Feral Jundi

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Industry Talk: The Booming Private Security Industries Of Pakistan And India

Filed under: India,Industry Talk,Pakistan — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Matt @ 1:52 PM

     Below I have posted two snapshots of the private security industries in Pakistan and India. In a nutshell, those industries are exploding with growth. In Pakistan, terrorism is the driver of this increase. In India it is a combination of economic expansion along with terrorism as the drivers.

     Of course Pakistan and India are very mistrustful of one another, and there is also the growth of their defense industries to meet the needs of their militaries. Interesting stuff and definitely an area to keep a watch on. –Matt

Boom in Pakistan’s private security industry

January 18, 2011

Pakistan’s deteriorating  law and order has led to a boom in the private security industry in the country. Companies are investing millions of dollars to train and update their security operations.

 An estimated 30,000 private security guards have found employment with 400 private security agencies that have sprung up in Pakistan in recent years. These guards are paid about ten thousand Pakistani rupees a month… well above the minimum wage of six thousand.

Specialist security guards and bodyguards make around 25 thousand rupees.

Training includes special focus on the deadliest of enemies, the suicide bomber. Iqbal Mahmood, the trainer at Security 2000 explains how to look for one. “If someone is draped in white dress, particularly resembling a white shroud is a sign that the person has come ready to die. This is usually the first sign, secondly when the body looks a bit out of proportions; particularly the chest is raised higher than a normal human being is another give away sign that this person might be a suicide bomber,” says Mahmood.

The security industry in Pakistan is worth around 60 million dollars a year. Visit any luxury hotel in Pakistan and you’ll see where the money is being spent.

Zahid Shah, Security Manager at Pearl Continental Hotel says, “We have tried to maintain and standardise our security arrangements by beefing up this location with various kinds of systems, there can be hydraulic blockers, there are electronic barriers, there are sniffer dogs, besides of course the manual arrangements which is comprising of the security guards and the supervisors that we have.”

Story here.

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Booming private security agencies seek PE funding

Paramita Chatterjee & Pramugdha Mamgain

18 Jan, 2011

As rapid economic expansion creates a booming market for private security services, small and mid-sized companies in the sector are seeking risk capital infusion to further expansion plans. Growing public infrastructure in the form of roads, airports, shopping malls and commercial complexes has triggered a boom in the market for security services that is expected to grow five-fold to reach a size of 30,000 crore by 2015.

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Law Enforcement: Mafia Takedown The Largest Coordinated Arrest In FBI History

Filed under: Al Qaeda,Law Enforcement,New York — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Matt @ 1:26 PM

     Authorities said the indictments resulted from years of investigations, including the use of wiretaps and cooperating witnesses.

     “These cases are the cumulative results of years of investigative work, including the development of key cooperating witnesses, a trend that has definitely been tilting in law enforcement’s favor,” said Janice Fedarcyk, head of the New York FBI. “The vow of silence that is part of the oath Omerta is more myth than reality today.” 

     This is awesome news and congratulations to all those in the FBI and other agencies that put this together and pulled it off. I also love this quote up top about ‘Omerta’. lol The snitches win, and this is yet again a prime example of how effective an insider can be to tearing apart an organization. Now if we can just get a snitch to help us tear apart Al Qaeda and capture or kill UBL. –Matt

Mafia Takedown–Largest Coordinated Arrest in FBI History

127 Busted in Largest Mafia Roundup in FBI History

Mafia Takedown–Largest Coordinated Arrest in FBI History

01/20/11

Early this morning FBI agents and partner law enforcement officers began arresting nearly 130 members of the Mafia in New York City and other East Coast cities charged in the largest nationally coordinated organized crime takedown in the Bureau’s history.

Members of New York’s infamous Five Families—the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Luchese crime organizations—were rounded up along with members of the New Jersery-based DeCavalcante family and New England Mafia to face charges including murder, drug trafficking, arson, loan sharking, illegal gambling, witness tampering, labor racketeering, and extortion. In one case involving the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) at the Ports of New York and New Jersey, the alleged extortion has been going on for years.

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Maritime Security: Hostage Taking At Record Levels In 2010 As Pirates Use Q-ship Strategies

Filed under: India,Kidnap And Ransom,Maritime Security,Somalia,Strategy — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Matt @ 6:28 AM

     IMB Director Pottengal Mukundan commented: “Whilst the use of hijacked vessels as mother ships is not a new phenomenon, the abduction of crew members could signal a significant new development.”

     At least five large hijacked cargo ships and three fishing vessels have acted as mother ships in the last couple of months, posing a new and significant threat to the safety of shipping. The five cargo vessels range in size from MT 5,000 to 72,000 in deadweight – or cargo carrying capacity – and include four tankers and a general cargo vessel. More than 100 crew members from these hijacked cargo vessels, are being forced to facilitate the attacks and in effect provide a human shield to any potential naval intervention. 

