HOMELAND SECURITY
26 Aug 09. Northrop Grumman Corp.’s cyber security team
bagged a follow-on $430m indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contract from the US Army. In lieu of the deal, the company will continue
providing a wide array of information operations (IO) and computer network operations (CNO) to the 1st Information Operations Command (Land), Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and its regional Computer Emergency Response Teams. The contract had originally been awarded to Northrop by the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, Fort Belvoir in 1997. Through this follow-on contract, valid for five years, Northrop will coordinate multiple battlefield functions such as electronic warfare, military deception, psychological warfare, operations security and computer-network operations to disrupt enemy decision-making while protecting information necessary for the US troops. (Source: Google)
24 Aug 09. An unprecedented attempt by the intelligence community to provide a wishlist of anti-terror technology to defence manufacturers has been heralded as a “huge step forward” by industry. Companies such as BAE Systems, Qinetiq and Smiths Industries have been lobbying the government for years to provide clarity on where they should invest research and development budgets for homeland security, while the intelligence services have bemoaned the fact that large military contractors have failed to grasp their particular needs. “This means companies can begin to understand where they can fit in and where they should be investing,” said Mike Shaw, who heads the national security business at Thales, a UK defence contractor. “There has been real progress in forcing people to talk more effectively to each other.” The strategy – brainchild of Charles Farr, director-general of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism at the Home Office – spells out for the first time the areas where help is wanted from industry and academia: namely protecting crowded public spaces, guarding national infrastructure such as power
stations, countering cyber-terror and improving the analytical software tools used by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. It also highlights key technologies the UK should develop, including knowledge management, screening, biometrics, physical protection, and countering improvised explosive devices.
Hugo Rosemont, security policy adviser to the Society of British Aerospace Companies, said: “The transparency here is a huge step forward.” Senior Whitehall officials said that the Home Office had decided to engage large defence contractors after considering whether to sideline them in favour of more innovative smaller companies. The security services are particularly concerned not to get bogged down in large defence-style equipment programmes, which suffer years of delays and huge cost overruns. (Source: FT.com)
Aug 09. TruePosition, Inc., a leading provider of wireless location technologies and solutions and a subsidiary of Liberty Media Corporation, today announced that it was awarded a multimillion dollar contract for its TruePosition Location Platform to be used for national security purposes. The TruePosition Location Platform is a wireless location determination system, which can be tailored to meet the performance needs of the customer or application. For this national security solution, the location technology being deployed is Uplink Time Difference of Arrival (U-TDOA). Renowned for its ability to accurately and reliably locate any mobile phone in any environment, including indoors, U-TDOA is currently used across the United States to locate emergency 9-1-1 phone calls dialed by mobile subscribers. Today, U-TDOA protects more than 100 million citizens and locates more than five million wireless 9-1-1 phone calls each month.
26 Aug 09. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) selected Raytheon’s insider threat management solution as the Insider Threat Focused Observation Tool (InTFOT) for the Department of Defense. Unde