Robert Matas | TheGlobeandMail.com

Canada and U.S. authorities are talking about extending cross-border security measures that were implemented for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver and were to end with the closing of the Winter Games.

The RCMP and the U.S. Coast Guard have jointly patrolled the waters off Vancouver since the beginning of the month, boarding nearly 200 vessels and interviewing about 500 people in their efforts to maintain security, RCMP Sergeant Duncan Pound of the border integrity program said in an interview.

Almost every small craft in the vicinity of the maritime border has been contacted to confirm the legitimacy of its voyage. Although some arrests on outstanding criminal warrants have been made and some vessels have been sent back to port for not being safe, none of the incidents involved a threat to Olympic security.

The joint patrols will end with the Paralympics but spokesmen from the two agencies said yesterday legislation that would allow joint maritime policing on a permanent basis is on the agenda of both the U.S. and Canadian governments.

Also, U.S. Senator Patty Murray of Washington state has asked Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to continue funding for the 2010 Olympic Co-ordination Centre in Bellingham, Wash., which was opened specifically to co-ordinate the U.S. response to any terrorist attack or domestic emergency during the Winter Games.

Ms. Napolitano, who will be in Vancouver on Sunday for the men’s hockey final and the Olympic closing ceremonies, said earlier this week she has heard “great reports” about the centre and would talk to people this weekend on whether more funding makes sense.

The centre, located 30 kilometres south of the Canada-U.S. border, brought together 40 U.S. federal, state and local agencies, including military intelligence groups, the navy, national guard, air force, coast guard and several groups involved in responding to emergencies from snowstorms to highway pileups.

Several federal and provincial government agencies from Canada were also involved, monitoring activities at the centre and establishing procedures to facilitate joint responses to cross-border events.
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Paul Joseph Watson | InfoWars.com

The Obama administration has announced that a further $215 million dollars will be spent on installing virtual strip search naked body scanners, meaning the devices will be in no less than half the nation’s airports by next year, but the historical record clearly shows that the scanners are a completely illegal violation of human rights.

“The $215 million proposal to acquire 500 scanners next year, combined with the 450 to be bought this year, marks the largest addition of airport-security equipment since immediately after the 9/11 attacks. There are only 40 body scanners in a total of 19 airports now,” reports USA Today.

Privacy advocate Marc Rotenberg pointed out that the scanners were yet another expensive instrument of the war on terror being used against the American people.

“We’ll have another Homeland Security Department program for the war on terror used almost exclusively on Americans,” said Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

As we have highlighted, the naked scanners are a boon for the military-industrial complex and people like former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, who vigorously promoted their use in the aftermath of the staged underwear bombing, having a huge financial stake in seeing them rolled out nationwide.

Despite the seemingly breakneck speed at which airports are rushing to adopt the scanners, some are proving to be less enthusiastic.

Durham Tees Valley Airport in the UK has refused to commit to installing the scanners despite the British government ordering all airports to adopt them before the summer season.

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Kurt Nimmo | InfoWars.com

Read the entire executive order here (in PDF format).

Obama has issued another executive order, this time establishing a so-called “Council of Governors.”
The order, signed on January 11, further diminishes the sovereignty of the states and builds on a framework for possible martial law. The executive order was completely ignored by the corporate media.

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1822 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 (Public Law 110-181), and in order to strengthen further the partnership between the Federal Government and State governments to protect our Nation and its people and property,” the order reads.

The Council shall meet at the call of the Secretary of Defense or the Co-Chairs of the Council to exchange views, information, or advice with the Secretary of Defense; the Secretary of Homeland Security; the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; the Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement; the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs; the Commander, United States Northern Command; the Chief, National Guard Bureau; the Commandant of the Coast Guard; and other appropriate officials of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, and appropriate officials of other executive departments or agencies as may be designated by the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of Homeland Security.
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Gawker.com

The gunman who killed 12 people today at Ft. Hood appears, based on current media reports, to be Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan who was listed as a participant in a Homeland Security Policy Institute’s presidential transition task force last year.

