Classified Information is defined as data, regardless of form that includes sensitive information that its disclosure is restricted by law or regulation to particular group of people. Information is classified at one of three levels based on the amount of danger that its unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause to national security.
The highest basic level of classified information is Top Secret. Top Secret information is defined as information that if disclosed would reasonably be expected to cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security. The next to highest level of classified information is Secret. Secret information is defined as information that if disclosed would cause "serious damage" to national security. The third level of classified information is Confidential. Confidential is defined as information that if disclosed could cause "damage" to national security.
There are other restrictions on information such as NTK - need to know and SSI - sensitive security information. In these dangerous times, a slip or accidental disclosure of classified information can easily result in loss of life and billions of dollars of damage.
The extraordinary sensitivity of our intelligence and defense organizations' mission requires the extraordinary protection against possible unauthorized disclosure of classified information. Any information coming to your attention concerning the loss or unauthorized disclosure of classified information should be reported immediately to proper government officials. Due to a number of recent security incidents involving the unauthorized disclosure of classified information training programs like "Handling Classified Information" has seen a significant increase in demand according to Spy-Ops. Organizations are taking additional steps to inform employees and contract workers of their responsibilities when handling sensitive information.
The most widely known case of leaking classified information came when the identity of a secret agent was disclosed. CIA covert operative Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, had her identity publically disclosed in multiple newspapers back in July of 2003. Since then, disclosures of classified information seem be become know monthly.
Examples (By far not an exhaustive list): Jul 15, 2008 The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is exploring into how confidential and extremely sensitive information on airline security and the state of airporst was leaked to the press. April 2008 A Defense Department official who worked as a weapons policy analyst pleaded guilty to disclosing classified military information that was later passed on to China. August 2007 A Congressman revealed a budget cut in the classified portion of the 2008 Intelligence Authorization Bill dealing with the human-intelligence programs. July 2007 Millions of documents containing sensitive and sometimes classified information have been floating about freely on file sharing networks after being inadvertently exposed by individuals downloading P2P software on systems that held the data. Among these documents were the Pentagon's classified (secret) network infrastructure diagrams, complete with IP addresses as well as information on five separate Department of Defense information security system audits. October 2006 A report published on the front page of the New York Times included a classified one-page slide "Iraq: Indications and Warnings of Civil Conflict" from an Oct. 18 military briefing. August 2006 A Navy lawyer could be put behind bars for 30 years after Navy officials charged him with passing along secret information while he was stationed at Guantanamo Bay.
April 2006 The CIA fired an officer who acknowledged, after failing a polygraph examination, giving classified information to a reporter.
April 2005 The Justice Department launched an investigation into leaks to the media about the National Security Agency's classified domestic surveillance program.
These incidents and many others have triggered multiple ongoing investigations by the FBI and many other federal entities. One would think that the people who have been authorized to handle classified information would take divulging this information more seriously. We should all be outraged when our country's secrets are disclosed for whatever reason. After all, it puts all of us at risk.
Last week while working on cyber attacks against media web sites I discovered some information I thought you might benefit from reading.
One of the more significant concerns with cyber warfare is a targeted attack against the news media. There are two different strategies that play here. The first possibility is a disruptive strategy -- where the cyber attack disables the media from reporting on activities and disrupting their ability to inform the public about events that are or have just taken place. The second strategy addresses the use of the media as a source of misinformation. Misinformation and disinformation campaigns are easily mounted and you can even find this tactic addressed in the well known work "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu. We have assessed the implication of both of these scenarios using the Scenario Based Intelligence Analysis Tool created by Spy-Ops. The result of that analysis is below.
Scenario 1 - Media Disruption
An attack against the entire media sector in an attempt to disrupt its ability to communicate with and inform the public is rated a 2.3 on our risk scale.
Scenario 2 - Dis or mis Information
An attack against a primary new source with the intent to inject mis-information for public dissemination is rated a 4.1 on our risk scale.
In support of the higher risk and increased likelihood of success in this type of attack is the following account of events that took place on June 17, 2007. The viewers of a Czech television channel watching a Web cam program monitoring weather in various Czech mountain resorts saw a nuclear explosion taking place in the Krkonose or Giant Mountains in the northern Czech Republic. CNN Europe reported that members of a Czech art group were responsible and got in trouble for hacking a television broadcast and inserting the phony video of the nuclear explosion.
One can only imagine the psychological impact on the viewers that witnessed this prank. The TV channel CT2 said that they received frantic phone calls from viewers who thought a nuclear war had started. By the way, just recently the artists were acquitted of the charges stemming from the fake nuclear blast on TV.
In a conversation I had with a security consultant he told me: "Sure it could happen in the U.S. today. The media industry has not made the necessary security improvements since the Captain Midnight incident in the late 80s."
Congress' watchdog agency, the Government Accountability Office, is warning that the Pentagon needs to improve how it plans for and manages development of critical intelligence and surveillance systems.
In a report released April 23, the GAO said the military has struggled "to improve integration across DOD and national intelligence agencies" hampered by the widely differing missions and bureaucratic cultures of the intelligence agencies.
This is not an academic exercise. The report notes that the military plans to spend $28 billion over the next seven years to field a wide array of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems. That's just airborne systems and does not include spy satellites, with their traditionally hefty price tags.
The GAO report cites one example where the Pentagon "had difficulty obtaining complete information" on top secret "national" assets - usually a veiled reference to highly classified radar and electro-optical satellites - "because of security classifications of other agency documents." Also, budget wars have hampered the effort to improve coordination across the intelligence enterprise, the GAO report says. In classic understated fashion, the report says that "disagreements about equitable funding from each budget have led to program delays."
The Pentagon has drawn up an "ISR Integration Roadmap" but it does not appear to help much, if the report's language is parsed carefully. The roadmap does not "provide a long-term view of what capabilities are required to achieve strategic goals or provide detailed information that would make it useful as a basis for deciding among alternative investments."
The GAO reviewed 19 intelligence and reconnaissance systems proposals and found that 12 "sponsors" - this could be a combatant command, an intelligence agency or a service -- "did not complete assessments, and the completeness of the remaining seven sponsors' assessments varied." Perhaps most worrying, was the office's finding that the entity charged with overseeing these crucial decisions - the Battlespace Awareness Functional Capabilities Board -- "lacks adequate numbers of dedicated, skilled personnel to engage in early coordination with sponsors and to review sponsors' assessments."
The report's authors recommend that Defense Secretary Robert Gates tells Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and James Clapper, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, to work together and develop "a comprehensive source of information on all ISR capabilities." Also, Gates should also put in place a monitoring process to make sure the capabilities board and those it works with do a better job. Finally, the report's authors say the capabilities board's staffing levels and their expertise should be reviewed.
-- Colin Clark
The Few . . . the Proud . . .
The Marines have always been good at delivering their message, and this commercial is another great example of that:
We now return to our regular programming. Semper Fidelis.
(Gouge: BT)
-- Ward
Does Airpower Create Insurgents?
In a recent op-ed in The Bulletin Charles Pena suggests that the American military's use of airpower is not helping us win the war. Here's the piece:
Operation Iraqi Freedom has rung in the new year with a bang - literally. On Jan. 10, U.S. warplanes dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, one of the largest air strikes of the Iraq war. This attack reflects the increased use of air power as a component of Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy (Gen. Petraeus is the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq and the primary author of FM 3-24, the Army's counterinsurgency manual). In 2007, the U.S. conducted more than 1,100 air strikes, a more than fivefold increase over the previous year.
The U.S. military's fascination with bombing is rooted in our competitive advantage in advanced technology.
The 1991 Gulf War saw the first widespread use of precision-guided munitions to destroy high-value targets (often deeply buried and hardened). Now ubiquitous in everyone's cars, the global positioning system was mated to dumb bombs to make them "smart" in Afghanistan, resulting in the venerable B-52 bomber (which has been in service in the U.S. Air Force since 1955) flying close air support missions at tens of thousands of feet altitude (usually directed by soldiers on the ground or the pre-set target coordinates). In Iraq, as guidance technology makes bombs more accurate, they are getting smaller - instead of 1,000-pound or 2,000-pound bombs, 500-pound (or even smaller) bombs can be used to destroy targets with less likelihood of collateral damage. According to Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Mueller, director of the Combined Air Operations Center in Iraq, the benefit of being able to use smaller bombs is that they can "take one building and not the whole block."
But the FM 3-24 counterinsurgency manual recognizes that "bombing, even with the most precise weapons, can cause unintended civilian casualties." Consequently, "an air strike can cause collateral damage that turns people against the host-nation government and provides insurgents with a major propaganda victory." In other words, bombing is a proverbial Catch-22. Insurgents or terrorists may be killed, but no matter how much care is taken to avoid non-combatant casualties, innocent civilians may also be killed.
According to Wing Commander Andrew Brookes of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, "Even a 400-pound bomb has a wide area of blast and you are quite likely to kill some civilians. Kill a wife, children, mother or uncle and people become so angry the terrorist cycle starts all over again."
Such phenomenon was evident in Iraq very early on. In November 2003, after U.S. F-16 fighter jets dropped several 500-pound bombs in Fallujah, one resident remarked, "We used to have hopes of the Americans after they removed Saddam. We had liked them until this weekend. Why did they drop bombs near us and hurt and terrify my children like this?"
Albert Einstein once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Yet this may be the case of increasing the use of air power in Iraq.
Even if civilians are not killed (the military claims that 35 al-Qaida militants were killed in the attack that dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs and that there were no civilian casualties), bombing results in destruction and devastation (the attack destroyed 25 homes and 13 vehicles). And the reality is that a bombed-out house is a bombed-out house - while the returning occupants may be happy to have al-Qaida out of the neighborhood, they may not be too happy about their house. The wake of such wreckage runs contrary to FM 3-24 and another important tenant of counterinsurgency: "Successful counterinsurgents support or develop local institutions with legitimacy and the ability to provide basic services, economic opportunity, public order, and security." So while bombing may be one solution to achieving security, it may also create setbacks to providing basic services and economic opportunity - and ultimately counterproductive to counterinsurgency.
Does airpower fly in the face of proper COIN doctrine, and is it actually causing setbacks as we work to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan?
(Gouge: WW)
-- Ward
Black Program Exposed?
Back in 1985, during my first airwing detachment to Fallon, Nevada, my squadron participated in an exercise called "Constant Peg." C-Peg was super classified and involved American fighter crews flying 1v1 ACM mission against Soviet fighters like MiG-23s and MiG-21s. These fighters were based at Tonopah. (My pilot and I went up against a MiG-23.)
Now during the briefs before the exercise the guys flying the MiGs were very hyper about us NOT landing at Tonopah . . . ever, ever, ever . . . even though the exercise took place just north of the field. "If you have an emergency go back to Fallon," was the refrain, which struck us as a bit excessive, even considering the fact these enemy airplanes were based there.
The squadron operations officer, who went on to be a corporate test pilot, said something that made sense years later: "They're not worried about the MiGs. There's something else going on there." When we pushed him for details, he said he didn't know. He just had a hunch that C-Peg was a cover for another program.
Well, we now know that other program was the F-117 developmental test program. And after seeing firsthand the V-22's DT program for three years, I can tell you that it's a miracle that nobody found out about the Stealth jet during that time. Incredible stories have emerged about long commutes and clueless families and night ops. They did have a couple of close calls. There were reports of UFOs by local civilians that were quashed by Air Force officials.
So, again, have the folks in Texas seen something the Air Force doesn't want them to see?
Check out these eyewitnesses in this news report. They seem convinced that they saw something weird:
-- Ward
Franks on the Take
The man Fiasco author Tom Ricks referred to as (I'm paraphrasing here) the worst tactician in modern military history is in the headlines for receiving a six-digit retainer from a veterans charity that only gives 25 percent of its income to the veterans it was set up to assist.
This from our friend Simon at ABC News:
Retired U.S. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, was paid $100,000 to endorse a veterans charity that watchdog groups say is ripping off donors and wounded veterans by using only a small portion of the money raised for veterans services, according to testimony in Congress today.
President Bush delivered a blow to California's whale and dolphin huggers today on behalf of the Navy. Here's the press release from DoD:
The Navy announced today that two important steps have been taken under existing law and regulations to allow it to conduct effective, integrated training with sonar off the coast of southern California after a federal court earlier this month imposed untenable restrictions on such training.
In accordance with the provisions of the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA), and at the recommendation of the Secretary of Commerce, the President concluded that continuing these vital exercises without the restrictions imposed by the district court is in the paramount interests of the United States. He signed an exemption from the requirements of the CZMA for the Navy's continued use of mid-frequency active (MFA) sonar in a series of exercises scheduled to take place off the coast of California through January 2009. The Navy already applies twenty-nine mitigation measures approved by federal environmental regulators when using active sonar, and these will remain in place.
An exemption from the act was sought after an order was issued on Jan. 3 by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, which created a significant and unreasonable risk that the Navy will not be able to conduct effective sonar training necessary to certify strike groups for deployment in support of world-wide operational and combat activities. Use of sonar is part of critical, integrated training that must be done in the Navy's operating area off the coast of San Diego to take advantage of Southern California's bathymetric features and its extensive ranges, airfields, and other infrastructure necessary for effective training. Approximately half the Navy's fleet will receive its most critical, "graduate level" training here before it deploys its forces around the world.
In a separate but related action, the Council on Environmental Quality approved the Navy's request for alternative arrangements for compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, for these exercises until completion of the Southern California Range Complex environmental impact statement.
Following up on these actions, Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter signed a decision memorandum yesterday agreeing to those arrangements, which include adaptive management measures, more thorough reporting procedures, and increased public participation.
"We can protect our national security while simultaneously being good stewards of the environment," said Winter. "These alternative measures, in addition to the 29 protective measures already in place, will ensure our operating forces can train realistically without harming the environment."
"We are already taking extensive measures to protect marine mammals, and we have had positive results from those measures," said Winter. "We are furthermore committed to an extensive data collection effort to help inform our future efforts in this regard."
Even before the court's order, the Navy employed 29 protective measures, developed in cooperation with the National Marine Fisheries Service, any time sonar is used on Navy ranges, or in major exercises. The existing measures include, among other things, stationing specially trained lookouts to look for marine mammals, passive acoustic monitoring for marine mammals, establishing safety zones around ships where sonar power is reduced or shut down if marine mammals are sighted, and employing extra precautions during chokepoint exercises.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead said that the actions were necessary in order to ensure the Navy's ability to train Sailors to detect quiet submarines that might threaten its ships.
"We cannot in good conscience send American men and women into potential trouble spots without adequate training to defend themselves," said Roughead.
"The southern California operating area provides unique training opportunities that are vital to preparing our forces, and the planned exercises cannot be postponed without impacting national security," said Roughead. "The steps that have been taken will allow our men and women to train realistically, while continuing the effective employment of proven mitigation measures that have been endorsed by the Council on Environmental Quality and our regulator, the National Marine Fisheries Service."
So has sanity prevaled here? Or is this another win for the evil empire running roughshod on the environment?
-- Ward
U.S. Watched Israeli Raid
Here's a little intrigue to wrap your head around while you're waiting for the turkey to cook. Dave Fulghum at Ares Weblog reports the following:
There are new details of Israeli's attack on Syria that suggests the U.S. had knowledge of the event and perhaps some back-channel involvement. The Pentagon was monitoring the electronic emissions coming from Syria during Israel's Sept. 6 attack and, while there was no active Pentagon engagement in the operation to destroy a nuclear reactor, there was advice provided, say military and aerospace industry officials.
I ran across an interesting study published by the RAND Corporation that took a look at how the United States could best leverage its current communications and intelligence networks to wage an effective information operations campaign in a counterinsurgency.
The study, aptly titled “Byting Back: Regaining Information Superiority Against 21st Century Insurgents,” takes a novel, “web 2.0” approach to the problem of gaining information to fight an insurgency. RAND rightly states that the information requirements for conventional war – the basis upon which most of the Pentagon’s intelligence apparatus is based – are very different from those of a counterinsurgency.
“If winning war requires understanding the terrain, winning counterinsurgency requires understanding the human terrain: the population, from its top-level political structure to the individual citizen. A thorough and current understanding of individuals and their community can help rally support of the government by allowing the government to meet the needs of the local population. Because insurgents do not identify themselves as such on sight, knowledge at the individual level is often what it takes to make such necessary distinctions.”
The study suggests utilizing local “wikis” compiled by the population, security services and government officials; leveraging cell phone networks to push information and to potentially track insurgents; incorporating the use of video and voice recorders on individual weapons to compile information and lessons learned and the institution of a detailed government census of the population.
The RAND analysts call this an integrated counterinsurgency operating network, or ICON.
Interestingly, the authors developed a metric of 160 information requirements in a counterinsurgency. From their analysis, the RAND authors found that only 13 of those bits of information required covert sources, while 90 could be obtained by troops on patrol and 57 come from the population itself. How do you think the military views this balance now? I betcha it’s weighted heavily toward the “covert operative” side of things.
What the RAND study also reveals is that the ICON benefits from openness.
