By Robert Green, Senior Editor
 

Now that the Dubai ports deal has been squelched, questions remain as to whether Arab management of major U.S. ports constituted a unique threat to homeland security? Or would the Persian Gulf company set to take over operation of shipping hubs been under even greater pressure to install tough new security systems?

The UAE was a base of operations for part of the 9/11 attack and has been a hatching ground since for a number of other terrorists and terror-related support efforts. However, DP World conversely has operated the Port of Dubai, the world’s sixth busiest port and the largest one in al Qaeda’s sphere of influence, through a period of significant expansion and technology implementation, while also supporting UAE’s sign-on to the U.S.-led Container Security Initiative (CSI) for better security monitoring of cargo in late 2004.

In the 1990s, the port of Dubai was one of the first in the world to implement then-new eCommerce and eShipping systems, and one of the first to operate an intranet/web portal for more effective shipping and manifest processing. Its growth as a world port followed many of these innovations, officials have said.

Moreover, the expansion of the port, and implementation of better security, came as threats to such facilities heightened and communiqués from Osama bin Laden and other terrorist higher-ups not only targeted ports but even advised jihadists to infiltrate them. Dubai was a terminal through which a bogus computer company was able to ship parts for rogue nuclear reactors around the world, as part of the Pakistan-based A. Q. Khan nuclear weapons black market.

A member of the U.S. committee that approved the DP World buyout said because the company is Gulf-based it has “a strong incentive to make sure [terrorist threats to U.S. ports] never materialize.”

In fact, U.S. ports might have experienced an up tick in both security profile and efficiency if some of the same processes used by- and planned for in Dubai were installed here. A DP World official recently said that the company’s high-tech security upgrades made last year at the Pusan New Terminal in South Korea would have been adopted for Dubai.

The project there was fashioned around a Samsung-developed central security system in which threats are anticipated and met via a network of monitors including upgraded cctv, lasers, radiological and other sensors, and explosive- and motion detection fencing of the sort normally found in high-sensitivity military settings.

The Pusan project was fashioned around compliance with a number of post-9/11 standards, including the Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism treaty, also a U.S.-led program that has exerted tough new benchmarks on ports.

DP World was formed from the original Dubai Ports Authority, which managed the digitalization projects at the port of Dubai in the 1990s. With the buyout, DP World’s DPI Terminals  will manage 52 facilities worldwide and will likely become an important focal point for emerging port security trends. The company also is involved in rail systems and operates the CSX international freight line.

March 24, 2006 • Volume 4 • Number 4
 

Piracy - Down, Up (In Iraq), Foiled by LRAD 

By Robert Green, Senior Editor

The good news is that 2005 marked a significant downturn in piracy events worldwide, with 276 total attacks at sea reported compared to 2004, when there were 329. However, the bad news is that there was a surge to 10 total piracy attacks in the Gulf region near Iraq in 2005.

Waterways around Basra and Umm Qasr attracted most of the Iraqi piracy, almost all of which was conducted by bandits rather than insurgents. The attacks occurred in the primary shipping lanes for Iraqi oil, however, and should mark an area of concern for both the Iraqi government and coalition forces.

Perhaps the best news about piracy in 2005 followed a November event when a luxury cruise ship reportedly used a newly deployed Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) to send an ear-splitting signal to would-be attackers, driving them back in the waters off Somalia.

The pirates (attacking in two speed boats) had fired at least one rocket-propelled grenade and a hail of automatic weapons at the cruise ship when the operators returned fire with the LRAD sonic blast.

The non-lethal LRAD, first reported on last March (ADD LINK http://www.publicsectorinstitute.net/ELetters/EGovernment/v3n4/Acoustics.lsp)

, is used on Navy ships, some Stryker vehicles in Iraq, and increasingly at infrastructure in the U.S. It is a “focused beam, phased array” system and is provided by American Technology Corp. of San Diego.

In 2005, there were 35 such pirate attacks in the waters near Somalia, an ungoverned and lawless region that has not registered an official tourist in more than 15 years.

March 24, 2006 • Volume 4 • Number 4
 

Terrorist Hunter Addresses IntelCon, May 7-9

By Robert Green, Senior Editor

What is the best way to combat complacency in the war on terror? Maybe a visit to Rita Katz’s web site will do it for you.