The task force was not officially affiliated with the White House. It was a project of the Homeland Security Policy Institute, an independent thinktank housed at George Washington University, aimed at drafting policy recommendations for the incoming Obama administration.

According to the task force’s May 2009 report [pdf], a “Nidal Hasan” from the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine was a task force event participant. Other participants included Senate and House staffers, Department of Homeland Security officials, Defense Department officials, and reporters for Politico, the Washington Post, and the London Times.

blog.taragana.com

Government to conduct terror prevention exercise (NLE09)

WASHINGTON — The government is conducting its first-ever nationwide exercise Monday aimed at preventing a terrorist attack.
The five-day exercise, being coordinated by the Homeland Security Department, will involve simulated “real life” scenarios, with a focus on preventing a terrorist from entering the U.S. to carry out an attack. Also participating will be officials from the Pentagon, office of the Director of National Intelligence as well as the Justice and State departments.

The exercise will take place at command posts and field locations in Washington, D.C., in addition to Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and California.

Homeland Security spokesman Clark Stevens says the simulations will most likely not affect or be seen by the public. Previous nationwide exercises have focused on terror response efforts rather than prevention.

Video from ABC’s Good Morning America, broadcast July 8th

John Byrne | RawStory.com
A Government Accountability Office investigator smuggled live bomb components into a federal building in just 27 seconds, then assembled a bomb in a restroom and ventured throughout the building without being detected, a leaked tape revealed Wednesday.

In addition, congressional investigators were able to penetrate every single federal building they probed without any difficulty — 10 in all.
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Kurt Nimmo | InfoWars.com 

A press release buried on the FEMA website, dated June 30, 2009, announces a meeting between FEMA administrator Craig Fugate and Maj. Gen. Yair Golan of the Israeli Defense Forces Home Front Command. “I look forward to working with my Israeli counterpart as co-chair of an emergency management work group to improve emergency management practices in both countries,” said Fugate. “These partnerships are critical in ensuring that we are incorporating best practices and also working towards greater public preparedness.”

The Israeli National Emergency Management Authority and FEMA partnership was established under “an emergency management work stream workgroup established under a 2007 Memorandum of Understanding with DHS,” according to the press release. FEMA representatives attended the national preparedness exercise Turning Point 3 in Israel on June 1, 2009, and Israel sent observers to the TOPOFF 4 national exercise in the United States, as well as personnel to participate in FEMA emergency management training.

TOPOFF, or Top Officials, is billed as “the nation’s premier terrorism preparedness exercise” by the Department of Homeland Security. “Thousands of federal, state, territorial, and local officials engage in various activities as part of a robust, full-scale simulated response to a multi-faceted threat,” the DHS website explains.

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SECURITY | O’Hare site to handle calls if West Loop office attacked, damaged

(* So “quietly”, so “secretly”,… it is in THE SUN TIMES!!!*)

Fran Speilman | Chicago Suntimes.com

Amid cloak-and-dagger secrecy, the Daley administration is building a backup 911 center at O’Hare Airport to handle emergency calls if a terrorist attack or natural disaster damages Chicago’s primary facility in the West Loop, City Hall sources said Wednesday.

Sources said the backup facility will be located in an O’Hare building that houses the airport’s communications nerve center.

Rooms in that building — possibly two floors below ground — are being retrofitted into a rudimentary version of Chicago’s state-of-the-art 911 center at Madison and Loomis. The work started in late January. It was not known when the work would be completed or how much it would cost.

Dispatchers and call takers will not have their own consoles at the backup facility. They will field calls while seated four-to-a-table. The project will be paid for by federal Homeland Security funds.

The project is so hush-hush, City Hall refused to talk about it.

“Post Sept. 11, all cities are making efforts to shore up their security,” said Ray Orozco, executive director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications and a former Chicago fire commissioner.

