STATE-RUN "TIA" EXPOSED

Long-time Defense Tech readers will be familiar with MATRIX -- the data-mining project, run by 10 state governments, that's eerily similar to Total Information Awareness.

Now, the ACLU has a rundown of this creepy program, which combs through credit card transactions, marriage records, and vehicle registration data to find alleged evil-doers. This report based mostly on newspaper articles. But it's the most complete profile to date of this largely-hidden program.

MATRIX (short for "Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange") "is designed not only to build dossiers on all of our lives so they will be a keystroke away for police and other government officials, but also to search through our dossiers and those of others in a hunt for patterns indicative of terrorist or other criminal activity," the report notes.

"It’s scary," says Phil Ramer, the intelligence chief for Florida, which is taking the lead on MATRIX. "It could be abused. I mean, I can call up everything about you, your pictures and pictures of your neighbors."

DARPA'S ROBOT ROAD RACE OFF-TRACK

One of Darpa's slickest PR moves in years was to sponsor a robotic road race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas -- with a million bucks in cash going to the winner.

But now, there's trouble brewing for Darpa's "Grand Challenge", four months before it's slated to begin. Over 100 teams have signed up to take part in the race. But, in a surprise announcement, Darpa is saying that all but 20 of them won't be allowed to ride.

"There are factors beyond DARPA's control that limit the number of vehicles that can participate in the Los Angeles to Las Vegas event," the race's program manager, Col. Jose A. Negron, writes in a letter to racers. "The need to comply with environmental regulations, ensure the safety of the participants and spectators, and complete the event within the number of available daylight hours limit what can be accomplished in one day. Given these constraints, our analysis leads us to believe that only 20 vehicles can be allowed to run the Grand Challenge route."

How will the 20 teams be picked? By who spent the most? By who's got the fastest robot car? The letter doesn't say.

(via Robots.net)

IRAQI TERROR KINGPIN FOUND?

One of the things that has made the guerilla attacks in Iraq so damn scary is that the people behind them has been a mystery. There's no Osama, no Arafat to blame for the carnage.

Now, CNN claims to have found a mastermind: General Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, the northern regional commander in Saddam's military.

"Al-Duri, the 'King of Clubs' in the U.S. military's 'most wanted' deck of cards, is the highest-ranking member of the Saddam Hussein regime still at large, except for Saddam himself," CNN notes.

The network says "Pentagon officials" -- relying on confessions by freshly-captured members of the Ansar Al-Islam terror group -- have fingered Al-Duri as the kingpin.

It's a big breakthrough, if true. But, as with all "first reports," take this one with a grain of salt...

THERE'S MORE: "Senior American officials" now say there's evidence that Saddam may be behind the insurgency.

Of course, this "role by Mr. Hussein could not be corroborated, and one senior official cautioned that recent intelligence reports contained conflicting assessments," according to the Times.

Hmm... Front page claims, backed by hazy intelligence... This all sounds so familiar, somehow...

AND MORE: "Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said on Friday that he saw no signs that Saddam Hussein was active in coordinating attacks on American forces in Iraq," Reuters reports.

"I don't know where he is or what he's doing, but we really don't have the evidence to put together a claim that he is pulling all the strings among these remnants in Baghdad and other parts of the country that are causing us the difficulty," Mr. Powell said on the ABC News program "Nightline," according to a transcript.

He also cast doubt on reports that one of Mr. Hussein's deputies, Izzat Ibrahim, was behind the attacks, saying, "I see no evidence to support that."

LIGHT HEALS -- BUT WHY?

Tiny flashes of infrared light can play a role in healing wounds, building muscle, turning back the worst effects of diabetes and repairing blinded eyes -- on this much, scientists and doctors agree. But what they can't decide on is why all these seemingly miraculous effects happen in the first place.

For more than a decade, researchers have been studying how light-emitting diodes, or LEDs -- miniscule, ultra-efficient bulbs like the ones found in digital clocks and television remotes -- might aid in the recuperative process. NASA, the Pentagon and dozens of hospitals have participated in clinical trials. Businesses have sold commercial LED zappers to nursing homes and doctors' offices. Magazines and television crews have drooled on cue. Medicare has even approved some LED therapy.

Despite all that effort, "there's not a clear idea of how this works. There are just working hypotheses," said Marti Jett, chief of the molecular pathology department at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

One possibility comes from Dr. Harry Whelan, a colleague of Jett's and a neurology professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin. In a 2002 study backed by the National Institutes of Health and the Persistence in Combat program from the Pentagon's research arm, Whelan used LEDs to restore the vision of blinded rats. Toxic doses of methanol damaged the rats' retinas. But after exposure to the flashes of infrared light, up to 95 percent of the injuries were repaired.

Human trials have been less dramatic, but still shockingly effective. Using a Food and Drug Administration-approved, handheld LED -- playfully called Warp 10 for its Star Trek style -- wound-healing time was cut in half on board the USS Salt Lake City, a nuclear sub. Diode flashes improved healing of Navy SEALs' training injuries by more than 40 percent. And a Warp 10 prototype was used by U.S. Special Forces units in Iraq, Whelan asserts.

These LEDs originally were developed by NASA to stimulate plant growth. Now, the agency wants to use the gadgets to build astronauts' muscles during weightlessness. DNA synthesis in muscle cells quintupled after a single application of LEDs flashing at the 680-, 730- and 880-nanometer wavelengths, according to Whelan.

How exactly all this happened remains a mystery, Jett said. She's identified more than 20 genes that typically are associated with retinal damage, for example, and "the LED alters all of them."

My Wired News story has more on the puzzling power of LEDs.

GOV'T WEBSITES YANKED

Knowledge is the enemy. And the Web is his ally.

That's the clear-cut message the Bush administration is sending. Across the government, previously public information is being taken off-line, Secrecy News shows. Here are three of the most recent examples:

- The influential Defense Science Board has removed its list of members. A spokesman cited post-9/11 security regulations as the reason. "He didn't explain how deleting the names of corporate CEOs and others who advise the government on defense policy was likely to increase security against terrorism," Secrecy News notes. (You can find the Board members' names here.)

