The host site of the Delta Force video did some updating yesterday which affected the video feed on DT.
We pulled the post until the glitch was fixed.
So now it's back up and we've got it for you again...Enjoy.
-- Christian
Picking the Killers from the Kids
During a Pentagon briefing yesterday, the Joint Chiefs’ head of regional operations, BGEN Perry Wiggins, deconstructed a recent operation to take out Taliban fighters hiding among children.
The explanation comes as the military takes fire from the Afghan government on civilians killed in the crossfire between coalition troops and Talib holdouts.
And it’s also interesting to note, the detailed description of the Special Forces troops’ avoidance of friendly fire comes in sharp contrast to the Army’s condemnation of the Marine Corps’ commandos who were booted from Afghanistan after their response to a roadside ambush killed civilians in the crossfire in March.
BGEN Wiggins:
I'm sure all you know, there's been a lot of recent coverage about civilian casualties associated with the counterinsurgency operations against the Taliban. Here's an illustration of how we actually operate against the barbaric enemy that we face in the Afghanistan theater, and shows the restraint and precision exercised by our forces with respect to the civilian populace.
On May 8th and into May 9th, a combined patrol of U.S. Special Forces and Afghan national army forces killed over 150 Taliban fighters in an engagement north of Sangin, in Helmand province of Afghan's southern province. This enemy contact was in support of NATO's international security force, Operations Achilles. During the fight, U.S. forces initially encountered high-capable Taliban in the Sangin valley, who pursued our units in an effort to seize an offensive advantage. Our forces repelled the initial Taliban assault and, using terrain and close air support, engaged the enemy with devastating effect.
During this engagement in Sangin, intelligence indicated there was a major or a senior Taliban commander for Helmand province at a particular target compound.
What you see here is an actual snapshot from the full-motion video asset, which was able to confirm the presence of 10 to 20 Taliban, circled in green, at this target compound.
Through the same -- through the use of the same full-motion video asset, children, circled in red on the slide, were identified near the objective. Consequently, U.S. Special Forces did not engage the target compound, due to the risk of harm to civilians. This is an example of the care taken to prevent civilian casualties and mitigate risk to them amid a long and intense battle with the enemy.
It was learned after this engagement that the Taliban fighters were taking refuge among local villagers, using them as human shields. This angered the Sangin tribal leaders, who blamed the Taliban for deliberately involving civilians and bringing the fight to the area. In response, the local elders mobilized an anti-Taliban militia that reportedly killed three Taliban leaders and captured 15 Taliban fighters.
Interesting news on the infowar front, in two parts. First, Declan McCullagh has stumbled onto a previously-undisclosed FBI Net-monitoring program that's "broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI's [infamous] Carnivore surveillance system."
Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords...
Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It's employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can't "isolate the particular person or IP address" because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section...
That kind of full-pipe surveillance can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing--or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch.
The Global Islamic Media Front [recently] announced the imminent release of new computer software called "Mujahideen Secrets.. [allegedly] the first Islamic computer program for secure exchange [of information] on the Internet," and it provides users with "the five best encryption algorithms, and with symmetrical encryption keys (256 bit), asymmetrical encryption keys (2048 bit) and data compression [tools]."
The package "is comparable to any number of commercial products available here in the United States," says ZDNet blogger Mitch Ratcliffe. "The difference is an Islamist skin, which seems more a gimmick to inspire confidence in the software than a guarantee it will be effective."
But "'Mujahedin Secrets' is the latest example of the growing technical competence of online supporters of al-Qaida and other Islamic terror networks, but encryption capabilities are not new in the world of cyber-jihadis," IntelCenter's Ben Venzke tells UPI.
"This is consistent with the ongoing efforts of jihadist sympathizers online... Encryption is used by some (Islamic terrorists)" and some al-Qaida manuals have addressed the question.
He said encryption is "a standard part of the operational security practiced (online) by those (Islamic terrorists) who take the time to use it.
Inside the N.S.A. Hearing
National Journal surveillance reporter Shane Harris has been watching Attorney General Gonzales’ testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He calls an exchange with Senators Feingold and with Schumer about the NSA domestic wiretapping program's new legal status "especially illuminating." Harris sees a new kind of order for the eavesdropping, issued by a single -- likely Administration-friendly -- judge.
