WORST. REDACTION. EVER.

Just when you thought our government's secrecy policies couldn't get any more ridiculous, this little nugget comes down the pike.

In a legal battle with the ACLU, the Justice Department blacked out a section of a legal document -- not because it disclosed sensitive information, but because it contained a quote from the Supreme Court that warned about the dangers of stifling speech in the name of "security."

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

"Now we have absolute, incontrovertible proof that the government also censors completely innocuous material simply because they don't like it," The Memory Hole's Russ Kick thunders. "The mind reels at such a blatant abuse of power (and at the sheer chutzpah of using national security as an excuse to censor a quotation about using national security as an excuse to stifle dissent)."

SONAR = WHALE WOES?

For years, environmentalists and the U.S. Navy have been duking it out over a new class of ultra-loud sonars -- and whether the machines are bad for the local whale population. The Navy says it needs the active sonars, to track quiet, electric submarines that roam coastal waters. But the devices can crank up to 238 decibels -- 4.3 billion times as loud as the sounds that can cause people pain. Green groups say that whales, which rely on their hearing to mate, feed, and navigate, are effected even more dramatically. Sometimes, they even run aground as a result.

The Navy has long disputed that its sonars have harmed any whales. But now, according to the Washington Post, the service "has acknowledged that vessels on maneuver off Hawaii last month used their sonar periodically in the 20 hours before a large pod of melon-headed whales unexpectedly came to shore."

"There is no evidence of a relationship here between the sonar use and the whale behavior," a Navy spokesman said.

PENTAGON PCS SPEW SPAM

All those Nigerian business offers and penis enlargement promises you've been getting? They could be coming from Pentagon computers, says USA Today.

THERE'S MORE: Crappy computer security "is eating us up," Army CIO Lt. Gen. Steve Boutelle told an IT conference today.

MISSILE SHIELD: CONFUSION REIGNS

"Despite U.S. President George W. Bush’s declaration that a nascent missile defense system is nearly ready, the military officials responsible for operating the system are far from clear about who will do what, when and how," reports Defense News.

"Parts of the system are still in development, rigorous tests have yet to be conducted, commanders are unclear about the rules of engagement, and operators have yet to be fully trained."

So many key tests of the system have been scrapped that "the command that is responsible for drawing up the ground-based system’s operating plans and procedures doesn’t yet know exactly what the missile shield can do," the magazine notes.

There are even questions about just what hardware will be part of these engagement sequences. The missile defense official said they could include the Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC)-3 and other weapons meant for tactical battlefield use, raising the possibility that military commanders may ask to deploy PAC-3 batteries on U.S. soil, which would be a first.

Nor does the military have a firm grasp on who is going to pull the trigger -- a decision that's "more difficult than with ordinary weapons because different services and commands will operate different parts of" the missile shield.

Overall, the ground-based system will be run by the Northern Command; the future Sea-based Missile Defense system will be run by Pacific Command. The Air Force will operate some sensors, radar and satellites, and the Army will run command-and-control systems and launch and maintain some interceptor rockets. When the sea-based shield comes online, the Navy’s role will grow...

Missile defense officials envision a system that is never finished.

LASERS 1, MORTARS 0

Lasers have been getting pretty good at knocking down rockets, as we've seen in tests over the last few years. Now, the ray guns are starting to prove that they can zap one of the most common battlefield threats – mortars – as well.

In tests last week at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the Tactical High Energy Laser blasted individual mortar rounds and salvos of the munitions. That's the first time a "directed energy" weapon has done so. Since 2000, the weapon, a collaboration between the American and Israeli militaries, has been successfully zapping rockets and artillery shells in tests.

U.S. forces in Iraq could sure use the ray gun right now; mortars have become a favorite of insurgents there, used almost as commonly as roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. Two teenagers were killed over the weekend when mortars struck eastern Baghdad. But the laser is still years away from operational use – 2007, at the earliest. (via GeekPress)

DEFENSE TECH + CNNFN

I'm scheduled to be on CNNfn's "The Flip Side," around 11:40 am, to yammer on about government secrecy.

"ORGANIC" DRONES TAKE OFF

The Pentagon wants its soldiers on the ground to have drones of their own – flying robots that can spy on enemy hideouts, detect or trigger ambushes, and spot explosives. American Lieutenants and Captains have a few of these unmanned scouts already. But the drones all have their problems: too slow, too cumbersome to launch, too susceptible to the elements, or too reliant on in-flight hand-holding.

Enter Organic Aerial Vehicles, or OAVs. ("Organic," in defense lingo, means operated by the smallest of fighting forces.) These are drones designed to take off like a helicopter, fly like a plane, and linger over a battlefield for long stretches -- without orders from a flesh-and-blood master, and without a care for the weather.

Prototypes of the OAV look strange, almost like metallic pigs-in-blankets. And they come in three sizes -- hand-held, midget-height, and larger-than-soldier. Recently, Honeywell, which is developing the OAVs for the Pentagon, flight tested the 29-inch-diameter, four-foot-high version at the Soldier Battle Lab in Fort Benning, Ga. And the drone flew well, according to ISR Journal, traveling up to 30 knots in light rain and moderate winds during its 18 minute, fully autonomous flights. Eventually, the OAV is supposed to fly up to 100 knots – several times quicker than the current, small unit drones, like the Pointer or Dragon Eye.

Now, Pentagon mad scientist division Darpa is looking for companies to build the next phase of OAVs. These 112-pound drones should be able to stay in the air for two hours at a time. They should have a fully-developed collision avoidance system, so the OAVs don't bump into buildings, trees – or each other – while they're flying. And drones should be able to network together, to form an autonomous swarm of scouts, sitting in the sky.

TXT 4 RNC PRTST

The most common of personal electronics -- the mobile phone -- is becoming a tool of choice for political organizers. And when activists by the thousands gather in New York City to protest at the Republican National Convention, cell phones will get their most intense workout yet as activist instruments.

