Homeland Security News

The Director of Homeland Security Programs is a key leadership position within the university. The Director provides the resources for a quality learning experience for students by ensuring coherence in the discipline and relevance to the practice. This management position contributes to Read more…

DHS releases Blueprint for Cybersecurity in the face of growing cyber security concerns. The Blueprint for a Secure Cyber Future is based on the Department of Homeland Security Quadrennial Homeland Security Review Report’s strategic framework by providing a strategy for secure and resilient cyber environment. With this guide, stakeholders at all levels of government and the private sector can establish common language to develop the cybersecurity capabilities.

The Blueprint breaks down cybersecurity into two areas of action:

• Protecting our Critical Information Infrastructure Today
• and Building a Stronger Cyber Ecosystem for Tomorrow.

The Chemical Sector Security Summit 2012 will be held on July 30 – August 2, 2012 at Baltimore, Md. The sixth annual Summit will provide a forum for representatives from the chemical community to exchange information and network with other security professionals, share best practices, learn more about chemical security regulations, and gain insight into the roles of state, local, and federal agencies and departments involved in chemical security. The National Protection & Programs Directorate’s Office of Infrastructure Protection (NPPD/IP) and the Chemical Sector Coordinating Council are co-sponsoring the 2012 Chemical Sector Security Summit in Baltimore, Maryland.

EQI is the Israeli company that provides the earthquake early warning solutions presented at ISDEF 2011.

Israeli Minister of the Home Front Defense Matan Vilnai: Preparedness is Everything

S.T.I. Ltd has presented UVIS (under vehicle inspection system) at ISDEF 2011. S.T.I. Ltd provides explosive detection solutions for homeland security market.

At the opening ceremony of the 5th annual Israel defense exhibition ISDEF 2011 the Israeli Minister of the Home Front Defense Matan Vilnai said:

“I have just returned from trip to Japan. The country is recovering from the triple blow of tsunami, earthquake and the following nuclear disaster. The only way to cope with such unfortunate events is to be prepared. Preparedness is everything.”

IDO Security, Inc. exhibits MagShoe(TM) shoes-on scanning device at Israel’s defense and security expo, ISDEF 2011. The MagShoe has already been successfully installed, among other places, at the Israeli Parliament House - (Knesset), Ben Gurion - Israeli International Airport and at the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.

Call for Participants: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security (IEEE HST 11)

IEEE HST 2011, to be held 15-17 November 2011 in Boston, MA, will bring together global science and technology thought leaders to foster homeland security technology innovation. The conference is produced by IEEE with technical support from DHS S&T, IEEE Biometrics Council, IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, and IEEE-USA, as well as with organizational support from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Raytheon, and MITRE. The focus of the Call for Papers, Posters and Tutorials is on emerging technologies in the areas of: Cyber Security, Attack and Disaster Preparation, Recovery, and Response; Land and Maritime Border Security, and Biometrics, Forensics and Physical Security. Sponsors include Raytheon, Massport, Elbit Systems, and Teledyne Benthos. To learn more, visit www.ieee-hst.org or contact Robert Alongi, IEEE at information@ieee-hst.org at +1 781-245-5405.

Good old Europe is changing in the face of terror threat - all national treasure sites, like Musée d’Orsay or Notre-Dame de Paris, are heavily patrolled.

Difficulty of the U.K. authorities to deal with gang violence that has taken over the London streets in the recent weeks once again demonstrates that law enforcement needs new approaches to prevent and fight the crime. Help may come from rather obscure academic field - Semantic Graph Database (SGD).

A few months ago, in April 2011, the Workshop on Semantic Graph Database Search Patterns has taken place in Seattle, Washington, USA. One of the case studies presented at the workshop was Application of Semantic Graph Database Search Patterns in Law Enforcement (excerpt from the workshop’s report):

This data has ≈ 100K elements/records about people, places, and events, and on the order of millions of relationships between records. It is in relational form,
but with a rudimentary triple-based ontology.

Major features of the dataset include:

• Gang activity, sex offenders, burglary, etc.
• Roles: witness, victim, suspect, perpetrator– Events are temporal. Associations between people and addresses/phone number are temporal. Addresses are spatial, linked to people and organizations.
• Example of events: car prowl at a certain time, time of report of shots fired, not so much booking or jail-related, more focused on officers. However, history and records are important, like criminal records and people who were in jail together or shared a cell together.

Characteristics of useful queries include:

1. Shortest path queries (“Show how two people are connected”) are very useful, but tend to blow up for time or memory.
2. Who is associated with crimes over a specific geographic region? The spacial component becomes very difficult for boundary cases such as a car accident
   in the middle of a street that serves as a boundary for the law enforcement zones.
3. When a crime occurs, queries are requested that perform the task of landscaping, or trying to find anything related to the new crime, such as similar victims, locations, etc.

Finally, it would be useful to be able to search for probable crime spree patterns. Here a crime spree is loosely defined as a pattern of similar crimes following a feasible spatio-temporal sequence. For example, give all crimes in the “neighborhood” (defined) of a given space+time, and do so iteratively for all crimes in the neighborhood, until the neighborhood can no longer be expanded. The sequence can no longer be expanded when the time between two events are such that there was not sufficient time to move from the previous location to the next. Since the “time” of the crime is a fuzzy term—when did a break-in happen given when it was first noticed?—this constraint may come down to a confidence factor dipping below some threshold.