The FBI announced that most of the 108,000 tips its received from its terrorism tip line is baseless. From Reuters: The FBI tracked about 108,000 potential terrorism threats or suspicious incidents from mid-2004 to November 2007, but most were found groundless, a Justice Department review found on Friday. The department’s office of inspector general gave the figure in [...]

The current economic crisis hitting the global economy probably won’t affect the operations of al-Qaida, according to security analysts. From the AP (via Yahoo News): Al-Qaida, which gets its money from the drug trade in Afghanistan and sympathizers in the oil-rich Gulf states, is likely to escape the effects of the global financial crisis. One reason is that [...]

More and more US Mayors and Police Chiefs are looking for help from the federal government in fighting crime, not terrorism prevention.  From USA Today: The government doles out too much anti-terrorism money to towns and cities for emergency equipment that rarely gets used while cash-strapped police struggle with crime, according to a growing number of mayors, [...]

NATO announced that it will begin targeting drug trafficking in Afghanistan to limit the amount of revenue that the Taliban receives from the drug trade.  From the NY Times:  NATO forces in Afghanistan will step up attacks on drug lords and narcotics traffickers who are supporting an insurgency that has rebounded in the past year and is responsible for rising [...]

India is facing a possible threat of home grown terrorists after a recent bombing. From the CS Monitor: The portrait of an Indian terrorist has long been a caricature: poor Indian Muslims indoctrinated in radical seminaries and funded by Pakistan, India’s neighbor and longtime enemy. But two of the suspects arrested Wednesday were software engineers, one ran [...]

North Korea has told the United States that it no longer wishes to be removed from its terrorism list. From the New York Times: North Korea said Friday that it no longer wished to be removed from the United States’ terrorism blacklist, signaling that it is hardening its stance amid reports that its leader, Kim Jong-il, may [...]

The Taliban in Afghanistan is said to be using Internet phone company Skype to avoid detection.  From The Daily Mail: Taliban fighters targeting British troops in Afghanistan are using the latest ‘internet phones’ to evade detection by MI6, security sources said last night. Skype, a popular piece of consumer software that allows free calls to be made over [...]

Video sharing site YouTube has banned terrorism training videos from being shown on their website. From the AP (via Google News): In addition to barring terror training videos, the new YouTube community guidelines include bans on videos that incite others to commit violent acts, videos on activities such as how to make bombs and footage of sniper [...]

Seven years after the 9/11 attacks, Osama Bin Laden remains at large and al Qaeda is regaining its strength in Afghanistan.  According to the AP, 2008 is the deadliest year in Afghanistan since the invasion in 2001.  An insurgent attack Thursday on a compound in eastern Afghanistan killed a U.S. soldier, bringing the death toll this year [...]

The Irish Republican Army is no longer a security threat to the United Kingdom, according to the Independent Monitoring Commission.  From the AP (via the IHT): The Irish Republican Army is fading away in Northern Ireland and poses no security threat to the British territory, international experts concluded Wednesday in another landmark for peacemaking. The governments of Britain and Ireland [...]