“By contrast, security tended to be the least stringent desideratum. Only 2 requirements were of the sort that could not be shared with indigenous forces, while 28 could be shared with anyone.”
Though RAND admits the technologies to build such an intel network are well within reach, linking them together could pose significant challenges.
“In addition to designing and engineering work, DoD and leading IT firms will have to work together as they never have before to crack such problems as providing selective security in an open search-collaborative environment. With proper incentives, market forces will provide most of the drive needed. But an abundance of creativity and common purpose will also be needed.”
It seems to me, though, that all the tools are out there to do this. We don’t need ungainly weapons cameras developed by some billion dollar defense contractor, for example, when most cell phones come with one embedded in their wafer-thin mechanics. The key is to form a sort of intelligence “community” that interweaves these different streams into one easily accessible database...a counterinsurgency Myspace, maybe?
In a historic blogosphere first, President Bush sat down with a small group of military bloggers, including yours truly from Defense Tech. I've got to tell you, all politics aside, it was a very cool experience.
First disclaimer to hardcore traditional media zealots. This meeting didn't happen in the Press Room because it wasn't designed to be a press conference. It was a conversation and an opportunity for the president to demonstrate that he was aware of what the milbloggisphere is capable of. And certainly the meeting came about
because the staffers were convinced the assembled had shown themselves in writing to be pro-mission (or in my case pro-military), if not pro-administration.
We met with the president in the West Wing's Roosevelt Room, which is adjacent to the Oval Office. The president walked in without any fanfare and worked his way around the table, shaking hands and thanking folks for coming. He sat down at the head of the table and spoke for a time before opening up the floor for discussion. Here are some of the highlights from my notes. (Remember it's hard to write and maintain eye contact with the Commander-in-Chief):
"The question is will we do what it takes to defend ourselves?"
"We should be optimistic that freedom can take root in parts of the world where it's been written off."
"We need to change the conditions that cause 19 kids to get on planes to kill Americans."
"This strategy is my strategy."
"I'm defining a horizon of peace."
"I don't mind people attacking me . . . that's politics . . . but I do mind people impugning the integrity of our generals."
The questions started with Bill Roggio and Bill Ardolino, who were beaming into the room via VTC from Baghdad - a nice touch in support of milblog cred. John from Castle Argghhh! mentioned that his local lawmaker (a Democrat) in Kansas has awakened to the power of the blogoshere. Matt from Blackfive.net allowed that he had an embed headed for the Phillipines to join a special forces unit there, which caused the president to chuckle and opine to General Lute (the recently-appointed war czar), "Milbloggers in the Phillipines."
I was next. I started by telling President Bush that I had spent Tuesday morning watching the original 9-11 "Today Show" broadcast in real time and that the experience had left me, among other thoughts and emotions, wondering whether his petition to the nation had been strong enough in terms of calling citizens to duty. (You all remember the snippet made famous in "Farenheit 911" where he tells the nation to "go to Disneyworld.")
The president paused for a moment and then replied that he believed the nation had responded. "Volunteerism is up nationwide," he said. "I'm headed to Quantico after this meeting to speak to a group of Marine second lieutenants, men and women who are joining the fight in spite of what they hear in the polls."
About that time Chief-of-staff Josh Bolten poked his head in, a signal that told the president that Marine One was ready to go. "I want to show you all the Oval Office before I go, though," he said as he rose from his chair.
I queued up behind him as he opened the big door to the Oval Office, and I was reminded of when Dorothy entered Oz. The colors, the lighting, the history (good and bad) . . . it was a rush. The president gave me one of his signature "it's good to be king" expressions and quipped, "Pretty nice, huh?"
"Yessir, Mr. President. Pretty nice."
So we each had our photo taken in front of his desk (I had a vision of the classic Nixon/Elvis shot), and I moved across the room to talk to Tony Snow (it was his last day on the job) and Dana Perino (who's about five feet tall, max).
We finished our time with the Commander-in-Chief by ambling out to the Rose Garden and watching him get on Marine One for his flight to Quantico. He gave that same wave he always gives to the press corps and then paused at the top of the boarding ladder and waved back at us. As the helo flew out of sight somebody in the group spotted Barney, the First Dog. Bonus!
I will say, in general, at this meeting President Bush came off as more comfortable with the message than I've seen him appear on TV or in speeches. No deer-in-the-headlights stuff here. Truly unwaivering and passionate. He also grew very emotional as he made a linkage between his father's service in World War II and the fact that Japan is now an ally and then said, "I've had meetings with the prime minister of the country he fought." He actually teared up as he said that.
But my favorite quote came when he told us that he'd just finished reading three books about George Washington and his legacy. Again he gave that wry smile and said, "If they're still writing about the first guy then the forty-third guy doesn't have anything to worry about."
All in all, it was an amazing day for Defense Tech and one I'll never forget. In fact, I'd rank the event a close second to the time I sat in with Cheap Trick. It was that good.
So now please lecture me on how this isn't an appropriate post for Defense Tech and this site used to be so much better . . .
(Photo: Bill Roggio's view of the meeting through his VTC screen in Iraq. I'm on the far right. That's President Bush in the middle. Looks comfortable, don't he?)
Is he dead or alive? Is this guy on the tape an imposter? (Shades of the "Paul is Dead" hoax, huh?) And what's with the dye-job on the beard? Is he trolling? Maybe in his petition for Americans to turn to Islam he's really saying the opposite: "This cave life sucks! Who's up for a Hooters run?"
Somehow this doesn't surprise me, but for all the gnashing of teeth by the Army over the potential security threat of milblogs it turns out the real threat is official Army websites.
Defense Tech founder Noah Shachtman, who now runs the tres gouge Danger Room blog for Wired, is on the case as he has been since the beginning:
"For years, members of the military brass have been warning that soldiers' blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post far more potentially-harmful than blogs do.
"The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period."
Got a great morning post item for DT fans sent to us by an alert reader yesterday. Unfortunately, other items nudged themselves in front of this one, but we thought we’d better get it out sooner rather than later.
I know there are a lot of Iraq war skeptics reading this, but if ever there was more solid proof that those who criticize Iraq war coverage by the world’s mainstream press just might have a point, I don’t know how better to distill it than with this picture...
It’s an Agence France Press photo taken by Wissam al-Okaili whose caption reads:
An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.
Uh, huh...these bullets “hit her house” during the raid. Our readers can certainly understand how that couldn’t have been possible.
So why didn’t an editor catch this obvious error? We’ll let DT readers reach their own conclusions on that one. Obviously some of the reporters, photogs and their editors either need to go to “war coverage school” or have their own ideas on how to portray conflict to the rest of us.
(Gouge to DT reader JH)
UPDATE: From DT reader "Wembly"...
PS The Getty site now shows:
CORRECTS BULLETS TO UNSPENT An elderly Iraqi woman holds up two unspent bullets at her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, 14 August 2007. US and Iraqi troops carried out massive assaults against Shiite militants, killing four in Baghdad's volatile slum of Sadr City, and arresting several more across Iraq, the military said today. AFP PHOTO / WISSAM AL-OKAILI (Photo credit should read WISSAM AL-OKAILI/AFP/Getty Images)
Editor: Thanks for the new gouge, Wembley...
-- Christian
France Fears Blackberry Snooping by U.S.
(AP) PARIS - BlackBerry handhelds have been called addictive, invasive, wonderful - and now, a threat to French state secrets.
That, at least, is the fear of French government defense experts, who have advised against their use by officials in France's corridors of power, reportedly to avoid snooping by U.S. intelligence agencies.
"It's not a question of trust," French lawmaker Pierre Lasbordes told The Associated Press. "We are friends with the Americans, the Anglo-Saxons, but it's economic war."
Le Monde newspaper, which broke the story, described BlackBerry withdrawal among those who have given them up. "We feel that we are wasting huge amounts of time, having to relearn how to work in the old way," the daily quoted a ministry office director as saying.
E-mails sent from "Le BlackBerry" pass through servers in the United States and Britain, and France fears that makes the system vulnerable to snooping by the U.S. National Security Agency, Le Monde reported. The company that makes BlackBerrys, however, denies such spying is possible.
Lasbordes, who was commissioned in 2005 by then-Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to look into such issues, said he alerted the government to this "weakness" months ago. He said he met with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. to discuss the problem in the course of preparing his report on the security of French information systems.
The Canadian company "admitted that there was a certain fragility in the protection of information when you use the e-mail system" and promised it would be resolved, said Lasbordes, adding: "That was more than a year ago."
BlackBerrys pose "a problem with the protection of information" and "the risks of interception are real," Alain Juillet, in charge of economic intelligence for the government, told Le Monde.
Research In Motion insisted that BlackBerry e-mails cannot be read by the NSA or other organizations. The e-mails are more heavily encrypted than online banking Web sites, Research In Motion said in a statement.
"No one, including RIM, has the ability to view the content of any data communication sent using the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution," the company said.
The BlackBerry system has been accredited by security agencies in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Austria and Canada, Research in Motion said, adding that a certification process is under way in the Netherlands and Germany.
In France, the circular on BlackBerries from the General Secretariat for National Defense applies in theory to all ministries, and "it's up to everyone to be responsible," Lasbordes said.
Another official in a major ministry who got rid of his BlackBerry following the order said authorities are looking at other types of hand-held computers to use instead.
The prime minister's office would not confirm that it and the presidential palace were included in the circular, as Le Monde reported. But a spokesman, Severin Naudet, cited the General Secretariat for National Defense as saying that no type of hand-held computer is risk-free.
"It's not a problem if you're writing to your mother-in-law," Lasbordes said. But "one can imagine a minister coming from a meeting of the G-8 or G-7, et cetera, or a meeting in Brussels, and he sends information to his colleagues. It goes via Canada and the United States and that's it, game over."
Suspicion goes both ways. At a Group of Eight summit in Germany this month, White House aides were instructed to leave their wireless e-mail devices behind, apparently for fear of Russian eavesdropping.
According to AP, Paris Hilton recently said, "I was shocked to see all the attention devoted to the amount of time I would spend in jail for what I had done by the media, public and city officials. I would hope going forward that the public and the media would focus on more important things like the men and women serving our country in Iraq and other places around the world."
A New Meaning to "Old Ironsides," Perhaps? (Updated)
The U.S. Navy’s official news service recently reported that Vice Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, Director Navy Staff, relieved Cmdr. Thomas C. Graves of command of the USS Constitution because of “a loss of trust and confidence in his ability to command.”
Now “a loss of trust and confidence” is a euphemism for any number of things the Navy (or any organization worried about its reputation) would rather not have in the public eye. Sometimes it actually has something to do with a commander’s warfighting ability, but in this case it’s safe to assume it’s – ahem – something else. Besides a ceremonial spin around Boston Harbor in 1997, the over two century’s old Constitution has been welded to the pier since 1934. The frigate’s cannons were last fired in anger in 1815 1854.
So let’s just say one has to do something pretty stupid to lose a superior’s trust and confidence when one’s command is a tourist attraction. We’d hate to prejudge, of course, but for some reason the expression “Friggin’ in the riggin’” comes to mind.
(Updated, 140 EDT, May 17) - Navy Times reports that sources familiar with the incident said that Graves allegedly struck an enlisted member of his crew with a stack of paperwork.
Which, of course, is different that what we previously insinuated in terms of what he used to "strike" a member of his crew.
In its perennial effort to restrict the kinds of information available to America’s enemies in the wide open Internet world, the Army has issued an updated policy on what qualifies as “operational security” and how the service may restrict the release of such data.
Since as early as 2005, the Army – and, to a lesser extent, other services – has been battling the proliferation of weblogs, or “blogs,” authored by service members often on deployment. Army public affairs and intelligence specialists have been worried that the freewheeling nature of blogs risks divulging certain details of attacks and vulnerabilities that could aid insurgents, who they say scan the internet for tidbits to help in their attacks.
The new Army regulation further defines what qualifies under the “operational security” guidelines and appoints an Army Web Risk Assessment cell to execute a quarterly examination of personal Web sites, releases from family readiness sites, non-government unit pages, blogs as well as .mil sites.
The new regs were first reported by former DT editor Noah Shachtman who now writes for Wired magazine.
The opsec rules preclude bloggers from writing about or posting pictures or videos:
Do not publicly disseminate, or publish photographs displaying critical or sensitive information. Examples include but are not limited to Improvised Explosive Device (IED) strikes, battle scenes, casualties, destroyed or damaged equipment, personnel killed in action (KIA), both friendly and adversary, and the protective measures of military facilities.
The funny thing is the public affairs office in Iraq has already gotten into the “new media” world, airing its own YouTube videos of attacks against enemy positions like this one…
And this one…
It’s been a constant struggle for the services to balance the rights of free speech with the genuine need to keep information useful to the enemy out of his hands – especially in the electronic media world. The updated regulations give a lot of leeway to unit commanders to regulate the information flow from their soldiers, but one has to wonder whether superiors will err on the side of caution and ban out of hand all blogs authored by troops on deployment.
So far, only a handful of so-called “Milbloggers” have been disciplined for their posts, with one of the best known cases revolving around Spec. Colby Buzzell, whose blog “My War” was shut down a few years ago after his postings gained momentum in the mainstream media and irked his commanders.
Buzzell parlayed his success into a book deal, but others who are caught in the opsec net may not be so fortunate.
The new Army order also covers personal emails, which have always been flagged by commanders who see the risks of compromising information, as well as discussion board entries.
Consult with their immediate supervisor and their OPSEC Officer for an OPSEC review prior to publishing or posting information in a public forum.
(1) This includes, but is not limited to letters, resumes, articles for publication, electronic mail (e-mail), Web site postings, web log (blog) postings, discussion in Internet information forums, discussion in Internet message boards or other forms of dissemination or documentation.
It remains to be seen how intensively the Army will investigate these postings for opsec violations which would take a tremendous amount of manpower considering the over 130,000 troops deployed to Iraq alone.
The breezes through the corridors of the "five-sided wind tunnel" are gusting this morning with the news that names of prominent Pentagon officials and defense experts may be among the 15,000 on Deborah Jeane Palfrey's list.
"The tentacles of this matter reach far, wide and high into the echelons of power in the United States," the "DC Madam" wrote in a court filing last month. Unsubstantiated reports allege that senior defense officials and a high-ranking principal from a conservative think tank are on Palfrey's list.
The Associated Press reports that Palfrey ran her business from 1993 to 2006 catering to upscale clients in and around the Beltway. Her roster of escorts was 130 strong, ranging in age from 23 to 55. One advertisement she ran read, "Best selection and availability before 9 pm each evening." No doubt!
According to the report, clients paid $300 for 90 minutes of discreet (well, not so much) "high-end erotic fantasy service." (No word on an "ugly early" discount, but it seems like a natural, doesn't it?)
The scandal has already snared boutique warfare specialist Harlan Ullman and Undersecretary of State Randal Tobias, who claimed he had nothing more than massages from the women who visited him.
So, dear DT readers, it's analogy time: Paying a high-end erotic fantasy service associate for a "regular" massage is like . . . what? Help us out.
Best one (as judged by the DT staff) wins recognition in the next "The People's Site" posting.
-- Ward
I'm a Manipulative Hack...
Perhaps I can finally put up a post everyone can agree on (yeah, right), and especially on a day like today when I get comments like this…
Unreal. You sir, will never qualify for "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?"
…Or this one…
You and Rumsfeld should enjoy a martini together.
If this article wasn't free to read, I'd cancel my subscription today. Not because of your opinion, but because you possess no expertise in the field in which you report on.
Alright, here you go guys: Journalists (like me) suck…
So says a new report from the Joan Sorenson Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University – though not in such pedestrian terms.
In a thorough analysis of media coverage during the 2006 Israel/Hezbollah war (which I covered from Cyprus and Beirut for the Military Times newspapers and USA Today), media sage - and no friend to its critics on the “right” - Marvin Kalb paints a disturbing picture of media bias, manipulation and outright advocacy for the Hezbollah cause.
I remember telling my colleagues back home that from my perspective at the US Embassy in Beirut, you couldn’t tell there was a war going on at all. Life continued as normal on the streets and civilians went about their daily business unencumbered. There was no smoke rising from the hills, no explosions, no panic. My observations fell on deaf ears, most suspecting I was a right-wing, Israel-loving nut.
The exhaustive Harvard study calls into question the rapid assertion by Human Rights Watch that the Israeli military committed war crimes and the media’s reluctance to hold Hezbollah to account for its own criminal behavior. The various instances of doctored photos (such as the above Reuters photo) and exaggerated casualty claims are mere sideshows to the outright failure to adhere to the journalistic mantra of balanced coverage without editorializing opinion.
Because Hezbollah functioned as a quasi-military force within its populace, protecting it, feeding it, housing it, and in general caring for its needs, the Israelis were quickly accused of hitting civilian targets with an indiscriminate callousness amounting to war crimes.
On August 3, Human Rights Watch specifically accused Israel of war crimes. Few seemed to note that before the war, on May 27, Nasrallah had actually—and publicly—embraced the guerrilla tactic of hiding soldiers among civilians. “[Hezbollah fighters] live in their houses, in their schools, in their churches, in their fields, in their farms and in their factories,” he said, adding, “You can’t destroy them in the same way you would destroy an army.”
