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DNI names new chairman of the National Intelligence Council
February 27th, 2009
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dennis Blair has named a veteran of American diplomacy, intelligence and statecraft to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC).
The new chairman, former Ambassador Charles Freeman, Jr., will be responsible for overseeing the NIC's production of National Intelligence Estimates and other intelligence community analytic products.
Napolitano's DHS: General Counsel nominee and key staff appointments
January 29th, 2009
President Obama will nominate Ivan Fong, the author of a seminal report on cyber crime policy, as the next DHS general counsel.
Fong is currently the chief legal officer and secretary for Cardinal Health, Inc., and served previously as deputy associate attorney general for the Department of Justice. He also was primary author and editor of The Electronic Frontier: The Challenge of Unlawful Conduct Involving the Use of the Internet, written in 2000 for the President’s Working Group on Unlawful Conduct on the Internet.
In addition, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has announced three key staff appointments. They are:
Former FBI agent nominated to be Empire State's homeland security director
January 29th, 2009
New York Governor David Paterson has nominated former FBI agent Thomas Donlon to serve as the Empire State's next director of homeland security.
The $136,000 per year post, vacant since last summer, requires confirmation by the State Senate.
Top U.N. official to get senior DHS post
January 26th, 2009
President Obama will nominate Jane Holl Lute, a Desert Storm veteran who currently holds a senior U.N. post, as deputy secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, according to a DHS statement that also announced the appointments of two former senior aides to then-Arizona Governor Napolitano.
They are Noah Kroloff, her former deputy chief of staff and director of policy, who now becomes her chief of staff at DHS, and Jan Lesher, her former chief of staff and director of Arizona's Department of Commerce, who now becomes her chief of staff for operations at DHS.
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Attorney General says farewell
January 9th, 2009
The long goodbye of the Bush Administration continued on Jan. 8 with a graceful farewell address by Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in which he addressed not only the successes of his 14-month tenure as the head of the Department of Justice, but the setbacks and disappointments as well.
Foremost in the first category, Mukasey said, was that "we helped to set up an institutional framework that will protect our national security while preserving our nation’s commitment to civil rights and civil liberties. We helped to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to address modern forms of communication used by our enemies, and to plug other intelligence gaps. And we put in place new, consolidated guidelines for domestic FBI operations. Those guidelines will help the Bureau to remain the first-class crime solving agency it always has been. They also will continue its transformation into a first-class intelligence-gathering organization and a full-fledged member of the intelligence community that has helped assure that this country has not suffered a terrorist attack since September 11, 2001."
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ASIS names Cummings new president
January 8th, 2009
Alexandria, VA-based ASIS International, the well-known trade organization for security management professionals, has named Michael Cummings, CPP, as its new president.
Cummings has been in the security field since 1973, specializing first in retail and, since 1985, in the health care arena.
Currently, he is director of loss prevention services for Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee, WI, a position he has held since 1987.
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ATF names Stoop its Baltimore SAC
December 5th, 2008
Theresa Stoop, chief of staff for the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Michael Sullivan, has been named Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of ATF’s Baltimore field division.
The posting marks a return for Stoop, an ATF veteran, who also served as Baltimore division SAC from 2000 to 2003.
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Change is coming
December 1st, 2008
If you need a reminder that, as the campaign rhetoric proclaimed, “Change is coming,” consider these ringing remarks earlier this year to the Washington, DC-based American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, a nonprofit group that characterizes itself as a progressive legal organization:
“Our needlessly abusive and unlawful practices in the ‘War on Terror’ have diminished our standing in the world community and made us less, rather than more safe,” the speaker, an ACS board member, said last June. “For the sake of our safety and security, and because it is the right thing to do, the next president must move immediately to reclaim America’s standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights.”
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