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Archive for November, 2003

FBI USED ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE TO SNOOP

Thursday, November 20th, 2003

“An appeals court this week put the brakes on an FBI sur­veil­lance tech­nique that turns an auto­mo­bile driver’s on-​​board vehi­cle nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem into a covert eaves­drop­ping device,” accord­ing to SecurityFocus.
“The case arose from a 2001 FBI sur­veil­lance oper­a­tion in Las Vegas, in which agents obtained a court order com­pelling a telem­at­ics com­pany to secretly acti­vate the stolen vehi­cle recov­ery fea­ture in a customer’s car. The fea­ture, designed to listen-​​in on car thieves as they cruise around in a stolen auto, turns on a dash­board micro­phone and pipes con­ver­sa­tions out over a cell­phone con­nec­tion — nor­mally to the company’s response cen­ter, but in this case to an FBI lis­ten­ing post. “
THERE’S MORE: Congress yes­ter­day gave the FBI “greater author­ity to demand records from busi­nesses in ter­ror­ism cases with­out the approval of a judge or a grand jury,” the Times reports. “While banks, credit unions and other finan­cial insti­tu­tions are cur­rently sub­ject to such demands, the mea­sure expands the list to include car deal­ers, pawn­bro­kers, travel agents, casi­nos and other busi­nesses.“
AND MORE: The New York Police Department yes­ter­day became the first group of local cops to have access to Interpol’s 80-​​country crim­i­nal data­base.

Posted in You can run... | Comments Off

SPEED KILLS, MILITARY WANTS MORE

Thursday, November 20th, 2003

550 miles per hour is too slow. And a 1,500-mile range just isn’t big enough.
The Tomahawk cruise mis­sile may seem fast and far-​​reaching. But Pentagon plan­ners want more. Late last week, they handed out con­tracts to 10 firms to start design­ing a hyper­sonic mis­sile that can out­run the now-​​retired Concorde, and can hit a ter­ror­ist nest in Europe from the East Coast.
The Falcon, or Force Application and Launch from the Continental United States, project aims to fire a bunker-​​busting bomb into near-​​space, and then send it crash­ing into a tar­get more than 3,000 miles away, at four times the speed of sound.
Speed is becom­ing an increas­ingly cru­cial com­po­nent of how American forces fight. In the Gulf War, it took days for the U.S. mil­i­tary to iden­tify a tar­get and put a bomb on it. In recent engage­ments in Afghanistan and Iraq, that process was cut to as lit­tle as 20 min­utes, in some cases.
But this quick response only hap­pens when there are bombers and cruise mis­siles in the imme­di­ate neigh­bor­hood. If U.S. forces receive a tip that ter­ror­ists are in a part of the world where they don’t have American planes in the sky, it can take hours, or days, to act on that infor­ma­tion.
With its pro­posed speed and range, the Falcon project — co-​​sponsored by the Air Force and Darpa, the Pentagon’s research arm — aims to make just about the whole world a dan­ger­ous place to be a bad guy.
“When Osama’s bad brother Larry shows up sud­denly in Niger, this is some­thing we can tar­get him with imme­di­ately,” said Daniel Goure, a mil­i­tary ana­lyst at the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Virginia.
My Wired News arti­cle has details on the Falcon effort.
THERE’S MORE: A German mis­sile sys­tems com­pany, Lenkflugkrpersysteme, “has for the first time con­ducted a test fir­ing of a hyper­sonic mis­sile sur­pass­ing Mach 7,” says Jane’s International Defence Review. “But the fir­ing, on 23 October at Germany’s Meppen prov­ing range, may be the last in LFK’s hyper­sonic mis­sile devel­op­ment pro­gram now that the German defense min­istry has with­drawn all fund­ing as of January 2004, the company’s new tech­nolo­gies and stud­ies chief engi­neer Peter Gleich has told IDR.” An LFK press release about the event is here.
AND MORE: In the 60’s, Defense Tech pal Jim Lewis notes, the U.S. built a drone that could go Mach 3 — and even flew it over China a few times.
AND MORE: Air Force fore­cast­ers pre­dict that by 2015, America’s foes will be able to keep most U.S. planes 250–300 nau­ti­cal miles away. That’s one of the rea­sons that Air Force is so keen on Falcon, accord­ing to a recent Inside the Air Force report.