First, the attorney general referred to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge who issued this recent authorization as “he,” when Gonzales said, “He was very careful.” That means that the presiding judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who reportedly has expressed concerns about the NSA program tainting other FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant applications, was not the judge who issued this order that apparently allows the NSA program to continue. Of course, Kollar-Kottelly is the only woman on the 11-member court, so that doesn’t much narrow down the question of which judge gave the order.
When Feingold asked Gonzales how long it took the court to issue this order, Gonzales replied that it took “longer than a normal FISA” application. There are varying accounts of how long it takes to secure and execute a FISA warrant, but administration officials have said in the past that they didn’t originally seek FISA warrants for the NSA program, in part, because the process took too long. So, it sounds as if Gonzales is saying that this most recent order from the judge came after longer than usual deliberation on his part.
Gonzales also said that the administration submitted an “application” for this order to the judge, and that it was “innovative.” To the first part—application—this raises the question, which the Justice Department hasn’t answered, of whether this recent order applied to one particular intercept, to more than one, or to the entire program. Sen. Schumer pressed Gonzales for some specificity on this point, but the attorney general declined to discuss what he said were “operational details” of the matter. But reading between the lines a bit, I suspect that Gonzales means the administration has come up with an application for electronic surveillance, one that that fits the special parameters of the NSA program, and that this “innovative” application is different from a traditional FISA application. “It took some time for a judge to get comfortable” with this application, Gonzales said, which I think implies that this application is, indeed, unusual. Whether it will be used on a case-by-case basis, or whether it will cover any and all surveillance conducted under the parameters of the NSA program is unclear. But presumably, if a judge has found this new application acceptable, and has ruled that it does work under the intelligence surveillance law, then the administration would use it again if necessary.
One final note, Gonzales did refer to “orders,” plural, from the judge. He said that these orders “meet the legal requirements under FISA” and that “they also include minimization procedures [to protect personal privacy] above-and-beyond” what is normally required under law. Gonzales also acknowledged that, until the judge issued his recent order, the administration did not believe that “FISA was available” to cover the NSA program. At times, officials have said that they thought FISA did not apply, indicating that they had made a legal judgment independent of the court’s ruling. But Gonzales now seems to be saying that officials were unsure whether FISA applied or not, which is what prompted them to work up this new, innovative application to the court.
One other note: In yesterday's background briefing by senior Justice Department officials, one of the them said that the new orders "take advantage of use of the use of the FISA statute and developments in the law. I can't really get into developments in the law before the FISA court. But it's a process that began nearly two years ago, and it's just now that the court has approved these orders."
"Developments in the law" implies that the recent court order is based not only on FISA, but on recent law, as well. Could be the Patriot Act, which includes electronic surveillance provisions. It sounds as if the judge considered statutes other than FISA in making his decision.
-- Shane Harris
UPDATE 9:33 AM: As TPM Muckracker notes, "Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) out-and-out called Gonzales a liar." The AG claimed he briefed Congress on the surveillance program's new legal boundaries. "She was never told of the plan, she said, and from what she heard yesterday it likely stinks:
Ms. Wilson, who has scrutinized the program for the last year, said she believed the new approach relied on a blanket, “programmatic” approval of the president’s surveillance program, rather than approval of individual warrants.
Administration officials “have convinced a single judge in a secret session, in a nonadversarial session, to issue a court order to cover the president’s terrorism surveillance program,” Ms. Wilson said in a telephone interview. She said Congress needed to investigate further to determine how the program is run.
UPDATE 9:38 AM: Gonzales has met the enemy. And he blogs.
The Justice Department has decided to let the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- the traditional, and legal, monitor of government wiretap programs -- start examining the spy efforts. Before, the Bush Administration said no such review was needed -- a legal reading that even former NSA chiefs said was wildly off-base.
The court has already "approved one request for monitoring the communications of a person believed to be linked to al-Qaida or an associated terror group," the AP says.
It's a huge (and welcome) turnaround for an administration that said previously that the president had the power to order almost anything in the name of fighting terror. (And "still believes that," according to flack-in-chief Tony Snow.) So why the change? Snow mumbled something about the court's increased "agility." But you can bet your ass the new Congress had a whole lot to do with it.
