The 9/​11 hijack­ers were allowed to get into the coun­try, and get on planes, because var­i­ous fed­eral agen­cies didn’t share their watch lists — their reg­is­ters of ter­ror­ist sus­pects.
But 20 months after the 9/​11 attacks, ABC News reports, “the U.S. gov­ern­ment still lacks a con­sol­i­dated ter­ror­ism watch list that is eas­ily acces­si­ble to all law enforce­ment.

Nine dif­fer­ent fed­eral agen­cies run at least 12 dif­fer­ent watch lists, and frus­trated local police fear the same sort of infor­ma­tion break­down could hap­pen again.
“I truly believe that we are not get­ting the infor­ma­tion that’s needed to pro­tect our com­mu­nity mem­bers,” said Michael Chitwood, the police chief in Portland, Maine, one of the nation’s busiest sea­ports and the place where Mohamed Atta and another 9/​11 hijacker boarded a plane to attack the World Trade Center.
“It’s out­ra­geous. It does not make any sense.” 

U.S. troops have once again fired on pro­test­ers in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, the Associated Press reports. In less than 48 hours, at least 15 Iraqi civil­ians have been killed.
Is this the only way to do crowd con­trol? A recent Tech Central Station arti­cle of mine looks at high-​​tech police aids that might help save lives.

It has noth­ing to do with mil­i­tary tech­nol­ogy. But my lat­est Wired News arti­cle does deal with two of the day’s most weighty issues: online music and porn.

By most accounts, Apple’s new iTunes music down­load ser­vice is pretty cool — the first legit­i­mate alter­na­tive to the song swap­ping on Kazaa, Morpheus and other file-​​trading ser­vices.
But Apple’s move won’t slow down the manic expan­sion of these trad­ing net­works. Why not?
Here’s a one-​​word answer: porn.
Kazaa and com­pany are increas­ingly traf­fick­ing in dirty video clips. And until Apple starts offer­ing up Christy Canyon down­loads, the swap­ping ser­vices can sleep easy.

You’d think that the Environmental Protection Agency’s inves­ti­ga­tors would con­cen­trate on crimes against Mother Nature. But you’d be wrong.
Since 9/​11, the 220 sleuths in the Agency’s crim­i­nal divi­sion have focused on counter-​​terror efforts, the New York Times reports, and shied away from envi­ron­men­tal inquiries.
“They have dropped the ‘E’ in the E.P.A. and have become just a pro­tec­tion agency,” one gov­ern­ment watch­dog told the paper.
According to the Times, “annual crim­i­nal refer­rals made by the envi­ron­men­tal agency to the Justice Department had dropped about 30 per­cent, from 481 in 2000 to 341 in 2002.”

The Bush Administration is begin­ning to build a new arse­nal of “tac­ti­cal” nuclear weapons — small Bombs, used in dis­creet areas, like under­ground biochem labs. So it’s help­ful to look at another time when such weapons were also being con­sid­ered. This month’s Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has such a view.

As the Vietnam War esca­lated in spring 1966, a high-​​ranking Pentagon offi­cial with access to President Lyndon Johnson was heard by sci­en­tist Freeman Dyson to say, “It might be a good idea to toss in a nuke from time to time, just to keep the other side guess­ing.”

So Dyson and a hand­ful of other sci­en­tists con­ducted a study to see just how effec­tive tac­ti­cal nukes would be. Their con­clu­sion:

It would take 3,000 tac­ti­cal nuclear weapons (TNW) per year to inter­dict sup­ply routes like the Ho Chi Minh trail. More prob­lem­at­i­cally, U.S. forces might become vul­ner­a­ble to a Soviet-​​orchestrated coun­ter­at­tack; and the first use of tac­ti­cal nuclear weapons against guer­ril­las might set a prece­dent that would lead to use of sim­i­lar weapons by guer­ril­las against U.S. targets.

Read the rest of the story here. (There’s also a funny wrap-​​up of reac­tions to my February excur­sion to Los Alamos. I’ll link to the arti­cle once it comes on-​​line.)
THERE’S MORE: One Defense Tech reader isn’t buy­ing the study. “If there was one thing the Johnson Administration was good at, it was throw­ing out wild num­bers to jus­tify a point of view,” he writes. “Dyson’s num­bers are inflated.”