Morning Security Brief: Secure Flight, Retail Crime, Whistleblowing at O'Hare, Inherently Safer Technologies, & More

♦ TSA's Secure Flight program will give the federal government "unprecedented power" to determine what passengers can board airliners flying to, from, or over the United States, reports Montreal's The Gazette. The program begins in Canada and worldwide in December 2010. "Flights between two Canadian cities, that travel over U.S. airspace, are excluded, but about 80 per cent of Canadian flights to the Caribbean and other southern points and to Europe fly over the U.S.," the paper reports, adding the U.S. policy was never discussed in the Canadian Parliament.

♦ A recent survey conducted by the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) reports that large retailers continue to experience increasing levels of retail crime as the economy recovers. Over three-fourth of respondents said amateur shoplifting has increased while 65 percent report an increase in organized retail crime. And nearly three out of four large retailers report seeing their stolen goods on sale in online marketplaces—by far the most popular venue to fence stolen goods.

♦ The former security chief at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport has filed a $2 million lawsuit against the city alleging retaliation for blowing the whistle on security weaknesses at the airport. James Maurer claims he was fired for pushing costly security upgrades that would have sucked up money the city wanted to spend on O'Hare's modernization. Some nights, Maurer said, security was so threadbare that only two Chicago police officers were responsible for the entire airport.

♦ The Obama administration supports considering the inclusion of inherently safer technology (IST) provisions into a bill to reauthorize the country's Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards, said the top infrastructure protection official at the Department of Homeland Security yesterday. ISTs replace a more dangerous chemical or chemical process with a safer alternative. "The administration believes that flexibility and staggered implementation would be required in implementing in any new IST policy should Congress choose to enact one," Beers testified before a Senate committee yesterday. Ranking member Susan Collins opposes an IST mandate as impractical and harmful to business.

♦ The National Security Agency (NSA) is assisting the Department of Homeland Security's mission to protect government computer systems from cyberattack, reports The Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Gorman. Using NSA-rooted technology, "[t]he program is designed to look for indicators of cyber attacks by digging into all Internet communications, including the contents of emails, according to the declassified summary," Gorman reports. "Homeland Security will then strip out identifying information and pass along data on new threats to NSA. It will also use threat information from NSA to better identify emerging cyber attacks." Speaking at the annual RSA conference on Tuesday, the White House's cybersecurity chief told listeners that the government will address privacy concerns.