A GUIDE TO MEETING THE EU DIRECTIVE ARTICLE 110 - Location Based SMS, Cell Broadcast or a 'Hybrid' Approach?

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When a natural or man-made disaster occurs, keeping the public safe is the priority for government and emergency services. With less than 3 years before the deadline to implement a public warning system for countries across the EU- what can be learnt from countries that have already taken this step?

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Experience from a series of recent events across Europe – including the floods in France and the forest fires in Greece – has served to highlight why it’s so vital that members of the public receive potentially life-saving information from official channels in a timely way.

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When disaster strikes, making sure that citizens get the right information at the right time can help save lives. In Europe, new legislation means EU member states have until June 2022 to establish a modern public warning system that uses text messages to tell people about the nature of a threat, its location, and the best next steps to take.

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An effective public warning system must be rapid, reliable and require no prior action by the people it’s trying to protect. How can governments provide one? At a time of growing uncertainty and risk, it’s an increasingly important question.

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Critical events can affect the general public in a variety of different ways. In the last month, for example, a community in the UK’s peak district faced homes and businesses being flooded from a burst dam. In Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, in July, the highest ever temperatures were recorded during an extreme heatwave putting vulnerable citizens at risk. These situations required public agencies to help evacuate people to safety and use mainstream media or house-to-house contact to keep residents informed.

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Q&A with Jaz Vilkhu, managing director at Marshalls Landscape Protection

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It has been quite a few years since I sat in a hospital laboratory in a converted old second world war Nissen Hut manually testing the blood group of a blood sample. I was 6 years old and my dad ran the lab and had been called in for an emergency on a Saturday morning. The health and safety teams of today would have a heart attack if they knew what I was doing but I had watched dad do it on so many occasions and rules were different then. I decided there and then that that part of science and even forensic science were not for me, but a scientist by qualification I became. I studied applied science which allowed me to examine materials, explosives, organophosphate based chemicals, computers, nuclear samples and much more. 

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With the refugee crisis that hit Europe in recent years and the prominence border issues are taking in the Brexit debates, border security is at the front of many peoples thinking.  Philip Ingram MBE (PI) managed to sit down and chat with Berndt Koerner (BK), who is the deputy executive director of the European Border and Coastguard Agency, Frontex, and explore some of these issues from his perspective.

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Gatwick airport hit the headlines again at the end of August when the Guardian reported, “an airliner carrying up to 186 passengers was forced to take avoiding action after a drone was spotted, a near-miss report has revealed.” They have been asked if their new counter drone capability worked or not and if not why? However, to date no answer has been forthcoming.

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There are commonalities across the board when it comes to approaches to Security.  The Governments Counter Terrorism Strategy, CONTEST, reviewed last year kept at its heart the ‘four P’ work strands of Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare.   These work strands fall perfectly into the concept for physical security priorities in looking at Design, Secure and Respond.

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We don’t hear much about developments in CCTV until something happens, it just seems to be there in the background, watching quietly but the one thing that has hit the press recently is the MET Police trial of the use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology, which came to an end in July and not without controversy.

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“ISIS and Al Qaeda encrypted invite only channels on Telegram continue to encourage vehicle attacks into crowded places and give instructions as to the best methods of attack,” said Vasco Amador, CEO of Global Intelligence Insight, a company that has penetrated and monitors many of these groups. “The threat has never gone away,” he added. 

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Philip Ingram MBE (PI) caught up with Dr Tinku Acharya (DrTA) at INTERPOL’s bi-annual congress in Singapore, INTERPOL World, last month. Dr Acharya from Videonetics Technology Pvt. Ltd was part of the first video compression standards committee for JPEG 2000 and wrote the first book on video compression, something vital to todays CCTV. A fascinating man who has influenced todays CCTV capabilities hugely by being one of the world’s leading lights on Video Compression.

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Organisations need to be better equipped during and after emergency situations, such as a terror attack. Here, John Davison explains how your business continuity plan can help keep staff safe and reduce business disruption

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Extreme Right-Wing terror is on the rise, and someone is paying for it. The Real IRA were identified by Forbes Israel in 2014 as being the 9th richest terror organisation globally, sandwiched between Boko Harem and Al Shabab. Their annual turnover of £32 Million comes from somewhere.

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One of the beauties of reporting on new technologies is watching them develop. In May last year I was able to report the development of the Patriot One PATSCAN cognitive microwave radar enabled hidden threat detection capability. A bit of a mouthful but essentially it allowed a crowd to be surveilled discretely as it passed a certain point and anyone carrying a concealed gun or a knife or an explosive device would be identified.

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Not every idea is new, not every bit of innovative technology has come straight off the production line. Sometimes you just stumble across a capability that has been quietly working away in the background, adding value to local communities and helping to keep us safe. Sometimes it involves best practice, sometimes it involves novel kit sometimes it involves both.

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£100 + Billion is the scale of money laundering on the UK annually according to the National Crime Agency (NCA). Their very own video talks of how money laundering is key to serious and organised crime gangs as they procure and sell weapons, drugs and people, through human trafficking.

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