Thirty-five countries pledged Tuesday to turn international guidelines on nuclear security into national laws, including France, Britain, Canada and Israel. This move is aimed at preventing terrorists from acquiring nuclear material. The initiative also commits countries to open up their security procedures to independent review – a further step toward creating an international legal framework to mitigate risks of nuclear terrorism.
The United States is advising airlines with direct flights serving Russia to be aware of the possibility of explosive materials concealed in toothpaste or cosmetic tubes. Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to airlines flying to Russia warning of the potential threat. The bulletin said that officials believed that the explosives might be used during flights or smuggled into the city of Sochi, where the Winter Olympics begins this week.
American telephone metadata was only found to have played a role in initiating 1.8 percent of investigations, with a total contribution from NSA surveillance to investigations coming to 7.5 percent of cases. Traditional investigative methods (informants, community tips, targeted intelligence) provided 59.6 percent of impetus for those investigations, the report states.
Russia began implementing stringent security measures Tuesday in Sochi, one month before the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics. According to CBSNews, tens of thousands of Russian police, security agents, rescue workers and army troops are being deployed from the games.
Terrorism has emerged in the last decade as one of the most critical issues with which governments must contend, topping most Western nations’ agendas in terms of resource allocation. For example, some reports indicate the United States has spent more than one trillion dollars waging the “War on Terror” – money and resources that may have been allocated very differently in the absence of such threats.
Seventy-five percent of Americans agreed with the statement “occasional acts of terrorism in the U.S. will be part of life in the future,” according to an April survey conducted after the Boston Marathon bombing.
UK government watchdog David Anderson reports that smaller-scale attacks are more difficult to detect and prevent, and that they are usurping massive, 9/11-scale terrorist plots as a top risk in Britain.
Biological terrorism attacks, ground-to-air missiles and other evolving threats have motivated the UK Home Office to implement additional counter-terrorism measures.