By war’s end, it was clear that Nasrallah was right. Hezbollah, though severely wounded, remained a fighting force in defiant objection to all U.N. resolutions calling for it to be disarmed.
Israel defended its military operations by citing two relevant articles in international law: using civilians for military cover was a war crime, and any target with soldiers hiding among civilians was considered a legitimate military target. Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, framed her government’s argument in cold language. “When you go to sleep with a missile, “ she told The New York Times, “you might find yourself waking up to another kind of missile.”
Israel’s defense, though, fell on deaf ears, not only among diplomats but also reporters, as daily evidence mounted of civilian deaths. Hezbollah, whenever possible, pointed reporters to civilian deaths among Lebanese, a helpful gesture with heavy propaganda implications. Early in the war, reporters routinely noted that Hezbollah had started the war, and its casualties were a logical consequence of war. But after the first week such references were either dropped or downplayed, leaving the widespread impression that Israel was a loose cannon shooting at anything that moved.
There’s also a disturbing passage about possible complicity by the United Nations in Hezbollah’s many deadly ambushes of Israeli troops.
UNIFIL was the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. It consisted of roughly 2,000 troops stationed along the Lebanese-Israeli border from 1978 until the end of the 2006 war. Its mandate required “full impartiality and objectivity.”
During the war, it published information on its official website about Israeli troop movements, information that in military circles might well be regarded as “actionable intelligence.”
Take, for instance, its posting of July 25, 2006:
“Yesterday and during last night, the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) moved significant reinforcements, including a number of tanks, armored personnel carriers, bulldozers and infantry, to the area of Marun Al Ras inside Lebanese territory. The IDF advanced from that area north towards Bint Jubayl and south towards Yarun.”
Or, its posting of July 24, which disclosed that IDF forces stationed between Marun Al Ras and Bint Jubayl were “significantly reinforced during the night and this morning with a number of tanks and armored personnel carriers.”
It was part of UNIFIL’s responsibility to report violations of the ceasefire, including troop movements, to the U.N., but presumably this information was to be conveyed through confidential channels, not on the Internet, where the information in wartime could be as valuable as hard, military intelligence suddenly exposed to the light.
These postings, similar to others during the war, coincided with heavy fighting in the region. Israeli units came under severe Hezbollah attack.
It is impossible for outsiders to know whether Hezbollah used the information provided by UNIFIL, which was available to anyone with a laptop, or whether Hezbollah depended primarily upon information provided by loyal local supporters. However, no UNIFIL posting during the war contained any specific information relating to Hezbollah’s military movements, perhaps because they were not visible to UNIFIL or perhaps because UNIFIL did not choose to see the movements.
Frida Ghitis at World Politics Watch has an outstanding write up on the report. She points out the increasing role media coverage plays in a non-state strategy of asymmetric warfare.
Before long, Hezbollah had achieved a definitive propaganda victory. The media had not only acquiesced to tell Hezbollah's version of the war, they had started contributing to the creation of the narrative, with at least one Reuters photographer altering photographs to make Israeli attacks look more damaging. And many reporters simply failed to offer much context. The study quotes the New York Times' Stephen Erlanger commenting on a satellite picture published by his paper. The picture showed a southern suburb of Beirut, which was largely destroyed. Erlanger said it "bothered me a great deal," because the image with no context failed to show that this was a small part of a Beirut, and the rest of the city was largely undamaged by the war.
The Harvard paper shows the need for journalists to brace themselves and remain vigilant when they cover conflicts between open societies on one side, and media-controlling militias on the other. These conflicts, which we will undoubtedly continue to see, demand that journalists make a greater effort to provide context and to keep from become willing collaborators with one side. Islamic militant groups, such as al-Qaida and others, have openly described their strategy of manipulating the media and winning on the "information battlefield." Hezbollah, too, had a well crafted, and ultimately successful media plan.
In an open society, ground rules may be announced, but they are not likely to be observed or enforced. During the 2006 summertime war in the Middle East, it was Israel versus Hezbollah, led by the charismatic Hassan Nasrallah, and because Israel did not win the war, it is judged to have lost. In Iraq, in the not too distant future, it may well be the United States versus the Mahdi Army, led by the equally charismatic Sheik Moqtada al-Sadr. The challenge for responsible journalists covering asymmetrical warfare, especially in this age of the Internet, is new, awesome and frightening.
"It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers. In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late.
"Accordingly , I'm readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I'll, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials - after the fact."
All typos are bad. Some are real bad. To wit (from a DefenseLink press release):
Raytheon Co., Tucson, Ariz., was awarded a $23,700,000 cost-reimbursement contract on Mar. 2, 2007, to procure long lead material in support of the FY07 production of Evolved Seasparrow Missiles (ESSM) for NATO Seasparrow Consortium countries and Foreign Military Sales (FMS) customers. Raytheon Co. will procure long lead material used in FY07 ESSM production for Australia, Canada, Germany, Greece, Norway, Spain, United States, and the United Arab Emigrants. Work will be performed in Australia (26 percent); The Netherlands (25 percent); Spain (19 percent); Tucson, Ariz. (12 percent); Norway (6 percent); Greece (4 percent); Germany (4 percent); Canada (2 percent); Denmark (1 percent); and Turkey (1 percent), and is expected to be completed by Feb. 2010. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The contract also supports the United Arab Emigrants under the FMS program. The contract was not competitively procured. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, D.C., is the contracting activity (N00024-07-C-5431).
(Editor's note: This no kidding is a press release that was sent to the Defense Tech offices.)
18DoughtyStreet.com, Britain’s first political web tv station, has launched a two minute viral campaign to combat growing anti-Americanism across Britain and Europe.
The two minute campaign that has been posted on YouTube and is being distributed across Britain via email paints a world that would be less free, less healthy and less prosperous if America had never existed.
Through five fictional news reports from the 1950s onwards it portrays a world dominated by Soviet Russia and warns that much of the world’s prosperity and medical advances would have been lost.
18DoughtyStreet.com is the initiative of internet entrepreneur Stephan Shakespeare and a number of Britain’s most-read bloggers who have come together to challenge the biases of establishment broadcasters and mainstream parties.
Tim Montgomerie, Director of 18DoughtyStreet.com, said, “For much of the last fifty years Europe has benefited from America’s security umbrella and from the dynamism of American enterprise and science. The advert ends by suggesting that if the US-led coalition had not intervened in Iraq the world could now be being held to ransom by a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein.”
The text of the advertisement is here:
Opening caption: “Imagine a world without America.”
SCENE 1: 1950s STUDIO WITH MAN IN DINNER SUIT
Caption: 1959
“You are watching the News from London. General Secretary Stalin was in France today to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Paris by the Red Army. Organised crowds of young people sang the Soviet anthem as troops marched down the Champs Elysees . . .”
Caption: A World Without America . . . Would Be A World With Less Freedom
SCENE 2: 1960s STUDIO WITH SAME PRESENTER IN FLOWER POWER SUIT
Caption: 1969
“Latest data from the British Department of Health show that deaths from polio rose again last year. The hunt for a vaccine continues. . .”
Caption: A World Without America… Would Be A World Without Many Medical Advances
SCENE 3: 1970s STUDIO WITH SAME PRESENTER IN LARGE LAPELED BROWN SUIT
Caption: 1979
“Tonight the Mediterranean Sea is full of boats of Jewish refugees fleeing for their lives. Earlier in the day the poorly-equipped and under-funded Israeli army was finally defeated and Arab combined forces – with Soviet air cover - entered Tel Aviv. . .”
Caption: A World Without America… Would Be A World Without Israel
SCENE 4: 1980s STUDIO WITH SAME PRESENTER IN SHOULDER-PADDED POWER SUIT
Caption: 1989
“Arriving at today’s hunger summit in her ministerial Lady Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher vowed to work with Austrian President Arnold Schwarzenegger in fighting increasing hunger across Asia. . .”
Caption: A World Without America. . . Would Be A Poorer World
SCENE 5: TURN-OF-THE CENTURY STUDIO WITH SAME PRESENTER IN NEWSROUND-TYPE OPEN SHIRT AND JEANS
Caption: 1999
“At a Downing Street press conference earlier today the British Prime Minister said that President Saddam Hussein was a man he could do business with. He was speaking after it was confirmed that the Revolutionary Republic of Iraq and Kuwait had acquired nuclear weapons. . .”
Caption: A World Without America. . . Would Be A World Held To Ransom By Tyrants
CLOSING SEQUENCE
In the final sequence a whole series of words and phrases appear on the screen and then disappear. . . at first slowly and then fast. . .
A free Afghanistan
40 percent of the world’s R&D
Free Taiwan
Nylon
Elvis Presley
Air conditioning
Marshall Plan
South Korea
Democratic Nicaragua
Typewriter
A free Japan
Protection of world trading routes
Jazz
50 percent of the world food programme
The motorcar
The liberation of the Falklands
Berlin Airlift
The bra
Frozen food
Dishwasher
Denim jeans
$15bn HIV/AIDS programme
FM radio
Coca Cola
Free Haiti
Supercomputer
26 percent of global aid spending
Final message on screen with atlas of world without USA as image:
A WORLD WITHOUT AMERICA
A world with more disease, more poverty, more danger.
Sponsored by BritainAndAmerica.com
(Editor's endnote: Wow, we'd better get on the step and make a list of things we should thank Europe for. I'll start:
1. Pissing off our forefathers so bad that they came to America.
That doggone liberal mainstream press is up to it again, labeling the plan Tony Blair introduced today as a "withdrawal." Thank goodness Vice President Cheney collared ABC's Jonathan Karl before the correspondent got to the airwaves and added to the proliferation of bad skinny.
"I look at it, and what I see is an affirmation of the fact that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well," Cheney said.
The digital rights crusaders over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation are suing the Department of Defense, "demanding expedited information on how the Army monitors soldiers' blogs," according to an EFF statement.
EFF filed its suit after the Department of Defense and Army failed to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about the blog monitoring program...
According to news reports[ahem, ahem], an Army unit called the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell (AWRAC) reviews hundreds of thousands of websites every month, notifying webmasters and bloggers when it sees information it finds inappropriate. Some bloggers have told reporters that they have cut back on their posts or shut down their sites altogether because of the activities of the AWRAC.
Well, not exactly. Most of the bloggers I've talked to dialed back their sites because of a more broad suspicion about blogging within the military community -- and unclear regulations about what can and can not be written online.
Still, the EFF's suit should be useful. Because the AWRAC's blog-eying regimen seemed almost laughably loose, when it was announced in October. The Army team "uses several scanning tools to monitor [these] sites for OPSEC [operational security] violations," the Army notes. "The tools search for such key words as 'for official use only' or 'top secret,' and records the number of times they are used on a site. Analysts review the results to determine which, if any, need further investigation."
The most common OPSEC violations found on official sites are For Official Use Only (FOUO) documents and limited distribution documents, as well as home addresses, birthdates and home phone numbers.
Unofficial blogs often show pictures with sensitive information in the background, including classified documents, entrances to camps or weapons. One Soldier showed his ammo belt, on which the tracer pattern was easily identifiable.
The EFF's suit "demands records on how the AWRAC conducts its monitoring, as well as any orders to soldiers about revision or deletion of web posts. It also demands expedited processing, as the information is urgently needed by the public."
"Of course, a military effort requires some level of secrecy. But the public has a right to know if the Army is silencing soldiers' opinions as well. That's why the Department of Defense must release information on how this program works without delay," EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann said.
"Any U.S. military surge in Iraq will be far more than a troop increase," Aviation Week says, in a fascinating new article. "A key element in the deployment will be an accelerated effort to bring more and newer technologies to bear on the foe, in part by targeting insurgent commanders, often through their communication networks."
But perhaps the most intriguing family of systems being "readied for operations" is BAE Systems' Suter network exploitation programs, designed to "break into enemy networks to hear communications, see what enemy sensors are seeing and, in some circumstances, become the systems manager with the ability to manipulate enemy sensors."
"Suter finds the doors that have to be opened," an Air Force official tells Aviation Week.
L-3 Communications' Network-Centric Collaborative Targeting tool is considered Suter's "eyes and ears." With the system, three planes can pick up, within seconds, "the location (within a few hundred feet) and identity of enemy emitters -- radios, low-power cell phones and satellite phones, as well as other devices used for command and control and detonation of explosives... Plans are to have UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] or manned aircraft nearby that can deliver weapons or guide ground teams to the emitter's location within minutes."
A series of Suter programs explored the ability to pipe data streams -- embedded with specialized algorithms -- into enemy communications networks without being detected. The portals into the network are found by precisely locating antennas (as aiming points for the data streams) whether they are part of an air defense system or a hand-held communications device linked to others in an ad hoc tactical network for a small insurgent team.
However, there's the possibility that [the new gear] could interfere with [existing] U.S. [military] technology. Baghdad, where the force buildup is expected, is electronically polluted. For example, one smart system that jammed improvised explosive devices locked onto another smart system because of a lack of coordination between electronic warfare systems operated by different services and agencies. Jammers also can conflict with surveillance and communication systems... The problem is so pervasive that antennas have been put on 110-ft.-high poles to get them out of the worst interference.
Still, I have a feeling this story, from the Telegraph, is a little over-blown.
Terrorists attacking British bases in Basra are using aerial footage displayed by the Google Earth internet tool to pinpoint their attacks, say Army intelligence sources.
Documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google.
The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked.
Written on the back of one set of photographs taken of the Shatt al Arab Hotel, headquarters for the 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group, officers found the camp's precise longitude and latitude.
"This is evidence as far as we are concerned for planning terrorist attacks," said an intelligence officer with the Royal Green Jackets battle group. "Who would otherwise have Google Earth imagery of one of our bases?... We believe they use Google Earth to identify the most vulnerable areas such as tents."
As the paper notes, "it is unclear how old the maps are." But unless they're very recent, it's hard to believe they'd show today's tents all that accurately.
Newsweek has a must-read story on something we've hammered on againandagain here at Defense Tech HQ: the American military's inability to get its message out in any sort of sensible way. Especially through new media.
A draft report recently produced by the Baghdad embassy's director of strategic communications Ginger Cruz... makes the stakes clear: "Without popular support from US population, there is the risk that troops will be pulled back ... " Under the heading DOMESTIC MESSAGES, Cruz goes on to recommend 16 themes to reinforce with the American public, several of which Bush is likely to hit: "vitally important we succeed"; "actively working on new approaches"; "there are no quick or easy answers."
What's even more telling is that the IRAQI MESSAGES—the very next section—are still "TBD," to be determined. Indeed, the document so much as admits that despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, the United States has lost the battle for Iraqi public opinion: "Insurgents, sectarian elements, and others are taking control of the message at the public level." Videos of U.S. soldiers being shot and blown up, and of the bloody work of sectarian death squads, are now pervasive. The images inspire new recruits and intimidate those who might stand against them. "Inadequate message control in Iraq," the draft warns, "is feeding the escalating cycle of violence..."
Sunni insurgents in particular have become expert at using technology to underscore—some would say exaggerate—their effectiveness. "The sophistication of the way the enemy is using the news media is huge," Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, told NEWSWEEK just before he returned to the United States. Most large-scale attacks on U.S. forces are now filmed, often from multiple camera angles, and with high-resolution cameras... In some cases, U.S. officials believe, insurgents attack American forces primarily to generate fresh footage...
What the insurgents understand better than the Americans is how Iraqis consume information. Tapes of beheadings are stored on cell phones along with baby pictures and wedding videos. Popular Arab satellite channels like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya air far more graphic images than are typically seen on U.S. TV—leaving the impression, say U.S. military officials, that America is on the run...
The U.S. military's response, on the other hand, usually sticks to traditional channels like press releases. These can take hours to prepare and are often outdated by the time they're issued. Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, director of the military's press operations in Baghdad until this past September, complains that all military-related information has to be processed upward through a laborious and bureaucratic chain of command. "The military wants to control the environment around it, but as we try to [do so], it only slows us down further," he says. "All too often, the easiest decision we made was just not to talk about [the story] at all, and then you absolutely lose your ability to frame what's going on."
So you'd think that Jonas would be all into the idea of using these data-mining systems to predict who the next terrorist attacker might be.
Think again. "Though data mining has many valuable uses, it is not well suited to the terrorist discovery problem," he writes in a new study, co-authored with the Cato Institute's Jim Harper. "This use of data mining would waste taxpayer dollars, needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties, and misdirect the valuable time and energy of the men and women in the national security community." Are you listening, NSA?
Jonas doesn't have a problem cobbling together information on suspects from various databases. It's using these databases to forecast a terrorist's behavior -- think market research, but for Al-Qaeda -- that Jonas hates. "The possible benefits of predictive data mining for finding planning or preparation for terrorism are minimal. The financial costs, wasted effort, and threats to privacy and civil liberties are potentially vast," he writes.
One of the fundamental underpinnings of predictive data mining in the commercial sector is the use of training patterns. Corporations that study consumer behavior have millions of patterns that they can draw upon to profile their typical or ideal consumer. Even when data mining is used to seek out instances of identity and credit card fraud, this relies on models constructed using many thousands of known examples of fraud per year.