UPDATE 3:28 PM: Shocker. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in his letter describing the rule change, appears to be lying through his teeth shading the truth, saying that the administration has been trying to put the wiretaps under the court's authority since the spring of 2005. If that's the case, Glenn Greenwald asks, "why didn't they say so when the controversy arose?"
There have already been proposals for the FISA court to grant blanket retroactive approval to the program, and if that's what this is, then it's not much of a concession from the administration. If, on the other hand, it's actually case-by-case approval by FISA judges we're talking about, I'm not sure how that's going to square with the reported scope of the program. The ostensible grounds for circumventing the FISA in the first place were that this program didn't fit in the FISA framework. And given that it reportedly does a kind of mile-wide-and-inch-deep network analysis that is antithetical to the personalized, legally sanctioned surveillance contemplated by the FISA, I'm not sure how you can make the two procedures fit. Unless what they're really saying here is that they're abandoning the program altogether, and returning to one-target-at-a-time, retail-rather-than-wholesale surveillance. Which somehow I doubt.
UPDATE 3:35 PM: "It sounds to me like this court just re-wrote the law and made a second category of wiretaps (one that is easier to get but only targeted at overseas communications)," writes Ryan Singel.
He also notes that Gonzales's announcement comes just a day before he is supposed to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Pretty sneaky, sis," Ryan says.
UPDATE 4:51 PM: "Another question raised by Gonzales’ letter — indeed, in the first sentence — is which FISC judge issued this order?" surveillance scoopmaster Shane Harris tells Defense Tech.
The letter states that “a judge” issued the order. Does Gonzales mean the court’s presiding (or chief) judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly? Presumably he would have said so if that were the case. Kottelly has been briefed on the NSA program previously. She reportedly has been concerned that information obtained without warrants under the NSA program could taint other warrant applications before the court.
The FISC is made up of 11 sitting federal judges hailing from judicial districts across the country. Did the administration select a particular judge to approach for this order? Here’s the breakdown on how many judges were appointed by a particular president:
"The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States," the Times reports. It's "part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering. And the CIA is joining in, also "issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies."
The letters “provide tremendous leads to follow and often with which to corroborate other evidence in the context of counterespionage and counterterrorism,” said Maj. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman...
But even when the initial suspicions are unproven, the documents have intelligence value, military officials say. In the next year, they plan to incorporate the records into a database at the Counterintelligence Field Activity office at the Pentagon to track possible threats against the military, Pentagon officials said...
Some national security experts and civil liberties advocates are troubled by the C.I.A. and military taking on domestic intelligence activities, particularly in light of recent disclosures that the Counterintelligence Field Activity office had maintained files on Iraq war protesters in the United States in violation of the military’s own guidelines. Some experts say the Pentagon has adopted an overly expansive view of its domestic role under the guise of “force protection,” or efforts to guard military installations...
One prominent case in which letters were used to obtain financial records, according to two military officials, was that of a Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who was suspected in 2003 of aiding terror suspects imprisoned at the facility. The espionage case against the chaplain, James J. Yee, soon collapsed, and he was eventually convicted on lesser charges of adultery and downloading pornography.
Eugene Fidell, a defense lawyer for the former chaplain and a military law expert, said he was unaware that military investigators may have used national security letters to obtain financial information about Mr. Yee, nor was he aware that the military had ever claimed the authority to issue the letters.
Mr. Fidell said he found the practice “disturbing,” in part because the military does not have the same checks and balances when it comes to Americans’ civil rights as does the F.B.I. “Where is the accountability?” he asked. “That’s the evil of it — it doesn’t leave fingerprints.”
The current TomDispatch has a great round-up of Darpa's research into the future of urban warfare. But man, do you have to put up with a lot to get to the good stuff.
The article's main thrust is that the Pentagon is readying itself for a "low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor." There's an "assumed need to be in the urban Iraqs of the future, [so] the question for the U.S. military becomes a practical one: How to deal with these uppity children of the third world."
Yeah, I'm rolling my eyes, too. Like the failed-state jihadists of the world will just go about minding their own business... if the U.S. just stays out their slums. Sure. Worked like a charm, before 9/11.