Mobile-engaged masses don't just connect differently; they act differently too. Short-messaging system (SMS) alerts over cell phones have enabled demonstrators to shift tactics, deploy resources and respond to the police, just about instantly.

Law enforcement officials concede they're having trouble keeping up with these fast-moving, cell-connected groups.

"Now, they can actually coordinate tactics, create a feint. They'll start a demonstration in one place to draw the police, while their true objective is in another," said Charles "Sid" Heal, a crowd-control specialist and 29-year veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

"There's nothing we can do right now to counter them," Heal said. "They're in a digital age, and we're still in analog."

There's more in my Chicago Tribune story.

HOMELAND DUTIES FOR BOEING'S DRONES?

"Discussions are under way to see if Boeing Co.'s unmanned aerial vehicle program can be applied to homeland security," according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

"Boeing's unmanned program is mostly known for the combat applications being designed for U.S troops and the Pentagon's multibillion-dollar Future Combat Systems program. But Jim Albaugh, chief executive of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, said other uses could be found for the unmanned aerial vehicles, such as conducting border surveillance or detecting the release of deadly pathogens within the United States."

As regular Defense Tech readers know, Boeing is one of two companies that's developing killer drones for the Pentagon. But those unmanned planes are still years away from being operational. The Homeland Security Department would likely be more interested in vehicles like the ScanEagle, a lightweight drone which recently set endurance records by completing a nearly 17-hour flight over Washington's Puget Sound.

ALL THAT SECRECY IS EXPENSIVE

The 9/11 Commission, leaders in Congress -- even the government's top secret-keeper -- all agree that Washington's penchant for keeping information under wraps has grown out of control. Now, a coalition of watchdog and civil liberties groups has documented just how much it's costing to keep all those records away from the public eye.

During the 2003 fiscal year, the federal government spent more than $6.5 billion securing classified information, according to a new "Secrecy Report Card" from OpenTheGovernment.org. That's an increase of more than $800 million from the previous year, according to the group, and a nearly $2 billion jump since 2001. But it's only a best guess, really; the report card's accounting doesn't include a penny from the Central Intelligence Agency, which keeps even its overall budget classified.

"I've read supposedly classified documents where page after page after page didn't tell me anything I didn't already know," Rep. Christopher Shays, who chairs the House Committee on Government Reform's national security panel, tells Defense Tech. When asked what percentage of government records were being wrongly kept from the public, Shays replied, "I tend to think 90 percent is not an exaggeration."

My Wired News article has details.

THERE'S MORE: "Tony Tether, director of DARPA, is one of the bigger [secrecy] offenders. Since he became director, more of what DARPA does has become classified, and at a higher level. In some cases, the classification level of programs has gone up at the same rate or faster than those performing the work can upgrade their clearances," says one Defense Tech pal.

"A significant and growing element of DARPA's work in information assurance is classified, and cannot be discussed in this forum. The future thrust is for more of these efforts to become classified. Why? Because of our increasing dependence on networks, their vulnerabilities and techniques for protecting them become more and more sensitive. Accordingly, our efforts have become classified," Tether told the House Science Committee a few months back.

"Classifying vulnerabilities of military systems, critical vulnerabilities with no known fixes, or beyond state-of-the-art attacks can make some sense," our pal continues. "But classifying techniques for protecting networks just guarantees that the techniques will only be available to the military, and will not be available to protect critical infrastructure and commercial networks. Defensive computer security at DARPA has traditionally been unclassified, but that has changed since Tether has been around."

PROF LEADS "DARPA OF DISSENT"

The place didn't feel like a radical's den; there were too many toys lying around. It didn't look like an artist's studio; the wipe board was filled with schematics, not sketches. And it sure didn't seem like an engineer's lab -- especially not with the impossibly cute, white-furred bunny gnawing at the cables. But the loft in Manhattan's West Village was a bit of all three, really: the home to controversial art and engineering professor Natalie Jeremijenko.

For more than a decade, Jeremijenko and her collective of tinkerers and artistes, the Bureau of Inverse Technology, have been using technology to explore the limits of social and environmental issues, from suicide to toxic skies. She's won slots at top universities, like Yale and Stanford, and at prestigious art centers, like the Whitney Museum, for the work. But starting this weekend, the machines put together here by Jeremijenko and her cohorts may get their biggest stage yet, by giving a guerrilla geek's edge to the protests swirling around the Republican National Convention in New York City.

Months ago, it became clear that the RNC counter-demonstrations were going digital. But most of the gadgetry involved was household stuff -- text messages to report cops' whereabouts, or web pages to arrange housing. Jeremijenko and her group have gone beyond that, hand-crafting devices meant to level, just a bit, law enforcement's technology advantage over activists.

Their devices include a 10-foot balloon, for counting crowds; a set of pirate transmitters, for taking over local radio stations; and 1,400 face masks that measure the level of pollution in the Manhattan air. Think of the group as a kind of Darpa of dissent -- with Jeremijenko's loft as the headquarters.

Check out my other article at Wired News today for more.

JET DEFENSE ON THE RUNWAY

At last, there's a bit of good news about the shoulder-fired missiles that terrorists have found so irresistable. After years of taking its sweet time, the Department of Homeland Security yesterday handed out a pair of contracts to design and test a prototype missile defense for passenger planes.

BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman will each get about $45 million, to spend over the next 18 months, so they can get their systems ready to shoulder-fired threat. Both companies will likely use some variation of the "Directed InfraRed CounterMeasure," or DIRCM, which uses beams of light to jams missile guidance systems.

Despite the contracts, the Homeland Security Department still sounds less-than-thrilled about the infrared solution, however.

