DRONE ARMY? NOT

Note to wide-eyed futurists: The Matrix and Terminator 3 are not -- repeat not -- documentaries. There are no all-robot armies in the works. Please go back to your desks.

MORE MONEY FOR LAME BIOSENSORS

The Bush administration wants another $119 million for its BioWatch program, which puts air filters in 31 major cities, to sniff for toxic terror attacks.

Too bad the system's close to useless, experts say.

First off, BioWatch protects against the most unlikely of terror threats: a crop duster, releasing a gigantic toxic cloud over an urban area. Maybe James Bond's bad guys would come up with such a scheme. But Osama & Co. haven't shown anywhere near the technical sophistication to brew up and maintain that much poison. And even if they did, a cold wind or a hard rain neutralizes most biothreats.

Plus, why fly a biplane over Times Square when you can send anthrax through the mail, or release it in a skyscraper's vents?

Even if a grandiose attack should come, BioWatch wouldn't provide any warning. The BioWatch filters are checked every 24 hours. Then, samples have to be run over to a Centers for Disease Control-approved lab. And then it takes another 12 hours to run tests. So if a pathogen is released, BioWatch won't know about it until a day-and-a-half later.

"You're getting very little specific data. And it's unclear what you could do with that information that's useful in the middle of an emergency," Peter LeJenue, a biodefense specialist with Potomac Institute for Policy Studies said.

What's more, LeJeune added, hundreds of these filters would be needed, to completely track the air in a single city. And the current program isn't anywhere near that extensive.

THERE'S MORE: Our friends at DARPA are looking for research proposals to neutralize toxic clouds before they can reach troops on the battlefield.

AND MORE: Speaking of hare-brained schemes, the Pentagon is asking for a 13 percent increase in its missile defense programs next year, to $10.2 billion.

ENERGY "COMMANDOS" TEST NUKE SEC'Y

Back in the day, security at the country's nuclear labs were tested by Navy SEALs and Army Rangers. Not any more.

Today, the Energy Department has its own 40-person team, trained to "think like terrorists," that conduct mock attacks on nuclear facilities. National Defense magazine claims that these guys are the "cream-of-the-crop of DOE’s security guards."

Glenn Podonsky, director of the DOE office of independent oversight performance assurance, crows, "We’re as good as, if not better than, any military organization we have today."

Maybe. But given the Energy Department's lame record of defending its bases, a team of grandmothers with their hips recently replaced could probably make off with a pile of uranium.

U.S. PLANS PAK OFFENSIVE

"The Bush administration," reports the Chicago Tribune, "is preparing a U.S. military offensive that would reach inside Pakistan with the goal of destroying Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network."

U.S. Central Command is assembling a team of military intelligence officers that would be posted in Pakistan ahead of the operation, according to sources familiar with details of the plan and internal military communications. The sources spoke on the condition they not be identified.

As now envisioned, the offensive would involve Special Operations forces, Army Rangers and Army ground troops, sources said. A Navy aircraft carrier would be deployed in the Arabian Sea.

Referred to in internal Pentagon messages as the "spring offensive," the operation would be driven by certain undisclosed events in Pakistan and across the region, sources said. A source familiar with details of the plan said this is "not like a contingency plan for North Korea, something that sits on a shelf. This planning is like planning for Iraq. They want this plan to be executable, now."

THERMOBARIC TERRORISTS?

The thermobaric bomb is just about the most vicious weapon you can imagine -- igniting the air, sucking the oxygen out of an enclosed area, and creating a massive pressure wave crushing anything unfortunate enough to have lived through the conflagration.

So pray -- pray hard -- that this Defense News story is all wrong:

Thermobaric bombs, which the U.S. military is striving to perfect, may also be emerging as a weapon of choice for terrorists, according to a bomb expert at Battelle, a research institute...

There have been no attacks with thermobaric bombs in the United States, but their use is suspected in many terrorist bombings in Russia and other countries — and proven in a few cases, said Tom Burky, Battelle’s top explosives expert.

Thermobarics use an explosion to ignite fuel, often metallic fuel such as aluminum. The burning fuel creates a slower and more sustained shock wave than a conventional explosion, which makes it better at breaking down walls and destroying people and equipment, Burky said.

Thermobaric explosives have been used... for decades by non-NATO militaries. In the 1960s, the former Soviet Union developed a variety of thermobaric weapons, including shoulder-fired weapons and artillery shells.

The U.S. military didn’t get interested in them until the 1990s. The U.S. Air Force developed a big thermobaric bomb to drop into caves in Afghanistan, and the Army is working on a thermobaric 25mm round...

Much of the information about thermobaric weapons has been classified. That’s a problem for homeland security first responders such as police and firefighters, Burky said. They are not being provided with important information about thermobaric weapons, such as safe standoff distances, how the much more powerful blast of a thermobaric weapon would be deflected and channeled by buildings and how to render thermobaric weapons safe, he said.

FLOWER POWER FOR MINE DETECTION

"A Danish biotech company has developed a genetically modified flower that could help detect land mines," Reuters reports.

The genetically modified weed has been coded to change color when its roots come in contact with nitrogen-dioxide (NO2) evaporating from explosives buried in soil. Within three to six weeks from being sowed over land mine infested areas the small plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red whenever close to a land mine.

Aresa Biodetection, the Danish firm developing the plant, says field tests could begin as early as this year.

(via /.)

GUARDS CHEATED NUKE SECURITY DRILLS

Security guards at the country's leading nuclear storehouse have been cheating during antiterrorism drills -- perhaps for as long as 20 years, according to a report released Monday by the Energy Department's inspector general.

And now, watchdogs in Congress and beyond are questioning whether the tons of enriched uranium at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, are really safe at all.

