The Wilson County School District voted unanimously to approve shatter-resistant glass films to be installed at each of its 24 brick-and-mortar campuses.
On Monday, board members Kimberly McGee, Larry Tomlinson, Carrie Pfeiffer, Jamie Farough, Melissa Lynn, Joseph Padilla, and Beth Meyers all voted to approve Director of Schools Jeff Luttrell’s recommendation that the board hire Osteen Construction to install the security film for a total of $900,105.36.
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Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Scott Golden said he is confident in the security measures being taken for attendees of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Milwaukee will host the Republican National Convention from July 15-18, during which tens of thousands of delegates, guests, and press members will gather to officially nominate Donald Trump for president and his yet-to-be-announced running mate for vice president.
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An Ohio man has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to interfering with the performance of the duties of a flight crew.
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Donald Trump resumed his role as the “wise fool” in recent, off-the-cuff remarks about NATO. He suggested that free-riding NATO members who do not pay their fair share might have to fight Russia on their own. National security hawks and Trump’s media enemies responded with lots of pious talk about our sacred NATO obligations. Joe Biden even said Trump was “un-American.”
Trump is not the first to suggest NATO partners should pay their fair share. But unlike his predecessors, he is willing to employ some leverage to make it happen. The real dirty secret here, as evidenced by how long this situation has gone on, is that enabling the Europeans to neglect their own defense is a feature and not a bug of America’s dominance over the NATO organization.
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With a tidal wave of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border under President Biden daily and Congress locked in a battle over border security, zealots pushing open borders are becoming increasingly out of touch with the American people.
Under Biden’s reckless Open Borders agenda, nine million illegals have entered the country through the southern border, including 1.8+ million who escaped Border Patrol and are presumably living in the U.S. without documentation.
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As he takes heat for proposing that the United States roll back aid to Israel in pursuit of stronger regional relationships for the key American ally, GOP top tier presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants a new approach to U.S. relations with friends and foes alike.
And he’s harkening back to the founders’ vision of avoiding “entangling alliances” to get there.
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Students that attend Fulton County Schools and DeKalb County Schools were met with new security improvements including weapon detection systems and push-button alert systems.
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Governor Brian Kemp recently announced that 118 projects have been awarded grant funding totaling $83.5 million to “improve community-level public safety measures and address law enforcement staffing challenges that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
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The Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) announced a new security protocol that applies to everyone who enters TDOC prisons in 2023.
Beginning this month, all people who enter a TDOC prison will be required to be screened by a full body scanner. The scanners are meant to “act as deterrents for individuals considering bringing contraband into a facility,” TDOC explained in a recent press release.
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Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Turning Point USA Faith Field Rep. Nicole Herchberger and Rutheford County TPUSA Chapter President Hannah Faulkner in studio to discuss the motivation for the rally and Faulkner’s future aspirations.
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Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake announced Tuesday that police coverage at Metro Schools for the upcoming school year will be the highest ever, and will include elementary, middle and high school campuses.
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An internal survey given to inmates at the Hennepin County Adult Corrections Facility refers to them as “residents.”
The survey, sent to all incarcerated inmates in May, asked for feedback on the correctional facility’s current conditions, living standards, quality of care, programs, and services.
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Despite the arrest Wednesday of an armed man who allegedly claimed he intended to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended not passing a House bill seeking to increase security for the justices’ homes, and gruffly responded to a reporter, “I don’t know what you’re talking about … nobody is in danger.”
On Thursday – just one day after 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske was arrested near Kavanaugh’s home and then charged with attempted murder of a Supreme Court justice – Pelosi was about to leave her weekly press conference when she responded brusquely to a reporter who shouted out to her, “You said the justices are protected, but there was an attempt on Justice Kavanaugh’s life.”
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The Secret Service is paying over $30,000 a month to rent a Malibu mansion to provide security for President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, according to a news report Monday.
The agency tasked with protecting the president and his family have been renting the house close Hunter’s close to $20,000 a month Malibu property for close to a year, according to ABC News.
Don Mihalek, a current ABC News contributor and former senior Secret Service agent, said that the exorbitant rental figure is merely “the cost of doing business for the Secret Service.”
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The email from “Norton Protection” said I owed $999.99, which was “charged successfully and it will appear on your bank statement in 24 to 48 hours.” Although I have an account with a leading cybersecurity company, I’ve never paid that much for its products. To “cancel” the charge, I was instructed to call a number, conveniently highlighted in yellow.
