Morning Security Brief: AQAP Poison Food Plot, TSA Wasteful Spending, DHS Domain Seizures, Mexican Carjacking Warning, & More

♦ CBS news reports that an "intelligence source" has "confirmed" that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula wants to poison food at American hotels and restaurants. "The plot uncovered earlier this year is said to involve the use of two poisons - ricin and cyanide - slipped into salad bars and buffets," reports Armen Keteyian. "Of particular concern: The plotters are believed to be tied to the same terror group that attempted to blow up cargo planes over the east coast in October, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."

♦ The Transportation Security Administration too often wastes money on unproven technology that fails to perform as planned. "In addition to beefing up the fleets of X-ray machines and traditional security systems at airports nationwide, about $8 billion also paid for ambitious new technologies," reports The Washington Post. "The agency has spent about $800 million on devices to screen bags and passenger items, including shoes, bottled liquids, casts and prostheses. For next year, it wants more than $1.3 billion for airport screening technologies. But lawmakers, auditors and national security experts question whether the government is too quick to embrace technology as a solution for basic security problems and whether the TSA has been too eager to write checks for unproven products."

♦ The ability of the Department of Homeland Security to seize Internet Web sites that it alleges carry counterfeit goods has some citizens alarmed. "While the aim may be noble, some within the tech industry say they are concerned that the government can get an order from a federal magistrate and shut down a website without ever contacting the owner," reports FOXNews.com.“You start with kind of a ‘presumed guilty’ kind of approach because really there's nobody, there's no opportunity to stand up and say, ‘Now wait a minute, my site's just fine,’” David Sohn of the Center for Democracy and Technology told FOX. Presently, domain name owners can only challenge the seizure of their Web site after the fact thereby inverting due process.

♦ The escape of nearly 200 inmates from a Nuevo Laredo prison in Mexico last week might mean an increase in carjackings along the Mexican border, according to a former government intelligence analyst. “I expect there’s going to be an increase in carjackings, blockades where they steal cars from innocent people whether they’re Mexican or American,” Gary Hale, a former Drug Enforcement Agency intelligence supervisor who now runs his own private intelligence shop, told ABC5 in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas. "Hale and his team built a map to show the four cities in Mexico that are 50 miles from the border where Zetas have recently carjacked people. He says it could happen in every Mexican state that borders the United States. The Zetas operate in all of them."

♦ A homeland policy analyst from the conservative Heritage Foundation argues information sharing and intelligence should replace full body scanners and enhanced pat-downs as primary screening options at U.S. airports. "Certainly we need multiple layers of security, as Napolitano suggests, but layered defense shouldn't become code for trying to childproof the country against terrorists. And it need not mean piling up physical security measures and applying them all to everyone robotically," argues Jenna Baker McNeill in U.S. News and World Report. "Airport security depends on much more than equipment and pat-downs. Robust intelligence gathering and information sharing among local, state, federal, and international law officers are vital to an effective defense. They can help inform the choices we make in the physical security process so that very few people need to go through the inconvenience of extensive scrutiny."