Editor’s notes

Trying to secure the Super Bowl was nothing compared to the upcoming Olympic Games. The logistics involved in coordinating all the teams and athletes along with security personnel from numerous agencies should probably be considered an Olympic event all in itself.
Canada will spend about $900 million (U.S.) to keep the Games safe (up from [...]

In recent months I’ve spent a lot of time reading, talking, thinking and writing about aviation security. But, there’s nothing like seeing some of these processes in real life. In case you missed my series of live blogs, I was in Florida this week attending TechSec Solutions. As usual, I flew out of the Portland [...]

Apparently, I’ve been distracted lately and haven’t had ports on my radar because two fairly significant changes to port security just came to my attention (not to worry, I’ve adjusted my Google alerts appropriately).
The first is that the Obama administration has apparently just dropped this whole 100 percent cargo screening initiative that was due [...]

I have counterterrorism on the brain these days. Prior to my attendance at the Private Sector Counterterrorism Awareness workshop (sponsored by the Maine Emergency Management Agency in collaboration with DHS) I hadn’t really thought that much about the role of the private sector in such efforts. And to be honest, living in Maine doesn’t exactly [...]

It’s 8am and here I am in Augusta, Maine attending the “Private Sector Counterterrorism Awareness” workshop hosted by the Department of Homeland Security and the Maine Emergency Management Agency. So far, the cinnamon buns are delicious and the coffee is most needed (I’m not exactly a morning person). I’m very anxious to hear what DHS [...]

There’s no let up to this debate about whether or not full-body scanners should be more widely adapted in aviation security. An article in the Huffington Post claims that during a test of the technology on a German television show, the scanner was unable to detect some of the components on a person’s body.
Schneir [...]

Nothing’s going right for the Transportation Security Administration lately. The Washington Post is reporting that Erroll Southers, on the year anniversary of no one being in charge of the TSA, withdrew his nomination to lead the embattled agency, citing “political ideology” as the primary obstruction to his confirmation.
“It is clear that my nomination has [...]

The New York Times yesterday published a fairly in-depth article about additional warning signs the administration made that could have prevented the Christmas Day terrorist attack.
While the article notes that the intelligence community was very in tune with monitoring information coming out of Yemen, it was still unable to pull together and interpret the [...]

The TSA just can’t get a break lately. It’s been made very clear to the public by the President and Secretary Napolitano that there needs to be some major improvements to the government’s system of gathering intelligence. But the media just can’t let it go. Now ABC News is reporting that an 8-year-old boy is [...]

*UPDATED BELOW 1.13.10
In the wake of all the aviation security discussion, the use of millimeter wave technology keeps coming up over and over. And while there is a strong possibility that this type of technology would’ve detected the vial of explosives hidden on the body of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, there has been conflicting reports about [...]