Terrorism has no similar indicia. With a relatively small number of attempts every year and only one or two major terrorist incidents every few years—each one distinct in terms of planning and execution—there are no meaningful patterns that show what behavior indicates planning or preparation for terrorism. Unlike consumers’ shopping habits and financial fraud, terrorism does not occur with enough frequency to enable the creation of valid predictive models. Predictive data mining for the purpose of turning up terrorist planning using all available demographic and transactional data points will produce no better results than the highly sophisticated commercial data mining done today [with results in the low single-digits – ed.]. The one thing predictable about predictive data mining for terrorism is that it would be consistently wrong.
Without patterns to use, one fallback for terrorism data mining is the idea that any anomaly may provide the basis for investigation of terrorism planning. Given a “typical” American pattern of Internet use, phone calling, doctor visits, purchases, travel, reading, and so on, perhaps all outliers merit some level of investigation. This theory is offensive to traditional American freedom, because in the United States everyone can and should be an “outlier” in some sense. More concretely, though, using data mining in this way could be worse than searching at random; terrorists could defeat it by acting as normally as possible.
Treating “anomalous” behavior as suspicious may appear scientific, but, without patterns to look for, the design of a search algorithm based on anomaly is no more likely to turn up terrorists than twisting the end of a kaleidoscope is likely to draw an image of the Mona Lisa.
Civil libertarians and bloggers have talked 'til they're blue in the face about how lame this kind of terror-predicting is. But I don't think I've ever heard a giant of the field, like Jonas, come out against the practice -- at least not on-the-record. Let's hope this is one conversation that the feds are monitoring.
UPDATE 11:49 AM: Shane Harris here. Die-hard proponents of pattern-based 'data mining' to catch terrorists will remain unconvinced by Jonas' and Harper's argument. While it's true that data mining in the commercial sector is based upon "training patterns," backers of systems such as Total Information Awareness will say, yes, and that's why data mining for terrorists has to start with hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of known or potential terrorist patterns to look for. A major part of TIA research was the creation of terrorist attack templates through red teaming exercises, in which experts were paid to come up with devious and clandestine plots that a terrorist might conceivably attempt. Their various machinations would, presumably, leave a set of digital footprints -- airline tickets purchased, money wired, hotels paid for, and so on -- and THAT data would be mined for clues.
What's also interesting about this paper is the combination of the authors. Jim Harper is a well-known and articulate activist, and has long since staked out central territory in the security vs. privacy debate. But Jonas has stayed out of politics. Indeed, those who've met him will know that he sticks out like a sore West coast thumb among Washington gear heads, being unafraid to use the word "dude" in formal conversation and happily acknowledging his ignorance of most Beltway insider baseball. But those who know Jonas and have heard him speak about electronic terrorist hunting know that, like his co-author Harper, he has a strong libertarian streak. Maybe Jonas wouldn't put it quite that way -- dude -- but it's there.
Aussie Military Bans Blogs
The U.S. military aren't the only ones clamping down on troops who blog.
The blogs were destroyed in September, hours after pictures of Australian soldiers playing with guns surfaced on the internet in the days before the inquiry into Private Jake Kovco's death in Baghdad. [He was the first Australian servicemember killed in Iraq -- ed.]
...A 26-year-old Sunshine Coast soldier serving in Iraq was placed under review and his milblog "Iraqi Letters" was deleted during the ADF's move to silence servicemen online.
The soldier's writing was positive of the army [The blog was an excellent advert for the ADF" one commenter said -- ed.] and at times poetic, detailing the taste of cold water on a dust-parched throat and the friendly ribbing soldiers received after the Socceroos lost to Kuwait.
Minutes after "Iraqi Letters" was destroyed, Brisbane IT consultant and blogging expert Mike Fitzsimons salvaged it for safe-keeping. [Alas, it looks like it was subsequently yanked -- ed.]
"I think it is a valuable piece of Australian history," he said. "Look at how today's historians revere letters from Gallipoli."
...Neil James, the executive director of independent lobby group Australia Defence Association, said milblogs should be allowed provided they were risk-assessed and any potential security violations censored.
"(Blogging) is not going to go away and the Defence Force is going to have to face up to this," he said. "It is not something that can be ignored."
Maybe if everything was going jim-dandy in Iraq, and world opinion was solidly behind the operation, then the western militaries could afford to silence the mission's most vociferous supporters. As we all know, it ain't. The entire operation is teetering on one foot. And short-sighted bureaucrats seem to be doing everything they can to shoot that foot off.
David Hambling here - I’m looking after DefenseTech for a few days from London, a city known for its iconic Tower Bridge. The bridge is not named for its own towers, but for the nearby Tower of London .
Now a big tourist attraction, the Tower was started in 1078 by William the Conqueror, the Norman warlord who had invaded and siezed the throne 12 years before. (The legal basis for William’s actions is still a matter of debate). Unlike most such castles, the Tower was not entirely for the defense of the city – it was as much to give the invaders a fortified base to protect them from the locals. William faced a major insurgency, and reacted with massive force, especially in the North where he left “not a blade of grass between the Rivers Trent and Tweed.”
The ringleaders of the insurgency were outlaws like Hereward the Wake, a survivor from the previous regime who was eventually persuaded to switch sides. Some of Hereward’s Norman-fighting exploits were later attributed to Robin Hood (who, if he ever existed, was at around least a century later), now reincarnated yet again in a swashbuckling new BBC TV series
Maybe in 900 years the Green Zone will be a must-see for coachloads of visitors - fleeced and thoroughly misinformed by their guides about the history of the place - while popular entertainment will feature bands of colorful Iraqi outlaws outwitting a dastardly Sherif of Baghdad. History may be written by the winners, but it soon gets a makeover from the scriptwriters.
Army to Fake the News
As if gagging milbloggers, posting to its own lame blog, denying embeds and writing silly editorials weren't enough, now the Pentagon is preparing to get into "news" production in a big way, all part of its effort to spin the Iraq War. So says Defense Tech pal Paul McLeary (and former embedded reporter) from the Columbia Journalism Review Daily:
An Associated Press story yesterday discussed a new DoD memo one of its reporters got a hold of that said that "new teams of people" at the Pentagon "will begin working to 'develop messages' for the domestic 24-hour news cycle."
But what might that mean? CNN.com followed up, and reported that the new operation is to have four branches: New Media, Rapid Response, TV and Radio Booking, and Surrogates. The idea is to massage the domestic media coverage of the war and of the Pentagon in general.
For example, the New Media branch will create "products and distribut[e] information" for the Internet, as well as through podcasting, DVDs and Web sites, including YouTube. Rapid Response will "Develop messages and products for the 24/7 media cycle." For example, CNN says that "In recent weeks, there has been an increase in Pentagon-written letters to the editors of dozens of news organizations." The TV and Radio Booking branch will "provide civilian and military guests for cable network and radio programs," while Surrogates will "Provide information and visibility to the surrogate community" -- which presumably means getting analysts to go on TV to express support for Pentagon programs, or for Rummy himself.
The info war over Iraq and Afghanistan is heating up. On one side, the mainstream media is publishing increasingly bleak headlines: Newsweek's "Losing Afghanistan," for instance. Also, Gannett's military-audience newspapers, including Army Times, are calling for SecDef Donald Rumsfeld's termination. On the other side, the military is cracking down on milbloggers, refusing embeds and firing off angry editorials -- all in an effort to tell a consistent story of success in the so-called War on Terror.
The military's latest move is this: a website solely dedicated to rebutting claims made by the mainstream media. Check it out. It's a gas.
On the site, the Pentagon takes critics of the Iraqi Security Forces to task for their dour appraisals of the forces:
CLAIM: “For two years, American sergeants, captains and majors training the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don’t show up for duty and cannot sustain themselves.”
FACTS: Some 300,000 Iraqi Security Forces are risking their lives for their new country. Polls of Iraqis show consistent support among the populations for members of the Iraqi Security Forces. Iraqi forces are increasingly taking the lead in operations against the enemy.
Actually, both claims are (sorta) right. Iraqi forces have no sense of national identity. And they are increasingly capable -- but only as local security forces. On several occasions I have visited Iraqi Army units that have flatly refused to deploy, or have been besieged in their deployed bases by hostile local residents. And even as Iraqi forces improve in a tactical sense, they remain dependent on coalition forces for logistics and most of their air support. That won't change any time soon.
And don't get me started on the Iraqi police -- technically a security outfit and a mob that the Pentagon always includes in its censuses of Iraqi forces. These guys are actively evil, grossly incompetent and, in most towns, very nearly insurgents themselves. As for the Pentagon's claim that security forces have "consistent support among the populations," I call B.S. The average Iraqi is actually scared of his local police.
A U.S. government website intended to prove that the preemptive Iraq war was justified published pre-1991 documents from Iraq that weapons experts say are a blueprint for would be atomic bomb makers, according to the New York Times.
According to Times reporter William Broad's story,
Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”
Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.
Early this morning, a spokesman for Gregory L. Schulte, the American ambassador, denied that anyone from the agency had approached Mr. Schulte about the Web site.
The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.
“For the U.S. to toss a match into this flammable area is very irresponsible,” said A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of classification at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the nation’s nuclear arms program. “There’s a lot of things about nuclear weapons that are secret and should remain so.”
The website, known as the Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal, included documents culled from some 55,000 boxes seized from the offices of Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime after the 2003 invasion.
While I hate to criticize the government for opening documents to the public, there's just something deeply ironic about teaching the world how to build the bomb in the process of trying to justify a war that didn't turn up the promised smoking guns.
Also, isn't it the government's job to be investigating the New York Times for publishing sensitive information, not the other way around?
The Pentagon's public affairs office admitted to reporters today that it had created the equivalent of a rapid reaction force to strike back at media coverage it considers inaccurate and to harness new technologies like "instant messaging" and "podcasting."
The Pentagon has been punching back at reporters and columnists recently with letters to the editor which have gotten prominent treatment in Early Bird, a daily clipping service intended to keep the military and contractors intended to keep them abreast of military news.
The first item in Monday's edition was an unpublished letter to the Washington Post, which read:
To the Editor:
Your article and the accompanying headline ("Rumsfeld Tells Iraq Critics to 'Back Off,'" October 26, 2006) said incorrectly that the Secretary’s comments in his Thursday press conference were aimed at "detractors" and "critics." In fact, the Secretary was referring specifically to journalists seeking to create a perception of major divisions between the positions of the U.S. and Iraqi governments. Secretary Rumsfeld was not referring to critics of the administration's Iraq policy.
Sincerely,
Dorrance Smith, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs
Riiiight. Well, glad that got cleared up. As Sharon Weinberger pointed out last week, this emphasis is becoming a trend.
From Agence France-Presse:
Eric Ruff, the Pentagon press secretary, insisted that the new public affairs program was not prompted by either the elections or polls showing that only about 37 percent believe the war is going well.
"What were looking at doing is, 'How can we get better, how can we get faster, how can we transform public affairs?'," he told reporters.
"And we're looking at being quicker to respond to breaking news. Being quicker to respond, frankly, to inaccurate statements," he said.
"And we're looking at this whole issue of new media -- podcasting, and IM-ing and all those kinds of things, where people are basically running circles inside us," he said.
Ruff disclosed the expanded operations after questions were raised about a wall being built in the Pentagon press operations center that will separate the new unit from Pentagon public affairs officials who deal with the media.
Hunh, and this has nothing to do with low poll numbers at all? Sorry, Ruff's denials don't pass the smell test.
Combine the news of this new nitpicking operation with the Pentagon's crackdown on milbloggers and its continued heavy-handed treatment of reporters embedded in Iraq, a death toll of 101 American soldiers so far this month, deteriorating relations with the Iraqi government, and a CNN poll registering domestic support for the war at 34%, and you have a stew with the rather unpleasant odor of desperation. Is this really what Rummy wanted when he begged public affairs to "adapt to today's media age?"
I expect my first missive from the Delta Force-esque PR flacks will be in my inbox pronto.
For the last couple of weeks, Defense Tech has been looking into the increasinglyhostile atmosphere that soldier- journalists -- milbloggers -- have been facing. Now, a bunch of bigger outlets have picked up on the story -- and advanced it several steps.
The [Army's] August order [about blogs] specifically states that soldiers may not create or update their blogs during duty hours, and the sites must not 'contain information on military activities that is not available to the general public.'
That includes 'comments on daily military activities and operations, unit morale, results of operations, status of equipment, and other information that may be beneficial to adversaries.'
If soldiers are found violating those rules, both the servicemembers and their commanding officers are notified... leadership can decide what punishment, if any, the soldiers should face...
Noah Shachtman, editor of defensetech.org, said... "The fact that soldiers want to write about their experiences is something that should be embraced by the Army... They’re not looking to bad-mouth the military. They’re looking to talk proudly about their experiences."
"We are not a law enforcement or intelligence agency. Nor are we political correctness enforcers," Lt. Col. Stephen Warnock, [head of the Virginia National Guard "Big Brother" website-monitoring unit] said. "We are simply trying to identify harmful Internet content and make the authors aware of the possible misuse of the information by groups who may want to damage United States interests."
Some bloggers say the guidelines are too ambiguous - a sentiment that has led others to pre-emptively shut down or alter their blogs.
"It's impossible to determine when something crosses the line from not a violation to a violation. It's like trying to define what pornography is or bad taste in music," said Spc. Jason Hartley, 32, who says he was demoted from sergeant and fined for reposting a blog he created while deployed to Iraq with the New York Army National Guard.
According to Hartley, the Army had forced him to stop the blog even before the oversight operation existed, citing pictures he had posted of Iraqi detainees and discussions of how he loaded a weapon and the route his unit took to get to Iraq.
Blackfive's [Matt] Burden says soldiers are receiving mixed messages: some receive approval from their immediate commanders, only later to be rebuked by more senior officials. Burden says his site and another milblog, Armor Geddon, were once featured in an internal Army PowerPoint presentation which described both as serious operational security risks.
"That kind of message from the administration of the Army sends a chilling signal to a young soldier who was told by his commander that it was okay to do what he was doing," Burden told Wired News.
He and fellow milbloggers gathered this year in April for a first ever MilBlog Conference in Washington, DC. They plan to reconvene in May, 2007. Debate over how to address authorities' OPSEC concerns without creating a "chilling effect" among bloggers was a heated topic at the 2006 gathering.
"My advice would be to bring together active duty, reserve and veteran bloggers to take a look at this issue in a way that would help the military," Burden says, "There's a lot of positive information coming from these 1,200 or so military blogs, and if it's not positive, it's giving people a better understanding of what it's like to be a soldier or the family of a soldier fighting this war."
Active duty milblogger John Noonan co-edits OPFOR (military slang for "opposing force") and posts on such topics as "foreign policy, wargaming, grand strategy and hippy bashing."
Noonan is among those who believe the current flap is partly the result of a generation gap between younger, tech-savvy recruits for whom life online is second nature and older, more senior military officials who don't get the net and are accustomed to the military's long-established history of carefully monitoring release of information from the battlefield.
"They don't want to lose the traditional control they've had over information released from the battlefield to the American people," Noonan said. "It's counterintuitive for military guys who are used to total control over what information is released and what isn't, to all of a sudden having zero control."
Xeni also filed a story for NPR's Day to Day, which should air this afternoon.
UPDATE 10/31/06 4:20 PM: ABC News weighs in here, with some pretty bruising commentary from Blackfive. Note to self: Do not piss this guy off.
Air Force Electronic Attacks Stymied
The situation isn't too bad right now, fighting a low-tech foe. But Air Force planners are deeply worried about the future, and the service's abilities to take out enemy radars. The flyboys' airborne electronic attack (AEA) efforts -- zapping opponents' air defenses, with big bursts of radar energy -- are in disarray, reports Air Force magazine.
"Last year, the Air Force canceled its central AEA program, the B-52 Standoff Jammer." Then, the Air Force was taken off the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System killer drone project, which the Air Force was planning to use "as a radar jammer loitering directly over enemy air defenses. It is no exaggeration to say that the Air Force AEA roadmap, which was years in the making, virtually collapsed."
The Air Force faces a hard deadline for bringing on new operational AEA capability. Since 1999, it has been sharing the Navy’s four-seat EA-6B Prowler escort jammer aircraft, but the Prowler fleet begins retiring in 2009... For some time, plans have called for USAF by then to be out of the Navy’s program and fielding its own system.
The airborne electronic attack business comprises five primary disciplines, each taking the action progressively closer to the target... [From long-range, stand-off strikes to point-blank jamming to cyber attacks which] cause an enemy radar to think it’s a washing machine and go into the rinse cycle.
The problem is, these are all very different jobs. No single aircraft is going to be able to handle them all. Not a revamped B-52 or F-15E, not the Navy's Prowler $100 million-per-plane replacement, and not even the new F-22 fighters, equipped with next-gen radars.
So now the idea is patch together lots and lots of different types of aircraft, including the Joint Strike Fighter and "the Miniature Air-Launched Decoy... a smallish missile that emulates the radar signatures of other aircraft and, it is hoped, will draw the fire of enemy air defenses."
