David Coleman Headley, a U.S. citizen, pleaded guilty in court Thursday to a dozen federal terrorism charges, and admitted that he participated in planning the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, as well as later planning an attack against a Danish newspaper cartoonist.

Headley further admitted to having longstanding ties to the Pakistan terrorist group, Lashkar e Tayyiba (LeT), which is believed responsible for the Mumbai attacks.

As part of his plea deal, Headley is expected to continue cooperating with authorities, and will have to testify in foreign judicial proceedings should he be told to do so.

For more on Headley and his guilty plea, check out this Chicago Sun-Times article and the U.S. Justice Department release.

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has posted this advisory about "public reports of malicious code circulating via spam email messages impersonating the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)."

According US-CERT, the malicious unsolicited emails may contain subject lines related to DHS or other government activity, as well as a link or attachment, which if clicked on or opened may infected the user's computer with malicious code, including the Zeus Trojan.

We had a post last month about how U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) had contracted with Westat, an independent research firm, to review the effectiveness of the web-based E-Verify system, which allows employers to determine whether prospective employees are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents and therefore legally able to work in the country. The key findings reported at that time indicated E-Verify fails to identify illegal workers about half the time.

Now USCIS is refuting these reports. In this DHS blog post, Lauren Kielsmeier, Acting Deputy Director and Chief of Staff for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, presents data to "set the record straight" on E-Verify's accuracy and efficiency.

It's being reported that the FBI and the Virginia State Police have joined a Virginia Tech Police investigation into a series of threats allegedly being made against Virginia Tech University. These threats were made via YouTube videos, and emails sent to members of the school's community.

Speaking to the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice and Science Subcommittee on Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder was asked a question about the likelihood that Osama bin Laden would be brought to justice in the U.S.

Holder's response is refreshingly direct and probably right on point. Holder responded, "The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom."

Holder went on to explain the simple reality of a situation was the U.S. to have bin Laden in its sights, "He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so that he is not captured by us."

DHS Secretary Napolitano on Tuesday issued a short and to-the-point statement about the short-term future of SBInet - the high-tech, virtual Southwest border fence initiative started by the Bush administration.

Citing a plague of cost overruns and missed deadlines, the Secretary has decided first to redeploy $50 million of Recovery Act funding originally allocated for the first test sections of SBInet, dubbed "Block 1", to other "tested, commercially available security technology" along the Southwest border.

Second, the Secretary is freezing all SBInet funding beyond Block 1's initial deployment to the Tucson and Ajo regions until January 2011.

A "light" 4.4-magnitude earthquake struck Los Angeles County just after 4 am local time. The quake was centered near Pico Rivera which is about 11 miles east-southeast of the city of Los Angeles. Authorities tell the LA Times that there doesn't appear to be any major damage in either location.

Anonymous sends us to this BBC article titled "Meet USCybercom: Why the US is fielding a cyber army". While the entire piece is a good read, the first point made in it is particularly valuable to understanding the "Why" of the title.

Daniel Kuehl of the US National Defense University describes the type of targeted capability USCybercom is working to achieve. He makes the argument that if there is a building in a populated neighborhood where an enemy's cyber capability lies wouldn't there be some very good reasons for using a "bunch of key strokes" on it, instead of a laser-guided 1,000 pound bomb?