PENTAGON RELEASES INTEL BUDGET

The Pentagon has revealed what it wants to spend next year on classified intelligence programs. That's "an implicit repudiation of the Director of Central Intelligence," according to Secrecy News. DCI George Tenet has said that "public disclosure of a single aggregate figure for all intelligence-related spending would damage national security and compromise intelligence sources and methods. Even fifty year old budget data remain classified at CIA."

The Pentagon figures don't say much-- just that the generals want about $4.1 billion for intelligence R&D and $544 million in procurement funds. "Which is why," Secrecy News says, "there are no grounds for classifying them, let alone a much broader aggregation of all intelligence spending government-wide."

U.S. MOVING TO TEMPORARY MINES

"The Bush administration plans to announce that, in a step to lessen the dangers of land mines, it will end the use of long-lasting mines in warfare and instead concentrate on mines that go inert within hours or days," the New York Times reports.

However, "there are no plans for the United States to sign the international treaty to ban land mines, which has been in effect since 1997."

Nor is there any indication whether or not the U.S. military intends to pursue the so-called "Self-Healing Minefield" -- mines that can move, and reorganize themselves, to avoid being cleared.

THERE'S MORE: The Washington Post puts Bush's land mine move in a much harsher light, saying it "represents a departure from the previous U.S. goal of banning all land mines designed to kill troops. That plan, established by President Bill Clinton, set a target of 2006 for giving up antipersonnel mines, depending on the success of Pentagon efforts to develop alternatives."

AND MORE: "The biggest problem right now in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Chechnya is not related to landmines," says Phil Carter. It's "the use of cluster munitions, like the CBU-87. These are large bombs dropped from aircraft which, at a certain point close to the ground, break up into hundreds of little bomblets which are essentially the size of a hand grenade or RPG warhead. The dud rate for these bomblets inevitably produces a handful of duds from each bomb or sortie, which stay in the ground long after the bombing run."

AND MORE: Human Rights Watch thinks "smart" mines -- like the ones Bush is proposing to use -- aren't much better than the dumb ones. "Experience has shown that nations -- especially those in the developing world where mines have been used the most -- are unwilling to give up the dumb mines in their arsenals, if more wealthy and technologically advanced nations insist on the right to keep the smart mines in their arsenals," the group says.

JANE'S: PAK NUKE SALES OVERT, GOV'T APPROVED

Pakistan's government is now trying to portray the sale of nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea as the cloak-and-dagger work of a few, isolated rogues.

But that's a lie, says Jane's Defense Weekly, in a report released today. Nuclear sales were so out in the open that underlings of Abdul Qadeer Khan -- the father of the Pakistani Bomb -- were handing out glossy brochures advertising their services at a 2000 arms conference.

One of the brochures, a 10-page catalogue from A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories' Directorate of Vacuum Science and Technology, offered virtually all the components needed to establish a uranium-enrichment plant. The specialised centrifuge pumps, gauges, valves and other components each have civilian uses, but together provide the means to enrich the rare uranium-235 isotope to a particularly pure grade so that it can be used to fuel a nuclear weapon.

If there was any doubt as to what was on offer, a second accompanying brochure under the heading of "nuclear-related products" listed "complete ultracentrifuge machines" and other components needed to build a uranium-enrichment plant.

JDW readily obtained the brochures on the spot and inquired whether all of the listed items were available for sale. Several KRL officials provided positive assurances that all had government approval for export...

KRL was not the only Pakistani organisation peddling worrisome technology at the Karachi exhibition. Its rival laboratory - the National Development Complex - was also handing out marketing packages offering a variety of technologies useful in the development of long-range ballistic missiles. While Pakistan is under no legal international obligation to control missile technology sales, it has often pledged to do so.

Moreover, Khan himself has alleged that he received approval for the Iranian transfers from officers in the Pakistani army. One former senior US intelligence officer agrees with this assessment, saying that the former Pakistani Chief of the Army Staff, Gen Mirza Aslam Beg, was "a crucial figure". The official added: "Whatever the network is, it has got to envelop part of the [Pakistani] military establishment."

THERE'S MORE: Via Cursor, here's a link to one of Khan's nuclear brochures.

AIR FORCE SPENDS BIG FOR SATELLITES

The military satellite business is a strange beast. The Pentagon long ago made it policy to rely on civilian contractors to supply their eyes in the sky. But there's not enough of a commercial market to make the satellite business worthwhile. So, instead, the U.S. military throws extra cash at the companies, to make sure they'll keep making the orbiters.

Yesterday, for example, the Air Force announced it would start paying Boeing and Lockheed Martin "50% more to send U.S. military satellites into space to compensate for the collapse of commercial demand that threatens their launch businesses," according to Bloomberg News.

"Payments will increase to as much as $135 million per launch from $91 million, based on a preliminary estimate, because the service wants to ensure the companies stay in the military program, said Richard McKinney, the Air Force's deputy director of space acquisition."

Last year, the Pentagon handed out a $500 million contract to commerical satelitte imagery provider Digital Globe. Shortly thereafter, it promised to make a similiar payment to Digital Globe's competitor, Space Imaging, so the company could stay afloat.

PENTAGON EXAMINES MALARIA DRUG'S SUICIDE LINK

UPI: "The Pentagon reversed course Wednesday and told Congress it would look into whether an anti-malaria drug... might be causing suicides, one month after asserting the drug could not be a factor."

21 G.I.s assigned to Iraq and Kuwait have committed suicide, according to the wire service. "The Army is investigating another five deaths in Iraq as possible suicides, along with six deaths among soldiers in Iraq who returned to the United States and then killed themselves."