"First off, heads should roll," said Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT), who chairs the House Committee on Government Reform's National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations Subcommittee. "I can assure you, my committee will be following up in a very direct way."

Y-12 is America's main facility for processing enriched uranium. It stores nearly all of the country's reserve of about 5,000 "secondaries," the thermonuclear hearts of hydrogen bombs.

When a team of Y-12 rent-a-cops racked up a perfect score during an antiterror drill June 26, officials there were shocked. How could the guards have performed so well, they wondered, when a computer model had predicted that the defenders would lose at least half of their confrontations?

The answer was simple: The guards cheated. They had seen the computer models of the strikes the day before they were launched, rendering the test "tainted and unreliable," according to the report. And this wasn't the first time it had happened.

"From the mid-1980s to the present," contract security guards had been given the plans to the attacks beforehand, noted Inspector General Gregory Friedman. The defenders knew ahead of time "the specific building and wall to be attacked by the test adversary," and they knew "whether or not a diversionary tactic would be employed..."

If that wasn't a big enough advantage, "management would identify the best prepared protective force personnel and then substitute them for lesser prepared personnel," according to the report. "Based on specific attack information, trucks or other obstacles would be staged at advantageous points to be used as barricades and concealment."

The guards got slaughtered the few times they didn't cheat, said Ronald Timm, who spent six years as an independent security analyst at Y-12.

During one test, simulated terrorists took a mock, 44-pound uranium package, and "got outside of the fences in 38 seconds," he said. "People were shocked out of their minds."

My Wired News article has details.

THERE'S MORE: When are the Democratic presidential candidates going to go after the Bush administration on nuclear security? That's what a former senior Energy Department official wants to know. Recall all the [Republicans] on Capitol Hill beating up Clinton and [then-Energy Secretary] Hazel [O'Leary] for their failures," the official e-mails Defense Tech. "What has changed?"

AND MORE: Rep. Shays notes that nuclear security testing has gotten much harder since 9/11. "The basic assumption used to be, terrorists had to get in and get out [of a place like Y-12]. And getting out was so difficult," he tells Defense Tech. "That's changed since September the 11th. Now, we've got to assume that all they want to do is get in. And that's much more difficult to stop."

AND MORE: At the Pantex nuclear facility, "workers dismantling an aging nuclear weapon secured broken pieces of high explosive by taping them together," according to the AP.

"Homer Simpson has apparently relinquished his post at Springfield nuclear plant," declares the Register.

AND MORE: "Nice story, but 'heads should roll' -- don't make me laugh," says one insider. "If Shays wants to get at the problem, he ought to go down the hall and talk to the labs' protectors over on the Senate side."

AND MORE: What's left of Libya's stillborn nuclear program has just been shipped to Y-12. Oy.

SPACESHIP DESIGNS ONLINE

The big aerospace companies are starting to manuever for Bush's Moon-and-Mars lucre. Here's a Boeing sketch for the "interplanetary Crew Exploration Vehicle" -- "assembled at the Lunar Space Station" and "capable of traveling to Mars or beyond."

More graphics are here.

(via NASAWatch)

ZEPPELINS RETURN

Blimps are back -- at least a little.

Later this month, the Air Force is due to test out in Texas a V-shaped, 175 foot-long, helium filled airship. The goal, according to Aviation Week: to put together a "near-space maneuvering vehicle," operating more than 100,000 feet up, that can relay messages and spy on enemies.

It's one for the first times since the 60's that Americans has aggressive tried to exploited that region of the skies, Col. Kent Traylor, vice commander of the U.S. Air Force's Space Warfare Center, tells the magazine.

But it's not the only lighter-than-air craft being designed by the U.S. military. By the end of the year, the Missile Defense Agency is supposed to pick a contractor for its High Altitude Airship -- a solar-powered zeppelin that'll track missiles from 65,000 feet.

THERE'S MORE: Mirrored, laser-firing blimp, anyone? The Pentagon "might combine two of its missile defense efforts — the Aerospace Relay Mirror System and the High Altitude Airship — to increase the range of military laser systems," according to a Jane's story from over the summer (via Global Security Newswire).

The Missile Defense Agency is scheduled to begin flight tests of the airship in 2006, and officials want to conduct experiments that combine both systems around that time. The airship is primarily being developed to track missiles, but it could be teamed with the mirror relay system to allow ground-based lasers to track targets that are out of direct view, according to Jane’s. The mirror system would be attached to the airship with cables and would sit 50 meters below the aircraft.

AND MORE: Popular Science has details on the High Altitude Airship. Did we mention it's 25 times the size of the Goodyear blimp?

WHAT ABOUT DICK? CIA GETS SOLE BLAME FOR WMD LAPSE

It's the CIA's fault. That's the long-and-short of former chief weapons inspector David Kay's interview in the New York Times today. He says the intelligence agency failed to pick up signs of Iraq's internal chaos, which blocked progress towards nuclear, biological, and chemical arms.

Now, it's true that American intelligence had been saying for years that Iraq had WMD stockpiles. But isn't it just a bit overly-simple to blame the CIA?

After all, there have been many, many reports that our pal Dick Cheney and his cronies pressured CIA spooks into pumping up the WMD threat. Shouldn't they get skewered, too?

THERE'S MORE: Reader MS points out that in his interview with the Times, Kay makes sure to say, "I never got any pressure to find a certain outcome." Sure he didn't.

Slate's Fred Kaplan has more on Kay's "Art of Camouflage."

BEYOND THE FACE SCAN

While the U.S. government is mandating that face- and fingerprint-scans be embedded in passports by late 2004, DuPont is developing the next generation of biometrics: the three-dimensional mugshot.

CHENEY: LIAR OR FOOL?

Around the Defense Tech dinner table in the 1980's, there was a common theme (other than would my brother finally eat his vegetables): Was Ronald Reagan a conniving genius, a guy who willfully ignored the facts, or just a complete idiot?

