Fellow Americans, on January 31, we celebrate the anniversary of what was undoubtedly one of the most hilarious faux-pas in homeland security: the 2007 Boston Bomb Scare.
For those who stepped in late, on January 31, 2007, the city devolved into mass hysteria (well, kind of) when police were alerted to a number of suspicious electronic devices scattered around the city.
Before long, the city realized that the light-up displays were actually promotions for the upcoming film version of the cartoon show Aqua Teen Hunger Force--light-emitting diode (LED) circuit boards shaped like the show's "Mooninite" characters. But by that point, there had already been trains delayed, traffic rerouted, bridges shut down, and press conferences aplenty.
The Mooninites had been installed in a dozen other American cities, including my hometown of New York, where I saw one for weeks on Lafayette Street near Cooper Square and didn't think that it could possibly be anything other than silly cartoon art.
Apparently, some things just don't go over too well in the land of the Red Sox. When the state's attorney general arraigned the marketers in charge of the campaign for planting a "hoax device" in public, the statute used to justify the arraignment actually used the phrase "infernal machine."
As a commemoration of the national-security laugh fest's one-year anniversary, a group of artists have brought LED art back to Boston's streets, this time in the shapes of political figures like George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. The Boston Globe reported earlier this month that the original "Aqua Teen terrorist" remains proud of his work.
Poor, neglected Boston must've just wanted its moment in the post-apocalyptic sun; after all, you sure didn't see that Cloverfield monster splashing around in the Charles River or the megahurricanes from The Day After Tomorrow flooding the Big Dig.
Full disclosure: I am not rooting for the Patriots this weekend.
(Credit:
Northrop Grumman )
The chances of your flight being hit by a shoulder-fired, laser-guided missile are good enough that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has spent more than $100 million looking into ways to prevent it.
Defense contractor Northrop Grumman just completed 6,000 hours of in-flight testing on its Guardian directed infrared countermeasures (DIRCM) system, all part of the DHS initiative to adapt existing military technology to protect commercial aircraft from attack by surface-to-air-missiles (SAM) similar to the U.S.-made Stinger.
The DIRCM system works by first detecting the attack, then directing an invisible, eye-safe laser to the homing/seeker device of the incoming missile, disrupting its guidance signals, which ultimately protects the aircraft, according to Northrop Grumman (video here).
Much of the testing has been conducted on FedEx MD-10 and MD-11 cargo jets, using a ground-based electronic missile surrogate to simulate the launch of a SAM at an aircraft during takeoff or landing. The Guardian performed as advertised by automatically detecting the simulated launch and mock missile, according to the company.
More than 40 commercial aircraft have been attacked by Man Portable Air Defense Systems (Manpads) since the 1970s, resulting in the loss of about 400 lives, according to the U.S. State Department.
In a report to Congress, DHS estimated the per-flight cost to be $65 more than it wants to spend, which is $300. That comes to about 70 cents per passenger on cross country flights.The unit itself cost around $1 million, but that's wholesale--orders of 1,000 or more please.
The industry has yet to get on board however. As one airline executive put it in an interview with Aviation Week, "Is this a prudent use of resources?" A plane could just as well be shot down by an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) or a .50-caliber machine gun. "Shouldn't we be doing more to go after the archer rather than trying to catch the arrows?" Then again, this is an industry allegedly too cheap to give its passengers fresh air.
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Robots with names like Eyeball, Dragon Runner, ToughBot, Marv, Matilda and Talon fearlessly rolled and hovered over wreckage and rubble last week in Disaster City, a 52-acre training center for first responders and emergency workers.
Last week's robotics exercise, the fourth in two years sponsored by the Science and Technology Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at the Commerce Department, has a complex task: finding ways of evaluating performance of robots so that they can be fairly compared, according to The New York Times.
(Credit:
CAGW)
The U.S. defense budget gave us the Internet and thermo-nuclear obliteration. For a quick peep at what our tax dollars are up to now, we go to some 2007 Pig Book listings for defense and homeland security appropriations.
We'll skip the $1.2 billion F-22 project and lower our sights to the $1.35 million set aside for the Obesity in the Military Research Program, proving that MREs aren't that bad after all. But to cover its bases, Congress threw in $1.6 million to improve the shelf-life of vegetables.
With wine you dine; hence $5.5 million for the House of Gallo better-late-than-never study of "basic neuroscience and the effects of alcohol on the brain." If that doesn't pan out, there's $5 million in the budget for alcohol breath testers.
And don't try to fake it and take the wheel anyway. There is $12 million to pay the American Trucking Association to recruit and train "highway professionals to identify and report security and safety situations on the nation's roads."
The list goes on: $3.2 million for the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program ($109.1 million since 1995), $7 million for the SA-90 big brother surveillance blimp, and $12 million for the Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium in Kentucky. The latter protects "citizens living in rural areas by training emergency responder teams" just in case Al Qaeda flies a plane into Bubba's barn.
(Credit:
Sarnoff Labs)
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to that club you were thrown out of, they come up with another way to keep you behind the rope.
Touted as a "non-invasive" approach to checking ID, iris scanners rely on pattern recognition of the image reflected from the iris's convex cornea--which, when converted into a digital template, will give you away every time.
The problem with conventional iris scanners is that they require the subject to hold still and submit. Now, a new-fangled unit produced by Sarnoff Labs in New Jersey can reportedly identify up to 20 subjects per minute as they casually stroll through a recognition portal.
The new biometric system, dubbed Iris On the Move (IOM), shoots photos at slightly different distances and in different directions using an array of high-resolution cameras synchronized with an infrared strobe light that blasts the subject's face 30 times per second.
The manufacturer claims that at least one of these photos will result in a clear, high-definition image of the target's iris, which can then be checked against a bad guy database.
You can forget the shades too. Apparently neither glasses, contact lenses, or even goggles will fool the system.
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