Possibly the Most Incompetent TSA Story Yet
TSA imaginarily bombs itself.
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3 February 2012
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22 January 2012
Schneier on Security: The Continued Militarization of the U.S. Police
This particular aspect of police militarization (Texas Highway Patrol with six .30 caliber machine guns on a PT boat) will be solved by global warming.
The boat won’t do so much when the Rio Grande is dry.
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19 January 2012
DHS responsibilities for aviation security, domestic surveillance, and port security have made it too easy for politicians to disguise pork barrel spending in red, white, and blue. Politicians want to bring money home to their districts, and as a result, DHS appropriations too often differ from what ought to be DHS priorities.
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11:18
Americans are not safer because the head of DHS is simultaneously responsible for airport security and governmental efforts to counter potential flu epidemics.
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17 January 2012
The TSA Proves its Own Irrelevance
That’s right; not a single terrorist on the list. Mostly forgetful, and entirely innocent, people. Note that they fail to point out that the firearms and knives would have been just as easily caught by pre-9/11 screening procedures. And that the C4 — their #1 “good catch” — was on the return flight; they missed it the first time. So only 1 for 2 on that one.
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11 January 2012
9/11 could join the Trojan Horse and Pearl Harbor among stratagems so uniquely surprising that their very success precludes their repetition.
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14 December 2011
Yet More Fear-Mongering from the DHS
Al Qaeda is sewing bombs into people. Actually, not really. This is an “aspirational” terrorist threat, which basically means that someone mentioned it while drunk in a bar somewhere. Of course, that won’t stop the DHS from trying to terrorize people with the idea and the security-industrial complex from selling us an expensive “solution” to reduce our fears.
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13 December 2011
Schneier on Security: Iranians Capture U.S. Drone
The Iranians claim they used “electronic warfare” to capture the drone, implying that they somehow took control of it in the air and steered it to the ground. It would be a serious security design failure if they could do that. Two years ago, there was a story about al Qaeda intercepting video signals from drones. The command-and-control channel is different; I assumed that there was some pretty strong encryption protecting that.
Encryption of course only works if the opponent doesn’t know the key ;-)
Also, anybody want to bet that the company who designed the drone systems may be using RSA tokens for network access, or has done so in the past?
there is nothing to bet on, the company is lockheed martin and it was breached with securid
I love the internet.
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7 December 2011
It’s easy to believe that if only people wouldn’t disclose problems, we could pretend they didn’t exist, and everything would be better. Certainly this is the position taken by the DHS over terrorism: public information about the problem is worse than the problem itself. It’s similar to American’s willingness to give both Bush and Obama the power to arrest and indefinitely detain any American without any trial whatsoever. It largely explains the common public backlash against whistle-blowers. What we don’t know can’t hurt us, and what we do know will also be known by those who want to hurt us.
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4 November 2011
Weaponized UAV Drones in the Hands of Local Police
He said they are designed to carry weapons for local law enforcement. “The aircraft has the capability to have a number of different systems on board. Mostly, for law enforcement, we focus on what we call less lethal systems,” he said, including Tazers that can send a jolt to a criminal on the ground or a gun that fires bean bags known as a “stun baton.”
You didn’t just think they would use the drones over there, did you?
Montgomery County in Texas is the new over there.
