Fire up the warp drive. Wesley Clark is con­vinced peo­ple will one day be able to travel faster than light — a feat Einstein and oth­ers have deemed impos­si­ble.
“During a whirl­wind cam­paign swing Saturday through New Hampshire, Clark, the newest Democratic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date… dropped some­thing of a bomb­shell,” reports Brian McWilliams for Wired News.

“I still believe in e=mc, but I can’t believe that in all of human his­tory, we’ll never ever be able to go beyond the speed of light to reach where we want to go,” said Clark. “I hap­pen to believe that mankind can do it.“
“I’ve argued with physi­cists about it, I’ve argued with best friends about it. I just have to believe it. It’s my only faith-​​based ini­tia­tive.” Clark’s com­ment prompted laugh­ter and applause from the gath­er­ing.
Gary Melnick, a senior astro­physi­cist at the Harvard-​​Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said Clark’s faith in the pos­si­bil­ity of time travel was “prob­a­bly based more on his imag­i­na­tion than on physics.“
While Clark’s belief may stem from his knowl­edge of sophis­ti­cated mil­i­tary projects, there’s no evi­dence to sug­gest that humans can exceed the speed of light, said Melnick. In fact, con­sid­er­able evi­dence posits that time travel is impos­si­ble, he said.
“Even if Clark becomes pres­i­dent, I doubt it would be within his pow­ers to repeal the pow­ers of physics,” said Melnick. 

THERE’S MORE: Glenn Reynolds, who used to chair the National Space Society, says the General’s faster-​​than-​​light dreams might not be so off-​​base.

“The CIA is set to spend sev­eral mil­lion dol­lars to develop a video game aimed at help­ing its ana­lysts think like ter­ror­ists,” reports the Washington Times.
“The agency’s Counter Terrorist Center, or CTC, is work­ing with the Los Angeles-​​based Institute for Creative Technologies on a project designed to help its ana­lysts, ‘think out­side the box,’” a CIA spokesman tells the paper.
In the not-​​too-​​distant past, the Insitute has helped the Army build video games that sup­pos­edly help “develop lead­ers that can deal with com­plex prob­lems, ones that involve emo­tional issues, polit­i­cal issues and social issues.“
“Among those lead­er­ship tasks: get­ting a team to clear a house, pro­tect aid work­ers, or hold off a mob from a U.S. embassy.“
Guess they didn’t get that one ready in time for Iraq.
Check this Wired News story from 2001 for more.

Ten days ago, the FBI called Defense Tech, look­ing for infor­ma­tion about Adrian Lamo, the so-​​called “Homeless Hacker.” Get ready to turn over your notes about Lamo, an agent warned.
Now, SecurityFocus.com’s Mark Rasch is shed­ding new light on the FBI’s move:

The demand that jour­nal­ists pre­serve their notes is being made under laws that require ISP’s and other “providers of elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices” to pre­serve, for exam­ple, e-​​mails stored on their ser­vice, pend­ing a sub­poena, under a statute mod­i­fied by the USA-​​PATRIOT Act.
The pur­pose of that law was to pre­vent the inad­ver­tent destruc­tion of ephemeral elec­tronic records pend­ing a sub­poena. For exam­ple, you could tell an ISP that you were inves­ti­gat­ing a hack­ing case, and that they should pre­serve the audit logs while you ran to the local mag­is­trate for a sub­poena.
It was never intended to apply to journalist’s records.
Similarly, the let­ters go on to inform the reporters that the FBI intends to get an order for pro­duc­tion of records under the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act, a statute that applies only to ISPs. Citing that law, they insist that the jour­nal­ist is man­dated to pre­serve records for at least the next three months and pos­si­bly longer. This demand is all the more egre­gious in that it comes more than a year after the arti­cles and inter­views first appeared — after any actual Internet logs would have been rou­tinely deleted. 

THERE’S MORE: The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is now weigh­ing in on the FBI’s calls.

In recent years, the priests of the Pentagon have devel­oped a new ortho­doxy: network-​​centric war­fare. That’s the notion that every infantry­man, every pilot, every drone and every gen­eral will share every­thing they see and hear over an Internet for com­bat. It’s become the unques­tion­able cen­ter­piece of the U.S. military’s vision for its future.
On the eve of Gulf War II, Defense Tech high­lighted a cou­ple of heretics, who weren’t sure network-​​centric fight­ing was such a great idea. Now, Aviation Week reports, more of these thinkers are emerg­ing.
Yale pro­fes­sor Charles Perrow notes that shar­ing infor­ma­tion at all lev­els could eas­ily lead to gen­er­als micro­manag­ing bat­tles.
“It isn’t dif­fi­cult to envi­sion the fog of war being replaced by the fog of sys­tems,” he writes.
Defense ana­lysts Loren Thompson, with the Lexington Institute, says both the U.S. and her adver­saries will have access to Internet tech­nol­ogy.
“This means enemy forces will be able to use it them­selves, and they will under­stand how the U.S. employ­ment of net­works can be used against U.S. forces.“
Network-​​centric war­fare pro­po­nents seem obliv­i­ous to the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties they them­selves might cre­ate, he adds. The Navy, for exam­ple, isn’t requir­ing that its sys­tems with­stand an elec­tro­mag­netic pulse.
“We are act­ing like the dan­ger doesn’t exist at the same time we are pur­su­ing sim­i­lar [anti-​​electronics] weapons,” Thompson told Aviation Week.

Public radio’s “Future Tense” pro­gram inter­viewed me about my run-​​in the gub-​​ment. Listen to me mum­ble on the topic here.