Keeping Safe at Railway Stations

Security Managers, as part of their employee security awareness programme, should periodically remind staff who commute by rail of the dangers of congregating on large station concourses, such as those found in major cities like London. In some stations irresponsible railway company practice of not publishing platform departure details until the final minutes before train departure exacerbates this problem as it creates a very compact and attractive target immediately in front of the large display screens.

While police presence has been dramatically stepped up in these areas, this presents little defence against a suicide attack. Staff should be advised to choose more remote, less congregated, areas in which to wait for trains, and to remain vigilant to anybody behaving suspiciously.

The potential devastation to human life of a railway station bomb was illustrated on August 2, 1980, when a bomb explosion at the Central Station in Bologna, Italy, killed 85 people and wounded a further 200.

Do You Really Know Who Is Guarding Your Facility?

The UK Home Office has admitted illegal immigrants have been mistakenly cleared for jobs as security staff. Government ministers have ordered new checks to be carried out on hundreds of thousands of security staff vetted by the Security Industry Authority over the past three years.

In the interim, security managers in the UK are advised to contact their guarding contract managers to seek reassurance that the latter have carried out their own diligent pre-employment checks on foreign guards prior to deployment to clients’ premises.

Selecting a Guarding Contractor is one of a number of new sessions to be added to Security Management Stage 2, which runs 30 June - 11 July and 13 - 24 October 2008.

The session will focus on the mechanisms that have to be in place to ensure a good guarding contract, and will be led by a management representative from a leading UK guarding contractor, allowing course participants to interact and identify key elements of best practice.

Fraud at the Met?

Scotland Yard has refused to comment on a News of the World press report that up to £6m of credit cards expenses are unaccounted for and hundreds of police officers are likely to be interviewed, following the arrest of 2 detectives over allegations that staff Amex credit cards were used to pay for personal expenses.

For the full story click here.

A CCD or a CMOS Chip in a CCTV Camera? Which Should You Chose?

Time was when CCTV cameras with CCD chips were always superior to those with CMOS chips. This is no longer necessarily the case. And with the advent of power-over-Ethernet cameras and with CMOS chips consuming just one-hundredth of the power of CCD chips, perhaps now is the time to reconsider.

Read on at:

http://www.axis.com/products/video/camera/ccd_cmos.htm

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question362.htm

ASIS International European Security Management Conference, Barcelona, 13-16 April 2008

The International Academy for Security Management is delighted to announce that Director of Training David Cresswell has been invited to address the ASIS International European Security Conference on the subject of terrorism risk analysis.

The presentation will focus on an examination of the validity of formal risk analysis methodologies to the tricky task of terrorism risk determination, and will draw on a dissertation of the same subject which won for David the 2007 Imbert Prize for best security management dissertation of the year.

This will be ASIS International’s 7th European Security Conference and will be held in Barcelona over the period 13-16 April 2008. Approximately 500 delegates are expected to attend in order to network in this unique setting and to listen to almost 40 speakers covering every aspect of security, with a particular focus on Europe.

For details on how to register click here.

British MPs Back out of Trip to Iran amidst Fears of Impending Israeli Air Strike

A claim by President Ahmadinejad that Iran has 3,000 working uranium-enriching centrifuges sent a tremor across the world yesterday amid fears that Israel would respond by bombing the country’s nuclear facilities.

Military sources in Washington said that the existence of such a large number could be a “tipping point”, triggering an Israeli air strike. The Pentagon is reluctant to take military action against Iran, but officials say that Israel is a “different matter”. Amid the international uproar, British MPs who were to have toured the nuclear facility were backing out of their Iran trip.

Read on at:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2827787.ece

US Nightmare Scenarios in the Middle East and Pakistan

With Israel upping the ante in the Middle East and warning that Iran will have nuclear weapons capability within two years, rather than the four originally predicted by the US administration, the prospect of a fundamentalist Pakistan in possession of nuclear weapons is beginning to cause alarm in the White House.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Bidden warned this week: “It is hard to imagine a greater nightmare for America than the world's second-largest Muslim nation becoming a failed state in fundamentalists' hands, with an arsenal of nuclear weapons and a population larger than Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea combined."

Read the full CBS news article by clkcking here.