 Denmark: Ax attacker linked to al-Qaida Aarhus, Denmark (UPI) Jan 4, 2009 - Danish authorities have expanded the investigation into the attempted murder of an illustrator who drew a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, with the suspect accused of having plotted a similar murder attempt against U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Kurt Westergaard, 74, knows that the cartoon he drew of the prophet with a bomb instead of a turban will always haunt him. He has had police protection ever since the cartoon row turned violent in 2006. Danish authorities had arrested three suspects who allegedly plotted to murder him. This past Friday, the threat became real. Around 10 p.m., a 28-year-old Somali-born resident of Denmark wielding an ax broke into Westergaard's house near Aarhus. The cartoonist was able to flee into a "panic room" in his home. Police arriving at the scene shortly afterward shot the attacker in the leg and the hand. He has since been held in custody and charged with attempted murder. Danish intelligence officials linked the man, who has not yet been identified, to an East African Islamist militia allied with al-Qaida. Police Monday searched three homes, two of which belong to the suspect's relatives, in order to find out whether the man acted alone. Danish newspaper Politiken said the man has also been suspected of trying to assassinate Hillary Clinton during her visit to Kenya this past summer. The man was apparently held by Kenyan authorities but released due to lack of evidence, the newspaper said. Danish authorities had since monitored him. However, they had no idea he was planning to kill Westergaard. The Organization of the Islamic Conference condemned the attack on Westergaard's life, saying it "runs totally against the teachings and values of Islam." Westergaard's drawing -- showing the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse -- was first published by Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten in 2005 as part of a collection of cartoons dealing with Islam. Reprints of the cartoons in 2006 triggered violent protests all over the world that killed more than 50 people. They also sparked a boycott of Danish products and attacks on Danish institutions in Muslim countries. |
Washington (UPI) Jan 5, 2009
Airport security buildups geared toward installing more body scanners at departure points have heartened investors who poured money into safety and security industries with the clear aim of profiting from current trends.
Amid low interest rates, investors moved large sums into security industries last year after expert forecasts that demand for equipment, expertise and services related to safety and security could only grow because of continuing threat perceptions worldwide.
Industry researcher Strategic Insight estimates that a record $400 billion moved into security industry bond funds during 2009, MarketWatch.com said.
The London Guardian newspaper said security industries hoped to profit from the current rush to install body scanners at airports and other checkpoints, including buildings, but there was little guarantee the new equipment would eliminate the threat.
The scanner manufacturers claim they would detect materials of the sort Nigerian Abdulmutallab allegedly took onto his Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day, but experts caution that it would depend on a series of factors, not least the vigilance of the scanner operator, The Guardian said.
The body scanners are set to cause further delays in flight operations wherever they are installed, but they can still fail if the operator is not vigilant enough.
"It's one of the big difficulties with airport security," The Guardian quoted Flight International Editor Kieran Daly as saying. "You're asking people to do a job which is not only very important and carries a very high risk if there is a failure, but is also exceptionally tedious."
Body scanners can handle two to three people a minute, a little faster than a conventional frisk, the newspaper said. Once authorities decide to go ahead with deployment of the scanners, shareholders in the industry can look forward to significant returns on their investment because of the huge outlay of capital required by governments and corporations.
A single body scanner can cost up to $160,000, excluding training and maintenance, compared with $5,000 to 8,000 for a single industry-standard metal detector.
Still, chances of error can never be eliminated, industry analysts said.
Philip Baum, an aviation security expert, told The Guardian, "There is no one answer. The first step of the process should always be the proper use of the human brain: people making an intelligent decision as to which security lane a passenger goes down."
Controversy also surrounds the kind of scanners being deployed. U.S. manufacturer Brijot told United Press International their machine protects passenger privacy and is better at detecting suspect materials in intimate body areas than most of the scanners currently deployed at airports.
Although Brijot machines are used by the U.S. military and in private palaces in the Middle East, mainly because of their privacy aspect, the manufacturer said it hopes its product will be brought into wider use.
In the meantime, incidents such as the Christmas Day bombing attempt have given new impetus to investors flocking into research and development of more effective anti-terrorist equipment with the hope of lucrative returns.
Hovering drone draws rave reviews at CES
Moving the iPhone forward makes the
AR.Drone go forward while a sideways movement makes it turn a corner or change
direction. Command buttons on the iPhone allow it to go up or
down.
by Staff
Writers
Las Vegas, Nevada (AFP) Jan 6,
2010
Hovering silently a few feet off the ground it
looks like a flying saucer out of a Steven Spielberg film.
But it's no alien device. It's a new toy called the AR.drone from French
company Parrot -- a small remote-controlled helicopter which is piloted using an
Apple iPhone or an iPod Touch through a Wi-Fi connection.
A demonstration of the miniature helicopter, or quadricopter for its four
propellers, drew rave reviews at the opening here of the annual Consumer
Electronics Show (CES) as it flew around the heads of exhibitors and
journalists.
The pilot maneuvers the drone using the accelerometer in an iPhone or
iPod.
Moving the iPhone forward makes the AR.Drone go forward while a sideways
movement makes it turn a corner or change direction. Command buttons on the
iPhone allow it to go up or down.
Parrot specializes in making hands-free wireless systems for cars and company
founder Henri Seydoux said the AR.Drone is the first product of its kind from
the Paris-based firm, which employs 450 people worldwide.
"We expect to have it on the market sometime this year," the Parrot chief
executive told AFP.
He declined to name a price saying it had not yet been set.
The AR.Drone weighs just over 300 grams, or half a pound, and is equipped
with a video camera that streams to the iPhone or iPod the view from the
"cockpit."
The AR.Drone can be used for what Parrot called "augmented reality gaming" --
allowing "real world objects and conditions, like a tree or wind, to become a
part of the video gaming experience."
Parrot said the AR.Drone is built on an open platform and the company is
inviting outside developers to creates games for the
device.
Whole body scanner may be part of the answer, but not all of
it
Published 7 January 2010
Whole body scanners should provide the answer to security
screening, but the human element – people get bored, distracted, and careless –
will make them less than flawless; the future of screening is technology that
reduces the possibility of human error to zero; there is also a need for
passenger profiling that does not need to take into account the race or religion
of the passenger
Whole-body scanner's image // Source: therawfeed.com
In the aftermath of the botched attack to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on
Christmas, the media and security analysts have seized upon full body
scanners, or whole body imaging technology, as a solution to passenger
screening problems.
Matthew Harwood writes
that the controversial scanning technology, which allows security officials to
peer underneath a passenger’s clothes, has seen a big push since the attack
because 23-year-old jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had sewn the high
explosive he tried to detonate on the plane in his underwear — an innovation
that eluded airport security in the Netherlands and Nigeria.
As former homeland security chief Michael Chertoff argued in the Washington Post, whole body
scanners are one more critically important layer of security that can detect
contraband metal detectors can’t. “Watch lists surely are an important layer, as
is intelligence-sharing, but others, such as the deployment of advanced
detection technology, are just as important,” he wrote (Harwood notes that
Chertoff has a conflict-of-interest when promoting whole body imaging: One of
the clients of his security and risk management firm is a manufacturer of whole
body imaging technology).
Chris Yates, an aviation security analyst with Jane’s Information Group, wrote an article for BBC.com, reminding readers that these
full body scanners, while certainly a “game changer,” are not “the panacea to
the threats we face today.”
Why? Because of the human element. “Full body scanners are often only as good
as the people paid to be behind the screens, analyzing the succession of complex
images scrolling in front of their eyes,” he writes. “Staff monitoring screens
typically only do so for a two-hour stretch - one of a rotation of duties to
stop them from getting bored.”
Yates believes the future of screening is technology that reduces the
possibility of human error to zero and discusses some emerging technology
attempting to do just that. He also argues for passenger profiling that does not
need to take into account the race or religion of the passenger.
The aviation industry routinely collects vast amounts of data on our
traveling habits that can be used to build up an extremely useful profile.
Information regarding the destination, frequency and duration of overseas trips
allows those tasked with ensuring the security of flights to positively identify
passengers who may travel to regions of the world determined to be high-risk for
example. That enables higher levels of security to be applied to that person as
he or she passes through the airport.
In the end, Yates argues for a smart blend of the best detection technology
and the best profiling techniques to sniff out those that target the commercial
aviation sector.
Airport security starts in the parking lot
Hovering drone draws rave reviews at CES
Moving the iPhone forward makes the
AR.Drone go forward while a sideways movement makes it turn a corner or change
direction. Command buttons on the iPhone allow it to go up or
down.
by Staff
Writers
Las Vegas, Nevada (AFP) Jan 6,
2010
Hovering silently a few feet off the ground it
looks like a flying saucer out of a Steven Spielberg film.
But it's no alien device. It's a new toy called the AR.drone from French
company Parrot -- a small remote-controlled helicopter which is piloted using an
Apple iPhone or an iPod Touch through a Wi-Fi connection.
A demonstration of the miniature helicopter, or quadricopter for its four
propellers, drew rave reviews at the opening here of the annual Consumer
Electronics Show (CES) as it flew around the heads of exhibitors and
journalists.
The pilot maneuvers the drone using the accelerometer in an iPhone or
iPod.
Moving the iPhone forward makes the AR.Drone go forward while a sideways
movement makes it turn a corner or change direction. Command buttons on the
iPhone allow it to go up or down.
Parrot specializes in making hands-free wireless systems for cars and company
founder Henri Seydoux said the AR.Drone is the first product of its kind from
the Paris-based firm, which employs 450 people worldwide.
"We expect to have it on the market sometime this year," the Parrot chief
executive told AFP.
He declined to name a price saying it had not yet been set.
The AR.Drone weighs just over 300 grams, or half a pound, and is equipped
with a video camera that streams to the iPhone or iPod the view from the
"cockpit."
The AR.Drone can be used for what Parrot called "augmented reality gaming" --
allowing "real world objects and conditions, like a tree or wind, to become a
part of the video gaming experience."
Parrot said the AR.Drone is built on an open platform and the company is
inviting outside developers to creates games for the
device.
Whole body scanner may be part of the answer, but not all of
it
Moving the iPhone forward makes the AR.Drone go forward while a sideways movement makes it turn a corner or change direction. Command buttons on the iPhone allow it to go up or down. |
Las Vegas, Nevada (AFP) Jan 6, 2010
Hovering silently a few feet off the ground it looks like a flying saucer out of a Steven Spielberg film.
But it's no alien device. It's a new toy called the AR.drone from French company Parrot -- a small remote-controlled helicopter which is piloted using an Apple iPhone or an iPod Touch through a Wi-Fi connection.
A demonstration of the miniature helicopter, or quadricopter for its four propellers, drew rave reviews at the opening here of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) as it flew around the heads of exhibitors and journalists.
The pilot maneuvers the drone using the accelerometer in an iPhone or iPod.
Moving the iPhone forward makes the AR.Drone go forward while a sideways movement makes it turn a corner or change direction. Command buttons on the iPhone allow it to go up or down.
Parrot specializes in making hands-free wireless systems for cars and company founder Henri Seydoux said the AR.Drone is the first product of its kind from the Paris-based firm, which employs 450 people worldwide.
"We expect to have it on the market sometime this year," the Parrot chief executive told AFP.
He declined to name a price saying it had not yet been set.
The AR.Drone weighs just over 300 grams, or half a pound, and is equipped with a video camera that streams to the iPhone or iPod the view from the "cockpit."
The AR.Drone can be used for what Parrot called "augmented reality gaming" -- allowing "real world objects and conditions, like a tree or wind, to become a part of the video gaming experience."
Parrot said the AR.Drone is built on an open platform and the company is inviting outside developers to creates games for the device.
Published 7 January 2010
Whole body scanners should provide the answer to security screening, but the human element – people get bored, distracted, and careless – will make them less than flawless; the future of screening is technology that reduces the possibility of human error to zero; there is also a need for passenger profiling that does not need to take into account the race or religion of the passenger
Whole-body scanner's image // Source: therawfeed.com
In the aftermath of the botched attack to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas, the media and security analysts have seized upon full body scanners, or whole body imaging technology, as a solution to passenger screening problems.
Matthew Harwood writes that the controversial scanning technology, which allows security officials to peer underneath a passenger’s clothes, has seen a big push since the attack because 23-year-old jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had sewn the high explosive he tried to detonate on the plane in his underwear — an innovation that eluded airport security in the Netherlands and Nigeria.
As former homeland security chief Michael Chertoff argued in the Washington Post, whole body scanners are one more critically important layer of security that can detect contraband metal detectors can’t. “Watch lists surely are an important layer, as is intelligence-sharing, but others, such as the deployment of advanced detection technology, are just as important,” he wrote (Harwood notes that Chertoff has a conflict-of-interest when promoting whole body imaging: One of the clients of his security and risk management firm is a manufacturer of whole body imaging technology).
Chris Yates, an aviation security analyst with Jane’s Information Group, wrote an article for BBC.com, reminding readers that these full body scanners, while certainly a “game changer,” are not “the panacea to the threats we face today.”
Why? Because of the human element. “Full body scanners are often only as good as the people paid to be behind the screens, analyzing the succession of complex images scrolling in front of their eyes,” he writes. “Staff monitoring screens typically only do so for a two-hour stretch - one of a rotation of duties to stop them from getting bored.”
Yates believes the future of screening is technology that reduces the possibility of human error to zero and discusses some emerging technology attempting to do just that. He also argues for passenger profiling that does not need to take into account the race or religion of the passenger.
The aviation industry routinely collects vast amounts of data on our traveling habits that can be used to build up an extremely useful profile. Information regarding the destination, frequency and duration of overseas trips allows those tasked with ensuring the security of flights to positively identify passengers who may travel to regions of the world determined to be high-risk for example. That enables higher levels of security to be applied to that person as he or she passes through the airport.
In the end, Yates argues for a smart blend of the best detection technology and the best profiling techniques to sniff out those that target the commercial aviation sector.
Behavioural clues are a vital link, experts say
A full body scan may reveal a bomb tied to an ankle, but the space between the fingers could determine a terrorist's state of mind.
Joe Navarro, an ex-FBI agent, says there is no "Pinocchio effect" when looking for deceit.
"Our bodies tell us we're either comfortable or uncomfortable and when people lie you see displays of discomfort," he said.
Navarro, who teaches non-verbal communication to poker players, says when a person lacks confidence, the fingers that normally rest apart, tend to come together.
Detecting these kinds of nervous clues may soon be the norm at Canadian airports. The federal government announced Tuesday it will soon accept bids for a company to design a behaviour observation screening program for Canadian airports. The new layer of security will focus on recognizing irregular and suspicious behaviour.
But Navarro said a problem in examining small clues is that compressed lips, cracked voice and increased blinking can occur with honest people under stress. Flight cancellations, unruly children and surly airline staff could lead to an airport filled with false positives.
The ideal model, many experts say, is the Israeli one, where travellers are asked seemingly innocuous questions to determine if further screening is needed. In addition, behavioural specialists observe travellers from the time they arrive in the parking lot.
Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security firm based in Israel, said trained observers at the Tel Aviv airport are senior university students.
"It's a part-time job instead of McDonald's," he said.
Sela said employees are tested all the time with the terrorism equivalent of the secret shopper. "We have actors who we constantly send out to the airport to act strange and give out signals," he said.
Sela didn't want to disclose the strange behaviour employees look for but explained that in an air-conditioned terminal, a person sweating profusely is one to watch.
"It doesn't mean you're a terrorist but it signals there is a problem and we should talk to you," he said.
Navarro, who is surprised more airports haven't adopted the Israeli model, said clues can range from a suddenly shifted foot to the absence of a smile.
"In the history of mankind, there has never been a happy terrorist," he said, noting that post-facto scans of crowds before the attempted assassinations of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan and former Alabama governor George Wallace revealed a stony faced person in a crowd of happy people.
"It is almost impossible to wear a mask of happiness when you're going to blow something up," he said.
Another sign is anxious, repetitive behaviour. Navarro said people who hide explosives often will incessantly fidget with a briefcase.
Paul Ekman, a psychologist who has studied deceit for decades, and is the inspiration for Lie to Me, a Fox TV show about a genius who helps police detect lies using psychology, said the key is in the face.
Ekman calls these clues "microexpressions," an involuntary flicker of a facial feature when a person is trying not to reveal their true feelings. They last for 1/25th of a second and most people don't notice them.
Navarro said governments have been reluctant to dedicate resources to this kind of observational training – and that's dangerous.
"When we rely on machines, the individual loses the ability to observe acutely," he said.
A Transport Canada spokesman said the government will soon post a request for a proposal for the program, but an estimated cost for an actual program is far off.
Former RCMP officer and security analyst Chris Mathers doesn't think the Canadian traveller is ready to absorb the costs of employing university graduates.
"Right now we have security guards. You'd need some pretty astute people to do that. This is an inexact science. It's very difficult," he said.
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Tel Aviv, Israel (UPI) Jan 13, 2009
Days after completing a test of its Iron Dome shield, Israel says it will take years before the Jewish state's new rocket anti-missile system will be fully deployed.
The warning was sounded by Defense Minister Ehud Barak who predicted, meantime, that once deployed along his country's borders with Gaza and Lebanon, the Iron Dome system will significantly reduce hostilities from militants.
Developed over the last two years at a cost of $200 million by state-owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., the Iron Dome uses small guided missiles to destroy short-range rockets used by Hezbollah and Hamas militants.
The system, which identifies threats by radar, stops missiles between 2.5 and 45 miles. Hezbollah traditionally uses Iranian-made Fajr rockets to wage attacks into Israel.
Israel has had no defense umbrella to shield itself from thousands of rockets that militants have darted into its southern and northern territories over the years. Millions of Israeli civilians are within range of these rockets.
Once deployed, said Barak, the Iron Dome would "save time of fighting and deter in many cases a potential enemy from really launching an attack."
The Dome is part of a three-tier shield intended to stop different levels of incoming attacks. It is expected to be deployed in conjunction with the long-range, high-altitude Arrow II system, which has been operational since 2000.
The third tier of the shield aims to counter intermediate-range missiles and includes a system known as David's Slingshot.
Both the Arrow II and David Slingshot systems have been developed in cooperation with the United States while the Iron Dome is solely an Israeli project.
It is generally accepted that the military would need about 20 batteries to defend the entire stretch of Israel's northern and southern borders from bombardments launched by Hamas and Hezbollah, respectively.
Each battery costs $14 million, creating consternation among military strategists and planners in Israel.
Earlier this week the prominent daily Haaretz said the system's running costs would require either diverting substantial funds from other defense projects or significantly increasing the defense budget.
"The moment, though, that the enemy realizes that its weapons are not effective enough and that the price it is paying for using them is greater than the benefit, it won't be using them anymore," wrote an opinion piece of the ynet Web site. "Active defense is at times an alternative to war," it said, adding that "there was no other alternative in the world for the Iron Dome."
U.K. firm says its scanning technology meets security, privacy concerns
Published 13 January 2010
Cambridge, U.K.-based TeraView says it is developing terahertz body scanners which use light from upper end of the infra-red spectrum, with a wavelength between 0.1 and 1mm; the scanners do not produce an image but a "fingerprint" -- rather than blurry pictures of naked tourists, a TeraView scanner would return absorbance data that could be automatically analyzed to approve travelers or alert airport staff to investigate further
A British firm is aiming to capitalize on travelers’ privacy issues by offering a security scanner that does not produce an image, yet can identify a wide range of concealed explosives.
Following Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s failed attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner over Detroit, body scanners are firmly on the security agenda. The current generation, one example of which was on trial at Manchester Airport before the on Christmas day attack, use either millimeter waves or backscatter X-rays to produce revealing images of travelers. Security officials say that hiding explosives in your pants, out of the reach of a pat-down, is not possible any more.