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WILL AGGRO TACTICS IN IRAQ WORK?

Wednesday, November 19th, 2003

The American counter-​​insurgency in Iraq is reach­ing new heights, the New York Times reports.
In Saddam’s home­town, Tikrit, “com­man­ders called in AC-​​130 gun­ships, A-​​10 attack planes and Apache heli­copter gun­ships, as well as Air Force F-​​16 and F-​​15E fighter-​​bombers with 500-​​pound bombs, the mil­i­tary said, in the largest bom­bard­ment in the area since President Bush declared the end of major com­bat on May 1.“
Meanwhile, U.S. forces called in air strikes “against tar­gets in cen­tral Baghdad for the first time since the Spring,” Channel News Asia notes.
Major General Charles Swannack, who leads the 82nd Airborne, says the stepped-​​up offen­sive “demon­strates our resolve, and we are not going to fight this one with one hand tied behind our backs.“
But the Salt Lake City Tribune notes that “a top-​​secret CIA assess­ment from Iraq, widely reported last week, has warned that such aggres­sive coun­terin­sur­gency tac­tics by the army could incite more Iraqis to fight the Americans.“
With their grue­some acts, terrorist-​​type insur­gent groups (think Hamas, or Peru’s Sendero Luminoso) tra­di­tion­ally try to pro­voke the gov­ern­ment into ever-​​more repres­sive responses. The more heavy-​​handed the gov­ern­ment is, the the­ory goes, the more the pop­u­lace is rad­i­cal­ized, and the more ripe for rev­o­lu­tion the area becomes.
Does that mean, then, the the U.S. offen­sive is play­ing into the bad guys’ hands? Do American mil­i­tary com­man­ders have any other choice?
THERE’S MORE: On the other end of the tac­ti­cal spec­trum, “the deci­sion to pull the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division out of the ‘Sunni Triangle’ city of Ramadi and to turn local secu­rity over to Iraqi offi­cers might be the most sig­nif­i­cant step since the U.S.-led occu­pa­tion began six and a half months ago,” Slate’s Fred Kaplan says. “If the Ramadi exper­i­ment suc­ceeds, it could serve as the road map to a respon­si­ble exit strat­egy. If it fails, it will dra­ma­tize the depths of our predica­ment, the utter lack of good options, the tenac­ity of the dare we say it? quag­mire that bogs us down.“
AND MORE: “The U.S. Air Force used some of the largest weapons in its inven­tory to attack tar­gets in cen­tral Iraq,” accord­ing to the Associated Press.
“A pair of 2,000-pound satellite-​​guided bombs were dropped late Tuesday near Baqouba, 30 miles north­east of Baghdad, on ‘camps sus­pected to have been used for bomb-​​making,’ said Maj. Gordon Tate, a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division.”

Posted in War Update | Comments Off

POLICY MARKET REDUX?

Tuesday, November 18th, 2003

The infa­mous “ter­ror futures mar­ket” may be on its way back.
Starting in March, 2004, Net Exchange — the pri­vate firm that was one of the con­trac­tors on the ini­tial Darpa project — will begin tak­ing “invest­ments” on world events. This time, how­ever, no gov­ern­ment money will be involved. And “vio­lent acts” will be taboo, too.
(via Cursor)

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

DARPA: HELP US FIND BOMBS, JAM CELLS

Tuesday, November 18th, 2003

“If you’ve got a good idea” for how to take on ter­ror­ists, Darpa and the influ­en­tial Defense Science Board write in e-​​mailed pleas, “turn it in as soon as pos­si­ble because we’ve got the money” for new anti-​​evil doer tech­nol­ogy.
Two areas are of par­tic­u­lar inter­est, Aviation Week notes: detect­ing the impro­vised explo­sive devices being used to pick off U.S. sol­diers in Iraq, and jam­ming the cell phones relied on to pass orders and trig­ger those explo­sives.
“The first few ground vehicle-​​mounted detec­tion and jam­ming devices from Darpa have just been deployed in Iraq,” the mag­a­zine says. But the range of these is pretty lim­ited.