All it took to bird-dog my fake debt email was a simple search-engine query of the invoice’s telephone number. It was based in Hawaii. Unfortunately, perhaps, for the real employees of Norton’s help desk, they are likely not stationed in the Aloha State.
In a nation swimming in real debt – with the average American owing an estimated $90,000 – it’s not surprising that “phantom debts” are one of the hottest scams.
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The same group of Russian hackers behind the December 2020 SolarWinds attack are targeting companies in the U.S. technology supply chain, according to a Monday report released by Microsoft.
Russian hacking group Nobelium is targeting cloud infrastructure companies and information technology software resellers in an attempt to gain access to these companies’ customers, according to Microsoft’s research. Microsoft believes Nobelium to be the same group responsible for the SolarWinds hack in late 2020 that affected multiple Cabinet-level agencies, federal contractors and critical infrastructure companies.
“This recent activity is another indicator that Russia is trying to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain and establish a mechanism for surveilling – now or in the future – targets of interest to the Russian government,” Tom Burt, Microsoft’s vice president for customer security and trust, wrote in the report.
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The tech industry’s anti-terrorism alliance announced Monday it would begin tracking content from far-right organization in a shared counter-terrorism database used by major tech companies.
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), a non-profit organization founded by Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, will add manifestos, posts and links from far-right militias flagged by U.N. anti-terrorist group Tech Against Terrorism to a shared database, GIFCT told Reuters. The organization will also share content flagged by Five Eyes, a global partnership between intelligence agencies in the U.S. and other countries, Reuters reported.
The database, established in 2017 and shared exclusively by the tech giants, aggregates hashes, or digital signatures, of images, videos and URLs, allowing tech companies to easily remove logged content, according to the GIFCT website. The database was previously focused on content primarily from Islamic terror organizations, according to Reuters.
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The state government of California has been revealed to have spent $13 million on providing security for 120 empty houses for five months, even as a homeless crisis ravaged the state, Fox News reports.
In a report broken by local outlet Fox 11, the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) paid $9 million to the highway patrol from November 2020 to April 2021, and gave another $4 million to a private security firm over the same period, all for the purpose of protecting the vacant houses in Pasadena.
In a statement addressing the report, CalTrans said that the houses had been purchased by the government 60 years ago, when there were plans for a change in the local infrastructure by connecting the 710 freeway to the 210. However, that project “is no longer moving forward,” the government statement declared.
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It’s been a gold star week for the men and women of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Nearly six months after the events of January 6, the FBI, under the direction of Joe Biden’s vengeful Justice Department, is accelerating the nationwide manhunt for anyone involved. Since June 23, agents have arrested 17 people from Florida to California. Charges range from assaulting police officers and criminal trespassing to something called “destruction of property in special maritime and territorial jurisdiction and aiding and abetting.”
The dragnet is part of the nonstop campaign of terror unleashed by the Biden regime against the political Right. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who compares January 6 to the Oklahoma City bombing and Capitol protesters to terrorists, pledged the “Capitol breach” probe would be his top priority. Garland last week bragged in a press release that his department reached the “benchmark” of arresting 500 people and warned he would “hold all January 6 perpetrators accountable” for their actions that day. His prosecutors routinely ask the courts to keep the accused behind bars awaiting trials that won’t start until late this year or perhaps even 2022; dozens have been held for months in a D.C. jail that specifically houses January 6 defendants.
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Regardless of one’s political affiliation, it’s not difficult to find voters in Georgia who were discouraged by the messiness of the 2020 election process.
It’s one thing to be disappointed by the outcome. It’s entirely another to feel disenfranchised and frustrated by questions and uncertainties surrounding absentee ballot handling, unsecured drop boxes, and questionable third-party funding of local elections.
In evaluating federal, state, and local voting safeguards, these and other serious complications — glitches, missing votes, even water pipe breakages at polling locations or ballot drop boxes — raised legitimate concerns and weakened voter confidence in Georgia’s election integrity.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leaving Rep. Eric Swalwell on the House Intelligence Committee, she announced on Friday, despite the California Democrat’s close contacts with an alleged Chinese spy.