Current DIRCMs cannot be easily adapted to the U.S. commercial air fleet, and must be re-engineered. The current available DIRCMs have roughly 300 hours of life before they must be repaired or refurbished. While suitable for the military or special purpose aircraft, given their maintenance and logistical infrastructure, this is not suitable for U.S. commercial air fleet use. The cost of the training, ground support equipment, supplies and spares, and logistics trail that would need to be in place at every U.S. airport would be significant. Estimates put this cost at as much as $5 billion to $10 billion per year prior to the re-engineering efforts of this program.

Never mind that Israel is putting a similar system in place, Tom Ridge's people say. "El Al Airlines is able to use these technologies because they fly out of one airport where their maintenance personnel can all be centrally located. In the U.S., with more than 400 airports and more than 6,000 aircraft in the commercial fleet, the maintenance cost of [such] technology at current system costs would be staggering."

NEW HELMET: HEALTH HAZZARD?

The Army's new, Advanced Combat Helmet might be more than a little damaging to G.I.s' health, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Made of a new type of Kevlar, the helmet is stronger and lighter than its predecessor. But the new helmet has a critical flaw, Col. Poffenbarger contends: It is about 8% smaller than the old helmet, offering less protection on the back and side of the head.

In past wars, this might not have been a big problem. In infantry-style combat, soldiers typically are struck in the front of the head as they charge toward the enemy. But in Iraq, where the deadliest threat is remote-detonated roadside bombs, many soldiers are getting blasted on the sides and back of the head, says Col. Poffenbarger. In other words, they are getting hit in areas where the new helmet offers less coverage.

"I've become convinced that for this type of guerrilla fight, we are giving away coverage that we need to save lives," says Col. Poffenbarger, a 42-year-old former Green Beret.

His research is based on about 160 head-trauma patients who have passed through the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, where he works. Because the hospital houses the only American neurosurgeons in Iraq, virtually every serious head-trauma patient is treated by him or his partner... Extrapolating from this, Col. Poffenbarger estimates the new helmet might result in a 30% increase in serious head traumas if distributed throughout the entire force in Iraq...

For now, the Army is committed to issuing the helmet to all 840,000 soldiers in the force by 2007, says Col. John Norwood, the Army's project manager for soldier equipment. (via Phil Carter)

REAL MISSILE DEFENSE DELAYED

While the U.S. military rushes to switch on its ballistic missile defense system, the Pentagon's program for combating cruise missiles is in deep trouble, Aviation Week reports. And it may not get better for a long, long time to come.

China, Iran, and Syria are among the countries building up big arsenals of land-based cruise missiles, which are seen by some analysts as a bigger threat to American security than any ballistic danger. That's mostly because the missiles are so easy to obtain. "For the price of two fighters or four attack helicopters a country can buy about 40 cruise missiles," Aviation Week notes.

The Patriot missile defense system is supposed to provide some protection against the threat. But the Patriot's track record is iffy. And Patriots are expensive -- $2 to $3 million per shot.

So the Defense Department wants a smaller, more mobile, more accurate, cheaper solution. And it wants the system by the end of the decade.

But it ain't gonna happen, Aviation Week says. The Patriot's replacement, the Medium Extended Air Defense System, now isn't scheduled to come online until 2015.

It's one of a whole lot of hurdles the Pentagon is going to face as it tries to stop cruise missile attacks, says Victoria Samson, with the Center for Defense Information.

"I think what we are going to find out is that ballistic missile defense is a cakewalk compared to cruise missile defense," she tells Defense Tech. Tracking ballisitic missiles is hard. But "when you factor in something that is powered, can fly low to the ground, and has a much lower radar cross section, the job gets much more difficult. As we saw in [the Iraq war], when Iraq cobbled together old Seersucker cruise missiles and used them over land (instead of over the water, as they were designed) against Coalition troops, not only did we not engage them with the Patriot, but we flat-out failed to pick them up on our radar."

"SELF-HEALING" PLANES -- MAYBE, SOME DAY

The same material that makes golf balls tough may soon make bullet holes vanish in 'self-healing' aircraft fuel tanks," says New Scientist.

Recently, US [Navy] scientists discovered that a commercially sold polymer - used to coat bowling pins, helmets, and golf balls - displays a curious property when shot at: it can immediately "pave over" the bullet holes.

Now, a team led by Christopher Coughlin, a materials engineer at the Naval Air Systems Command in Patuxent River, Maryland, is trying to understand why the polymer self-heals. He hopes one day it can be used to help aircraft fuel tanks recover quickly from enemy fire.

NEW WAR LAWS NEEDED?

It's time to rewrite the rewrite the laws of war.

That's the provacative position taken by Defense Tech pal Phil Carter in Slate today. He reviews two new reports on the conflict in Iraq, which reveal just how confused U.S. commanders were in treating prisoners there. Phil writes:

Should the 20th-century laws of war change to reflect 21st-century methods of war? [The laws] posed tangible problems for commanders on the ground in Iraq, faced with the need to gather intelligence about insurgents who were killing their soldiers. In some cases, commanders appear to have decided that the ends justified the means — that military necessity justified the use of potentially unlawful detention and interrogation practices.

It's easy to condemn such choices as inhumane and immoral from the relative safety of New York City or Los Angeles. And we should condemn barbaric abuses like those depicted in the photographs from Abu Ghraib. But doing so does little to address the practical problems faced by our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, where issues arise every day that don't fit neatly into either our moral or legal paradigms. The modern laws of war, consisting of the four Geneva Conventions, were written in 1949 to apply to state-on-state conflicts that would look like World War II. Since World War II, our nation has fought two conventional wars (Korea and Desert Storm) and a long list of unconventional or ambiguous wars. The laws of war don't apply so cleanly to places like Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Our enemies, like al-Qaida and the Iraqi insurgents, have adapted to overwhelming U.S. battlefield superiority by adopting unconventional tactics that generally break international law.