This has raised concerns from privacy, civil liberties, and child protection groups over who will see the images and how they will be stored. The Manchester Airport trial quickly ran into trouble over consent and the making of indecent images of children, first reported here.
Chris Williams writes that TeraView, based in Cambridge, United Kingdom, says it can satisfy both sides of the debate. It claims to be furthest along developing terahertz body scanners, which use light from upper end of the infra-red spectrum, with a wavelength between 0.1 and 1mm.
The firm’s scanners do not produce an image but a “fingerprint.” Rather than blurry pictures of naked tourists, a TeraView scanner would return absorbance data that could be automatically analyzed to approve travelers or alert airport staff to investigate further.
The “fingerprints” identify textiles, skin underneath, metals, and – crucially — varieties of explosives, including PETN — Mutallab’s weapon of choice. Semtex, TNT, and RDX all have their own terahertz signature, too.
“We detect with higher sensitivity and lower false alarm rate than with images,” said Dr. Don Arnone, TeraView’s CEO. “The advantages outweigh the disadvantages and nobody we’ve spoken to has suggested they need images,” he added.
The firm has held talks with the Home Office and Department of Transport, and sold testing kit to the U.S. Navy.
This more discreet approach to airport screening requires significant work, however. TeraView, which span out of Toshiba Research Europe in 2001, is seeking funding to incorporate the technology into a unit for airports, which Arnone estimates will take twelve months.
It also has competition pushing the body scanners of the future. Among the gaggle of body scanner firms gaining publicity in the wake of the failed Christmas day attack was Advanced Photonix, another terahertz outfit, based up the road from the target, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Arnone believes his firm’s early start and patents put it in the lead against terahertz rivals. Even so, the more advanced technologies are backed by some of the giants of public security. Rapiscan, part of OSI Systems, is responsible for X-raying travelers at Manchester Airport. Qinetiq, formerly part of the U.K. Ministry of Defense, is meanwhile pushing a millimeter wave scanner which does not produce an image, but was forced to admit it would not have detected Mutallab’s exploding incendiary pants.
Arnone said he has received several calls since Christmas from authorities seeking confirmation that TeraView could detect PETN.
U.K. firm says its scanning technology meets security, privacy concerns
Published 13 January 2010
Cambridge, U.K.-based TeraView says it is developing terahertz body scanners which use light from upper end of the infra-red spectrum, with a wavelength between 0.1 and 1mm; the scanners do not produce an image but a "fingerprint" -- rather than blurry pictures of naked tourists, a TeraView scanner would return absorbance data that could be automatically analyzed to approve travelers or alert airport staff to investigate further
If terhertz scanners ever make it into airports, public health campaigners may cast more obstacles. A study in Physics Letters A in October suggested that the radiation could damage DNA, despite its non-ionizing properties. More work is needed, advocates admit, but set against the very well known risks of ionizing X-ray radiation and the fact that travelers are already being irradiated for security purposes, the threat to terahertz scanners from the finding seems minimal.
Williams writes that the advantage of terahertz technology in resolving the privacy debate over body scanners seems in little doubt. What remains unproven are the benefits of body scanners themselves for counter-terrorism. The reaction to Mutallab means no self-respecting terrorist will attempt the exploding pants ploy where he knows body scanners are in use. He will simply try something else, and air travel will still be very safe but not risk-free.
Robot wars in Canada’s future?
Last Updated: 10th January 2010, 4:19pm
OTTAWA — Don’t expect them to say “Hasta la vista, baby,” but the robotic armoured vehicles and pilotless aircraft being developed by Canada’s military scientists may one day be able to think for themselves.
The aim of the project by Canada’s defence research branch, launched last fall, is to improve on the current generation of remote-controlled devices designed for the battlefield.
It may sound like something from the Terminator films, but defence scientists say what they’re doing is a long way from the world envisioned by the science fiction action flicks that made California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name.
Franklin Wong, who leads the project at Canadian Forces Base Valcartier, Que., says the vehicles under study are not meant for combat but rather surveillance.
“That’s a very important capability that we’re looking for,” Wong said in a recent interview.
“Many of our projects (at Defence Research Canada) are geared towards the surveillance aspect.”
Whether these robotic vehicles should eventually be armed is an ethical debate for policy-makers and leaders, he added.
In the four-movie Terminator franchise, humanity fights in a genocidal war waged by artificially intelligent robots. Some of Schwarzenegger’s most memorable catch phrases — “Hasta la vista, baby” and “I’ll be back’ — came from his turn as one of the murderous cyborgs.
Canada’s goals are much less dramatic.
The Canadian military currently employs Israeli-made Heron unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to patrol bomb-infested roads and provide early warning of ambushes for troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
The Heron is capable of carrying weapons, but the Conservative government as recently as last spring turned down a request by the air force to install missiles on the drones that are controlled by pilots on the ground at a base station.
The U.S. employs an arsenal of sophisticated unmanned aircraft, such as the Predator and the Reaper, which have conducted an all-out aerial assault on Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists hiding in Pakistan.
The Pentagon and defence contractors have already built remotely guided armoured vehicles, such as the Gladiator. The squat six-wheeled tractors in development since 2005 for the U.S. Marine Corps are about the size of an all-terrain vehicle and bristle with rocket tubes and guns.
The U.S. Army has a bigger unmanned ground vehicle called a Crusher, something akin to a monster truck.
And armies all over the world have long used remote bomb-sniffing robots.
But taking the human out of the equation is fraught with scientific and moral challenges.
The technical hurdle to be overcome is mostly software-related. Wong calls it giving the vehicles a “certain level of autonomy,” and acknowledged policy-makers need to grapple with the implications.
“Technologically, a reconnaissance vehicle versus an armed vehicle, one is not harder than the other to make,” said Wong.
“The main difference when we talk reconnaissance vehicles versus armed vehicles really is an ethical question. Because it becomes a decision on who is going make the decision to pull the trigger.”
Defence planners see uses for robot recon vehicles in places such as the Arctic, where harsh weather conditions limit human activity. They would also be good for border surveillance, experts argue.
Last fall, the federal government awarded a sole-source contract to Quanser Consulting Inc., an Ontario company that specializes in robotics. It was given the task of acquiring vehicles and helping set up the research centre at Valcartier, where the development would be done.
Wong said a side benefit is that the military will better understand, when it comes time to buy these vehicles, what robotic technology works and what doesn’t work.
The pace of change is staggering and as long as the U.S. keeps pumping money into robotic research the vehicles will appear pretty quickly, he said. 13:11ET 10-01-10
Use biometrics for boarding pass linked to the luggage and the person who fly's that prevents this from happening
U.S. boarding pass system easy to circumvent
Published 20 January 2010
Unbelievable but true: If a terrorist obtains someone else’s
credit card, he (the terrorist) could then follow instructions on the Internet
to doctor a boarding pass; the terrorist could then show the fake boarding pass
with his own name instead of the cardholder’s, along with his own ID, to pass
through security, where the boarding pass is not scanned into the system; then
at the gate, where the terrorist is not asked to show his ID again, he can
simply hand in the real boarding pass with the cardholder’s name and be let onto
the plane
Fake boarding pass // Source: wired.com
A confluence of loopholes involving online ticketing and security screening
has Senator Chuck Schumer (D-New York) worried that terrorists could exploit
these long-known-about weaknesses to strike commercial aircraft even if their
names appeared on the federal no-fly list.
During a press conference on Sunday at his offices in New York City, Schumer
outlines broadly how watch listed terrorists could make it past security and
still board an airline, reports the Epoch Times.
While the con involves a sleight of hand, it is a rather
unsophisticated ruse.
If a terrorist obtains someone else’s credit card, they could then follow
instructions to doctor a boarding pass, which are easily accessible on the
Internet. He could then show the fake boarding pass with his own name instead of
the cardholder’s, along with his own ID to pass through security, where the
boarding pass is not scanned into the system. Then at the gate, where he is not
asked to show his ID again, he can simply hand in the real boarding pass with
the cardholder’s name and be let onto the plane. This technique was posted on a
Web site and proven achievable by an Indiana University student in 2006 and
noted in a 2007 report by Transportation Security
Administration (TSA).
More than three years ago, security maven Bruce Schneier explained this vulnerability more straightforwardly.
You can also use a fake boarding pass to fly on someone else’s ticket. The
trick is to have two boarding passes: one legitimate, in the name the
reservation is under, and another phony one that matches the name on your photo
ID. Use the fake boarding pass in your name to get through airport security, and
the real ticket in someone else’s name to board the plane.
This means that a terrorist on the no-fly list can get on a plane: He buys a
ticket in someone else’s name, perhaps using a stolen credit card, and uses his
own photo ID and a fake ticket to get through airport security. Since the ticket
is in an innocent’s name, it won’t raise a flag on the no-fly list.
Matthew Harwood writes
that to plug this security hole, Schumer wants security procedures to go back to
how they were immediately following 9/11. After the terrorist attacks,
passengers had to show their boarding pass and ID at their departing gate to
ensure the names on each document matched. After two years, however, those
security procedures were allowed to lapse. Schumer also called on the TSA to
encrypt the barcodes on boarding passes so they cannot be forged. Finally,
Schumer said he will introduce legislation making it a felony to alter or tamper
with a boarding pass. The crime, according to WPIX.com, will be tantamount to manufacturing a
fake ID. “It’s unbelievable that after years of recalibrating aviation and
airport security so that we can keep a close eye on suspicious individuals, this
enormous hole remains in the system,” Schumer said. “It has rendered the
terrorist watch list nearly useless.”
New sonic nonlethal system is so loud, it may kill
Published 20 January 2010
Military units and law enforcement have a variety of nonlethal
system which rely on emitting loud noise to cause the enemy – or unruly
demonstrators – to disperse; all sonic blasters have one problem in common: it
is difficult to have an arrangement that can impact the target without deafening
the operator – and the prolonged exposure to the deafening noise to which the
operators are exposed is even worse than short blasts to which the enemy is
exposed; the new Thunder Generator gets around this by allowing the operator be
at a safe distance
Thunder Generator // Source: physorg.com
All kinds of devices have been dubbed “sonic blasters,” from the Long
Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) super loudhailer to the piercing Banshee
to the Inferno
(”most unbearable, gut-wrenching noise I’ve ever heard in my life,” according to
Sharon Weinberger).
David Hambling writes
that a new device, developed in Israel, merits the “sonic blaster” label more
than most: the Thunder
Generator really is a blaster, producing a series of ear-splitting
explosions. Some are so loud, they could be deadly.
Israeli firm PDT Agro developed the Thunder
Generator, based on a gadget to scare away birds. The design is very simple:
gas from a cylinder of domestic liquid petroleum (LPG) is mixed with air and
then detonated, producing a series of high-intensity blasts. Patented “pulse
detonation” technology ensures high-decibel blasts. According to Defense
News, the Israeli Ministry of Defense has now licensed a firm called
ArmyTec to market
the Thunder Generator for military and security applications.
Hambling writes that the generator can produce up to a hundred blasts a
minute, with a 12-kilogram cylinder of gas running to around five thousand
blasts. ArmyTec say it can continue for “hours of continuous operation,” and
suggest that a number of generators could be networked together to cover a wide
area. Various configurations are possible, including a curved barrel for firing
around corners.
The device is designed to be used remotely. It has an effective range of up
to fifty meters, and the makers say that it is extremely loud but will not do
any lasting damage at this range. They warn, though, that within ten meters the
Thunder Generator could cause permanent damage or even death.
Explosive acoustic weapons are not in themselves a new concept. Explosives
are one of the few ways of producing a sound loud enough to have a real effect.
The Germans experimented with this in the Second World War without
much success. Back in the 1990’s Primex
Physics International carried out development work on a crowd-control
“acoustic blaster” which combined the output for four separate explosive-driven
sources. The device was so large it had to be mounted on a truck, and while the
company thought it might one day work out to a hundred meters this was
not proven.
Hambling says that the tough part has always been getting the noise to blare
in one direction. It is difficult to have an arrangement that can impact the
target without deafening the operator. Prolonged exposure is even worse than
short blasts. Electronic devices like LRAD are fairly directional, but are by no
means quiet for the user. The Thunder Generator gets around this by allowing the
operator be at a safe distance.
“Perhaps it might be more accurate to see the Thunder Generator as a sort of
repeating stun grenade;” Hambling writes. “The fuel-air blast it produces is not
dissimilar to the fuel-air explosion produced by the new Improved Flash
Bang Grenade developed at Sandia National Laboratory.”
New sonic nonlethal system is so loud, it may kill
Published 20 January 2010
Military units and law enforcement have a variety of nonlethal
system which rely on emitting loud noise to cause the enemy – or unruly
demonstrators – to disperse; all sonic blasters have one problem in common: it
is difficult to have an arrangement that can impact the target without deafening
the operator – and the prolonged exposure to the deafening noise to which the
operators are exposed is even worse than short blasts to which the enemy is
exposed; the new Thunder Generator gets around this by allowing the operator be
at a safe distance
Thunder Generator // Source: physorg.com
In at least one case a large number of blast grenades were used for their
sonic deterrent effect. During the Vietnam War, the United States operated a
number of floating river bases. There was a constant danger of attack from
Vietcong swimmers, so they were kept at bay by explosive means, as this memorial site
recalls: “Seafloat was protected from swimmer zapper attacks by throwing
concussion grenades into the water from 4 watch stations so that one grenade
exploded underneath the ammo pontoons as often as every 30 seconds 24 hours
a day.”
This approach seems to have been effective against swimmers, but it also
resulted in cracks in the pontoons, which had to be pumped out daily.
The agricultural predecessor of the Thunder Generator has been used in Israel
for nearly two years without accident. There is clearly a risk of leaving an
unattended system driven by a gas canister. There are also countermeasures: as a
British
science program showed last year, with sufficient sound insulation even the
LRAD can be damped to a tolerable level.
India awards Implant Sciences $6 million contract for
sniffer
Published 20 January 2010
India will deploy the company’s explosive detector – the
Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 – for protection of military and civilian facilities;
the sniffer comes with a large substance library which includes not only
standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of
improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs)
Implant Sciences announced
a contract totaling approximately $6 million for its Quantum Sniffer QS-H150
Portable Explosives Detectors and associated support. The contract was awarded
by the government of India, for use by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) in force
protection and public safety applications in the country.
Glenn Bolduc, president and CEO of Implant Sciences, commented, “This
contract award is significant in many ways. Most importantly, it allows Implant
Sciences to continue to contribute to worldwide anti-terrorism efforts. We are
also very pleased that this award represents the largest single order in the
company’s history.”
The company expects to ship the entire order within the current fiscal year
which ends 30 June, 2010.
Jeff Tehan, Implant Sciences’ vice president of marketing and sales, added,
“Implant Sciences is the sole contract awardee after an arduous competitive
evaluation that started over 24 months ago. We are extremely proud of this, the
validation it represents, and the follow-on opportunities it creates. To best
support this contract and others in India and South Asia, Implant Sciences has
partnered with LNG Security Services of Delhi, who will provide warranty and
post-warranty technical support, as well as operator and
administrator training.”
The company says the QS-H150 offers technical, operational, and competitive
advantages. Among the most significant are non-contact sample collection,
non-radioactive ionization, simultaneous detection and identification of
explosives particulate and vapor, continuous self-calibration, and ultra-fast
clear down (cycle time). The company also says that the substance library of the
QS-H150 is the broadest in the industry and includes not only standard military
and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade
explosives (IEDs and HMEs). The library is also easily expanded as new
threats emerge.
U.S. structural engineers begin on-site damage assessments in
Haiti
Published 20 January 2010
U.S. engineers are going to Haiti to study the earthquake and
its ramifications for structural engineering; the structural engineers emergency
response committee (SEER) of the National Council of Structural Engineers
Associations (NCSEA) -- the SEER consists of volunteer structural engineers
trained in the structural engineering aspects of emergency response to
earthquakes, hurricanes, and other disasters -- is in talks with the U.S.
government and the private sector to identify ways in which the structural
engineering community can lend its talents, skills and experience
Damage from landlsides is common in Haiti. In Port-au-Prince, there is
widespread destruction of nonductile concrete structures. Many rubble or
unreinforced masonry walls failed. The E-in-plan Presidential Palace in
Port-au-Prince still has much of the first floor intact, with windows unbroken,
but there is total collapse above the first floor. There is very light
reinforcing evident in failed columns near the entry. At the port, there is a
collapsed pier and cranes, and several buildings are under water. Extensive
lateral spreading and liquefaction is evident.
ENR’s Nadine Post writes
that these and numerous other on-site observations on damage from Haiti’s
magnitude 7 earthquake are from Eduardo Fierro, a principal of forensic and
seismic engineer at the Van Nuys, California-based Bertero Fierro Perry
Engineers Inc. Fierro is on the ground in Haiti surveying damage to bridges,
industrial buildings, the port and more. His photos of structures with major and
minor damage, along with his assessments, are available at the Haiti
Earthquake Clearinghouse Web site). The Web site is managed by the Earthquake
Engineering Research Institute.
Fierro notes odd failures in buildings with minor damage. For example, in one
building, there is a single broken window but the concrete and glass block
appears undamaged. In another area, there is a concrete structure that collapsed
but dilapidated wood structures adjacent show little sign of
earthquake damage.
More engineers are leaving to do reconnaissance work. Seismic engineer Kit
Miyamoto left 18 January for Haiti with the nonprofit Pan American Development
Foundation (PADF) of the Organization of American States. Miyamoto will provide
structural engineering expertise to support PADF disaster relief efforts.
Miyamoto, CEO of Miyamoto International, will assess structural stability of
damaged structures; identify safe access for PADF personnel; and assess the
overall structural damage conditions and how these lessons may apply to other
countries. Miyamoto’s reports from Haiti will be posted at www.miyamotointernational.com.
PADF, a natural disaster relief arm of the OAS, is sending emergency relief
supplies including food, tools, telecommunications equipment, and more. PADF
will be working with civil protection authorities, the private sector and
community organizations to provide immediate and long-term assistance.
The National Council of Structural Engineers Associations is reminding public
and private-sector personnel that they should not self-deploy to affected areas.
“The U.S. State Dept. is coordinating foreign disaster assistance, and U.S.
assets should deploy only if tasked to do so by the State Dept.,” says NCSEA, in
a 18 January press release. “The most urgent need at the present time is
supporting ongoing disaster relief fundraising efforts. When requests for
technical support are received through the proper authorities, NCSEA will look
to its member organizations to provide trained volunteers,” says
the release.
According to NCSEA, its structural engineers emergency response (SEER)
committee, which consists of volunteer structural engineers trained in the
structural engineering aspects of emergency response to earthquakes, hurricanes,
and other disasters, is currently communicating with the government and the
private sector to identify ways in which the structural engineering community
can lend its talents, skills and experience.
Use biometrics for boarding pass linked to the luggage and the person who fly's that prevents this from happening
U.S. boarding pass system easy to circumvent
Published 20 January 2010
Unbelievable but true: If a terrorist obtains someone else’s
credit card, he (the terrorist) could then follow instructions on the Internet
to doctor a boarding pass; the terrorist could then show the fake boarding pass
with his own name instead of the cardholder’s, along with his own ID, to pass
through security, where the boarding pass is not scanned into the system; then
at the gate, where the terrorist is not asked to show his ID again, he can
simply hand in the real boarding pass with the cardholder’s name and be let onto
the plane
Fake boarding pass // Source: wired.com
A confluence of loopholes involving online ticketing and security screening
has Senator Chuck Schumer (D-New York) worried that terrorists could exploit
these long-known-about weaknesses to strike commercial aircraft even if their
names appeared on the federal no-fly list.
During a press conference on Sunday at his offices in New York City, Schumer
outlines broadly how watch listed terrorists could make it past security and
still board an airline, reports the Epoch Times.