“I will neither confirm nor deny the steps we’re taking — whatever they are. I won’t do it. No one will do it. There’s a lot at stake. I try to be as open with you as I can. But, there are some things I just can’t discuss.”
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Rod Beckström, the Department of Homeland Security’s controversial cyber-security chief, has suddenly resigned amid allegations of power grabs and bureaucratic infighting.

Beckström — a management theorist, entrepreneur and author — was named last year to head up the new National Cybersecurity Center, or NCSC. To some, it seemed an odd choice since Beckström isn’t an expert in security. But the hope was that he could use his management skills to help coordinate the nation’s often-dysfunctional network defenses.

Part of the Department of Homeland Security — for now, the government’s lead agency for cyber protection — the Center was supposed to be the one place where the defense of civilian, military and intelligence networks could all be marshaled together.

At least, that was the idea. But the Center never had a chance to even start doing its job, Beckström complained in a resignation letter to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano that has been obtained by Danger Room. The Center “did not receive appropriate support” from the Department of Homeland Security to help coordinate network defenses, he said.

“During the past year the NCSC received only five weeks of funding, due to various roadblocks engineered within the department and by the Office of Management and Budget.”

What’s more, Beckström said, it is a fiction that DHS is in charge of the country’s cyber security. That power, he asserts, is held by the National Security Agency — the supersecret signals intelligence service — that “currently dominates most national cyber efforts.” And that, he says, is not a good idea.

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Paul joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com 

A new bill introduced in Congress authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to set up a network of FEMA camp facilities to be used to house U.S. citizens in the event of a national emergency.

The National Emergency Centers Act or HR 645 mandates the establishment of “national emergency centers” to be located on military installations for the purpose of to providing “temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster,” according to the bill.

The legislation also states that the camps will be used to “provide centralized locations to improve the coordination of preparedness, response, and recovery efforts of government, private, and not-for-profit entities and faith-based organizations”.

Ominously, the bill also states that the camps can be used to “meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security,” an open ended mandate which many fear could mean the forced detention of American citizens in the event of widespread rioting after a national emergency or total economic collapse.

Many credible forecasters have predicted riots and rebellions in America that will dwarf those already witnessed in countries like Iceland and Greece.

With active duty military personnel already being stationed inside the U.S. under Northcom, partly for purposes of “crowd control,” fears that Americans could be incarcerated in detainment camps are all too real.

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Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com 

Following Northcom’s denial that U.S. Army combat teams would be used to deal with “civil unrest” after the announcement that thousands of active duty military personnel were being moved inside the United States, an Army.com report now concedes that more than 400 Marines assigned to one unit includes a “security force” that would operate within the homeland.

A September 8 Army Times report stated that active duty troops from the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team returning from Iraq would be on call as a “federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks,” for a period of 12 months from October 1st.

This preceded a December 1 Washington Post article which reported on plans to station 20,000 more U.S. troops inside America for purposes of “domestic security” from September 2011.

According to the Army Times article, their duties would include dealing with “civil unrest and crowd control”. This admission was later denied by Northcom’s operations division chief Army Col. Michael Boatner, who told Homeland Security Today, “This response force will not be called upon to help with law enforcement, civil disturbance or crowd control, but will be used to support lead agencies involved in saving lives, relieving suffering and meeting the needs of communities affected by weapons of mass destruction attacks, accidents or even natural disasters.”

However, a January 7 American Forces Press Service story posted on Army.com confirms that at least some units operating inside the U.S. will rely on a “security force” to provide protection for troops responding to a mass casualty event in America.

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AP

The terrorism threat to the United States over the next five years will be driven by instability in the Middle East and Africa, persistent challenges to border security and increasing Internet savvy, says a new intelligence assessment obtained by The Associated Press.

Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks are considered the most dangerous threats that could be carried out against the U.S. But those threats are also the most unlikely because it is so difficult for al-Qaida and similar groups to acquire the materials needed to carry out such plots, according to the internal Homeland Security Threat Assessment for the years 2008-2013.

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As part of long term agenda to establish “military form of government,” combat likely unrest following total economic collapse.

