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Suspicious packages, some containing improvised bomb-like devices, are being investigated in Newark, Philadelphia and other locations in the United States, according to the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets. All of the packages either originated from or have some connection to Yemen, where violence between al Qaeda and the Yemeni government has been escalating over the last month.

Secretary Ridge will discuss the security environment facing the United States. He will offer his unique insights into existing and emerging threats, recent overseas terror alerts and U.S. engagement with the rest of the world.

There can be no denying that the risks to living in the Washington Beltway area are increasing. It’s an almost default answer to point to the poor safety record of the region’s Metro system, the seemingly increasing number of pedestrian/bike accidents and the regular (and unfortunate) crime statistics. But the recent sniper-esque shootings at regional military facilities and the arrest of a Pakistani, naturalized U.S. citizen for planning to attack crowded Metro stations are giving all of us in the National Capital Region a bit of concern. When it comes to emergencies, how we respond is really up to us. That is why I’m asking my co-workers, friends and neighbors – are you ready?

If journalists are going to maintain intellectual integrity, then they must objectively acknowledge–whether they like it or not–that there are indeed Americans still traumatized by the murder of some 3,000 Americans by Islamic extremists who crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Because East Asia is often overlooked in terms of terrorism analysis (even Southeast Asia garners scant attention from but a small handful of scholars, analysts and commentators), I felt and continue to feel compelled to learn from the Japanese counterterrorism experience. Learning from like-minded liberal democracies (including the United Kingdom and Israel) benefits U.S. national security as well as the broader international security community. The focus of my efforts, thus, was to comprehend how the Japanese government counters terrorism – particularly its culture, system and methods. This is the first in a three-part series.

When we talk about social media’s relevance to law enforcement, there are two different applications – using social media to facilitate communication between cops and mining clues about suspects from social media sites. Social media tools like this allow faster progress on analyzing trends, patterns and regional issues without needing to make dozens of phone calls hoping that one of your colleagues has relevant answers to your query. However, there is a distinction between “talking” via social media, and using tried and true tools and processes for investigation and analysis.

Several months back, I had the opportunity to contribute two articles for a publication that Faircount Media was doing to commemorate the centennial of the first woman police officer in the United States. The publication recently came out, and the items that I put together for the publication, “100 Years of Women in Law Enforcement,” were just made available online. There is much to celebrate with this diversity in leadership and the accomplishments that are being made in the various public and private sectors are worthy of note.

According to the Washington Post, “[f]our men accused of planting bombs outside synagogues in the Bronx and plotting to fire missiles at military planes were convicted on Monday, in a case that was widely seen as an important test of the entrapment defense.” These most recent convictions, however, are a reminder that, someday, this could happen. We can’t always rely on incompetent terrorists. The problem is that, unlike 9/11, there will be little practical measures that can be done after the fact to mitigate the threat.

NPR news analyst Juan Williams was recently fired after making controversial remarks on The O’Reilly Factor. Here is a brief video of Williams talking about why he was fired and elaborating on his initial comments. What say you, reader? Was Williams out of line or does he offer sound insight?

By Jena Baker McNeill
Last week, Time Magazine led with the story, “Locked and Loaded: The Secret World of Extreme Militias.” Page after page, the article describes renegade, anti-government militia groups. The article, in its coverage of militia groups, however, makes one glaring omission: State Defense Forces (SDF). If you haven’t heard of them, don’t worry. Most Americans have not. These forces receive little press and little public attention and largely operate under the radar. But SDFs are actually a low-cost means for states to enhance homeland security efforts without relying on the bureaucratic federal apparatus.

In Part I of this series, we discussed the emergence of a U.S. strategy towards the Middle East built on two pillars – Oil Security and Israel Security – and the introduction of a third pillar in support of the first two – the Peace Process. In this part, we explore the impact of regional developments and U.S. actions and/or reactions on the security of oil from a U.S. strategic interest. We begin with the region’s single most important event of the last 20-plus years of the twentieth century – the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Somewhere someone said, “Money complicates things.” That’s the phrase that came to mind after reading the front page story of the Washington Post: “Six months after the spill, BP’s money is changing the gulf as much as its oil. Money, regardless of who hands it out, has a tendency to make some happy and others deeply angry. This is another one of those cases.