That amounts to 15.8 suicides per 100,000 soldiers per year, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr. told a House Armed Services Committee panel. That's not much more, he claimed, than Army suicide rates of between 9.1 and 14.8 per 100,000 in the Army between 1995 and 2002.

Last fall, a Naval Reserve commander in Iraq alleged that the military doctored his medical file to get rid of any evidence of lariam, which he claims made him suicidal.

RAVE FOR NEW ARMY RIFLE

Army Times has just tested out the service's new rifle, the XM8. To say the paper's psyched would be somewhere south of an understatement. "One Awesome Weapon" is their XM8 cover story.

ANTI-TERROR CHAT ROOM LAUNCHES

One of the biggest complaints about domestic defense after 9/11 was that law enforcement officials still weren't sharing what they knew about potential threats.

In response, the Homeland Security Department put together a computer network for federal authorities to exchange information. But, until now, local cops -- the guys on the front-lines of any anti-terror fight -- were shut out of the extranet.

That changed yesterday, the Washington Post reports, when the Department opened the network up, launching what amounts to a giant chat room for counter-terrorists.

The network will provide a real-time instant messaging, e-mail and live chat service for 5,000 authorized users across 300 agencies in all U.S. states, five territories and 50 urban areas, Ridge said. Users with proper security clearances and software will be able to share vast quantities of data, from audio to computer models, and from foreign news clippings to refined analyses...

The system has already proved its value, authorities said. During last August's East Coast power failure, Washington officials lost telephone contact with New York City. Using the network, New York officials within minutes ruled out terrorism and permitted colleagues across the country to 'stand down.'

U.S. FORCES SLIM DOWN FOR NEXT IRAQ PHASE

The U.S. military isn't just swapping soldiers in Iraq, the Associated Press reports. It's slimming down, too.

The Army's 4th Infantry Division, which currently occupies a swath of Iraq north of Baghdad, will require 19 of the Navy's massive "roll-on, roll-off" or Ro-Ro ships to carry away its vast collection of tanks...

By contrast, the Army's 1st Infantry Division, which will replace the Tikrit-based 4th Infantry in the coming weeks, is arriving in Kuwait on just five Ro-Ro ships...

Military officials have said the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq will take on a less-intrusive hue when the massive rotation of U.S. troops now underway sends 110,000 fresh troops into neighboring Iraq to replace the 130,000 being sent home.

Instead of patrolling Iraq in Bradley armored vehicles and 70-ton Abrams tanks - brought in for the land invasion in March - incoming soldiers and Marines will rely more on armored Humvees and other lighter, more maneuverable vehicles. Hence the need for fewer trips by Navy ships like the hulking gray U.S.N.S. Pomeroy, which was being loaded Monday with Humvees from the Army's V Corps, which is in the process of returning to Germany.

The troop rotation also signals the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom 2, when most U.S. troops will be shifted from the current tight-knit occupation that uses dozens of bases inside Baghdad and other cities, to large camps lying on the outskirts of Iraqi cities. Several bases have already closed.

DRONE RACE RUN-UP

Wired magazine has a big, fat preview of next month's Darpa "Grand Challenge" -- the million-dollar, all-robot road race from L.A. to Vegas.

Meanwhile, Robots.net was a round-up of what the local press is saying about their hometown Grand Challenge teams.

COMET PROBE HUNTS FOR SEEDS OF LIFE

An international space probe set to launch Thursday morning won't just take the closest look yet at the core of a comet. It may shed light on the origin of life on Earth.

A series of recent studies have suggested that comets may have brought water and amino acids -- the building blocks of life -- to Earth billions of years ago. But that's all theoretical. Scientists don't yet have direct proof that comets really carry these materials. Only a couple of probes have ever seen comets up close, after all.

Rosetta, the European Space Agency craft scheduled to lift off Thursday from a launching pad in French Guyana, could dramatically augment the available evidence. If it works as planned, Rosetta will be the first probe to land on a comet's surface. The samples it takes from the soil and atmosphere of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko should determine whether these interplanetary streakers contain the chemical precursors to bacteria, plants and people.

My Wired News article has details.

HOMELAND SEC'Y BUDGET: BS

The Bushies say they want to boosting homeland security spending by ten percent or more. But the numbers tell a different story, according to Slate's Fred Kaplan.

The actual budget is about 25 percent smaller than the administration's press release (and subsequent press stories) indicates. It's just 3 percent larger than last year's budget, not 10 percent to 28 percent as the official numbers suggest. Several vital programs—including assistance to state and local governments—have been cut. And the official budget projections for the next five years—numbers that haven't been reported in press releases or news stories at all—show almost no growth...

Some of the reported increases are misleading. Funding for the "protection of critical infrastructure and key assets" is said to go up from $12.6 billion to $14 billion. However, it turns out that over half that sum, $7.6 billion, is to protect military bases—a task that's covered in the Defense Department budget...

Meanwhile, several vital short-term programs are being kept at the same level or cut. The Firefighters Grants Program (to train local firefighters to deal with terrorist strikes) is cut from $746 million to $500 million. The Federal Air Marshal Service is cut from $640 million to $613 million. The Aviation Passenger Screening Program is flat (at $1.5 billion). Ditto for Border Patrol ($1.8 billion) and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center ($200 million). The Metropolitan Medical Response System, which had received $50 million each of the last two years, has been eliminated.

COMANCHE GROUNDED

The Army has decided to pull the plug on the troubled Comanche helicopter program. "With about $8 billion already invested in the program," the Associated Press reports, "the cancellation is one of the largest in the history of the Army."