There are "so many different components and pieces and parts," one Air Force official tells the magazine. "It gets very complex. ... It’s just a matter of what we can afford and what kind of risk will we assume if we don’t have all the pieces together."
Red Teaming Tomorrow's Radars
Nicholas Weaver is a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in California. This is the first in an occasional series for Defense Tech.
In the past, military technology might have consistently outpaced civilian gear. Not any more.
Civilian electronics, manufacturing, and development cycles have radically shortened and improved. The computer which runs the F-22 is an absolute design marvel for its time, for example: 700 MIPS (Millions of Instructions per Second), approximately 300 Megabytes of memory, and some 20 billion DSP [digital signal processing] style operations.
Yet its time was the late 80s and early 90s, when much of the hardware was finalized. Today, a Playstation 3 meets or exceeds this performance, for $600 instead of perhaps $30,000,000. (Of course, the F22's avionics are considerably more robust and presumably more reliable.)
So the question becomes, what happens if America's opponents start massively adopting commercial technology and commercial design styles? In Iraq, insurgents are already using commercial gear to build and trigger bombs. But it's not hard to imagine absorption on a much broader scale. After all, the weapon business is a business, there are brilliant engineers around the world, and the basic building blocks continue to grow more sophisticated.
This occasional series of speculations will attempt to predict that future, by technological "red-teaming," sketching out what an opponent could do. This first article attempts to postulate what the future of air defense radar will be, and how it will force radical changes in US military operations.
The United States enjoys pure air superiority. No other nation can hope to match the USAF, and no other country will likely try. But an opponent doesn't have to match our fighters, they only need ground based air defenses, which starts with radars.
Today, they don't have much of a hope. Between stealth aircraft and anti-radar missiles, an opponent's air defenses will be destroyed within minutes of a conflict. , or simply remains offline in an attempt to preserve some capabilities. {Which is what the Serbs did in the 90s – keeping their radars off, mostly, and using ballistic firing.)
But there is a technology which might change this balance. And it's got its roots in the commercial world. Multipath radar would provide a defender with a robust radar system, able to detect and track many stealth aircraft, counter anti-radar missiles, and enable the defender to track all radio emitters within the country.
In a conventional radar, a radio signal is broadcast. When a plane or other object is in the path of this beam, it may be reflected back towards the radar station. By using timing, direction, and the size and intensity of the reflected signal, the radar site can track and identify objects. Yet it is this very radar signal which anti-radar missiles target, making the stations vulnerable to attack.
Stealth aircraft avoid radar by being made of materials that are either transparent to, or absorbing of, the radar's signal. Or, the planes scatter the radio signal so that it bounces away from the radar station. That's why stealth aircraft have such unusual shapes.
But there is another way to build a radar. If you scatter a bunch of radio sources around the countryside, each of which are broadcasting, the signals will scatter off any aircraft in the area. With a group of distributed receivers, these scattered signals can be received and analyzed. This is called "multipath radar", as the signals traverse multiple paths to receivers.
There are a few prerequisites for multipath radar. The broadcasters, although simple, need to transmit an identifier as part of their signals, and be at known locations. The receivers, on the other hand, need to be very sophisticated. This requires sophisticated radio antennas and, more importantly, "serious DSP magic," which, when networked together, can compute a cohesive picture of the defender's airspace.
Yet the hardware to perform such DSP operations is becoming commonplace and commercially prevalent. GNU radar and other designs can receive the signals, and conventional computers and DSPs can then process the results, extract the features, and create an overall picture. There have been prototypes built in the United Kingdom, able to track commercial aircraft by observing the reflected signals from cell-phone towers.
Why do I believe multipath radar will be a case where civilian technology may have a huge military impact? Simply because the "serious DSP Magic", the signal processing components and programming skills needed to make everything work, are the same principles behind spread-spectrum cellular basestations, software radios, and even MIMO antennas for 802.11N basestations.
If multipath radar is deployed by adversaries or potential adversaries, it could greatly affect US operations. Stealth aircraft based on scattering the signal are simply not stealthy to multipath radar. Worse, the transmitters are no longer co-located with the receivers and electronics. Thus anti-SAM and anti-radar tactics will need to be restructured, as simply blowing up the transmitters destroys valueless targets and an adversary could simply build more $500 transmitters than the US has anti-radiation missiles.
Finally, the same DSP processing and antenna infrastructure which forms a multipath radar also enables the defender to track radio sources, by detecting unique sources and using timing to triangulate their locations. Simple traffic analysis, knowing where your opponents are, can be invaluable for military strategists. Radio silence protocols would need to be strictly enforced and enhanced, which could also affect proposed "system of systems" technologies.
A new technology can change the world. Multipath radar might change how the US military needs to operate, both in the air and on the ground. And the building blocks are in catalogs, now.
Tanker Brothers is a blog from a pair of Abrams operators, initially set up to "express their frustration at the lack of American support for the Iraq conflict and to pay tribute to their Military heritage of Patriotism and Honor." The site is one of the featured blogs at Military.com, and is in the top ten at BestMilitarySites.com.
Despite all that, the site is about to go dark, come Veterans' Day.
Make no mistake, it has nothing to do with not wanting to Blog anymore: on the contrary, this has been a labor of love for me. I started this blog with one goal, and only one goal: to let the American Public know what was REALLY going on in Iraq... Unfortunately.... sometimes things don't always work out the way we want them to.
As my readers know, my little brother has already deployed to Iraq, and I'm literally on "the countdown" to when I get on a plane to join him. There was nothing more that I wanted to do than to continue this site, and even "kick it up a notch", since I would once again be on the ground.
With the new OPSEC paranoia, though, I don't think I would have the opportunity. The DoD is cracking down on MilBlogs, and I wouldn't be able to continue Blogging and still be compliant with AR 25-1, the Army's Regulation governing Personal Websites...
Now, unofficially speaking, I think the DoD is making a huge mistake crippling the MilBlog movement. MilBlogs have been instrumental at keeping the American Public informed, and getting the good news of the War on Terror out to people that would otherwise never hear it. And the American public is hungry for news like that. The American public is starving for news like that.
Isn't this exactly the kind of website that the Defense Department ought to be trying to keep online?
UPDATE 4:53 PM: "We're carried on [the official Army website] Stand To! pretty regularly...so we're good enough for the Army's senior leaders, but not good enough to keep blogging? It doesn't make sense," Tanker Brother Mike Gulf tells me.
I would never, ever compromise security, or put even one single Soldier's life in jeopardy. If there [is] even a small chance, I tank the story. Even CENTCOM tells me I'm "good to go", to which my response was: "Then show me how I can [comlly] AR 25-1, and show me a way to post!"
The DoD should be embracing the MilBlog Movement: we're the guys and gals actually getting the TRUTH out about the War, and encouraging support, and the American public to open thier eyes and get the view from guys on the ground.
In a counterinsurgency, the media battlespace is critical. When it comes to mustering public opinion, rallying support, and forcing opponents to shift tactics and timetables to better suit the home team, our terrorist enemies are destroying us. Al Qaeda's media arm is called al Sahab: the cloud. It feels more like a hurricane. While our enemies have "journalists" crawling all over battlefields to chronicle their successes and our failures, we have an "embed" media system that is so ineptly managed that earlier this fall there were only 9 reporters embedded with 150,000 American troops in Iraq. There were about 770 during the initial invasion.
Many blame the media for the estrangement, but part of the blame rests squarely on the chip-laden shoulders of key military officers and on the often clueless Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad, which doesn't manage the media so much as manhandle them.
So writes super-blogger Michael Yon in an essay in The Weekly Standard. Yon, a former soldier-turned- journalist who spent nine months embedded with infantry units in Iraq and Afghanistan last year, has fearlessly reported the facts from some of the worst places in the world, including Baqubah in north-central Iraq, where in January 2005 I was on the receiving end of a spectacular suicide bombing. Now Yon writes about a foe nearly as harmful to the U.S. war effort: Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, departing head of the Baghdad Press Information Center. Continues Yon:
Johnson has repeatedly gone on record decrying the lack of press coverage in Iraq, all while alienating the last vestiges of any press willing to spend month after month in combat with American soldiers. Meanwhile, "the most quoted man in Iraq" has become a major media source in his own right. Too bad there is no one else to tell the story of our troops. Too bad the soldiers' families have little idea what they are up to from day to day.
I've had my own run-ins with Johnson. He was instrumental in the abrupt and violent end to my February 2006 embed with the 4th Infantry Division in Balad, which effectively spelled the end of my career as a U.S. military embed. I have since embedded successfully with British forces in Iraq -- a move on my part that, according to British press officers, elicited protests from Johnson's office.
Johnson's out of Iraq now, reportedly on his way to the Pentagon where he will surely make trouble for the Washington defense press, including yours truly, as I'm about to go on staff at Defense Technology International. In Johnson's place is a Colonel Christopher Garver, who you can contact directly here. Let's hope Garver understands the value of the press in fourth-generation warfare.
But even if he does, he'll be in a minority, as the Army has recently taken steps to crack down on our most unfiltered source of information from the front: soldier bloggers. As milblogs get shut down, embeds become even more important. Tragically, recent reports have pinned the number of embeds in Iraq at around ten. That's too few. There would be eleven if Garver would let Yon back in, twelve if he'd let me back too, and many more if he demonstrated a willingness to work with alternative media. There is no shortage of independent journalists eager to risk their lives to report on U.S. troops; there is only a lack of will on the part of the military to grant us access.
"Dave" has been in and out of the military since 1981. Now, he's getting ready to deploy to Iraq. So he decided to start a blog, as "a place... to share [his] thoughts, feelings, and observations, before, during, and after the Army Reserve is done with [him]." He managed to put up a couple of entries -- and pictures of his cats, Stinky Pooh and Buddy Badger."
But Dave has pulled the plug on his blog, just six weeks after he started it. Why? "Today we had a briefing on Blogs 'do's and don't' for the Army," he writes. "It appears to be very subjective as to what is and isn't allowed, so to keep from violating some Army reg, policy, or wish of the commander, I will have this as my last post." Then Dave linked to Defense Tech's post from last week, on the Army's "Big Brother" unit.
Now, Dave clearly wasn't going to be a model spokesperson for the military. He laughed at the Army's new slogan. And he wrote darkly about how the service "turned me from a career soldier loving the Army to someone that couldn't wait to get out just that quick."
But still. This is someone who plunged back into military life, long after he was out. Someone who wrote of his desire to be "an outstanding soldier, a mentor, a leader, someone who cared enough to make a difference." Isn't that exactly who the Army wants telling its story? And isn't Dave's online retreat exactly what friends of the military, like Andi and Blackfive, have been warning about?
UPDATE 8:18 PM: Speaking of Blackfive, the man isn't amused by the Army's new attitude -- or its blog-hunting squad.
As a former Intel Officer, I agree that there's a need to make sure that blogs aren't violating OPSEC. For instance, if three bloggers are in separate units but witness an event and blog about it, there might not be an OPSEC issue in one blog, BUT if you put the information from all three blogs together, you might be able to piece together Battle Damage Assessment or Order of Battle information. Since the bloggers might be in different chains of command, this might be missed by their 06 commanders who are responsible for blog review. Setting up a group to evaluate this possibility is needed.
However, the watchdog should also realize that coming down on bloggers for some (perceived) OPSEC violations might be a bit ridiculous - especially when there are photos and explicit descriptions of weapon systems and procedures that are publicly available on civilian (ie. FAS) or military/DoD websites.
Warning bloggers of possible violations is a good thing. But mindlessly cracking down on them without considering the consequences to the positive information flow will only create a cadre of negative military bloggers flying under the radar that will become the anti-military poster children for the New York Times and CNN.
And then one of the few alternative sources of information about our military and the war will be gone...
UPDATE 8:23 PM: Milblogger Dadmanly "didn't think this was going to cause problems," originally. Now, his "opinion on this has shifted."
Reminds me of the old MOS, I forget the nomenclature, but they were commonly called BF'ers, or buddy ******s.
I suppose I am too much the optimist not to have acknowledged the probability that DoD (under Rumsfeld) might go too far and weigh the Golden Goose for holiday dinner.
Bad, bad news, if this goes any further than alerting milblogs of slips, unintended exposure, ill-advised details. And alerting to commands if they have been serious vulnerabilities.
Although, as a National Guardsman, I would love to spend my drills scanning MILBLOGS…
MySpace pages, chatrooms, YouTube, and countless other personal and public web pages are used and read on orders of magnitude above and beyond what weblogs are. I suspect (actually I hope) that the real problem here is that "blogs" is now military shorthand for "anything anyone puts anywhere on the web". (In fact, if you read the sometimes-mentioned-in-this-discussion Army training on blogs****, you'll find that most - perhaps all - of the OPSEC violations cited didn't occur on blogs at all, but on other open web sites.)
In a nutshell, I want the military to ensure information that can get me killed isn't widely available via open sources on the web or elsewhere, but I've seen absolutely nothing to give me confidence that the military is capable of doing so... Damanly says (in somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion) that he'd "love to spend my drills scanning MILBLOGS…". But you see, he's one of the military's leading experts on weblogs, so that will never happen in a million years. What they're going to do is get some guys to sit at computers and respond whenever a bell rings because an automated process has detected too many instances of the initials "FOUO" in a web site.
Jeebus.
Army "Big Brother" Unit Targets Bloggers
Bloggers: "Big Brother is not watching you, but 10 members of a Virginia National Guard unit might be," according to the Army. The Manassas-based Guardsmen are on a one-year assignment to clamp down on both "official and unofficial Army Web sites for operational security violations."
The team, working "under the direction of the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell" hunts for "documents, pictures and other items that may compromise security" -- and then orders the parties to take the offensive content offline.
Not that the material is top secret or anything, an Army News Service article notes.
The most common OPSEC [operational security] violations found on official sites are For Official Use Only (FOUO) documents and limited distribution documents, as well as home addresses, birthdates and home phone numbers.
Unofficial blogs often show pictures with sensitive information in the background, including classified documents, entrances to camps or weapons. One Soldier showed his ammo belt, on which the tracer pattern was easily identifiable.
Since the relatively wide-open days following the Iraq invasion in 2003, the Pentagon has been slowly tightening the screws on military bloggers. Officers started busting frontline diarists for their websites. In Iraq, new rules required bloggers to check with their commanders before posting. Then, in August, a message came highest levels of the military that "EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, NO INFORMATION MAY BE PLACED ON WEBSITES THAT ARE READILY ACCESSIBLE TO THE PUBLIC UNLESS IT HAS BEEN REVIEWED FOR SECURITY CONCERNS AND APPROVED IN ACCORDANCE WITH DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MEMORANDUM WEB SITE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES, DECEMBER 7, 1998."
"So much for military blogging," said one officer, deployed in Iraq, when the ruling came down. Not that the officer -- an active blogger back in the States -- was doing much public writing while on the front lines. "The Army's guidance on OPSEC [operational security] has been broad and ambiguous enough to chill my speech," he wrote to me. "Discretion is clearly the better part of valor where OPSEC rules are concerned, because the sensitivity of any particular detail is in the eye of the beholder."
Other soldiers, even ones stationed back home, took similar measures.
As of today, May 5th, 2006, I am officially shutting down my blog... There are certin [sic] commands out there that do NOT want me to blog... they have been trying very hard to find out who I am and shut me down... I really don't want to end my military career over a blog - it has gotten THAT bad!
Others -- thousands of others -- have continued on, trying to stay within the rules. The Virginia National Guard Web-trolling team "uses several scanning tools to monitor [these] sites for OPSEC violations," the Army notes. "The tools search for such key words as 'for official use only' or 'top secret,' and records the number of times they are used on a site. Analysts review the results to determine which, if any, need further investigation."
"Pictures of [soldiers'] compounds or weapons" are also considered off-limits.
In an age when so many troops have access to the Internet -- and "open source intelligence" is becoming so critical -- it's only natural that military higher-ups have grown concerned about what's posted online. But OPSEC isn't the only dimension to the counter-terror fight. This is, as the cliche goes, a battle of hearts and minds, after all. That battle largely takes place in the press, broadly defined. And, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld observed earlier this year, "our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but... our country has not adapted." Just the other day, the New York Times shrieked about Iraqi insurgents using YouTube to spread fear.
So you would think that the Defense Department would be doing everything it could to encourage positive coverage of the war –- to bring stories of brave American troops, risking their lives for Mideast democracy, to the Internet browsers everywhere. But Rumsfeld's penchant for secrecy -- and the military's fear that even the smallest, most innocuous detail about American operations could give insurgents the upper hand –- has scuttled this crucial media mission.
Air Force Wants Software Spies
What if you could send a computer program to do the job of a spy, or a bomber, or drone? It sounds like science fiction -- and it'll probably stay that way, for a long, long time. But Air Force researchers think there's enough to the idea to start funding a trio of companies for initial work into these attacking, snooping "Cyber Craft."
"Using the Cyber Domain to conduct military operations... has significant potential," an Air Force paper announces. Examples include long-term intelligence activities, like "being to monitor a military barracks, accumulate financial information on a potentially hostile nation, or provide status on the political climate of a South American country."
