“Despite vig­or­ous efforts, the U.S. gov­ern­ment has been unsuc­cess­ful so far in find­ing key senior Iraqi sci­en­tists to sup­port its pre­war claims that for­mer pres­i­dent Saddam Hussein was pur­su­ing an aggres­sive pro­gram to develop nuclear, bio­log­i­cal and chem­i­cal weapons,” accord­ing to the Washington Post.

Sources said four senior sci­en­tists and more than a dozen at lower lev­els who worked for the Iraqi gov­ern­ment have been inter­viewed by U.S. offi­cials under the direc­tion of the CIA. Some sci­en­tists have been arrested and held for months, oth­ers have made deals in return for infor­ma­tion and at least one has agreed to be inter­viewed out­side Iraq.
No mat­ter the cir­cum­stances, all of the sci­en­tists inter­viewed have denied that Hussein had recon­sti­tuted his nuclear weapons pro­gram or devel­oped and hid­den chem­i­cal or bio­log­i­cal weapons since United Nations inspec­tors left in 1998. Several key Iraqi offi­cials ques­tioned the sig­nif­i­cance of evi­dence cited by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion to sug­gest that Hussein was step­ping up efforts to develop new weapons of mass destruc­tion programs.

Depleted ura­nium (DU) has been used for decades in anti-​​tank shells because its ultra-​​dense. But DU has been a con­tro­ver­sial, pos­si­bly toxic, method for pierc­ing armor — blamed by some for so-​​called “Gulf War Syndrome,” by oth­ers for birth defects.
A new alloy is emerg­ing that could be a suit­able sub­sti­tute for DU, New Scientist reports.
The U.S. Army is expected to award a con­tract “for a test batch of 30-​​millimetre ammu­ni­tion of the type used by American A-​​10 ‘tank buster’ air­craft, which fired some 75 tonnes of DU dur­ing the recent Iraq con­flict,” accord­ing to New Scientist.
For years, it’s been thought that tung­sten could replace DU, since it’s about as dense, but –hope­fully — not as toxic.
The prob­lem has been that “tung­sten shells flat­ten on impact, form­ing a mush­room shape. But DU rounds self-​​sharpen as they deform” — mak­ing the ammu­ni­tion much more effec­tive.
“Now Liquidmetal Technologies, an R&D com­pany based in Tampa, Florida, says it can get com­pa­ra­ble per­for­mance from pen­e­tra­tors made of an exotic alloy of tung­sten,” says New Scientist, which claims the rounds could be ready in as soon as two years.

Just out of high school, thou­sands of miles from friends and par­ents, and iso­lated by lan­guage and cul­ture from the peo­ple around them, young air­men sta­tioned on a U.S. Air Force base in Europe can find life pretty lonely.
But now the military’s fresh faces can get a bit of the com­forts of home — by wast­ing their pals in an online shoot-‘em-up game.
U.S. Air Forces in Europe, or USAFE, is invest­ing about $200,000 into net­worked gam­ing cen­ters at 14 bases scat­tered across the con­ti­nent. All told, more than 100 Microsoft Xbox game con­soles will be pur­chased, giv­ing thou­sands of air­men a famil­iar new option for their down­time.
“Everything is so dif­fer­ent here. So it’s nice to have a taste of what (air­men) are used to — a taste of America,” said David Quinn, who heads the USAFE’s Community Activities branch. “This is a way to get them out of the dorms, to keep them from sit­ting and star­ing at four walls.“
Stars & Stripes had an arti­cle about this a lit­tle while back. My Wired News piece picks up where it left off.

Did the Penatgon make a mis­take in can­cel­ing its Policy Analysis Market — the instantly-​​notorious ter­ror­ism trad­ing floor?
“The idea of a fed­eral bet­ting par­lor on atroc­i­ties and ter­ror­ism is ridicu­lous and it’s grotesque,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-​​OR) fumed, as he brought the project to the gen­eral public’s atten­tion.
But sup­port­ers of the pro­gram point out that gath­er­ing intel­li­gence is often a messy busi­ness, with pay­offs to unsa­vory char­ac­ters and the elim­i­na­tion of poten­tial adver­saries. The futures mar­ket, ugly as it may sound, doesn’t involve any of those moral com­pro­mises, said Robin Hanson, one of the ear­lier pro­mot­ers of the con­cept of trad­ing floors for ideas and a PAM project con­trib­u­tor. It’s just a way of cap­tur­ing people’s col­lec­tive wis­dom.
“Among the many things we do for intel­li­gence, this is one of the least rep­re­hen­si­ble,” Hanson said. “Paying peo­ple to tell us about bad things. That’s intrin­sic to the intel­li­gence process.“
And a trad­ing floor could be more effec­tive than pay­ing off a snitch.
Projects sim­i­lar to PAM, like the Iowa Electronic Markets, which spec­u­late on elec­tion results, have been sur­pris­ingly reli­able indi­ca­tors of what’s going to hap­pen next.
My Wired News story has Hanson’s — and oth­ers’ — case for ter­ror­ism futures.
THERE’S MORE: Althought the mar­ket has been billed an aggre­ga­tor of infor­ma­tion, “oddly, the hope of the PAM might have been the igno­rance of investors, rather than their intel­li­gence,” Slate notes.