But killing the copter won't be cheap, the AP notes. "Although killing the Comanche project would save tens of billion in future costs, the cancellation decision is expected to require the Army to pay at least $2 billion in contract termination fees."

THERE'S MORE: The Pentagon’s Department of Operational Test and Evaluation 2003 report on the Comanche is online here.

DRONE BORDER WATCH

There's been a lot of talk in the last year about letting unmanned planes keep an eye on American borders. A vigilante group even started using its own drone to do wilcat patrols. Now, the Homeland Security Department is officially committing to a robotic border watch.

"The first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to be used on the U.S. land border will be tested and deployed in 2004," a department fact sheet reads. "This technology will allow Homeland Security officers to better monitor remote border locations in the day or at night. In addition, specially-equipped long-range P-3 surveillance aircraft will fly hundreds of additional hours in support of both counter drug and counter terrorism efforts."

PATRIOT = H.A.L.?

“This was like a bad science fiction movie in which the computer starts creating false targets. And you have the operators of the system wondering is this a figment of a computer's imagination or is this real.

"They were seeing what were called spurious targets that were identified as incoming tactical ballistic missiles. Sometimes, they didn't exist at all in time and space. Other times, they were identifying friendly U.S. aircraft as incoming TBMs."

That's how KTVT-TV reporter Robert Riggs describes his experience being embedded with a Patriot missile battery during Gulf War II. It's part of a larger examination by "60 Minutes" into the vaunted missile defense system, which attacked friendly targets three of the 12 times they were used during the Iraq conflict.

ARMY BUILDS SIM EARTH

The U.A. Army is building its own massively multiplayer Internet game -- a Sims Online-like planet taken "from a real-world terrain database and... drawn to the same scale" as Earth, the BBC reports.

So far the artificial world is empty -- only Kuwait City has been modeled. But there's more to come.

"The emphasis in the artificial Earth will be on human interaction rather than conflicts involving lots of military hardware," Robert Gehorsam, with the gaming company There, tells the Beeb. "Combat will be a part of the game. But it is also intended to let the Army simulate intelligence work as well as patrols, planning and working with indigenous populations. "

(via /.)

BLACK "TIA"-LIKE RESEARCH REVEALED

We've been saying for months not to get too happy over the supposed "death" of Total Information Awareness. Now, Defense Tech Pal Mike Sniffen reports that when Congress moved to defund TIA, it "quietly agreed to continue paying to develop highly specialized software to gather foreign intelligence on terrorists."

In a classified section summarized publicly, Congress added money for this software research to the "National Foreign Intelligence Program," without identifying openly which intelligence agency would do the work.

It said, for the time being, products of this research could only be used overseas or against non-U.S. citizens in this country, not against Americans on U.S. soil.

Congressional officials would not say which Poindexter programs were killed and which were transferred. People with direct knowledge of the contracts told the AP that the surviving programs included some of 18 data-mining projects known in Poindexter's research as Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery.

THERE'S MORE: Phil Carter has a nice analysis of the risks of TIA-like efforts.

PENTAGON PREPS FOR WAR IN SPACE

An Air Force report is giving what analysts call the most detailed picture since the end of the Cold War of the Pentagon's efforts to turn outer space into a battlefield.

For years, the American military has spoken in hints and whispers, if at all, about its plans to develop weapons in space. But the U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight Plan changes all that. Released in November, the report makes U.S. dominance of the heavens a top Pentagon priority in the new century. And it runs through dozens of research programs designed to ensure that America can never be challenged in orbit -- from anti-satellite lasers to weapons that "would provide the capability to strike ground targets anywhere in the world from space."

Space has become an increasingly important part of U.S. military efforts. Satellites are used more and more to talk to troops, keep tabs on foes and guide smart bombs. There's also long been recognition that satellites may need some sort of protection against attack.

But the Air Force report goes far beyond these defensive capabilities, calling for weapons that can cripple other countries' orbiters.

That prospect worries some analysts, who fear the U.S. may spark a worldwide arms race in orbit.

"I don't think other countries will be taking this lying down," said Theresa Hitchens, the vice president of the Center for Defense Information. The space weapons programs listed in the Air Force report went largely unnoticed until Hitchens circulated them in an e-mail Thursday. "This will certainly prompt China into actually moving forward" on space weapon plans of its own, she added. "The Russians are likely to respond with something as well."

My Wired News article has details on the Air Force's space war plans.

THERE'S MORE: Quicker, cheaper ways to get into orbit -- that's also a key component of the Air Force report. Right now, space launches have to be planned months in advance. But the Air Force wants to orbiters to be able to take off "on demand" -- just like planes do today.

Another goal is a hypersonic missile, launched from the United States, that can strike almost anywhere in the world. That's something Defense Tech discussed in detail here.

AND MORE: Gen. Lance Lord, who heads Air Force Space Command, told Inside the Air Force that he's focusing on "reversible effects" in space -- weapons that can "temporarily degrade enemy capability, but do not permanently damage their space systems," according to the journal. "However, he did not rule out pursuing more damaging counterspace capabilities for use when it is in the interest of national security."

AND MORE: Space.com has a killer round-up of what's in the Air Force plan.

NUKE DUMP SITE UNSAFE

"The nation's nuclear waste dump proposed for Nevada is poorly designed and could leak highly radioactive waste, a scientist who recently resigned from a federal panel of experts on Yucca Mountain tells the Associated Press."

Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is planned to begin receiving waste in 2010. Some 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste at commercial and military sites in 39 states would be stored in metal canisters underground in tunnels.