And the laws of war don't give our field commanders a good way to respond to this unconventional threat while still staying within bounds themselves. The central challenge of counterinsurgency is the proper calibration of force: Too much will alienate the population; too little will allow an insurgency to survive. Good intelligence enables commanders to find the right level of force, but such intelligence is very difficult to get in Iraq, because of our enemies' zeal and the cultural barriers that prevent us from understanding family and tribal networks.

A better legal framework is needed to help commanders in these kinds of ambiguous situations, one that gives commanders the flexibility on the ground to do what has to be done while not stepping on our values in the process.

LEON SHACHTMAN, 1913-2004

Leon Shachtman, my father's father, passed away the other day at the age of 91. I'm helping my grandmother pick up the pieces. And, frankly, I need a few days to recover myself; the man helped raise me. I'll be back blogging on Wednesday or Thursday.

ANTI-MISSILE TEST SHORT-CIRCUITS

One of the big tests of the Alaska missile defense system -- originally pegged for December, 2003, and then rescheduled for this August -- has been delayed again. The booster for the anti-missile interceptor is having computer problems, Victoria Samson, an analyst with the Center for Defense Information, tells Defense Tech. "It's supposed to cause a 200 millisecond telemetry dropout from the flight computer. It isn't that much, but apparently is enough to warrant pulling out the computer and replacing it."

Word is that this test -- known as "Integrated Flight Test-13C" -- now won't happen until late-September, at the earliest. And that's more than a bit troubling, for two reasons. First, the Alaska anti-missile system is supposed to come on line just a few weeks later, in October. Second, missile and interceptor aren't even supposed to meet up during "IFT-13C," according to Samson.

"Officially, this test is slated to be a target 'fly-by,'" she says.

AND MORE: " Unfortunately, the Alaska missiles cannot defend America. And that's the least of their shortcomings.," says the L.A. Times' William Arkin.

The big problem is that missile defense focuses "on the wrong threat," he adds. "The December 2001 National Intelligence Estimate on ballistic missile threats, which advocates of the new system cite as their justification, predicted that several countries could use ships off the U.S. coast to launch missiles — cruise missiles, that is — that would sneak under the currently planned antimissile network. In fact, any homeland security expert will agree that U.S. ports and maritime approaches are the most vulnerable."

$1B FOR NAVY'S KILLER DRONE

The Pentagon's mad scientists have given Northrop Grumman a billion bucks on to develop the Navy's killer drone.

The X-47B unmanned combat aerial vehicle (that's a little Photoshopped mock-up to the right) is one of a pair of pilotless fighter planes Darpa would like to see built for the Defense Department. But, unlike Boeing's X-45C, the Northrop drone "is designed to autonomously take off and land on an aircraft carrier, whose runway is about 300 yards long," the Los Angeles Times notes.

"Under the newly awarded agreement, the Northrop Grumman team will conduct a five year effort to design, develop and demonstrate a minimum of three full-scale, flight-worthy air vehicles and three mission control systems," according to a Darpa press release.

The system will include integrated sensors, communication, navigation equipment and low observability features, along with a common operating system to meet mission capability objectives established by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy. The targeted missions encompass suppression of enemy air defenses, penetrating surveillance in denied enemy airspace, and precision strike − all from both land and aircraft carrier bases. The system’s objectives include an air vehicle combat radius of 1,500 nautical miles with a weapons payload of 4,500 pounds, electronic warning system and an integrated synthetic aperture radar. The vehicles are designed to survive in a high threat environment and feature beyond-line-of-sight network connectivity for global operations.

"X-47B flight demonstrations will begin in 2007," Darpa tells us, "at a West Coast test site."

EARSPLITTER FOR RNC DEFENSE

"Forget the megaphones. Police will have a much more high-tech — and louder — option to make themselves heard over the din of Manhattan traffic and noisy protesters outside the Republican National Convention," the AP reports. "It's called the Long Range Acoustic Device, developed for the military and capable of blasting warnings, orders or anything else at an ear-splitting 150 decibels."

The department recently bought two of the 45-pound acoustic sound machines for $35,000 apiece, and plans to mount them on Humvees posted outside Madison Square Garden. It would mark the first time the instrument — which can beam sounds for 300 yards or more — has been used by a civilian force.

"We believe we'd be able to use them in a number of scenarios," said Paul Browne, the police department's chief spokesman.

Two possible uses cited by Browne: directing crowds to safety following a terrorist attack or other calamity, and reminding protesters where they're allowed to march and rally.

The military, which has used the machines in Iraq, bills them as a "non-lethal weapon" designed to disperse hostile crowds or ward off potential foreign combatants by delivering prerecorded warnings in several languages and, if needed, an earsplitting screeching noise. But police insist the latter feature won't be used at the convention.

"It's only to communicate in large crowds," Inspector Thomas Graham of the department's crowd control unit said Thursday.

Graham said police had tried out the device in Times Square, and found it delivered clear, even sound over four blocks. Decibel readers will be used to keep the volume at a safe level, he added.

DECADE LATER, LOS ALAMOS NUKES STILL UNSTABLE

It's ten years later, and Los Alamos still hasn't stablizied its most dangerous nuclear materials. That's the word today from the Energy Department's Inspector General, Gregory Friedman. Here are some of the "highlights" of his report:

* In 1994, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board recommended that the Department of Energy stabilize fissionable and radioactive materials at Los Alamos National Laboratory and at numerous other Department sites. The purpose of the Board's recommendation was to reduce safety and health risks to Department employees and the public.

* Citing little progress at Los Alamos, in 2000, the Board reemphasized the importance of the stabilization program and recommended that the Department accelerate its schedule.

* Although the Department has made some progress in stabilizing the most hazardous fissionable materials, stabilization has not been accelerated to the level anticipated.

* According to Los Alamos' most recent Project Execution Plan, the materials will not be completely stabilized until 2010; a date well beyond the original projected completion date. The Department has also missed interim milestones and project tasks, which may delay the stabilization effort beyond 2010.