Besides, the U.S. has been fighting in cities since... well, since before there was a U.S. (George Washington tangled with the Red Coats in New York City, for example.) And we've never been all that good at it. The fact is, American armed forces have almost always preferred a stand-up fight -- an open war -- to some close-quarters, urban combat. That's what are training is oriented around. That's what our gear is made for. But the guys plotting to hurt us and our allies are in cities. So it's into urban canyons our military must go.
The article winces about American military talk of prepping for "Baghdad 2015" and urban fights of the issue fights. "Today, it's Baghdad; tomorrow...it could be Accra, Bogota, Dhaka, Karachi, Kinshasa, Lagos, Mogadishu or even a perennial favorite, Port au Prince." But given how badly "Baghdad 2007" is going, doesn't the Pentagon -- and especially, its research arms -- owe it to the rest of us to get better at those kinds of conflicts? Especially when Baghdad is only one in a long list of urban operations (Mogadishu, Srebrenica, Kabul) the U.S. has found itself in over the last few decades? Wouldn't anything less would be... well, a dereliction of duty?
Anyway. After several more paragraphs, we get to the meat of the story, on "the wide range of efforts to visualize, map out, and spy on the global mega-favelas that the U.S. has, until now, largely scorned and neglected." Most of these programs won't be new to close readers of Defense Tech. But it's interesting, and helpful, to see 'em all in one place. Items include...
VisiBuilding: This is a program aimed at addressing "a pressing need in urban warfare: seeing inside buildings" by developing technology that will allow U.S. forces to "determine building layouts, find anomalous quantities of materials," and "locate people within the building..."
UrbanScape: This program aims "to make the foreign city as ‘familiar as the soldier's backyard'" by providing "the warfighters patrolling an urban environment with an up-to-date, high resolution model of the urban terrain that can be viewed, manipulated and analyzed."
Urban Hopping Robots... a semi-autonomous hybrid hopping/articulated wheeled robotic platform [like this one, maybe -- ed.] that could adapt to the urban environment... and provide the delivery of small payloads to any point of the urban jungle while remaining lightweight, small to minimize the burden on the soldier.
Close Combat Lethal Recon This deadly, loitering explosive expressively for use in urban landscapes will expand a soldier's killing zone by reaching "over and around buildings, onto rooftops, and into open building portals." Think of it as a smart grenade or, according to DARPA Director Tether... "a small mortar round with a grenade-size explosive in it. A fiber-optic line unreels from its back end and provides the data link that allows the soldier to see the video from the munition's camera and to fly it into the target."
If it works -- and that's always a big if, when you're talking about a Darpa project -- that does sound like a nasty weapon. Not just in a city. But in any environment.
FWIW, The story leaves of of its list two of the creepiest Darpa programs geared towards urban fights. "Combat Zones That See" tries to strap cheap cameras together, giving soldiers watch over an entire city at once; the "Integrated Sensor is Structure" program aims to do the same thing -- with a giant, all-seeing blimp. And then there's Darpa's next robotic road race. It's through... a city! (Cue scary music.)
The international consultancy that McConnell has worked at for a decade as a senior vice president, Booz Allen Hamilton, won contracts worth $63 million on the TIA "data-mining" program, which was later cancelled [kinda sorta -- ed.] after congressional Democrats raised questions about invasion of privacy... While his role in the TIA program is unlikely to derail McConnell's nomination, spokespeople for some leading Democratic senators such as Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Ron Wyden of Oregon say it will be examined carefully.
McConnell was a key figure in making Booz Allen, along with Science Applications International Corp., the prime contractor on the project, according to officials in the intelligence community and at Booz Allen who would discuss contracts for data mining only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "I think Poindexter probably respected Mike and probably entrusted the TIA program to him as a result," said a longtime associate of McConnell's who worked at NSA with him...
Intel experts agree that McConnell will need all the good will he can get from the intelligence and defense communities. "It's a good appointment for a bad office," says John Arquilla, who teaches intelligence at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "The directorate of national intelligence should not exist. It's very redundant." Insiders say Negroponte was frustrated by his lack of budgeting control over Pentagon intelligence, and the resistance of the CIA to his direction since his office was created in 2004 as part of the Bush administration's post-9/11 reforms.
And by the way, Rutty asks in the comments (I'm paraphrasing heavily here): What was McConnell's role in Echelon -- the NSA's massive information sweeper, which got some much attention during the Clinton years? (The project had been around for decades, remember.)