- The online Center for Army Lessons Learned has been taken down, after the Washington Post reported on an "unusually blunt" report from the website on the inadequacies of U.S. military intelligence in Iraq.

- The White House is preventing Google and other search engines from locating key documents on its website. Files referring to Iraq seem to be particularly verboten.

Two weeks ago, some of the country's top current and former spies blasted the Bushies for their penchant for secrecy.

Rich Haver -- until recently Donald Rumsfeld's special assistant for intelligence -- said, "It's causing a total meltdown of our intelligence processes."

THERE'S MORE: Phil Carter notes that a copy of the Iraq after-action report can be found here.

AND MORE: The White House has changed its website policies, and search engines can now access the entire site.

NEW SCRUTINY FOR BOEING DEAL

For months, watchdog groups like the Project on Government Oversight have been howling about the Air Force's deal with Boeing to lease 100 tankers -- even though the lease would cost $5.6 billion more than buying the planes outright.

Now, the national press' major players are starting to catch up. Today, New York Times columnist David Brooks called the deal "the Encyclopaedia Britannica of shady. It's as if somebody spent years trying to gather every single sleazy aspect of modern Washington and cram it all into one legislative effort."

Yesterday, the Washington Post examined on its front-page the sordid machinations surrounding the Boeing contract in excruciating detail. And the paper profiles the "Dragon Lady" who helped ram the deal through.

CONGRESSMEN: NO TO SPACE PLANE

Congressional overseers may put the brakes on the Orbital Space Plane -- NASA's planned near-Earth ship to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

In a letter, Leaders of the House Science Committee told NASA chief Sean O'Keefe that work on the Plane should be put on ice until "we - the Congress, the White House, and NASA - have reached any agreement... on appropriate NASA goals for human space flight" and on how the craft fits in with those plans.

TERRORISTS COULD BREED NEW POX

"With a basic level of biological training, terrorists could modify smallpox or monkeypox viruses and create a previously unseen strain of biological weapon," Global Security Newswire reports.

Monkeypox is the easier of the two to make and get, says St. Louis University virologist Mark Buller. But it's less lethal -- with a mortality rate around 10 percent. The Newswire notes that "a strain of monkeypox was brought into the United States by a pet giant Gambian rat earlier this year, but there were no fatalities among the 49 reported cases."

Earlier this month, Defense Tech heavyweights duked it out over whether terrorists would ever take the time to breed a new, pox-based biological monster.

RASHID ATTACK DETAILS EMERGE

Details are emerging from the weekend's deadly attack on the al-Rashid hotel in Baghdad that injured 16 people and barely missed Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz:

The missiles were launched from an improvised multirocket platform, a homemade version of the Katyusha system used by Russia, military officials said. The Irish Republican Army has used similar systems.

The launcher was hidden in a blue trailer made to resemble a mobile electricity generator, a ubiquitous item in Baghdad, where electrical service is unreliable. In the quiet of early Sunday morning, a white passenger vehicle towed the trailer down a major street that runs between the hotel and a large park. It was then unhitched at a cloverleaf that had been closed by the Americans for security reasons. The car pulled away. Soon after, at 6:08 a.m., 8 to 10 missiles thudded into the hotel, about 450 yards away, officials said.

The casualties could have been higher; 11 missiles failed to fire because of electrical or mechanical malfunctions. In addition, the wheel base of the trailer had been booby-trapped with explosives, which American soldiers deactivated.

Altogether, the launcher held 40 missile pods, said Brig. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the First Armored Division, whose responsibility is the security of Baghdad. General Dempsey spoke Sunday evening at a news conference held in a building in a compound near the Rashid Hotel.

Half the missiles were 68-millimeter, which have a range of two to three miles; the other half were 85-millimeter, with a three- to four-mile range, he said. The smaller ones were French-made, and designed for use by helicopters. The others were Russian. The French rockets, officers said, were quite new, and were probably purchased after the arms embargo was in place. They were in pristine condition,'' said one military officer who inspected the rocket tubes and assembly.

Mr. Hussein had weapons of that type, but General Dempsey said he did not know if the missiles used the hotel attack came from Mr. Hussein's arsenal.

General Dempsey described the device as clever, but not sophisticated.'' He called it a science project in a garage with a welder and a battery and a handful of wires.''

That such an unsophisticated device could be used against one of the most fortified and well-guarded sites in Baghdad raised questions about the military's ability to secure any major site in Baghdad. The compound is surrounded by high concrete walls, but the missiles were fired over them...

A New York Times reporter traveling with Mr. Wolfowitz was a few rooms from where one of the rockets hit. Looking across the street, he saw the trailer from which the rockets had been fired, and saw one projectile coming at the hotel, trailing sparks.

The Times also reports that bombings at five police stations and the Baghdad office of the Red Cross have killed 34 people and wounded 224 more.

"It puts us back into combat operations," Lt. Col. Eric Nantz, a battalion commander with the 82nd Airborne Division's 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, tells the Washington Post. "It's not where we want to be. It's not where the Iraqi people want us to be."

NEW SOLDIER SUITS SIMPLIFIED

"The Army is drastically simplifying the makeup of its high-tech soldier ensemble, the Land Warrior, in an effort to make the system less prone to failures and easier to use," National Defense reports.

"After the last version of Land Warrior failed reliability tests earlier this year, the Army switched gears and decided to make the system less complex and modify the hardware to make it compatible with the new [and controversial] Stryker infantry vehicle. The so-called Land Warrior Stryker Interoperable (LWSI) is scheduled to be completed by 2006...

"The LW SI will have a single processor. The previous LW had a dual processor, which frequently malfunctioned. Other changes include a more simplified data bus and a Linux-based operating system, as opposed to Windows. 'Evidence shows that Linux is more stable. We are moving in general to where the Army is going, to Linux-based OS,'" says the program's manager, Lt. Col. Dave Gallop.

