17 dead in Pakistani car bombings

A pair of bombings in Pakistan killed at least 17 people, including security officials, and wounded dozens of others Friday, officials said. Ten people died and at least 60 were wounded when a massive car bomb targeted the intelligence agency that plays a central role in Pakistan's anti-terrorism campaigns, said Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister for North West Frontier Province.

The 800-pound bomb ripped through the Inter-Services Intelligence's provincial headquarters, collapsing large parts of the multistory building in central Peshawar. Hussain said seven of the dead were security officials and several others were thought to be buried under the rubble. Rescue teams were working to remove debris to find survivors.

Ayub Shah, whose house is about one-tenth of a mile from the blast site, said he had just come home from morning prayers when he heard gunfire. That lasted about a minute, then he heard the blast, which shattered windows at his house.

A second explosion hit North West Frontier Province's Bannu District, southwest of Peshawar. In that attack, a suicide bomber rammed his car into the Bakka Khel police station, killing seven, five of whom were policemen, and injuring 23 others, said Bannu police Officer Oranzed Khan.

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'Balloon Boy' Parents Plead Guilty

A Colorado couple pleaded guilty Friday to charges related to a massive hoax that had authorities scrambling to find a boy believed to have been carried away in a helium balloon. Richard Heene pleaded guilty to a felony charge of attempting to influence a public servant, Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden. His wife, Mayumi Heene, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false report.

Last month, the couple called Federal Aviation Administration officials, a Fort Collins, Colo., television station, and law enforcement officers to report that their 6-year-old son was inside a helium balloon that had become untethered from the family's house and floated away.

Prosecutors want the Heenes to serve some time in jail, but the final decision will be made by Schapanski at a Dec. 23 sentencing hearing. Most of the country would support jail time and it would send the right message for this kind of crime. This cannot go unpunished in a very appropriate way.

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As Olympic flame burns, Canada's sex industry heats up

Canada’s sex trade industry is a complicated mess. Any time you have humans being actively bought and sold for the purposes of sexual exploitation, things tend to get a little tangled, even scandalous. Especially when it’s happening in your own backyard. A 2008 report by the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada (CISC) states that “across the country, organized crime networks are actively trafficking Canadian-born women and underage girls inter and intra-provincially, and in some instances to the United States, destined for the sex trade.” While the images of foreign women in faraway countries holed up in seedy brothels seem morally reprehensible, Canadians should be just as abhorred by images of their own women and children being trafficked within the borders of their True North Strong and Free.

Naomi Baker, from Canada Fights Human Trafficking, says that human trafficking is the fastest growing crime across the globe, with the bulk of the demand stemming from America and Canada. The North American Forum on Integration attributes this to “their more convenient and cheap location, as well as their lax legal and law enforcement systems.” Canada contributes to the demand when, according to the RCMP, 800 to 1,200 people are trafficked here every year, while there are activists placing the number as high as 15,000 annually. But don’t be too quick to place significance on numbers; organizers of the underground crime market make it their fulltime job to stay under the radar and away from traceable statistics. The fact that there is even one sexually trafficked victim within these borders is crime enough.

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Scientists use computer to 'read minds' on screen

Scientists have discovered how to read 'the mind’s eye' using a computer that can replicate what humans are seeing or recalling by monitoring their brain activity. The breakthrough, by a team at the University of California, raises the prospect of scientists eventually being able to record dreams or enable police to identify criminals by recalling the memories of a witness.

The development is similar to that envisaged in the film Minority Report, in which an individual’s private thoughts can be readily accessed by the authorities. Neurologists at the university have already matched patterns of activity in the brain with static images seen by the person, and now say it is possible to “decode” signals generated in the brain by moving scenes. Their work, which has yet to be peer reviewed, could lead to technology that would allow security agencies to interrogate prisoners.

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Ranking Terrorist Threats By Degree Of Separation

This past year has been one of the FBI's busiest — at least when it comes to terrorism cases. In the first 10 months of 2009, there have been possible plots exposed in Denver; Springfield, Ill.; Dallas; Boston; and, just this week, Chicago. With so many alleged plots, it's difficult to know how seriously to take any particular threat. So the intelligence community has an informal system for ranking them. The basic idea: The closer the link to al-Qaida, the more serious the plot.