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.
DNI's Privacy Pow-Wows
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all U.S. intelligence agencies, has for nearly three months been holding a series of low-profile "privacy workshops" with a range of experts on technology and privacy.
The stated purpose to educate DNI officials, their technologists, and civil liberties watchdogs on what current and emerging technologies could be used to protect privacy rights during the collection and analysis of intelligence. These broad — and largely informal — discussions are being held against the backdrop of increased surveillance and electronic monitoring by the government as it pursues terrorist suspects.
Some of the workshop attendees praised the DNI for seeking checks against potential abuses, particularly as the government’s appetite for data mining and profiling systems increases. But several well-known and highly regarded experts - who include vocal critics of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies - were not invited to attend.
The final workshop will be held next week, outside Washington. Officials aren’t asking attendees to recommend a particular way forward on privacy-protection, but they say they’ll use what they’ve learned to help chart the DNI’s “research agenda.”
Check out the full story in the current National Journal, out now.
-- Shane Harris
More Antiwar Protests in Military Database
The Talon database started as a way for the Defense Department to collect tips on possible threats to military facilities. But as the program grew, those tips of so-called "suspicious incidents" became themselves more and more suspect.
One “incident” included in the database is a large anti-war protest at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles last March that included effigies of President Bush and anti-war protest banners. Another incident mentions a planned protest against military recruiters last December in Boston and a planned protest last April at McDonald’s National Salute to America’s Heroes — a military air and sea show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The Fort Lauderdale protest was deemed not to be a credible threat and a column in the database concludes: “US group exercising constitutional rights.”
New documents, obtained by the ACLU, catalog more, previously-undisclosed monitoring of free speech, in the name of force protection. A Veterans for Peace march in Las Cruces, New Mexico, is tagged a "threat to military facilities." A "church service for peace" in New York is labeled "potential terrorist activity."
"The Defense Department tightened its procedures earlier this year to ensure that only material related to actual terrorist threats — and not peaceable First Amendment activity — was included in the database," the New York Times reports.
The head of the office that runs the military database, which is known as Talon, said Monday that material on antiwar protests should not have been collected in the first place.
“I don’t want it, we shouldn’t have had it, not interested in it,” said Daniel J. Baur, the acting director of the counterintelligence field activity unit, which runs the Talon program at the Defense Department. “I don’t want to deal with it.”
When the NSA's warantless wiretapping program was revealed, defenders of the effort told us not to worry. "Before we intercept these communications, the government must have information that establishes a clear link to these terrorist networks," the President said last December.
But it's the creeping expansion of a program like Talon, from counterintelligence to counter-dissidence, that gets folks like me so concerned about domestic spying without legal review. Sure, the programs start out with the best of intentions. But it becomes way too easy for a bureaucracy to slide into something that's just plain wrong.
Beyond the Pinhole: Darpa's 10-Gram Cameras
Video cameras keep getting smaller and smaller; look at what you can see these days on your cell phone, or on a TV poker show. The military's way-out research arm wants 'em to get even tinier still -- an order of magnitude smaller, at least, than today's cameras.
The ultimate goal: a short wave infrared eye that's as heavy as two quarters -- about 10 grams -- and able to pick out child-sized targets from 100 meters away. Mounted on helmets or on itty-bitty drones, these minuscule cameras could give U.S. forces a "night time dominance" for a "new generation," Darpa believes.
But "getting down to that size [won't] just [take] aggressive engineering," says Dr. Terry Boult, who heads the Vision and Security Technology Lab of University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. "It will probably take a radically new approach."
There are a fewcameras today which meet Darpa's aggressive size and weight specifications, Boult notes. But with today's lenses, they can't peer very far out into the distance. At 100 meters, Boult says, "you might see a semi but not a person."
By the end of phase II of the program, Darpa not only wants an ultra-small camera out of its "Micro-Sensors for Imaging" effort. The agency wants an entire featherweight imaging system -- including batteries, a goggle-mounted 1280 x 1024 display, and all the signal processing doodads -- in a 350-gram package.
Good luck, cameramen.
Military Ballots' Privacy Risks
American troops could be putting their most personal information at risk -- just by voting in next week's elections.