While the con involves a sleight of hand, it is a rather
unsophisticated ruse.
If a terrorist obtains someone else’s credit card, they could then follow
instructions to doctor a boarding pass, which are easily accessible on the
Internet. He could then show the fake boarding pass with his own name instead of
the cardholder’s, along with his own ID to pass through security, where the
boarding pass is not scanned into the system. Then at the gate, where he is not
asked to show his ID again, he can simply hand in the real boarding pass with
the cardholder’s name and be let onto the plane. This technique was posted on a
Web site and proven achievable by an Indiana University student in 2006 and
noted in a 2007 report by Transportation Security
Administration (TSA).
More than three years ago, security maven Bruce Schneier explained this vulnerability more straightforwardly.
You can also use a fake boarding pass to fly on someone else’s ticket. The
trick is to have two boarding passes: one legitimate, in the name the
reservation is under, and another phony one that matches the name on your photo
ID. Use the fake boarding pass in your name to get through airport security, and
the real ticket in someone else’s name to board the plane.
This means that a terrorist on the no-fly list can get on a plane: He buys a
ticket in someone else’s name, perhaps using a stolen credit card, and uses his
own photo ID and a fake ticket to get through airport security. Since the ticket
is in an innocent’s name, it won’t raise a flag on the no-fly list.
Matthew Harwood writes
that to plug this security hole, Schumer wants security procedures to go back to
how they were immediately following 9/11. After the terrorist attacks,
passengers had to show their boarding pass and ID at their departing gate to
ensure the names on each document matched. After two years, however, those
security procedures were allowed to lapse. Schumer also called on the TSA to
encrypt the barcodes on boarding passes so they cannot be forged. Finally,
Schumer said he will introduce legislation making it a felony to alter or tamper
with a boarding pass. The crime, according to WPIX.com, will be tantamount to manufacturing a
fake ID. “It’s unbelievable that after years of recalibrating aviation and
airport security so that we can keep a close eye on suspicious individuals, this
enormous hole remains in the system,” Schumer said. “It has rendered the
terrorist watch list nearly useless.”
New sonic nonlethal system is so loud, it may kill
Published 20 January 2010
Military units and law enforcement have a variety of nonlethal
system which rely on emitting loud noise to cause the enemy – or unruly
demonstrators – to disperse; all sonic blasters have one problem in common: it
is difficult to have an arrangement that can impact the target without deafening
the operator – and the prolonged exposure to the deafening noise to which the
operators are exposed is even worse than short blasts to which the enemy is
exposed; the new Thunder Generator gets around this by allowing the operator be
at a safe distance
Thunder Generator // Source: physorg.com
All kinds of devices have been dubbed “sonic blasters,” from the Long
Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) super loudhailer to the piercing Banshee
to the Inferno
(”most unbearable, gut-wrenching noise I’ve ever heard in my life,” according to
Sharon Weinberger).
David Hambling writes
that a new device, developed in Israel, merits the “sonic blaster” label more
than most: the Thunder
Generator really is a blaster, producing a series of ear-splitting
explosions. Some are so loud, they could be deadly.
Israeli firm PDT Agro developed the Thunder
Generator, based on a gadget to scare away birds. The design is very simple:
gas from a cylinder of domestic liquid petroleum (LPG) is mixed with air and
then detonated, producing a series of high-intensity blasts. Patented “pulse
detonation” technology ensures high-decibel blasts. According to Defense
News, the Israeli Ministry of Defense has now licensed a firm called
ArmyTec to market
the Thunder Generator for military and security applications.
Hambling writes that the generator can produce up to a hundred blasts a
minute, with a 12-kilogram cylinder of gas running to around five thousand
blasts. ArmyTec say it can continue for “hours of continuous operation,” and
suggest that a number of generators could be networked together to cover a wide
area. Various configurations are possible, including a curved barrel for firing
around corners.
The device is designed to be used remotely. It has an effective range of up
to fifty meters, and the makers say that it is extremely loud but will not do
any lasting damage at this range. They warn, though, that within ten meters the
Thunder Generator could cause permanent damage or even death.
Explosive acoustic weapons are not in themselves a new concept. Explosives
are one of the few ways of producing a sound loud enough to have a real effect.
The Germans experimented with this in the Second World War without
much success. Back in the 1990’s Primex
Physics International carried out development work on a crowd-control
“acoustic blaster” which combined the output for four separate explosive-driven
sources. The device was so large it had to be mounted on a truck, and while the
company thought it might one day work out to a hundred meters this was
not proven.
Hambling says that the tough part has always been getting the noise to blare
in one direction. It is difficult to have an arrangement that can impact the
target without deafening the operator. Prolonged exposure is even worse than
short blasts. Electronic devices like LRAD are fairly directional, but are by no
means quiet for the user. The Thunder Generator gets around this by allowing the
operator be at a safe distance.
“Perhaps it might be more accurate to see the Thunder Generator as a sort of
repeating stun grenade;” Hambling writes. “The fuel-air blast it produces is not
dissimilar to the fuel-air explosion produced by the new Improved Flash
Bang Grenade developed at Sandia National Laboratory.”
New sonic nonlethal system is so loud, it may kill
Published 20 January 2010
Military units and law enforcement have a variety of nonlethal
system which rely on emitting loud noise to cause the enemy – or unruly
demonstrators – to disperse; all sonic blasters have one problem in common: it
is difficult to have an arrangement that can impact the target without deafening
the operator – and the prolonged exposure to the deafening noise to which the
operators are exposed is even worse than short blasts to which the enemy is
exposed; the new Thunder Generator gets around this by allowing the operator be
at a safe distance
Thunder Generator // Source: physorg.com
In at least one case a large number of blast grenades were used for their
sonic deterrent effect. During the Vietnam War, the United States operated a
number of floating river bases. There was a constant danger of attack from
Vietcong swimmers, so they were kept at bay by explosive means, as this memorial site
recalls: “Seafloat was protected from swimmer zapper attacks by throwing
concussion grenades into the water from 4 watch stations so that one grenade
exploded underneath the ammo pontoons as often as every 30 seconds 24 hours
a day.”
This approach seems to have been effective against swimmers, but it also
resulted in cracks in the pontoons, which had to be pumped out daily.
The agricultural predecessor of the Thunder Generator has been used in Israel
for nearly two years without accident. There is clearly a risk of leaving an
unattended system driven by a gas canister. There are also countermeasures: as a
British
science program showed last year, with sufficient sound insulation even the
LRAD can be damped to a tolerable level.
India awards Implant Sciences $6 million contract for
sniffer
Published 20 January 2010
India will deploy the company’s explosive detector – the
Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 – for protection of military and civilian facilities;
the sniffer comes with a large substance library which includes not only
standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of
improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs)
Implant Sciences announced
a contract totaling approximately $6 million for its Quantum Sniffer QS-H150
Portable Explosives Detectors and associated support. The contract was awarded
by the government of India, for use by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) in force
protection and public safety applications in the country.
Glenn Bolduc, president and CEO of Implant Sciences, commented, “This
contract award is significant in many ways. Most importantly, it allows Implant
Sciences to continue to contribute to worldwide anti-terrorism efforts. We are
also very pleased that this award represents the largest single order in the
company’s history.”
The company expects to ship the entire order within the current fiscal year
which ends 30 June, 2010.
Jeff Tehan, Implant Sciences’ vice president of marketing and sales, added,
“Implant Sciences is the sole contract awardee after an arduous competitive
evaluation that started over 24 months ago. We are extremely proud of this, the
validation it represents, and the follow-on opportunities it creates. To best
support this contract and others in India and South Asia, Implant Sciences has
partnered with LNG Security Services of Delhi, who will provide warranty and
post-warranty technical support, as well as operator and
administrator training.”
The company says the QS-H150 offers technical, operational, and competitive
advantages. Among the most significant are non-contact sample collection,
non-radioactive ionization, simultaneous detection and identification of
explosives particulate and vapor, continuous self-calibration, and ultra-fast
clear down (cycle time). The company also says that the substance library of the
QS-H150 is the broadest in the industry and includes not only standard military
and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade
explosives (IEDs and HMEs). The library is also easily expanded as new
threats emerge.
U.S. structural engineers begin on-site damage assessments in
Haiti
Use biometrics for boarding pass linked to the luggage and the person who fly's that prevents this from happening
U.S. boarding pass system easy to circumvent
Published 20 January 2010
Unbelievable but true: If a terrorist obtains someone else’s
credit card, he (the terrorist) could then follow instructions on the Internet
to doctor a boarding pass; the terrorist could then show the fake boarding pass
with his own name instead of the cardholder’s, along with his own ID, to pass
through security, where the boarding pass is not scanned into the system; then
at the gate, where the terrorist is not asked to show his ID again, he can
simply hand in the real boarding pass with the cardholder’s name and be let onto
the plane
Fake boarding pass // Source: wired.com
A confluence of loopholes involving online ticketing and security screening
has Senator Chuck Schumer (D-New York) worried that terrorists could exploit
these long-known-about weaknesses to strike commercial aircraft even if their
names appeared on the federal no-fly list.
During a press conference on Sunday at his offices in New York City, Schumer
outlines broadly how watch listed terrorists could make it past security and
still board an airline, reports the Epoch Times.
While the con involves a sleight of hand, it is a rather
unsophisticated ruse.
If a terrorist obtains someone else’s credit card, they could then follow
instructions to doctor a boarding pass, which are easily accessible on the
Internet. He could then show the fake boarding pass with his own name instead of
the cardholder’s, along with his own ID to pass through security, where the
boarding pass is not scanned into the system. Then at the gate, where he is not
asked to show his ID again, he can simply hand in the real boarding pass with
the cardholder’s name and be let onto the plane. This technique was posted on a
Web site and proven achievable by an Indiana University student in 2006 and
noted in a 2007 report by Transportation Security
Administration (TSA).
More than three years ago, security maven Bruce Schneier explained this vulnerability more straightforwardly.
You can also use a fake boarding pass to fly on someone else’s ticket. The
trick is to have two boarding passes: one legitimate, in the name the
reservation is under, and another phony one that matches the name on your photo
ID. Use the fake boarding pass in your name to get through airport security, and
the real ticket in someone else’s name to board the plane.
This means that a terrorist on the no-fly list can get on a plane: He buys a
ticket in someone else’s name, perhaps using a stolen credit card, and uses his
own photo ID and a fake ticket to get through airport security. Since the ticket
is in an innocent’s name, it won’t raise a flag on the no-fly list.
Matthew Harwood writes
that to plug this security hole, Schumer wants security procedures to go back to
how they were immediately following 9/11. After the terrorist attacks,
passengers had to show their boarding pass and ID at their departing gate to
ensure the names on each document matched. After two years, however, those
security procedures were allowed to lapse. Schumer also called on the TSA to
encrypt the barcodes on boarding passes so they cannot be forged. Finally,
Schumer said he will introduce legislation making it a felony to alter or tamper
with a boarding pass. The crime, according to WPIX.com, will be tantamount to manufacturing a
fake ID. “It’s unbelievable that after years of recalibrating aviation and
airport security so that we can keep a close eye on suspicious individuals, this
enormous hole remains in the system,” Schumer said. “It has rendered the
terrorist watch list nearly useless.”
New sonic nonlethal system is so loud, it may kill
Published 20 January 2010
Military units and law enforcement have a variety of nonlethal
system which rely on emitting loud noise to cause the enemy – or unruly
demonstrators – to disperse; all sonic blasters have one problem in common: it
is difficult to have an arrangement that can impact the target without deafening
the operator – and the prolonged exposure to the deafening noise to which the
operators are exposed is even worse than short blasts to which the enemy is
exposed; the new Thunder Generator gets around this by allowing the operator be
at a safe distance
Thunder Generator // Source: physorg.com
All kinds of devices have been dubbed “sonic blasters,” from the Long
Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) super loudhailer to the piercing Banshee
to the Inferno
(”most unbearable, gut-wrenching noise I’ve ever heard in my life,” according to
Sharon Weinberger).
David Hambling writes
that a new device, developed in Israel, merits the “sonic blaster” label more
than most: the Thunder
Generator really is a blaster, producing a series of ear-splitting
explosions. Some are so loud, they could be deadly.
Israeli firm PDT Agro developed the Thunder
Generator, based on a gadget to scare away birds. The design is very simple:
gas from a cylinder of domestic liquid petroleum (LPG) is mixed with air and
then detonated, producing a series of high-intensity blasts. Patented “pulse
detonation” technology ensures high-decibel blasts. According to Defense
News, the Israeli Ministry of Defense has now licensed a firm called
ArmyTec to market
the Thunder Generator for military and security applications.
Hambling writes that the generator can produce up to a hundred blasts a
minute, with a 12-kilogram cylinder of gas running to around five thousand
blasts. ArmyTec say it can continue for “hours of continuous operation,” and
suggest that a number of generators could be networked together to cover a wide
area. Various configurations are possible, including a curved barrel for firing
around corners.
The device is designed to be used remotely. It has an effective range of up
to fifty meters, and the makers say that it is extremely loud but will not do
any lasting damage at this range. They warn, though, that within ten meters the
Thunder Generator could cause permanent damage or even death.
Explosive acoustic weapons are not in themselves a new concept. Explosives
are one of the few ways of producing a sound loud enough to have a real effect.
The Germans experimented with this in the Second World War without
much success. Back in the 1990’s Primex
Physics International carried out development work on a crowd-control
“acoustic blaster” which combined the output for four separate explosive-driven
sources. The device was so large it had to be mounted on a truck, and while the
company thought it might one day work out to a hundred meters this was
not proven.
Hambling says that the tough part has always been getting the noise to blare
in one direction. It is difficult to have an arrangement that can impact the
target without deafening the operator. Prolonged exposure is even worse than
short blasts. Electronic devices like LRAD are fairly directional, but are by no
means quiet for the user. The Thunder Generator gets around this by allowing the
operator be at a safe distance.
“Perhaps it might be more accurate to see the Thunder Generator as a sort of
repeating stun grenade;” Hambling writes. “The fuel-air blast it produces is not
dissimilar to the fuel-air explosion produced by the new Improved Flash
Bang Grenade developed at Sandia National Laboratory.”
New sonic nonlethal system is so loud, it may kill
Published 20 January 2010
Military units and law enforcement have a variety of nonlethal
system which rely on emitting loud noise to cause the enemy – or unruly
demonstrators – to disperse; all sonic blasters have one problem in common: it
is difficult to have an arrangement that can impact the target without deafening
the operator – and the prolonged exposure to the deafening noise to which the
operators are exposed is even worse than short blasts to which the enemy is
exposed; the new Thunder Generator gets around this by allowing the operator be
at a safe distance
Thunder Generator // Source: physorg.com
In at least one case a large number of blast grenades were used for their
sonic deterrent effect. During the Vietnam War, the United States operated a
number of floating river bases. There was a constant danger of attack from
Vietcong swimmers, so they were kept at bay by explosive means, as this memorial site
recalls: “Seafloat was protected from swimmer zapper attacks by throwing
concussion grenades into the water from 4 watch stations so that one grenade
exploded underneath the ammo pontoons as often as every 30 seconds 24 hours
a day.”
This approach seems to have been effective against swimmers, but it also
resulted in cracks in the pontoons, which had to be pumped out daily.
The agricultural predecessor of the Thunder Generator has been used in Israel
for nearly two years without accident. There is clearly a risk of leaving an
unattended system driven by a gas canister. There are also countermeasures: as a
British
science program showed last year, with sufficient sound insulation even the
LRAD can be damped to a tolerable level.
India awards Implant Sciences $6 million contract for
sniffer
Use biometrics for boarding pass linked to the luggage and the person who fly's that prevents this from happening
U.S. boarding pass system easy to circumvent
Published 20 January 2010
Unbelievable but true: If a terrorist obtains someone else’s
credit card, he (the terrorist) could then follow instructions on the Internet
to doctor a boarding pass; the terrorist could then show the fake boarding pass
with his own name instead of the cardholder’s, along with his own ID, to pass
through security, where the boarding pass is not scanned into the system; then
at the gate, where the terrorist is not asked to show his ID again, he can
simply hand in the real boarding pass with the cardholder’s name and be let onto
the plane
Fake boarding pass // Source: wired.com
A confluence of loopholes involving online ticketing and security screening
has Senator Chuck Schumer (D-New York) worried that terrorists could exploit
these long-known-about weaknesses to strike commercial aircraft even if their
names appeared on the federal no-fly list.
During a press conference on Sunday at his offices in New York City, Schumer
outlines broadly how watch listed terrorists could make it past security and
still board an airline, reports the Epoch Times.
While the con involves a sleight of hand, it is a rather
unsophisticated ruse.
If a terrorist obtains someone else’s credit card, they could then follow
instructions to doctor a boarding pass, which are easily accessible on the
Internet. He could then show the fake boarding pass with his own name instead of
the cardholder’s, along with his own ID to pass through security, where the
boarding pass is not scanned into the system. Then at the gate, where he is not
asked to show his ID again, he can simply hand in the real boarding pass with
the cardholder’s name and be let onto the plane. This technique was posted on a
Web site and proven achievable by an Indiana University student in 2006 and
noted in a 2007 report by Transportation Security
Administration (TSA).
More than three years ago, security maven Bruce Schneier explained this vulnerability more straightforwardly.
You can also use a fake boarding pass to fly on someone else’s ticket. The
trick is to have two boarding passes: one legitimate, in the name the
reservation is under, and another phony one that matches the name on your photo
ID. Use the fake boarding pass in your name to get through airport security, and
the real ticket in someone else’s name to board the plane.
This means that a terrorist on the no-fly list can get on a plane: He buys a
ticket in someone else’s name, perhaps using a stolen credit card, and uses his
own photo ID and a fake ticket to get through airport security. Since the ticket
is in an innocent’s name, it won’t raise a flag on the no-fly list.
Matthew Harwood writes
that to plug this security hole, Schumer wants security procedures to go back to
how they were immediately following 9/11. After the terrorist attacks,
passengers had to show their boarding pass and ID at their departing gate to
ensure the names on each document matched. After two years, however, those
security procedures were allowed to lapse. Schumer also called on the TSA to
encrypt the barcodes on boarding passes so they cannot be forged. Finally,
Schumer said he will introduce legislation making it a felony to alter or tamper
with a boarding pass. The crime, according to WPIX.com, will be tantamount to manufacturing a
fake ID. “It’s unbelievable that after years of recalibrating aviation and
airport security so that we can keep a close eye on suspicious individuals, this
enormous hole remains in the system,” Schumer said. “It has rendered the
terrorist watch list nearly useless.”
New sonic nonlethal system is so loud, it may kill
Use biometrics for boarding pass linked to the luggage and the person who fly's that prevents this from happening
U.S. boarding pass system easy to circumvent
Published 20 January 2010
Unbelievable but true: If a terrorist obtains someone else’s credit card, he (the terrorist) could then follow instructions on the Internet to doctor a boarding pass; the terrorist could then show the fake boarding pass with his own name instead of the cardholder’s, along with his own ID, to pass through security, where the boarding pass is not scanned into the system; then at the gate, where the terrorist is not asked to show his ID again, he can simply hand in the real boarding pass with the cardholder’s name and be let onto the plane
Fake boarding pass // Source: wired.com
A confluence of loopholes involving online ticketing and security screening has Senator Chuck Schumer (D-New York) worried that terrorists could exploit these long-known-about weaknesses to strike commercial aircraft even if their names appeared on the federal no-fly list.
During a press conference on Sunday at his offices in New York City, Schumer outlines broadly how watch listed terrorists could make it past security and still board an airline, reports the Epoch Times.
While the con involves a sleight of hand, it is a rather unsophisticated ruse.