I find myself asking the same questions after reading this L.A. Times story about Dick Cheney today.

Vice President Dick Cheney revived two controversial assertions about the war in Iraq on Thursday, declaring there was "overwhelming evidence" that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Al Qaeda and that two trailers discovered after the war were proof of Iraq's biological weapons programs...

U.S. intelligence officials agree that there was contact between Hussein's agents and Al Qaeda members as far back as a decade ago and that operatives with ties to Al Qaeda had at times found safe haven in Iraq. But no intelligence has surfaced to suggest a deeper relationship, and other information turned up recently has suggested that significant ties were unlikely.

Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is in custody, has told American interrogators that Al Qaeda rejected the idea of any working relationship with Iraq, which was seen by the terrorist network as a corrupt, secular regime. When Hussein was captured last month, he was found with a document warning his supporters to be wary of working with foreign fighters.

"There's nothing I have seen or read that backs [Cheney] up," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who called Cheney's remarks Thursday "perplexing."

Cheney also argued that the main thrust of the administration's case for war — the claim that Iraq was assembling weapons of mass destruction — had been validated by the discovery of two flatbed trailers outfitted with tanks and other equipment.

"We've found a couple of semi-trailers at this point which we believe were in fact part of [a WMD] program," Cheney said. "I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction."

That view is at odds with the judgment of the government's lead weapons inspector, David Kay, who said in an interim report in October that "we have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile [biological weapons] production effort."

THERE'S MORE: "Given enough time, Iraq certainly could have and probably would have developed CBW weaponry, and probably would have formed closer ties with Al Qaeda. By going into Iraq we pre-empted those possibilities," writes Defense Tech dad (and dinner table talk leader) Tom Shachtman. "Cheney could have said that, and been more believable. We really need to get beyond the seeming imperative, in our culture, that politicians must not admit to having been wrong."

AND MORE: "How about conniving genius liar?" asks Defense Tech reader MB. "All you have to do is look at the numbers of people the polls show still believe in the Al Qaida connection and WMD. These claims have been completely debunked, so Bush can no longer tell such bald lies to continue to reinforce these ideas among the rubes, but Cheney as VP is not subject to the same rules. So he keeps telling the lies, and the rubes keep falling for them, but Bush keeps his hands squeaky clean."

AND MORE: "David Kay, who stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for weapons of mass destruction, said on Friday he does not believe there were any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq," according to Reuters.

"I don't think they existed," Kay tells the wire service. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s."

WHY NO ANTI-TERROR ATTACKS PRE 9/11?

Why weren't Special Forces used to hunt down Osama & Co. before 9/11? After all, terrorists had bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and the USS Cole in 2000. Troops were specifically trained to take out top bad guys. Plans were drawn up to bomb the hell out of their camps. So what happened?

This Weekly Standard article -- recommended by several readers -- provides answers. Among the most surprising: "The military...didn't want to touch it. There was great reluctance in the Pentagon."

JANE'S: U.S. MULLING HIZBULLAH STRIKES

Could the U.S. be planning covert attacks against terrorists in Lebanon? Jane's Intelligence Digest thinks so.

US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld is considering plans to expand the global war on terrorism with multi-pronged attacks against suspected militant bases in countries such as Lebanon and Somalia...

Sending US troops into lawless Somalia would not be new, nor is it likely to cause serious diplomatic waves. Covert US forces have periodically infiltrated the country over the past two years in order to conduct surveillance and even snatch [Al Qaeda] suspects...

However, sending US special forces into Lebanon - and in particular an area like the Bekaa Valley (which is virtually Syrian territory) and where the bulk of Damascus' military forces in Lebanon are deployed - would be an entirely different matter. Deployment of US forces in the area would almost certainly involve a confrontation with Syrian troops.

That may well prove to be the objective, since the Bush administration is currently stepping up pressure on the Damascus regime in a bid to force it to cut off all support for radical Palestinian groups which have been targeting Israel during the three-year-old intifada. Washington also wants Syria to abandon its weapons of mass destruction and to withdraw all its forces from Lebanon, a virtual satellite since Syria moved in with tacit US support in 1990 as part of a strategy to end Lebanon's civil war.

The US administration has long considered Damascus as a prime candidate for 'regime-change' (along with Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and possibly even Saudi Arabia). Syria, once a powerhouse of Arab radicalism that could not be ignored, has been seriously weakened, both militarily and politically. Washington may feel that the time is coming to oust Bashir Al-Assad and the ruling generals. Targeting Syria via Lebanon, the only concrete political influence Damascus has to show following decades of radical diplomacy, could prove to be a means to that end...

Moreover, since the 11 September 2001 attacks, Washington has been keen to prove that Hizbullah has a global reach, and is thus a legitimate target for its war on terrorism. Thus far, US intelligence services have been unable to produce compelling evidence supporting this claim. So instead of launching military strikes, the Bush administration has sought to weaken Hizbullah by putting pressure on Iran, the movement's ideological mentor, and on Syria, which has used the Shia militants as what amounts to a proxy force against Israel over the last 20 years...

Washington's own focus on Hizbullah has intensified amid claims that the movement has links with Al-Qaeda (even though Hizbullah is staunchly Shia, while Al-Qaeda's religious ideology stems from the puritanical Wahhabite sect of Sunni Islam). Whether there is any actual operational alliance between Hizbullah and Al-Qaeda remains highly questionable.

PANEL: DROP NET VOTING

"A new $22 million system to allow soldiers and other Americans overseas to vote via the Internet is inherently insecure and should be abandoned, according to a panel of computer security experts asked by the government to review the program."

Marc Strassman's Voting News has more.