FBI HUNTING SECRETS ONLINE

The Justice Department may let the FBI "conduct a search-and-destroy mission on any computers harboring classified information about a 1980s case that temporarily became public in a lawsuit," the Associated Press reports. "A federal judge previously rejected the idea."

The initial request from federal prosecutors in Sacramento, Calif., was considered highly unusual by legal experts because it did not specify which computers the government believed might contain the classified information or how agents would retrieve and destroy information already made public...

At issue are two court filings in a suit by a former FBI counterintelligence agent. The documents include brief references to a one-month undercover trip overseas in late 1987 by the agent, Lok T. Lau, who was fired for shoplifting more than a decade later and is suing over his dismissal.

The documents - still containing the classified material - were available from the courthouse for up to 19 days. Copies have been published on the Internet, including the Web site for the Sacramento-based California First Amendment Coalition, an open-government group.

(Thanks to Defense Tech reader JI)

NEW SPY GEAR FOR IRAQ

The Pentagon is rushing new gear out of its labs and into Iraq, in an attempt to thwart guerilla attacks, the New York Times reports in a maddeningly-vague story today.

New Defense Department spending "would include $38.3 million for tethered blimps equipped with digital cameras to spy on guerrillas' movements, more than $30 million for electronic jammers to disrupt their remote-controlled bombs, and $70 million to develop and buy what the letter called other 'rapid-reaction/new solution' technologies.

"Some devices would help detect roadside bombs and booby traps that have been killing American-led occupation forces, (Darpa chief Anthony) Tether said. These countermeasures use a variety of approaches including lasers, acoustic sensors and electromagnetic technologies, he said. He said the devices would be shipped in the next three to four months or sooner, after accelerated, last-minute development and testing."

THERE'S MORE: New Scientist has details on the technologies -- including a laser system to home in on snipers by finding "the tiny particles caught in the ballistic shockwave generated by a shot."

KEEPING THE SONS OF "TIA" IN CHECK

On this, everyone in the gold-tinged, eagle-frescoed Senate conference room agreed: Federal authorities badly want to be able to comb the data trails of ordinary people in order to spot terrorists. But what -- if any -- limits should be put on that frighteningly invasive power? A panel of lawmakers, think tankers, data miners and civil libertarians assembled here Tuesday couldn't even begin to make up their minds.

Congress has yanked the funding for Terrorism Information Awareness, the Pentagon's notorious überdatabase effort. But research into TIA-like projects continues, essentially unrestricted. Tomes of regulations tell spooks and cops and g-men how they can amass intelligence and gather evidence. But much of the data mined by these children of TIA -- like itineraries, school transcripts and credit card receipts -- might not fall under those traditional definitions. There's only a vague sense that these database-combing programs can't be allowed to grow out of control.

"When somebody buys a ticket on Delta Airlines in Munich, Germany, if there's any potential for (that person to have) a suspicious background, I want bells and whistles to go off on that computer," Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) told the group of 25 or so policy makers assembled in the Russell Senate Office Building's third floor by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank. But Congress "won't allow (intelligence) agencies" to "truly gather information on people's personal lives."

Nice words. But as Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, notes, "none of us really have the answer" for how to put them into action.

My Wired News report from Washington has more.

THERE'S MORE: As usual, Phil Carter has got some interesting things to say about this. Check 'em out here.

PATRIOT HYPE, PATRIOT REALITY

A new picture of the Patriot missile's performance in Gulf War II is emerging -- and it's not the happy scene we were all shown on television last spring.

As recently as last week, the Army claimed that it had a perfect intercept record during Operation Iraqi Freedom. But that's "at best, a wild twisting of the facts," Victoria Samson, with the Center for Defense Information (CDI), says.

She's examined a new report from the Army's 32d Army Air and Missile Defense Command which looks at how the Patriots performed. And that study contradicts the military's ballistic boosterism.

"According to the Army's own report, 23 Iraqi missile launches are documented. Subtract the nine reported intercepts, and take away the one Iraqi missile that blew itself up shortly after launch and the four which were out of Patriot range, and that leaves nine missiles which should have been intercepted and were not. A 100% interception rate glosses over what actually happened in the battlefield," she writes. (emphasis mine)

CDI's analysis -- including a day-by-day breakdown of OIF's missile battles -- here.

ALL-SEEING SATELLITES BEGIN TO FOCUS

The Space Based Radar -- the Pentagon's proposed series of all-seeing satellites -- is moving forward. Raytheon just picked up a $37.4 million contract to build a pre-prototype array of sensors for the network of eyes in the sky, scheduled for 2012.

The job, to be finished by next September, calls for the development of a unit combining cloud-piercing ground synthetic aperture radar, moving target indication, and digital terrain elevation data.

Last month, SAIC inked a deal worth up to $139.4 million for system integration work on the project.

REPEATING INTEL BLUNDERS

It's bad enough that the Bush White House totally misgauged Saddam's nuclear weapons program. But now they're making matters worse, by turning their method for reaching such cockeyed conclusions into a template for future intelligence operations.

The reason the Bushies got so hysterical about a nuclear Iraq, explains the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, is that they insisted on "direct access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign agent reports."

In the past, professional spooks analyzed information before passing it on, "to prevent raw intelligence from getting to people who would be misled." But under Dubya, that all changed.

Hersh shows in his story how one piece of unscrubbed data – the now- infamously forged "Yellowcake" documents from Niger – bypassed the normal vetting process, and was tapped directly by administration bigwigs, who misused the papers utterly.

But that's in the past. Having learned their lesson with the Niger debacle, the administration must have changed its mind. It trusts its professional analysts now, right?

Wrong. Last week, at the Geo-Intel conference in New Orleans, Thomas Behling, the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, told an audience of spooks and geeks that the America's future intelligence architecture will rely on giving policy-makers "direct access to the data."

"Disintermediation is going to happen to the intelligence business," he added.

In the Internet world, that's a buzzword for a good thing: getting needless middlemen out of the way.

In the intelligence world, however, disintermediation increasingly sounds like something very bad.