Consider the case of Najibullah Zazi, the Denver-area shuttle bus driver who stands accused of plotting to blow up targets in New York City. Intelligence officials claim that the Zazi case is the most serious this country has faced since Sept. 11, 2001, because they believe Zazi had a direct link to senior al-Qaida leaders. Officials say that in addition to allegedly training in an al-Qaida camp, Zazi apparently called someone in Pakistan for instructions just before he was arrested. That's seen as a red flag, because it suggests that al-Qaida was behind the plot in some way. And al-Qaida, as a general matter, likes its attacks to be big.

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PhoneSnoop application bugs BlackBerrys

The Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is warning BlackBerry users about a spyware program that allows attackers to turn a target's handset into a microphone that can be accessed remotely.

PhoneSnoop is a free, remote spying application designed for BlackBerry phones. The app works by intercepting phone calls from a predetermined 'trigger' number. When PhoneSnoop detects an incoming call from that number, it accepts the call and turns on the BlackBerry's speaker phone, effectively allowing the caller to listen in on the target's surroundings.

There are some very real limitations of this spying app: For starters, an attacker would need to have physical access to the victim's phone in order to install the app. PhoneSnoop also can't listen in on the victim's phone calls, and it leaves a conspicuous new program icon in the victim's app list.

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Terrorists are using blogs to engage counter-terrorists experts online

A senior Arab Afghan adviser to al Qaeda and the Taliban has openly challenged an Australian counter-terrorism expert in a series of blog posts. Abu Walid al Masri has written direct responses to Leah Farrall, an Australian academic who writes the All things Counter Terrorism blog and has years of experience fighting terrorism with the Australian Federal Police.

Farrall recently described al Masri as “one of Mullah Omar’s most trusted advisers” in an op-ed for the Australian. He has written 12 books in Arabic relating to Afghanistan and al Qaeda, and has just re-emerged as an author for the Taliban’s flagship magazine publication, in which he recently encouraged the Taliban to engage in the kidnapping of British and American soldiers. Because of this, Al Masri has been one of Farrall’s “main academic interests for many years” and she was shocked read his blog posts about her: “To say that I am blown away by this would be a pretty massive understatement”.

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New software aids law enforcement in solving gun and gang related crimes

ShieldOps is the name of the company. GunOps and Gang Injunction are the names of the programs that could help improve the investigation and completion of gun and gang-related crimes. The inventors in the company’s programs are Jon Centanni, a Cal State Fullerton alumnus and detective sergeant, and Rocky Edwards, a firearms examiner. Both work for a large municipal law enforcement agency in Southern California.

It began with an idea; ShieldOps was created due to the demand. As Edwards quoted from a well-known Aesop fable, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” The overwhelming amount of case data they go through daily needed some form of organization. By chance, Centanni and Edwards were attempting new ways of cataloging data around the same time.

Edwards came up with an idea of tracking gun-related crimes through firearm cartridge cases and bullets. Simultaneously, Centanni was beginning to experiment as well. “I started working on creating a database to track all of the hits that (Edwards) kept stacking on my desk. I needed something to organize in my mind all of the ballistically linked cases because there are so many of them,” Centanni said.

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Crime analysis and the critical role of location intelligence

Crime analysis is a law enforcement profession dedicated to the identification of patterns, trends and problems in crime and disorder. It has become an increasingly important part of policing and crime prevention and thousands of specialist crime analysts are now employed by police forces worldwide. Crime analysts work at all levels in policing the study of crime, incident, and intelligence information. The role is to identify, predict and forecast occurrences and suggest solutions, effective strategies and tactics to address crime and disorder. Other duties include preparing statistics, data queries and the use of geographical information systems(GIS) for the identification of local, regional, national and international crime concerns.

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The threat of homegrown terrorism

The apprehension last week of Sudbury native Tarek Mehanna is the fifth terrorism-related arrest in the United States in as many months, putting homegrown radicalism back on the radar screen. But many question whether individuals like Mehanna are the “real deal.’’ Do they really pose a significant terrorist threat or are they acting out but lack the capability to inflict any real damage? How dangerous are homegrown radicals? Will the United States, like Europe, become more susceptible to native radicals rather than terrorist plots hatched abroad from organized groups like Al Qaeda?

Terrorism specialist Marc Sageman claims that we are facing a “leaderless jihad.’’ Al Qaeda central is not the driving force of terrorism as an operational machine but rather its ideology serves as an inspiration for self-organizing local groups to carry out their own attacks. But other experts, including Bruce Hoffman, maintain that it is established organizations like Al Qaeda that remain the dominant threat and that we must focus more on the organization and its capabilities rather than random, radicalized individuals.

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