"‘If we get high-temperature liquids, the metal [in the canisters] would corrode and that would eventually lead to leakage of nuclear waste," Paul Craig, a physicist and engineering professor at the University of California-Davis, says.

"Therefore, it is a bad design. And that is very, very bad news for the Department of Energy because they are committed to that design."

ARMORED HUMMERS UNDERCUT

American Humvees in may not be sitting ducks in Iraq. But they're pretty close. Without some extra armor, the vehicles certainly can't stand up to the Iraqi insurgents' onslaught of rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs.

"So how is the White House proposing to deal with this?" asks Slate's Eric Umanky. "By underfunding the program to armor Humvees."

We mentioned last week that the U.S. Army is discouraging its soldiers from adding their own jerry-rigged armor to their Humvees. But it's testing out a new-fangled "peel-and-stick" kind of armor on a limited number of Hummers. And the service is steeling a few of its vehicles through official channels.

Now, Marine Corps higher-ups are saying they won't even take that step. They like their Humvees the way they are.

"We've looked at the up-armored Humvee... and it has maintenance problems. It's much lower to the ground," and its weight and configuration make it more difficult to move from ship to shore, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Michael Hagee tells UPI.

NOBEL WINNERS: WHITE HOUSE DISTORTS SCIENCE

20 Nobel laureates are accusing the Bush administration of "deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry," the Times is reporting.

The prize-winners, organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, say in a report that "the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented."

"We're not taking issue with administration policies. We're taking issue with the administration's distortion ... of the science related to some of its policies," the group's president, Kurt Gottfried, told Fox News.

The Union's report is online here.

ROBO RENT-A-COP

Maybe the crooks are wimpier in Tokyo. But I can't imagine that a whole lot of thieves are going to be scared off by this Japanese security drone.

"The robot, the first of its kind in the world, can lay down a smokescreen against intruders," reports Australia's Courier-Mail. And, it can mark "unwelcome intruders with paint balls."

Tmsuk Inc. plans on renting out these robo-guards to private corporations, government offices, and hospitals starting in April. The company is asking for ¥3 million ($36,500) a year for the mechanical defenders.

BRAIN SCAN ON DEATH ROW

Right after 9/11, "brain fingerprinting" -- the controversial technique that supposedly spots a liar by measuring the mind's electrical activity -- was suddenly hot. Now, it's "about to take centre stage in a last-chance court appeal against a death-row conviction in the US," the BBC reports.

Dr. Larry Farwell, the founder of Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, says he gave his test a few days ago to Jimmy Ray Slaughter, who has been convicted of "shooting, stabbing and mutilating his former girlfriend, Melody Wuertz, and of shooting to death their eleven-month old-daughter, Jessica," according to the Beeb.

Dr. Farwell claims his test show that "Jimmy Ray Slaughter did not know where in the house the murder took place; he didn't know where the mother's body was lying or what was on her clothing at the time of death - a salient fact in the case."

Slaughter is now on death row in an Oklahoma prison. It's unclear what the impact of the brain fingerprinting will be on his 11th-hour appeal to escape execution.

BLOODBATH FOR NAVY SKIPPERS

In the last 13 months, 20 Navy commanding officers have been fired -- more than in the last three years combined. Navy Times explores why.

THERE'S MORE: The paper is also reporting that "tons of Marine Corps materiel stored during the Cold War in Norwegian caves is being dusted off for duty in the hot combat zones of Iraq."

In March, Marine Forces Europe will begin shipping an undisclosed number of vehicles, ammunition and food supplies from Norway to support I Marine Expeditionary Force’s deployment in Iraq, said Lt. Col. Joseph Rizzo, the command’s operations officer.

That shipment will be coupled with about 1,000 Marines from 1st Force Service Support Group from Camp Pendleton, Calif., and vehicles and other equipment already arriving in Kuwait."

DARPA GOAL: FOODLESS FIGHTERS

Soldiers' moms will no doubt be horrified. But the Pentagon is looking into ways for GIs to fight for up to five days -- without eating a single meal.

During a mission, soldiers in the field typically don't have the time, or the inclination, to chow down. That lack of food can affect their battlefield performance. So Darpa, the U.S. military's far-out research arm, wants scientists to figure out if soldiers can operate at top levels -- without lunch breaks.

"The question is: 'Are there temporary biochemical approaches we can use to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of soldiers when they're already worked to exhaustion?'" said a Darpa life sciences consultant, who asked not to be named.

The agency has a couple of ideas on how this might be done: A cocktail of nutrients or so-called "nutraceuticals" could help build endurance. Lowering soldiers' core body temperature might keep them from overheating. Or, perhaps, the change could be made at the microscopic level, by turbo-charging mitochondria -- the cell's energy suppliers.

The Darpa project, called "Metabolic Dominance" or "Peak Soldier Performance," is part of a wider, future-facing Pentagon research push to develop grunts who are pretty much immune to normal human demands.

My Wired News article has details.

THERE'S MORE: Darpa's forays into biological research have run into controversy in recent months. Last fall, the Senate tried to cut tens of millions of dollars in agency programs like the "Brain Machine Interface," which has yielded startling results in using the mind to operate robotic limbs. Much of that funding was later restored. But the fight served as a "shot across the bow," according to one agency contractor. And, as a result, Darpa has renamed most of its biology programs, to make them sound less like science fiction, and more like military necessities. For example, "Persistence in Combat," the project to keep injured G.I.s pulling the trigger on the battlefield for days, is now known as "Soldier Self-Care." "Metabolic Dominance" is slated to become "Peak Soldier Performance."