PENTAGON WANTS LITTLE NUKES

A yet-to-be-released study by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board "recommends developing a range of lower-yield nuclear weapons because the current US arsenal 'is not adequate to [meet] future national security needs," Jane's Defence Weekly reports. "The thinking, a senior military official explained, is that atomic weapons with smaller explosive yields would be seen as more credibly used, thus increasing their deterrence power against potential adversaries."

The envisaged new arsenal is not to be confused with the notion of much smaller "mini-nukes" that have gained notoriety over the past year. Instead, the study’s proposed new weapons will be an evolution of existing nuclear weapons... adapted to produce lower yields as well as "special effects" such as an enhanced electromagnetic pulse...

The study also proposes dramatic increases in non-nuclear capabilities, but several would entail serious treaty repercussions. Most prominently, it calls for MX Peacekeeper ICBMs to be converted, by 2010, to carry conventional explosives at an initial research and deployment cost of US$950 million. Another recommendation calls for development of a new 1500 nautical mile range submarine-launched ballistic missile, also topped with conventional warheads.

SUPERSONIC ERA CLOSES

When the Concorde lands for the final time at London's Heathrow Airport on Oct. 24, it'll be the last chance in a generation for commercial air passengers to pierce the sound barrier, aviation analysts say.

The Concordes are marvels of engineering and design, radically different from the cookie-cutter jets that crowd the skies. Legions of fans list their Concorde flights among the high points of their lives.

But the economics of operating an aging, fuel-chomping, deafeningly loud fleet of supersonic jets have become too cumbersome for British Airways and Air France. And the financial barriers to creating new, ultra-fast planes are too high for any other commercial carrier to start flying at Mach speed any time in the near future.

While research into new, supersonic technology continues across the globe, most of these efforts are geared toward the military. Many won't be ready for decades to come.

Check out my Wired News article for the rest of the story.

THERE'S MORE: Aviation Week looks at the Pentagon's plans for a breed of missiles that can go Mach 4, or faster.

FBI: LOST IN TRANSLATION

"Every day, (FBI) wiretaps and bugs... record hundreds of hours of conversations conducted in Arabic or other Middle Eastern languages like Farsi. Those conversations must all be translated into English — and quickly — if investigators are to head off budding Qaeda plots against the United States," Newsweek notes.

"Today, more than two years after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI is still woefully short of translators....

"Every week, say informed sources, hundreds of hours of tapes from wiretaps and bugs pile up in secure lockers, waiting, sometimes for months on end, to be deciphered."

FEDS WANT ALL-SEEING EYE IN THE SKY

An all-seeing, omnipresent set of eyes in the sky: that's the collective goal of the spooks, suits, generals, and geeks gathered this week in New Orleans to discuss the future of satellites in war, homeland security, and spycraft.

But talking about this Big Brother vision in a hotel ballroom is proving to be a whole lot easier than executing it in orbit. Several of the satellite systems which figure to be steps towards this globe-watching goal are wrapped in controversy, cost overruns, or long delays.

There's more in my Wired News story from the Geo-Intel conference.

SPIES ATTACK WHITE HOUSE SECRECY

There's a "total meltdown" in America's intelligence services -- and the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy is one of the major reasons why, current and former top U.S. spooks charged Tuesday.

George W. Bush's White House has pushed like few before it to put government information out of the public's grasp. Moves to classify documents are up 400 percent from a decade ago, to more than 23 million such actions in 2002, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, a division of the National Archives.

But despite their cloak-and-dagger reputation, several of the country's leading spies, past and present, aren't happy about the rush to make things secret. To counter far-reaching, stealthy terrorist cabals, the country needs more openness, not less, they said Wednesday at Geo-Intel 2003, a first-of-its-kind conference here on the use of satellites in war, intelligence and homeland security.

"Our secrecy system is all about protecting secrecy officers, and has nothing to do with protecting secrets. It's a self-licking ice-cream cone," said Rich Haver, until recently Donald Rumsfeld's special assistant for intelligence, now with Northrop Grumman. "We're compartmentalizing the shit out of things. It's causing a total meltdown of our intelligence processes."

My Wired News report from New Orleans has more.

RUMSFELD WANTS 100 BASES SHUT

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is planning to cut at least 100 of the nation's 425 military bases," reports the Los Angeles Times. That's "more closures than in the four previous rounds of base closures combined."

"Rumsfeld is expected to submit to the congressional Base Closure and Realignment Commission a plan to shutter as many as one-third of Army bases, one-quarter of Air Force bases and a smaller percentage of Marine Corps and Navy bases."

The cuts -- if Congress agrees to them -- would begin in 2005.

(via Atrios)

MONEY FOR THOUGHT-CONTROLLED ROBOTS SLASHED

By now, you've probably heard about the Duke University effort to control a robotic arm with a monkey's mind. You might have read that the science is being partially funded by Darpa, the Pentagon's research arm, through its "Brain Machine Interface" project.

But what's far less known is that, despite the splashy breakthrough, Congress is aiming to cut the money for the Brain Machine Interface program by more than half.

It's one of a number of Darpa biology projects Senate budgeteers tried to kill earlier this year. Others include the "Immune Building" effort (to make a structure invulnerable to biochem attack) and the "Continuous Assisted Performance" program (to help soldiers go without sleep).

The House partially revived these efforts. But the Brain Machine Interface project is still slated to see its $17 million budget trimmed by $10 million.

THERE'S MORE: Robots that can do martial arts moves were shown off this week at a Tokyo technology fair.

UNGUARDED ARMS FUELING IRAQ ATTACKS

Virtually every guerilla attack in Iraq is being "carried out with explosives and matériel taken from Saddam Hussein's former weapons dumps, which are much larger than previously estimated and remain, for the most part, unguarded by American troops," the New York Times reports.

The problem of uncounted and unguarded weapons sites is considerably greater than has previously been stated, a senior allied official said.

The American military now says that Iraq's army had nearly one million tons of weapons and ammunition, which is half again as much as the 650,000 tons that Gen. John P. Abizaid, the senior American commander in the Persian Gulf region, estimated only two weeks ago...

A private American company, Raytheon, has been awarded a contract to destroy the weapons, but it will not begin work until December, one official said.