Swalwell for years maintained contact with Christine Fang, a Chinese national who the FBI determined was working covertly as an intelligence agent for the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
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In June 2019, Susan Gordon stood on a stage at the Washington Convention Center. Behind her loomed three giant letters, “AWS,” the abbreviation for Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the giant Internet retailer. After three decades at the Central Intelligence Agency, Gordon had risen to one of the top jobs in the cloak-and-dagger world: principal deputy director of national intelligence. From that perch she publicly extolled the virtues of Amazon Web Services and the cloud services the tech giant provides the CIA.
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TULSA, Oklahoma – At an event as big, complex and scheduled on short notice as President Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa Saturday, there are innumerable behind-the-scenes tidbits that never make it to click-bait headlines or a story. Here are a few such takeaways. Rally Attendees Tulsa rally-goers ranged from CEOs of major corporations to heads of small manufacturers, to a Tulsan currently living under a bridge because he temporarily lost his job due to COVID-19, from home-schooling families to higher education students, from places as far away as Boston, Massachusetts to Portland, Oregon and San Diego, California as well as numerous fly-over states in between, representing every color and age, from those who voted for Trump in 2016 to those who weren’t even registered to vote in 2016. A couple of first-time Trump rally attendees pointed out the President sense of humor, saying he was “hilarious,” in the way he presented stories about “the fake news.” One attendee from Indiana was impressed that the rally began with a prayer, and noted that it is needed to set an example to get the country turning back to God. A freelance photographer who has captured a countless number and variety of…
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Jack Wilson, the man who used his gun to save his Fort Worth congregation from a shooter Sunday, is a county commission candidate whose slogan is, “Make sure your vote is on target.”
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by Steven Bittenbender With election security frequently in the news, the Ohio House Transportation and Public Safety Committee took the opportunity recently to discuss a cybersecurity bill. The panel convened a hearing on Senate Bill 52, which deals with bolstering the state’s cybersecurity. A major part of the initiative is to protect the state’s elections from outside interference or tampering. Secretary of State Frank LaRose said it’s an important issue, especially given that Ohio’s likely to be a swing state in next year’s presidential election. “The eyes of the world will be on Ohio in 2020, and we will rise to that occasion,” he said. The Secretary of State told the committee that, if passed, the measure gives Ohio a chance to become a national leader in cybersecurity. It received unanimous support in the Senate. Beyond the election provisions, the bill also creates a permanent Chief Information Security Officer for the state that would be based within the Secretary of State’s office. LaRose said that position’s role would be different from the Chief Information Officer, which also reports to him. The CISO would work with the state’s 88 county boards of elections. In addition, the state also would create…
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On Friday’s Tennessee Star Report with Steve Gill and Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am-the duo chatted with State Rep Cameron Sexton about another Justin Jones assault that occurred at the Tennessee Capitol this week. Allegedly Jones and his sidekick named Kenesha followed Sexton and Casada to the “white elevator” and continuously called the men “racists” before throwing a cup of Frothy Monkey coffee into the elevator hitting Speaker Casada and also State Representative Deborah Moody. Further on into the discussion the men questioned how Jones (who is out on bail for another alleged assault) was able to manage this and were concerned that next time it could be an instance like that of Steve Scalise who was shot during a Republican Baseball game last summer. Gill questioned whether or not the Nashville Assistant District Attorney would revoke his bail and called for added security for legislators. Gill: Good to have you with us. You were right there in the thick of it. Here, just to refresh your recollection, I sound like a lawyer don’t I? To refresh your recollection, here’s what it sounded like. (Audio…
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by Dorothy Denning Cybersecurity researchers and analysts are rightly worried that a new type of computer, based on quantum physics rather than more standard electronics, could break most modern cryptography. The effect would be to render communications as insecure as if they weren’t encoded at all. Fortunately, the threat so far is hypothetical. The quantum computers that exist today are not capable of breaking any commonly used encryption methods. Significant technical advances are required before they will be able to break the strong codes in widespread use around the internet, according to a new report from the National Academy of Sciences. Still, there is cause for concern. The cryptography underpinning modern internet communications and e-commerce could someday succumb to a quantum attack. To understand the risk and what can be done about it, it’s important to look more closely at digital cryptography and how it’s used – and broken. Cryptography basics Y At its most basic, encryption is the act of taking an original piece of information – a message, for instance – and following a series of steps to transform it into something that looks like gibberish. Today’s digital ciphers use complex mathematical formulas to transform clear data…