If a terrorist obtains someone else’s credit card, they could then follow instructions to doctor a boarding pass, which are easily accessible on the Internet. He could then show the fake boarding pass with his own name instead of the cardholder’s, along with his own ID to pass through security, where the boarding pass is not scanned into the system. Then at the gate, where he is not asked to show his ID again, he can simply hand in the real boarding pass with the cardholder’s name and be let onto the plane. This technique was posted on a Web site and proven achievable by an Indiana University student in 2006 and noted in a 2007 report by Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
More than three years ago, security maven Bruce Schneier explained this vulnerability more straightforwardly.
You can also use a fake boarding pass to fly on someone else’s ticket. The trick is to have two boarding passes: one legitimate, in the name the reservation is under, and another phony one that matches the name on your photo ID. Use the fake boarding pass in your name to get through airport security, and the real ticket in someone else’s name to board the plane.
This means that a terrorist on the no-fly list can get on a plane: He buys a ticket in someone else’s name, perhaps using a stolen credit card, and uses his own photo ID and a fake ticket to get through airport security. Since the ticket is in an innocent’s name, it won’t raise a flag on the no-fly list.
Matthew Harwood writes that to plug this security hole, Schumer wants security procedures to go back to how they were immediately following 9/11. After the terrorist attacks, passengers had to show their boarding pass and ID at their departing gate to ensure the names on each document matched. After two years, however, those security procedures were allowed to lapse. Schumer also called on the TSA to encrypt the barcodes on boarding passes so they cannot be forged. Finally, Schumer said he will introduce legislation making it a felony to alter or tamper with a boarding pass. The crime, according to WPIX.com, will be tantamount to manufacturing a fake ID. “It’s unbelievable that after years of recalibrating aviation and airport security so that we can keep a close eye on suspicious individuals, this enormous hole remains in the system,” Schumer said. “It has rendered the terrorist watch list nearly useless.”
Published 20 January 2010
Military units and law enforcement have a variety of nonlethal system which rely on emitting loud noise to cause the enemy – or unruly demonstrators – to disperse; all sonic blasters have one problem in common: it is difficult to have an arrangement that can impact the target without deafening the operator – and the prolonged exposure to the deafening noise to which the operators are exposed is even worse than short blasts to which the enemy is exposed; the new Thunder Generator gets around this by allowing the operator be at a safe distance
Thunder Generator // Source: physorg.com
All kinds of devices have been dubbed “sonic blasters,” from the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) super loudhailer to the piercing Banshee to the Inferno (”most unbearable, gut-wrenching noise I’ve ever heard in my life,” according to Sharon Weinberger).
David Hambling writes that a new device, developed in Israel, merits the “sonic blaster” label more than most: the Thunder Generator really is a blaster, producing a series of ear-splitting explosions. Some are so loud, they could be deadly.
Israeli firm PDT Agro developed the Thunder Generator, based on a gadget to scare away birds. The design is very simple: gas from a cylinder of domestic liquid petroleum (LPG) is mixed with air and then detonated, producing a series of high-intensity blasts. Patented “pulse detonation” technology ensures high-decibel blasts. According to Defense News, the Israeli Ministry of Defense has now licensed a firm called ArmyTec to market the Thunder Generator for military and security applications.
Hambling writes that the generator can produce up to a hundred blasts a minute, with a 12-kilogram cylinder of gas running to around five thousand blasts. ArmyTec say it can continue for “hours of continuous operation,” and suggest that a number of generators could be networked together to cover a wide area. Various configurations are possible, including a curved barrel for firing around corners.
The device is designed to be used remotely. It has an effective range of up to fifty meters, and the makers say that it is extremely loud but will not do any lasting damage at this range. They warn, though, that within ten meters the Thunder Generator could cause permanent damage or even death.
Explosive acoustic weapons are not in themselves a new concept. Explosives are one of the few ways of producing a sound loud enough to have a real effect. The Germans experimented with this in the Second World War without much success. Back in the 1990’s Primex Physics International carried out development work on a crowd-control “acoustic blaster” which combined the output for four separate explosive-driven sources. The device was so large it had to be mounted on a truck, and while the company thought it might one day work out to a hundred meters this was not proven.
Hambling says that the tough part has always been getting the noise to blare in one direction. It is difficult to have an arrangement that can impact the target without deafening the operator. Prolonged exposure is even worse than short blasts. Electronic devices like LRAD are fairly directional, but are by no means quiet for the user. The Thunder Generator gets around this by allowing the operator be at a safe distance.
“Perhaps it might be more accurate to see the Thunder Generator as a sort of repeating stun grenade;” Hambling writes. “The fuel-air blast it produces is not dissimilar to the fuel-air explosion produced by the new Improved Flash Bang Grenade developed at Sandia National Laboratory.”
New sonic nonlethal system is so loud, it may kill
Published 20 January 2010
Military units and law enforcement have a variety of nonlethal system which rely on emitting loud noise to cause the enemy – or unruly demonstrators – to disperse; all sonic blasters have one problem in common: it is difficult to have an arrangement that can impact the target without deafening the operator – and the prolonged exposure to the deafening noise to which the operators are exposed is even worse than short blasts to which the enemy is exposed; the new Thunder Generator gets around this by allowing the operator be at a safe distance
Thunder Generator // Source: physorg.com
In at least one case a large number of blast grenades were used for their sonic deterrent effect. During the Vietnam War, the United States operated a number of floating river bases. There was a constant danger of attack from Vietcong swimmers, so they were kept at bay by explosive means, as this memorial site recalls: “Seafloat was protected from swimmer zapper attacks by throwing concussion grenades into the water from 4 watch stations so that one grenade exploded underneath the ammo pontoons as often as every 30 seconds 24 hours a day.”
This approach seems to have been effective against swimmers, but it also resulted in cracks in the pontoons, which had to be pumped out daily.
The agricultural predecessor of the Thunder Generator has been used in Israel for nearly two years without accident. There is clearly a risk of leaving an unattended system driven by a gas canister. There are also countermeasures: as a British science program showed last year, with sufficient sound insulation even the LRAD can be damped to a tolerable level.
Published 20 January 2010
India will deploy the company’s explosive detector – the Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 – for protection of military and civilian facilities; the sniffer comes with a large substance library which includes not only standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs)
Implant Sciences announced a contract totaling approximately $6 million for its Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 Portable Explosives Detectors and associated support. The contract was awarded by the government of India, for use by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) in force protection and public safety applications in the country.
Glenn Bolduc, president and CEO of Implant Sciences, commented, “This contract award is significant in many ways. Most importantly, it allows Implant Sciences to continue to contribute to worldwide anti-terrorism efforts. We are also very pleased that this award represents the largest single order in the company’s history.”
The company expects to ship the entire order within the current fiscal year which ends 30 June, 2010.
Jeff Tehan, Implant Sciences’ vice president of marketing and sales, added, “Implant Sciences is the sole contract awardee after an arduous competitive evaluation that started over 24 months ago. We are extremely proud of this, the validation it represents, and the follow-on opportunities it creates. To best support this contract and others in India and South Asia, Implant Sciences has partnered with LNG Security Services of Delhi, who will provide warranty and post-warranty technical support, as well as operator and administrator training.”
The company says the QS-H150 offers technical, operational, and competitive advantages. Among the most significant are non-contact sample collection, non-radioactive ionization, simultaneous detection and identification of explosives particulate and vapor, continuous self-calibration, and ultra-fast clear down (cycle time). The company also says that the substance library of the QS-H150 is the broadest in the industry and includes not only standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs). The library is also easily expanded as new threats emerge.
Published 20 January 2010
U.S. engineers are going to Haiti to study the earthquake and its ramifications for structural engineering; the structural engineers emergency response committee (SEER) of the National Council of Structural Engineers Associations (NCSEA) -- the SEER consists of volunteer structural engineers trained in the structural engineering aspects of emergency response to earthquakes, hurricanes, and other disasters -- is in talks with the U.S. government and the private sector to identify ways in which the structural engineering community can lend its talents, skills and experience
Damage from landlsides is common in Haiti. In Port-au-Prince, there is widespread destruction of nonductile concrete structures. Many rubble or unreinforced masonry walls failed. The E-in-plan Presidential Palace in Port-au-Prince still has much of the first floor intact, with windows unbroken, but there is total collapse above the first floor. There is very light reinforcing evident in failed columns near the entry. At the port, there is a collapsed pier and cranes, and several buildings are under water. Extensive lateral spreading and liquefaction is evident.
ENR’s Nadine Post writes that these and numerous other on-site observations on damage from Haiti’s magnitude 7 earthquake are from Eduardo Fierro, a principal of forensic and seismic engineer at the Van Nuys, California-based Bertero Fierro Perry Engineers Inc. Fierro is on the ground in Haiti surveying damage to bridges, industrial buildings, the port and more. His photos of structures with major and minor damage, along with his assessments, are available at the Haiti Earthquake Clearinghouse Web site). The Web site is managed by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.
Fierro notes odd failures in buildings with minor damage. For example, in one building, there is a single broken window but the concrete and glass block appears undamaged. In another area, there is a concrete structure that collapsed but dilapidated wood structures adjacent show little sign of earthquake damage.
More engineers are leaving to do reconnaissance work. Seismic engineer Kit Miyamoto left 18 January for Haiti with the nonprofit Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) of the Organization of American States. Miyamoto will provide structural engineering expertise to support PADF disaster relief efforts. Miyamoto, CEO of Miyamoto International, will assess structural stability of damaged structures; identify safe access for PADF personnel; and assess the overall structural damage conditions and how these lessons may apply to other countries. Miyamoto’s reports from Haiti will be posted at www.miyamotointernational.com.
PADF, a natural disaster relief arm of the OAS, is sending emergency relief supplies including food, tools, telecommunications equipment, and more. PADF will be working with civil protection authorities, the private sector and community organizations to provide immediate and long-term assistance.
The National Council of Structural Engineers Associations is reminding public and private-sector personnel that they should not self-deploy to affected areas. “The U.S. State Dept. is coordinating foreign disaster assistance, and U.S. assets should deploy only if tasked to do so by the State Dept.,” says NCSEA, in a 18 January press release. “The most urgent need at the present time is supporting ongoing disaster relief fundraising efforts. When requests for technical support are received through the proper authorities, NCSEA will look to its member organizations to provide trained volunteers,” says the release.
According to NCSEA, its structural engineers emergency response (SEER) committee, which consists of volunteer structural engineers trained in the structural engineering aspects of emergency response to earthquakes, hurricanes, and other disasters, is currently communicating with the government and the private sector to identify ways in which the structural engineering community can lend its talents, skills and experience.
Great Idea rather than combo and the key as should hotels with entry rather than a pass card
Biometric travel luggage for secure, stylish travel
Published 20 January 2010
The biometric business case offers travelers a high level of security for their luggage; the case can be opened only if the built-in scanner recognizes the fingerprints of the individual trying to open it; for family luggage, the fingerprints of several family members may be programmed into the scanner’s memory
Biometric luggage // Source: coolmaterial.com
For security-conscious travelers, the Biometric Business Case from AvidBiometrics offers travel in style and in security with the ultimate biometric suitcase and roller cases. The Biometric is using the same technology trusted to secure high-level state secrets, this is the only business case with a biometric security scanner. A scanner on top of the case reads your fingerprint, compares it to its internal database, and provides access only when it detects a perfect match, providing an unprecedented level of security when traveling with sensitive business documents or valuables.
Its memory stores up to eight fingerprints, allowing associates or family with approved security clearance to access the contents. Made from high-density, flexible polycarbonate, the hard-sided business case withstands 250 lb/ft of force and reverts to its original shape, thwarting cracks or dents and protecting what’s inside.
The case has two 3 1/2? ball bearing wheels and a telescoping aluminum handle. The scanner’s battery lasts up to 90 days and recharges via the included USB cable or AC adapter.
Israel can use stockpiled U.S. arms
In the 34-day
2006 war with Hezbollah, Israeli stocks of air force bombs and artillery
ammunition were seriously depleted, almost to what the army deemed a critical
level.
by Staff
Writers
Tel Aviv, Israel (UPI) Jan 19, 2009
The U.S. Army is reportedly building up stockpiles of
missiles, armored vehicles, artillery shells and other equipment in Israel that
the Israelis will be allowed to use in an emergency.
The increase in the U.S. arsenal in the Jewish state now under way, reported
by the Washington-based Defense News weekly, will reinforce support for Israel
by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama in the confrontation with
Iran over its contentious nuclear program.
That commitment was evidenced by a two-week joint air-defense exercise,
Juniper Cobra 10, by U.S. and Israeli missile forces in October-November 2009,
the largest exercise ever held by the two allies.
Some 1,500 U.S. personnel, along with 17 warships from the 6th Fleet,
participated in countering simulated attacks by ballistic, medium-range and
short-range missiles and rockets on Israel.
These efforts are also seen as an attempt by the Obama administration to
reassure Israel that the Americans will support them in a confrontation with
Iran -- though not necessarily with combat forces -- and to encourage the Jewish
state not to launch unilateral air and missile strikes at Iran's nuclear
facilities.
In 2008 the Pentagon also installed a strategic long-range X-band radar
system at Nevatim air base in the Negev Desert south of Tel Aviv. It can detect
incoming missiles from hundreds of miles away.
At the time Juniper Cobra was being held, there were reports that the
Americans would leave several Patriot PAC-3 air-defense systems behind once the
maneuvers ended.
It is not clear whether they are included in the reported increase in U.S.
stockpiles.
The expansion of these stockpiles emerged amid a heightening of tension with
Iran, as a U.S.-led dialogue with Tehran appeared to flounder after four months
of tortuous negotiations that have failed to produce any concrete agreement by
Iran to curb its nuclear program.
The Israelis view a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat and have said
they will launch unilateral military
strikes against the Islamic Republic if it believes Tehran is close to acquiring
nuclear weapons.
Israel's leadership believes Iran is using the talks to buy time to push
forward with its program and that 2010 will be the year of decision regarding
military action.
This has led to reviews of Israel's strategic position in the event of
hostilities.
Any conflict that erupts will probably not be a swift exchange of airstrikes
and missile salvoes, as many expect, but will probably drag on for weeks or
months.
According Amos Harel, an analyst with the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, a
key Israeli Defense Ministry researcher, Moshe Vered, has concluded that "the
ideology of the Iranian regime
will dictate a prolonged war."
Harel wrote that Vered argues that the length of that war "will be measured
in years, not in weeks or days" because of the Shiite perception "by which one
must fight and sacrifice for the sake of justice and to correct wrongs to Islam
and to Muslims."
"This outlook sees Israel's existence as a wrong that must be corrected for
the sake of world redemption. Â…
"Iran's willingness to sacrifice many victims for a long period of time in a
conflict with Israel will dictate a prolonged war between the two states that
will be difficult to end."
If that is the case, U.S. military stockpiles in Israel may be increased
further.
Israeli
forces
ran critically short of ordnance and military equipment in the October 1973 war
when the Jewish state was attacked by Egypt and Syria and was nearly
overwhelmed.
Only a major U.S. airlift ordered by President Richard Nixon saved the
day.
In the 34-day 2006 war with Hezbollah,
Israeli stocks of air
force
bombs and artillery ammunition were seriously depleted, almost to what the
army
deemed a critical level.
According to Defense News, the current buildup "is the final phase of a
process that began over a year ago to determine the type and amount of U.S.
weapons and ammunition to be stored in Israel."
That, it added, was "part of an overarching American effort to stockpile
weapons in areas in which its army may need to operate, while allowing American
allies to make use of the ordnance in emergencies."
The United States began stockpiling $100 million in military equipment in
Israel in 1990.
Iran threatens to hit Western warships in Gulf if
attacked
Six-power
talks on Iran constructive: US
Washington (AFP) Jan 19, 2010 - The latest
talks by six world powers on the nuclear standoff with Iran were constructive,
US officials said Tuesday. "We are moving on both tracks," said State Department
spokesman Philip Crowley, referring to diplomacy and the threat of further
sanctions. "We believe we are making progress." Crowley, however, said Iran's
response to the international community's demands for assurances about its
nuclear program have been inadequate. The five permament members of the UN
Security Council -- the United States, France, Germany, Russia and China -- plus
Germany met Saturday in New York but reached no decision on further sanctions
against Iran. China in particular has resisted sanctions. Iran's Foreign
Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Monday welcomed the "realistic approach" taken by
the six powers, while China called on the sides to "show flexibility" and to
stick with diplomacy despite the impasse. "We continue our conversations in
terms of options that are available to us, both in terms of the Security Council
going forward but also steps that can be taken in a coordinated way on a
national basis," Crowley said. US senators have drawn up a bill that if adopted
would impose sanctions on companies that export fuel to Iran. The sanctions
imposed so far by the United Nations principally target Iran's proliferation
activity, having little real economic impact. The United States, Britain,
France, Russia and Germany want them to be enhanced to target the revenues of
the Iranian regime.
by Staff
Writers
Tehran (AFP) Jan 19, 2010
Iran's
Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi said Tuesday that Western warships stationed in
the Gulf are "best targets" for the Islamic republic if its nuclear sites are
attacked, Fars news agency reported.
Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened to deliver a "crushing response"
and hit US targets, including its bases in the Gulf and neighbouring Iraq
and
Afghanistan,
if Iran's nuclear sites are attacked.
"Why are there so many warships there? The Westerners know that these
warships are the best target for operation by Iran if they do anything against
(us)," Vahidi told a conference entitled "Persian Gulf" in Tehran.
He also criticised the building of US bases in the region and Washington's
"unofficial presence in Yemen."
The United States and its regional ally Israel, which accuse Iran of seeking
atomic weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme, have never ruled
out a military option to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive.
Iran denies the charges and has continued to expand its nuclear programme
despite UN sanctions.
earlier related report
Iran welcomes West's new
'realism' on nuclear drive
Tehran (AFP) Jan 19, 2010 - Iran on Tuesday
welcomed what it called the West's newfound "realism" on Tehran's controversial
atomic programme after world powers failed to decide on new sanctions.
The United States, meanwhile, said Iran's response to the international
community's demands for assurances about its nuclear programme was inadequate
while Britain warned of punitive financial measures.
But China, one of six world powers with Washington and London
involved in talks on Iran, urged flexibility in the standoff over Tehran's
nuclear drive and a return to talks.
However, Iranian Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi renewed a warning that
Tehran's forces could hit Western warships in the Gulf if it comes under attack
over the nuclear standoff.
On the diplomatic front, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told
reporters: "Speaking of sanctions is repetitive and it is not constructive.
"Some Western countries... should correct their approach and be realistic
about our (nuclear) rights. And we feel there are traces of realism to be seen,"
he added.
On Monday, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki made similar positive
comments.
"We are ready to help with the realistic approach and at the same time we
will wait for public and backstage developments in Iran's nuclear case," Mottaki
told reporters.
US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said recent talks by six world
powers on the nuclear standoff with Iran were constructive. "We are moving on
both tracks," he said, about diplomacy and the threat of further sanctions.
But Iran's response to demands for assurances about its nuclear program
remains inadequate, he said.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said financial sanctions could help
bring the Islamic state into line.
"We believe that financial sanctions... have an important role to play in
exerting pressure at the appropriate points in the (Iranian) regime and not
affecting the Iranian people," Miliband told lawmakers.
World powers made up of the UN Security Council's five permanent members plus
Germany met in New York on Saturday but failed to reach an agreement about new
sanctions.
The six are concerned about Tehran's rejection of a UN-brokered deal under
which most of Iran's low enriched uranium (LEU) stockpile would be shipped
abroad to be further enriched into reactor fuel.
Iran has come up with its own counter-proposal of a staged and simultaneous
swap of LEU with nuclear reactor fuel. This has been largely rejected by world
powers, insisting Tehran accept the International Atomic Energy Agency
offer.
The New York meeting brought together senior officials from Britain, France,
Germany, Russia and the United States. But China, signalling its reluctance to
back tougher sanctions pushed by the West, sent a lower-level diplomat.