BIODEFENSE DEBATE RAGES

My story earlier this week on overblown fears about biological and chemical threats has generated an unexpectedly intense debate. Brandon Keim, with the Council for Responsible Genetics, is the latest to weigh in:

The amount of money being spent by the Bush administration to build new bioterror research facilities could, if spent internationally, do such things as eradicate malaria or vaccinate millions of children; emerging infectious diseases in the developing world pose far more of a threat than 'bioterrorists'.

Moreover, the best defense against biological terrorism is a sturdy public health infrastructure -- one with proper training and equipment, open lines of communication, and (most importantly) the widest possible coverage of the population. Needless to say, the public health system under the Bush administration has corroded with alarming rapidity, most visibly in the millions of people who have lost health coverage -- and as a result might delay seeking medical care at the beginning of a disease outbreak, when time is most of the essence.

SAVING PVT. RYAN... FROM PAIN

It's a scene that's been repeated thousands of times on hundreds of battlefields: A soldier is hit by gunfire or shrapnel. He calls out for a medic, who tries to stabilize him on the spot and arranges for the injured warrior to be taken to a field hospital. And then, the soldier is gone -- maybe for the rest of the conflict.

But with the pace of American military missions getting faster and faster, losing GIs to injuries becomes an increasingly ugly option: Units that stay together fight better, military analysts say. And with soldiers operating in smaller groups -- think of the Special Forces combing the mountains of Afghanistan -- there often isn't a medic around to provide aid.

So Pentagon-funded scientists and doctors are working on a suite of technologies and treatments to let soldiers heal themselves, just about instantly. Acute pain and blood loss will be controlled in five minutes or less, if the program is successful. And an injured GI, assuming the wounds are not too severe, can stay alive and fighting on the battlefield for up to 96 hours -- without the help of a medic, without being evacuated.

The technologies, developed under a broad Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency effort called Persistence in Combat, all sound pretty far-fetched: a painkiller soldiers could take -- before they get hurt; a sensor that scans the eye for internal trauma; a bandage that stimulates skin repair with electrical impulses. But several of these projects are surprisingly close to reality, with human trials either underway or about to begin.

My Wired News article has more.

FBI ADMITS SCREW-UP IN DEMAND FOR REPORTERS' NOTES

The FBI's orders to reporters (including me) to keep their notes about alleged hacker Adrian Lamo "were based on improper legal authority," the bureau admitted to The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

In the middle of last month, the FBI called me -- and then sent letters to at least 13 reporters -- demanding that we preserve all our records related to Lamo, who's been charged with breaking into the New York Times' network.

In response to a protest letter from the Reporters Committee questioning the FBI's tactics, Deputy General Counsel Patrick Kelly wrote that the statute used to justify the order "does not apply under the circumstances of this case." The statute, the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act, is meant to apply to Internet Service Providers, not journalists...

Yesterday, a Justice Department spokesman said FBI agent Christine Howard did not follow procedure when requesting records from the media. Media subpoenas must be cleared through internal review at the FBI and approved by the Attorney General's office.

In his response to the Reporters Committee, Kelly enclosed an example of a new letter, dated Oct. 7, that has been sent to each reporter who was previously contacted by the FBI. Although the new letter retracts the threat of obstruction of justice charges for noncompliance with the request, it asks the reporters to "voluntarily take appropriate action to preserve relevant records and materials."

The new letter hasn't come yet.

STUDY: SONAR KILLING WHALES

The Navy has been tussling with environmentalists for years over a new breed of ultra-loud sonars and how they effect whales.

Now, a new Nature study "provides some of the most direct evidence to date that sonars can kill marine mammals."

"A team led by Paul Jepson of the Institute of Zoology in London concludes that 14 whale deaths off the Canary Islands last year may have been caused by decompression sickness after the animals shot to the surface to escape sonars during Spanish-led international naval exercises. The team says the sonar appears to have caused gas bubbles to form in the blood, damaging the whales' livers and kidneys.

John Hildebrand, with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, tells Nature that "this report has the potential to be the 'smoking gun' on the cause of sonar-related mammal strandings."

But, according to Knight-Ridder, other top marine mammal watchers are skeptical. Darlene Ketten, with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute tells the news service unlikely that whales getting decompression sickness seems unlikely.

"We expect that these animals over 50 million years evolved to avoid problems resulting from diving," Ketten says.

PANEL: REVIEW BIORESEARCH FOR TERROR CONNEX

"Despite scientists' general distaste for any constraints on research, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences yesterday recommended prior review, at the university and federal levels, of experiments that could help terrorists or hostile nations make biological weapons," the New York Times reports.

Though physicists have long lived with the fact that certain areas of research are classified and cannot be discussed openly, biologists are relatively new to security concerns. Apart from biological defense research, done mostly at military institutions, academic biology is focused on medicine and conducted without security restraints...

The panel's work seems likely to be palatable to many scientists, but it remains to be seen if those concerned with national security will be satisfied.

BIGGER WORRIES THAN BIOCHEM

Lost in the hullabaloo over David Kay's report on Iraq's unconventional arms are some pretty basic questions. Like, why all the hysteria about biological and chemical weapons in the first place? And why is America spending billions to defend against on a large-scale biochem attack that'll almost certainly never come?

Maybe the hyperventilating news accounts are true, that Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups have tried to get their hands on such agents. But without the expertise and funding of a state sponsor like Iraq, it's almost impossible to pull off the attack of Biblical significance that the press has been wailing about for so long.

Heck, even with a state sponsor, it's extremely difficult. Lots and lots of money and expertise and needed. Environmental conditions have to be just right; a strong breeze or a light snow will neuter a big chunk of biological strikes.

So it's no surprise that, since 1900, there have been only 40 recorded bio-attacks. Compare that to conventional terrorist strikes, the ones using guns and bombs. There have been more than 650 of them worldwide -- just since the start of 2002, observes Gary Ackerman, with the Center for Nonprofileration Studies, in a soon-to-be-published article. What's more, "there has never been a single bioterrorist incident with more than 15 fatalities -- an all-too-common occurrence when terrorists use conventional weapons," he writes.