AND MORE: Darpa has released the list of companies and hospitals who have received "Peak Soldier Performance" grants. They are, according to spokesperson Jan Walker: Mars Inc. / Oxford University / National Institutes of Health, Oklahoma State University, Munchi BioTherapeutics Inc., and Stanford University / Naval Health Research Center."

AND MORE: The Army may have found a way to keep soldiers from over-heating, New Scientist reports: "a new, lightweight cooling vest, using ammonia and powered by hydrocarbon fuel."

Some wearable cooling systems already exist and are used by astronauts, for example. But these are based on pumping cooled water through the vest's tubes. This requires substantial power, making these systems too heavy to be carried...

The new vest still employs water as a coolant, but uses a cooling system powered by burning hydrocarbon fuel to remove the heat from the water.

Warm water in the vest's tubes is pumped past an array of microscopic tubes - each about the width of a human hair - containing liquid ammonia. The ammonia absorbs the water's heat and vaporises, cooling the water.

BOMB-SNIFFING 'BOTS TO IRAQ

Police forces have been using robots for were to collect and defuse bombs. Now, the Pentagon is sending 150 of the 'bots to Iraq, look for the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) which have been so deadly to American G.I.s.

"Cameras in the small, tele-operated robots allow troops to safely inspect a suspected IED while their 'disruptor' arms, or shotgun-like devices, fire shells to shatter IEDs," Defense News explains.

"60 MINUTES" DELAYS NUKE LAB SEC'Y DRILLS

"The Bush administration is putting off test assaults on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and other U.S. nuclear-weapons sites on the eve of a 60 Minutes report on lax nuclear security," long-time nuke-watcher Ian Hoffman reports.

The Ed Bradley-delivered story also focuses on problems at thr Y-12 nuclear storage facility. The Energy Department said that security drills had been faked there, for maybe as long as twenty years.

THERE'S MORE: That 60 Minutes report is now online here.

RED MARS

The Soviet Union might have been poised to implode in 1989. But that didn't stop the whiz-kids at the CIA from predicting that the Evil Empire would "likely" soon be painting the Red Planet, um, Red.

"We believe the Soviets are planning for a manned Mars landing mission some time after the year 2000," reads the CIA's then-secret analysis, now de-classified.

(via Secrecy News)

BLIMPS TO IRAQ

The Army is sending blimps to Iraq, to spot bad guys from the skies.

Two 56,000-cubic-foot, tethered, "aerostats" will be ready to ship this summer, part of a Pentagon-wide push towards airships. The military likes the helium-filled crafts because they're cheap -- just $1.6 million each -- and because they can stay in the air much, much longer than regular airplanes or copters.

Lockheed Martin, who got the Army contract for the Iraq-bound blimps, says they've built more than 8,000 of 'em for commercial and military customers.

COLD WAR URANIUM M.I.A.

President Bush unveiled his plan to curb nuclear proliferation yesterday. But a new Energy Department report shows just how tough it's going to be to check the spread of nuclear material. The Department says that tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU), given to countries like Iran and Pakistan during the Cold War, can't be accounted for -- and probably never will be.

In the 1950s, as part of the Atoms for Peace program, the U.S. gave then-friendly countries HEU for their nuclear energy programs -- in exchange for promises not to develop atomic weapons.

Four decades later, the American government decided that trying to recover some of the HEU produced by these foreign nuclear reactors might be sound policy. You know, since HEU can be used to make a nuclear bomb and all.

Good idea. But here's the problem: this program, known as the Foreign Research Reactor Spent Fuel Acceptance Program, addresses only about 30% of the HEU that America gave away.

And of that 30% -- about 5,200 kilograms -- the Energy Department now figures it will only be able to get about about half back.

What's worse, according to the Department, is that there has been "no effort to recover an additional 12,300 kilograms of HEU" given away outside of the Acceptance Program.

Participation in the Acceptance Program was voluntary. So many countries with U.S. produced HEU had chosen not to participate, including Israel, Japan, and France.

That list shouldn't scare anybody, except the most red-faced of the "freedom fries" crowd.

But there are two more countries that should make anybody quiver: Iran and Pakistan.

THERE'S MORE: If the world's nuclear powers agree to the guidelines outlined in Bush's speech, "the world will be a safer place," argues Slate's Fred Kaplan. "The question is: Why should they? What is Bush offering in the way of incentives to keep nuclear wannabes from pursuing their desires or to dissuade nuclear dealers from hawking their wares? Judging from his speech, nothing."

CONGRESS THINKS CAPPS II STINKS

The CAPPS II passenger screening system is seriously screwed up, a new Congressional report finds. The General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, has spent the last four months studying the controversial program. Its conclusion (according to the L.A. Times):

"Uncertainties surrounding the system's future functionality and schedule alone result in the potential that the system may not meet expected requirements, may experience delayed deployment, and may incur increased costs."

The GAO report found that the Transportation Security Administration, which runs CAPPS II, hadn't adequately addressed seven of eight concerns raised by Congress about the system.

The Times says that "these include preventing abuses, protecting privacy, creating an appeals process, assuring the accuracy of passenger data, testing the system, preventing unauthorized access by hackers and setting out clear policies for the system."

THERE'S MORE: The GAO report is now online here.

DARPA WANTS GEAR THAT DECONTAMINATES ITSELF

The U.S. military has a pretty decent system for keeping its troops safe if there's a biological or chemical attack. But getting the toxins off of its gear -- that's a major hassle. The Army still relies on a four-decade old, ultra-corrosive solution to get rid of bio- or chem-agents. And new research, into toxic-eating enzymes and foams, hasn't fully bloomed, yet.

So Darpa is on the hunt for materials that can decontaminate themselves. The biocidal coatings would be used for everything from electronics to tank hulls, sensors to personnel carriers' insides.