Researchers think the programs could answer shorter-term, tactical questions, too. "Like who is in this building across the street, where are the tanks located in a particular town or village that is going to be entered by friendly forces, or what’s the latest intelligence regarding adversarial forces in a particular town or village."
Obviously, it would take more than a bulked-up Web crawler to get the job done. Cyber Craft would have to be able to hop from standard computer networks to electrical grids to wireless nets and back, over and over again.
Cyber agents will need to embody the ability to covertly travel across these mediums, constantly assessing the network layout, morphing itself as networks change, and remaining covert while maintaining the integrity of its mission. Increased use of data hiding techniques and data hiding detection techniques add additional complexity to the Cyber craft weapon arsenal... Cyber weapons will need to perform real-time continuous self-assessment of the adversary’s detection capability and be able to make instant decisions to morph or self-destruct. Both these functions will be required in covertness and with the decision information sent back to its Cyber Craft home.
"As an example of a Cyber Craft application, consider a squad of marines entering a residential area," the Air Force paper offers.
Current intelligence is about 20-mins old and the squad leader requires updated information. The squad leader finds an electrical outlet and plugs in. This outlet allows access to the power grid of the town and subsequently access to the adversary’s computer network. The squad leader injects a Cyber Craft into the system, whose mission is to locate a) any insurgents or b) locate any hidden military facilities... The Cyber Craft detect[s] some activity at a military installation within 1000-ft of the Marines location. The Cyber Craft performs a 'recce mission' to gather intelligence on the insurgents (exact location, number, arms, etc.) and sends back data/information to the marines. However, in the meantime the marines have moved and have located a different means of connecting to the network. The Cyber Craft has 'sensed' this shift so readdresses the feedback information to the marine’s new location and port. The 'Cyber Craft' acquires a positive ID, and sends an alert message back to the marines that the insurgents are about to leave and may be heading their way... The Cyber Craft executes its orders (turns power off, locks the doors), sends back an acknowledgement and self destructs.
There's not much of this that today's software can do, the Air Force researchers acknowledge. "Agent development, agent size and complexity, detection technology, realtime agent learning and self morphing technology, RF and network penetration technology are a few of the technological challenges requiring additional investment."
But the Air Force, earlier this year, did hand out contracts to three firms to start working the problem. Assured Information Security of Rome, NY got a $99,170 grant to "research and develop a CyberCraft software tool that will be able to covertly enter a network and move about the network to detect intrusions or other abnormalities." Indialantic, FL outfit 3 Sigma Research is looking to build "Cyber Craft organized in to 'cells' to enhance survivability and increase resiliency to attack." And Solidcore Systems, out of Palo Alto, will try to put together a system that include[s] a harbor (a host), and a dock (a control environment for Cyber Craft execution) and cyber craft themselves (ordinary programs that can get launched to hosts and run there)."
Of course, building the Cyber Craft, hard as it is, may wind up being the project's simplest part. The real questions come if and when fighters start to deploy the things. For instance, "How can we trust the Cyber Craft to 'do the right thing?'"
The goal is to develop a system that follows the 'fire-and-forget' methodology. However, with this philosophy comes the danger of a Cyber Craft morphing into something that performs unintended actions that would be harmful to friendly forces or provide an adversary with information about the sender’s intentions, position, etc. One way of controlling a Cyber Craft is have it 'dissolve' after completing its’ mission. However, depending on the level of the Cyber Craft (strategic, operational, and tactical) the mission length can go from minutes to years... Thus, the damage that can be inflicted by a rogue Cyber Craft could be significant.
Board Stiff
On Feb. 28, 2005, the Army took the unusual step of announcing in the Federal Register that the Army Science Board, a group of advisers to service leaders on technology and other issues, planned to hold an “open” meeting at the Institute for Defense Analyses in northern Virginia.
This step is required under Defense Department and Army regulations. So why was it unusual? Two reasons: First, the ASB rarely holds open meetings, even though such Federal Advisory Committees are by law supposed to do everything possible to ensure public access to their deliberations.
And second: The notice of this particular open meeting was published three days after the meeting ended.
At least they announced that one. According to the Federal Register, the Army hasn’t announced a single ASB meeting in 2006, even though the board’s Web site – which otherwise is pretty much a wasteland – says it has met three times this year.
What gives? ASB officials told me more than a year ago that they were working on getting more staff and better compliance with the rules. But things haven’t changed much; in fact, they might be worse. Take a look at the ASB reports page, which, once upon a time, contained links to all of the board’s reports once they were cleared for public release – a long process, to be sure, but one with the right ending.
Now, if you’re lucky, you get a number for the report once it’s finished. Then it’s off to DTIC – the Defense Technical Information Center – to search for the report. But as the reports page shows, there are quite a few reports that haven’t yet seen the light of day (I had to file Freedom of Information Act Requests to get two, which were more than two years old by the time I got them).
This isn’t the way it’s supposed to work, and other Pentagon advisory groups – the Defense Science Board, especially – do a far better job at getting at least their reports out to the public, although they too keep almost everything tightly under wraps until the final report is done.
And the DSB is considered highly influential: In recent years, its recommendations on crucial issues like special operations forces and strategic communications have become Pentagon policy.
What about the Army Science Board? When I covered the Army closely back in the 1990s it seemed a similarly influential group; now, though, it’s tough to tell if anyone cares what they do.
There are lots of Army folks out there: What do you think? Does the Army Science Board have any clout? Does it do good work? Do you ever see anything from them?
Some news on the Pentagon and its penchant for secrecy.
* First up: The Washington Post story referenced earlier today, which addresses the National Security Archive's work on the retroactive classification of U.S. strategic missile totals.
Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a part of the Energy Department, said the Pentagon excised the missile numbers. Under a 1998 law, Wilkes's agency focuses on scrubbing declassified documents for sensitive U.S. nuclear weapons information that, in the wrong hands, could be used to harm Americans, he said.
"It's not our call to do missile data," Wilkes said. "There's no question that current classified nuclear weapons data was out there that we had to take back," he added. "And in today's environment, where there is a great deal of concern about rogue nations or terrorist groups getting access to nuclear weapons, this makes a lot of sense."
I should stress here that the numbers in total have in some cases been part of the public record for decades.
ALTHOUGH NOT A FINITE LIST, SUCH INFORMATION INCLUDES, AMONG OTHER THINGS, TECHNICAL INFORMATION, OPERATIONAL PLANS, TROOP ROTATION SCHEDULES, POSITION AND MOVEMENT OF U.S. NAVAL CRAFT, DESCRIPTIONS OF OVERSEAS MILITARY BASES, VULNERABILITY OF WEAPON SYSTEMS OR DISCUSSION OF AREAS FREQUENTED BY U.S. PERSONNEL OVERSEAS. SPECIAL ATTENTION SHALL BE GIVEN TO IDENTIFICATION OF INFORMATION THAT WOULD FACILITATE CIRCUMVENTION OF DOD, COMPONENT OR COMMAND POLICIES, RULES, REGULATIONS OR OTHER SIGNIFICANT GUIDANCE (E.G., ORDERS, MANUALS, INSTRUCTIONS, SECURITY CLASSIFICATION GUIDES).
A lot of that makes infinite sense, but there's enough generic language there to give anyone, anywhere in the military, the leeway to restrict just about anything. And they do just that.
The new web alert also has this to say on military blogs:
PERSONAL BLOGS (I.E., THOSE NOT HAVING DOD SPONSORSHIP AND PURPOSE) MAY NOT BE CREATED/MAINTAINED DURING NORMAL DUTY HOURS AND MAY NOT CONTAIN INFORMATION ON MILITARY ACTIVITIES THAT IS NOT AVAILABLE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC. SUCH INFORMATION INCLUDES COMMENTS ON DAILY MILITARY ACTIVITIES AND OPERATIONS, UNIT MORALE, RESULTS OF OPERATIONS, STATUS OF EQUIPMENT, AND OTHER INFORMATION THAT MAY BE BENEFICIAL TO ADVERSARIES.
* Finally, this story, on how one of the great champions of a sane government secrecy policy has been compelled, under something of a legal threat from the Department of Homeland Security, to pull a "for official use only" document from the web.
UPDATED 8/22/06: Reader "DC Loser" asks a good question:
Does this mean that all those reference documents and textbooks sitting in my basement with the ICBM numbers (1,054 under SALT I) are now classified? Am I going to lose my clearance because of this? What am I going to tell them on my next poly?
Strategically placed surveillance cameras will soon transform the 1,200 mile Texas-Mexico border into the most ambitious open source intelligence experiment of its kind. Anybody with an internet connection will be able to monitor real-time footage from the cameras and report suspected illegal activity to Texas Homeland Security via an 800 number. The hope is that enough virtual eyes on the border will free enforcement officials to assume more specialized functions. The plan, announced last week by Governor Rick Perry, calls for the deployment of cameras within the next 30 days.
This is only the latest sign that policy makers at all levels are slowly embracing open source intelligence solutions to big problems. The "open source" in open source intelligence differs from that of open source software. In this case, open sources are publicly available information resources such as newspapers, magazines, television and the internet. Like open source software, collaboration often improves the breadth and precision of open source intelligence analysis.
In March, armchair intelligence analysts mouse-clicked themselves into a frenzy when the US government published thousands of captured Iraqi documents on the internet. Several in the open source intelligence community have proposed that US intelligence agencies continue publishing all (or most) of the intelligence they collect. Given unlimited access to national intelligence, those same armchair analysts would translate and pick apart every item on every grocery list seized from beneath potential terrorists' refrigerator magnets. And they'd do it quickly; Arabic speakers began posting translations of the captured Iraqi documents only hours after the government published them.
But the Bush Administration doesn't want their help, opting in most cases for the Cold War model of in-house analysis. In fact, this administration would rather curtail or shut down so-called "open-source intelligence" entirely.
The administration's undeclared war on the media has proven far more effective than its other campaigns. Recent offensives include Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez indicating the Justice Department may prosecute journalists for publishing classified information and House Intelligence Committee Republicans expressing concerns that press coverage of classified information has damaged national security. Former Reagan lackey and current CNN commentator William Bennett has suggested punishment for the Pulitzer Prize winning journalists who wrote about the CIA's secret prisons and the NSA's domestic spy program.
It's enough to make a citizen journalist swear off secrets forever, despite the occasional sign of progress.
In his 1999 book Secrecy: The American Experience, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan outlined what he believed to be a "uniquely American" philosophy of openness and transparency:
Open sources give us the vast majority of what we need to know in order to make intelligent decisions. Decisions made by people at ease with disagreement and ambiguity and tentativeness. Decisions made by those who understand how to exploit the wealth and diversity of publicly available information, who no longer simply assume that clandestine collection--that is, 'stealing secrets'--equals greater intelligence. Analysis, far more than secrecy, is the key to security.
Very few within the Beltway heard him. Seven years later the American intelligence community still lives within the hermetic confines of a Cold War era bubble, home also to nearly everyone in the executive branch from President to press secretary. They'd rather decertify the press than glean answers from it.
This war in Iraq was launched on a theory: That, with the right communication and reconnaissance gear, American armed forces would be quicksilver-fast and supremely lethal. A country could be conquered with only a fraction of the soldiers needed in the past.
During the initial invasion in March 2003, this idea of "network-centric warfare" worked more or less as promised -- even though most of the frontline troops weren't wired up. It was enough that the commanders were connected.
But now, more than three years into the Iraq conflict, the network is still largely incomplete. Local command centers have a torrent of information pouring in. For soldiers and marines on the ground, this war isn't any more wired that the last one. "There is a connectivity gap," a draft Army War College report notes. "Information is not reaching the lowest levels."
And that's a problem, because the insurgents are stitching together a newtwork of their own. Using throwaway cellphones and anonymous e-mail accounts, these guerrillas rely on a loose web of connections, not a top-down command structure. And they don't fight in large groups that can be easily tracked by high-tech command posts. They have to be hunted down in dark neighborhoods, found amid thousands of civilians, and taken out one by one.
David Axe -- recently back from his 6th trip to Iraq -- and I have a special report in this month's Popular Science, on "Winning (and Losing) the First Wired War." Give it a read. And see how this network-centric ideal is playing out, for real.
Iraqi Army's Retina Scans
In Iraq, it's tough to sort out who's an ally, and who's Al Qaeda. So the Marines are giving Iraqi Army recruits the biometric once over.
According to Security Products magazine, the Marines are using the Biometric Automated Toolset System, which relies, in part, on iris recognition to provide "extremely accurate identification (false acceptance rate is 1 in 1.2 million), performing both un-tethered and tethered enrollment authentication."
This specific recognition device represents each individual iris as a small, 512-byte IrisCode and can function as a standalone device or in combination with custom network applications for identity recognition, security and tracking...
[It also] incorporates a face recognition engine... scalable up to tens of millions of faces and capable of providing real-time response. The recognition process represents faces as an extremely concise 128-byte "eigenface" template for minimal storage and enhanced search speed.
Also of interest is an article on BATS training for the 1-22 Infantry Regiment, which describes how the gizmos are used to identify prisoners and suspects on the scene of incidents such as an IED blast. The soldiers can quickly scan those in the area and cross-reference the results with suspects at other IED scenes.
As for army recruits, I suspect that their scans are also cross-checked against the prisoner and suspect databases. (This blog says so.} I hope it's right.
The Defense Department has issued a new publication outlining joint doctrine on the use of "information operations," according to Secrecy News. Which might make you think the Pentagon has some new rules for keeping computers safe. But Information operations is used for a wide range of military operations designed "to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own," according to the document, officially known as Joint Publication 3-13. The doctrine document follows the 2003 publication of a DOD "Information Operations Roadmap", which outlined plans for developing capabilities needed to achieve information dominance. Microwave blasts, propaganda campaigns, radio jams, and hack attacks are all part of the plan. In fact, the range of tactics that are part of "information operations" is so wide that the term risks confusing the uninitiated. So here’s a primer.
First of all, the term "information warfare," which in the past has been widely used as a synonym for information operations and some of its various component disciplines, is now defunct. The new doctrine removes it as a term "from joint IO doctrine." So purge it from your vocabulary if you want to be doctrinally correct.
What kind of operations can be classified as information operations? Joint Publication 3-13 lists "electronic warfare (EW), computer network operations (CNO), psychological operations (PSYOP), military deception (MILDEC), and operations security (OPSEC)" as part of IO. In other words, jamming enemy radios (EW), hacking into adversary computer networks (CNO), broadcasting radio messages into enemy territory to encourage surrender (PSYOP), deceiving foes about where and when an attack is coming (MILDEC) and protecting friendly communications from spying (OPSEC) are all information operations.
At first, all this seems almost to make sense. The disciplines in question all seem to bear some tenuous relation to the use or communication of information. But the more one examines IO’s subsidiary disciplines, the more it becomes clear that information operations is a bewilderingly big umbrella.
For example, the document defines electronic warfare as "any military action involving the use of electromagnetic (EM) and directed energy to control the EM spectrum or to attack the adversary." Directed energy includes, among other things, lasers. So zapping a target with a laser (sure to be more common in years to come) is information operations. At the same time, a PSYOPs campaign to place ghost-written op-eds in newspapers – ŕ la DOD contractor the Lincoln Group – is also information operations. Installing virus protection software on a DOD computer? You guessed it: information operations. Heck, even putting those weird OPSEC posters on the walls of the Pentagon is information operations.
Confused yet? No need to be. Just remember this: information operations is a catch-all term for a variety of military operations, most of which are somehow related to information, computers or the electromagnetic spectrum, and which don’t easily fit into any doctrinal box. Meanwhile, stay tuned for a future update to Joint Publication 3-13, in which the term information operations is sure to be summarily banished from joint doctrine.
But what's not as widely known is why the bureau is so behind the times. The big culprit is FBI culture, it turns out. Until very recently, being computer-savvy hasn't been considered much of an asset in the FBI, and clues were something you kept to yourself.
My story in Slate explains. Check it out -- it's my first one for 'em.
UPDATE 6:03 PM: Slate is more of an essay-driven operation. So I didn't get to use some of the juicier quotes that I squeezed from folks in researching this story. Here are a few:
*"Compar[ing] with the FBI is like comparing the Neanderthal system of 'one bang club on cave mean yes, two mean no,' to the futuristic Star Trek vision of intergalactic communications that transcend time and distance. If Captain Kirk found himself in... the FBI headquarters building in D.C., he surely would tap the communicator on his chest with the comment 'Scotty, beam me up, there is no intelligent life in this rectangular cave.'"
-- former NSA officer
* "Guys would write their notes on legal pads, and lock them in a safe at night when they went home."
-- former FBI agent
* Every SAC [Special Agent in Charge of an FBI office] is his own king. And they don't like people from other divisions coming into their kingdoms... If I'm working on an L.A. case, and I've got leads in Chicago, the attitude is, 'Why Go?' Everyone gets tied in knots."
-- former FBI agent
* "Everything the Bureau has been talking about, they’ve had here for years... You can’t believe how far ahead they are here."
-- U.S. Strategic Command analyst, formerly with the FBI.
