Mexico, and the cross-border region that embraces the frontier between Mexico and the United States, are embroiled in a series of interlocking, networked criminal insurgencies. These criminal insurgencies are essentially battles for dominance of the plazas, or corridors for the shipment of drugs into the United States. They are battles for profit and power. Cartels…

In Gaza, a tentative ceasefire has been declared. But the war in cyberspace continues. Israel and its adversaries have taken to the global cyber commons to wage cyberwar against each other, deploying crowdsourced information militias. The Israeli Consulate and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) extensively utilize Youtube and Twitter to make their case, boiling complicated…

We are proud to feature this new paper by John Sullivan: Security and public safety agencies must address a range of current and emerging  threats. These range from conflicts, strategic crime, terrorism, disease and natural hazards, as well as the confluence of any or all occurring at a given point in time. A range of…

Money quote from the Author’s Note: The unavoidable conclusion is that the U.S. government cannot continue to allow a collecting agency to make unilateral originator control determinations regarding the intelligence it collects. … I hope to explain why they are not in position to make the best “need to know” determinations – that decision must…

I used to wax and wane about the need to purge national security functionaries, but I’ve stopped waning, as my latest commentary at ThreatsWatch indicates.

(cross-posted at Haft of the Spear) I don’t get Insight Magazine so I don’t know the full story that goes along with this teaser: The U.S. intelligence community has assessed that Osama bin Laden has benefited from a secure haven in Pakistan that allows him to plan a major attack on the U.S. It took…

(Cross posted to Haft of the Spear) I engaged in several conversations about cyber threats this past week and each conversant repeated with certainty a lack of concern over a relationship between terrorists and mobsters in the virtual world. I’d like to think that an unholy alliance of that sort isn’t possible, but . .…

Love those tart cherries . . . As predicted, it turns out that the recently leaked NIE isn’t exactly the scathing indictment of current war/counterterrorism efforts as certain elements would have you believe. In fact just a few snippets of the rest of the story paint a much more interesting picture. Amazing thing context. Something…