Security
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Thank you for your faithful readership through the past five years. Over its short run, the Counterterrorism Blog served an important role both as a leading terrorism news and information aggregator and as a site where noted practitioner-experts presented commentary and analysis. This combined to make the site a regular “one-stop” bookmark for the interested public, media and policy community at a crucial time. CTB has had a remarkable run, and a tremendous impact – in addition to being visited over 8.2 million times, the CTB spurred news stories, held Congressional briefings, embedded reporters in war zones, and informed the policy debate – even earning a negative review from Al Qaeda! As the world has changed and the terrorism community has evolved so has the ability of the volunteer contributing experts on the Counterterrorism Blog to dedicate their time and energy to this enterprise. In light of this, the Board has made the decision to discontinue publishing here.
Counterterrorism Blog
According to this report on the UK’s Sun website, elements of the terror group al Qaeda may be plotting a deadly cyanide poison attack during the London Olympics. The report states that extremists on a website with links to the terror group have posted detailed instructions on how to cause carnage at this summer’s Games. [...] 3/25/2012 | 0 comments | View Post Authorities say a Montana man tried to bring four loaded, semi-automatic handguns past a security checkpoint at Sacramento International Airport and was being held without bail Friday. Harold Waller, 45, was arrested Thursday afternoon after Transportation Security Administration officials found a gun in one of his carry-on bags, said Sacramento County Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Ramos. [...]
Homeland Security News
In Homeland Security - News and Analysis of Critical Issues in H
By William Tucker “If you look at last year, 30 ships and up to 700 hostages were held – today that is eight [ships] and around 200 [hostages].” – Rear Admiral Duncan Potts, the operation commander for the EU Naval Force in Somalia
Entropic Memes Blog
Growing up as a kid, we didn’t eat rice very much. In fact, I’m pretty sure there were only three ways of using the stuff, for us: In a stuffed-pepper hotdish, and in two dubious concoctions one of my older siblings dreamed up: Chicken Noodle and Rice soup (made by adding a handful of instant rice to a can of soup) and Tomato Soup with Rice (made by adding as much instant rice as possible to a can of tomato soup). Yes, yes. We were a very sad slice of middle America. Well, in the last couple of decades, rice has become a major staple of my household’s diet. Gone is the bland and tasteless instant rice; here in its stead is the delicious and aromatic long-grain jasmine rice.
UNREDACTED
CIA Abu Zubaida Interrogation Photo. Zubaida was waterboarded 83 times in one month. The Zelikow Memo concluded that this type of "enhanced interrogation" was prohibited by the McCain Amendment and the Convention Against Torture. Yesterday, the National Security Archive received and posted the elusive “Zelikow Memo.” In 2009, after the Obama administration declassified the “ Torture Memos ,” former State Department Counselor Philip Zelikow went public about the existence of this memo, which concluded that the CIA could no longer legally conduct “enhanced interrogations.” This conclusion was not a big hit within the Bush White House.
This reference work contains the locations of SAM sites and related air defense facilities identified in open source imagery, presented as a collection of Google eEarth placemarks. The downloadable file found above contains four separate folders: SAMs by country, SHORAD SAMs, Historical Sites, and Target Range SAMs. There is a fifth folder, Range Rings, which may be downloaded here: Range Rings . This is a link to where the file is hosted, right-clicking and selecting "Save As" will not work.
IMINT & Analysis
F-35B test aircraft BF-3 flies with weapons bay doors open in March 2012. Photo: Lockheed The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the supposed backbone of the Pentagon’s future air arsenal, could need additional years of work and billions of dollars in unplanned fixes, the Air Force and the Government Accountability Office revealed on Tuesday. Congressional testimony by Air Force and Navy leaders, plus a new report by the GAO, heaped bad news on a program that was already almost a decade late, hundreds of billions of dollars over its original budget and vexed by mismanagement, safety woes and rigged test results . At an estimated $1 trillion to develop, purchase and support through 2050, the Lockheed Martin-built F-35 was already the most expensive conventional weapons program ever even before Tuesday’s bulletins. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps are counting on buying as many as 2,500 F-35s to replace almost every tactical jet in their current inventories.
Danger Room
Hollywood studios want a federal judge to preserve data on all the 66.6 million users of Megaupload, the file-sharing service that was shuttered in January due to federal indictments targeting its operators. The Motion Picture Association of America is requesting Carpathia, Megaupload’s Virginia-based server host, to retain the 25 petabytes of Megaupload data on its servers, which includes account information for Megaupload’s millions of users. That’s according to a newly surfaced court filing in the Megaupload prosecution in connection to charges of racketeering and criminal copyright infringement.
Threat Level
GroupIntel
“In a potential escalation of the U.S. attack on Mexican drug cartels, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, introduced legislation Wednesday to designate four Mexican drug cartels as ‘foreign terrorist 1 Comment • Read this post »XRY works by first jailbreaking the handset. According to Micro Systemation, no ‘backdoors’ created by Apple used, but instead it makes use of security flaws in the operating system the same way that regular jailbreakers do. Once the iPhone has been jailbroken, the tool then goes on to ‘brute-force’ the passcode, trying every possible four digit combination until the correct password has been found. Given the limited number of possible combinations for a four-digit passcode -- 10,000, ranging from 0000 to 9999 -- this doesn’t take long. Once the handset has been jailbroken and the passcode guessed, all the data on the handset, including call logs, messages, contacts, GPS data and even keystrokes, can be accessed and examined. Paul Ceglia's lawsuit against Facebook is fascinating, but that's not the point of this blog post.
on Security