"DISPOSABLE" TERRORISTS THWART SECURITY STEPS

The new, biometric security measures being put in place by the Homeland Security Department won't make America any safer, argues the National Post.

That's because there's a "new model" of terrorist. The old, hardened, "reusable" militant is gone. Instead, there are one-time, suicidal, "disposable" bad guys.

Biometrics target identity -- but when militant groups advanced (or regressed) from reusable terrorists to disposable terrorists, identity became moot. Today the acute threat no longer comes from "known" terrorists. Recruits are groomed for a single terrorist act, during which they self-destruct. Before being deployed, disposable terrorists have usually done nothing. They're "innocent" voyagers whose fingerprints and faces appear in no database....

Like bees, disposable terrorists die as they sting -- but unlike bees, they cannot be recognized for what they are until they've stung. Machines that compare faces and fingerprints are helpful against reusable terrorists who try to hide their identities, but a disposable terrorist doesn't care if we know who he is.

THERE'S MORE: "The effort to invoke high tech in the terrorism problem is symptomatic of American culture--overfascination with high tech and an incomprehensible incapability to deal with the human dimension and cultural underpinnings of terrorism," Capt. Julio Gutierrez, of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, notes over at the Alidade discussion group.

The most effective counter against the disposable terrorist is to develop the HUMINT (human intelligence, or spies) to penetrate terrorist networks and neutralize them where they breed--before they send operatives out on missions. But that takes something which Americans find difficult--learning obscure Middle East and Asian languages to full native fluency and living like those people for years so as to get to know them and understand their weaknesses and strengths. It's actually cheaper to develop well-prepared HUMINT agents and case officers who can operate almost invisibly in the markets of Peshawar or Sanaa (a few hundred million $$) than it is to build multi-billion dollar aerial weapon systems or nationwide airport biometrics machines. However, we seem to always choose to build some highfaluting Rube Goldberg machine that is supposed to detect bad stuff (but cannot really detect bad people).

AIR SAFETY INFO IN NASA TERROR DATABASE

NASA researchers are using flight-safety records -- including reports of sick passengers, bad weather and sleepy pilots -- to build an anti-terror database.

Under the generic name Data Mining and Aviation Security, computer scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center are developing a program for predicting terrorist threats by integrating "the Internet and classified intelligence data" with information from two flight-safety databases.

The program is the second recent example of a NASA effort to mine information storehouses for enemies of the state. Over the weekend, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) revealed that Northwest Airlines forked over millions of passenger records to the space agency for a terrorist-screening project, an effort enhanced with data from the 1990 U.S. census.

Although the new program's budget is undersized -- less than $1 million, according to Ames spokesman David Morse -- civil libertarians are troubled by the effort. Such projects are a waste of resources, they say, especially at a time when the space agency is gearing up for a return to the Moon.

"This is 21st-century phrenology," said privacy advocate Bill Scannell, referring to the discredited art of reading people's personalities from the bumps on their heads. "You might as well stick a couple of employees in a sub-basement and have them read tea leaves."

My Wired News article has details.

THERE'S MORE: Using flight safety reports for homeland defense is a "pretty wild experiment," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program. "They're literally attempting to monitor us through our entrails, rather than focusing on the physical security measures that we know work."

For example, Steinhardt notes, airport tarmacs still aren't secure. Just last month, a dead body was discovered at New York's Kennedy Airport, wedged into the wheel of a British Airways 747. How the person got on to the tarmac – and how the corpse managed to go undetected through 15 take offs and landings in eight days – remains a mystery.

AND MORE: Sandra Hart, with the Human Factors Research and Technology Division of NASA Ames, wants to fight terrorists -- bad. She makes the following plea on the American Psychological Association's website to let her and her colleagues get involved with stopping evil-doers:

We can develop system-wide baseline and trend information to identify gaps and vulnerabilities in the security system. Data mining and visualization tools can be adapted to convey security information clearly and unambiguously. Data acquisition and analysis tools can identify patterns in routes of flight as well as passenger profiles. We can help establish policies, design technologies, and develop procedures to ensure that the people in the system are even more effective. We can predict the potential impact of new ideas on the reliability and effectiveness of the system and then evaluate them as they are developed and fielded. Basic knowledge of human vision, cognition, attention, and so on can improve the design of security technologies. Expertise in organizational and team behavior might be applied to the formation of more effective security teams and mitigate the proliferation of ad hoc responses by pilots and controllers in response to perceived threats. Human Factors expertise in task analysis, modeling, and simulation can offer insights into the skills required to perform crucial tasks, identify functions that are candidates for automation, and develop training. We can work with the front line - - security personnel, ticket agents, pilots, flight attendants and their employers - - to identify security gaps and figure out how to ensure that humans are part of the solution in the future, not the problem. (emphasis mine)

Just in case you thought only a couple of NASA mad scientists wanted to find Osamas in our information...

AND MORE: EPIC will file a suit against NASA tomorrow in U.S. District Court in San Jose, to force the space agency to spill the beans about all of its anti-terror efforts.

NEW SEC'Y CHIEF FOR NUKE LAB

A week after a watchdog group blasted its security as loosey-goosey, the Y-12 nuclear weapons complex in Oak Ridge, TN has named a new security chief.

REAL, LIVE "SMART DUST" -- SORTA

The idea of "smart dust" -- speck-sized sensors, able to detect biological or chemical arms -- has been around for years. But now, Defense News reports, there's starting to be a bit of substance behind the hype.

Currently, the tiny sensors aren't all that tiny -- pager-sized, or thereabouts. And, already, there are both civilian and military orders for the devices. But a significantly smaller version should be ready by this summer, greatly increasing the demand for the detectors.

Here's a rough sketch of how the gadgets work, according to Defense News:

Each tiny device will feature power, communications, sensing and computer systems feeding into a secure, self-configuring network that can pass information locally using low-powered radios. For longer-distance transmissions to command centers, satellite communications may be used.