(And before you ask: Yeah, I talked to current agents, too. They just weren't as snarky as the exes.)
Battlefield Questions, Answered Fast
The fancy sensors, flying drones, and big bandwidth pipes get most of the attention. But, when it's being done right, network-centric warfare is as much about simple collaboration as it is about gee-whiz gadgetry. Chat rooms, message boards, online libraries all give folks in the field new sources of information and advice, so they can make better battlefield choices.
The latest Army Times has a great example of this in action -- a sort of rapid-fire "Dear Abby" for commanders in the field.
An Army major general in Iraq had a classified question about the insurgency early last month. Rather than pull his advisers away from their immediate mission, he e-mailed a request to a military think-tank, the Center for Army Lessons Learned. 'We answered it in seven hours with 10 people digging for information,' said Craig Hayes, manager of CALL's Request for Information [service].
Contractors developed the Request for Information prototype six years ago to enable soldiers to get immediate information online, culled from sources outside and within CALL. With a few keystrokes, soldiers — regardless of rank — had access to 100 experts and a few hundred thousand documents...
Before the Iraq war, a couple of CALL staffers answered a few questions a week as a secondary duty, Kinsey said... Now, [they're] providing upward of 120 answers a week... And it’s a two-way feed, with troops in the field not only seeking information but also providing insights and tips gained on the battlefield and at tactical centers. CALL staffers take that information and turn it around within 18 hours, kicking it back to others who need it.
Any soldier — or Marine, airman or sailor — may file an RFI, but those deployed or about to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan have priority. The staff tries to answer those questions within eight hours.
“Recently, we got one that said, ‘I’ve got two Soviet mine rollers and no clue how to use them,’” said Albert Fehlauer, lead RFI research analyst. The soldier was trying to train Iraqi troops on their own weapons. “That’s the rewarding aspect. You feel that you’re really helping people.”
Boing Boing vs. U.A.E.
Superblog Boing Boing is being "blocked by entire countries including the United Arab Emirates, and by many library systems, schools, US government and military sites, and corporations," Xeni says. The reason: a silly little program called Smart Filter, which classified 25,000 BB posts as "nudity."
The problem is, most of these posts don't have any boobies at all. "They're stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn't wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions..."
[Smart Filter maker] Secure Computing offered us a devil's bargain: if we'd change the URLs of images with "nudity" (which, they assured us, included photos of Michaelangelo's David) to something they could detect and block, they'd let the rest of the world see us again. That guy in the UAE who was worried he'd be imprisoned for trying to read BoingBoing would be OK again.
[I]nstead we've decided to help put Secure Computing out of business... We're publishing a guide to evading the SmartFilter censorware. There are hundreds of ways to defeat these censorware apps, and we're going to catalog as many of them as possible. (We'll publish this tutorial shortly, and update the post you're reading with a link to the permanent page).
Net is Military's "Weakest Link"
I've always been prettyskeptical about so-called "cyber-terrorism" -- the idea that an Al-Qaeda type is going to logic bomb a server, rather send a truck bomb into a building; for a group trying to sew fear, that electronic attack just doesn't seem visceral enough. Cyber-warfare, on the other hand, sounds plenty likely. Every day, American armed forces grow increasingly reliant on their communications networks -- to relay orders, transmit reconnaissance footage, and plan attacks. Which means those networks become juicier targets, all the time. Unfortunately, they're also the U.S. military's "weakest link," according to National Defense magazine.
The U.S. military is comfortable facing enemies on traditional battlefields, but facing them in the virtual world is a new challenge, said Army Brig. Gen. Susan Lawrence, Joint Staff chief information officer and director of command, control, communications and computers. Until the military figures out how to defeat its adversaries in this battle space, “we’re not going to win the global war on terrorism,” she said at a military communications conference.
Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Robert Shea, director of command, control, communications and computer systems on the Joint Staff, said at the conference that “the network is our center of gravity, and our ability to defend it is our Achilles’ heel.”
Army Col. Carl Hunt, director of technology for the joint task force for global network operations, said those who attack the Pentagon’s network are often “a half step ahead of us.”
“We’ve gone to great lengths to build complementary capabilities in the kinetic battlefield,” but not in the virtual battlefield, he told military writers at a briefing. “We have a very thin, fragile communications capability basically in the global information grid and the Internet.”
Air Force, Cyberspace Defenders
Ever since the Air Force broke off from the Army in 1947, the flyboys have prided themselves on being the military's resident techies -- the dudes with the newest gadgets and the coolest toys. That gear-head role has become increasingly important, lately, now that so few other countries can lift a finger to stop American dominance of the skies. That's sent the Air Force hunting for new missions; look at the airmen's recent attempt to become the Defense Department's gatekeepers for unmanned aerial vehicles, for example.
The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests -- to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace...
As Airmen, it is our calling to dominate Air, Space, and Cyberspace. If we can decisively and consistently control these commons, then we will deter countless conflicts. If our enemies underestimate our resolve; then we will fly, fight, and destroy them.
"We have quite a few of our Airmen dedicated to cyberspace ... from security awareness, making sure the networks can't be penetrated, as well as figuring out countermeasures," Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne told Air Force Print News. "The Air Force is a natural leader in the cyber world and we thought it would be best to recognize that talent."
"The pioneers of airpower...knew what their mission was: to fly and fight wherever our Nation calls," Wynne added in a letter to airmen. "The Air Force's mission statement has evolved over time, but it does not change the nature of who we are or what we do... Keep up the great work!"
Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents, and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country. ... As part of a psychological operations campaign that has intensified over the past year, one of the military officials said that the task force [responsible for planting the stories] also has purchased an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station, and is using the outlets to channel pro-American messages to the Iraqi public. Neither is identified as a military mouthpiece.
This news should come as no surprise to those following the coalition's information warfare campaign in Iraq. But planting stories represents the seediest -- and least common -- tactic for shaping Iraqi attitudes. The main campaign of the infowar is the coalition's efforts to train up Iraqi journalists in Western-style journalism. Division and brigade public affairs shops throughout Iraq work hand-in-hand with local reporters, helping them gain access to important stories, equipping them with technology they otherwise could not afford and encouraging them to network, check their sources and tell both sides.
Seriously. I've seen it happen in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division, in eastern Iraq with the 278th Cavalry Regiment and with British forces in Basra. A couple bad apples don't represent the entire coalition infowar effort.
Take, for example, the Diyala radio station near Baqubah, where Iraqi journalists host call-in talk programs and the provincial governor delivers speeches. Last year a busload of radio employees were massacred by insurgents, so the 1st Infantry Division began patrolling the area and posted guards at the station. Now it's secure. And sadly, in Iraq these days, secure means free.
Does that make everything that comes out of the Diyala radio station propaganda?
THIS JUST IN: Defense News quotes White House spokesman Scott McClellan responding to the allegations:
"We're very concerned about the reports," ... McClellan told reporters. "We have asked the Department of Defense for more information.
"We want to see what the facts are.
"The United States is a leader when it comes to promoting and advocating a free and independent media around the world, and we will continue to do so," McClellan added.
"We've made our views very clear when it comes to freedom of press.
"And in terms of this specific issue, again, what we want to do is find out what the facts are and then we�ll be able to talk about it more at that point," he said.
--David Axe
New Cyberthreats
I just sat in on a conference call put together by the SANS Institute. They do all sorts of tracking of computer vulnerabilities, and they also do worldwide training sessions in stopping hackers, etc.
SANS today released a new Top 20 threat list, detailing what kinds of systems and programs are being targeted by hackers these days. Roger Cumming, Director of Britain's NISCC, which is the UK equivalent of the US' own Critical Infrastructure Protection Board,detailed two major trends to look out for as far as protecting critical infrastructure.
First, Cumming noted, as more and more networks converge onto single platforms (think of communications becoming more and more based on Voice over Internet Protocol, for example) the threats are increased. In other words, a cyber-attack won't just knock out your email, it will knock out the voice communications you rely on as well. More and more apps on a single platform will also offer hackers more avenues into your critical systems.
Cumming also mentioned that cyber-watchers are seeing a real shift now in the motives for attacks. He called the current situation a "malicious marketplace," where hackers are getting paid to do their dirty work. It's no longer just teenagers with too much time on their hands. There's no reason why terrorists, for example, couldn't try to hire these professional hackers to launch attacks on critical US infrastructure.
Now, for the record, if you follow Defense Tech, you know the whole "cyberthreat" issue's been raised before. And that it's fair to say that we've been, shall we say, uber-skeptical about this kind of cyber-terrorism. Here, and here, for example.
Also of note: attackers have realized that Microsoft and others now offer automatic patches to plug holes in operating systems, and that, by and large, computer users are taking those patches. So, the hackers are now finding ways to exploit vulnerabilities, not in operating systems, but in applications like media players, and even anti-virus software itself. Beware when streaming that new Britney Spears vid!
All of this, of course, has huge implications for the US military and the Dept. of Homeland Security. They use much of the same, off-the-shelf software that ordinary users do, and so they face the same issues when it comes to hacking, etc. Scary, I know.
Alan Paller of SANS noted, however, that the US Air Force is setting an example of good governance in addressing these threats. Being a radio guy, I give you an audio clip of Paller talking about this during the press conference today. Download Alan Paller's first clip
But, Paller also noted that the hardest work -- finding out what's already been compromised, and removing the offending bugs -- has yet to be done. Download Alan Paller's second clip
-- Clark Boyd, technology correspondent for The World public radio program. The World is co-production of the BBC World Service in London and WGBH public radio in Boston.
Iraq Airwaves: Traffic Jam
Every once in a while around Baghdad, American bomb squads stop what they're doing, and retire to their bunks. The reason why: "Compass Call," a modified C-130 turboprop plane which serves as the "only US wide-area offensive information warfare platform," according to GlobalSecurity.org. The Compass Call and the Navy's EA-6B Prowler can jam radio and cell phone traffic for miles around, disrupting insurgent communications. But the aircraft also can disrupt the jammers that bomb squads use to stop improvised explosives, Aviation Week notes. There's even a fear that all those crossed signals could accidentally detonate guerilla bombs.
"We have a smart system that jams IEDs [improvised explosive devices] in Iraq, that found itself fighting with another smart electronic system," Lt. Gen. Walter Buchanan, chief of the 9th Air Force and Central Command Air Forces, says. "They got locked on [to each other] because of the lack of coordination..."
Another concern is accidentally triggering IEDs with jamming signals. "We deconflict our jamming activities when we know we have people near IEDs... so that we don't unintentionally set them off," he says.
The problems also extend to surveillance and communications systems. "When you take a look at data links and the number of jammers in place and all the radios we have out there, [deconflicting] becomes a very difficult problem," Buchanan says.
Because all of the communication systems are in similar bands and create interference, a Predator UAV at Balad, the main U.S. air base in Iraq, is in danger of losing its ground control link once it is 35 mi. from base, he says. In the less congested airways of Afghanistan, that range is 120 mi.
"The problem is bad enough that Central Command is putting more urgency into developing an EW [Electronic Warfare] Coordination Cell," the magazine observes. "The task is critical because new users of the electromagnetic spectrum come into theater almost daily."
Before the end of the decade, information warfare specialists are expected to use these and other electronic warfare aircraft, both manned and unmanned, to find enemy communications networks and plot with precision their location on the ground. Those networks would then be seeded with false information as well as viruses, worms, zombies, Trojan Horses and other computer attack tools that would leave them communicating with U.S. analysts as often as they do with other insurgents.
Sign Language
Back in college I had a Soviet studies professor whose office was decorated with lurid, humorless security posters from the U.S.S.R. I thought they were artifacts peculiar to repressive, secrecy-obsessed regimes -- until I started covering the Pentagon.
On bulletin boards, doors and office walls throughout the building, my colleagues and I would find dozens of security posters and signs of varying quality and message – some of them just as spooky as those Soviet posters in my professor’s office (and some still focused on the Soviets, for that matter). My favorite, which one of my co-workers was kind enough to swipe for me, was a warning to government officials about to travel abroad. “Get your travel threat briefing before departing,” it screamed, the words surrounded by hideous, bloody drawings of what might happen to if you weren't careful – hostage situations, attacks in café’s, etc.
These kinds of signs have been around a long time, of course. Here’s one of the all-time classics. (Some, though, were pretty horrible.)
Now, they’re official policy – according to military regulations, such security warnings have to be displayed in certain areas.
But do they work? Consider this: According to an Army security manual, “after a while, a security poster, no matter how well designed, will be ignored; it will, in effect, simply blend into the environment. For this reason, awareness techniques should be creative and frequently changed.”
There are quite a few signs and posters online. Some are, in fact, creative. Some are attempts at humor. Most fail. And some are just plain weird. (Really weird. And what's up with all the kids?)
Here's a sampling of some of the best -- and worst.
Lying your ass off -- excuse me, strategic communications -- is the oldest government consulting job in the book. Defense Tech pal Sharon Weinberger has found an English firm looking to take the profession to a whole new level, by mass-deluding citizens in times of national crisis.
There is not a web of like-minded (much less amenable) patriots gaining succor and inspiration from the populace. There are a thousand disparate cabals and petit punks and opportunists, each with competing motivations and interests... The permutations are endless and motivations intertwined.
All of which, from what I've understand, is interesting and true; I've heard reports of more than 75 distinct groups fighting the U.S. over there. But it's also kind of irrelevant. Because these insurgents may not need a cohesive ideology to thrive. Technology, in many ways, has taken its place.
It used to be that a small group of ideological-driven guerilla leaders would spread information, tactics, training, and cash to their followers. No more. Internet-enabled insurgents with only the loosest of real-world connections can now share all of that freely online. These guys don't have to like each other. They don't have to agree with one another. They don't even have to interact, really. All they have to do is post material to the Net. John Robb -- who's doing some of the smartest thinking and writing around on the subject -- calls it "Open Source warfare."
Without using the term themselves, the Washington Post has just finished a must-read three-part series on these Open Source guerillas. Here's a snippet from today's final installment:
An entire online network of Zarqawi supporters serves as backup for his insurgent group in Iraq, providing easily accessible advice on the best routes into the country, trading information down to the names of mosques in Syria that can host a would-be fighter, and eagerly awaiting the latest posting from the man designated as Zarqawi's only official spokesman.
"The technology of the Internet facilitated everything," declared a posting this spring by the Global Islamic Media Front, which often distributes Zarqawi messages on the Internet...
This and other Arabic-language forums hosted discussions on the latest news from Iraq, provided a place for swapping tips on tradecraft, circulated religious justifications for jihad, and acted as intermediary between would-be fighters and their would-be recruiters...
Many postings to the boards were not official statements from al Qaeda but unsolicited advice, such as the recent notice called "the road to Mesopotamia" posted on an underground Syrian extremist site, in which one veteran offered a detailed scouting report, down to advice on bribing Syrian police and traveling to the border areas by claiming to be on a fishing trip.
The bulletin boards also make information quickly available from Iraq, where fighters are gaining combat experience against the U.S. military. In one case cited by John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, would-be insurgents in the Sahara Desert were able to ask for -- and receive -- information from the ground in Iraq about how best to build bombs.
In this way, the new Iraqi "non-insurgency" may be tougher to beat, ultimately, than the more ideological guerillas of the past. With such a diverse band sharing information so quickly, there's no one "leader" or group of leaders to eliminate. In fact, taking out the most visible leaders might only make the Open Source network more efficient, by eliminating unnecessary nodes.
Some might read Major High's comments, and take comfort. Me, I'm nervous as hell.
THERE'S MORE: Major High -- and a whole lot of other people -- respond in the comments section. Be sure to read.
Hack Attack
In 2002, the Department of Justice indicted (in absentia) a resident of the UK, Gary McKinnon, of hacking into DOD and NASA computers and causing almost a million dollars worth of damages. Yesterday, they got around to trying to extradite him for trial.
McKinnon, a self described UFO fan, was apparently searching for files labeled "Area 51" or other evidence that the US is concealing all it knows about extraterrestrial life. McKinnon says that any damage was accidental, when he tried to cover his tracks by erasing data. He must have been disappointed, as he found nothing about UFOs.
His biggest crime appears to be that he kept 2000 DOD and NASA computers from being able to access the internet for three days in the Spring of 2002 (although many were still able to send and receive email). As with most computer crimes, no one noticed any visible tremors of panic in the DC area.
McKinnon did not, DOD says, gain access to any classified information. He got access to unclassified systems as a result of sloppy security practices (not changing the default password), but he now says that he was closed out by DOD administrators soon after getting in.
70 years in jail (which is what the US is threatening him with) seems excessive. That an unemployed Brit with a UFO mania was able to tromp around unclassified DOD computers is embarrassing, and he deserves a stiff fine, some community service, and maybe a little jail time.
The real issue is who else is tromping around, perhaps a bit more skillfully, not leaving tracks, and not confining themselves to searching for UFO data. McKinnon himself said "I was always very frightened when I realized there were always other people from all over the world on there [the DOD networks]."
Even if McKinnon was unable to access classified data, people at DOJ say (off the record) that he was able to look at weapons R&D material that shouldn't be public. The internet has been a tremendous boon for espionage, and if McKinnon found a way to get in, we have to assume that other, more professional types, did so as well.