In its call for proposals, issued last week, Darpa envisions a two-part research effort, lasting a total of three-and-a-half years.

The research would be centered in three areas: surface modification, self-cleaning and renewal, and sporicide development.

First, the surface modification thrust must demonstrate biocidal activity on the surface with less than 0.5 percent additive. This implies that a very small percentage of the bulk material will contain the biocidal compound and that most of the effective biocide will reside at the surface. Second, the self-cleaning thrust requires the biocidal surface properties be persistent over ten (10) challenge/renewal cycles. The third thrust, on sporicide development, requires the demonstration of a surface capable of killing or rendering spores harmless.

ACXIOM & "TIA": MATCH MADE IN HELL

By now, regular Defense Tech readers are familiar with Acxiom, the data aggregation company that's supplying your personal information to government data-mining efforts like CAPPS II. Today, it came to light that the company was being considered as a supplier for Total Information Awareness, Darpa's uber-database project.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has obtained internal Darpa e-mail about using Acxiom in TIA experiments. According to one message, Jennifer Barrett, Acxiom's Chief Privacy Officer, gave Darpa advice on how to keep objections to TIA to a minimum.

"One of the key suggestions she made is that people will object to Big Brother, wide-coverage databases, but they don't object to use of relevant data for specific purposes that we can all agree on. Rather than getting all the data for any purpose, we should start with the goal, tracking terrorists to avoid attacks, and then identify the data needed (although we can't define all of this, we can say that our templates and models of terrorists are good places to start)," wrote Darpa's Lt. Col. Doug Dyer. "Already, this guidance has shaped my thinking."

BUSH: CURB NUKE FUEL

Several countries, including Iran and North Korea, are accused of hiding nuclear weapons programs behind the veil of atomic power efforts. That's why the President is announcing a new initiative to keep nations from getting the equipment and fuel needed to make nuclear energy.

For decades, America and her allies have tried to limit which countries get nuclear weapons. But they've largely left atomic reactors alone. Now, that's about to change.

The New York Times calls it a re-examination of the "'basic bargain' underlying the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: that those states that promise not to pursue nuclear weapons will receive help in producing nuclear fuel for power generation."

According to the paper, Bush, in a speech this afternoon, won't ask "for a reopening of the 1970 treaty, which one [official] said would be 'too hard.' Instead, he will appeal to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, 40 countries that sell most nuclear technology, to refuse to sell equipment to any country that is not already equipped to make nuclear fuel, either by enriching uranium or by reprocessing spent fuel for plutonium."

ARMY SAYS NO TO AD-HOC ARMOR

Last week, we talked about how U.S. soldiers are adding jury-rigged armor to their Humvees, to toughen the vehicles up against RPGs and roadside explosives. Now, the Army is telling its troops to cut it out -- or be very, very careful, at least.

“What we want to avoid is having soldiers adding ad-hoc armor to their vehicles and giving themselves a false sense of security,” Maj. Gen. N. Ross Thompson III, commanding general for the Army’s Tank-automotive and Armaments Command, says in a statement.

An Army press release warns of the "potential consequences" of ad-hoc armor: "more required maintenance as the additional weight will likely mean early structure and mechanical failures, and reduction in the amount of cargo the vehicle can safely carry... Drivers will need more time to brake due to the increased weight; and the added material could possibly change the vehicle’s center of gravity, increasing the risk of vehicle rollover."

Sensible guidelines? Or bureaucratic clamp-down?

POLYGRAPH ALTERNATIVE IS A LIAR

"Voice-stress analysis, an alternative to the polygraph as a method for lie detection, is already widely used in police and insurance fraud investigations," notes a Washington University press release. "Despite its booming popularity, a number of federally sponsored studies have found little or no scientific evidence to support the notion that existing voice-stress technologies are capable of consistently detecting lies and deceptions."

SURE, NISSAN HAS A SONIC BLASTER

File this one under "highly unlikely":

A device intended to suppress hailstorms by blasting out sound waves is being tested in the US by the car manufacturer Nissan. The company hopes to protect the large fleet of new vehicles made at its plant in Canton, Ohio, from the damage that can be caused by falling hailstones.

Nissan spokesman Frank Limpus told New Scientist that the device works by firing sound waves into a cloud in order to disrupt the formation of hailstones.

The system is said to have a range of 15,000 metres and to generate 120 decibels of noise at ground level when in use. It is also said to switch on automatically when weather conditions conducive to hailstorms are detected.

CLARK: FATHER OF CAPPS II?

Did Gen. Wes Clark push the federal government into the controversial CAPPS II passenger screening system? That's what Farhad Manjoo suggests in today's Salon.

THERE'S MORE: The Washington Post is reporting that Ben H. Bell III, who's heading up the CAPPS II program for the Transportation Security Administration, has just resigned. The Post article doesn't give a reason for the resignation. But a spokesperson for the agency says Bell's departure won't impact the roll-out of the passenger screening effort.

NEXT UPDATE 2/10/04

See ya Tuesday! And in the meantime, go read this fascinating L.A. Times article from William Arkin, on the arbitrary nature of intel.

NUKE LAB "BRAIN DRAIN" STOPPED

Officials at the country's national labs were terrified a few years back: Their best minds were being lost to higher-paying, private sector jobs, or to retirement. The departures not only jeopardized future research. They "threatened the nation with inadvertent, unilateral nuclear disarmament," according to Aviation Week.

But now, thankfully, that trend seems to be reversing, the magazine says.