The system is run by a microcontroller that dictates the tasks performed and controls power to the various components of the system to conserve energy — a primary concern because the system can house only a very small battery...

From time to time, the microcontroller will receive a reading from one of the sensors, process the data and store it in its memory. It also will occasionally turn on its communications device to transmit data to a base station or another sensor system, or to see if the system has received messages from other sensors in the network...

Because of the sensors’ size and low cost, the military could use them in a wide variety of missions, including the surveillance of borders, underground facilities, oil pipelines or other important resources... They also could be dropped behind enemy lines to monitor adversaries and equipment. For instance, the sensors can log and report the speed and direction of vehicles, revealing enemy troop movements to U.S. troops miles away.

The sensor systems were tested by the military during an early operational test at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps base, Calif., in March 2001. During the test, several sensors were successfully dropped from an unmanned aerial vehicle flying 30 miles per hour at an altitude of 150 feet.

Once on the ground, the systems became synchronized and were able to detect the speed and direction of several passing vehicles, including Humvees, light armored vehicles and trucks.

CENSUS, NORTHWEST AIR GAVE FLIERS' INFO TO FEDS

Northwest Airlines and the Census Bureau teamed up to supply personal information on millions of people to a clandestine government travel security project -- one that's awfully similiar to the notorious Total Information Awareness and CAPPS II data-mining efforts.

Last fall, JetBlue Airways forked over millions of passenger records to a defense contractor, who used it to test a terrorist-screening program. Around the same time, Northwest, the country's fourth-largest airline, claimed that they would never, ever do such a thing themselves.

"But Northwest acknowledged Friday that by that time, it had already turned over three months of reservation data to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center," notes the Washington Post.

Using the travel data, government-funded researchers were able to track down the 1990 Census records of 439,381 passengers. This information was added to refine the data-mining project.

"Information given by American citizens for reasonable demographics information has been turned around and used to spy on people. This sounds like East Berlin, circa '74," privacy advocate Scannell tells the Washington Times.

The Northwest discovery came after the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the government. The documents unveiled from that request are here.

SECRECY A CAMPAIGN ISSUE?

Normally, presidential candidates spend the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary sucking up to hog farmers and singing the praises of those oh-so-flinty New Englanders.

But in the last week, on the eve of the formal start of the 2004 elections, two Democratic contenders took time to talk about a topic that's usually reserved for spooks, conspiracy theorists and a couple of policy geeks: how the government keeps its secrets. There's a faint, but real, possibility that this most opaque of subjects could become a full-blown issue in the presidential campaign.

My Wired News article has more.

COPTER SHOOTERS WISING UP

"A classified Army study of the downings of military helicopters in Iraq found that guerrillas have used increasingly sophisticated tactics and weapons — including at least one advanced missile — to attack American aircraft," the New York Times reports.

The insurgents have proved adept at using both rocket-propelled grenades, which are point-and-shoot weapons, and heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, which require greater maintenance and skill, said Army officials familiar with the study.

No type of helicopter is more vulnerable or more protected against the problem, the review found. But the team recommended specific changes to help pilots better evade ground fire, Army officials said. Senior officers declined to elaborate, but changes in the past have included flying more missions at night with lights off to avoid detection...

One troubling finding, Army officials said, is that on at least one occasion the insurgents used a SA-16 shoulder-fired missile, which has a guidance system that is harder to thwart than the SA-7 missiles and rocket-propelled grenades that insurgents have used in other attacks.

WATCHDOG: NUKE LAB CAN'T DEFEND ITSELF

Project on Government Oversight, the watchdog group so instrumental in exposing the Los Alamos scandals, is now accusing the Y-12 nuclear weapons complex in Oak Ridge, TN of slipshod security.

According to POGO, a terror drill last month turned "pretty ugly" when Y-12's "security forces could not adequately protect the enormous stockpiles of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from a terrorist attack." The exercise was part of a larger Department of Energy (DOE) review of the facility's defenses.

DOE spokesman Joe Davis, tells the Knoxville News-Sentinel that "anything that POGO says is second- and third-hand."

But other DOE officials confirm that security at Y-12 had been shaken up, in the wake of the security review.

Congressional critics, like Rep., Christopher Shays (R-CT), have long warned that Y-12 is a major risk.

POGO senior investigator Peter Stockton says the main problem is an infiltrator can be over a Y-12 fence, and into an enriched uranium holding area, in about 45 seconds.

"That's not a lot of time to put a gun on somebody," he says.

MOON BASE: RECURRING DREAM

Moon Base? Old news.

In his hotly anticipated announcement Wednesday, President Bush ordered NASA scientists to plan for a manned "foothold on the moon." They might look through their old filing cabinets to start. Because the U.S. government and its contractors have been planning lunar colonies since long before Neil Armstrong took his one giant leap for mankind in 1969.

Since word of Bush's space plan leaked last week, political rivals and some space-policy experts have assaulted it for being too expensive and grandiose.

But the 2004 plan sounds downright meek compared with a 1959 scheme to use nearly 150 rockets to outfit a military outpost on the moon. A 180-person lunar commune probably isn't in the works, as was proposed in 1972. And it's hard to imagine a replay of 1975's idea to build a 100-ton, magnetic-levitation train for tossing bags of freshly mined lunar soil into space, where it would be processed into industrial supplies.

My Wired News article has looks at some of history's kookiest moon plans.

THERE'S MORE: Ben Bova, Greg Bear and other science-fiction luminaries are fired up about the new space plan.

