Better late than after the election, I always say…

Quote of note:

A Prudential spokesman in Elizabeth, N.J., Robert DeFillipo, said Friday that company officials were confident that terrorists had taken no photographs of the headquarters since before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Yesterday, Prudential executives were at the FBI, where they looked at photographs from the computer, and were confident afterward that none of the photographs were more recent than 2001," DeFillipo said.

"One of the reasons they were confident was they noticed surveillance cameras that were installed after 9/11 were not in the photographs they examined. In addition, they noticed that some of the photographs that they looked at appeared to be taken out of a history of the company that was published four years ago."

The photos from the history book were of the building's interior and exterior, DeFillipo said.

Terror threat info may have been updated
By Katherine Pfleger Shrader, Associated Press Writer | August 6, 2004

WASHINGTON --Authorities have some evidence that suspected terror surveillance information on five financial buildings was looked at again and perhaps updated in January, a top homeland security official said Friday.

Separately, President Bush defended the decision to issue terrorism warnings last weekend based on the information.

James Loy, the deputy secretary of homeland security and No. 2 official at the agency, initially told The Associated Press that new surveillance photographs were taken in January of Prudential Financial Inc.'s headquarters in Newark, N.J., both interior and exterior, and were not simply old photographs that had been altered or otherwise updated.

"New pictures," Loy said after a ceremony in Elizabeth, N.J., to give badges to officers of the department's Customs and Border Protection Office. Pressed to provide specifics, he said: "Both inside and out."

But later Friday, Loy said that he had not personally been "poring over" the intelligence information. Loy said it was clear the surveillance files of the Prudential Building and four other sites held on a captured computer were accessed and perhaps updated in January, but he could not say with certainty that there were new photos taken then. He said he had been speaking hypothetically of what could constitute updating of information.

Loy said there also is some evidence of "freshening" of surveillance information from the other four buildings specifically named in the terror warnings last weekend, although he again said he could not say that "with total clarity."