All three primary nuclear labs--Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia--have been able to recruit and retain high-quality scientists, engineers and technicians during the last few years, and have rehired some of those who left for big paychecks and stock options during the dot-com boom. That reversal is revitalizing one of the nation's largest pools of scientific expertise at a time when high-tech, multidisciplinary teams are being focused on countering terrorism.

Although Los Alamos National Laboratory has seen significant losses to retirements, it realized a net gain of 333 employees since Oct. 1, 2002. Further, the lab has done considerable "strategic hiring" to ensure its technical needs are met over the long term.

PENTAGON DROPS NET VOTING

Good news from ComputerWorld.

"The U.S. Department of Defense has decided, for now at least, to drop its efforts to give overseas U.S. military personnel voting access over the Internet, because of concerns about the security of the system."

TENET TO WHITE HOUSE: SCREW YOU

On the surface, it may have seemed like a polite, if rigorous, defense of his employees and their roles in pre-war intelligence. But CIA Director George Tenet's speech today was actually a not-so-subtle "fuck you" to the White House.

"They never said there was an imminent threat. Rather they painted an objective assessment for our policymakers." is what the transcripts will say Tenet told his Georgetown University audience.

But here's what he really said:

"Hey, Cheney and Rumsfeld. You too, Dubya. The CIA never told you to invade Iraq right now. That was your idea. You guys took our information, twisted it around, and made that case. And now you want to pin this Iraq mess on me? Go to Hell."

NUCLEAR BOWL: CAL VS. TEXAS

Two of the country's biggest universities are headed for a multibillion dollar showdown over who runs the nation's most important nuclear lab.

The University of Texas' board of regents voted unanimously Wednesday to begin preparing a potential bid to operate the troubled Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. The University of California has been running the lab since its inception more than 60 years ago. But after waves of scandals forced the ouster of most of Los Alamos' senior staff, the Energy Department announced that it would put the lab's $3 billion-per-year management contract up for bid for the first time, when it expires next year.

Several corporate and academic institutions are expected to go after the Los Alamos contract in the upcoming year. By committing $500,000 to start work on a bid, the University of Texas is the first major player to formally announce its intentions.

UT officials say they won't decide on whether to place a full-blown bid until after they see the Energy Department's request for proposal on Los Alamos. But already, controversy is swirling around UT's decision. Some Los Alamos employees are questioning whether UT has the science expertise needed to run one of the world's premiere research centers.

Lab watchdogs, on the other hand, are worried that the school might be a little too cozy with the Republican establishment in Washington, D.C., and could be particularly pliant regarding President Bush's push for new nuclear weapons. After all, critics note, Texas is the home state of the president, and of Rep. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader.

There's more in my Wired News article.

LIFELOG DEAD

The Pentagon has pulled the plug on LifeLog, its stunningly ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person's entire existence.

Run by Darpa, the Defense Department's research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received. Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and experiences.

LifeLog's backers said the all-encompassing diary could have turned into a near-perfect digital memory, giving its users computerized assistants with an almost flawless recall of what they had done in the past. But civil libertarians immediately pounced on the project when it debuted last spring, arguing that LifeLog could become the ultimate tool for profiling potential enemies of the state.

Researchers close to the project say they're not sure why it was dropped late last month. Darpa hasn't provided an explanation for LifeLog's quiet cancellation. "A change in priorities" is the only rationale agency spokeswoman Jan Walker provided.

However, related Darpa efforts concerning software secretaries and mechanical brains are still moving ahead as planned.

LifeLog is the latest in a series of controversial programs that have been canceled by Darpa in recent months. The Terrorism Information Awareness, or TIA, data-mining initiative was eliminated by Congress -- although many analysts believe its research continues on the classified side of the Pentagon's ledger. The Policy Analysis Market, which provided a stock market of sorts for people to bet on terror strikes, was almost immediately withdrawn after its details came to light in July.

"Darpa's pretty gun-shy now," added Lee Tien, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been critical of many agency efforts. "After TIA, they discovered they weren't ready to deal with the firestorm of criticism."

My Wired News article has details on LifeLog's cancellation.

THERE'S MORE: LifeLog may be dead, but Darpa still has plenty of creepy data-mining programs, the BBC notes.

Imagine being able to pinpoint someone's location anywhere in the world simply by typing a few keywords on your PC. That is what software partly funded by the US military is trying to do.

The MetaCarta program works by analysing thousands of documents and cross-checking the results with a massive geographical database...

The software automatically extracts geographic references from text documents such as e-mails or webpages. Millions of documents can be searched using keywords, place names or a time reference. Search results appear as points on a map instead of as a list of documents. The company says this information can be used, for example, to track patterns of criminal activity and identify spots of intensity.

(via /.)

PEEL-AND-STICK ARMOR IN IRAQ

Usually, adding to an armor to a Humvee means welding on giant steel plates. Now, U.S. forces in Iraq are starting to stick their armor on, like bumper stickers.

The Aztik 100 Instant Armoring System is, according to its maker, a lightweight, semi-flexible combination of ceramics, textiles, and polymers that forms a protective coating capable of stopping a .50 caliber bullet. The panels have glue on one side, so they can slap on to a car as if they were decals. StrategyPage claims American troops are already using the sticky protection in Iraq. But the Associated Press (whom I'm more inclined to believe) says live-fire tests there are only now about to begin.

THERE'S MORE: Soldiers that can't get a hold of the stick-on armor are going to local metal shops in Iraq to get their Humvees toughened up, Stars and Stripes says.

RICIN MYSTERY

The big news today, of course, is that the biotoxin ricin appears to have been found in the office of Bill Frist, the Senate's majority leader. An envelope filled with the powder was discovered in Frist's mail room. And now, three Senate office buildings have been shut down while the mail is checked there, too.