     This is infuriating to read, because the world is just standing by as a crime wave takes place.  It is frustrating from my point of view because here we have this vibrant and experienced wartime security contracting industry willing and able to protect every boat out there, and yet the response to this fast paced piracy scourge has been to throw money at them.  Keep paying ransoms and keep fueling the very industry that benefits from these criminal acts–insanity…..

     The other story here is the piracy strategies out there are evolving and these folks are able to scale up their operations because of these new strategies.  What they are doing is using one vessel to attack another larger vessel, and then using those larger vessels to prey on similar larger vessels. Then they use the hostages from the prior vessels taken as a kind of mobile human shield/hostage currency.

     This strategy is also great for false flag or Q-ship style attacks.  If vessels are unable to tell if another captured vessel is under pirate control, then these captured ships can do all sorts of interesting things.  They can maneuver closer to other ships, they can increase their speed to match that of other ships, they can pretend to be a ship in distress, and they can force all of their captured hostages to pretend to be active crew members on the top decks.  Today’s pirates certainly understand the value of Q-ships to their industry.

     Finally, today’s current anti-piracy strategy sucks.  We have billions of dollars of naval hardware from around the world, that cost millions of dollars to operate every day, and their strategies have not stopped today’s piracy. We have more hostages taken, more boats taken, and an expansion of piracy territories. In other words, we have yet to offer an effective challenge to this innovative and vibrant piracy industry.

     And now other entrepreneurs are watching and learning from today’s pirates.  So yes, it would be nice to square away Somalia on the mainland and that might put a little bit of a dent in the industry itself.  But I think what today’s strategists forget is that what we are looking at are the beginnings of an ‘open source piracy’ era. Pirates are emerging from all over the world, and they are learning from what the Somali’s are doing.  It is a very basic concept, and because there is no effective anti-piracy strategy to stop them this open source piracy will just spread and flourish.

     Of course putting armed security on the boats is a no-brainer, but that alone will not stop this open source piracy scourge.  You need to create an industry out of destroying these folks, and not just an industry that deals with the effects of piracy. We could also learn a thing or two from those that actually wiped out piracy. Guys like Pompey or Woodes Rogers did an excellent job of eradicating this scum, and yet here we are in modern times with the same problems they faced and we have yet to get organized and do what is necessary. –Matt

Hostage-taking at sea rises to record levels, says IMB

Latest attack changes dynamic of Somali piracy

Somali pirates closer to India; premiums up 

Hostage-taking at sea rises to record levels, says IMB

Monday, 17 January 2011

More people were taken hostage at sea in 2010 than in any year on record, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) International Maritime Bureau’s (IMB) global piracy report disclosed today. Pirates captured 1,181 seafarers and killed eight.  A total of 53 ships were hijacked.

The number of pirate attacks against ships has risen every year for the last four years, IMB revealed.  Ships reported 445 attacks in 2010, up 10% from 2009. While 188 crew members were taken hostage in 2006, 1,050 were taken in 2009 and 1,181 in 2010.

“These figures for the number of hostages and vessels taken are the highest we have ever seen,” said Captain Pottengal Mukundan, Director of the IMB’s Piracy Reporting Centre, which has monitored piracy worldwide since 1991. “The continued increase in these numbers is alarming.”

“As a percentage of global incidents, piracy on the high seas has increased dramatically over armed robbery in territorial waters,” said Captain Mukundan. “On the high seas off Somalia, heavily armed pirates are overpowering ocean-going fishing or merchant vessels to use as a base for further attacks.  They capture the crew and force them to sail to within attacking distance of other unsuspecting vessels.”

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Monday, January 17, 2011

Industry Talk: Afghanistan’s Push To Tax US Contractors Could Renew Tensions

Filed under: Afghanistan,Industry Talk — Tags: , , , , , , , — Matt @ 10:49 AM

     “DOD and State and the primes are telling them ‘No, you’re subs, don’t pay taxes??” the company official said. But “the Afghan government has become so hard to work with on so many fronts that I’m not sure whether this issue is still in the embassy’s top ten list of things.”

     Another contracting executive said there was “tension in the embassy” between those officials who work on helping the Afghan government collect more revenue so it can pay its own way, and those “responsible for working on behalf of U.S. business.”

     “We know we’re going to have to pay at least $8 billion to $10 billion a year for the next 10 years to keep these guys running,” the executive said. “The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are putting heat on the government to create a tax base. Some of the biggest cash flow into the country is Western aid.”

     This is interesting.  You have two forces at play here.  There is the IMF and World Bank who want Afghanistan to have a tax base, and you have the US that is supposed to protect US business from being taxed.

