Morning Security Brief: Digital Leaks, Chemical Security, East African Wake-Up Call, Civilian Investigators, & Black Hat/Defcon

♦ On the heels of the massive disclosure of Pentagon documents on the Afghanistan War, Agence France Presse looks at how technology facilitated such a massive information leak. "The difference with the Pentagon Papers is that Daniel Ellsberg took a huge sheaf of paper and gave it to a reporter," James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told AFP. "Now you can take even more documents and give them to the whole world." Tom Conway, director of federal business development at computer security firm McAfee, explained to AFP how to make it harder for leakers to disclose information in the digital age. These measures include "blocking access to the Internet, disabling DVD drives on personal computers, compartmentalizing sensitive information and flagging or blocking behavior that is 'outside the norm,'" Conway said. "If all of a sudden someone goes from downloading 50 megabytes a day to 9,000 a day that should set off a red flag."

♦ Water World magazine looks ahead to tomorrow when the Senate Homeland Security and Government Reform Committee will mark up a controversial House-passed chemical security bill. "The House-passed chemical security bill would give state drinking water agencies power to determine whether high-risk facilities would need to adopt 'inherently safer' approaches," the magazine reports. "Industry groups largely oppose the House-passed approach, blasting the safer-methods mandate as government overreach, while more than 85 green, labor and community-action groups aligned earlier this month to laud the Senate version introduced by Lautenberg." Democrats generally favor the inherently-safer technology provisions while Republicans oppose it.

♦ African columnist Bobi Odiko writes that the suicide attacks against World Cup viewers in Uganda is a wake-up call for the East African Community (EAC). "It remains incumbent on the EAC and the international community to put more effort in strengthening of legal and administrative frameworks that protect the region from the effects of terrorism," writes Odiko at East African Business Week. "There is need to ensure the protection of human rights as well in the dispensation. International and even the regional courts need to be granted sufficient international criminal jurisdiction, including on the crime of terrorism, so that the perpetrators are treated as enemies of humankind generally and not just as perpetrators against the most immediate victims. The rule of law needs to be the prevailing factor as the globe unites to combat the pre-meditated, politically motivated violence and espionage."

♦ Budgetary woes have led San Francisco to initiate a novel pilot program to deal with nonviolent criminal investigations. "The whole idea behind civilian investigators is to speed up response time, save money, and free up sworn officers so they can focus on more important things. Currently in San Francisco, sworn officers respond to non-violent crimes such as burglaries and car break-ins.," writes Lilian Kim of ABC-7 San Francisco. "But under the pilot program, 15 civilian investigators, who would cost about half as much as sworn officers, will be assigned to respond to those types of cases. They will be trained to collect evidence, conduct interviews and photograph crime scenes." The police union is opposed to the program, which will begin in January.

♦ If you never heard of the massive hacking conferences BlackHat/Defcon, then IDG News' Robert McMillan gives you an introduction and what to expect from the anarchy this year. "Black Hat, the more corporate event, and its unruly sister conference, Defcon, are held one after the other each year in Las Vegas," McMillan writes. "This year's Black Hat conference is on Wednesday and Thursday. Defcon runs Friday through Sunday. So expect some chaos this week in Las Vegas. Expect some surprises. If you're attending, expect a hangover."