Despite this, the Department of Homeland Security's 2004 budget, signed into law last Wednesday, allocates nearly $900 million for "Project BioShield," an effort to prep vaccines and treatments for biological and other threats; $88 million for the "National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center," to protect people and crops from germ attacks; $38 million for air filters to catch pathogens; $84 million for the public health system, to treat biological and chemical-attack victims; the list goes on, just about endlessly. And it doesn't even begin to touch the $1.2 billion the Pentagon wants to spend next year on chem-bio detection, the $1.6-or-so billion from the National Institutes of Health, or the $600 million that President Bush wants to spend to keep looking for Saddam's unconventional stash.

My Tech Central Station article has more.

THERE'S MORE: A number of people wrote in, expressing upset with this story. But JB -- a doctor -- was the most eloquent, by far. Here's what he had to say:

Your analysis and conclusions are probably correct, with regard to both chemical weapons and biotoxins such as botulinum.

But they are utterly and dangerously incorrect when applied to biological agents that can infect humans, reproduce and amplify themselves and then spread to other people. Then it is not a question of quantity or dispersion, but of creating an agent with the right incubation period, mode of transmission and lethality, and then introducing it into the target environment in the proper way.

All of which is, unfortunately, now easy.

You may have heard of the Australian mousepox experiments, the news of which made quite a stir in interested circles a year and a half ago or so. Researchers, in an effort to use mousepox virus (a normally mild, nonlethal murine infection) as a vector for a cytokine (IL-4) to induce inflammation in infected mice and suppress their reproduction, found that the insertion of the gene for that cytokine turned this little nothing disease into a fatal one, and that previously useful mousepox vaccine became fairly ineffective, to boot.

Note that mousepox is related to the virus that causes human smallpox, that you can buy the necessary materials mail order easy as you please, and that the technology for inserting a gene for this or something else into an existing viral genome is trivial, and could be done by any grad student in the subject with access to any reasonable university or industrial molecular bio/genetics lab.

This, of course, is just an example. You could just as well modify Ebola virus to extend its non-prostrating contagious period a little, so epidemics would spread instead of burning out, etc. etc.

The danger is acute. We are now in a period of time, which may last 10 years or so (no one knows), in which the ability to create such genetically modified killers is widespread, but the ability to identify, respond to, and neutralize them quickly enough to avert catastrophe, has not yet developed. And every day's news reminds us that the irrational evil that would not for a moment hesitate to use such a weapon continues to exist in the world.

By downplaying the need to use all available methods and strategies (including, of course, pre-emptive military action when necessary) to prevent this threat from killing millions of innocents is wrong.

AND MORE: Barbara Rosenberg, with the Federation of American Scientists, calls JB's warning the "typical response of the scientist who knows nothing about BW (biological weapons)."

He says it is easy. Ha. No terrorist group would waste time and resources to genetically engineer a new agent and test the result, including field tests of delivery etc etc. when they can get a bigger, faster and far more reliable bang by simple, conventional means. Extending the incubation time of ebola is not something you take off the shelf. Furthermore, the uncontrollable epidemic scenario is vastly exaggerated. Ask public health officials who have seen smallpox epidemics.

Incidentally, the mousepox experiment increased lethality, not infectivity. Existing agents are already sufficiently lethal.

He's right, we need to be able to respond quickly to outbreaks -- but no intentional outbreak will ever rival what nature already does (while few in the developed world pay any attention).

AND MORE: The tone of the piece was that defending against biological weapons is pointless because they have never killed more than 15 people per given incident," writes Defense Tech pal Wyatt Earp.

"But that's not accurate because bioweapons have killed more than 15 people per incident in the past. Bioterror is just a spin-word for an act of war using biological weapons. And biological weapons while not changing the outcome of wars, have inflicted mass casualties on civilian populations during warfare and have killed more than 15 people (during anthrax leaks) in Russia.

AND MORE: James Lewis, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, forwards on an article (unavailable online, sorry) that basically says the worry over bio-terror began when Bill Clinton started reading apocalyptic novels like the Cobra Event and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six.

AND MORE: Defense Tech reader DS reminds us to "keep in mind (that) setting priorities is always hardest at the outset of war. Over time, have faith that the USA will get its act together."

AND MORE: RS, a distinguished Defense Tech reader, says to check out the Adrienne Mayor's Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare inthe Ancient World. (The Times did a story on Tuesday keyed off of the book.)

Biochem warfare "all started in -- I swear by the Gas Mask of Gilgamesh -- Sumeria, circa 1700 BC," RS notes. That "provides Iraq with considerable wiggle room, as thay can claim that anything Dave Kay digs up is just war surplus from Tilgath Pileser's last hit on Uruk."

AND MORE: "When deciding where to allocate resources, one must take into account not only the probability of the threat, but its potential consequences," JB fires back at Barbara Rosenberg. "While a conventional suicide bomber or another plane hijacking are certainly much more probable than the scenarios we are discussing here, the deaths and civilizational disruptions they would cause would be trivial in comparison to a successful biological or nuclear attack."

PENTAGON: MISSILE DEFENSE EASY AS PLAYING BALL

Shooting down missiles only seems hard. But, really, it's as easy as throwing a ball in the air – at least, according to the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency.

"Imagine trying to hit a ball that has been thrown towards you with another ball in mid air," the Agency says on its website. "Better yet, TRY IT!"

What you need:
• Two, synthetic foam (or equivalent) soft-sided balls
• At least one friend to help

Directions:
1. Decide which of you will be the target missile and which will be the interceptor.
2. The person who is the target missile throws her or his ball into the air in an arch (as if it is a missile following the curve of the Earth) toward the other person with the interceptor ball.
3. The person with the interceptor ball then needs to try and hit the target ball with the interceptor ball, knocking it away before the target ball is able to hit him or her.

A five-launch test of the game by Global Security Newswire "resulted in four misses and one midcourse hit that failed to significantly alter the path of the target."

