Posts by Chameleon Associates
Prone to Violence
On May 10th of this year, the FBI and the Homeland Security Department issued an eight-page bulletin entitled “White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat with Lethal Violence”. The analysis pointed to the high number of violent incidents over the last decade involving neo-Nazis, white extremists and the KKK. Anyone who pays attention to domestic terrorist…
Read MoreThe Drone Police
Drones are prominently in the news this week. The U.S. Department of Defense has given military bases new guidelines allowing them to shoot down consumer drones trespassing on (above) military bases. The Los Angeles Police Department wants to finally use two drones it received from the Seattle Police Department that have been sitting unused on…
Read MoreDHS Reauthorization
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Reauthorization of the Department of Homeland Security Act, bill HR 2825. The vote was 386 for and 41 against, with 32 democrats and 9 republicans in opposition. It’s next up to the U.S. Senate to deliberate and vote. “The threats we face have evolved in the past…
Read MorePassports
A passport is a critical travel document without which you are literally grounded. We might nowadays associate passports mainly with train and aviation travel. But there are biblical references to travel documents that survive til today. In the Old Testament (Nehemiah 2:7-9), around…
Read MoreTextalyzer
Perhaps you can relate: driving to work this morning on the highway a car in the lane next to me started to gradually slow down and then it was swerving a bit. As I sped past, I saw the driver looking down at his phone, no doubt texting. Once I reached my exit, the off…
Read MoreInvisible Code
Earlier this month, NSA employee Ms. Reality Winner was found distributing a printed copy of sensitive information to the publication Intercept. Although the NSA did not verify the exact means by which they were able to determine that it was Ms. Winner who printed the document, one possible way is via micro dots. The…
Read MoreIran’s Push for Power
Since 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has tried to establish itself as a dominant power in the Middle East. The goal to dominate during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s cost both sides of the conflict millions of lives and billions of dollars. While the Iran-Iraq war was essentially over the Shaat al-Arab (the…
Read MoreReality is Stranger than Fiction
Reality Winner who worked for Pluribus International at their offices in Georgia was arrested this week under the Espionage Act for sending a classified document to Intercept, a publication first created in 2014 as a platform to report on documents released by Edward Snowden. Ms. Winner faces one count of “gathering, transmitting or losing defense…
Read MorePerception and Travel Risk
I recently went to Paris and before my departure, more than one friend warned me to be careful while in Europe. When I arrived in Paris, my French friends expressed concern over the shootings at schools in the U.S. It seems that danger is to a degree a matter of perspective. Our perspective is most…
Read MoreManchester Attack – Known Vulnerabilities
With the Manchester U.K. suicide bombing incident still under investigation, it is hard to draw final conclusions regarding security failures in this incident. What we know now is that the Manchester Suicide Bomber exploded himself at the foyer of the arena immediately after the concert ended at around 10:30PM and just as thousands of young…
Read More