Noting that the annual homeland tab has jumped by $44 billion since 2001, a Federal Reserve Bank of New York report finds no signs “that increases in homeland security have led to far larger costs for the overall US economy,” The Wall Street Journal’s John McCary mentions. House homeland panel members are demanding clarification as to how exactly states and cities can use a new $1 billion grant program to improve their emergency comm capabilities, TechnologyDaily’s Chris Strohm says.

Hammering the homies: On the privacy tip, Americans still finger DHS and its TSA subunit as the “least trustworthy of all federal agencies, but that level of trust has risen from last year,” United Press International’s Shaun Waterman cites from a survey. The pages thrown up by ICE and TSA are among the “Dirty Dozen” federal Web sites rated the worst at E-FOIA compliance, Network World’s Michael Cooney recounts. DHS’s opening of a FedEx package posted from Hong Kong to Toronto “is a cautionary tale for Canadians, businesses and Ottawa officials,” The National Post’s Diane Francis alerts. DHS has failed to adequately safeguard the domestic food supply from terrorist tampering, Bloomberg’s Neil Roland has an IG Report judging.

Feds: DHS’s Mike Chertoff outlined to high-tech execs yesterday the planned shift to improved technology to check incoming people and cargo, TechnologyDaily’s Heather Greenfield reports — and then headed to Baltimore for an in-person peek at Charm City preparedness, WJZ-TV 13 tells. The House homeland chief wants a DHS IG probe of Federal Protective Service performance “from financial problems to contracting oversight,” Government Executive’s Jonathan Marino mentions. Secret Service agents are to be stationed in Moscow this year under a secret accord between DHS and Russia’s Federal Security Service, Secrecy News’ Steven Aftergood reveals.

State and local: Public safety officials from across southwestern Florida gathered yesterday to hear a pitch for a 2,000 acre training site in Charlotte County, Fort Myers’ NBC2tells. Massachusetts’ governor has accused INS of reneging on promises to coordinate on a contentious March 6 immigration raid, The Boston Globe reports. Missouri’s state treasurer was in D.C. this week trumpeting her efforts to bar state investments from companies operating in terror-sponsoring countries, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch records. The Nevada Assembly has unanimously okayed a bill that outlaws wielding hoax WMDs and boosts penalties for false threats, The Las Vegas Sun says.

Poly-ticks: “Firefighters, hailed as heroes on Sept. 11, cheered Hillary Rodham Clinton when they gathered on Wednesday to size up presidential contenders minus Rudolph Giuliani,” Reutersleads. If elected President, Giuliani pledged at another event, he would better gird communities against terror attack, Newsday notes. The law firm headlined by Giuliani does business with a company tied to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, who has famously called President Bush “the devil,” McClatchy Newspapers mentions. “Leading independent presidential candidate for 2008” Daniel Imperato expresses his approval that “the United States and Iran were able to come together for the recent Iraqi summit,” via openPR.com. Dem contender John Edwards’ campaign HQ reopened yesterday after a to-do over the proverbial envelope containing a “white substance,” APreports.

Bugs ‘n bombs: A proposed ban on .50-caliber rifles advanced Tuesday in the Illinois Senate after supporters cautioned that terrorists could use the weapon, The Springfield State Journal-Register reports. The produce industry “is using radio-frequency ID tags and GPS to track food, in the hope of curtailing outbreaks of food-borne illness,” The Wall Street Journal leads — and see CQ Homeland Security’s Wednesday item on produce terror. The FDA seeks to determine whether deadly bird flu can contaminate the food supply and is cracking down on pet bird and poultry smuggling that can spread the virus, AP reports. Gotham officials plan to expand the search for human remains from the collapse of the World Trade Center, UPI relays.

Ivory (Watch) Towers: Leading universities including Oxford and Cambridge have been targeted by Islamic extremists who remain widely active on campuses, The Sunday Telegraph quotes a prominent academic. The University of Leeds is accused of infringing free speech after Muslim student protests led it to cancel a lecture on “Islamic anti-Semitism” by a German academic Wednesday night, the Times of London tells. At the National Cyber-Forensics & Training Alliance in Pittsburgh, students and researchers from Carnegie Mellon University work with DHS, FBI and USPS agents “to counter malicious computer programs,” The Washington Post spotlights.

Coming and going: “It remains shockingly easy for airport employees to sneak into secure areas and carry dangerous materials onto a plane without detection,” The New York Times chides. The Homeland Security Daily Wireposts a caveat to a proposal under now DHS review to field drone aircraft to help defend airliners against shoulder-launched missiles: Considering the high rates of UAV crashes, will cities go along? Spring break travelers are opting for U.S. destinations this year in the first major test of new rules requiring passports to fly from Mexico, the Caribbean or Canada, The Washington Times tells — and see the Post on unprecedented passport application delays.