But that may not be such an unrealistic ratio. After all, recent anti-missile tests have flopped spectacularly. A former Pentagon testing director recently said the current missile defense plan was "simply not up to the job." And an American Physical Society report said that catching a missile as it was launching would be an extremely difficult task for America's current and near-future anti-missile technologies.

MDA spokesman Chris Taylor told Global Security Newswire that the ball game just a way to entertain "a younger audience and people that surf the Web."

If that's the case, consider John Pike, with GlobalSecurity.org, a fuddy-duddy. He says, "They've got too much time on their hands. I mean, it’s not even a good game."

THERE'S MORE: "Despite their attempt to make missile defense a hands-on physics experiment, what the Missile Defense Agency really shows is that missile defense is a losing game most of the time," Philip Coyle, the former Pentagon testing chief, writes.

It's not impossible to win; once in a while you may get lucky with your Nerf ball... (But) unlike Nerf balls, intercontinental ballistic missiles travel at thousands of miles per hour. Try the game by hurling golf balls or steel ball bearings, instead of Nerf balls, and you'll get the idea. And maybe a few broken windows. too.

Recently the American Physical Society, a group of U.S. professional physicists, reported why missile defense in the boost-phase is so difficult. You have to be very close and very fast, or you'll miss. Try it with Nerf balls and you'll see that the physicists are correct.

Also, unlike Nerf balls, ICBMs can dispense decoys and countermeasures in the middle of flight that look just like real warheads. Sort of like a Nerf ball cloning itself in mid flight. Try the game where the attacker throws a handful of Nerf balls, not just one. You won't be able to tell which one to go after.

In the terminal phase, the game gets even more interesting. If the attacker throws a ball close to the defender, the defender has a chance, although not a good one. But if the attacker throws Nerf balls at targets all over the back yard (think of the back yard as the United States), the poor defender can't cover the back yard with enough Nerf balls to do the job. The size of the "defended area" is critical in terminal defense.

Finally, try the game where the attacker just hurls his Nerf ball straight at the defender, not upward in a long looping arc. That's like a cruise missile. Cruise missiles fly at low altitude, skimming under the defender's radar. Saddam Hussein proved that this works during the war in Iraq. His cruise missiles were not even detected by the U.S. Patriot anti-missile system, and so they were not shot down. Fortunately, Saddam's cruise missiles didn't hit anyone, the result of lousy targeting and guidance systems on his cruise missiles.

AND MORE: Oh, dear God. There's not only a missile defense nerf game. There's a coloring book, too.

BUSH RILING LIBERTARIANS

I've got a story in today's American Prospect, about libertarians' growing frustration with the Bush administration:

Alina Stefanescu is in the middle of a crisis. The Romanian-born, Alabama-raised 25-year-old has been a libertarian since the 10th grade. A hardcore one. An activist. An academic. A brainiac foot soldier in the broad conservative movement so committed to the cause, she used to wear an Ollie North T-shirt to class in her Tuscaloosa high school. So when there's been a choice between a Democrat and a Republican, Stefanescu has gone with the GOP just about every time.

But all that seems to be changing. The Bush White House's heavy-handed approach to the war on terrorism, its spendthrift fiscal plan and its adventures overseas have soured Stefanescu on the GOP. And she's not the only one.

Libertarians across the country are slowly beginning to question their Republican loyalties. And if they break with the GOP -- or even decide to sit out the 2004 election -- it could be as bad for George W. Bush as the alienation of the religious right was for his dad in 1992.

PENTAGON SOLD BIO-LAB GEAR ONLINE

The Defense Department sold openly, over the Internet, gear that could be used for a bio-weapons lab, according to a draft Congressional report.

"Many items needed to establish a laboratory for making biological warfare agents were being sold on the Internet to the public from DoD's excess property inventory for pennies on the dollar, making them both easy and economical to obtain," CNN quotes the report from the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, as saying.

"As requested, GAO established a fictitious company and purchased over the Internet key excess DoD biological equipment items and related protective clothing necessary to produce and disseminate biological warfare agents."

CNN notes that "The Defense Department agency responsible for the sale of excess property to the public, the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service, halted the sale of such items September 19 while the practice is reviewed."

THERE'S MORE: "The DoD selling excess equipment that could be used to make CBW agents is a problem, but focusing on that sale will mislead us," writes Defense Tech Dad Tom Shachtman. "The equipment bought from DoD (by the GAO sting) could also have been bought from regular commercial outlets, possibly even the same ones that sold the stuff originally to DoD.

"The GAO is correct, however, in concluding that DoD does not check out the buyers of its surplus equipment in any significant way; that aspect of the surplus-inventory reduction program could be easily fixed."

NUKE LABS FLOP SECURITY TESTS

After years of anonymity, one of the whisteblowers who proved just how limp the security measures at Los Alamos are has emerged from behind the curtain.

Rich Levernier spent six years running mock terrorist assaults on Los Alamos and other nuclear weapons labs for the U.S. government. He tells Vanity Fair, "In more than 50 percent of our tests at the Los Alamos facility, we got in, captured the plutonium, got out again, and in some cases didn't fire a shot, because we didn't encounter any guards."

Last week, Los Alamos' ousted security chief -- responsible for the swiss-cheese defense of these assaults -- was allowed to rejoin the lab as a consultant.

MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM "NOT UP TO THE JOB"

President Bush demanded that the military build him a missile defense system by next fall.

But Philip Coyle, the former head of the Pentagon's Operational Test and Evaluation office, says in the current Arms Contol Today that the anti-missile system Bush is getting is "simply not up to the job."

The ground-based midcourse defense system, as it is now called, has not shown that it can hit anything other than missiles whose trajectory and targets have been preprogrammed by missile defense contractors to eliminate the surprise or uncertainty of battle. Nor has it proven that it can hit a tumbling target, perform at night, or find ways to counter the decoys and countermeasures that a real enemy would use to throw a defense off track. Tests so far have all been conducted at unrealistically low speeds and altitudes, and it is not clear that the system will be able to track and identify the warhead it is supposed to destroy.

