With all the attention and outrage over the Department of Homeland Security’s full-body scanners now in place at airports around the country, another technology seems to have slipped under the radar. Biometrics describes systems that collect data – fingerprints, for example – and then match them to an information bank of stored data. Fingerprint biometrics [...]

Last week, the Defense Department announced U.S. Cyber Command, tasked with defending DoD’s military networks against cyber assaults, is now fully operational. In other words, Cybercom, if necessary, is ready for cyber war. It all started with a worm-infested flash drive left in the parking lot of a Defense Department base in the Middle East. [...]

Earlier this year, six cosmonauts began a 500-day isolation test to see whether humans can endure the rigors of a trip to Mars and back. Last week, NASA announced it is planning something much longer-term: a 100-year Starship that would take a crew to Mars… and leave them there. NASA is partnering with DARPA and [...]

Over the past year, while major weapons systems have been canceled left and right as defense budgets have shrunk, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have remained a bright spot in the market. In fact, some industry analysts predict the global market for UAVs will top $11.5 billion annually by 2020. However, while U.S. firms have managed to [...]

Here’s a riddle for you: How can you make stock trades based on information that hasn’t been made public yet AND avoid jail time? Run for Congress. That’s right, even though Congress has an unprecedented stake in America’s economy, being a majority shareholder in GM, exerting unprecedented control over the healthcare and energy industries, there [...]

In March, the Government Accountability Office released a report updating long-term fiscal projections and predicting an “unsustainable” growth in the federal deficit – reaching World War II highs as early as 2020. To trim the budget, Robert M. Gates has cut $340 billion in life-cycle costs from the Pentagon’s long-term outlook, but will rising fiscal [...]

The recent showdown over Senate approval of defense appropriations highlights the reliance on continuing resolutions to keep government agencies, as well as the companies they do business with afloat. But it’s often a bumpy ride, experts say. A continuing resolution is the legal authority approved by Congress if an appropriations bill has failed to pass [...]

Will SBINet get a second chance? Some say “yes,” but its brand may change. Last week, Alan Bersin, commissioner of Customs & Border Protection (CBP) at DHS, promoted Mark Borkowski, SBINet’s project manager, to run a new office tasked with managing complex acquisition processes for CBP.  The move is part of a broader effort at [...]

In an unusual move, the Defense Intelligence Agency has entered negotiations with St. Martin’s Press to purchase all 10,000 copies of Operation Dark Heart, the controversial memoirs of former undercover operative Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer. The move is unusual because the book had already been cleared for publication by the U.S. Army. Also, it only [...]

Controversial plastic hardener bisphenol-A (BPA), best known for the extensively-reported controversy over its use in plastic baby bottles and sippy cups, has shown up somewhere new: receipts from retail cash registers. A new study, commissioned by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), found that 40 percent of receipts printed on heat-activated synthetic paper by cash registers [...]