Khalid Konfidential: Admitted 9/11 instigator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also confessed to beheading a Wall Street Journal reporter — with “my blessed right hand” — in 2002, Reuters has a revised transcript showing — and see The Times of London for a list of the 30 attacks for which he grandiosely takes responsibility. A focus on these actual and attempted attentats has obscured the terror deputy’s “use of the trial as a propaganda vehicle for al Qaeda,” a Slate columnist surveys. Officials, likewise, tell AP they see “an element of self-promotion” here — while The New York Times suggests Mohammed also “may have complicated the prosecution of his former colleagues.” More broadly, the impression that has emerged from the proceedings is of “an individual who represents the worst kind of enemy,” The Christian Science Monitor maintains — as AP, again, speculates that Mohammed’s bust in 2004 crippled al Qaeda’s ability to carry out 9/11-type attacks.

Courts and rights: Two key congressionalleaders secretly flew to Guantanamo Bay on Saturday to observe the closed military hearing for Mohammed and twocolleagues, the Postlearns. A Canadian arrested in Spain on suspicion of terror financing agreed early this week to be handed over to the United States, where he is wanted for fraud, AP says. A Paris court yesterday handed a French Muslim convert nine years for conspiring with Pakistani extremists for terror attacks in Australia, Agence France-Pressereports. “Tariq Ramadan, the so-called ‘moderate’ Islamic ‘intellectual,’ was briefly detained and charged for ‘insulting a public agent’ Sunday” at Paris’s main airport, The Terror Finance Blogblabs.

Over there: A new Islamist grouplet, anchored in a Lebanese refugee camp, is led by a fugitive Palestinian who preaches al Qaeda ideology, the Times tells. President Pervez Musharraf is a very strong ally in the terror war, Reutersfinds a senior U.S. official saying yesterday in offering a $750 million aid package for Pakistan’s Afghan border areas. Tehran will appeal Interpol’s requests for the arrest of five prominent Iranians and a Lebanese militant in connection with Argentina’s worst terrorist attack, AP reports. North African extremists are merging into an “arc of radical Islamism” under Algeria’s leading Islamist organization, AFP has France’s top anti-terror judge charging.

Kulture Kanyon: U.S. consular officials “were very kind to me; they gave me a visa. But when I arrived here, at JFK, I had two and a half hours of Q&A,” independent Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami tells the Times. “Bank robbers, terrorists and prowlers have given ski masks a bad name for years, but a Connecticut man is wearing them around town to prove that not everyone who dons one is plotting mayhem,” AP reports. “Mixing dance, music, text, and video, ‘Homeland Security’ questions our assumptions about the nature of a ‘homeland’ and asks what security means in the lives of our young people today,” ActivistResource.org notifies of a Manhattan performance last week. Marvel Comics seems poised to use the death of Captain America “as the focus of a large-scale debate on the balancing of freedom and security,” a Wall Street Journal writer eulogizes. The New Yorkerposts a video excerpt from “My Trip to al Qaeda,” staff writer Lawrence Wright’s one-man show based on his award-winning non-fiction tome, “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” (Knopf).

Screen idols: Is there a link between coercive interrogations on Fox’s “24” and the treatment of real U.S.-held detainees? Reuters’ Steve Gorman wonders, noting that “some interrogators say they have based their techniques on what they have seen on television.” The Brisbane teacher accused of building bombs in his bedroom shopped for explosives with a phony license bearing a photo of Michael Chiklis, who plays a bad lieutenant on FX’s “The Shield,” The Australian’s Kevin Meade mentions. “Sometimes I wonder if we’re like Greeks [and] Romans and the Byzantines. With barbarians at our gates, we’re paralyzed with doubt as to whether it is legitimate to project our power upon other nations,” Chicago Tribunethumbsucker John Kass contemplates of “300, Warner Bros.’s Thermopylae thriller.

E-Ride to hell: “SADR CITY, Iraq - As U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies wade into a first test of their new ‘surge’ strategy here in this bucolic slum, local officials are already lamenting one casualty,” CAP News recounts. “Saddam’s old palace had been renamed Cinderella’s Castle, and it’s the shining jewel of a sprawling $37 billion theme park. Disney Iraq, or Mesopotisney as the locals call it, promised to pull large segments of this Baghdad suburb out of a three-decades-long grinding poverty. Instead, it has been a largely iconic reminder of glorious plans gone awry. The park’s delayed opening is a blow to the local residents of Sadr City, who for months have been teased with the possibility of such exotic attractions as Space Mountain and flushing toilets. With insurgents promising an opening day bloodbath, and even normally irrationally-optimistic U.S. officials predicting that princess parts would probably rain down around a ten-block perimeter of the park within minutes of it opening, city leaders are being cautious.”