Once again, the present catches up with the future: the Los Angeles Times reports on the growing use of private security firms and private investigators to carry out work public police forces used to do. The Times reports, “The U.S. private security industry is expected to grow 6.3% a…
Ben Zygier passport (screen capture from Channel 10, via Haaretz) An interesting recap article in Haaretz today reviews the recent history of Mossad’s practice of “borrowing” passports from recent immigrants to use in operations. The hook: it appears Ben Zygier – the so-called Prisoner X – may have…
Hezbollah has been in the news over the past few weeks for two issues: its alleged responsibility for a suicide bombing in Bulgaria, and the spillover effects from the civil war in Syria. On 19 July last year, a suicide bomb gutted a tour bus near Burgas Airport in Bulgaria,…
Doha 12 is inspired by a real-life incident: Mossad’s 2010 assassination in Dubai of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. I’ve written a summary of this operation and its fallout for the good folks at Criminal Element, and now it’s available for your delectation. As an added incentive to check it out,…
I’m on the grill again at Juniper Grove, a book-review and author promotion site run by author Jaidis Shaw. It’s a nice post – many thanks to Jaidis. Most of the questions are new, so there’s little overlap with the Murder Lab interview from December. To make this more interesting,…
Once again, the present catches up with South’s near-future: on 30 January, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued Integration of Drones into Domestic Airspace: Selected Legal Issues, a report outlining (among other things) the problems of trespassing and voyeurism that private operation of drones will bring literally to our doorsteps…
One of the conceits of South, my near-future thriller, is that in 2032, we will all be carrying what essentially is a national ID card embedded with voluminous information about ourselves, and security agencies will have an ID reader that can access all this data as well as check it…
Criminal Element, a mystery/thriller/crime site run by Macmillan, has just posted the first of what I hope will be several articles written by…me. Continuum: Future Cop on Today’s Beat Continuum, SyFy’s latest series (U.S. debut on January 14), drops a cop and some villains from the future into 2012 and…
A while back, I posted about fashion in 2032 in connection with my work-in-progress, South. One aspect I didn’t think much about is passive surveillance countermeasures. Discovery News wrote on 18 January about Adam Harvey, a New York artist and activist who has debuted a line of outerwear using a…
How close to reality is Zero Dark Thirty? The Pacific Standard online magazine ran on 16 January an article written by Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst and targeteer, in which she compares the hunting-bin-Laden movie to her own work in the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center, and then with the Zarqawi…