A New York City Police car is seen outside a Manhattan apartment building November 21, 2011, where New York police arrested Jose Pimentel. REUTERS/Mike Segar On Saturday afternoon, just moments before authorities say Jose Pimentel was about to complete work on a powerful pipe bomb intended to kill American citizens, New York Police Department personnel burst into his apartment and put a hasty end to his aspirations. Pimentel, who went by the alias Muhammed Yusuf, was described by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a “lone wolf, motivated by …
The law, increasingly, is becoming a tool used by opponents of American power to harass American officials and, through the courts, limit America’s freedom of action. A case in point is the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Amir Meshal (an American citizen). Meshal, who lives in New Jersey, says that in 2006 he travelled to Somalia “to enrich his study of Islam.” At that time, parts of Somalia were under the control of the Islamic Courts Union – a fundamentalist militia. Later that year …
An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack is one of the “huge” potential threats that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) worries about. At least that is what Art Cummings, a deputy assistant director in the agency’s Counterterrorism Division, told Ronald Kessler in an interview for Kessler’s new book The Secrets of the FBI. An EMP is a high-intensity burst of electromagnetic energy caused by the rapid acceleration of charged particles. The burst causes disruption of an electromagnetic system and fries electronic devices within its line of sight. Depending on its intensity, …
On Friday, a Somali-born man attempted to blow up a van full of explosives at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. The FBI, however, had supplied him with a fake bomb and was able to arrest him immediately as part of a well-orchestrated string operation. Kudos to the FBI for taking this plot down. Similarly to the recent D.C. Metro plot, the public was never in any danger—and that, of course, is a good thing. What isn’t a good thing, however, is the recent focus on throwing security …
Violent and property crime fell in America last year, the second full year of the current recession, according to new data from the FBI. Recently, the Associated Press ran a story on how criminologists are puzzled by declining crime rates during times of high unemployment. Criminologists should not be surprised, because the social science literature on the relationship between unemployment and crime rates is mixed. Studies tend to find either a positive relationship or no relationship at all between unemployment and crime. Policymakers and journalists need to understand that the …
On a grand scale, social networking is a popular and efficient way of communicating in an expeditious time frame; getting your information out to whomever, whenever. Unfortunately in today’s society there is always a downside to something so convenient. According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), there has been an increase in the number of hijacked social networking accounts reported to www.ic3.gov. One of the more popular scams involves online criminals planting malicious software and code onto to victim computers. It starts by someone opening a spam e-mail, sometimes …