“This is kind of sad,” a Navy offi­cial tells Aviation Week. “It can be per­ceived as a mark of des­per­a­tion, and [with more timely invest­ments] we shouldn’t have been put in that posi­tion.“
“Project Eyes,” man­dated by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper, is exam­in­ing exist­ing tech­nolo­gies to see if they can be applied quickly to the prob­lem…
However, when asked if the Air Force in par­tic­u­lar was orga­ni­za­tion­ally pre­pared to shift its long-​​endurance intelligence-​​gathering resources to focus on the spread­ing ter­ror­ist threat in Iraq, a senior ser­vice official’s reply was pun­gent: “Hell, no. Out of all the Air Force task forces, not one is focused on counter-​​terrorism.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

VIRUS BUILT FROM SCRATCH

Saturday, November 15th, 2003

Scientists, lead by the genome sequenc­ing pio­neer Craig Venter, “have built a virus from scratch in only two weeks,” Nature reports. “It is the sec­ond virus to be syn­the­sized from com­mer­cially avail­able ingre­di­ents. The first — a poliovirus com­pleted by Eckard Wimmer and his col­leagues in 2002 — took three years to make.“
Defense Tech reader JB says Venter’s break­through shows that, not too long from now, “it will be a triv­ial exer­cise for a rogue gov­ern­ment or other mod­er­ately sci­en­tif­i­cally sophis­ti­cated group to cre­ate mod­i­fied organ­isms for use as ter­ror weapons. The genomes of var­i­ous pathogens are already known, and mod­i­fi­ca­tion for increased vir­u­lence or com­mu­ni­ca­bil­ity, or even vaccine/​drug resis­tance, would be eas­ily achiev­able with some tar­geted exper­i­men­ta­tion.“
The CIA, appar­ently, shared JB’s gloomy views.
“Growing under­stand­ing of the com­plex bio­chem­i­cal path­ways that under­lie life processes has the poten­tial to enable a class of new, more vir­u­lent bio­log­i­cal agents engi­neered to attack dis­tinct bio­chem­i­cal path­ways and elicit spe­cific effects,” reads a CIA report, “The Darker Bioweapons Future.“
A few weeks ago, JB and Barbara Hatch Rosenberg form the Federation of American Scientists engaged in a semi-​​civil throw­down here at Defense Tech over the bioter­ror threat.

Posted in Chem-Bio | Comments Off

DARPA ROBO-​​RACE FINALISTS ANNOUNCED

Friday, November 14th, 2003

The teams for Darpa’s “Grand Challenge” — the $1 mil­lion all-​​drone road race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas — are set, says UV Online. And despite fears that only university-​​backed megacrews would qual­ify for the mid-​​March ride, sev­eral of the lit­tle guys have made the final cut.
A team from Palos Verdes High School in California will be run­ning. And so will Team LoGhIQ, the straight-​​out-​​of-​​college boys, pro­filed in this Wired News arti­cle of mine, who maxed out their credit cards to build their ‘bot.
Unfortunately, the way Darpa came to its deci­sion is a lit­tle shady. First, the Challenge was open to all teams. Then, agency offi­cials decided that only twenty teams could com­pete — and that they’d visit every drone-​​making site to decide which ones could run. Finally, they decided to pick 19 of the 20 teams, and only allow site vis­its to deter­mine who got the final slot, and the five alter­nate posi­tions.
Some teams, shut out of the process, say they’re going to start their own, “Civilian Grand Challenge,” to run side-​​by-​​side with Darpa’s race. But orga­niz­ing the event with so lit­tle time is going to be pretty-​​damn-​​near impos­si­ble.
THERE’S MORE: The rea­son the Grand Challenge is such a big deal is that the drones won’t be able to talk to their human mas­ters at all dur­ing the race.
Most of what are today called “autonomous” aer­ial or ground vehi­cles are, in fact, oper­ated from a human being in another loca­tion — souped-​​up radio-​​controlled toys, in other words. Each Global Hawk UAV, for exam­ple, has two or three flesh-​​and-​​blood oper­a­tors on the ground, plus a dozen peo­ple devoted to its main­ten­nance, StrategyPage observes.
That’s why pre­dic­tions of all-​​robot armies any time soon are so silly. And that’s why the Grand Challenge is such a big step.