In Beijing,
Mehmanparast's opposite number, Ma Zhaoxu, also at a press conference on
Tuesday, said: "China has all along proposed the proper settlement
of the Iran nuclear issue through dialogue and consultation ...
"We hope relevant parties can enhance consultations, show flexibility and
promote the early peaceful solution of the relevant issue in a proper
manner."
Ma said his country was aware of the proliferation concerns of the Western
nations but insisted the Islamic republic had the right to the peaceful use of
nuclear energy.
Iran's defence minister reiterated that his country was not cowed by the
threat of military action.
"Why are there so many warships there? The Westerners know that these
warships are the best target for operation by Iran if they do anything against
(us)," Vahidi said.
Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened to deliver a "crushing response"
and hit US targets, including its bases in the Gulf and neighbouring Iraq and
Afghanistan, if Iran's nuclear sites are attacked.
The United States and its regional ally Israel, which accuse Iran of seeking
atomic weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme, have never ruled
out a military option to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive.
Iran denies the charges.
India awards Implant Sciences $6 million contract for
sniffer
Published 20 January 2010
India will deploy the company’s explosive detector – the
Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 – for protection of military and civilian facilities;
the sniffer comes with a large substance library which includes not only
standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of
improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs)
Implant Sciences announced
a contract totaling approximately $6 million for its Quantum Sniffer QS-H150
Portable Explosives Detectors and associated support. The contract was awarded
by the government of India, for use by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) in force
protection and public safety applications in the country.
Glenn Bolduc, president and CEO of Implant Sciences, commented, “This
contract award is significant in many ways. Most importantly, it allows Implant
Sciences to continue to contribute to worldwide anti-terrorism efforts. We are
also very pleased that this award represents the largest single order in the
company’s history.”
The company expects to ship the entire order within the current fiscal year
which ends 30 June, 2010.
Jeff Tehan, Implant Sciences’ vice president of marketing and sales, added,
“Implant Sciences is the sole contract awardee after an arduous competitive
evaluation that started over 24 months ago. We are extremely proud of this, the
validation it represents, and the follow-on opportunities it creates. To best
support this contract and others in India and South Asia, Implant Sciences has
partnered with LNG Security Services of Delhi, who will provide warranty and
post-warranty technical support, as well as operator and
administrator training.”
The company says the QS-H150 offers technical, operational, and competitive
advantages. Among the most significant are non-contact sample collection,
non-radioactive ionization, simultaneous detection and identification of
explosives particulate and vapor, continuous self-calibration, and ultra-fast
clear down (cycle time). The company also says that the substance library of the
QS-H150 is the broadest in the industry and includes not only standard military
and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade
explosives (IEDs and HMEs). The library is also easily expanded as new
threats emerge.
Sniffing Out Terrorists
File image
courtesy AFP.
by Staff
Writers
Munich, Germany (SPX) Jan 21,
2010
A new intelligent system has been developed to
help identify terrorists carrying explosives. Sensitive electronic noses capture
the smell of the explosives; the system processes the acquired data, correlates
it with individuals' movements ... and ultimately tracks down the suspects.
Literally hundreds of people are hurrying through the long airport corridor
between Terminals A and B. Among them are two terrorists, who've hidden
themselves in the crowd.
They're carrying small containers of chemicals in their jacket pockets,
individual components for an explosive. But there's something the criminals
don't know. As well as being observed by security cameras, they're also being
"sniffed out" by chemical noses hidden in the corridor wall.
The smell sensors sound the alarm when the terrorists walk past, alerting an
airport security guard who notes the problem on his monitoring equipment. At
this point in time, he can't tell precisely who is carrying hazardous chemicals
- but he knows the sensor network
will continue to "sniff out" and track down the suspects.
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication,
Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE in Wachtberg have built a prototype
security system to replicate just such a scenario. They've named it HAMLeT,
which stands for Hazardous Material Localization and Person Tracking. "HAMLeT
will alert security personnel to suspicious individuals," says head of
department Dr. Wolfgang Koch from the FKIE. The system involves a network of
highly-sensitive smell sensors which follow an explosive's trail.
There are oscillating crystals on the sensor chips, and whenever the
electronic noses capture chemical molecules, their oscillation frequency
changes. The precise nature of the change is different for different substances.
A further component in the system - the sensor's data fusion function - traces
the explosive's path and ferrets out the carrier.
A second sensor network is needed to track the route the individual takes;
for this, the researchers have used laser scanners.
"HAMLeT's real achievement is its ability to collate all the data and convert it
into a clear and accurate overall picture," says Koch. The sensor data fusion
process employs complex algorithms which allow HAMLeT to build up a precise
image of pedestrian flows and connect a particular smell with a specific
individual.
In a trial involving the German Armed Forces, researchers at the FKIE proved
the system's ability to track down five "terrorists" carrying hidden explosives.
The scientists are now working
to refine the prototype's algorithms in order to reduce the false alarm
rate.
Pearson gets first full-body scanner
The first full-body scanner in Canada is up and running at Pearson
International Airport, federal transport security officials said
Thursday.
A millimeter-wave scanner, using radio frequencies to scan skin surface,
“went live yesterday for U.S. bound flights at Terminal One,” said Mathieu
Larocque, spokesman for the Canadian
Air Transport Security Authority.
Posing for the electronic strip-search is voluntary, for adults only and
produces images seen by a screener “in a remote room,” said Larocque. “They have
no way of seeing the passenger. The image they look at doesn’t have any
identification. There is no name, no flight number.”
The scanner is used for secondary screening, meaning someone marked for a
pat-down can opt for the machine instead, on “all U.S. bound flights.”
CATSA is rolling 11 of the millimeter-wave machines at major airports “as we
speak,” although Pearson has the first one. Larocque couldn’t specify when
others will arrive at Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Halifax and
Winnipeg. Another 30 scanners are scheduled to be installed “later in the
spring.”
Larocque, who went through a scanner himself during a pilot project at the
Kelowna, B.C., airport last year, said the procedure “takes five seconds” but
passengers must remember to unload pens, change and other objects into a bin
earlier.
CATSA is monitoring how the machines “affect the flow of passengers,” but
there is nothing definitive yet, he said.
Toronto Star Travel Editor Jim Byers reported early this morning about
encountering the machine at the airport.
“There was only one lineup with the machine,” Byers said. “People were told
to step inside a large, glass-enclosed unit and raise their hands in the
air.”
Nobody appeared to be objecting and the lineup seemed to be moving normally,
he said.
There was a huge security contingent at Pearson Thursday morning, with dozens
of uniformed workers and supervisors in suits managing the process, he said.
“The lineup to get to U.S. customs was 200 or 300 metres long, at least. Once
inside, it was situation normal and people went through U.S. customs in the
regular fashion. But after that, at security, they had people step on mats and
follow a green sign that pointed folks to the proper security lineup.”
“It was the usual shoes and laptops out of your bag. But what was different,
at least different from the pre-Christmas period, is the care they took going
through my knapsack,” Byers said.
“They leafed through my travel magazines, checked out my laptop and unzipped
all the compartments to check everything from my sunglasses case to my lip balm.
They ran swabs over my laptop and over my knapsack and then put them through a
machine, likely to test for explosive residue.
“After checking all bags for all passengers, (they asked) most folks to stick
their hands into their pants or tuck them under their belt and against their
stomach and again deep into their pockets, then remove them and have their hands
checked for illegal substances.”
More stringent restrictions on air passengers worldwide went into effect
after the aborted Christmas Day bombing attempt on a flight from Amsterdam bound
for Detroit. Transport Canada
promised earlier this month to introduce full-body scanners within three months
at major airports.
The government transport authority relaxed some of the new restrictions
Tuesday when it announced passengers could bring a small carry-on bag, in
addition to a personal item such as a purse or knapsack, on to the
flight.
CIA contractor flying surveillance drone over Haiti
Israel can use stockpiled U.S. arms
In the 34-day
2006 war with Hezbollah, Israeli stocks of air force bombs and artillery
ammunition were seriously depleted, almost to what the army deemed a critical
level.
by Staff
Writers
Tel Aviv, Israel (UPI) Jan 19, 2009
The U.S. Army is reportedly building up stockpiles of
missiles, armored vehicles, artillery shells and other equipment in Israel that
the Israelis will be allowed to use in an emergency.
The increase in the U.S. arsenal in the Jewish state now under way, reported
by the Washington-based Defense News weekly, will reinforce support for Israel
by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama in the confrontation with
Iran over its contentious nuclear program.
That commitment was evidenced by a two-week joint air-defense exercise,
Juniper Cobra 10, by U.S. and Israeli missile forces in October-November 2009,
the largest exercise ever held by the two allies.
Some 1,500 U.S. personnel, along with 17 warships from the 6th Fleet,
participated in countering simulated attacks by ballistic, medium-range and
short-range missiles and rockets on Israel.
These efforts are also seen as an attempt by the Obama administration to
reassure Israel that the Americans will support them in a confrontation with
Iran -- though not necessarily with combat forces -- and to encourage the Jewish
state not to launch unilateral air and missile strikes at Iran's nuclear
facilities.
In 2008 the Pentagon also installed a strategic long-range X-band radar
system at Nevatim air base in the Negev Desert south of Tel Aviv. It can detect
incoming missiles from hundreds of miles away.
At the time Juniper Cobra was being held, there were reports that the
Americans would leave several Patriot PAC-3 air-defense systems behind once the
maneuvers ended.
It is not clear whether they are included in the reported increase in U.S.
stockpiles.
The expansion of these stockpiles emerged amid a heightening of tension with
Iran, as a U.S.-led dialogue with Tehran appeared to flounder after four months
of tortuous negotiations that have failed to produce any concrete agreement by
Iran to curb its nuclear program.
The Israelis view a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat and have said
they will launch unilateral military
strikes against the Islamic Republic if it believes Tehran is close to acquiring
nuclear weapons.
Israel's leadership believes Iran is using the talks to buy time to push
forward with its program and that 2010 will be the year of decision regarding
military action.
This has led to reviews of Israel's strategic position in the event of
hostilities.
Any conflict that erupts will probably not be a swift exchange of airstrikes
and missile salvoes, as many expect, but will probably drag on for weeks or
months.
According Amos Harel, an analyst with the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, a
key Israeli Defense Ministry researcher, Moshe Vered, has concluded that "the
ideology of the Iranian regime
will dictate a prolonged war."
Harel wrote that Vered argues that the length of that war "will be measured
in years, not in weeks or days" because of the Shiite perception "by which one
must fight and sacrifice for the sake of justice and to correct wrongs to Islam
and to Muslims."
"This outlook sees Israel's existence as a wrong that must be corrected for
the sake of world redemption. Â…
"Iran's willingness to sacrifice many victims for a long period of time in a
conflict with Israel will dictate a prolonged war between the two states that
will be difficult to end."
If that is the case, U.S. military stockpiles in Israel may be increased
further.
Israeli
forces
ran critically short of ordnance and military equipment in the October 1973 war
when the Jewish state was attacked by Egypt and Syria and was nearly
overwhelmed.
Only a major U.S. airlift ordered by President Richard Nixon saved the
day.
In the 34-day 2006 war with Hezbollah,
Israeli stocks of air
force
bombs and artillery ammunition were seriously depleted, almost to what the
army
deemed a critical level.
According to Defense News, the current buildup "is the final phase of a
process that began over a year ago to determine the type and amount of U.S.
weapons and ammunition to be stored in Israel."
That, it added, was "part of an overarching American effort to stockpile
weapons in areas in which its army may need to operate, while allowing American
allies to make use of the ordnance in emergencies."
The United States began stockpiling $100 million in military equipment in
Israel in 1990.
Iran threatens to hit Western warships in Gulf if
attacked
Six-power
talks on Iran constructive: US
Washington (AFP) Jan 19, 2010 - The latest
talks by six world powers on the nuclear standoff with Iran were constructive,
US officials said Tuesday. "We are moving on both tracks," said State Department
spokesman Philip Crowley, referring to diplomacy and the threat of further
sanctions. "We believe we are making progress." Crowley, however, said Iran's
response to the international community's demands for assurances about its
nuclear program have been inadequate. The five permament members of the UN
Security Council -- the United States, France, Germany, Russia and China -- plus
Germany met Saturday in New York but reached no decision on further sanctions
against Iran. China in particular has resisted sanctions. Iran's Foreign
Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Monday welcomed the "realistic approach" taken by
the six powers, while China called on the sides to "show flexibility" and to
stick with diplomacy despite the impasse. "We continue our conversations in
terms of options that are available to us, both in terms of the Security Council
going forward but also steps that can be taken in a coordinated way on a
national basis," Crowley said. US senators have drawn up a bill that if adopted
would impose sanctions on companies that export fuel to Iran. The sanctions
imposed so far by the United Nations principally target Iran's proliferation
activity, having little real economic impact. The United States, Britain,
France, Russia and Germany want them to be enhanced to target the revenues of
the Iranian regime.
by Staff
Writers
Tehran (AFP) Jan 19, 2010
Iran's
Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi said Tuesday that Western warships stationed in
the Gulf are "best targets" for the Islamic republic if its nuclear sites are
attacked, Fars news agency reported.
Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened to deliver a "crushing response"
and hit US targets, including its bases in the Gulf and neighbouring Iraq
and
Afghanistan,
if Iran's nuclear sites are attacked.
"Why are there so many warships there? The Westerners know that these
warships are the best target for operation by Iran if they do anything against
(us)," Vahidi told a conference entitled "Persian Gulf" in Tehran.
He also criticised the building of US bases in the region and Washington's
"unofficial presence in Yemen."
The United States and its regional ally Israel, which accuse Iran of seeking
atomic weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme, have never ruled
out a military option to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive.
Iran denies the charges and has continued to expand its nuclear programme
despite UN sanctions.
earlier related report
Iran welcomes West's new
'realism' on nuclear drive
Tehran (AFP) Jan 19, 2010 - Iran on Tuesday
welcomed what it called the West's newfound "realism" on Tehran's controversial
atomic programme after world powers failed to decide on new sanctions.
The United States, meanwhile, said Iran's response to the international
community's demands for assurances about its nuclear programme was inadequate
while Britain warned of punitive financial measures.
But China, one of six world powers with Washington and London
involved in talks on Iran, urged flexibility in the standoff over Tehran's
nuclear drive and a return to talks.
However, Iranian Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi renewed a warning that
Tehran's forces could hit Western warships in the Gulf if it comes under attack
over the nuclear standoff.
On the diplomatic front, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told
reporters: "Speaking of sanctions is repetitive and it is not constructive.
"Some Western countries... should correct their approach and be realistic
about our (nuclear) rights. And we feel there are traces of realism to be seen,"
he added.
On Monday, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki made similar positive
comments.
"We are ready to help with the realistic approach and at the same time we
will wait for public and backstage developments in Iran's nuclear case," Mottaki
told reporters.
US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said recent talks by six world
powers on the nuclear standoff with Iran were constructive. "We are moving on
both tracks," he said, about diplomacy and the threat of further sanctions.
But Iran's response to demands for assurances about its nuclear program
remains inadequate, he said.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said financial sanctions could help
bring the Islamic state into line.
"We believe that financial sanctions... have an important role to play in
exerting pressure at the appropriate points in the (Iranian) regime and not
affecting the Iranian people," Miliband told lawmakers.
World powers made up of the UN Security Council's five permanent members plus
Germany met in New York on Saturday but failed to reach an agreement about new
sanctions.
The six are concerned about Tehran's rejection of a UN-brokered deal under
which most of Iran's low enriched uranium (LEU) stockpile would be shipped
abroad to be further enriched into reactor fuel.
Iran has come up with its own counter-proposal of a staged and simultaneous
swap of LEU with nuclear reactor fuel. This has been largely rejected by world
powers, insisting Tehran accept the International Atomic Energy Agency
offer.
The New York meeting brought together senior officials from Britain, France,
Germany, Russia and the United States. But China, signalling its reluctance to
back tougher sanctions pushed by the West, sent a lower-level diplomat.
In Beijing,
Mehmanparast's opposite number, Ma Zhaoxu, also at a press conference on
Tuesday, said: "China has all along proposed the proper settlement
of the Iran nuclear issue through dialogue and consultation ...
"We hope relevant parties can enhance consultations, show flexibility and
promote the early peaceful solution of the relevant issue in a proper
manner."
Ma said his country was aware of the proliferation concerns of the Western
nations but insisted the Islamic republic had the right to the peaceful use of
nuclear energy.
Iran's defence minister reiterated that his country was not cowed by the
threat of military action.
"Why are there so many warships there? The Westerners know that these
warships are the best target for operation by Iran if they do anything against
(us)," Vahidi said.
Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened to deliver a "crushing response"
and hit US targets, including its bases in the Gulf and neighbouring Iraq and
Afghanistan, if Iran's nuclear sites are attacked.
The United States and its regional ally Israel, which accuse Iran of seeking
atomic weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme, have never ruled
out a military option to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive.
Iran denies the charges.
India awards Implant Sciences $6 million contract for
sniffer
Published 20 January 2010
India will deploy the company’s explosive detector – the
Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 – for protection of military and civilian facilities;
the sniffer comes with a large substance library which includes not only
standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of
improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs)
Implant Sciences announced
a contract totaling approximately $6 million for its Quantum Sniffer QS-H150
Portable Explosives Detectors and associated support. The contract was awarded
by the government of India, for use by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) in force
protection and public safety applications in the country.
Glenn Bolduc, president and CEO of Implant Sciences, commented, “This
contract award is significant in many ways. Most importantly, it allows Implant
Sciences to continue to contribute to worldwide anti-terrorism efforts. We are
also very pleased that this award represents the largest single order in the
company’s history.”
The company expects to ship the entire order within the current fiscal year
which ends 30 June, 2010.
Jeff Tehan, Implant Sciences’ vice president of marketing and sales, added,
“Implant Sciences is the sole contract awardee after an arduous competitive
evaluation that started over 24 months ago. We are extremely proud of this, the
validation it represents, and the follow-on opportunities it creates. To best
support this contract and others in India and South Asia, Implant Sciences has
partnered with LNG Security Services of Delhi, who will provide warranty and
post-warranty technical support, as well as operator and
administrator training.”
The company says the QS-H150 offers technical, operational, and competitive
advantages. Among the most significant are non-contact sample collection,
non-radioactive ionization, simultaneous detection and identification of
explosives particulate and vapor, continuous self-calibration, and ultra-fast
clear down (cycle time). The company also says that the substance library of the
QS-H150 is the broadest in the industry and includes not only standard military
and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade
explosives (IEDs and HMEs). The library is also easily expanded as new
threats emerge.
Sniffing Out Terrorists
File image
courtesy AFP.
by Staff
Writers
Munich, Germany (SPX) Jan 21,
2010
A new intelligent system has been developed to
help identify terrorists carrying explosives. Sensitive electronic noses capture
the smell of the explosives; the system processes the acquired data, correlates
it with individuals' movements ... and ultimately tracks down the suspects.
Literally hundreds of people are hurrying through the long airport corridor
between Terminals A and B. Among them are two terrorists, who've hidden
themselves in the crowd.
They're carrying small containers of chemicals in their jacket pockets,
individual components for an explosive. But there's something the criminals
don't know. As well as being observed by security cameras, they're also being
"sniffed out" by chemical noses hidden in the corridor wall.
The smell sensors sound the alarm when the terrorists walk past, alerting an
airport security guard who notes the problem on his monitoring equipment. At
this point in time, he can't tell precisely who is carrying hazardous chemicals
- but he knows the sensor network
will continue to "sniff out" and track down the suspects.
