Morning Security Brief: Security Screening Protests, Cyberattack Coming, Aviation Security Scares, Terror Alert System, & More

♦ With the threat of protests looming today over new security screening procedures at airports, The San Francisco Chronicle finds people will submit to full body scans or enhanced pat downs just to get home for Thanksgiving. The Salt Lake Tribune finds the same thing, reporting "Most travelers seemed to take it in stride Tuesday." The big test, however, remains today as "National Opt-Out Day" gets underway across the United States. 

♦ The former Director of National Intelligence tells Forbes that a cyberattack against the United States is inevitable. The threat comes from two different adversaries with different motivations, says Admiral J. Michael McConnell, who now runs Booz Allen Hamilton's national security business. "On one side, it is a relatively small group of extremists [with] a different world view that want to change the world order. What they will finally figure out is that crashing an airplane into a building gets them a lot of publicity, [but] at some point, they’re going to move to different means. They will eventually, in my view, move to the soft underbelly of the country, which is the digital infrastructure and digital dependence. And when they figure that out, a relatively small group could do strategic damage," McConnell warns. "The other side of the coin is the bleeding of intellectual capital–pulling the innovation engine of what drives the country away from us to the competitive advantage of another player. [Nation-states] aren’t incentivized, particularly if they hold U.S. debt, to damage the U.S. economy. Are they incentivized to capture intellectual property? I’ll let you pick out which country is doing that because it’s pretty obvious."

♦ Three unrelated aviation security incidents at airports in Boston and Phoenix and on board a flight from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Denver led to scares yesterday. All the incidents proved to be benign, reports Reuters: dogs sniffing out bedding material in duffel bags in Boston, a traveling cop leaving a loaded gun clip on the cabin floor of the Phoenix flight, and a man acting suspiciously on the Charlotte flight. "We followed the normal protocol," TSA Administrator John Pistole told CNN after the Boston incident. "The incidents led to plenty of jitters during the busiest domestic travel week of the year, even without the angst of intense pre-flight screening," reports the newswire.

♦ Once again the Department of Homeland Security is considering the retirement of the color-coded terrorism alert system. "The system's demise would not be the end of terror alerts; instead, the alerts would become more descriptive and not as colorful. In the past two years, Obama administration officials have changed security protocols without changing the color of the threat, such as introducing new airport security measures after a terrorist tried to bring down a Detroit-bound jetliner last Christmas," reports the Associated Press. "By scrapping the colors, President Barack Obama would abandon a system that critics long have said was too vague to be useful and that Democrats criticized as a political scare tactic. And it would represent a formal undoing of one of the George W. Bush administration's most visible legacies."

♦ Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano yesterday e-mailed TSA workers a thank you note for their service. According to FOXNews.com, "This comes on the eve of one of the year's busiest travel days and as critics of new TSA security measures call on those traveling the day before Thanksgiving to refuse full-body imaging, which would force TSA agents across the country to give pat-downs and, the critics say, would let Americans 'see for themselves how the TSA treats law-abiding citizens.'"