Secret knowledge
The Army has picked Lockheed Martin to manage its massive intranet, called Army Knowledge Online. The service started the thing a few years ago to provide soldiers with an Internet portal that offered e-mail, easy access to records and other information. In recent years, though, it's become somewhat difficult to manage, so the service is switching gears, choosing Lockheed Martin to integrate it all.
AKO has a dark side, though. Since 9/11, especially, it's become an easy place for the service to keep information from the prying eyes of reporters and the public. And we're not talking top-secret or even sensitive stuff, either; routine, even mundane info often gets locked away.
Take this site, for example. It's the home page for the branch of the Army responsible for buying weapons and other stuff with the billions of taxpayer dollars provided the service each year.
Right in the middle of the page you'll see a list of documents that appear about as sensitive as the average dry-cleaning ticket. But most are behind the AKO firewall. And way down on the left, there's something called a "PEO-PM" list -- the names and numbers of the program managers who steer Army weapon systems. That was publicly available for years, but now can't be seen by anyone without a .mil IP address.
Also available for years was a monthly Army acquisition newsletter containing routine announcements; that's gone, too. (I read it every month when it was accessible, and I can attest it was the exact opposite of sensitive.)
There are countless other examples, including this one, noted by estimable Steve Aftergood. And perhaps the biggest loss to the public were countless documents -- all unclassified -- once available via the Center for Army Lessons Learned.
The Army's not alone, of course; the other services and the Pentagon in general are keeping far more information behind electronic firewalls than ever before. And it's not all post-9/11, either; even under Clinton, the Internet was treated by the military as a whole new ballgame, where even unclassified information was suddenly deemed sensitive and pulled from view.
The most egregious example is the annual report of the Defense Department's top testers. The director of operational test and evaluation is charged by law with holding the Pentagon's feet to the fire when it comes to testing the military equipment it fields. And the annual report -- which is unclassified and available in hard copy to anyone who asks for it -- is chock-full of information on the status of every major system the military develops, buys and fields. But after 2001, the Pentagon decided it couldn't be put online. (The latest can be found here, with a price tag.)
"This kind of secrecy doesn't have anything to do with protecting national security," says Aftergood. "It's all about the military's bureaucratic desire to evade outside scrutiny. So while spending keeps going up, oversight is coming down."
That's how Wired News describes the Pentagon's Joint Functional Component Command for Network Warfare. The highly classified U.S. Strategic Command unit is "charged with defending all Department of Defense networks" -- and with attacking other countries' computers, too.
SPYBOYS, START YOUR BLOGGING
Former Centcom intelligence analyst and Defense Tech pal Kris Alexander has some advice for our spyboys in this month's Wired magazine: start blogging.
It's an open secret that the US intelligence community has its own classified, highly secure Internet. Called Intelink, it's got portals, chat rooms, message boards, search engines, webmail, and tons of servers. It's pretty damn cool... for four years ago...
The first step toward reform: Encourage blogging on Intelink. When I Google "Afghanistan blog" on the public Internet, I find 1.1 million entries and tons of useful information. But on Intelink there are no blogs. Imagine if the experts in every intelligence field were turned loose - all that's needed is some cheap software. It's not far-fetched to picture a top-secret CIA blog about al Qaeda, with postings from Navy Intelligence and the FBI, among others. Leave the bureaucratic infighting to the agency heads. Give good analysts good tools, and they'll deliver outstanding results.
And why not tap the brainpower of the blogosphere as well? The intelligence community does a terrible job of looking outside itself for information... If intelligence organizations built a collaborative environment through blogs, they could quickly identify credible sources, develop a deep backfield of contributing analysts, and engage the world as a whole. How cool would it be to gain "trusted user" status on a CIA blog?
Sign me up, Kris!
NEW PROPAGANDA TECH FOR SPECIAL OPS
You'd think that, in 2005, there'd be a better way to push propaganda. But last year, the U.S. military dropped 9.3 million leaflets into Afghanistan, and another 3.8 million into Iraq, according to Special Operations Technology magazine, trying to convince the locals to play nice with G.I.s.
U.S. Special Operations Command is exploring alternatives to the flyers. In a recent call for research, SOCOM expressed an interest in "air droppable, scatterable electronic media" to spread the good word about American intentions. "Internet-capable devices, entertainment and game devices, greeting cards, and phone and text messaging technologies" are just a few of the suggested options for these so-called "psychological operations," the magazine notes.
Already, the Pentagon has purchased 100,000 solar-powered radios, so folks on the ground can listen in to official American dispatches. (It's a time-tested technique.) To that, SOCOM is considering adding "disposable or temporary cell phone[s]," Special Operations Technology notes.
Another, more cost-effective solution might be to use tried and true technologies and applications but adapt them for military use. Did you ever send or receive a talking greeting card? Hallmark tried, but discontinued such a line. SOTECH talked to one of the company’s chip providers about how that same technology might enhance military leaflet programs. Sure enough, they had first-hand knowledge, but a company executive was unable to provide details.
The company, Americhip, specializes in producing sound inserts—short recorded advertisements—embedded on chips that can be used in any number of printed, package, or trinket applications such as a key chain or other small gadget. These talking cards, packages, toys or other novelties offer a number of communications advantages, including overcoming literacy issues. Plus, there’s the “look what I have” factor that, according to Americhip’s Web site, may help generate more attention and keep the piece in circulation longer than a static piece of paper.
COFFEE-CAN NETWORK GETS READY TO JAM
"One of the biggest threats in Iraq is [a commercial walkie-talkie] radio," a defense contractor tells Aviation Week. "It's a tiny thing that costs about $100. They've got a 10-mi. range and operate between 40-50 MHz. That's what the terrorists are using. It's hard to monitor. They give a guy a radio, put him on top of a hill, and [he and a string of others] will relay communications for hundreds of miles."
So how does the Pentagon plan on fighting this $100 threat? With a set of cheap, coffee-can-sized transmitters of its own. Except, in this case, cheap means $10,000 a pop. And the little buggers "can listen to enemy radars and communications, analyze an opponent's network and movement of systems and jam emitters or infiltrate enemy computers with packages of algorithms," according to the magazine. An early-phase test of the system, known as "Wolfpack," is scheduled for next week.
No one "Wolf" is particularly powerful. But, collectively, they can be used to triangulate enemy signals -- like those walkie-talkie conversations -- and monitor hostile networks. The idea is to "litter the battlefield with these small objects," Preston Marshall, WolfPack's program manager at Darpa, explained last year.
He'd like to see the Wolves tough enough to be chucked out of helicopters, dropped by drones, or places on rooftops by soldiers. "Once a cylinder hits the ground, it checks itself out. If everything is working properly, the fins will erect and make the device stand up, Marshall said. "An inflatable antenna goes up and it generates a radio signal. They form a network. Wolf networks find other wolf networks and eventually find a path back to the command center."
"A WolfPack typically would have at least five wolves," Aviation Week adds. "They are designed to be identical, so each of them can take another's role, including subpack leader, to gather information, and pack leader to send it into the larger battlefield network."
The system would come with its own mission planning tool to optimize where wolves are placed. And, as long as a wolf can communicate with any other wolf, it has access to the whole network.
The WolfPack network is set up to be dynamic and autonomous. The pack will reassign responsibilities as needed, and the network may by itself establish sub-nets if those would be useful in attacking a target. Moreover, WolfPack is designed to be smart enough to detect patterns in how an adversary employs his electronic systems so the key nodes can be jammed, listened to or invaded. The system is designed to locate emitters with enough accuracy that they can be attacked with a mortar or bomb.
THERE'S MORE: "To put it bluntly, the 'defense contractor' [quoted at the beginning of the post] is full of crap," says Defense Tech reader WT.
Every SINCGARS (Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System) radio carried in the field is capable of intercepting those transmissions, and there are intelligence assets that are specifically designed to intercept and jam those transmissions. In fact, due to the low power of those radios (typically 2.5 to 7 watts output), they are very susceptible to jamming. The positioning of these radios (on top of hills or tall buildings) makes them more susceptible to direction finding and interception. They are most definitely *NOT* hard to monitor. They are in fact little different from the Soviet era VHF radios. The only difference is in size and weight, the difference between a backpack radio and a handheld. The output wattage and frequencies are the same, as is the modulation.
I suspect that this is a case of justifying something that might be needed in the future (note the reference to ‘infiltrat(ing) enemy computers’) by tying it to the current conflict. A neat toy that could be very useful, but not something that is needed in Iraq now, or in the near future. I’m not saying that this isn’t something that should be pursued, just that the guy doesn’t know what he is talking about.
EURO BANKS HELD OFF U.S. INFO BOMBS
Why didn't the U.S. go after Iraqi computer networks as hard as they could have during the Iraq invasion? To keep French ATMs safe, an Aviation Week article hints.
Basic services such as automatic banking machines could [have been] affected. Parts of the European banking system, for example, were a concern to U.S. officials planning electronic attacks on Iraq. Much of that country's electronic infrastructure was built by French firms.
Nevertheless, the magazine says, the Pentagon is working to develop "computer network attack devices [that] can hijack enemy transmissions, insert specially designed algorithms and then send the altered data stream back into the foe's network."
HACKERS' RIGHTS SLIP AWAY
Hackers have long been treated like terrorists by the Justice Department. But now, things have just gotten a whole lot worse for people who make a habit of snooping around computer networks, thanks to Attorney General John Ashcroft.
The new guidelines, billed as a response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, permit the Bureau to engage in the "proactive collection of information on threats to the national security," displacing an older policy that obliged the FBI to have a specific investigative purpose before collecting information on individuals or groups.
Like the older rules, the new guidelines allow the Attorney General to specify anything as threat to national security at any time. But a few threats are specifically hardcoded into the new rules: terrorism, espionage, sabotage, political assassination, and "foreign computer intrusion."
The latter is defined as "the use or attempted use of any cyber-activity or other means by, for, or on behalf of a foreign power to scan, probe, or gain unauthorized access into one or more U.S.-based computers."
To date, there has not been a single case of state-sponsored "cyber-terrorism" -- ever. Nor are such attacks very likely, as Jim Lewis, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted in an article of mine from last year.
SADDAM-ITES RULE IRAQI I.S.P.
Saddam's boys are still running Iraq's only Internet service provider, Brian McWilliams writes in today's Wired News.
THERE'S MORE: Slate tells us what EverQuest and other "virtual world" games can teach the world about rebuilding Iraq.
HIGH-TECH WAR NOT SO BLEEDING EDGE
You remember all those breathless accounts of American bleeding-edge technology being used in the air war above Iraq? Well, you can forget 'em now.
Sure, the U.S. did use an unprecedented number of spy drones in Gulf War II. But "many of the weapons used were quite old—some of them nearly antique—and most of their missions were not in the least bit exotic," Slate's Fred Kaplan writes.
A recently-released Air Force report documents exactly what the service did in the war -- the number and kind of bombs dropped, missions flown, and planes used.
Kaplan sifts through the report, and finds a number of surprises. Here's one:
During the war, most analysts assumed the majority of bombs were smart bombs and the majority of smart bombs were the new, cheap Joint Defense Attack Munitions or JDAMs. The old smart bombs, the ones used in Desert Storm, were laser-guided. In other words, a crew member would shine a laser on the target; the bomb would follow the beam. However, the beam could be deflected by dust, smoke, rain, even humidity. And the laser-guided bombs were expensive—around $100,000 apiece. JDAMs are guided by Global Positioning Satellites. The pilot punches the target's coordinates into the bomb's GPS receiver andthe bomb homes in on the spot; environmental conditions aren't a factor. And they're cheap—a JDAM kit can be strapped onto an old-fashioned "dumb bomb" for $18,000.
However, it turns out that of the 19,948 smart munitions fired during Gulf War II, 8,716—two-fifths—were the '90s-era laser-guided bombs. Substantially fewer, 6,642, were JDAMs. The other 4,590 smart weapons were GPS-guided but much more expensive models than the JDAM.
More surprising, another 9,251 bombs—or one-third of all the bombs dropped during this war—were unguided, unmodified dumb bombs. It would be good to know where these dumb bombs—and the less-reliable laser-guided bombs—were dropped: on the battlefield, in cities? In other words, was "collateral damage" a greater problem than our vision of a JDAM-dominating war suggested?
IRAQ UNPLUGGED
American air strikes have cut off most Iraqis' access to the Internet. But a few key sites remain up, Brian McWilliams reports in Salon, including Babil Online -- a newspaper run by Saddam's son, Uday.
AL JAZEERA HACKERS: LAME
The hacking of al Jazeera's website has many Defense Tech readers wondering: "Is this (the work of) a new breed of patriotic, nationalistic hacker? Or is some tenuous propaganda arm of our own government involved?"
Neither. It's a cry for attention by a couple of no-skills "script kiddies" trying to show off to their sunken-chested pals.
"Every time there is a political target of opportunity, some kiddie will use it as justification for a (website) defacement or DOS (denial-of-service attack)," security researcher Robert Ferrell tells Wired News' Michelle Delio.
"This kind of thing goes on constantly. The only reason it's news at all is because...we happen to be at war with Iraq," he adds. "Al-Jazeera may be a major news service, but a website is a website, whether it belongs to Billy Bob or Time Warner. Knocking one off the Internet isn't a difficult proposition."
But it's a crime, nonetheless. Last year, 18 year-old Robert Lyttle defaced dozens of government websites, supposedly to show how easy it would be for terrorists to gain access to our national electronic infrastructure. The government thanked him with an FBI raid and a house arrest.
At the time, veteran hacker Oxblood Ruffin called Lyttle and his partner "pimply nitwits from the 'burbs out looking for some rep."
He added, "It's just this kind of stupidity that gives hacking a bad name."
SADDAM'S WEB SITE HACKED
After shakily surviving nearly a week of intense shelling in Baghdad, the Web site of the Iraq government has apparently fallen prey to hackers," Brian McWilliams writes. "Since Wednesday, some visitors to Uruklink.net have been surprised with a red-white-and-blue message that reads, 'Hacked, tracked, and NOW owned by the USA.'"
The digital rights crusaders over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation are 
A third squadron of 
While the Pentagon 
So you'd think that Jonas would be all into the idea of using these data-mining systems to predict who the next terrorist attacker might be.
"The Australian Defence Force has 
As if 
The info war over Iraq and Afghanistan is heating up. On one side, the mainstream media is publishing increasingly bleak headlines: Newsweek's 
For the last couple of weeks, Defense Tech has been looking into the 
"Last year, the Air Force canceled its central AEA program, the B-52 Standoff Jammer." Then, the Air Force was 
In the past, military technology might have consistently outpaced civilian gear. Not any more.
Despite all that, the site is 
So writes 
But Dave has pulled the plug on his blog, just six weeks after he started it. Why? "Today we had a briefing on Blogs 'do's and don't' for the Army," he writes. "It appears to be very subjective as to what is and isn't allowed, so to keep from violating some Army reg, policy, or wish of the commander, I will have this as my last post." Then Dave linked to Defense Tech's post from last week, on the Army's "
The team, working "under the direction of the 
"Using the Cyber Domain to conduct military operations... has significant potential," an Air Force 
This step is required under Defense Department and Army regulations. So why was it unusual? Two reasons: First, the ASB rarely holds open meetings, even though such Federal Advisory Committees are by law supposed to do everything possible to ensure public access to their deliberations.
During the initial invasion in March 2003, this idea of "network-centric warfare" worked more or less as promised -- even though most of the frontline troops weren't wired up. It was enough that the commanders were connected.
In Iraq, it's tough to sort out who's an ally, and who's Al Qaeda. So the Marines are giving Iraqi Army recruits the biometric once over.
Also of interest is an article on 
But what's not as widely known is why the bureau is so behind the times. 
The latest 
The problem is, most of these posts don't have any boobies at all. "They're stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn't wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions..."
I've always been 
Now, the Air Force has 
SANS today released a new 
Back in college I had a Soviet studies professor whose office was decorated with lurid, humorless 
Now, they’re official policy – according to military regulations, such security warnings have to be displayed in certain areas.
A few days ago, a Marine Corps major, David High, argued that the fight in Iraq 
AKO has a dark side, though. Since 9/11, especially, it's become an easy place for the service to keep information from the prying eyes of reporters and the public. And we're not talking top-secret or even sensitive stuff, either; routine, even mundane info often gets locked away.
Already, the Pentagon has purchased 100,000 solar-powered radios, so folks on the ground can listen in to official American dispatches. (It's a 
"One of the biggest threats in Iraq is [a commercial walkie-talkie] radio," a defense contractor tells Aviation Week. "It's a tiny thing that costs about $100. They've got a 10-mi. range and operate between 40-50 MHz. That's what the terrorists are using. It's hard to monitor. They give a guy a radio, put him on top of a hill, and [he and a string of others] will relay communications for hundreds of miles."
"A WolfPack typically would have at least five wolves," Aviation Week adds. "They are designed to be identical, so each of them can take another's role, including subpack leader, to gather information, and pack leader to send it into the larger battlefield network."