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On Thursday’s Gill Report – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 1510 WLAC weekdays at 7:30 am – Tennessee Star Political Editor Steve Gill talked about Florida’s governor’s race and the trending phenomenon of Democrat leaders and the denial of their failing cities. He was curious as to why voters would think to elect such officials again into a state-wide office when they were unsuccessful leaders in their own cities. “Hopefully folks will look at the records of these individuals rather than the rhetoric as we head closer to November and casting votes,” Gill quipped; adding: In Florida you’ve got the Tallahassee Mayor, mayor Gilliam running for governor in Florida the Democrat nominee. He’s a guy that is facing federal investigation for potential corruption charges. He’s a guy who’s been playing the race card against Ron DeSantis the Republican congressman for using the same wording that Democrats have used with reckless abandon about ‘we shouldn’t monkey with the economy’. They tried to turn that into a racial issue while again people from Barak Obama and whole host of other Democrats have used the exact terminology but of course (sarcastic tone) ‘it’s racist’ if a Republican says it (sarcastic tone) ‘it’s ok’…
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Tennessee’s Senate Judiciary Committee passed The School Safety Act (SB2059) unanimously Tuesday. Designed to be a simple stopgap measure, the measure would create a grant for LEAs to put more school resource officers in school this year. “I’m honored to work with Rep. Van Huss and colleagues on both sides of the aisle to protect our children,” the bill’s sponsor, Senator Mark Green (R-Clarksville) said in a statement. “The evidence is clear that school resource officers can deter attacks, and we need them in our schools–this year. While this is just the first step, we will keep working on legislation to strengthen school safety.” “The School Safety Act will place armed, trained, and stable officers between our students and those who would do them harm. I am honored to work with Senator Green on behalf of Tennessee school kids to keep them safe,” Rep. Micah Van Huss (R-Jonesborough) added. Both Senator Green and Represenative Van Huss are combat veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The House bill, HB2129 has passed out of two committees and will be heard in the Finance, Ways & Means Committee. Green is running for the Republican nomination in the 7th Congressional District. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN-07) is running for the…
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Your Facebook account is spraying your personal info onto the internet like a hose. Here’s how to stop it. Facebook Apps There are probably too many third-party apps accessing your Facebook data. Facebook Right now is a pretty complicated time to be one of Facebook’s roughly 2 billion active users.
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by Timothy Summers Protecting individual privacy from government intrusion is older than American democracy. In 1604, the attorney general of England, Sir Edward Coke, ruled that a man’s house is his castle. This was the official declaration that a homeowner could protect himself and his privacy from the king’s agents. That lesson carried into today’s America, thanks to our Founding Fathers’ abhorrence for imperialist Great Britain’s unwarranted search and seizure of personal documents. They understood that everyone has something to hide, because human dignity and intimacy don’t exist if we can’t keep our thoughts and actions private. As citizens in the digital age, that is much more difficult. Malicious hackers and governments can monitor the most private communications, browsing habits and other data breadcrumbs of anyone who owns a smartphone, tablet, laptop or personal computer. As an ethical hacker, my job is to help protect those who are unable, or lack the knowledge, to help themselves. People who think like hackers have some really good ideas about how to protect digital privacy during turbulent times. Here’s what they – and I – advise, and why. I have no affiliation or relationship with any of the companies listed below, except…
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Despite the horrific attack in suburban Washington D.C. on Republican legislators, regular protests at Tennessee’s legislative plaza and death threats made against at least two Tennessee legislators, there have been no requests by legislative leadership for additional review of security procedures, in general, or the Cordell Hull Building, specifically, as the legislature prepares to move there from Legislative Plaza/War Memorial Building later this year. The Tennessee Star requests for comment from Lt. Gov. Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge) and Speaker Beth Harwell (R-Nashville) as to whether they had requested a security review in light of these events, were referred to their respective communications person, and, in turn, referred to Connie Ridley, Director, Office of Legislative Administration. Ms. Ridley’s response began with reassurance, “The General Assembly takes the security of members, staff and the general public seriously,” but continued generically, We review our policies and procedures and make updates as appropriate on an ongoing basis. As you might expect, a thorough evaluation of all our security policies and procedures is a large part of the ongoing transition process to our new facility. There has been cause for concern at the current facility, starting with a change this year to the security policy where…
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