LABS: SLOPPY SECURITY FOR CLASSIFIED TECH

Security regulations for the handling of classified technologies have been repeatedly violated at three of the country's most important laboratories. That's the conclusion of the Energy Department's Inspector General, who today issued a report detailing security woes at Los Alamos, Sandia, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

On multiple occasions, the Inspector General found, foreign nationals were working on secret research programs -- even though they have been specifically forbidden from doing so, since the Wen Ho Lee scandal. Officials at Sandia didn't bother to go through the Department-required classification and counterintelligence reviews on key research and development deals. And there was no indication that the labs matched their employment rolls against State and Treasury Department bad guy lists.

"We did not detect any direct evidence of a security compromise," the IG's report says. But "any breakdown in the vigorous application of required safeguards of lack of a clear policy in this arena represents a potential threat to our nation's security."

COLD WAR TOYS EAT UP PENTAGON BUCKS

For the last two years -- and for the forseeable future -- the U.S. troops have become into terrorist-hunters, peace-keepers, fighters of messy, dirty little wars.

But the Pentagon is still spending its money like it's about to duke it out with the Russians in eastern Europe, Army Times alleges.

While American infantrymen hunt guerrillas in the back alleys of Iraq and Special Forces foot soldiers track terrorists in Afghanistan and Indonesia, the Pentagon is spending billions on supersonic jets like the new F/A-22 Raptor, which moves too fast to identify ground targets...

As Thomas White, former secretary of the Army, observed, 'None of the big programs have been perturbed, and we continue to pour money into them..."

In the Pentagon budget, three of every four dollars are spent on precisely the same things as in August 2001, according to a study by former Pentagon budget analyst Chuck Spinney...

Much of that money is for fixed manpower costs, but the weapons-buying accounts are heavily skewed toward high-tech and high-cost weapons systems, Spinney and other analysts said.

These include $3 billion for F-18 Super Hornet attack fighters, $3.5 billion for F/A-22 air superiority fighters and $4.4 billion toward development of another high-performance airplane, the Joint Strike Fighter.

Congress wrote a $100 million check for the Air Force to study a potential new bomber, money for which the Pentagon didn’t ask.

Also in the budget: $1.5 billion for a Virginia-class attack submarine designed to hunt 1980s-era Soviet missile subs, $3.2 billion for three new Navy destroyers and $1.2 billion to begin buying parts for a new aircraft carrier.

NUCLEAR ROUNDUP

- Iran is still building centrifuges for uranium enrichment -- despite its pledge to stop making weapons-grade nuclear material.

- The U.S. will start sending India civilian nuclear and space technology.

- "North Korean officials told an unofficial delegation of U.S. experts last week that the country has no clandestine program to enrich uranium, even though one member of the delegation had been present when a senior North Korean official admitted it during a meeting in October 2002."

THERE'S MORE: "President Bush's top nuclear security administrator defended yesterday the administration's decision to begin research on a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons," according to the Baltimore Sun.

In a leaked memo from December 5, Linton Brooks, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, gushed about the repeal on the ban of such weapons.

"We should not fail to take advantage of this opportunity," he told the nation's nuclear lab chiefs. "We are now free to explore a range of technical options that could strengthen our ability to deter or respond to new or emerging threats without any concern that some ideas could inadvertently violate a vague and arbitrary limitation. I expect your design teams to engage fully."

Nevertheless, the Sun notes, Nonetheless, Brooks told reporters that other countries shouldn't pursue such research.

That earned guffaws from Joseph Cirincione, with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He says, "It's like telling your kids not to smoke when you have a two-pack-a-day habit."

MAG: COMANCHE = TURKEY

The Army's helicopter of the future, the RAH-66 Comanche, is a turkey, according to Aviation Week.

"In its initial inccarnation, it will be unable to communicate with other services or command-and-control aircraft, have no active protection against anti-aircraft missiles and no blast wall between the two crewmen," the magazine says. "Any hit in the cockpit... will likely disable or kill both."

"'Will the Army risk a $47-million helicopter in a mission over Baghdad?' asked an Army program official. 'It's not likely, yet the Comanche is eating up 39% of the Army aviation budget. All the other small aviation programs have been killed.'"

The Army's array of copters, drones, and planes have been under intense scrutiny since Gulf War II. On a single day during the conflict, two Apache helicopters were shot down, and thirty more were turned back by rocket-propelled grenades. Since then, a handful of Army Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters have been downed by insurgents armed with shoulder-fired missiles.

THERE'S MORE: Another Apache just went down west of Baghdad, the Times reports. Luckily, the both crew members survived.

AND MORE: "I'm not sure about calling the fate of an aircraft before it's fought," e-mails Defense Tech reader Wyatt Earp.

What's more, he says, "Aviation Week and other aerospace-related magazines haven't been making accurate calls on new systems in the last 15-20 years."

The F-117A was called the "Wobbly Goblin" when it first appeared in public view, he notes. The B-2A was labelled a "relic of the Cold War." Yet both have done well since their initial bad reviews.

AND MORE: National Defense has more on the Comanche debate, noting that the original order for 1200 copters has been cut in half.

AND MORE: "What the future of Comanche is as we look down the road is still an open question," Gen. Peter Schoomaker tells Army Times.

FBI ON UFOS

Wanna see the FBI's records on UFOs, cattle mutilation, and other "unusual phenomena?" Defense Tech pal PA points us to this handy Bureau website.

CAPPS II LIVES

Congress is edgy. Privacy advocates are apoplectic. And the airlines won't play ball.

But despite the resistance, reports the Washington Post, the U.S. government is going ahead with CAPPS II -- the far-flung database program that crunches information on every passenger headed into the sky.

The government will compel airlines and airline reservations companies to hand over all passenger records for scrutiny by U.S. officials, after failing to win cooperation in the program's testing phase. The order could be issued as soon as next month. Under the system, all travelers passing through a U.S. airport are to be scored with a number and a color that ranks their perceived threat to the aircraft...