A key concept in the missile defense plan is to catch the rockets before they take off. But in a July study, the American Physical Society said that couldn't be done with current or near-term American anti-missile technology.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT WMDs

How can inspectors tell if a chemical plant might be used for making mustard gas? It's one of a number of interesting questions answered in this "FAQ on WMDs" on Allsci.com.

NAVY FLEET AT PRE - WW I LEVELS

At the height of its Reagan-era expansion, the U.S. Navy had nearly 600 warships. Now, the fleet is now down to 296 warships -- the smallest size since before World War I, the San Diego Union-Tribune says.

Don't expect the fleet to get any bigger any time soon. The Navy says it will only have 300 ships by 2009.

THERE'S MORE: Defense Tech pal JP gives this fleet-reduction issue some historial perspective:

First, a smaller fleet has often historically proven to be a more effective one. Before the First World War, Admiral Jackie Fisher improved the quality of the Royal Navy by drastically slashing the number of warships in commission -- mostly cruisers on foreign station. He did so over howls of protest, dismissing the older ships he was scrapping as "a miser's hoard of useless junk" that in wartime a single modern enemy cruiser would "lap up, like an armadillo on an anthill." (...)

Older warships have historically been less capable than newer ones (this is, I think, less true now than formerly, because we've gotten better at upgrading them with better sensors, electronics, and weapons-control software, but it's still more-or-less the case) and they tend to be very expensive to operate... It becomes difficult to maintain them, old steam plants are more expensive to run than new gas turbines, parts are no longer available, wiring harnesses reach the limits of their ability to accept upgrades, etc. (...)

Second, missions do change, and warships tend to be optimized for some particular mission. The guided missile frigates in the fleet today, for example, were conceived and built as escorts needed to keep the sea lines of communication open between North America and Europe. That was a very sensible thing to plan for in the Cold War.

Today, with the old Soviet fleet basically rusting to nothing, and with no other large blue water [open ocean] navy out there to challenge us, it's not clear that we need a lot of frigates. They're still useful and versatile ships, which is why we'll continue to run them through the end of their useful lives, but the Navy doesn't intend to replace (them)...

Destroyers like the Arleigh Burkes are new, modern, and versatile, so they'll be around longer, and will continue to be built until the Navy figures out what should replace them.

If you were to try to summarize the change in the Navy's mission and strategy over the last ten years, you could say that the Navy now sees its primary mission as expeditionary power projection (as opposed to either sea control or nuclear deterrence, which preoccupied it before).

This means that it has to think more about striking land targets (hence the conversion of some Ohio class subs into cruise missile platforms), putting Marines ashore and supporting them there (hence the interest in shallow water anti-sub warfare, mine countermeasures, fast sea lift, and littoral operations generally), and maintaining a sovereign presence to support US operations around the world (which means, for now, a continued emphasis on nuclear-powered big-deck carriers, and, for the future, "sea-basing" that will reduce our dependence on various shady and shaky panjandrums and potentates willing to provide bases).

As the missions and strategies shift, there will inevitably be a number of ships retired as no longer really useful -- Fisher's miser's hoard of useless junk. There's an inevitable gap, I think, as any Navy figures out what new kinds of ships are needed to accomplish the new missions. You can see the Navy working this out pretty publicly right now.

AND MORE: Gregg Easterbrook examines the Littoral Combat Ship -- "pretty much the first American vessel in more than a century intended to hold coastal areas and bombard shore emplacements" -- and how it might be used off the shores of Africa and elsewhere.

AND MORE: Defense Tech reader DS disagrees with JP's historical analysis. British Admiral Jackie Fisher wasn't out to improve quality, per se, when he cut the number of cruisers before WW I. He did it "because the British needed the money and men to build and man the dreadnoughts they were building."

At the turn of the century, "better engines, better guns, better metallurgical techniques (which meant better armor) were all appearing on the scene... In 1905, (Fisher) decided to put all the innovations together in a single ship, which he hoped to have floating within the year... The ship that the British built, the Dreadnought, was everything that Fisher hoped for and more. It was fast, powerful, and heavily armored. It made, at a stroke, all other battleships obsolete."

But to pay for these new beasts, Fisher had to scrap the British cruisers.

COURT NIXES PAROLEE DNA DUMPS

"A federal appeals court declared unconstitutional Thursday a law requiring federal parolees to give blood for a DNA databank used to investigate crimes, a ruling that could also overturn laws in California and other states," reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

The law, passed by Congress in 2000, violates the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches because blood is extracted from parolees who are not suspected of committing new crimes, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in a 2-1 decision.

"Even parolees maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their own bodies," said Judge Stephen Reinhardt in the majority opinion. Although the government has targeted only a limited, supervised population for DNA collection, he wrote, "the rest of us might not be far behind." (...)

Nationally, the FBI has 1.4 million DNA samples in its databank, mostly from prisoners and parolees, said spokesman Paul Bresson.

KAY: NO IRAQI WMD

"After searching for nearly six months, U.S. forces and CIA experts have found no chemical or biological weapons in Iraq and have determined that Iraq's nuclear program was in only 'the very most rudimentary' state, the Bush administration's chief investigator formally told Congress yesterday.

"Before the war, the administration said Iraq had a well-developed nuclear program that presented a threat to the United States," the Washington Post notes.

Now, "It clearly does not look like a massive, resurgent program, based on what we discovered," former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay, who heads the government's search, said yesterday after briefing House and Senate intelligence committees in a closed session on his interim report. He said he will need six to nine months to conclude his work, and congressional sources said the administration is requesting an additional $600 million toward the effort to find weapons of mass destruction.

Kay, who heads the CIA's 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group, said the team had "discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment" that Iraq had hidden. He said he believes "there was an intent . . . to continue production at some point in time." Among the evidence unearthed was a network of laboratories and safe houses, a laboratory complex hidden in a prison and evidence of a program for ballistic and land-attack missiles with ranges prohibited by the United Nations.

Kay's statement and a few, undated, supporting photographs are here. The New York Times provides Kay report highlights here.