Sniffix: the $6,000 per-unit bomb detection device that turns out to work on "the same principles as a Ouija board." You have to admit, even the name sounds suspicious.

Michael Grabell reports for ProPublic.com. 

According to the company, Sniffex could detect explosives up to a football field away by reading the "interference between the magnetic field of the earth, the explosive, the device itself and the human body."
 
Critics called it a sham. Yet one unit in the U.S. military bought the device — eight for about $6,000 each — even though the military’s own tests (PDF) said the Sniffex performed no better than random chance. (The testers concluded that the Sniffex operates according to the same principles as a Ouija board.)

Grabell reports that on Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Sniffex with being "little more than the front for a $32 million stock fraud scheme that enriched insiders at the expense of unsuspecting investors."

(photo credit: Homeland Safety International) 

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Prick up your ears. And your eyes. CCTV is doing more than just watching you. It's figuring out your race.

Benjamin Males, a twenty-five year-old mechanical engineer and recent graduate of London's Royal College of Art, has written software and retro-fitted a CCTV (Closed Caption TV) camera that he bought on eBay to identify individuals by race. The Racial Targeting System is called The RTS-2. 

PCW Business Center has the story:   

The RTS-2 (Racial Targeting System) is essentially an automated racial-profiling tool, one that governments and police have not dared touch due to privacy and human-rights concerns, even though the technical capabilities already exist.

However, Males built the camera in an attempt to raise awareness of such issues among the public, which often appears oblivious to how frequently it is surveyed by CCTV (closed-circuit television) due to the prevalence of the cameras, especially in the U.K.

Surveillance cameras "have a significant effect on our lives and civil liberties," Males said. "We, as the public, aren't really in a position to discuss them or critique them because they are developed behind closed doors."

Fascinating. CCTV cameras have been a permanent fixture in London going back to the 1960s when they were first used as a tool to watch and track terrorists dispatched by the IRA. Images from London's CCTV cameras have more recently identified several high-profile Muslim terrorists, including Yassin Omar, a failed 7/21 train bomber who tried to flee the country dressed in a full-length black burka and carrying a white handbag. Last week, Omar's fiancée, Fardosa Abdullahi, was sentenced to three years in prison for her role in helping Omar escape. 

CCTV cameras are springing up all across America. Look up at your next traffic light and you'll see. 

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In response to yesterday and today's missile tests by Iran, Israel has announced that it will show off its advanced reconnaissance aircraft that can spy on Iran.

Unlike Iran, which tested its missiles at the Strait of Hormuz — in the Persian Gulf — for all to see, Israel's spy plane exhibit will take place inside the state-run Israel Aerospace Industries. 

Security for this event will be interesting.  

(Photo: From the website of Israel Aerospace Industries, LTD.)

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On Wednesday, Iran test-fired nine missiles, including the Shahab-3, during war games in the Persian Gulf which it called The Great Prophet III.

General Hossein Salami, commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard ground forces, oversaw the tests and had this to say:

"…our finger is always on the trigger and we have hundreds and even thousands of missiles ready to be fired against predetermined targets.” 

Soon to join that ready-to-be-fired list: the nuclear bomb.  

Iran said it was conducting the military exercises in response to threats from the U.S. and Israel. “We will chase the enemies on the ground and in the sky and we are able react strongly to enemy’s threats in shortest possible time,” Gen. Salami announced on state-run TV.

The Shahab-3 is a medium-range ballistic missile that can carry warhead to a target approximately 800 miles away. The Shahab-3 translates to Meteor-3, or Shooting Star-3 in Farsi.

According to the Federation of American  Scientists, the Shahab missile is a derivative of the North Korean No-dong missile, which was developed by Iranian money and Soviet Gorbachev era technology. 

CNN is also reporting that Iran is shelling Kurdish villages in Northern Iraq.  

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In Sunday's Washington Post, staff writer Ellen Nakashima reveals some of the most interesting, post 9/11 information available regarding the FBI's efforts to collect biometrics on foreign fighters.

The article indicates that hundreds of "insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa," have had previous run-ins with U.S. law enforcement agencies. Many of these foreign nationals once called America home and had been arrested here for everything from drunk driving to felony assault charges. 