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication,
Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE in Wachtberg have built a prototype
security system to replicate just such a scenario. They've named it HAMLeT,
which stands for Hazardous Material Localization and Person Tracking. "HAMLeT
will alert security personnel to suspicious individuals," says head of
department Dr. Wolfgang Koch from the FKIE. The system involves a network of
highly-sensitive smell sensors which follow an explosive's trail.
There are oscillating crystals on the sensor chips, and whenever the
electronic noses capture chemical molecules, their oscillation frequency
changes. The precise nature of the change is different for different substances.
A further component in the system - the sensor's data fusion function - traces
the explosive's path and ferrets out the carrier.
A second sensor network is needed to track the route the individual takes;
for this, the researchers have used laser scanners.
"HAMLeT's real achievement is its ability to collate all the data and convert it
into a clear and accurate overall picture," says Koch. The sensor data fusion
process employs complex algorithms which allow HAMLeT to build up a precise
image of pedestrian flows and connect a particular smell with a specific
individual.
In a trial involving the German Armed Forces, researchers at the FKIE proved
the system's ability to track down five "terrorists" carrying hidden explosives.
The scientists are now working
to refine the prototype's algorithms in order to reduce the false alarm
rate.
Pearson gets first full-body scanner
Israel can use stockpiled U.S. arms
In the 34-day
2006 war with Hezbollah, Israeli stocks of air force bombs and artillery
ammunition were seriously depleted, almost to what the army deemed a critical
level.
by Staff
Writers
Tel Aviv, Israel (UPI) Jan 19, 2009
The U.S. Army is reportedly building up stockpiles of
missiles, armored vehicles, artillery shells and other equipment in Israel that
the Israelis will be allowed to use in an emergency.
The increase in the U.S. arsenal in the Jewish state now under way, reported
by the Washington-based Defense News weekly, will reinforce support for Israel
by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama in the confrontation with
Iran over its contentious nuclear program.
That commitment was evidenced by a two-week joint air-defense exercise,
Juniper Cobra 10, by U.S. and Israeli missile forces in October-November 2009,
the largest exercise ever held by the two allies.
Some 1,500 U.S. personnel, along with 17 warships from the 6th Fleet,
participated in countering simulated attacks by ballistic, medium-range and
short-range missiles and rockets on Israel.
These efforts are also seen as an attempt by the Obama administration to
reassure Israel that the Americans will support them in a confrontation with
Iran -- though not necessarily with combat forces -- and to encourage the Jewish
state not to launch unilateral air and missile strikes at Iran's nuclear
facilities.
In 2008 the Pentagon also installed a strategic long-range X-band radar
system at Nevatim air base in the Negev Desert south of Tel Aviv. It can detect
incoming missiles from hundreds of miles away.
At the time Juniper Cobra was being held, there were reports that the
Americans would leave several Patriot PAC-3 air-defense systems behind once the
maneuvers ended.
It is not clear whether they are included in the reported increase in U.S.
stockpiles.
The expansion of these stockpiles emerged amid a heightening of tension with
Iran, as a U.S.-led dialogue with Tehran appeared to flounder after four months
of tortuous negotiations that have failed to produce any concrete agreement by
Iran to curb its nuclear program.
The Israelis view a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat and have said
they will launch unilateral military
strikes against the Islamic Republic if it believes Tehran is close to acquiring
nuclear weapons.
Israel's leadership believes Iran is using the talks to buy time to push
forward with its program and that 2010 will be the year of decision regarding
military action.
This has led to reviews of Israel's strategic position in the event of
hostilities.
Any conflict that erupts will probably not be a swift exchange of airstrikes
and missile salvoes, as many expect, but will probably drag on for weeks or
months.
According Amos Harel, an analyst with the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, a
key Israeli Defense Ministry researcher, Moshe Vered, has concluded that "the
ideology of the Iranian regime
will dictate a prolonged war."
Harel wrote that Vered argues that the length of that war "will be measured
in years, not in weeks or days" because of the Shiite perception "by which one
must fight and sacrifice for the sake of justice and to correct wrongs to Islam
and to Muslims."
"This outlook sees Israel's existence as a wrong that must be corrected for
the sake of world redemption. Â…
"Iran's willingness to sacrifice many victims for a long period of time in a
conflict with Israel will dictate a prolonged war between the two states that
will be difficult to end."
If that is the case, U.S. military stockpiles in Israel may be increased
further.
Israeli
forces
ran critically short of ordnance and military equipment in the October 1973 war
when the Jewish state was attacked by Egypt and Syria and was nearly
overwhelmed.
Only a major U.S. airlift ordered by President Richard Nixon saved the
day.
In the 34-day 2006 war with Hezbollah,
Israeli stocks of air
force
bombs and artillery ammunition were seriously depleted, almost to what the
army
deemed a critical level.
According to Defense News, the current buildup "is the final phase of a
process that began over a year ago to determine the type and amount of U.S.
weapons and ammunition to be stored in Israel."
That, it added, was "part of an overarching American effort to stockpile
weapons in areas in which its army may need to operate, while allowing American
allies to make use of the ordnance in emergencies."
The United States began stockpiling $100 million in military equipment in
Israel in 1990.
Iran threatens to hit Western warships in Gulf if
attacked
Six-power
talks on Iran constructive: US
Washington (AFP) Jan 19, 2010 - The latest
talks by six world powers on the nuclear standoff with Iran were constructive,
US officials said Tuesday. "We are moving on both tracks," said State Department
spokesman Philip Crowley, referring to diplomacy and the threat of further
sanctions. "We believe we are making progress." Crowley, however, said Iran's
response to the international community's demands for assurances about its
nuclear program have been inadequate. The five permament members of the UN
Security Council -- the United States, France, Germany, Russia and China -- plus
Germany met Saturday in New York but reached no decision on further sanctions
against Iran. China in particular has resisted sanctions. Iran's Foreign
Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Monday welcomed the "realistic approach" taken by
the six powers, while China called on the sides to "show flexibility" and to
stick with diplomacy despite the impasse. "We continue our conversations in
terms of options that are available to us, both in terms of the Security Council
going forward but also steps that can be taken in a coordinated way on a
national basis," Crowley said. US senators have drawn up a bill that if adopted
would impose sanctions on companies that export fuel to Iran. The sanctions
imposed so far by the United Nations principally target Iran's proliferation
activity, having little real economic impact. The United States, Britain,
France, Russia and Germany want them to be enhanced to target the revenues of
the Iranian regime.
by Staff
Writers
Tehran (AFP) Jan 19, 2010
Iran's
Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi said Tuesday that Western warships stationed in
the Gulf are "best targets" for the Islamic republic if its nuclear sites are
attacked, Fars news agency reported.
Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened to deliver a "crushing response"
and hit US targets, including its bases in the Gulf and neighbouring Iraq
and
Afghanistan,
if Iran's nuclear sites are attacked.
"Why are there so many warships there? The Westerners know that these
warships are the best target for operation by Iran if they do anything against
(us)," Vahidi told a conference entitled "Persian Gulf" in Tehran.
He also criticised the building of US bases in the region and Washington's
"unofficial presence in Yemen."
The United States and its regional ally Israel, which accuse Iran of seeking
atomic weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme, have never ruled
out a military option to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive.
Iran denies the charges and has continued to expand its nuclear programme
despite UN sanctions.
earlier related report
Iran welcomes West's new
'realism' on nuclear drive
Tehran (AFP) Jan 19, 2010 - Iran on Tuesday
welcomed what it called the West's newfound "realism" on Tehran's controversial
atomic programme after world powers failed to decide on new sanctions.
The United States, meanwhile, said Iran's response to the international
community's demands for assurances about its nuclear programme was inadequate
while Britain warned of punitive financial measures.
But China, one of six world powers with Washington and London
involved in talks on Iran, urged flexibility in the standoff over Tehran's
nuclear drive and a return to talks.
However, Iranian Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi renewed a warning that
Tehran's forces could hit Western warships in the Gulf if it comes under attack
over the nuclear standoff.
On the diplomatic front, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told
reporters: "Speaking of sanctions is repetitive and it is not constructive.
"Some Western countries... should correct their approach and be realistic
about our (nuclear) rights. And we feel there are traces of realism to be seen,"
he added.
On Monday, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki made similar positive
comments.
"We are ready to help with the realistic approach and at the same time we
will wait for public and backstage developments in Iran's nuclear case," Mottaki
told reporters.
US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said recent talks by six world
powers on the nuclear standoff with Iran were constructive. "We are moving on
both tracks," he said, about diplomacy and the threat of further sanctions.
But Iran's response to demands for assurances about its nuclear program
remains inadequate, he said.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said financial sanctions could help
bring the Islamic state into line.
"We believe that financial sanctions... have an important role to play in
exerting pressure at the appropriate points in the (Iranian) regime and not
affecting the Iranian people," Miliband told lawmakers.
World powers made up of the UN Security Council's five permanent members plus
Germany met in New York on Saturday but failed to reach an agreement about new
sanctions.
The six are concerned about Tehran's rejection of a UN-brokered deal under
which most of Iran's low enriched uranium (LEU) stockpile would be shipped
abroad to be further enriched into reactor fuel.
Iran has come up with its own counter-proposal of a staged and simultaneous
swap of LEU with nuclear reactor fuel. This has been largely rejected by world
powers, insisting Tehran accept the International Atomic Energy Agency
offer.
The New York meeting brought together senior officials from Britain, France,
Germany, Russia and the United States. But China, signalling its reluctance to
back tougher sanctions pushed by the West, sent a lower-level diplomat.
In Beijing,
Mehmanparast's opposite number, Ma Zhaoxu, also at a press conference on
Tuesday, said: "China has all along proposed the proper settlement
of the Iran nuclear issue through dialogue and consultation ...
"We hope relevant parties can enhance consultations, show flexibility and
promote the early peaceful solution of the relevant issue in a proper
manner."
Ma said his country was aware of the proliferation concerns of the Western
nations but insisted the Islamic republic had the right to the peaceful use of
nuclear energy.
Iran's defence minister reiterated that his country was not cowed by the
threat of military action.
"Why are there so many warships there? The Westerners know that these
warships are the best target for operation by Iran if they do anything against
(us)," Vahidi said.
Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened to deliver a "crushing response"
and hit US targets, including its bases in the Gulf and neighbouring Iraq and
Afghanistan, if Iran's nuclear sites are attacked.
The United States and its regional ally Israel, which accuse Iran of seeking
atomic weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme, have never ruled
out a military option to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive.
Iran denies the charges.
India awards Implant Sciences $6 million contract for
sniffer
In the 34-day 2006 war with Hezbollah, Israeli stocks of air force bombs and artillery ammunition were seriously depleted, almost to what the army deemed a critical level. |
Tel Aviv, Israel (UPI) Jan 19, 2009
The U.S. Army is reportedly building up stockpiles of missiles, armored vehicles, artillery shells and other equipment in Israel that the Israelis will be allowed to use in an emergency.
The increase in the U.S. arsenal in the Jewish state now under way, reported by the Washington-based Defense News weekly, will reinforce support for Israel by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama in the confrontation with Iran over its contentious nuclear program.
That commitment was evidenced by a two-week joint air-defense exercise, Juniper Cobra 10, by U.S. and Israeli missile forces in October-November 2009, the largest exercise ever held by the two allies.
Some 1,500 U.S. personnel, along with 17 warships from the 6th Fleet, participated in countering simulated attacks by ballistic, medium-range and short-range missiles and rockets on Israel.
These efforts are also seen as an attempt by the Obama administration to reassure Israel that the Americans will support them in a confrontation with Iran -- though not necessarily with combat forces -- and to encourage the Jewish state not to launch unilateral air and missile strikes at Iran's nuclear facilities.
In 2008 the Pentagon also installed a strategic long-range X-band radar system at Nevatim air base in the Negev Desert south of Tel Aviv. It can detect incoming missiles from hundreds of miles away.
At the time Juniper Cobra was being held, there were reports that the Americans would leave several Patriot PAC-3 air-defense systems behind once the maneuvers ended.
It is not clear whether they are included in the reported increase in U.S. stockpiles.
The expansion of these stockpiles emerged amid a heightening of tension with Iran, as a U.S.-led dialogue with Tehran appeared to flounder after four months of tortuous negotiations that have failed to produce any concrete agreement by Iran to curb its nuclear program.
The Israelis view a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat and have said they will launch unilateral military strikes against the Islamic Republic if it believes Tehran is close to acquiring nuclear weapons.
Israel's leadership believes Iran is using the talks to buy time to push forward with its program and that 2010 will be the year of decision regarding military action.
This has led to reviews of Israel's strategic position in the event of hostilities.
Any conflict that erupts will probably not be a swift exchange of airstrikes and missile salvoes, as many expect, but will probably drag on for weeks or months.
According Amos Harel, an analyst with the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, a key Israeli Defense Ministry researcher, Moshe Vered, has concluded that "the ideology of the Iranian regime will dictate a prolonged war."
Harel wrote that Vered argues that the length of that war "will be measured in years, not in weeks or days" because of the Shiite perception "by which one must fight and sacrifice for the sake of justice and to correct wrongs to Islam and to Muslims."
"This outlook sees Israel's existence as a wrong that must be corrected for the sake of world redemption. Â…
"Iran's willingness to sacrifice many victims for a long period of time in a conflict with Israel will dictate a prolonged war between the two states that will be difficult to end."
If that is the case, U.S. military stockpiles in Israel may be increased further.
Israeli forces ran critically short of ordnance and military equipment in the October 1973 war when the Jewish state was attacked by Egypt and Syria and was nearly overwhelmed.
Only a major U.S. airlift ordered by President Richard Nixon saved the day.
In the 34-day 2006 war with Hezbollah, Israeli stocks of air force bombs and artillery ammunition were seriously depleted, almost to what the army deemed a critical level.
According to Defense News, the current buildup "is the final phase of a process that began over a year ago to determine the type and amount of U.S. weapons and ammunition to be stored in Israel."
That, it added, was "part of an overarching American effort to stockpile weapons in areas in which its army may need to operate, while allowing American allies to make use of the ordnance in emergencies."
The United States began stockpiling $100 million in military equipment in Israel in 1990.
Six-power talks on Iran constructive: US Washington (AFP) Jan 19, 2010 - The latest talks by six world powers on the nuclear standoff with Iran were constructive, US officials said Tuesday. "We are moving on both tracks," said State Department spokesman Philip Crowley, referring to diplomacy and the threat of further sanctions. "We believe we are making progress." Crowley, however, said Iran's response to the international community's demands for assurances about its nuclear program have been inadequate. The five permament members of the UN Security Council -- the United States, France, Germany, Russia and China -- plus Germany met Saturday in New York but reached no decision on further sanctions against Iran. China in particular has resisted sanctions. Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Monday welcomed the "realistic approach" taken by the six powers, while China called on the sides to "show flexibility" and to stick with diplomacy despite the impasse. "We continue our conversations in terms of options that are available to us, both in terms of the Security Council going forward but also steps that can be taken in a coordinated way on a national basis," Crowley said. US senators have drawn up a bill that if adopted would impose sanctions on companies that export fuel to Iran. The sanctions imposed so far by the United Nations principally target Iran's proliferation activity, having little real economic impact. The United States, Britain, France, Russia and Germany want them to be enhanced to target the revenues of the Iranian regime. |
Tehran (AFP) Jan 19, 2010
Iran's Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi said Tuesday that Western warships stationed in the Gulf are "best targets" for the Islamic republic if its nuclear sites are attacked, Fars news agency reported.
Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened to deliver a "crushing response" and hit US targets, including its bases in the Gulf and neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan, if Iran's nuclear sites are attacked.
"Why are there so many warships there? The Westerners know that these warships are the best target for operation by Iran if they do anything against (us)," Vahidi told a conference entitled "Persian Gulf" in Tehran.
He also criticised the building of US bases in the region and Washington's "unofficial presence in Yemen."
The United States and its regional ally Israel, which accuse Iran of seeking atomic weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme, have never ruled out a military option to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive.
Iran denies the charges and has continued to expand its nuclear programme despite UN sanctions.
earlier related report
Iran welcomes West's new
'realism' on nuclear drive
Tehran (AFP) Jan 19, 2010 - Iran on Tuesday
welcomed what it called the West's newfound "realism" on Tehran's controversial
atomic programme after world powers failed to decide on new sanctions.
The United States, meanwhile, said Iran's response to the international community's demands for assurances about its nuclear programme was inadequate while Britain warned of punitive financial measures.
But China, one of six world powers with Washington and London involved in talks on Iran, urged flexibility in the standoff over Tehran's nuclear drive and a return to talks.
However, Iranian Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi renewed a warning that Tehran's forces could hit Western warships in the Gulf if it comes under attack over the nuclear standoff.
On the diplomatic front, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters: "Speaking of sanctions is repetitive and it is not constructive.
"Some Western countries... should correct their approach and be realistic about our (nuclear) rights. And we feel there are traces of realism to be seen," he added.
On Monday, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki made similar positive comments.
"We are ready to help with the realistic approach and at the same time we will wait for public and backstage developments in Iran's nuclear case," Mottaki told reporters.
US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said recent talks by six world powers on the nuclear standoff with Iran were constructive. "We are moving on both tracks," he said, about diplomacy and the threat of further sanctions.
But Iran's response to demands for assurances about its nuclear program remains inadequate, he said.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said financial sanctions could help bring the Islamic state into line.
"We believe that financial sanctions... have an important role to play in exerting pressure at the appropriate points in the (Iranian) regime and not affecting the Iranian people," Miliband told lawmakers.
World powers made up of the UN Security Council's five permanent members plus Germany met in New York on Saturday but failed to reach an agreement about new sanctions.
The six are concerned about Tehran's rejection of a UN-brokered deal under which most of Iran's low enriched uranium (LEU) stockpile would be shipped abroad to be further enriched into reactor fuel.
Iran has come up with its own counter-proposal of a staged and simultaneous swap of LEU with nuclear reactor fuel. This has been largely rejected by world powers, insisting Tehran accept the International Atomic Energy Agency offer.
The New York meeting brought together senior officials from Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States. But China, signalling its reluctance to back tougher sanctions pushed by the West, sent a lower-level diplomat.
In Beijing, Mehmanparast's opposite number, Ma Zhaoxu, also at a press conference on Tuesday, said: "China has all along proposed the proper settlement of the Iran nuclear issue through dialogue and consultation ...
"We hope relevant parties can enhance consultations, show flexibility and promote the early peaceful solution of the relevant issue in a proper manner."
Ma said his country was aware of the proliferation concerns of the Western nations but insisted the Islamic republic had the right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
Iran's defence minister reiterated that his country was not cowed by the threat of military action.
"Why are there so many warships there? The Westerners know that these warships are the best target for operation by Iran if they do anything against (us)," Vahidi said.
Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened to deliver a "crushing response" and hit US targets, including its bases in the Gulf and neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan, if Iran's nuclear sites are attacked.
The United States and its regional ally Israel, which accuse Iran of seeking atomic weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme, have never ruled out a military option to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive.
Iran denies the charges.
Published 20 January 2010
India will deploy the company’s explosive detector – the Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 – for protection of military and civilian facilities; the sniffer comes with a large substance library which includes not only standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs)
Implant Sciences announced a contract totaling approximately $6 million for its Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 Portable Explosives Detectors and associated support. The contract was awarded by the government of India, for use by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) in force protection and public safety applications in the country.
Glenn Bolduc, president and CEO of Implant Sciences, commented, “This contract award is significant in many ways. Most importantly, it allows Implant Sciences to continue to contribute to worldwide anti-terrorism efforts. We are also very pleased that this award represents the largest single order in the company’s history.”
The company expects to ship the entire order within the current fiscal year which ends 30 June, 2010.