* Unless the Department and Los Alamos place a higher priority on stabilizing these materials, radioactive materials at the Laboratory may continue to deteriorate and negatively impact the safety and health of workers. Further, by extending the schedule until 2010, the Department will incur an estimated $78 million in additional costs to stabilize these dangerous materials. Any delay beyond 2010 would exacerbate the situation.

RUMMY HEARTS MISSILE DEFENSE

"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Wednesday called a fledgling U.S. ballistic missile defense system in Alaska a triumph for the Bush administration 'over pessimism and skepticism,'" Reuters reports.

That's right, folks. The problem with the missile defense system isn't that it has flunked many of its rigged tests. The problem is that we're not cheering loud enough.

THERE'S MORE: Despite his unparalleled admiration for the anti-missile program, Rummy isn't quite ready to flip the switch on the system. "He is still working out the rules dictating when and under whose authority to fire a new system to protect the United States from missile attack, and is awaiting a final assessment about the system's readiness to begin operations," according to the Washington Post.

EX-PENTAGON BIG RIPS ANTI-MISSILES

President Bush's missile defense system, to put it plainly, "doesn't work." And tests of the program "so far have been more tightly scripted than a modern political convention."

That's not my opinion. It's the words of former Pentagon testing chief Phillip Coyle. In an e-mail to Defense Tech, he repeatedly rips the Bush administration over its anti-missile push, and breaks down the system's many, many problems:

On Thursday, July 22, 2004, the first ground-based missile interceptor was installed in a silo at Fort Greely, Alaska. In their press release on GMD [Ground-based Midcourse Defense] deployment, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency hailed it as "the end of an era where we have not been able to defend our country against long-range ballistic missile attacks."

Is this true? Have we not been able to defend ourselves? And can this system defend us now?

To each of these questions the answer is No.

If North Korea began assembling an intercontinental ballistic missile, huge rockets that must be launched from fixed launch facilities, highly visible to U.S. spy satellites, our military would blow it up on the ground immediately. Our military would not wait to see if they could intercept the missile when it was going thousands of miles per hour in space. We would blow up the whole ICBM launch facility with the same weapons that we have seen work so effectively in Iraq and Afghanistan, satellite and laser guided bombs and missiles. With those weapons, we already have a missile defense.

But what if we didn't see North Korea preparing an ICBM? Suppose the launch surprised us? Would our missile defenses protect us then? The answer is still No. This is because if we didn't see it, our missile defenses wouldn't work either, since they depend on our seeing it first with satellites too.

Not that our missile defenses have demonstrated realistic operational capability with existing satellites; they haven't. And the intended, future satellite systems, the Space-Based Infra-Red System-High [SBIRS] and the Space Tracking and Surveillance System, are years behind schedule and billions over budget. The intended X-band radar systems for missile defense also are delayed and missing. With these major elements missing, the system being deployed has no demonstrated capability to defend against a real attack.

When asked in a NATO press conference if he would deploy a missile defense system that that didn't work and that had not been adequately tested, President Bush replied, "And for those who suggest my administration will deploy a system that doesn't work are dead-wrong. Of course, we're not going to deploy a system that doesn't work. What good will that do? We'll only deploy a system that does work in order to keep the peace."

Unfortunately, three years later, that's exactly what President Bush has done, deployed a system that doesn't work and hasn't been adequately tested.

All of the MDA flight intercept tests so far have been more tightly scripted than a modern political convention.

In these tests, the target launch time, the flight trajectory, the point of impact, what the target looks like, and the make-up of other objects in the target cluster have all been known in advance to guide the interceptor. No enemy would cooperate by providing all that information in advance.

And if that weren't enough, the target reentry vehicle has carried a radar beacon, showing the interceptor, "Here I am." That's not something a real enemy would do either.

Considering all the artificial targeting aids in these tests, what is surprising is not that some of these tests have succeeded. What's surprising is that some have failed, including the most recent test in December 2002. Just a week later President Bush announced his decision to deploy the ground-based midcourse missile defense system in Alaska!

The Missile Defense Agency says they can't test the system realistically until it has been deployed. This also is not true. The Missile Defense Agency was testing the system from Kwajalein and Vandenberg when I was in the Pentagon, well before the construction began at Fort Greely. And they could still be doing that without Fort Greely. But as soon as President Bush announced his decision to deploy the system the priority went to construction and deployment. and the bottom fell out of the test schedule.

As you know there hasn't been a flight intercept test since December 2002, now 20 months ago, one week before the President made his announcement. But not because they couldn't have continued the test program as planned.

And of course they won't actually use Fort Greely for missile test launches anyway because of safety concerns.

And they do not test what they are actually deploying, namely a system with no X-band radar (and no radar beacon) using Cobra Dane and Aegis ships instead, no SBIRS satellites using DSP instead, and interceptors that depend on prior information.

This is like deploying a new military jet fighter with no wings, no tail and no landing gear. And without testing it to see if it could work [first].

THERE'S MORE: "The most dangerous thing about having this system is that someone on our side might be tempted to behave in a crisis as if it were real," says Defense Tech reader MB. "Wth our current national leadership, it's hard for me to conceive of a scenario other than accidental launch where the US having a virtual but not actual missile defense system does not increase the probability and degree of brinksmanship that political leaders might engage in."

FAITH-BASED MISSILE DEFENSE

Early in his administration, President Bush put a whole lot of stock in "faith-based" initiatives to solve domestic problems. Now, the President seems to be taking the same approach to military matters.

Yesterday, President Bush campaigned at a Boeing plant, promoting his missile defense system, due to come on line shortly. "We say to those tyrants who believe they can blackmail America and the free world, 'You fire, we're going to shoot it down,'" he said.

But there's a teeny-tiny problem with this bold declaration: no one knows whether it's true or not. The anti-missile system's effectiveness is a matter of faith, not evidence. Because, in a rush to ready the system before the election, the Defense Department scrapped some of the $10 billion per year program's most important tests. And the results the Pentagon does have are murky, at best.