The Washington Post today reports on plans to station 20,000 more U.S. troops inside America for purposes of “domestic security” from September 2011, an expansion of Northcom’s militarization of the country in preparation for potential civil unrest following a total economic collapse or a mass terror attack.

“The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials,” reports the Post.

“Domestic emergency deployment may be “just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority,” or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU’s National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of “a creeping militarization” of homeland security.”

As Alex Jones exposed back in the late 1990’s, U.S. troops have been training for this eventuality for a considerable amount of time. During numerous urban warfare drills that Jones attended and reported on, troops were trained to raid, arrest and imprison U.S. citizens in detention camps as well as taking over public buildings and running checkpoints. During role playing exercises, actors playing prisoners would scream “I’m an American citizen, I have rights” as they were being dragged away by troops.

The contention that the troops will merely help “recovery efforts” after a major catastrophe is contradicted by the fact that Northcom itself, in a September 8 Army Times article, said the first wave of the deployment, which was put in place on October 1st at Fort Stewart and at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, would be aimed at tackling “civil unrest and crowd control”.

After a controversy arose surrounding the admissions made in the Army Times article, Northcom retracted the claim but conceded that both lethal and non-lethal weaponry traditionally used in crowd control and riot situations would still be used in the field.

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Mimi Hall | USAToday.com

Agents along the Canada and Mexico borders are using a controversial new machine that can “read” the personal information contained in some government-issued ID cards — such as passports and driver’s licenses — as travelers approach a checkpoint.
The Homeland Security Department says the new practice will tighten security and speed the flow of traffic. Privacy advocates say the technology could make Americans less secure because terrorists or other criminals may be able to steal the personal information off the ID cards remotely.

“There’s this strange rush to a fancy or shiny new technology,” says Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The cards “are quite vulnerable” to being cloned or having their codes broken.

Machines are in place at five crossings — Blaine, Wash.; Buffalo; Detroit; Nogales, Ariz.; and San Ysidro, Calif. — as part of the government’s requirement that anyone who crosses the border must show a passport or other government documents proving citizenship and identity. The machines are being activated in Buffalo today; machines in Blaine and Nogales are in use; the rest will be on line over the next couple of months.

The new technology is being used in conjunction with new government passports, passcards and driver’s licenses embedded with computer chips that contain the holder’s name, date of birth, nationality, passport or ID number and a digitized photo. The personal data can be “read” by a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) machine as the person approaches a border-crossing checkpoint.
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CBSNews.com

Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Monday ordered his top department leaders to conduct a broad review to determine whether the military, National Guard and Reserve can adequately deal with domestic disasters and whether they have the training and equipment to defend the homeland.

The 41-page memo signaled an acknowledgment that the military must better recognize the critical role of the National Guard and Reserves in homeland defense, but stopped short of requiring many specific policy changes.

His memo comes in the wake of a stinging 400-page independent commission report that concluded the military isn’t ready for a catastrophic attack on the country, and that National Guard forces don’t have the equipment or training they need for the job.

That report, released early this year by the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, said the Pentagon must use the nation’s citizen soldiers to create an operational force that would be fully trained, equipped and ready to defend the nation, respond to crises and supplement the active duty troops in combat.
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We posted the Army Times article a few days ago… you can read the article here

Allison Barrie | FoxNews.com

Click here for an exclusive look at MALINTENT in action.

Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testing the next generation of security screening — a body scanner that can read your mind.

Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. This Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person — not the device — set to wreak havoc and terror.

MALINTENT, the brainchild of the cutting-edge Human Factors division in Homeland Security’s directorate for Science and Technology, searches your body for non-verbal cues that predict whether you mean harm to your fellow passengers.

It has a series of sensors and imagers that read your body temperature, heart rate and respiration for unconscious tells invisible to the naked eye — signals terrorists and criminals may display in advance of an attack.

But this is no polygraph test. Subjects do not get hooked up or strapped down for a careful reading; those sensors do all the work without any actual physical contact. It’s like an X-ray for bad intentions.
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ArmyTimes.com 

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.

But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

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