Jeff Tehan, Implant Sciences’ vice president of marketing and sales, added, “Implant Sciences is the sole contract awardee after an arduous competitive evaluation that started over 24 months ago. We are extremely proud of this, the validation it represents, and the follow-on opportunities it creates. To best support this contract and others in India and South Asia, Implant Sciences has partnered with LNG Security Services of Delhi, who will provide warranty and post-warranty technical support, as well as operator and administrator training.”
The company says the QS-H150 offers technical, operational, and competitive advantages. Among the most significant are non-contact sample collection, non-radioactive ionization, simultaneous detection and identification of explosives particulate and vapor, continuous self-calibration, and ultra-fast clear down (cycle time). The company also says that the substance library of the QS-H150 is the broadest in the industry and includes not only standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs). The library is also easily expanded as new threats emerge.
File image courtesy AFP. |
Munich, Germany (SPX) Jan 21, 2010
A new intelligent system has been developed to help identify terrorists carrying explosives. Sensitive electronic noses capture the smell of the explosives; the system processes the acquired data, correlates it with individuals' movements ... and ultimately tracks down the suspects.
Literally hundreds of people are hurrying through the long airport corridor between Terminals A and B. Among them are two terrorists, who've hidden themselves in the crowd.
They're carrying small containers of chemicals in their jacket pockets, individual components for an explosive. But there's something the criminals don't know. As well as being observed by security cameras, they're also being "sniffed out" by chemical noses hidden in the corridor wall.
The smell sensors sound the alarm when the terrorists walk past, alerting an airport security guard who notes the problem on his monitoring equipment. At this point in time, he can't tell precisely who is carrying hazardous chemicals - but he knows the sensor network will continue to "sniff out" and track down the suspects.
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE in Wachtberg have built a prototype security system to replicate just such a scenario. They've named it HAMLeT, which stands for Hazardous Material Localization and Person Tracking. "HAMLeT will alert security personnel to suspicious individuals," says head of department Dr. Wolfgang Koch from the FKIE. The system involves a network of highly-sensitive smell sensors which follow an explosive's trail.
There are oscillating crystals on the sensor chips, and whenever the electronic noses capture chemical molecules, their oscillation frequency changes. The precise nature of the change is different for different substances. A further component in the system - the sensor's data fusion function - traces the explosive's path and ferrets out the carrier.
A second sensor network is needed to track the route the individual takes; for this, the researchers have used laser scanners. "HAMLeT's real achievement is its ability to collate all the data and convert it into a clear and accurate overall picture," says Koch. The sensor data fusion process employs complex algorithms which allow HAMLeT to build up a precise image of pedestrian flows and connect a particular smell with a specific individual.
In a trial involving the German Armed Forces, researchers at the FKIE proved the system's ability to track down five "terrorists" carrying hidden explosives. The scientists are now working to refine the prototype's algorithms in order to reduce the false alarm rate.
The first full-body scanner in Canada is up and running at Pearson International Airport, federal transport security officials said Thursday.
A millimeter-wave scanner, using radio frequencies to scan skin surface, “went live yesterday for U.S. bound flights at Terminal One,” said Mathieu Larocque, spokesman for the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority.
Posing for the electronic strip-search is voluntary, for adults only and produces images seen by a screener “in a remote room,” said Larocque. “They have no way of seeing the passenger. The image they look at doesn’t have any identification. There is no name, no flight number.”
The scanner is used for secondary screening, meaning someone marked for a pat-down can opt for the machine instead, on “all U.S. bound flights.”
CATSA is rolling 11 of the millimeter-wave machines at major airports “as we speak,” although Pearson has the first one. Larocque couldn’t specify when others will arrive at Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Halifax and Winnipeg. Another 30 scanners are scheduled to be installed “later in the spring.”
Larocque, who went through a scanner himself during a pilot project at the Kelowna, B.C., airport last year, said the procedure “takes five seconds” but passengers must remember to unload pens, change and other objects into a bin earlier.
CATSA is monitoring how the machines “affect the flow of passengers,” but there is nothing definitive yet, he said.
Toronto Star Travel Editor Jim Byers reported early this morning about encountering the machine at the airport.
“There was only one lineup with the machine,” Byers said. “People were told to step inside a large, glass-enclosed unit and raise their hands in the air.”
Nobody appeared to be objecting and the lineup seemed to be moving normally, he said.
There was a huge security contingent at Pearson Thursday morning, with dozens of uniformed workers and supervisors in suits managing the process, he said.
“The lineup to get to U.S. customs was 200 or 300 metres long, at least. Once inside, it was situation normal and people went through U.S. customs in the regular fashion. But after that, at security, they had people step on mats and follow a green sign that pointed folks to the proper security lineup.”
“It was the usual shoes and laptops out of your bag. But what was different, at least different from the pre-Christmas period, is the care they took going through my knapsack,” Byers said.
“They leafed through my travel magazines, checked out my laptop and unzipped all the compartments to check everything from my sunglasses case to my lip balm. They ran swabs over my laptop and over my knapsack and then put them through a machine, likely to test for explosive residue.
“After checking all bags for all passengers, (they asked) most folks to stick their hands into their pants or tuck them under their belt and against their stomach and again deep into their pockets, then remove them and have their hands checked for illegal substances.”
More stringent restrictions on air passengers worldwide went into effect after the aborted Christmas Day bombing attempt on a flight from Amsterdam bound for Detroit. Transport Canada promised earlier this month to introduce full-body scanners within three months at major airports.
The government transport authority relaxed some of the new restrictions Tuesday when it announced passengers could bring a small carry-on bag, in addition to a personal item such as a purse or knapsack, on to the flight.
Published 21 January 2010
A controversial Oregon-based company, which performed all kinds of jobs for the CIA, is flying a surveillance drone over Haiti to help rescue teams in recovery operations – and also ferrying in supplies to Port au Prince
Noah Shachtman writes that when last we heard from Evergreen International Aviation, the Oregon-based firm was offering to post sentries at local voting centers during the 2008 election, “detaining troublemakers” and making sure voters “do not get out of control.”
Now, company vice president Sam White tells Aviation Week that the firm is flying at least one flying at least one ScanEagle surveillance drone over Haiti. ”The company has a fleet of 747s and a fleet of large and small choppers, and has begun ferrying in supplies to Port au Prince,” the magazine’s Paul McLeary notes. “White wouldn’t say who the company is moving cargo for, saying only that ‘we’re working with different agencies, and we have one plane coming in tomorrow full of humanitarian supplies.’”
Shachtman notes that over the years, Evergreen has had all sorts of interesting clients over its five-plus decades in operation. Back in the late 1980s, the company “acknowledged one agreement under which his companies provide occasional jobs and cover to foreign nationals the CIA wants taken out of other countries or brought into the United States.” Evergreen’s parent company flew Bill O’Reilly into Kuwait in 2006, according to SourceWatch. Last April, the company won a $158 million contract to supply the Air Force with helicopters in Afghanistan.
Haiti would not be Evergreen’s first disaster-response mission. In September the State of California chartered Evergreen’s 747 supertanker, to help put out forest fires there.
UPDATE 1: Brian Whiteside, executive vice president of Evergreen Unmanned Systems, denied that his company is flying drones for the earthquake recovery operation. “We have no UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] in Haiti — nothing currently in Haiti, and nothing in the region,” he told Shachtman. Whiteside acknowledged that “we do have teams over there that are trying to help.” Whiteside was not sure what, exactly, they have been able to accomplish. “We don’t have very good comms with them.” And when I asked him which government agency or charity Evergreen was trying to support, he ducked the question, and referred me to his spokesperson.
UPDATE 2: McLeary went back and posted the quotes he got from Evergreen’s Sam White. “We also have some UAVs here that we’re bringing in to, uh, probably work with the press to help out downloading live video links and aerial shots of the devastation,” he said. “We also have 747 cargo airplanes, and so we’re working with different agencies there and uh, we have a plane landing here tomorrow to bring in a lot of humanitarian supplies. So we’ll be here for quite some time.”
India awards Implant Sciences $6 million contract for
sniffer
Published 20 January 2010
India will deploy the company’s explosive detector – the
Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 – for protection of military and civilian facilities;
the sniffer comes with a large substance library which includes not only
standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of
improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs)
Implant Sciences announced
a contract totaling approximately $6 million for its Quantum Sniffer QS-H150
Portable Explosives Detectors and associated support. The contract was awarded
by the government of India, for use by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) in force
protection and public safety applications in the country.
Glenn Bolduc, president and CEO of Implant Sciences, commented, “This
contract award is significant in many ways. Most importantly, it allows Implant
Sciences to continue to contribute to worldwide anti-terrorism efforts. We are
also very pleased that this award represents the largest single order in the
company’s history.”
The company expects to ship the entire order within the current fiscal year
which ends 30 June, 2010.
Jeff Tehan, Implant Sciences’ vice president of marketing and sales, added,
“Implant Sciences is the sole contract awardee after an arduous competitive
evaluation that started over 24 months ago. We are extremely proud of this, the
validation it represents, and the follow-on opportunities it creates. To best
support this contract and others in India and South Asia, Implant Sciences has
partnered with LNG Security Services of Delhi, who will provide warranty and
post-warranty technical support, as well as operator and
administrator training.”
The company says the QS-H150 offers technical, operational, and competitive
advantages. Among the most significant are non-contact sample collection,
non-radioactive ionization, simultaneous detection and identification of
explosives particulate and vapor, continuous self-calibration, and ultra-fast
clear down (cycle time). The company also says that the substance library of the
QS-H150 is the broadest in the industry and includes not only standard military
and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade
explosives (IEDs and HMEs). The library is also easily expanded as new
threats emerge.
Artificial nose sniffs out terrorists
Published 25 January 2010
German researchers develop A cheap detector that responds
instantly to TATP in the atmosphere; at the heart of the device are three quartz
rods, each 3 millimeters long and 40 micrometers wide, which are made to vibrate
by applying an alternating voltage; any TATP in the air bonds to chemicals
coating the rods, causing their resonant frequency to change
German scientists have come up with a system that can sniff out terrorists by
capturing the smell of explosives. The artificial nose promises to make it much
easier to detect the explosive triacetone triperoxide, OneIndiareports.
The device could be installed in the doorways of buses, trains, and airports
to sound an alarm if someone carrying TATP crosses the threshold. The explosive
can be made using easily obtainable domestic chemicals and has explosive power
similar to TNT.
Siegfried Waldvogel, an organic chemist at the University of Bonn, Germany,
said, however, that TATP’s high vapor pressure at ambient temperatures makes it
hard to hide. The vapor diffuses through materials such as plastic bags and into
the surrounding air, but the current method for detecting it is time-consuming,
as air samples have to be sent to a lab for tests.
Now, Waldvogel and his colleagues have developed a cheap detector that
responds instantly to TATP in the atmosphere. At its heart are three quartz
rods, each 3 millimeters long and 40 micrometers wide, which are made to vibrate
by applying an alternating voltage.
Any TATP in the air bonds to chemicals coating the rods, causing their
resonant frequency to change. Each rod is coated with a different chemical — a
phenylene dendrimer, a cyclodextrin, and sodium cholate — and each changes its
rod’s resonant frequency in a different way. It is the combination of three
changes that reveals TATP’s presence.
In tests, the device was able to discriminate between the explosive and
similar gases, sensing it at levels of 1 part per million.
Explosives expert Sidney Alford of Alford Technologies in Chippenham, United
Kingdom, said: “There could be an enormous demand for such a device. TATP is
used both as a main charge and as a detonator in terrorist bombs, so even if it
is only being used to initiate another explosive, you will still be able to
sense it.”
—read more in Daniel Lubczyka et al., “Simple and Sensitive Online Detection
of Triacetone,” Sensors
and Actuators B: Chemical 143, no. 2 (7 January 2010): 561-66
(sub. req.)
Research aims to improve airport security
Published 25 January 2010
From body-part censors to cameras that recognize faces,
Carnegie Mellon's CyLab is working with security technology that assuages
privacy concerns; CMU's Instinctive Computing Lab, eventually envisions a system
that can wipe out the body image entirely, picking up only weapons, which will
appear to be floating in space
The underwear bomber’s thwarted attempt to blow up a Christmas Day flight
jeopardized President Barack Obama’s plans to close Guantanamo Bay prison,
refueled advocacy concerns about passenger privacy, and forced Yang Cai to
revisit an algorithm that identifies the curvature of a female breast.
Sitting in a Carnegie Mellon University office surrounded by plaster of Paris
molds of the human figure, Dr. Cai explained how his algorithm could put to rest
qualms about overexposure from 3-D body scanners at security checkpoints. His
algorithms measure the human frame and identify the breast and genitalia areas.
The system then automatically blurs those regions, blacks them out with a bar or
replaces the features with dummy human parts. “Every man could be Arnold
Schwarzenegger, and every woman could be Marilyn Monroe,” he said.
Airport security, however, has never been a place for fantasy.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Erich Schwartzel writes> that
the holiday scare and recent news that the Transportation Security
Administration (TSA) plans to deploy 450 full-body scanners nationwide have
government officials planning for legislation and passengers preparing
for lines.
Privacy questions
Everyone is worried about who’s looking at what. Two researchers at Carnegie
Mellon’s CyLab are working with security technology that assuages privacy
concerns. Cai’s research offers an automatic censor for certain body parts and
the CyLab Biometrics Center’s programs recognize faces and irises.
Despite the fact that Cai’s system blocks out private parts, it will identify
an object hidden around those regions.
Cai, who founded CMU’s Instinctive Computing Lab, eventually envisions a
system that can wipe out the body image entirely, picking up only weapons, which
will appear to be floating in space.
His research, started in 2000 and published six years later, uses “intrinsic
landmarks” to identify the body’s regions of interest. The unit of measure is
the human head. After that size is determined, the system knows that the breast
region is one-head-size down from the chin, and can map out the rest of the body
from there. “It’s instinctive computing,” he said. “We use one object to measure
another object.”
Iris scans
Downstairs at the CyLab is the Biometrics Center, which permits visitors in
the door only after scanning their iris (the center’s director, professor Marios
Savvides, also has a key.) That same kind of iris scan technology is seen by Dr.
Savvides and his twenty student assistants as a viable and eventual alternative
to fallible security methods, such as body scanners and behavioral analysts.
The problem is that iris scans work now only with highly cooperative subjects
who strike the right pose in the right lighting for the iris to be picked up. A
machine designed to mimic an airport metal detector sits in the back room.
Savvides’ students double as involuntary models.
As each walks through the machine, his or her face is illuminated in infrared
and the iris is captured by the camera. The machine matches the iris with those
stored in its database. The computer identifies the subject and says, “Nice to
see you.”
Savvides sees the eventual possibility of this technology identifying bad
guys whose irises have been stored.
These, however, are compatible guinea pigs who also need a good grade. What
about suspects actively avoiding the camera? Those are technologies that the lab
is “at the edge of,” Savvides said. That includes a camera that finds a face and
can follow it as it moves up to sixty feet away. He is also working on a system
that identifies irises from a distance for the Department of Defense, which
could take about a year to develop.
Research aims to improve airport security
Published 25 January 2010
From body-part censors to cameras that recognize faces,
Carnegie Mellon's CyLab is working with security technology that assuages
privacy concerns; CMU's Instinctive Computing Lab, eventually envisions a system
that can wipe out the body image entirely, picking up only weapons, which will
appear to be floating in space
Cameras with a far-reaching radius can help to identify a potential terrorist
before he reaches the scanners at a security checkpoint, which Savvides calls
“the last failure point.” Long-range cameras could track and identify a suspect
before he or she gets close to security or soldiers.
The lab mostly works with government contracts, although it had more industry
work before the recession, said Savvides.
Face mapping
The team is working with the FBI to map out the human face to help with image
profiling. They currently have seventy-nine facial points identified, with the
hope of using them as a template for a system that can recognize a face that
appears nervous or finicky.
Schwartzel writes that, ironically, it is the most ostensible and human
traits that still trip the technology — things such as facial hair or
eyeglasses. Savvides wants to work toward a technology that recognizes if the
image-captured person is scarred or wearing a hat. Cai’s work also is in the
research phase. His projects were funded by the National Science Foundation and
the Army Research Office.
Once a new technology is ready, the TSA review process can take several
years, said TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis. Technology is tested at a facility at
Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., and, if approved, is taken on as
part of a pilot program at select airports across the United States.
Whole-body imagers were first deployed in airports in Phoenix in 2007. The
TSA has purchased 150 scanners and will buy another 300 to be distributed
sometime this year.
By comparison, Pittsburgh’s airport security looks decidedly low-tech. Davis,
though, said the airport’s arsenal of metal detectors, luggage scanners, and
explosive trace detection machines is comparable to those in most sites across
the country. Pittsburgh also has uniformed officers trained in
behavior detection.
Though the number of total-body scanners the TSA will have matches the number
of commercial airports at 450, Davis said that does not necessarily mean every
airport will have one.
Concerns arise
Still, plans of a massive scanner deployment have some advocacy groups
worried. “Do these store and record images of American passengers stripped
naked? The answer is yes,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the
Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Rotenberg said the diversity of bomb-making materials complicates the
usefulness of body scanners that can not detect liquid or powder components.
He finds sacrificing privacy misses the big-picture problems, such as an
erosion of intelligence or a bureaucratic failure to communicate about a
specific threat like the Christmas Day bombing suspect, Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab. “Oftentimes we’re asked what the harm is in the privacy realm.
But this intrusion is the compelled disclosure of one in undress by the
government,” he said.
Cai, however, has found concerns over the systems to be unique to the United
States, adding that such a system wouldn’t cause much concern in parts of Asia,
which have populations more obsequious to the government, or in Europe, where
anyone looking for a thrill heads to the beach and not the airport.
Savvides, too, has little concern about his technology leading to a police
state. “Have you ever thought about how many cameras are in a casino?”
he asked.
Police camera use puts focus on privacy in public
India awards Implant Sciences $6 million contract for
sniffer
Published 20 January 2010
India will deploy the company’s explosive detector – the
Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 – for protection of military and civilian facilities;
the sniffer comes with a large substance library which includes not only
standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of
improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs)
Implant Sciences announced
a contract totaling approximately $6 million for its Quantum Sniffer QS-H150
Portable Explosives Detectors and associated support. The contract was awarded
by the government of India, for use by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) in force
protection and public safety applications in the country.
Glenn Bolduc, president and CEO of Implant Sciences, commented, “This
contract award is significant in many ways. Most importantly, it allows Implant
Sciences to continue to contribute to worldwide anti-terrorism efforts. We are
also very pleased that this award represents the largest single order in the
company’s history.”
The company expects to ship the entire order within the current fiscal year
which ends 30 June, 2010.
Jeff Tehan, Implant Sciences’ vice president of marketing and sales, added,
“Implant Sciences is the sole contract awardee after an arduous competitive
evaluation that started over 24 months ago. We are extremely proud of this, the
validation it represents, and the follow-on opportunities it creates. To best
support this contract and others in India and South Asia, Implant Sciences has
partnered with LNG Security Services of Delhi, who will provide warranty and
post-warranty technical support, as well as operator and
administrator training.”
The company says the QS-H150 offers technical, operational, and competitive
advantages. Among the most significant are non-contact sample collection,
non-radioactive ionization, simultaneous detection and identification of
explosives particulate and vapor, continuous self-calibration, and ultra-fast
clear down (cycle time). The company also says that the substance library of the
QS-H150 is the broadest in the industry and includes not only standard military
and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade
explosives (IEDs and HMEs). The library is also easily expanded as new
threats emerge.
Artificial nose sniffs out terrorists
Published 25 January 2010
German researchers develop A cheap detector that responds
instantly to TATP in the atmosphere; at the heart of the device are three quartz
rods, each 3 millimeters long and 40 micrometers wide, which are made to vibrate
by applying an alternating voltage; any TATP in the air bonds to chemicals
coating the rods, causing their resonant frequency to change
German scientists have come up with a system that can sniff out terrorists by
capturing the smell of explosives. The artificial nose promises to make it much
easier to detect the explosive triacetone triperoxide, OneIndiareports.