Policy mar­ket day-​​traders who don’t speak Arabic or have access to clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily make worse bets than the pro­fes­sion­als who spend their days sift­ing through Al Hayat and humintel reports. This is a seem­ing para­dox called the “dumb agent” the­o­ry­one of my esteemed pre­de­ces­sors in this box expli­cated it a few years ago. Walk up to a trav­eler wait­ing in an air­port, ask how many min­utes late the plane will take off, and you’re likely to get a wrong, unin­formed answer. Ask 75 more of your fel­low pas­sen­gers the same ques­tion, and you’ll get 75 more sim­i­larly wrong, unin­formed answers. But throw them all together and take the mean, and you’re likely to get some­thing pretty close to the right answer.

Priorities & Frivolities digs up a Harvard/​Stanford study of Tradesports​.com, which has been offer­ing “Saddam Securities.”

“The price of the Saddam Security is a rea­son­able assess­ment of the like­li­hood of war. The time series move­ment in the series seems sen­si­ble as mea­sured against both expert opin­ion and a nar­ra­tive approach. The mar­ket is deep enough that it should have value as a fore­cast­ing tool, and mar­ket data meets sim­ple tests of efficiency.”

Salon’s Scott Rosenberg makes a per­sua­sive case against the trad­ing floor:

Markets depend on good infor­ma­tion. The DARPA plan is based on the the­ory that an open mar­ket will draw out the best infor­ma­tion from mul­ti­ple sources. That’s fine if, in fact, the incen­tive of mak­ing money in the mar­ket is strong enough to over­come other moti­va­tions of par­tic­i­pants. If you were a ter­ror­ist plan­ning an attack, would you try to make a lit­tle money on the side by using your insider knowl­edge to place a win­ning bet? Or would you allo­cate a lit­tle extra money in your oper­at­ing bud­get to plac­ing decoy bets to delude those who you knew were turn­ing to the U.S. military-​​funded ter­ror mar­ket for intel­li­gence? Or would you sim­ply stay away, dis­trust­ing the market’s anonymity mech­a­nism on the assump­tion that its American design­ers will have built in some sort of back door? It’s nearly impos­si­ble to imag­ine any set of cir­cum­stances in which this mar­ket would pro­vide untainted infor­ma­tion.

Finally, Andy Borowitz puts his sig­na­ture Spinal Tap-​​esque spin on a New York Times edi­to­r­ial call­ing for John Poindexter to step down.
He writes, “The Pentagon has named Retired Admiral John Poindexter, the man respon­si­ble for the recently aban­doned idea of a ‘ter­ror­ism futures mar­ket,’ to head the newly cre­ated Department of Bad Ideas.“
AND MORE: New Yorker finan­cial colum­nist James Surowiecki has a defense of the PAM plan in Slate that’s just about iden­ti­cal, point-​​for-​​point, as my Wired News piece.

To Pentagon researchers, cap­tur­ing and cat­e­go­riz­ing every aspect of a person’s life is only the begin­ning.
LifeLog — the con­tro­ver­sial Defense Department ini­tia­tive to track every­thing about an indi­vid­ual — is just one step in a larger effort, accord­ing to a top Pentagon research direc­tor. Personalized dig­i­tal assis­tants that can guess our desires should come first. And then, just maybe, we’ll see com­put­ers that can think for them­selves.
Computer sci­en­tists have dreamed for decades of build­ing machines with minds of their own. But these hopes have been over­whelmed again and again by the messy, dizzy­ing com­plex­i­ties of the real world.
In recent months, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a series of seem­ingly dis­parate pro­grams — all designed, the agency says, to help com­put­ers deal with the com­plex­i­ties of life, so they finally can begin to think.
My Wired News arti­cle has more — includ­ing an exclu­sive inter­view with Ron Brachman, who heads the DARPA office over­see­ing projects like LifeLog. There’s a sep­a­rate story on Brachman’s lat­est project, “Real-​​World Reasoning,” designed to get com­put­ers to start look­ing at prob­lems from dif­fer­ent angles — a key arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence challenge.

