Homeland Security News

SMi’s Counter CBRNe Operations conference (2 - 3 Feb 2011, Millennium Gloucester Hotel, London) returns for the 4th year, following on from the sell-out success of last year’s event to bring together industry experts to discuss all aspects of CBRNe operations.

This exceptional conference will offer delegates the chance to experience an exciting and diverse four days, which will include: an optional site visit to the UK Defence CBRN centre, industry leading keynote addresses and presentations, interactive panel discussions and two workshops focusing on IED and interoperability between agencies during a CBRNe incident.

Hear from our line-up of international speakers:

• Chief Superintendent Stuart Harrison, Police Military Liaison Officer, Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), Home Office, UK
• Lauri Luht, EU CREMEX 2011 Co-ordinator, Ministry of the Interior, Estonia
• Gennadi Lutay, Head of Assistance and Protection Branch, International Coorperation and Assistance Division-OPCW
• John Conaghan, Counter Terrorism Security Coordinator, London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, British Transport Police
• Captain Michael Collins, Chief of Staff, Joint Task Force Civil Support, US NORTHCOM
• Chief Warrant Officer 4 Domah Diggs, Director, CBRN Defence School, US Marine Corps

Border Security 2011 (28 Feb – 1 March 2011, Sofia, Bulgaria), held in partnership with Borderpol, the World Border Organisation, is the leading European event dedicated to bringing together industry experts to examine the latest challenges facing the international border management community. Now in its 4th year, SMi’s forthcoming conference will present an exceptional line-up of keynote speakers, insight from leading experts and senior government officials, special addresses from Borderpol and an outstanding programme covering themes including border crime, border management in developing countries, interoperability and biometrics.

Hear from our keynote addresses:

• General Commissioner Zaharin Penov, Director, Chief Directorate Border Police, Bulgaria
• Principal Police Quaestor Ioan Buda, General Inspector, Romanian Border Police
• Colonel Leszek Elas, Commander in Chief, Polish Border Guard
• Colonel Sergey Agapov, Deputy Head, Directorate of International Cooperation, Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB)
• Serge Rinkel, Director of Technical Committee, Borderpol
• Colonel Zoltán Szabó (Ret’d), Director of European Secretariat Office, Borderpol
• Commodore Dan Thorell, Director & Head of Regional Command South, Swedish Coastguard
• Police Colonel Dr. Gábor Kovács Ph.D, Resident Twinning Advisor, EU Twinning Project, Hungarian National Police
• Nenad Banovic, Chief, Serbian Border Police Administration
• Lieutenant Colonel Tõnu Hunt, Deputy Director General, Estonian Border Guard
• Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Zehnder, Commander 2nd Region, Swiss Border Guard

Designing and maintaining databases for homeland security and defense applications is a challenge of cosmic proportions, considering a number of requirements to meet:

• Resilience
• Scalability
• Speed of data access
• No single point of failure
• Distributed data acquisition and common data sharing
• Managing massive unstructured data

For example, rapid image acquisition and analysis is an important initial source of information that can detail conditions over a wide area both to mitigate the effects of large-scale natural or technological disasters and to provide digital terrain analysis and geospatial updates to battlefield commanders and weapons platforms in support of mission planning, rehearsal and execution. Prior to the emergence of the non-relational database platforms, the image acquisition, analysis and sharing depended on slow, processing-intensive relational database management systems (RDBMS) that could not meet the field operator’s requirement for rapid access to accurate image data and analysis, timely update of database with multiple input sources and necessary level of redundancy.

In search of solutions engineers turned to the non-relational database management systems or NoSQL, a new technology that emerged to tackle scalability problems in exponentially growing social networks such as Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. With the emergence of the open source NoSQL platforms governmental agencies and a few technology startups tried to adopt NoSQL database technology to military and homeland security applications. We are getting reports of successful NoSQL pilots currently used as an alternative supplement/backup to existing systems.

Outstanding results have been accomplished in data mining application serving multiple data input points and collaborative data analysis. The NoSQL technology is not supposed to replace traditional RDBMS in military and homeland security applications. NoSQL addresses the RDBMS problems by supplementing scalability, seed and robustness, value adding to existing data, and maintaining a common set of data on the battlefield or emergency area for use by multiple field operators.

According to a recently released market report NoSQL Market Forecast 2011-2015, a considerable share of burgeoning NoSQL market will be attributed to the military and homeland security applications.

In-Q-Tel (IQT), the venture arm of CIA, has announced a strategic investment and development agreement with Cleversafe Inc., a provider of resilient storage solutions for storage clouds to support the missions of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The Cleversafe platform is ideal for storing mission critical data by addressing the core principles of data confidentiality, integrity, and availability within its information dispersal architecture. This approach solves the security problems associated with Cloud Storage since Cleversafe secures the confidentiality of data by transforming it to be inherently secure.

Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage technology, which has been in the commercial market for more than two years, seamlessly transforms data into secure slices, and then disperses these slices to multiple storage nodes typically across three or four data centers. Each individual slice is unrecognizable as data and therefore inherently secure, whereas a defined threshold of slices can be used to bit-perfectly recreate the original data. This storage efficient approach has thin provisioning built in and eliminates the need for traditional replication, thereby reducing storage requirements by 50 to 70 percent when compared to traditional RAID with replication and yet has even higher availability than four replicated copies.

Riot Control Technology has been demonstrated today at the opening of Israel Defence Exhibition (ISDEF) 2010.

The 4th Annual Israel Defence Exhibition (ISDEF) for Army & Police is taking place on the 18 – 20 of October, 2010 in Israel.

ISDEF’s advantage is that it uses Israel’s excellent reputation as a world leader in the fields of Defence and Homeland Security and collaborates between major decision makers. Being the only major international defense exhibition in Israel, ISDEF attracts top key players, political and government figures.

Event summary:

• Live demonstrations of the most advanced products on the market
• Full exposure to the Israeli Defense market
• 5,000 International visitors & 120 exhibitors from all over the world
• International defense delegations
• Face to face interaction with potential end users

Intellicheck Mobilisa, Inc. (AMEX:IDN), a provider of identity technology, access control and wireless security solutions, has been awarded approximately $500,000 of additional R&D funding for the Company’s Floating Area Network (FAN) technology and Littoral Sensor Grid (LSG) wireless security buoy project by US Navy.
The wireless security buoys provide a high-capacity sensor and communications network that provides real-time monitoring and reporting of littoral marine environments. The project’s key focus is anti-terrorism, with sensors integrated into the network to provide an outer perimeter early warning capability. As a secondary function, the buoys measure and report critical water quality factors that affect fragile marine ecosystems.

In fiscal 2012 eight more homeland response force units will be established. The units are regional forces that will cross state lines when needed. They are part of a restructuring of the nation’s chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosive consequence management enterprise. Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, Missouri, Utah and California each will host a homeland response force unit. On June 3, officials announced Ohio and Washington would receive units that will be operational in fiscal 2011. When not deployed for consequence-management operations, unit personnel will focus on planning, training, and exercising at the regional level.

The units will be key elements of the new Defense Department chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosive consequence management enterprise. The enterprise also will include a defense CBRNE Response Force, two consequence-management command and control elements, 57 weapons of mass destruction civil support teams and 17 CBRNE-enhanced response force packages.

One unit will be based in each of the 10 Federal Emergency Management Agency regions. The units are scheduled to have 270 Guardsmen, and each will have a medical team, a search and extraction team, a decontamination team and very robust command and control capabilities, officials said. The units are arranged in such a way that they will be able to drive to the site of an event within 12 hours.

The forces are part of a larger reorganization of the Defense Department’s domestic consequence management enterprise recommended in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced approximately $56 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding for airport security projects at Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT), Orlando International Airport (MCO), and St. Louis International Airport (STL) - enhancing the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) efforts to strengthen security at airports while creating jobs across the country.

These funds include $45.4 million for a new inline baggage screening system in the main terminal at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, and $3.1 million for the design of an upgraded inline baggage screening system in Terminals One and Two at St. Louis International Airport.

The inline screening systems use state-of-the art technology to screen checked baggage for explosives more quickly, while streamlining the ticketing process. They also provide on-screen resolution capabilities for security officers screening baggage—reducing the number of re-scans and physical bag searches.

Additionally, Orlando International Airport will receive $7.5 million to expand their closed circuit television (CCTV) system with several hundred cameras to provide enhanced surveillance capabilities throughout the airport.

ARRA, signed into law by President Obama on Feb. 17, 2009, committed more than $3 billion for homeland security projects through DHS and the General Services Administration. Of the $1 billion allocated to TSA for aviation security projects, $734 million is dedicated to screening checked baggage and $266 million is allocated for checkpoint explosives detection technologies.

Counter Terrorism Conference “Prepare, Prevent, Pursue, Protect” will be held 10th – 11th November 2010 at Hilton London Kensington, United Kingdom. Take the chance to hear a Keynote Address from Richard Bryan, Director of Commissioning, Olympic and Paralympics Security Directorate, Home Office, UK. His presentation will update you on the challenge of securing the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Hear how we will ensure a joined up multi-agency approach and the challenge of striking a balance between effective and visible security.

Keynote addresses also include:

• Assistant Chief Constable John Wright, Head of Prevent, Office of the National Co-ordinator Special Branch, Home Office, UK
• Asim Hafeez, Head of Intervention, Office of Security and Counter Terrorism, Home Office, UK
• Detective Chief Inspector Raffaele D’Orsi, S015 Counter Terrorism Command Ports, Metropolitan Police, UK

HOW TO BOOK
Visit http://www.smi-online.co.uk/counter-terrorism7.asp
Contact Teri Arri on: +44 (0) 20 7827 6162or email: tarri@smi-online.co.uk