It will collect travelers' full name, home address and telephone number, date of birth and travel itinerary. The information will be fed into large databases, such as Lexis-Nexis and Acxiom, that tap public records and commercial computer banks, such as shopping mailing lists, to verify that passengers are who they say they are. Once a passenger is identified, the CAPPS 2 system will compare that traveler against wanted criminals and suspected terrorists contained in other databases.

THERE'S MORE: Boing Boing founder Mark Frauenfelder says his six-year old daughter has now been flagged as a potential terrorist on the original CAPPS system, and there doesn't seem to be anything he can do to get her off.

UK WAR NETWORKS "COLLAPSED" IN IRAQ

Some of the British military's most important communications networks "collapsed at key moments during the Iraq war," Jane's Defence Weekly reveals.

A vital secure satellite communication link failed just as UK commanders in Qatar were trying to receive authorisation from government ministers in London to allow the bombing of a building in Basra where… "Chemical Ali" was believed to be hiding…

On the first day of the war, secure communications between London and the commander of UK forces in the Middle East… also failed…

"We had to rush to get equipment [into service] without an architecture," said one officer. "You can't wait until the last minute; you need time to train to turn equipment into a capability."

The proliferation of information technology systems in the UK armed forces was blamed for the network-wide interoperability problems during the Iraq war, with one officer calling it the 'Bermuda Triangle' issue. "On some occasions e-mails took 48 hours to get through."

A PROFESSOR GOES TO WAR

Peter Maass has an incredible you-are-there article about the perils of counterinsurgency in tomorrow's New York Times Magazine. Go read it. Now.

SAME NEEDLES, BIGGER HAYSTACKS

Since 9/11, we've heard countless "experts" tell us that the key to stopping terror attacks in to collect more data. The latest example: Las Vegas hoteliers turning over to the feds the names of 260,000 people staying under their roofs.

In today's Salon, Beyond Fear author Bruce Schneier says the approach is all wrong.

This broad vacuuming of data is expensive, and completely misses the point. The problem isn't obtaining data, it's deciding which data is worth analyzing and then interpreting it. So much data is collected that intelligence organizations can't possibly analyze it all. Deciding what to look at can be an impossible task, so substantial amounts of good intelligence go unread and unanalyzed. Data collection is easy; analysis is difficult.

Many think the analysis problem can be solved by throwing more computers at it, but that's not the case. Computers are dumb. They can find obvious patterns, but they won't be able to find the next terrorist attack. Al-Qaida is smart, and excels in doing the unexpected. Osama bin Laden and his troops are going to make mistakes, but to a computer, their "suspicious" behavior isn't going to be any different than the suspicious behavior of millions of honest people. Finding the real plot among all the false leads requires human intelligence.

More raw data can even be counterproductive. With more data, you have the same number of "needles" and a much larger "haystack" to find them in. In the 1980s and before, East German police collected an enormous amount of data on 4 million East Germans, roughly a quarter of their population. Yet even they did not foresee the peaceful overthrow of the Communist government; they invested too heavily in data collection while neglecting data interpretation...

This isn't to say that intelligence is useless. It's probably the best weapon we have in our attempts to thwart global terrorism, but it's a weapon we need to learn to wield properly. The 9/11 terrorists left a huge trail of clues as they planned their attack, and so, presumably, are the terrorist plotters of today. Our failure to prevent 9/11 was a failure of analysis, a human failure. And if we fail to prevent the next terrorist attack, it will also be a human failure.

Relying on computers to sift through enormous amounts of data, and investigators to act on every alarm the computers sound, is a bad security tradeoff. It's going to cause an endless stream of false alarms, cost millions of dollars, unduly scare people, trample on individual rights and inure people to the real threats. Good intelligence involves finding meaning among enormous reams of irrelevant data, then organizing all those disparate pieces of information into coherent predictions about what will happen next.

MOON AND MARS?

"President Bush will unveil a new American space initiative next week that is expected to include building a permanent base on the moon and later sending astronauts to Mars," the Los Angeles Times (and many others) report.

But don't expect a liftoff schedule in Bush's announcement. Speaking to the New York Times, an administration official "cautioned that the proposal could be broad and open-ended, more in the nature of 'a mission statement' rather than a detailed road map."

Space blogger Rand Simberg isn't happy about the upcoming announcement.

"There's no evidence that NASA has been, or can be, reformed sufficiently to entrust it with such a project," he says.

Strangely, Louis Friedman,executive director of the Planetary Society, isn't that psyched, either.

"A program that returns us to the moon and bogs us down, the same way the space station has bogged us down in low Earth orbit, would be terrible," he tells the L.A. Times.

But John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, thinks the moon is worth it, saying, "There is lots we have to learn before we go to Mars."

Me, I'm just happy to see space begin to get back some of the focus it so badly deserves. Look at history, and countries that explored, prospered. Maybe not immediately. But in the long run. Mars and beyond is the greatest exploration we can take.

THERE'S MORE: NASA Watchers Frank Sietzen and Keith Cowing say they have details on the Bush plan, which they claim will be announced next Wednesday. Moon landings would begin in 2013.

"To pay for the new effort -- which would require a new generation of spacecraft but use Europe's Ariane rockets and Russia's Soyuz capsules in the interim -- NASA's space shuttle fleet would be retired as soon as construction of the International Space Station is completed," the pair write.

However, a senior NASA official cautions Defense Tech to take these detailed reports with a big hepling of salt.

"Don't believe all you read," the official counsels.

IRAQ ARMS-HUNTERS YANKED

"The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment," the New York Times reports.

The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.

A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. But that team is "still waiting for something to dispose of," said a survey group member.

Some of the government officials said the most important evidence from the weapons hunt might be contained in a vast collection of seized Iraqi documents being stored in a secret military warehouse in Qatar. Only a small fraction have been translated.

