Morning Security Brief: Miami Airport Scare, Future of India's HLS Market, Kafkaesque Airport Security, & Pretexting

♦ An elderly scientist was detained last night at Miami International Airport after a TSA baggage screener noticed something that resembled a pipe bomb in his baggage. "A police bomb squad spent hours scouring the airport and passengers had to be evacuated from four of the airport's six concourses Thursday night and airport roadways were closed down, police and airport officials said," The Associated Press reports. "They described the shutdown of the concourses as a public safety precaution.The airport fully reopened just after 4 a.m. Friday before the first scheduled morning departures, which signaled the start of the peak Labor Day weekend." The FBI said the scientist is cooperative and has not been placed under arrest.

♦ A new study concludes that India is poised to become the biggest consumer of homeland security products and services over the next decade, reports The Economic Times. "By 2020, about 6 per cent of global procurement in the field of homeland security is expected to be emanated from India," according to the report by KPMG and Assocham. Other big spenders that will emerge are  Britain, Germany, and France. The United States is the current homeland security expenditure behemoth, accounting for 34 percent of global procurement.

♦ An Indian documentary filmmaker remains locked up after he was arrested at Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport on August 20 for packing brass knuckles in his luggage, even though he followed TSA travel rules. The problem: brass knuckles are illegal in Texas. According to the Houston Chronicle, Vijay Kumar will remain behind bars without bail on federal immigration charges. Complicating matters is that the misdemeanor charge of carrying brass knuckles was increased to a third-degree felony because it occurred in an airport. "Now, he has to stay locked up for a misdemeanor, essentially," his attorney Grant Scheiner said. "There are a lot of people signing petitions, and we're trying to get the message to the district attorney's office that Vijay Kumar is not a bad guy. He just made an honest mistake about the law."

♦ A hacker pretexting contest last month at DefCon unearthed a curious discovery: of the 135 employees of Fortune 500 companies called, the five employees that refused to divulge any information were all women, according to IDG News Service . "Within the first 15 seconds, they were like, 'This doesn't seem right to me,' and they ended the call," Chris Hadnagy, one of the event's organizers, said. While Hadnagy wouldn't hypothesize how sex played into the results, he ventured that it probably came down to the females particular training. "Obviously there was some kind of security awareness with their training," he said.