Technology Sectors

DHS is planning to spend up to $50 million to hire as many as four contractors to provide “aerial remote sensing” services, that will include taking photos from airborne sensors of homeland security missions and emergency incidents, processing those images and disseminating them throughout the department.

The chosen vendors will be asked to collect aerial imagery using digital cameras in what are known as “vertical” or “oblique” renditions to support emergency and non-emergency incidents nationwide.

Pivot3 Inc., a supplier of IP SANs to the video surveillance market, announced on Feb. 8 that surveillance industry veteran Mark Modica has been appointed to the newly-created position of vice president of business development for video surveillance.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) wants to organize two different focus groups per year -- one involving 500 immigrants; the other involving 500 “stakeholders” -- in order to gain further insights and early warnings, and improve the delivery of its communications, training and overall operations.

The TSA’s trusted traveler Pre Check program will expand to dozens more airports around the country in the coming months, including some of the busiest, such as Boston’s Logan, New York’s JFK and LaGuardia, Chicago’s O’Hare,  and Washington’s National and Dulles.

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and TSA Administrator John Pistole unveiled on Feb. 8 a lengthy list of additional airports where the Pre Check passenger pre-screening program will expand in 2012 following the current pilot initiatives at seven airports.

CBP agents helped save two people trying to traverse the south Texas scrubland after the couple sounded a rescue beacon near an internal border checkpoint.

U.S. Border Patrol said agents assigned to the Kingsville Station, near Sarita, TX saved the lives of two illegal aliens who activated a rescue beacon after becoming lost in the brush on Feb. 4.

A provision in the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill approved by Congress on Feb. 7, which would allow airports to privatize their security screeners and essentially opt-out of TSA’s program, is “troubling” and “regrettable,” said the leader of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Stonesoft announced on Feb. 8 that its firewall/VPN product family has received the Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+) certification, an international security standard for IT security products. The EAL4+ is the highest security standard for commercial products and indicates that the products are rigorously engineered to a high degree of quality, noted a company press release issued on Feb. 8.