Wake County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday became the first of four law enforcement agencies in North Carolina to receive new database link that will automatically check the criminal and immigration history of all individuals booked into the jail, according to a report submitted to the National Association of Chiefs of Police.

This new process provides local officers as much information available about individuals they arrest and help to more efficiently identify criminal aliens for potential removal.

The Departments of Homeland Security and Justice have made enhancements to their respective biometric systems-the Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) and the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) to improve the interoperability of the two systems and enable this new information sharing process. IDENT and IAFIS interoperability is the cornerstone of Secure Communities, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) comprehensive plan to identify and remove criminal aliens from local communities. In collaboration with DOJ and other DHS components, ICE plans to expand this capability to more than 50 state and local law enforcement agencies throughout the nation by next spring.

“Interoperability will create a virtual ICE presence at every local jail, allowing us to identify and ultimately remove dangerous incarcerated criminal aliens from our communities,” said Julie L. Myers, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for ICE. “Using this technology, we will build upon the remarkable success we have had working with state and local law enforcement and we will revolutionize the process of identifying criminal aliens in custody.”

“US VISIT’s innovative use of biometrics is all about providing comprehensive, reliable information to decision makers when and where they need it,” said US VISIT Director Robert Mocny. “By enhancing the interoperability of DHS’ and the FBI’s biometric systems, we are able to give federal, state and local decision makers information that helps them better protect our communities and our nation.”

“Under this plan, ICE will be utilizing FBI system enhancements that allow improved information sharing at the state and local law enforcement level based on positive identification of incarcerated criminal aliens. Additionally, ICE and the FBI are working together to take advantage of the strong relationships already forged between the FBI and state and local law enforcement necessary to assist ICE in achieving their goals,” said FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Assistant Director Tom Bush.

Sheriff Donnie Harrison noted that the Wake County Jail processes over 35,000 people each year. “With this new technology,” Sheriff Harrison said, “we may find more criminals or criminal aliens who otherwise could have slipped through the cracks.”

As part of the routine booking process at most detention centers, an individual’s fingerprints are checked against IAFIS to obtain information about the detainee’s criminal history. The new process will simultaneously check the detainee’s fingerprints against the full IDENT system which holds biometrics based immigration records. If the individual’s fingerprints match those of a non US citizen, the new automated process notifies ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC) for officials to evaluate the case and take appropriate action when necessary.

Additionally, the local law enforcement agency will receive biographic identification information about any non US citizen they arrest for criminal charges. Law enforcement officers can use this information to verify the identity of the person they have arrested.

Wake, Gaston, Buncombe, and Henderson county sheriffs’ offices are four of the seven sites nationwide that have participated in a pilot version of interoperability between the DHS and DOJ databases. Under the pilot, these sites received limited immigration history information. The remaining three North Carolina counties are scheduled to begin receiving full immigration history information beginning next week.

Local law enforcement officials are not permitted to take action against immigration violators unless trained and authorized by DHS. Wake, Gaston, and Henderson county sheriffs’ offices have signed 287(g) agreements with ICE which authorizes their trained officers to enforce immigration law under ICE supervision. Under the 287(g) program the trained officers already have access to the DHS databases; however officers have to run fingerprints separately on the IAFIS and IDENT systems.

This new interoperable system will streamline the process for jail officers and fully check both the criminal history and the immigration records of everyone processed into the jail. Currently only those referred to officers with immigration enforcement authority have their immigration histories checked.

DHS’ ICE and US-VISIT program are working with the FBI’s CJIS division to make this program possible. US VISIT manages the IDENT database, and CJIS manages the IAFIS database. ICE’s LESC serves as a national enforcement operations center by providing timely immigration status and identity information to local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies on aliens suspected, arrested, or convicted of criminal activity.

Technorati Tags: Automated Biometric Identification System, Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System

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An extensive federal report released Monday concludes that roughly one in four of the 697,000 U.S. veterans of the 1990-91 Gulf War suffer from Gulf War illness.