     My view on it is that Afghanistan benefits from this western aid because their main goal is to get that country on it’s feet. Taxing these aid providing companies is wrong, and I certainly hope the US embassy will work to protect American companies from these blood suckers. –Matt

Afghanistan’s push to tax U.S. contractors could renew tensions

By Karen DeYoung and Joshua PartlowSunday, January 16, 2011

The Afghan government is ramping up efforts to tax U.S. contractors operating there – an effort that could raise millions for the cash-strapped government but could also provoke fresh confrontation with the United States, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.

Taxation of U.S. government assistance is barred by U.S. law, as well as by a number of bilateral accords between Afghanistan and the United States. But the wording in the documents is vague, and the two governments disagree on what “tax-exempt” means.

Non-Afghan contractors who have recently received tax bills for work done under U.S. government programs say they have appealed to the Defense and State departments to clarify the matter with the Afghans. But they have been told simply to ignore the bills and “stand up for our rights,” said one official of an American company that has multiple U.S defense contracts in Afghanistan.

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Friday, January 14, 2011

Israel: The Dubai Job, By Ronen Bergman

Filed under: Cool Stuff,Dubai,Israel,Law Enforcement — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — Matt @ 9:21 AM

     According to the official police report, the killers first injected Al-Mabhouh with a poison, then smothered him with a pillow. Saeed Hamiri, M.D., of the Dubai forensic lab, said the crime-scene investigators found a trickle of blood on Al-Mabhouh’s pillow, bruises on his nose, face, and neck, and an injection mark on his right hip. Along with signs of struggle in the room—a damaged headboard, for example—these details would seem to suggest that the target was smothered to death. But one has to wonder about the plausibility of these conclusions. (The Dubai chief of police did not respond to several requests from GQ for an interview.)

 

     Why did the Mossad permit things to go so wrong in Dubai? In a word, the answer is leadership. Because Dagan refashioned the Mossad in his own image, and because he drove out anyone who was willing to question his decisions, there was no one in the agency to tell him that the Dubai operation was badly conceived and badly planned. They simply did not believe that a minnow in the world of intelligence services such as Dubai would be any match for Israel’s Caesarea fighters.

     Wow, what a cool article and it really shed some light on this assassination performed by the Mossad’s Caesarea.  I posted a deal about this incident when it first came out and it was very interesting to see how this played out on the world stage.

    Of course some folks called it an embarrassment for the Israelis, because the operatives and operation were revealed by the Dubai police.  And others called it a success and that maybe the Israelis wanted to show the world that the finest security out there could not stop them from doing what they had to do. Either way, the Hamas jackass they targeted is dead.

     Now that some time has passed and folks have been able to put the pieces together, we are now getting a better picture on how this went down.  I didn’t know back then if they used poison or a stun gun to incapacitate Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, so that they could smother him with a pillow. I guess it was poison and toxicology boiled it down to succinylcholine. *

     But with this stuff, the drug itself could have killed him. The pillow could have been used to muffle the target’s voice while waiting for the drug to do it’s thing. The big benefit of this drug is that it is one of the fastest acting muscle relaxants out there, so the struggle would have been minimal.

     The other part of this story that was interesting, was the commentary on Dagan–Mossad’s director.  If it is true that he is not seeking feedback or other people’s opinions then that is not good. Ultimately, an organization must be a learning organization if it wants to continuously improve. And because Dagan has forced out or shut down anyone that disagrees with him, now he is at the mercy of what Irving Janis calls groupthink. Not good. –Matt

The Dubai Job

One year ago, an elite Mossad hit squad traveled to Dubai to kill a high-ranking member of Hamas. They completed the mission, but their covers were blown, and Israel was humiliated by the twenty-seven-minute video of their movements that was posted online for all the world to see. Ronen Bergman reveals the intricate, chilling details of the mission and investigates how Israel’s vaunted spy agency did things so spectacularly wrong

By Ronen Bergman

January 2011

Monday, January 18, 2010. MorningAt 6:45 a.m., the first members of an Israeli hit squad land at Dubai International Airport and fan out through the city to await further instructions. Over the next nineteen hours, the rest of the team—at least twenty-seven members—will arrive on flights from Zurich, Rome, Paris, and Frankfurt. They have come to kill a man named Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, a Hamas leader whose code name within the Mossad—the Israeli intelligence agency—is Plasma Screen.

Most of the operatives here are members of a secretive unit within the Mossad known as Caesarea, a self-contained organization that is responsible for the agency’s most dangerous and critical missions: assassinations, sabotage, penetration of high-security installations. Caesarea’s “fighters,” as they are known, are the elite of the Mossad. They rarely interact with other operatives and stay away from Mossad headquarters north of Tel Aviv, instead undergoing intensive training at a separate facility to which no one else in the agency has access. They are forbidden from ever using their real names, even in private conversation, and—with the exception of their spouses—their families and closest friends are unaware of what they do. As one longtime Caesarea fighter recently told me, “If the Mossad is the temple of Israel’s intelligence community, then Caesarea is its holy of holies.”

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