Archive for August, 2010

It has been reported that dissident Republicans are targeting the Tory Party Conference in order to draw attention to their cause..

The Tory Party conference is due to take place in Birmingham in October. It was in Oct 1984 that the PIRA targeted the Tory party conference at the Grand Hotel Brighton killing 5 and injuring 34. Sent via BlackBerry® from BT

2 Men (52 and 21) have been arrested and questioned over explosives offences in North Wales. The operation was mounted after a suspect package was found inside Vauxhall Cross, the home of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)  otherwise known as MI6 and a second was discovered in a South London sorting office.

This event has extremely serious security implications for the SIS. How did the package get inside the building? and why wasnt ALL mail scanned off site before being allowed into the building? Serious question have  be asked about the security culture at Vauxhall Cross. Mistakes do happen but something as foreseeable as this should never happen. As with all security if there is a reliance on technology alone things will go wrong and if there is a reliance on people alone then things will go wrong. Given the nature of the building and the work they are involved in then complacency should be guarded against at all costs and the balance should be between well trained motivated staff and good effective technology.

A court of appeal ruling has cleared the way for two international terrorism suspects to claim damages for having control orders wrongly imposed on them for three and a half years. The judgment also raises the prospect that a third suspect will not be prosecuted for breaching the terms of his control order, which has also been quashed. The ruling, by three appeal court judges headed by Lord Justice Maurice Kay, upholds a previous high court judgment that the control orders against the three men should not merely be revoked but quashed because they should never have been made in the first place. The control order case involves three terror suspects who, for legal reasons, can only be named as AE, AF and AN. The decision to quash their control orders followed a landmark high court ruling that none of them had been given sufficient disclosure of the evidence against them to support the home secretary’s claims that they were engaged in terrorism-related activities.