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Homeland Security head tours center
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge on Wednesday toured the Center for National Response, a training center for police, firefighters and emergency medical teams from across the country. Ridge pledged to urge continued funding for the center, located in a one-time highway tunnel tucked into the West Virginia mountains. At the site, first responders are trained how to respond to accidents ranging from chemical spills to terrorist attacks. "It's an impressive operation and has the capacity to (create) realistic training scenes," Ridge said. The 2,800-feet-long tunnel is four stories high and includes wrecked automobiles, stalled city buses and a New York City subway car. Operators can expose first responders to whatever conditions they wish to train in.
seattlepi.nwsource.com
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Homeland Security Department Meets With Agriculture Industry
In order to protect Alabama's infrastructure, the state’s Homeland Security Department is meeting with members of Alabama's agricultural industry. Since agriculture is a $5 billion industry within the state, the federal government believes it could be a target for terrorism. The possible bioterrorism threat could be launched against the state’s farms and poultry factories. “This war on terror that we're fighting in this country is not necessarily a federal government problem, a state government problem, or even a local government problem,” said Jim Walker, Homeland Security director for Alabama. “It permeates all the way down to the individual citizen.” The federal government is looking specifically at poultry because chickens can transmit ailments. Some examples include avian influenza and the exotic Newcastle disease, both of which have been found in the United States. Alabama has purchased equipment that can help alleviate the threat. “We just feel like now with the atmosphere that we live in today that we've got to be able to detect bacteria and viruses and chemicals in a matter of hours rather than days,” said Ron Sparks, agriculture commissioner.
www.nbc13.com
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Homeland Security and Defense Telecommunications Spending to Increase 40 Percent by 2009; Emergency Response and 'Cyber-Warfare' Spur Growth
The federal market for telecommunications products and services will grow from $15.2 billion in FY2004 to almost $21 billion in FY2009, led by more than 40 percent growth in telecommunications spending by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, according to a report released today by INPUT, the leading provider of government market intelligence. In the report, "Federal Telecommunications MarketView," INPUT predicts homeland security, e-government, force transformation in the Department of Defense, and telecommuting will continue to drive the market. "Telecommunications stands out as one of the main technology segments that is seeing increases in near term spending due to homeland security initiatives," said Chris Campbell, senior analyst, federal market analysis at INPUT. "Telecommunications will support information sharing goals between agencies as well as communications between federal agencies and first responders at the state and local government level." Federal spending on telecommunications represents approximately 26% of the total federal IT spending in FY2004.
home.businesswire.com
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Community colleges to help in homeland security efforts
The Maricopa Community Colleges district has been selected to serve as one of 10 Regional Lead Institutions in the Prepare America Network. The national project supports the U.S. Office of Domestic Preparedness and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in efforts to use the resources of the nation's community and technical colleges in homeland security and emergency preparedness training. The Maricopa Community Colleges will serve as a regional facilitator in strategic planning with state homeland security offices and provide emergency preparedness training needs in the western region which includes Arizona, California, Nevada, Hawaii and various Pacific Islands. "While most professions commonly identified with homeland security are employed by police and fire agencies, the definition continues to expand," said Mary Vanis, director of the Center for Workforce Development.
phoenix.bizjournals.com
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State, Homeland Security urged to overhaul student visa process
Graduate-school applications from foreign students dropped 32 percent in the last year, and there is a growing concern that the student-visa application process is part of the problem. Policy experts on Monday called on the Homeland Security and State departments to streamline the process and to reinforce the government's commitment to invest in the cultural exchange of ideas. A lengthy application process, redundancy in interviews and repetitive security checks must be overhauled, Nils Hasselmo, president of the Association of American Universities, said. The average wait time for a security check in the last year was 67 days. Student visa applications are also down 21 percent since 2001. "Screening must be effective, rather than creating unnecessary processes and bureaucratic work," he said. "When we create barriers, we do harm to economy and national security."
www.govexec.com
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Houston airport using fingerprints, eye scan in security test
Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport began participating Tuesday in a federal test program designed to speed frequent flyers through security checkpoints by using fingerprint and eye scan matches on a special ID card. Houston becomes the third airport in the nation to let passengers who have registered personal information with the Transportation Security Administration to use an express lane that scans their biometric information as they leave ticketing areas for boarding gates. Minneapolis-St. Paul and Los Angeles started the 90-day test last month. Boston and Washington Reagan are set to join later this month.
www.usatoday.com
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More troops ordered to guard Athens Olympics
Greece beefed up security for the Olympic Games on Wednesday as it increased military involvement in safeguarding the security for the Olympic Games, but the Greek public order minister denied reports of problems with its massive surveillance system. An additional 35,000 military personnel have been assigned for "secondary" duties to free the 70,000 police and soldiers already assigned to guard Olympic sites in Athens and three other Greek cities. Police spokesman Lefteris Ikonomou said the additional manpower will be used to guard rail stations, borders and other areas, mainly outside Athens. The military also will provide 500 vehicles, 50 ships and more than 200 planes, including fighters to monitor a no-fly zone over Athens, as well as US made Patriot and Russian S-300 air defence systems. Greece is spending a record 1.2 billion euros on safeguarding the first Olympics since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States.
news.xinhuanet.com
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U.S. Port Inspectors Are Short-Staffed
The Homeland Security Department, short of inspectors who specialize in keeping agricultural diseases out of the country, has been catching less insect-infected food at the border. Interceptions of prohibited material in the last three months of 2003 were 32 percent below the same period in 2002, said Dr. John Payne of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, who coordinates the agency's work with Homeland Security. The drop came after responsibility for the inspections was switched from the Agriculture Department to the Homeland Security Department. A key reason, recognized by both departments, is that about 500 of the approximately 2,600 inspection positions are vacant. When USDA's border inspectors were merged into Customs and Border Protection at Homeland Security in March 2002, there were 387 vacancies. Homeland Security did not quickly fill the agriculture inspector vacancies, figuring it could cross-train thousands of customs and immigration inspectors to help do the job, Payne said. APHIS, which is part of the Agriculture Department, is still responsible for training inspectors.
www.dfw.com
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Terrorist Alert Will Prompt Higher Financial Services IT Spending
The recent terrorism alert based on the discovery of "unusually specific" plans to target five financial-services institutions -- including the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Citigroup in New York -- will trigger increased IT spending by those threatened locations and other financial institutions watching from afar. In 2004, TowerGroup estimates that the global financial-services industry will spend nearly $4 billion on the field of operational resiliency -- which encompasses protecting people, processes and infrastructure based on the notion that there should be no disruption in businesses in the event of a terrorist attack or outage. Spending will grow by 9.4 percent annually over the next three years, rising to $5.23 billion in 2007, TowerGroup estimates. "IT spending on operational resiliency, unlike any other area, is susceptible to spikes after an event," says Virginia Garcia, senior analyst, financial services strategies and IT investments at TowerGroup in Needham, Mass. Garcia says that after the World Trade Center attack she saw a 19.2 percent increase in spending on operational resiliency, and after the blackout of 2003, spending shot up 12 percent.
www.wstonline.com
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Bush calls on Congress to create new intelligence adviser post
Following a key recommendation from the panel investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush Monday called on Congress to create a position to oversee foreign and domestic intelligence operations. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States released a report last month calling for a major overhaul of the intelligence community, including the creation of a Cabinet-level national intelligence director that would oversee 15 federal intelligence agencies and consult with the director of the CIA. The CIA director currently coordinates all federal intelligence efforts. The commission's report also called for a position with budgetary power over the 15 agencies, but Bush administration officials describe the proposed position as an adviser to the president.
www.govexec.com
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