"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," the Washington Post noted earlier 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."

Slate's Fred Kaplan translates:

In the past six years of flight tests, here is what the Pentagon's missile-defense agency has demonstrated: A missile can hit another missile in mid-air as long as a) the operators know exactly where the target missile has come from and where it's going; b) the target missile is flying at a slower-than-normal speed; c) it's transmitting a special beam that exaggerates its radar signature, thus making it easier to track; d) only one target missile has been launched; and e) the "attack" happens in daylight.

Phillip Coyle, Christie's predecessor, put it more succinctly: the system is "simply not up to the job," he said.

Now, some might argue that merely having some deterrent to, say, North Korean missiles -- no matter how half-assed -- is better than nothing. Which would be true. If Pyongyang was worried at all that the thing might work. But if the Pentagon's own testing chiefs aren't convinced, what are the chances that the North Koreans are?

The situation isn't likely to change any time soon. The next stages of the Pentagon's missile defense plan call for building defenses that can catch enemy rockets before they take off. But in a study last year, the American Physical Society said that couldn't be done with current or near-term American anti-missile technology.

So it's no surprise that when the Defense Department tried to show off its anti-missile training program to reporters earlier this year, the wargame had to be rigged in order for the good guys to win.

DRONES IN, BASES OUT

President Bush's plan to drastically scale back the number of U.S. troops in Asia And Europe may come as a surprise to many. But at the Defense Department's labs and research centers, they've seen this coming for a long time.

That's why the Pentagon has been working on a series of weapons that would allow America's military to fight a battle overseas -- while keeping our forces based, for the most part, here at home.

Hypersonic missiles, with ranges over 3,000 miles, could strike at targets a continent away. Killer drones, deployed from aircraft carriers, could penetrate deep into enemy territory. Giant blimps could haul troops and equipment directly to the battlezone – without the need for billion-dollar airfields or deep-water ports.

But here's the catch: none of these systems are even remotely close to being ready for prime-time. So what happens in the near term? As Phil Carter points out, the U.S. military is going to replace their old, permanent installations with a series of easy-to-install, easy-to-rip-out "lilypad bases."

NUKE MONITORS: LAME

The Department of Homeland Security is spending a bundle to install new radiation detectors at ports and border crossings. Too bad the things don't work all that well, Newsday reports.

The devices can screen the contents of a truck or shipping container for emissions from radioactive material that terrorists might use in a "dirty" bomb to contaminate an area, specialists said in recent interviews.

But the chances are low, they said, that such detectors, which scan for gamma rays and neutrons, can pick up emissions from a well-shielded cache of highly enriched uranium -- material that could be used in a devastating nuclear bomb.

The portal machines also are prone to nuisance alarms on shipments of many materials with low levels of radioactivity, from kitty litter to bananas, and can be triggered by a person who has recently received radioactive tracers in a medical procedure.

The detectors, which must be calibrated to take into account the natural background radiation from rocks, soil and cosmic rays, can be set to minimize nuisance alarms.

"They adjust the detectors so the alarms are tolerable," said Page Stoutland, head of a program for radiological and nuclear countermeasures at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. "In doing that, have they made the detector such that it will miss legitimate threats? That's the concern..."

Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard co mmander who is now with the nonprofit Council on Foreign Relations, argues that "rather than the super, high-end stuff, the money would be better spent putting radiological devices in the boxes." Small sensors, if made cheaply enough, could be placed in every shipping container to monitor for radiation and relay data in real time as the ship is still at sea, he said.

HACKERS TAKE AIM AT RNC

Protesters have been targeting government and corporate websites for years. But when online activists strike at Republican domains during the G.O.P.'s convention later this month, the digital demonstrations might turn out to be more than symbolic, for once.

In the past, activists have been able to shut down the website of, say, the World Economic Forum for a few hours. But the impact of such a takedown was nebulous at best: It's hard to argue the organization really suffered from a few-hour lag in posting its press releases online.

In this year's presidential race, however, campaign websites have moved beyond the margins. During John Kerry's acceptance speech in Boston last month, for example, his website was visited by 50,000 people an hour, according to ComScore Networks, the online traffic-measuring firm. That's a droplet compared to the millions who'll watch the convention on TV. But taking down a campaign website would nevertheless remove a critical tool for reaching the public -- and likely generate a slew of stories in the mainstream media about the crash.

So it's no surprise that hardened electronic activists are planning to jam up the servers of georgewbush.com, rnc.org, and related websites, once the Republican National Convention gets underway on August 29.

"We want to bombard (the Republican sites) with so much traffic that nobody can get in," said CrimethInc, a member of the so-called Black Hat Hackers Bloc.

My Wired News article has details.

THERE'S MORE: Salon's Michelle Goldberg has a super story today on how radical protesters' tactics could backfire -- and cost John Kerry the election.

AND MORE: Steve Gilliard says Michelle is full of it.

Goldberg is worried about a bunch of halfwits who the cops have loudly announced that they are watching.

The problem with the Chicago analogy is multiple, but let's start with the police riot and end with the disorder in the hall. The anarchists are kids who will quickly learn that if the NYPD can handle St. Patrick's Day and the Puerto Rican Day parade where everyone over the age of 16 is drunk, their little street theater will pose no challenge.

But I think she needs to harp on the anarcho-kiddies. Get the GOP nice and frightened of them, worried about their antics.

Why?

Because the real protests, the ones that get people, including cops and firemen into the streets will be far different affairs. I don't get why she is so obsessed with some loud talking white boys from Williamsburg, who have neither influence nor support, while ignoring the far more serious protests on tap. If I was Rove, I would worry about the big union protests, not the anarcho-antics.

