Stabbing on Train
Well, it is only a matter of time before it gets to the United States. We had a terrorist that stabbed numerous people on a train in Europe. I keep thinking about the AMTK long distance trains and the lack of security at those remote stations. With copycat Homegrown...
Explosives Stolen from CSX Train
Well, I hate to say I told you so, but I knew this was going to happen and it did. 500 pounds of "fireworks grade" explosives stolen from a freight train. What is really weird is that this happened two days ago and I just found out about it today, 4.22.16. I'll keep...
Trespass and Communications
Today I was walking my dogs by the railroad track and saw a white Dodge pick-up driving on the Maintenance of Way (MOW) road. It was not railroad personnel, at least the truck did not have a railroad logo on it. So, I called it in to the Risk Management Center. The...
Shotgun Shell in Coupler
I was reading a professional rail magazine and the report of finding a shotgun shell in a coupler still has me wondering how secure our railroad infrastructure is. According to the comments associated with the article it was a spent round but that is really...
American’s Disrupt Rail Terrorist
Thanks to courage and quick thinking, three American service members took down a terrorist on a French passenger train. I truly hate to sound like a broken record but once again I am writing that it is not a matter of if but a matter of when it happens here in the...
Guess Who’s Looking Now
I was surfing on the web about the recent CSX oil tank train derailment in West Virginia. I saw the normal news media, Fox, ABC, etc., but what I saw next shocked me. Al Jazeera America, the Arabic language news media which is partly funded by the ruling family of...
Fear Mongering
I was recently published in "Progressive Railroading" and "Rail Professional" magazines about open source intelligence. The reason I am writing this is the day before the attacks in Paris I contacted the editor of Rail Professional (a U.K. magazine) because there was...
Rails and Domestic Terrorism
The Sovereign Citizen movement. Last week I attended a conference of school security. One of the modules was on the Sovereign Citizen movement. For those of you that are not familiar with this group, as of this moment, it consists of approximately 100,000...
NSA Has It Right
As an intelligence professional, I understand that NSA really doesn’t care what you do with your life as long as it does not deal with terrorism. Such is the case with the recent disclosure that, through monitoring of communications, NSA discovered that Al Qaeda...
TSA Says “Active Again in the Near Future”
So, we just lost some more eyes and ears that could tell us about potential terrorist or criminal threats on one of our critical infrastructures. The “First Observer” program just lost funding by the TSA. For those of you not familiar with the “First Observer”...