Well, there is a headline NO ONE ever expected to see…yeah, right. At the Homeland Security & Defense Business Council’s Cyber Security Awareness Month Conference, it actually happened – really. Roger Cressey of Good Harbor Consulting was the lead keynote speaker. After a good introduction by Marc Pearl, the head of the council, Cressey gave a super address that covered the water front of the key issues facing our nation in cyber. Yours truly had the honor of being the closing keynote speaker. I took exception with my friend Roger on a couple of areas. For one, he draws far too strong a line between cyber crime and cyber espionage, and does not consider cyber crime a national security issue but a law enforcement one. I could not disagree more.

Whenever you write a post like the one I posted yesterday on Security Debrief, heralding the dramatic improvements that FEMA has made in its engagement of the private sector, there is always the risk of forgetting or not mentioning someone who helped make that success possible. I was remiss in not mentioning a name of someone else who deserves recognition for helping make the FEMA private sector engagement turnaround possible. That name is Cindy Taylor.

The Middle East has undergone a sea change at the geostrategic level, presenting U.S. policymakers with a new set of serious challenges. To design a new approach to the region that would have resonance with the key players and be ultimately successful in preserving its vital interests, the United States needs to fully understand and assimilate “why and how” this shift has taken place in the region. In this four-part series, I will attempt to shed some light at the root developments that have caused the demise of the old Mideast order, the birth of the new order and its significant impact on U.S. strategic interests, and the viable policy options at the disposal of the United States, given the new realities of the region.

Last week, speaking at the Migration Policy Institute, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Alan Bersin gave a glowing review of the successes CBP was having in meeting its mission. Whether one agrees with Bersin’s overall assessment, there was one area that jumped out at me that begs further inquiry. One will note that Commissioner Bersin was clever in his wording, in that he did not SPECIFICALLY talk about the need to deploy Predator UASs, but about UASs in general. To my mind, he was being too clever by half, but he is not the first government official to use verbal misdirection to give himself wiggle-room for a later time.

The center of gravity for private sector engagement at DHS is at FEMA. Five years ago, if you had told me I would say those words, given all of my experiences at DHS and especially after my deployment during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, I would have told you that you were nuts. To say FEMA has become a far more welcoming place for the private sector to interact with would be an understatement. But how did this happen? How did FEMA turn around the hostile cultural and operational attitude towards the private sector?

Security Debrief founder/editor Chris Battle and I took to the skies today in search of homeland security adventure – well, actually just a 6:00 AM flight to Dallas/Fort Worth on business. While the terrorist threat is lethal, the day-to-day impact of the War on Terror most felt by Americans is our airport experience. When I compare my checkpoint experience from this morning with some I’ve had over the last decade, I’ve got to hand it to TSA. A sense of humor can make all the difference.

A week or so ago, I did a post on 5th Generation Warfare (5GW), and it apparently stirred up some interest among the readers of Security Debrief. Given that interest, I thought I would look a little deeper into this subject. My title will probably bother some. Isn’t it always about “winning?” Actually, life would be much simpler if it were. Vince Lombardi’s famous quote (“Winning isn’t everything, it is the ONLY thing.”) works for football but not for 5GW. As much as Americans love a winner, in 5GW it will not be quite so clear cut.

The consequences of this year’s biggest catastrophe – BP’s oil spill – will be with the region and the country for a considerable time, but it’s not the only man-made catastrophe that should give us reason for concern. The other man-made disaster as many in the Gulf Coast would call it was the Obama Administration’s moratorium on deep-water drilling. That highly prescriptive action unleashed a set of economic dominoes that many people I spoke with during my recent visit to the Gulf thought caused more economic damage than the oil spill itself. As my friend George Swift, the President and CEO of the Southwest Louisiana Partnership for Economic Development (SWLA Partnership), shared with me in late August, “You don’t shut down the whole airline industry because one plane crashes.”