AND MORE: In my article today, I make reference to a recent hacker conference session promising to teach folks how "to infiltrate organizations like the RNC." Defense Tech reader CL says that was wrong. "The HOPE conference that you referred to in your article does not endorse morons such as these 'Black Hat Hackers.' It is, in fact, people like them who give hackers a bad name. It's offensive that you refer to that gathering in such a detrimental way only to perpetuate the hysteria that comes with the word 'hacker.'"

DRONES PING TERRORISTS' MOBILES

"Experiments in the Nevada desert are using unmanned aircraft to find the exact location of enemy electronic emissions, such as the mobile phone of a terrorist in a fast-moving auto," Aviation Week reports.

U.S. Air Force researchers say they've been able to locate such targets, as well as mobile missile systems, within tens of meters and often in less than a minute, which makes them vulnerable to attack before they can flee surveillance.

Such tasks, until now, were the exclusive purview of classified systems on the Pentagon's small fleets of U-2, RC-135 Rivet Joint and other manned, intelligence-gathering aircraft. With the mission shifting to more versatile, long-endurance UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles], new technologies are emerging from the black world to become weapons in the war on terrorism, say researchers here.

While transferring the mission to UAVs is a technological leap in itself, more importantly, it opens doors for the U.S. invasion of enemy air defenses and other systems through their integrated communications links. Once electronic emissions are located, packages of algorithms analyze them and figure out how to exploit the foe's systems by mining them for information, deceiving them or taking control of their operation.

For example, U.S. Air Force operators can use new, growing families of electronic attack weapons to see, from inside the enemy's air defense system, what their radars can detect. They can even, as an option, turn enemy radars away from the areas where U.S. aircraft are penetrating their defenses... or, more intriguingly, they could be attacked at the speed of light with electronic algorithms or bursts of high-power microwaves.

FBI TARGETING RNC PROTESTERS

Does this strike anyone else as completely inappropriate?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been questioning political demonstrators across the country, and in rare cases even subpoenaing them, in an aggressive effort to forestall what officials say could be violent and disruptive protests at the Republican National Convention in New York.

F.B.I. officials are urging agents to canvass their communities for information about planned disruptions aimed at the convention and other coming political events, and they say they have developed a list of people who they think may have information about possible violence. They say the inquiries, which began last month before the Democratic convention in Boston, are focused solely on possible crimes, not on dissent, at major political events.

But some people contacted by the F.B.I. say they are mystified by the bureau's interest and felt harassed by questions about their political plans.

"The message I took from it," said Sarah Bardwell, 21, an intern at a Denver antiwar group who was visited by six investigators a few weeks ago, "was that they were trying to intimidate us into not going to any protests and to let us know that, 'hey, we're watching you.'"

THERE'S MORE: "The intelligence unit of the New York Police Department has been closely monitoring Web sites run by self-described anarchists," the AP says. "It also has sought to infiltrate protest groups with young, scruffy-looking officers posing as activists."

AND MORE: The FBI has also paid a little visit recently to John Young, who runs the always-informative Cryptome.org site. Young's sin, apparently, was posting publicly-available information about questionable security at the Convention sites in New York and Boston.

"They said, 'Why didn't you call us about this? Why are you telling the public?' And we said, 'Because it's out there and you can see it. You folks weren't doing anything,' " Young told ABC News.

The agents, according to Young, stressed they knew that nothing on the site was illegal. Young added: "They said, 'What we'd like you to do, if you're approached by anyone that you think intends to harm the United States, we're asking you to let us know that.' " (via Boing Boing)

AND MORE: "I have visited a few of those protest sites," writes Defense Tech reader WW. " They give specific instructions on how to tie up traffic, cripple police horses, disable police dogs and generally deny to others the right to peaceably go about their business, then try to cover themselves with a disclaimer that they are not advocating the breaking of any laws. A failure to investigate a criminal conspiracy like this would be dereliction of duty."

NUKE MATERIAL STAYS AT LOS ALAMOS HOT SPOT

It sure seemed like a good idea at the time. So maybe it was destined never to get off the ground at the troubled Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Technical Area 18, or the "Critical Experiments Facility," is one of the lab's most sensitive – and worst defended -- facilities. Several tons of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium and plutonium are there. But, because it's at the bottom of a canyon, it's almost impossible to keep safe from a terrorist attack. In a 1997 exercise, Army special forces were able to walk out of TA-18 with a wheelbarrow load of nuclear materials.

After years of warnings from watchdog groups like the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham finally agreed earlier this year to move TA-18's nuclear supply to safer locations.

When the lab was shut down for a security and safety review, Los Alamos' managers at the University of California proposed to use quiet period to hurry up the transfer of that radioactive material. It meant all the uranium and plutonium could be out by the end of the year – without holding up important research.

But Energy Department officials have blocked the move, POGO notes in a letter to Abraham. It's the latest in a series of bureaucratic maneuvers that have undermined the Energy Secretary's orders, the group alleges.

"MODERN" VICTIM FROM 19TH CENTURY

The Doe Network -- the group of online, amateur sleuths who've helped track down dozens of cold cases -- have contributed to the unravelling of another mystery. And this is one of their odder cases yet: a murder victim, thought to have been killed in the 1970's, turns out to have been dead for more than a century.

The skeleton, found with a hole in the skull, "is not a 'modern' homicide of a teenager," Kentucky state forensic anthropologist Dr. Emily Craig wrote to local officials in Jefferson County. "It is a disturbed grave, most likely from the mid or late 1800s."

"Craig's letter was forwarded from the coroner's office to Louisville Metro Police," the Courier-Journal notes, "where Lt. Mike Veto still had the packet on his desk yesterday afternoon. 'It was listed as an unsolved homicide, but it'll be changed now,' he said."

The remains were found on Labor Day 1988.

Four boys discovered them while digging in a spot where they played behind their homes in the Villa Ana subdivision off Dixie Highway...

Ron Howard, then a sergeant with the Jefferson County Police, recalled that he and his detectives worked the case.