That illness is a condition now identified as the likely consequence of exposure to toxic chemicals, including pesticides and a drug administered to protect troops against nerve gas.

The 452-page report states that “scientific evidence leaves no question that Gulf War illness is a real condition with real causes and serious consequences for affected veterans.”

The report, compiled by a panel of scientific experts and veterans serving on the congressionally mandated Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, fails to identify any cure for the malady.

It also notes that few veterans afflicted with Gulf War illness have recovered over time.

“Today’s report brings to a close one of the darkest chapters in the legacy of the 1991 Gulf War,” said Anthony Hardie, a member of the committee and a member of the advocacy group Veterans of Modern Warfare.

“This is a bittersweet victory, [because] this is what Gulf War veterans have been saying all along,” Hardie said at a news conference in Washington. “Years were squandered by the federal government … trying to disprove that anything could be wrong with Gulf War veterans.”

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The Bush administration on Thursday urged a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a group of Amish farmers in Michigan claiming RFID chips required on cattle “are a mark of the beast.”

The Amish farmers claim (.pdf) Michigan regulations requiring them to use radio frequency identification devices on their cattle “constitutes some form of a ‘mark of the beast’ and/or represents an infringement of their ‘dominion over cattle and all living things’ in violation of their fundamental religious beliefs,” according to the farmers’ lawsuit filed in September in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

In response to the charges, the United States Department of Agriculture wrote (.pdf) Thursday that its RFID tagging program is a voluntary measure to help agricultural officials track bovine and other livestock diseases. The USDA said the lawsuit should be directed at Michigan, which adopted RFID requirements last year.

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Source: breitbart.com

A website launched Friday with the backing of technology industry and Hollywood elite urges people worldwide to help craft a framework for harmony between all religions.

The Charter for Compassion project on the Internet at www.charterforcompassion.org springs from a “wish” granted this year to religious scholar Karen Armstrong at a premier Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in California.

“Tedizens” include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin along with other Internet icons as well as celebrities such as Forest Whittaker and Cameron Diaz.

Wishes granted at TED envision ways to better the world and come with a promise that Tedizens will lend their clout and capabilities to making them come true.

Armstrong’s wish is to combine universal principles of respect and compassion into a charter based on a “golden rule” she believes is at the core of every major religion.

The Golden Rule essentially calls on people to do unto others as they would have done unto them.

“The chief task of our time is to build a global society where people of all persuasions can live together in peace and harmony,” Armstrong said.

“If we do not achieve this, it seems unlikely that we will have a viable world to hand on to the next generation.”

Charter for Compassion invites people from “all faiths, nationalities, languages and backgrounds” to help draft statements of principles and actions that should be taken.

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Source: Times Online

Barack Obama is being given ominous advice from leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to brace himself for an early assault from terrorists.

General Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, this week acknowledged that there were dangers during a presidential transition when new officials were coming in and getting accustomed to the challenges. But he added that no “real or artificial spike” in intercepted transmissions from terror suspects had been detected.

President Bush has repeatedly described the acute vulnerability of the US during a transition. The Bush Administration has been defined largely by the 9/11 attacks, which came within a year of his taking office.

His aides have pointed to al-Qaeda’s first assault on the World Trade Centre, which occurred little more than a month after Bill Clinton became President in 1993. There was an alleged attempt to bomb Glasgow airport in Gordon Brown’s first days in Downing Street and a London nightclub attack was narrowly thwarted.

Lord West of Spithead, the Home Office Security Minister, spoke recently of a “huge threat”, saying: “There is another great plot building up again and we are monitoring this.”

Intelligence chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic have indicated that such warnings refer more to a general sense of foreboding than fear of an imminent or specific plan.

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Between Friday night and Sunday morning, a massive deletion operation took place at the European Internet address register (RIPE) to scrub references to a cover used by Germany’s premier spy agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND.