John Poindexter, the Pentagon divi­sion chief behind the noto­ri­ous Total Information Awareness mega-​​database, is at it again. Now, he’s head­ing up an effort to build a kind of stock mar­ket for ter­ror­ist strikes.
The New York Times reports, “traders bull­ish on a bio­log­i­cal attack on Israel or bear­ish on the chances of a North Korean mis­sile strike would have the oppor­tu­nity to bet on the like­li­hood of such events on a new Internet site” estab­lished by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Awareness Office.
According to the Associated Press, the Pentagon has requested $3 mil­lion for the Policy Analysis Market for next year and $5 mil­lion for the year after.
THERE’S MORE: “It sounds jaw-​​droppingly cal­lous, not to men­tion absurd,” notes the San Francisco Chronicle. “But experts say the DARPA-​​backed Policy Analysis Market is based on a legit­i­mate the­ory, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, that has a proven track record in pre­dict­ing out­comes.“

Basically, the idea is that the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness is smarter than any sin­gle per­son. By forc­ing peo­ple to put their money where their mouth is, the wagers help weed out know-​​nothings and give more weight to the opin­ions of those in the know.
“Markets are a great way of aggre­gat­ing infor­ma­tion that a lot of dif­fer­ent peo­ple have,” said Eric Zitzewitz, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “One of the big issues with intel­li­gence that was gath­ered before 9/​11 was that infor­ma­tion wasn’t aggre­gated within the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity. This is directly aimed at address­ing that.” 

Instapundit has more on this.
AND MORE: The Associated Press now says that the Pentagon will “aban­don” the Policy Analysis Market (PAM). Sen. John Warner, the chair­man of the Senate Armed Services Committee, spoke with the program’s direc­tor, “and we mutu­ally agreed that this thing should be stopped,” the AP reports.
AND MORE: The can­celled ter­ror mar­ket project wasn’t the Pentagon’s only exper­i­ment in trad­ing floors that gauge the like­li­hood of world events. Two small firms — Market Technologies Systems (the pro­fes­sors behind the famed Iowa Electronic Markets elec­tion exchange) and Neoteric Technologies — received grants from DARPA to build such oper­a­tions. Two of their trad­ing floors are up on the web, cur­rently: One mar­ket spec­u­lates in home­land secu­rity threat lev­els; the other in the spread of SARS.

By now, we’ve all heard that turf bat­tles in the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity were par­tially respon­si­ble for the 9/​11 plot being missed. But, accord­ing to Computerorld, a recent Congressional report also notes that creaky, out­dated infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy played a big role, too.

That lack of IT capa­bil­ity was a major prob­lem for the FBI’s pre-​​Sept. 11 inves­ti­ga­tion into poten­tial al-​​Qaeda plans, accord­ing to the report. In fact, when a Phoenix FBI field office agent drafted an e-​​mail in July 2001known now as the infa­mous “Phoenix Memo“he had no reli­able way of query­ing a cen­tral FBI sys­tem to deter­mine whether there were other reports on rad­i­cal fun­da­men­tal­ists tak­ing flight train­ing in the U.S.or whether other FBI field offices were inves­ti­gat­ing sim­i­lar cases. Another agent had expressed sim­i­lar con­cerns.
In addi­tion, con­gres­sional inves­ti­ga­tors found that because of the lim­i­ta­tions of the FBI’s Automated Case File (ACS) sys­tem, a num­ber of addressees on the Phoenix com­mu­ni­ca­tion, includ­ing the chief of the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit, weren’t aware of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion before the attacks occurred.
The FBI deployed the ACS in 1995 to replace a sys­tem of writ­ten reports and indexes. However, FBI agents told con­gres­sional inves­ti­ga­tors that the sys­tem was lim­ited in its search capac­ity, dif­fi­cult to use and unre­li­able. The sys­tem was so dif­fi­cult to use, in fact, that FBI offi­cials informed Congress that as of Sept. 26, 2002, 68,000 coun­tert­er­ror­ism leads dat­ing to 1995 remained out­stand­ing and unas­signed. (empha­sis mine) 

StrategyPage:

For nearly a cen­tury, sub­ma­rine design has dic­tated that the con­trol room be right below where the periscope is. That’s because the periscope was an opti­cal device, where the user in the sub was look­ing at what a sys­tem of mir­rors in the periscope tube showed was out­side.“
That changes with the new Virginia class U.S. Navy boats, which will be the first subs built with­out an opti­cal periscope. Instead, the periscope mast con­tains video, still and infrared cam­eras that pro­vide dig­i­tal images in color, and black and white.
Since the images are dig­i­tal, the periscope mast does not have to pierce the hull (cut­ting con­struc­tion costs a wee bit) and the con­trol room can be any­where in the sub.

The Associated Press reports:

The death of Colin McMillan, an oil­man await­ing Senate con­fir­ma­tion as Navy sec­re­tary, was ruled a sui­cide by gun­shot Friday.
McMillan, 67, was found dead Thursday at his 55,000-acre ranch in south­ern New Mexico, near the White Sands Missile Range.
“The cause is a self-​​inflicted gun­shot wound to the head. The man­ner is sui­cide,” said Tim Stepetic, spokesman for the state med­ical inves­ti­ga­tor.
In Alamogordo, District Attorney Scot Key would not say whether McMillan left a sui­cide note. Key said a hand­gun was found with the body.