JET DEFENSE: WHAT'S THE HOLDUP?

Congressional critics and outside analysts are taking aim at the Department of Homeland Security's plan to defend passenger planes against shoulder-fired missiles.

On Monday, Dr. Charles McQueary, the department's undersecretary for science and technology, announced an "aggressive" two-year study to "determine if in fact there is a viable and effective technology we could deploy to protect commercial aircraft."

Under McQueary's plan, three defense contracting teams will have six months and $2 million each to put together road maps for adapting military antimissile systems to civilian jets. Then the department will decide whether to build and test a prototype. That process could take up to a year and a half.

But that's too few decisions in too much time, critics contend. In a little more than a year, so-called MANPADS (short for man-portable air defense systems) have been used to attack an Israeli jet over Kenya, a DHL cargo craft over Iraq, a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter, and an Air Force C-17 transport plane. More than half a million of the weapons have been made since the mid-'60s, and tens of thousands of them are unaccounted for. The military's planes already have MANPADS countermeasures on board, argues Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York). Why wait to put them on passenger jets?

"Shoulder-fired missiles are probably the greatest danger commercial airliners face in today's world. While I'm glad DHS (Department of Homeland Security) is finally moving forward, it's at much too slow a pace. We can't afford to wait another two years to outfit planes -- it's already been 14 months since the Kenya attacks," Schumer said in a statement.

My Wired News article has details on the MANPADS debate.

THERE'S MORE: In September, the Bush Administration pledged $100 million towards jet defense -- and $60 million is budgeted this year towards these efforts. The month before, Northrop Grumman revealed a project to zap oncoming missiles with a chemical-powered laser.

AND MORE: In the Boston Globe, MIT's Theodore Postol and Geoffrey Forden argue that "foiling aircraft attacks isn't rocket science." They point to a number of relatively simple technologies which could help prevent jetliner hijackings.

"Multiple tiny video cameras could be placed throughout a plane's passenger compartment to record initial actions that might lead to a takeover," they suggest. "Wireless videocams could even be worn on the clothing of flight attendants."

AND MORE: On Thursday, an Air Mobility Command C-5 transport plane was hit by a missile, witnesses say. Luckily, the craft made it back safely to Baghdad airport. A Black Hawk helpicopter, struck near Fallujah, was not so lucky. Nine soldiers are dead.

'WEST WING' DOES 'TIA'

According to Footnote TV, the massively popular "West Wing" television show will tackle Pentagon data-mining efforts, modelled after the notorious Total Information Awareness project. But Footnote seems to think that such programs are a thing of the past -- which Defense Tech readers know damn well that they are not.

NO INTEL FOR 'DIRTY BOMB' THREAT

Homeland Security officials were terrified of a potential "dirty" bomb attack over the New Year's holiday -- even though they had no intelligence suggesting such an attack.

According to the Washington Post, "the U.S. government last month dispatched scores of casually dressed nuclear scientists with sophisticated radiation detection equipment hidden in briefcases and golf bags to scour five major U.S. cities for radiological, or 'dirty,' bombs."

The attention to a potential dirty bomb, for example, resulted not from specific recent information indicating such an attack but from the belief among officials that al Qaeda is sparing no effort to try to detonate one.

The terrorism crisis began late on Dec. 19, when analysts assembled what they described as extremely specific intelligence, including electronic intercepts of al Qaeda operatives' telephone calls or e-mails. One fear was that al Qaeda would hijack and crash an overseas flight into a U.S. city or the ocean. Another was that terrorists would shoot down an airliner with a shoulder-fired missile.

U.S. officials also became concerned that a large, open-air New Year's Eve celebration might be targeted. While the perimeters of football stadiums can generally be secured, outdoor celebrations are much more vulnerable, they said.

One of the U.S. officials' main fears was of a dirty bomb, in which a conventional bomb is detonated and spews radioactive material and radiation across a small area. Security specialists say such a weapon is unlikely to cause mass casualties but could cause panic and devastate a local economy.

On the same day that Ridge raised the national threat level to orange ("high") from yellow ("elevated"), the Homeland Security Department sent out large fixed radiation detectors and hundreds of pager-size radiation monitors for use by police in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Detroit. (emphasis mine)

DRONE DOGGIE BUILT FOR WAR

A robot dog could one day become a soldier's best friend -- if an Army program works out as planned.

Today's soldiers carry as much as 100 pounds of equipment. That's exhausting, even for the toughest grunt. In the future, the Army wants to dump up to half that gear onto the back of a drone. But military scientists are worried that robots with wheels won't be able to follow their human masters across mountain passes, up stairs and through forest trails.

To make their way across that kind of terrain, the drones will need legs -- maybe even four of them. So the Army's Tank-automotive and Armaments Command, or TACOM, has just doled out $2.25 million to two robotics firms to prototype a big, mechanical dog capable of carrying ammunition, food and supplies into battle.

The contracts are part of a broader Pentagon look into robots that take their cues from nature. Defense Department-backed scientists are studying swarms of bees and packs of wolves for ideas on how to get drones to work together. Man-made snakes, lobsters, flies -- even elephant trunks -- are just a few of the animal-inspired devices being created by military-funded researchers.

"We're coming full circle," said Paul Meunch, a TACOM research scientist. "In the days of George Washington, the Army used mules and horses. Then it moved on to trucks. And then armored vehicles and tanks. Now we could be swinging back to four legs."

My Wired News article has more.

THERE'S MORE: Hear me bark about robo-fidos on today's edition of public radio's "Future Tense" here.

ROBO-RACE MAP LEAKED; DARPA EVENT NOW "POINTLESS?"

Darpa's million-dollar robot rally, scheduled for March, may have been fatally compromised over the holiday break.

The whole point of the "Grand Challe