold on eBay, according to testimony from a federal trial this week.

John Roberts, a 27-year-old from Clarksville, Tennessee, testified Wednesday that he didn’t know the equipment he received was stolen.

“I didn’t try to hide anything,” Roberts said Wednesday. “That’s why I filed taxes on everything I sold on eBay. I thought it was okay.”

The equipment – some of which was resold to buyers in Russia, China, Mexico, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan and Ukraine – included machine gun and rifle parts, helmets, guns, medical equipment, gun sights, body army and more.

Weather security

Houston flood: 'No way to prevent' chemical plant blast or fire

A chemical plant near the flooded city of Houston is expected to explode or catch fire in the coming days.

During heavy rainfall from Hurricane Harvey, the Arkema plant at Crosby lost refrigeration of chemical compounds which need to be kept cool, and there is no way to prevent a possible fire, the company said.

At least 25 people have been killed in the aftermath of the storm.

US energy supplies have also been hit, as oil companies shut down pipelines.

The US National Weather Service downgraded the former hurricane to a tropical depression but has forecast continuing heavy rainfall over eastern Texas and western Louisiana.

Weapon smuggling

Journalist Interrogated, Fired For Story Linking CIA And Syria Weapons Flights

Investigative reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva authored a bombshell report for Trud Newspaper, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, which found that an Azerbaijan state airline company was regularly transporting tons of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Turkey under diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program to supply anti-Assad fighters in Syria. Those weapons, Gaytandzhieva found, ended up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

While it's long been understood that the US-Gulf-NATO coalition arming rebels inside Syria facilitated the rapid rise of the Islamic State as the group had steady access to a "jihadi Wal-Mart" of weapons (in the words of one former spy and British diplomat), the Trud Newspaper report is the first to provide exhaustive documentationdetailing the precise logistical chain of the weapons as they flowed from their country of origin to the battlefield in Syria and Iraq. Gaytandzhieva even traveled to Aleppo where she filmed and examined labeled weapons shipping containers held in underground jihadist storehouses.

The Bulgaria-based journalist obtained and published dozens of secret internal memos which were leaked to her by an anonymous source as part of the report. The leaked documents appear to be internal communications between the Bulgarian government and Azerbaijan's Embassy in Sofia detailing flight plans for Silk Way Airlines, which was essentially operating an "off the books" weapons transport service (not subject to inspections or tax under diplomatic cover) for the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), Saudi Arabia, Israel, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. 

Nuclear security

How many nukes are in the world and what could they destroy?

The world's current collection of 14,900 nuclear weapons possesses enough power to kill millions of people and flatten dozens of cities.

According to Telegraph research, it is estimated that the US and Russian arsenals combined have power equating to 6,600 megatons. This is a tenth of the total solar energy received by Earth every minute.

According to the NukeMap website, the dropping of the B-83, the largest bomb in the current US arsenal, would kill 1.4m people in the first 24 hours. A further 3.7m people would be injured, as the thermal radiation radius reached 13.km.

Likewise, the "Tsar Bomba" is the largest USSR bomb tested. If this bomb was dropped on New York, it is estimated that it could kill 7.6m people and injure 4.2m more. The nuclear fallout could reach an approximate area of 7,880km on a 15mph wind, impacting millions more people.

Both America and Russia's arsenals are regulated by several treaties that place limits on the numbers and kinds of warheads and delivery systems they have.