"There was a human being, and we didn't know what circumstances led to the death and it could have been a homicide," Howard said yesterday. "You spend a lot of frustrating time because there's no direction to take so you go in all directions."

The case was cold when Craig pulled it; she wanted to review it after Todd Matthews, a volunteer with the Doe Network, which tries to identify remains, sent her a question about it. Matthews needed more information other than age, race and gender...

"The bones were discolored and deteriorated," Craig said. "They were much more than they should have been for a recent death."

The X-rays of hardware showed pins and nails. The nails did not look modern, she said...

As for the body... it was positioned as if it were in a coffin.

She explained the hole in the skull as typical bone deterioration. "The bones had simply deteriorated to the point the thin bones of the skull were gone," Craig said.

"COPTERBOX" FOR MEDS, SUPPLIES

A few weeks back, we looked at the Army's "medical missile" for shooting supplies to wounded soldiers in hot zones. Well, apparently, there's more than one flying first aid kit out there.

With funding from the Army, Fayetteville, NC's DropMaster, Inc. has developed a "CopterBox" -- a fast-spinning, cardboard cylinder equipped with rotating blades -- that can be used to airdrop supplies to soldiers in need.

Chuck it out of a helicopter or a plane, and the CopterBox will slow a 60 lb. payload to 34 feet per second. And "since it spins at about 400 RPM, it cuts through trees and always reaches the ground, unlike parachute-based systems," writes DropMaster's engineering director Chase Warren. Plus, the things are cheap, Chase says: just $300 a pop.

But right now, the Pentagon ain't buying, Chase complains. Despite a small business grant from the Army -- and nine years of work by "my father, 5 other people and me" -- Chase says the answer has been the same from every branch of the U.S. military he's approached: "We don't have a requirement for your concept. No one has come to us asking for this."

THERE'S MORE: The Australian military has been using a similar product for years, notes Defense Tech reader GK. These "heliboxes" have maximum weight of just 7.5 kg, he says, but they're just right for rations, water, and the like.

LADY LIBERTY: FINGER, PLEASE

Wanna rent a locker at the newly-reopened Statue of Liberty? Then get ready to have your fingerprint read by an electronic scanner.

It's one of several ways that biometric technology is now "creeping into everyday life," the AP notes.

The Nine Zero, an upscale hotel in Boston, recently began letting guests in its $3,000-a-night Cloud Nine suite enter and exit by looking into a camera that analyzes their iris patterns. Piggly Wiggly Co. grocery stores in the South just launched a pay-by-fingerprint system, though pilot tests elsewhere have had lukewarm results...

Feelings seemed mixed about the lockers at the Statue of Liberty on a muggy New York afternoon last week.

Some people were befuddled by the system and had to put their fingers on the reader several times before a scan was properly made. Others forgot their locker number upon their return, or didn't remember which finger they had used to check it out. One young woman accidentally put her ticket to the statue in the locker, requiring her to open it and then re-register it all over again with another finger scan.

With all the confusion, lines at the three touchscreen kiosks that control the bank of 170 lockers frequently stretched six or seven people deep, requiring a five-minute wait.

WATCHDOGS: "IMMENSE" PLUTONIUM INVENTORY WOES

There's an "immense discrepancy in the accounts for how much plutonium" is being kept at Los Alamos, a team of watchdog groups is charging.

In a letter to lab director Pete Nanos, the groups note that, in 1996, top energy officials "prepared a memorandum detailing plutonium accounting discrepancies throughout the nuclear weapons complex."

"That] memorandum shows that the security-related nuclear materials accounts do not agree with the waste accounts. The Department of Energy reported a discharge to waste from [Los Alamos] of 610 kilograms of plutonium; Los Alamos indicates a figure of 1,375 kilograms... Evidently, there is a discrepancy of 765 kilograms, the equivalent of 150 nuclear weapons...

"To the best of our knowledge, LANL has yet to explain the large plutonium accounting discrepancy or address its security implications." (emphasis mine)

"MISSING" LOS ALAMOS DISKS NEVER GONE?

"The presumed missing computer disks that forced the security shutdown and political uproar at Los Alamos National Lab, appear to not be missing at all," according to a New Mexico television station.

KRQE News 13 has learned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has concluded the disks, thought to have contained nuclear weapon secrets, were never missing.

In early July, lab officials announced that the disks were missing, prompting a massive and unprecedented security shutdown and consequent investigation. Nearly two dozen scientists and administrators were placed on leave and virtually all lab operations were suspended.

Now, sources tell KRQE News 13’s Larry Barker that FBI investigators have concluded the disks in question, generally called 'Classified Removable Electronic Media' or C.R.E.M., were never missing and may have never existed in the first place.

The clerical error appears to center around the bar codes used to track classified material. The bar code stickers that would have been found on the supposed missing disks were instead discovered still affixed to their original printed forms.

The FBI declined comment on this report and the lab says it will release the findings of its investigation “when appropriate”.

Much of the lab's classified work is still shut down pending the outcome of a Department of Energy review.

The shut down has called into question the University of California’s management of the facility, made longtime political supporters question lab practices and has cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

"It may be that what we have here is a false positive -- the system says something is missing when it is not," Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), Los Alamos' top defender in Congress, tells the AP. "And just as if it were a medical test, it is better to find out the inventory was wrong than that the disks were actually missing. But this entire situation only reinforces that we need to improve the inventory system."

THERE'S MORE: The theory among Los Alamos scientists now is that "someone tried to save time by creating the paperwork for the disks before they were actually made."

"You can imagine people trying to streamline things," said astrophysicist Charles Keller tells the Times. "Maybe the information fit on fewer disks than was anticipated. I'm not saying that's how it happened, but it's what people do when they're trying to make their work run smoothly."

GRISLY VIDS ONLINE

Mid-air crashes, Baghdad ambushes, insurgents taken out from above -- all captured on video, all online here, at Military.com's "Shock & Awe" section. Crazy stuff. Not for the timid.