Posted in Drones | Comments Off

ISRAELI DRONE COPTER STOLEN

Wednesday, November 12th, 2003

The money and the soft­ware, they didn’t touch. But thieves made off with an Israeli robotic heli­copter pro­to­type over the week­end, Globes reports.
The copter, made by the Israeli firm Steadicopter, was stolen a few days after its final tests flights, a com­pany spokesman claims.
(via /​.)

Posted in Drones | Comments Off

CIA: “GROWING CONCERN” ABOUT SYRIA NUKES

Wednesday, November 12th, 2003

“In a marked shift from pre­vi­ous assess­ments, the CIA said in a report released today that it is mon­i­tor­ing Syrian nuclear inten­tions with ‘grow­ing con­cern,’” Global Security Newswire says.

The unclas­si­fied semi­an­nual report, cov­er­ing a period from Jan. 1 to June 30 of this year… (noted) con­tin­ued Syrian-​​Russian agree­ments on nuclear coop­er­a­tion and Damascuss expanded access to for­eign nuclear-​​related exper­tise. Previous agency assess­ments of Syrian nuclear weapons efforts, how­ever, do not describe U.S. inter­est in Syrian nuclear activ­i­ties in such omi­nous lan­guage…
The CIA says that Syria con­tin­ued dur­ing the first half of this year to seek for­eign assis­tance to develop a solid-​​propellant rocket motor devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion capa­bil­ity. Syria has also relied on other nations, pri­mar­ily North Korea, for assis­tance with its liquid-​​propelled mis­sile pro­gram, the report says.
Concerning bio­log­i­cal and chem­i­cal weapons, the report says that it is highly prob­a­ble that Syria has con­tin­ued to work to develop an offen­sive bio­log­i­cal weapons capa­bil­ity and that Syria con­tin­ues to seek for­eign assis­tance and equip­ment for its chem­i­cal weapons program.

In equally grim news, today’s Newswire also reports that the “Iran has sys­tem­at­i­cally con­cealed wide-​​ranging nuclear activ­i­ties includ­ing the pro­duc­tion of small amounts of plu­to­nium and low-​​enriched ura­nium,” accord­ing to the International Atomic Energy Agency. However, “it is not clear whether the coun­try has tried to develop a nuclear weapon.”

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GOVERNMENT LAB KEYS LOST — AGAIN

Wednesday, November 12th, 2003

“A U.S. nuclear weapons lab­o­ra­tory must replace up to 100,000 locks at a cost of more than $1.6 mil­lion, after staff lost sev­eral sets of mas­ter keys to the com­plex, then failed to notify supe­ri­ors,” the Associated Press reports.

The extra­or­di­nary series of secu­rity blun­ders at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is out­lined in a scathing report by the U.S. Energy Department’s inspec­tor gen­eral.
According to the report, offi­cials at the lab­o­ra­tory have lost nine mas­ter keys and three mag­netic key cards to the top-​​secret research facil­ity. In some cases, offi­cials still do not know when or how the keys went miss­ing.
In at least one instance, a loss only came to light after a lock­smith blew the whis­tle on secu­rity offi­cers who tried to have dupli­cate mas­ter keys made to replace a set they had lost. Such mas­ter keys are only entrusted to a hand­ful of staff.


Awful stuff. But what’s truly creepy is that, in March, an almost iden­ti­cal inci­dent went down at the government’s Sandia weapons lab.

Posted in Los Alamos and Labs | Comments Off

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