Site Map - Intelligence

12/11/2007 - Safety regulations. Small businesses often struggle with understanding them. Now they can get free on-site health and safety consultations from state governments. Participant companies' names are kept anonymous. In addition, any unsafe conditions found during a consultation will not automatically be reported. The program may even exempt businesses from general scheduled OSHA inspections for one year. @ Go to SM Online to learn more about this free service.

12/11/2007 - Building owners and managers can always make their facilities safer, but at what cost? Three years after the United States learned how vulnerable its landmark facilities were, a new software tool is being released that can help building owners and managers calculate and compare life-cycle costs of various methods used to reduce terrorist risk at buildings. Due out in beta version in September, with version 1.0 promised for March 2005 and a final version a year after that, the software "will allow building owners and managers to make comparisons among several alternative risk mitigation measures under different user-defined disaster scenarios," according to a recent report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Read "Cost-Effective Responses to Terrorist Risks in Constructed Facilities"

12/11/2007 - The State Department's annual review of terrorist incidents and trends has come under fire for understating the extent of international terrorism in 2003. Specifically, Patterns of Global Terrorism, 2003 states that attacks dropped 45 percent from 2001 to 2003 and that the 2003 total "represents the lowest annual total of international terrorist attacks since 1969." . The revised report, containing country analyses, information on terrorist groups, and policy initiatives, will be available on SM Online.

12/10/2007 - Could the transfer of U.S. and other Western manufacturing jobs overseas be a national security issue? The Conference Board raises that possibility in a recent paper. "Can Manufacturing Survive in Advanced Countries?" suggests the possibility that manufacturing "is a key incubator of new technologies through linked R&D expenditures" and may need to be "protected and nurtured."

12/10/2007 - Security, once a priority only for security professionals, is now getting the attention of environmental, health, and safety (EHS) professionals. They say that training employees to protect against terrorism and other violence has become a top priority. The findings come from a study of 828 EHS trainers conducted by Business and Legal Reports and the Environmental, Safety and Health Training Association.

12/10/2007 - Honesty isn't always the best policy, say museum security professionals exchanging ideas via a peer group electronic forum. Sometimes a white lie can work wonders. That's the case when it comes to the challenge of keeping curious or careless--and sometimes crazy--visitors from damaging the art.

12/05/2007 - In plain English, this means that via a Homeland Security Presidential Directive, the FBI will oversee a new multiagency Terrorist Screening Center.SM Online brings you the report.

12/05/2007 - The cost of 9-11 was staggering, but it was far less than a worst-case scenario in terms of life-insurance and injury related claims. That's according to Risk Management Solutions (RMS,a company that helps insurers gauge and manage risk. In a recent report, RMS estimates losses for several segments of the insurance industry--workers' compensation, individual and group life insurance, accidental death and dismemberment, and health insurance--in seven hypothetical scenarios that it models.

12/05/2007 - Britain's largest companies have become considerably more concerned about terrorism in the last year, according to a recent survey conducted by RAND Europe and Janusian Security Risk Management in conjunction with the Financial Times.

12/05/2007 - In January, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) implemented phase one of the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology, or US-VISIT, a program to collect, maintain, and share information on foreign nationals.

12/05/2007 - Even after the October 2002 Bali, Indonesia, bombings resulted in more than 200 deaths, counterterrorism cooperation among Southeast Asian governments remains "patchy," according to a briefing by John Chipman, director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). Chipman noted that Southeast Asian intelligence and law enforcement bodies are often "lacking in specific counterterrorism capacity...." The IISS briefing can be reached through SM Online.

12/05/2007 - Upon kidnapping a group of people, execute any security forces immediately. "This prevents others from showing resistance." That chilling comment is contained in al Qaeda training manuals on kidnapping, recovered by Western forces and translated by the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute (SITE Institute). The SITE Institute has posted these translated documents.

12/05/2007 - Privacy advocates are fighting a losing battle when it comes to the practice of private companies collecting personal information about customers. That's because technology makes it cheap and easy and marketing makes it profitable. And the terrorist threat makes that information valuable to the government as well. A report by the Department of Defense's Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee, which addresses privacy in the age of terrorism, can be reached via SM Online.