Members of the armed forces, stationed overseas, can cast their vote with a Federal Write In Absentee Ballot, or FWAB, if they can't get one from their local election boards. But that federal ballot, "Standard Form 186 (Oct 95)," comes with a major privacy risk, at least in some editions. The ballot has to be mailed in a special return envelope, in order to be properly processed. On military bases in the Pacific, Special Form 186 requires a service member to include his address, social security number, date of birth, and signature on the outside of that envelope.
In other words, everything needed to steal a soldier or sailor's identity is on public display, for anyone to see (full pics: back, front). .
"You'd think the people running this program would've noticed. It's a joke they didn't, and it's obvious no one was paying attention," a Navy aviation electrician, attached to the 7th Fleet, tells Defense Tech.
Online editions of the FWAB seem to be more security-conscious, warning servicemembers "NOT [to] WRITE ANY PERSONAL IDENTIFYING INFORMATION ON THE ENVELOPE" -- an envelope that's largely blank.
But the paper ballots aren't the only source of privacy concerns in the military voting system. An e-mail balloting program has been called into question, for using unencrypted data. "E-mail traffic can flow through equipment owned and operated by various governments, companies and individuals in many countries," the Washington Post quotes an August report prepared for the Pentagon as saying. "It is easily monitored, blocked and subject to tampering."
But even easier to monitor is a paper ballot, with personal data scrawled right on the outside of the envelope. Which is why the Navy aviation electrician refused to use the form.
"I wasn't the only person who didn't send the ballot in. It wasn't worth the risk," he notes. "I gave some money to the candidates instead."
UPDATE 7:02 AM: What are the absentee ballots like where you're stationed? Tell us here or write in.
Cameras to Comb Crowds
Cameras have grown smarter in recent years -- better able to recognize faces at close distances, and pick up on strange behavior from a little farther out. Go in through an out door, or leave a suspicious package behind on a train platform, for example, and you'll be spotted, quick.
But figuring out what a group of people is doing, or being able to ID a face within that group, that takes brains today's digital video software still doesn't have. U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is hoping a new research grant can begin to change that.
SOCOM just gave Colorado Springs-based Securics, Inc. a $100,000 grant to start developing programs for "Monitoring of Crowd Activities." The idea is to train cameras to find faces from afar, and to "develop new algorithms explicitly for crowd management, rather than building on the traditional intelligent video surveillance algorithms that are focused on isolated targets." Oh, and by the way: this should all happen in a small, self-contained system that takes up barely any power at all -- 7 watts, maybe.
Securics will start small, looking at algorithms for a crowd's "vertical motion energy," like a group of people "pumping its fists, or raising signs," says company chief Terry Boult.
There will also be some comparisons to how much activity is usually in the area. "If normally, on Tuesdays, there are only three people on this corner, and now there are 50, maybe there's a problem," Boult adds.
In addition, Securics will build on the work it did for Darpa, as part of the agency's "Human ID at a Distance" program. Boult says the company developed for Darpa software to identify faces from 100 to 200 feet away. The SOCOM effort, he hopes, will far surpass that.
"TIA" 2.0
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is building a new terrorist profiling system, called Tangram. What's wrong with the old profiling systems, you might ask? Well, according to an unclassified document describing Tangram, they're not all that good at catching terrorists.
The document, which is a description of the Tangram program for potential contractors, describes other, existing profiling and detection systems that haven't moved beyond so-called "guilt-by-association models," which link suspected terrorists to potential associates, but apparently don't tell analysts much about why those links are significant. Tangram wants to improve upon these methods, as well as investigate the effectiveness of other detection links such as "collective inferencing," which attempt to create suspicion scores of entire networks of people simultaneously.
Tangram's pedigree also is familiar. It is apparently the next generation of DARPA's Total Information Awareness system, which has been conducted in secret since Congress pulled public funding on the project in 2003. TIA programs form the foundation for Tangram, the document describing the system shows. (With one big difference: no privacy protections.)
Read the full story on Tangram in National Journalhere.
-- Shane Harris
Spyboys Go Web 2.0
Last week, the New York Times and some civil libertarians got all grossed out by a government plan to monitor the foreign press for its opinions of America. "It is just creepy and Orwellian," Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said.
So no one tell Lucy about this system keeping tabs on overseas TV channels, 24/7, for the military, ok? She's liable to get real upset.