The device could be installed in the doorways of buses, trains, and airports
to sound an alarm if someone carrying TATP crosses the threshold. The explosive
can be made using easily obtainable domestic chemicals and has explosive power
similar to TNT.
Siegfried Waldvogel, an organic chemist at the University of Bonn, Germany,
said, however, that TATP’s high vapor pressure at ambient temperatures makes it
hard to hide. The vapor diffuses through materials such as plastic bags and into
the surrounding air, but the current method for detecting it is time-consuming,
as air samples have to be sent to a lab for tests.
Now, Waldvogel and his colleagues have developed a cheap detector that
responds instantly to TATP in the atmosphere. At its heart are three quartz
rods, each 3 millimeters long and 40 micrometers wide, which are made to vibrate
by applying an alternating voltage.
Any TATP in the air bonds to chemicals coating the rods, causing their
resonant frequency to change. Each rod is coated with a different chemical — a
phenylene dendrimer, a cyclodextrin, and sodium cholate — and each changes its
rod’s resonant frequency in a different way. It is the combination of three
changes that reveals TATP’s presence.
In tests, the device was able to discriminate between the explosive and
similar gases, sensing it at levels of 1 part per million.
Explosives expert Sidney Alford of Alford Technologies in Chippenham, United
Kingdom, said: “There could be an enormous demand for such a device. TATP is
used both as a main charge and as a detonator in terrorist bombs, so even if it
is only being used to initiate another explosive, you will still be able to
sense it.”
—read more in Daniel Lubczyka et al., “Simple and Sensitive Online Detection
of Triacetone,” Sensors
and Actuators B: Chemical 143, no. 2 (7 January 2010): 561-66
(sub. req.)
Research aims to improve airport security
India awards Implant Sciences $6 million contract for
sniffer
Published 20 January 2010
India will deploy the company’s explosive detector – the
Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 – for protection of military and civilian facilities;
the sniffer comes with a large substance library which includes not only
standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of
improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs)
Implant Sciences announced
a contract totaling approximately $6 million for its Quantum Sniffer QS-H150
Portable Explosives Detectors and associated support. The contract was awarded
by the government of India, for use by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) in force
protection and public safety applications in the country.
Glenn Bolduc, president and CEO of Implant Sciences, commented, “This
contract award is significant in many ways. Most importantly, it allows Implant
Sciences to continue to contribute to worldwide anti-terrorism efforts. We are
also very pleased that this award represents the largest single order in the
company’s history.”
The company expects to ship the entire order within the current fiscal year
which ends 30 June, 2010.
Jeff Tehan, Implant Sciences’ vice president of marketing and sales, added,
“Implant Sciences is the sole contract awardee after an arduous competitive
evaluation that started over 24 months ago. We are extremely proud of this, the
validation it represents, and the follow-on opportunities it creates. To best
support this contract and others in India and South Asia, Implant Sciences has
partnered with LNG Security Services of Delhi, who will provide warranty and
post-warranty technical support, as well as operator and
administrator training.”
The company says the QS-H150 offers technical, operational, and competitive
advantages. Among the most significant are non-contact sample collection,
non-radioactive ionization, simultaneous detection and identification of
explosives particulate and vapor, continuous self-calibration, and ultra-fast
clear down (cycle time). The company also says that the substance library of the
QS-H150 is the broadest in the industry and includes not only standard military
and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade
explosives (IEDs and HMEs). The library is also easily expanded as new
threats emerge.
Artificial nose sniffs out terrorists
India awards Implant Sciences $6 million contract for sniffer
Published 20 January 2010
India will deploy the company’s explosive detector – the Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 – for protection of military and civilian facilities; the sniffer comes with a large substance library which includes not only standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs)
Implant Sciences announced a contract totaling approximately $6 million for its Quantum Sniffer QS-H150 Portable Explosives Detectors and associated support. The contract was awarded by the government of India, for use by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) in force protection and public safety applications in the country.
Glenn Bolduc, president and CEO of Implant Sciences, commented, “This contract award is significant in many ways. Most importantly, it allows Implant Sciences to continue to contribute to worldwide anti-terrorism efforts. We are also very pleased that this award represents the largest single order in the company’s history.”
The company expects to ship the entire order within the current fiscal year which ends 30 June, 2010.
Jeff Tehan, Implant Sciences’ vice president of marketing and sales, added, “Implant Sciences is the sole contract awardee after an arduous competitive evaluation that started over 24 months ago. We are extremely proud of this, the validation it represents, and the follow-on opportunities it creates. To best support this contract and others in India and South Asia, Implant Sciences has partnered with LNG Security Services of Delhi, who will provide warranty and post-warranty technical support, as well as operator and administrator training.”
The company says the QS-H150 offers technical, operational, and competitive advantages. Among the most significant are non-contact sample collection, non-radioactive ionization, simultaneous detection and identification of explosives particulate and vapor, continuous self-calibration, and ultra-fast clear down (cycle time). The company also says that the substance library of the QS-H150 is the broadest in the industry and includes not only standard military and commercial explosives, but also a wide variety of improvised and homemade explosives (IEDs and HMEs). The library is also easily expanded as new threats emerge.
Published 25 January 2010
German researchers develop A cheap detector that responds instantly to TATP in the atmosphere; at the heart of the device are three quartz rods, each 3 millimeters long and 40 micrometers wide, which are made to vibrate by applying an alternating voltage; any TATP in the air bonds to chemicals coating the rods, causing their resonant frequency to change
German scientists have come up with a system that can sniff out terrorists by capturing the smell of explosives. The artificial nose promises to make it much easier to detect the explosive triacetone triperoxide, OneIndiareports.
The device could be installed in the doorways of buses, trains, and airports to sound an alarm if someone carrying TATP crosses the threshold. The explosive can be made using easily obtainable domestic chemicals and has explosive power similar to TNT.
Siegfried Waldvogel, an organic chemist at the University of Bonn, Germany, said, however, that TATP’s high vapor pressure at ambient temperatures makes it hard to hide. The vapor diffuses through materials such as plastic bags and into the surrounding air, but the current method for detecting it is time-consuming, as air samples have to be sent to a lab for tests.
Now, Waldvogel and his colleagues have developed a cheap detector that responds instantly to TATP in the atmosphere. At its heart are three quartz rods, each 3 millimeters long and 40 micrometers wide, which are made to vibrate by applying an alternating voltage.
Any TATP in the air bonds to chemicals coating the rods, causing their resonant frequency to change. Each rod is coated with a different chemical — a phenylene dendrimer, a cyclodextrin, and sodium cholate — and each changes its rod’s resonant frequency in a different way. It is the combination of three changes that reveals TATP’s presence.
In tests, the device was able to discriminate between the explosive and similar gases, sensing it at levels of 1 part per million.
Explosives expert Sidney Alford of Alford Technologies in Chippenham, United Kingdom, said: “There could be an enormous demand for such a device. TATP is used both as a main charge and as a detonator in terrorist bombs, so even if it is only being used to initiate another explosive, you will still be able to sense it.”
—read more in Daniel Lubczyka et al., “Simple and Sensitive Online Detection of Triacetone,” Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical 143, no. 2 (7 January 2010): 561-66 (sub. req.)
Published 25 January 2010
From body-part censors to cameras that recognize faces, Carnegie Mellon's CyLab is working with security technology that assuages privacy concerns; CMU's Instinctive Computing Lab, eventually envisions a system that can wipe out the body image entirely, picking up only weapons, which will appear to be floating in space
The underwear bomber’s thwarted attempt to blow up a Christmas Day flight jeopardized President Barack Obama’s plans to close Guantanamo Bay prison, refueled advocacy concerns about passenger privacy, and forced Yang Cai to revisit an algorithm that identifies the curvature of a female breast.
Sitting in a Carnegie Mellon University office surrounded by plaster of Paris molds of the human figure, Dr. Cai explained how his algorithm could put to rest qualms about overexposure from 3-D body scanners at security checkpoints. His algorithms measure the human frame and identify the breast and genitalia areas. The system then automatically blurs those regions, blacks them out with a bar or replaces the features with dummy human parts. “Every man could be Arnold Schwarzenegger, and every woman could be Marilyn Monroe,” he said.
Airport security, however, has never been a place for fantasy. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Erich Schwartzel writes> that the holiday scare and recent news that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) plans to deploy 450 full-body scanners nationwide have government officials planning for legislation and passengers preparing for lines.
Privacy questions
Everyone is worried about who’s looking at what. Two researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab are working with security technology that assuages privacy concerns. Cai’s research offers an automatic censor for certain body parts and the CyLab Biometrics Center’s programs recognize faces and irises.
Despite the fact that Cai’s system blocks out private parts, it will identify an object hidden around those regions.
Cai, who founded CMU’s Instinctive Computing Lab, eventually envisions a system that can wipe out the body image entirely, picking up only weapons, which will appear to be floating in space.
His research, started in 2000 and published six years later, uses “intrinsic landmarks” to identify the body’s regions of interest. The unit of measure is the human head. After that size is determined, the system knows that the breast region is one-head-size down from the chin, and can map out the rest of the body from there. “It’s instinctive computing,” he said. “We use one object to measure another object.”
Iris scans
Downstairs at the CyLab is the Biometrics Center, which permits visitors in the door only after scanning their iris (the center’s director, professor Marios Savvides, also has a key.) That same kind of iris scan technology is seen by Dr. Savvides and his twenty student assistants as a viable and eventual alternative to fallible security methods, such as body scanners and behavioral analysts.
The problem is that iris scans work now only with highly cooperative subjects who strike the right pose in the right lighting for the iris to be picked up. A machine designed to mimic an airport metal detector sits in the back room. Savvides’ students double as involuntary models.
As each walks through the machine, his or her face is illuminated in infrared and the iris is captured by the camera. The machine matches the iris with those stored in its database. The computer identifies the subject and says, “Nice to see you.”
Savvides sees the eventual possibility of this technology identifying bad guys whose irises have been stored.
These, however, are compatible guinea pigs who also need a good grade. What about suspects actively avoiding the camera? Those are technologies that the lab is “at the edge of,” Savvides said. That includes a camera that finds a face and can follow it as it moves up to sixty feet away. He is also working on a system that identifies irises from a distance for the Department of Defense, which could take about a year to develop.
Research aims to improve airport security
Published 25 January 2010
From body-part censors to cameras that recognize faces, Carnegie Mellon's CyLab is working with security technology that assuages privacy concerns; CMU's Instinctive Computing Lab, eventually envisions a system that can wipe out the body image entirely, picking up only weapons, which will appear to be floating in space
Cameras with a far-reaching radius can help to identify a potential terrorist before he reaches the scanners at a security checkpoint, which Savvides calls “the last failure point.” Long-range cameras could track and identify a suspect before he or she gets close to security or soldiers.
The lab mostly works with government contracts, although it had more industry work before the recession, said Savvides.
Face mapping
The team is working with the FBI to map out the human face to help with image profiling. They currently have seventy-nine facial points identified, with the hope of using them as a template for a system that can recognize a face that appears nervous or finicky.
Schwartzel writes that, ironically, it is the most ostensible and human traits that still trip the technology — things such as facial hair or eyeglasses. Savvides wants to work toward a technology that recognizes if the image-captured person is scarred or wearing a hat. Cai’s work also is in the research phase. His projects were funded by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.
Once a new technology is ready, the TSA review process can take several years, said TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis. Technology is tested at a facility at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., and, if approved, is taken on as part of a pilot program at select airports across the United States.
Whole-body imagers were first deployed in airports in Phoenix in 2007. The TSA has purchased 150 scanners and will buy another 300 to be distributed sometime this year.
By comparison, Pittsburgh’s airport security looks decidedly low-tech. Davis, though, said the airport’s arsenal of metal detectors, luggage scanners, and explosive trace detection machines is comparable to those in most sites across the country. Pittsburgh also has uniformed officers trained in behavior detection.
Though the number of total-body scanners the TSA will have matches the number of commercial airports at 450, Davis said that does not necessarily mean every airport will have one.
Concerns arise
Still, plans of a massive scanner deployment have some advocacy groups worried. “Do these store and record images of American passengers stripped naked? The answer is yes,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Rotenberg said the diversity of bomb-making materials complicates the usefulness of body scanners that can not detect liquid or powder components.
He finds sacrificing privacy misses the big-picture problems, such as an erosion of intelligence or a bureaucratic failure to communicate about a specific threat like the Christmas Day bombing suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. “Oftentimes we’re asked what the harm is in the privacy realm. But this intrusion is the compelled disclosure of one in undress by the government,” he said.
Cai, however, has found concerns over the systems to be unique to the United States, adding that such a system wouldn’t cause much concern in parts of Asia, which have populations more obsequious to the government, or in Europe, where anyone looking for a thrill heads to the beach and not the airport.
Savvides, too, has little concern about his technology leading to a police state. “Have you ever thought about how many cameras are in a casino?” he asked.
Published 21 January 2010
South Portland, Maine, police is using automated license plate recognition CCTV which targets traffic scofflaws -- but it is connected to a centralized databank which helps the policy pick up people who are wanted on warrants and other potential offenders; supporters say new license-plate recognition technology will improve the safety
Camera mounted on police cruiser // Source: radiowroks.ca
New surveillance technology being used by South Portland, Maine, police is raising concerns among civil-rights advocates and lawmakers, who say it infringes on individuals’ civil rights. South Portland is apparently Maine’s first community to use automated license plate recognition, which targets traffic scofflaws, people who are wanted on warrants and other potential offenders.
Three cameras were mounted near the blue lights on top of one cruiser, two facing forward, and the third pointing to the passenger side of the car. The cameras take pictures of license plates and run the numbers through the National Crime Information Center’s database.
Portland Press Herald’s Melanie Cremer writesthat state Sen. Dennis Damon (D-Trenton), has introduced a bill to ban technology that is used to gather broad information about private citizens. He said the idea was presented to him by the Maine Civil Liberties Union.
Damon said he is concerned that such technology would let police drive through a parking lot and capture all of the license plates. “All of a sudden they would have reason to believe that I’m in this location – let’s say its a political rally,” Damon said. “Another sweep through a parking area might reveal I am there. Now, all of a sudden there is a track on me. To me, it’s too much of a concern that I might lose my privacy and freedoms that are afforded to me as a citizen of this state and nation.”
South Portland police Lt. Frank Clark said the technology is being used to detect people who are wanted, stolen vehicles or vehicles that have been involved in felonies or violent crimes. Police can also use the system to help find missing people, or when the state issues an Amber Alert, Clark said.
A computer in the cruiser alerts the officer when a vehicle in the database is detected. The officer can then call a dispatcher to verify that the person to whom the vehicle is registered has committed a violation or is wanted for questioning. If that is confirmed, the driver will be stopped.
The technology was installed on Jan. 6. So far, officers have received several hits from the database, none of which has led to enforcement. “Information is gold in this field,” Clark said. “The more information we have and the earlier the officers have it, the safer it will make them. It gives them a quick red flag before they approach the situation.”
David Harrison of South Portland supports the police initiative. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to be concerned about,” Harrison said. “If you are out there driving without a license or no insurance, I want you off the road.”
Bob Ryder, a retired police officer in South Portland, said automated license plate recognition is another tool to help officers do their job. “It will level the playing field for police officers’ safety,” he said.
The system, which cost more than $20,000, was purchased in the fall through a $113,000 grant to advance technology in the South Portland Police Department. Twenty-five to 28 other states use the technology.
Opponents compare it to traffic surveillance cameras. Last year, Governor John Baldacci signed a law that bars cities and towns from using photo enforcement to catch drivers breaking other traffic laws. Shenna Bellows, executive director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, said the technology is part of a growing trend toward a surveillance society. “Just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should, from a public policy perspective,” Bellows said. “The surveillance system undermines our fundamental right to be left alone, free from government harassment or monitoring unless we are suspected of wrongdoing. This technology turns the presumption of innocence on its head by recording everyone’s public movement.”
Police camera use puts focus on privacy in public
Published 21 January 2010
South Portland, Maine, police is using automated license plate recognition CCTV which targets traffic scofflaws -- but it is connected to a centralized databank which helps the policy pick up people who are wanted on warrants and other potential offenders; supporters say new license-plate recognition technology will improve the safety
Camera mounted on police cruiser // Source: radiowroks.ca
In a statement Clark issued Friday opposing the legislation, he said the department’s use of technology has helped them to be more effective and efficient in their work, and has helped them save lives. “Surveillance is generally defined as the act of observing or monitoring individual groups,” Clark said in the statement. “The ALPR does not do this. It does not observe people. It does not monitor people. It does not track people or their associations. It does what many good police officers have done by hand for many years, but does it much more efficiently and effectively.”
Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap met with South Portland Police Chief Ed Googins last summer after the department requested access to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles’ database for use with the cameras.
Police have access to driving records, registration records and titles. Dunlap said. They also can access a Web site that contains the names of drivers in their cities or towns whose licenses have been suspended. But South Portland wants more.
Clark said the department wants access to a database listing Maine’s most dangerous drivers. “The most appropriate use of the technology is to target drivers who have proven themselves to be a danger on the road,” Clark said. “We met with the MCLU and we feel very strongly there is a balance between the privacy concerns they are raising and the benefits this can provide.”
The department is finalizing its standard operating procedure for using the technology. As part of that, Clark and Lt. Todd Bernard are the only officers with access to the data. The department will store the information for thirty days.
Clark said an investigating officer can file a request with the chief to scan the data. The department will audit the system every thirty days to get a record of officers who request access to the data.
Bellows said that’s not enough. “An internal review is not sufficient for highly sensitive information like this,” she said. “The information about people’s daily movements could be used for a variety of harmful purposes.”
File image courtesy AFP. |
Munich, Germany (SPX) Jan 21, 2010
A new intelligent system has been developed to help identify terrorists carrying explosives. Sensitive electronic noses capture the smell of the explosives; the system processes the acquired data, correlates it with individuals' movements ... and ultimately tracks down the suspects.
Literally hundreds of people are hurrying through the long airport corridor between Terminals A and B. Among them are two terrorists, who've hidden themselves in the crowd.
They're carrying small containers of chemicals in their jacket pockets, individual components for an explosive. But there's something the criminals don't know. As well as being observed by security cameras, they're also being "sniffed out" by chemical noses hidden in the corridor wall.
The smell sensors sound the alarm when the terrorists walk past, alerting an airport security guard who notes the problem on his monitoring equipment. At this point in time, he can't tell precisely who is carrying hazardous chemicals - but he knows the sensor network will continue to "sniff out" and track down the suspects.
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE in Wachtberg have built a prototype security system to replicate just such a scenario. They've named it HAMLeT, which stands for Hazardous Material Localization and Person Tracking. "HAMLeT will alert security personnel to suspicious individuals," says head of department Dr. Wolfgang Koch from the FKIE. The system involves a network of highly-sensitive smell sensors which follow an explosive's trail.
There are oscillating crystals on the sensor chips, and whenever the electronic noses capture chemical molecules, their oscillation frequency changes. The precise nature of the change is different for different substances. A further component in the system - the sensor's data fusion function - traces the explosive's path and ferrets out the carrier.
A second sensor network is needed to track the route the individual takes; for this, the researchers have used laser scanners. "HAMLeT's real achievement is its ability to collate all the data and convert it into a clear and accurate overall picture," says Koch. The sensor data fusion process employs complex algorithms which allow HAMLeT to build up a precise image of pedestrian flows and connect a particular smell with a specific individual.
In a trial involving the German Armed Forces, researchers at the FKIE proved the system's ability to track down five "terrorists" carrying hidden explosives. The scientists are now working to refine the prototype's algorithms in order to reduce the false alarm rate.
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