There's something odd about the discovery, however. As near as I can tell (and I may have this wrong) people don't get hurt from inhaling ricin -- at least, not a little bit of it. Eating the stuff is what's so deadly. That's why previous terror plots using ricin have involved poisoning the food or water supply.

"When you talk about anthrax versus this ricin -- the same amount of anthrax, about one kilogram -- you would need four metric tons of ricin to produce the same effect. So a little bit of it really isn't going to create much of a problem," CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta said.

"To the best of my knowledge, in a human being, inhaling it has never hurt anybody," Frist tells the New York Times.

THERE'S MORE: "Ricin may actually indicate a fair bit of sophistication: it suggests an attacker familiar enough with it to know it would survive the irradiation of senate email unharmed, unlike other living biological agents," writes reader TH.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who heads the Federation of American Scientists' chemical and biological weapons efforts, disagrees.

"Ricin is easy to make," she writes. "ANYONE could have done it. I suspect that this is routine nut stuff."

What's more, Rosenberg adds, "if it was not weaponized to form an aerosol, it would have to be eaten to be toxic (eg, eating with contaminated hands--unlikely to deliver much of a dose). The lack of precautions being taken at Dirksen suggests they know already it is not aerosolizable."

AND MORE: Gary Ackerman, with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), warns that ricin can be ultra-deadly in an aerosol form. "About 3 milligrams will kill the average adult," he notes.

Making ricin aerosolizable is easier than doing it to, say, anthrax -- a living organism that can be killed at it's crushed into a fine powder. But, according to a CNS report from last year, ricin "aerosolization by means of a dispersal device... would require extensive prior research, development, operational planning, and testing, and [is] thus probably beyond the means of most terrorists."

"This is not a weapon of mass casualties," Ackerman says, referring to the Frist letter. "This is intended to get media attention."

AND MORE: The White House was also sent a ricin letter -- way back in November, ABC News is reporting. Another ricin package was left in a South Carolina post office last October.

EARLY MISSILE DEFENSE

The Pentagon says it will start up its missile defense system early -- in the summer, rather than in the fall, as previously scheduled. But the Defense Department's testing chief thinks the program may be going too far, too fast.

"The accelerated schedule, if realized, would enable President Bush to claim fulfillment of a major 2000 campaign pledge earlier than officials had indicated," the Washington Post notes.

Disclosing the planned summer start, Pentagon officials insisted in interviews that politics played no part in revising the schedule. They said the change grew out of the realization that the system could begin providing some anti-missile protection before all 10 of the interceptors slated for fielding this year had been lowered into silos in Alaska and California...

Whether the Bush administration is moving too fast to deploy the anti-missile system was in dispute even before the latest shift, with the Pentagon's own top weapons evaluator recently raising a warning flag. In a status report last month on major new weapons programs, Thomas P. Christie, director of the Pentagon's office of Operational Test and Evaluation, said a shortage of testing data would likely make it difficult for him to assess the system's effectiveness ahead of any deployment this year.

He expressed concern about the small number and relatively simple nature of flight tests, noting they have used the same course each time and have relied on surrogates and prototypes for key elements still under development. Problems with a new booster, designed to carry the interceptor vehicle into space, prompted the Pentagon to suspend flight intercept attempts after the last test in December 2002.

The next flight tests are scheduled for May and July; thus, the Pentagon could end up activating the anti-missile system before results of the summer tests have been fully assessed. (emphasis mine)

THERE'S MORE: The anti-missile system "may not be perfected, or even in what one might consider a production configuration," writes Defense Tech reader JA. "But having *something* in the silos complicates the problem greatly for North Korea, perhaps to the point of making it too expensive to even attempt to develop hardware."

AND MORE: "I don't see how it complicates anything for North Korea," reader MB responds. "They know as well as the rest of us that the chances are near nil of the system being able to intercept even the most rudimentary ICBM."

AND MORE: "That would be true if the leadership of the DPRK believes everything they read about the failures of the BMD (Ballisitc Missile Defense)," retorts reader Wyatt Earp. "The fact is the leadership of the DPRK is an extra kind of paranoid, so the acceleration of BMD is going to have the possibility of pushing the DPRK into two possible directions: Give up on their ICBMs because they aren't going to accomplish anything in light of the American BMD, whose failure is a sinister cover-up by those crafty Imperialists. Or fly the birds either on more test flights or on a strike to knockout the BMD site in Alaska sooner rather than later, thus not being as effective as they could be since they've not finished their missiles either."

BAD PRECEDENT FOR INTEL PANEL

So the President's setting up a panel to look for screw-ups in the country's intelligence agencies. This will amount to exactly zero, if recent history is any guide.

Right after he got into office, Bush ordered a comprehensive review of the CIA and related services. But, according to Secrecy News, he never bothered to implement any of the findings from that review, lead by Gen. Brent Scowcroft. Even after the massive intelligence failure of 9/11, Bush sat on his hands, with Congress "implor[ing]" him in 2002 to make changes. None came.

Check Josh Marshall's site for a whole bunch more.

BASTARD CHILDREN OF "TIA"

Congress supposedly killed Total Information Awareness, Darpa's far-flung effort to comb databases in search of terrorists. But that doesn't mean the authorities are finished sorting through the records of Americans to expose evildoers. Many analysts think bits of TIA still exist on the covert, "black" side of the Pentagon's ledger. This month's Wired magazine has my rundown of the unclassified efforts, with straight out of government and corporate documents.

THERE'S MORE: Former Utah Governor Mike Leavitt signed