The cleanup operation comes the night after Wikileaks’ revealed over two dozen covert BND networks provided by T-Systems (Deutsche Telekom). The IP addresses were assigned to an unregistered company at a Munich-based PO box linked to T-Systems.

T-Systems purged the RIPE database of all addresses exposed by Wikileaks, moving the addresses into a several giant anonymous “Class B” address pools.

The move comes just a few hours after T-Systems Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) contacted Wikileaks to demand removal of an internal T-Systems memo listing the BND cover addresses. Wikileaks refused and T-System did not respond to requests for further detail by the time of writing.

Yet an investigation into the addresses over the weekend reveals key information about the BND’s Internet activities. Findings include the removal of information on the BND’s own German Wikipedia entry–which stated that the Goethe Institute was sometimes used as BND cover, visits to websites including the Russian government and a Berlin escort agency (perhaps for “honey traps”), as well as crawling the Internet for terrorism related topics, such as the assassination of Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi.

Website references reveal that in 2006 numerous hosters of Internet websites complained about out of control “data mining” robots from two of the BND-linked IP addresses. One of the hosters ran a popular discussion forum on counter-terrorism operations.

The integrity and transparency of the RIPE system is not assisted by the T-Systems deletion. German citizens may wonder at the double standard. At a time when the population’s Internet addresses are being recorded by ISPs under laws derisively referred to as “Stasi 2.0″, the “real Stasi”—the BND, has had the largest telco in Germany scrub its addresses from the European record within 24 hours of their exposure.

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Buying ammonium nitrate, a common fertilizer that also could be used to make bombs, would get tougher under a rule proposed by the Department of Homeland Security.

The rule would require sellers and buyers of the fertilizer to register with the department, which would then check their names against the FBI’s terrorist watch list, according to DHS Web site. They would know if they’re in the clear within three days. The department also would address appeals within three days.

The proposed penalty for a violation is $50,000.

DHS said it still needs to determine how much ammonium nitrate needs to be in a fertilizer mix before the mix would fall under the new rules.

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Blackwater Worldwide is facing a “multimillion-dollar” fine from the State Department for allegedly shipping illegal weapons to its contractors in Iraq, McClatchy reports. The fine could be levied in the next few days. State officials charge that Blackwater, which holds a lucrative personnel-protection contract for US diplomats in Iraq, hid the arms inside shrink-wrapped pallets that were shipped directly from the company’s sprawling Moyock, North Carolina, headquarters. About 900 weapons were sent to Iraq without permits, 119 of which were especially “erroneous,” says a State Department official familiar with the shipments. Some of the weapons are thought to have wound up on Iraq’s thriving black market.

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The Bush administration has been planning since last spring to issue a final burst of federal regulations just before leaving office. It was recently announced that over 90 new regulations would be finalized before November 22 — 60 days prior to the end of Bush’s term — making them difficult, though not impossible, for President Obama to reverse.

Although many of the regulations have to do with energy and the environment, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted on Tuesday that there’s also “one that’ll kick opponents of the Patriot Act right in the teeth.”

The proposed regulation “would allow state and local law enforcement agencies to collect intelligence on individuals and organizations even if the information is unrelated to any criminal matter,” Maddow explained. She added, “Even if they weren’t already watching you — they soon could be.”

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US research firm Nielsen and its partner NeuroFocus said Wednesday they would offer a new service in Japan to scan the brain waves of potential customers to help companies improve their marketing.

The service will review brain waves, eye movements and other physical features of potential customers to precisely study the impact of commercial messages or products, the two firms said.

Nielsen will collect the necessary data in Japan and the California-based NeuroFocus will use its teams of experts, including physicians, to examine the effects of the tested products or commercial messages, they said.

The service measures the attention level and emotional engagement of possible customers and the message’s retention level, they said.

“NeuroFocus is a very new innovative approach of marketing research, but also it has a very economical value,” said Cindy Shin, the head of Nielsen’s Japan arm. “So NeuroFocus can really help our clients to do better marketing.”

The two firms formed a tie-up in February in the United States.

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