Katz, the author of Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America (Harper Collins; 2003; originally published under the byline Anonymous) has operated the Site Institute and its exhaustive www.siteinstitute.org resource since 2002, tracking the online doings of al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups.

At Site, Katz and her colleagues report and catalog the daily communications of terrorists, especially as they appear on radical jihadist web sites but even sometimes from encrypted emails. As well as video documents of roadside bombings or ambushes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, Site provides complete English-language text of many of the manuals distributed on the web by terrorists.

At Site, one can read exactly how al Qaeda would attack the Super Bowl or other high profile sports events using multiple suicide attackers; or read a jihadist guide on how to turn mobile phones into detonators. Links at Site run to topical announcements, such as the Taliban’s online cash reward offer for “he who kills the Danish caricaturist” and other jihadist obsessions.

Katz’s ability to track al Qaeda over the years has made her a valuable resource to government, and a number of officials have lauded her ability to get to places and unearth information few others have, including agencies vested with tracking terrorists. In fact, the question of why it is Site and other private, entrepreneurial groups in the U.S. have been effective at tracking terrorism will be addressed in May by Katz during the second annual IntelCon Conference.

The three-day event in Bethesda, Md., will include addresses in most areas of intelligence agency interest, and will include luminaries that range from former CIA director James Woolsey, Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation, Air Force secretary James Wicecarver, and numerous terrorism experts and authors including Judith Miller, Victor Davis Hanson, Walid Phares, and Paul Sperry, as well as terror hunters like Ms. Katz.

To find out more about the 2006 IntelCon conference (May 7-9), visit: http://www.intelconference.us/

To make the complacency go away real fast, visit the Site Institute: http://www.siteinstitute.org/

March 24, 2006 • Volume 4 • Number 4
 

Next Generation Intel Now

By Randy Ridley

Vice President and General Manager, Federal Systems, MetaCarta

With the era of Intelligence Reform upon us, the amount of data US intelligence agencies must process has dramatically increased while the time available to analyze it has correspondingly tightened. In 1994, the US intelligence community (IC) built an extensive intranet to deal with information overload. The “Intelink” is used to integrate and disseminate virtually every piece of information that the intelligence agencies report to their “customers,” from the White House to the warfighter.

In response to new demands on the IC, the Intelink Management Office (IMO) has partnered with MetaCarta over the last three years to build a next-generation intelligence dissemination and collaboration service called Intelligent Delivery Services (IDS).

As part of the IDS, MetaCarta developed its Geographic Text Search (GTS) system that automatically identifies and tags geographic references from any type of document in a customer’s text archives--whether they are emails, web pages, newswires or cables. GTS assigns a latitude and longitude to references so that analysts can search text archives using both keywords and geographic maps as filters. The results are displayed on a map with icons representing the locations found in the natural language text of the documents. The icons are hyperlinked to the documents they represent.

IMO’s vision is to link search and discovery tools to form an integrated experience so that instead of a generic list of documents to be read, the IDS can link otherwise independent information resources into cohesive, timely personalized information.

And the MetaCarta GTS is being used within the IDS to facilitate this type of search. GTS has currently indexed millions of documents posted on servers across top secret networks and supplies sub second responses to the thousands of users on those networks. As IDS evolves, users can subscribe to a query that includes the geographic extent along with subject and temporal constraints and get the results they need, and then be notified when new results are available. This type of focused and automated information retrieval dramatically increases IC productivity, allowing analysts to spend more time doing analysis and less time gathering.

MetaCarta also provides GeoTagger, a tool for the automated metatagging of content that supports categorization, browsing and routing of information. For example, news articles from multiple news feeds are sent to the GeoTagger, each identified by the geographic references within the article. The metadata produced includes the latitude and longitude of those references. The GeoTagger running within the IDS system is capable of keeping up with and tagging four million+ documents per day. The results are stored in a database along with metadata from other tools that deal with other entity types to support a myriad of information automation functions. Analysts use the GeoTagger to disambiguate geographic terms down to a specific location, rather then just identifying that a term is geographic. Location specificity is essential to the success of IDS.

Randy Ridley, a former Naval officer, has more than 20 years experience working in government and industry. Since 2002, he has  managed the MetaCarta public sector team. For more information, please visit: www.metacarta.com.