"In December 2001, an FBI team was sent on an unusual mission to Afghanistan. The U.S. military had launched a wave of airstrikes aimed at killing or capturing al Qaeda fighters and their Taliban hosts. The FBI team was to fingerprint and interview foreign fighters as if they were being booked at a police station.

The team, led by Paul Shannon, a veteran FBI agent embedded with U.S. special forces, traveled to the combat zone toting briefcases outfitted with printer's ink, hand rollers and paper cards. The agents worked in Kandahar and Kabul. They traversed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. They hand-carried the fingerprint records from Afghanistan to Clarksburg, W.Va., home to the FBI's criminal biometric database.

As they analyzed the results, they were surprised to learn that one out of every 100 detainees was already in the FBI's database for arrests. Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said."

The FBI also fingerprints bystanders in roadside bomb attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan; insurgents apparently often remain at the scene of a crime. According to analysts at the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center, "fingerprints lifted off a bomb fragment have been linked to people trying to enter the United States." 

And there's more: 

"In a separate data-sharing program, 365 Iraqis who have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for refugee status have been denied because their fingerprints turned up in the Defense Department's database of known or suspected terrorists."

Read the entire article here.  

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The Office of The Inspector General (IG) issued a report Tuesday regarding ongoing employee problems at the TSA. The results are not surprising. Low morale among screeners is compromising national security.

"Given their frustration, employees may be distracted and less focused on their security and screening responsibilities," the IG report says.

Also not surprising, TSA Chief Kip Hawley says it's all untrue.

Thomas Frank writes about the report for USA Today, but a more interesting take comes from Michael Grabell at ProPublica who explains how the Office of The Ombudsman, meant to be a confidential safe haven for screeners to discuss problems, works more like the barnyard in Animal Farm.

At one airport, a TSA employee was reportedly reprimanded by his boss for complaining to the ombudsman about work conditions. When the employee complained to the ombudsman about the reprimand, he was reportedly reprimanded again.

At another airport, screeners said a manager wrote down the names of employees attending a group meeting with the ombudsman.  A manager reportedly told one employee being considered for a promotion that attending the meeting "was a career move."

And when ombudsman staff tried to reach out to employees and identify workplace concerns, some TSA officials blocked them from visiting the checkpoints.

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Is Israeli-style airport security coming to America? For anyone tired of TSA treating their toiletries as a menace, there's good news on the horizon.

On May 29th, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff signed a landmark deal with Israel to share information about airport security. This means that DHS will beef up its behavior profiling system which looks for bombers, not bombs.

Although Israel's passenger profiling system is based on behavior, critics say it's based on race.

In my column for Pajamas Media this morning, I explain why this inference is false — citing the bloody Lod Airport massacre in May 1972 which killed twenty-six people, including sixteen Americans.

The massacre — carried out by Japanese college-aged kids willing to die for the Palestinian cause — fundamentally changed Israeli's approach to security. They haven't had an attack in the aviation domain since. 

(photo: Kozo Okamoto, convicted terrorist in the Lod Airport massacre, since renamed Ben-Gurion International Airport, after his release from an Israeli jail in a prisoner exchange. Photo credit unknown)

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In what's being called a favorably "drastic action," the U.S Air Force's (USAF) highest ranking officials — military and civilian — have been forced to resign over last summer's nuclear blunder. 

In August of 2007, an Air Force crew flew a B-52 bomber across the country — totally unaware that it was transporting six, nuclear-tipped missiles. The incident led to a report revealing that the USAF's handling of nuclear weapons was in drastic need of oversight and review.

An earlier blunder which also contributed to today's shake up — called "The Taiwan Incident" — involved the USAF mistakenly shipping four, ballistic missile warhead fuses to Taiwan. The order was supposed to be for helicopter batteries.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates takes responsibility for the historic move which was announced today at the Pentagon.

Gates said an internal investigation found a common theme in the B-52 and Taiwan incidents: "a decline in the Air Force's nuclear mission focus and performance" and a failure by Air Force leaders to respond effectively.

(Photo: Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael Moseley, left, and Secretary Michael Wynne.)

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