Archive for category Threat Watch

An Armed Citizenry Is Peace

From Daily Reckoning:

The entire criminal justice system depends on legal violence, and gun control is no exception. Somehow, many modern liberals who recognize the problems of using police power against drug users or illegal immigrants, or who show concern that law enforcement employs overbearing force against petty criminals, ignore the reality that gun control fundamentally entails physical coercion against mostly peaceful people.

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Frank Gaffney’s Testimony to Congress on Closing Gitmo

Frank Graffney on Closing Gitmo

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Keeping the NSA in Perspective

Keeping the NSA in Perspective is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

By George Friedman

In June 1942, the bulk of the Japanese fleet sailed to seize the Island of Midway. Had Midway fallen, Pearl Harbor would have been at risk and U.S. submarines, unable to refuel at Midway, would have been much less effective. Most of all, the Japanese wanted to surprise the Americans and draw them into a naval battle they couldn’t win.

The Japanese fleet was vast. The Americans had two carriers intact in addition to one that was badly damaged. The United States had only one advantage: It had broken Japan’s naval code and thus knew a great deal of the country’s battle plan. In large part because of this cryptologic advantage, a handful of American ships devastated the Japanese fleet and changed the balance of power in the Pacific permanently. Read the rest of this entry »

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Concern Increasing Over Skype’s Security

From Electronic Freedom Foundation:

This security limitation has concerned us for a long time. Last year, Chris Soghoian argued that, for this reason, “Skype is in a position to give the government sufficient data to perform a man in the middle attack against Skype users.” Soghoian argued that Skype should change its design to eliminate this ability, or else disclose the risk more prominently. One way of limiting man-in-the-middle attacks would be for Skype to introduce a way for users to do their own encryption key verification, without relying on the Skype service. As Soghoian notes, that’s what many other encrypted communications tools do—but such a verification option is missing from Skype.

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Training For A Fight

From Monderno:

Instead of trying to rationalize the fact that a certain type of violence could never happen to us, we should spend more time thinking of ways to counter that violence. How would you react if your front door is kicked in and you’re home alone with your child? How would you react when confronted by 5 people in a gas station with malicious intent? You need to step outside your relative comfort zone and inoculate yourself with the idea that a worst case scenario type situation CAN happen to you.

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Two Intruders Shot Dead In Houston

From Tea Party Economist:

This is the kind of welcome that should greet all such intruders in America, every time. It should greet all such intruders, all over the world, every time. If there were more greetings like this, there would be fewer intruders like this.

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NSA Admits Spying On More People Than Previously Reported

From The Atlantic:

But Inglis’ statement was new. Analysts look “two or three hops” from terror suspects when evaluating terror activity, Inglis revealed. Previously, the limit of how surveillance was extended had been described as two hops. This meant that if the NSA were following a phone metadata or web trail from a terror suspect, it could also look at the calls from the people that suspect has spoken with—one hop. And then, the calls that second person had also spoken with—two hops. Terror suspect to person two to person three. Two hops. And now: A third hop.

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Keeping Embassies Safe

From CNN:

Before entering a high-threat area like Benghazi, or indeed any other unstable environment, it is essential to determine if the mission is worth the risk. In assessing Benghazi, the first question that comes to mind is:  What was so important about having a diplomatic presence in a city characterized as unstable; a city the British, French and United Nations had effectively abandoned because of warring militias and earlier bombings?  Why was the United States still there? All assessments about the viability of the mission and all plans to protect U.S. diplomatic compounds around the world have to begin with answers to this question.

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Rep. Waxman (D-CA) Wants to Ban Individuals From Making Their Own Guns.

From LA’s NBC affiliate:

The mass shooting that left five people dead in Santa Monica is the reason a California congressman wants to make it illegal for people to buy parts on the Internet to build their own weapons.

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Invasion of the Drug Cartels

Info-graphic of the increasing influence of Mexican cartels in the United States. Click image to view full size.

cartels

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Korean Ship Detained In Panama With Missiles On Board

From Military Times:

Martinelli said the undeclared military cargo appeared to include missiles and non-conventional arms and the ship was violating United Nations resolutions against arms trafficking.

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Creating and Managing Passwords: How the Experts Do It

From Ars Technica:

I recently checked in with five security experts to learn about their approach to choosing and storing crack-resistant passwords. They include renowned cryptographer Bruce Schneier, who is a “security futurologist” at BT and recently joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s board of directors; Adriel T. Desautels, CEO of Netragard, a firm that gets paid to hack large companies and then tell them how it was done; Jeremiah Grossman, founder and CTO of WhiteHat Security; Jeffrey Goldberg, “defender against the dark arts” at AgileBits, a company that develops the popular 1Password password manager; and Jeremi Gosney, a password security expert at Stricture Consulting.

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USPS Must Allow Firearms In Parking Lots

The previous ban on firearms in Postal Service parking lots has been found unconstitutional.

From Gun Watch:

A Colorado federal district court ruled today in favor of a Colorado man and a national gun rights group holding that a U.S. Postal Service regulation barring firearms in its parking lots violates their right to keep and bear arms under the Constitution.

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Stratfor Third Quarter Forecast

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Jihadis Say They Started Arizona Fires

From The Long War Journal:

A Palestinian jihadist group, Masada al Mujahideen, recently claimed credit for ongoing wildfires in Arizona in a statement posted to jihadist forums today. The statement, titled “Masada al-Mujahideen Fulfilled its Promise and Attacked America Again After the Expiration of the Period with Fires that Achieved Historic Results,” was obtained and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group.

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