BBN Technologies' Broadcast Monitoring program pumps a TV channel -- Al-Jazeera, say -- through a set of servers, which do a quick-and-dirty transcription of the audio into Arabic text. Then, that text is ported into English.
The initial results are something short of Berlitz. "Did not professional background political motive for fighting veil as might be introduction," was the interpretation for one recent Al-Jazeera news snippet. But it's good enough for keyword searches, or to give human translators the heads-up when there's something relevant happening.
A quick search for "Saddam trial," at yesterday's Association of the United States Army convention, produced 43 hits from the last week of Al-Jazeera coverage. (The system keeps 90 days' worth of TV on its hard drive.) Click on any of those hits, and you instantly get the Arabic text, the English text, and the video segment. It's like TiVo for spies -- with a transcription service built in.
All of these groups are using the systems (which go for anywhere from $110,000 to $190,000 per channel) for pretty much the same thing: track what the foreign press is saying about the U.S. It's part of a larger effort in the government to stop relying quite so much on snitches and mega-expensive spy satellites -- and start paying more attention to so-called "open source intelligence." Stuff out in the public sphere, in other words. "Perhaps our best source of information is the television," Rear Adm. Ronald Henderson, deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff, recently noted.
And while that may give some people the willies, it sure sounds like a good idea to me. We know jihadists are using everything from Hotmail to YouTube to Al-Jazeera to spread their messages, and do their business. Why not track them out in the open? Think of it as the Web 2.0 approach to spying: Let the bad guys supply the intel for us; we'll just make the connections.
Judge Disses "State Secrets"; NSA Suit to Proceed
Since 1953, the federal government has asked courts 60 times to drop cases because of threats to national security. In 55 of those cases, the courts agreed. So when the government invoked the so-called "state secrets privilege" in the lawsuit against AT&T over the company's cooperation with the NSA's domestic spying efforts, most people figured this would be the 56th case kicked to the curb.
That means the suit will be the first against the NSA over its eavesdropping-on-Americans that'll actually get decided on its merits. Which is an extremely big deal, Patrick Radden Keefe tells Defense Tech. "There's a pretty good consensus among legal scholars that the whole reason the administration wanted to kill this on procedural grounds is that if it ever got before a judge on the merits, the judge would have to rule that the op was illegal."
Patrick Radden Keefe originally wanted to call his examination of Sen. Arlen Specter's so-called "compromise" bill on NSA spying, "Don't Shit in my Hand and Call it a Sundae." His editors at Slate declined, alas. Luckily, they seem to have left Patrick alone for the rest of his analysis of Specter's 18-page legal ejecta. Here's a chunk:
Review by the FISA court is optional. Whereas under the 1978 law, the president could authorize surveillance without seeking a warrant for up to 15 days after a declaration of war, Specter's bill eliminates the declaration-of-war provision and expands that 15-day grace period — to a year.
And Specter is just getting warmed up. Toward the end of the bill, a few sly additions demonstrate that everything else, accommodating though it seemed, was mere preamble. Section 801 proposes to amend FISA by inserting the phrase, "Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to collect intelligence with respect to foreign powers and agents of foreign powers." In other words, none of the constraints just outlined should be interpreted as absolute, because nothing in the preceding pages counts!
This provision, along with the accompanying suggestion that the president can find authorization to wiretap either through FISA or "under the Constitution," effectively codify the Bush administration's controversial argument that the president's authority as commander in chief under Article II of the Constitution gives him virtually unconstrained license to do whatever he sees fit, national-security-wise. According to this view, it's not the NSA surveillance program that's unconstitutional, but FISA itself. Critics have dubbed this the Article II on Steroids theory; and however much he puffs out his chest at the administration, it appears that Arlen Specter has become a subscriber. (emphasis mine)
So House Intel Committee chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) has blasted the White House for keeping Congress in the dark about some heretofore unknown "Intelligence Community activities." The lack of disclosure may represent... a violation of the law," Hoekstra wrote in a May 17 letter to the President.
Now, Washington is wondering: who told the chairman about the intel program? TPM Muckraker has an educated guess: former NSA analyst Russ Tice, who was a source on the New York Times'domestic surveillance scoop.
In an e-mail to Defense Tech, Tice says he "do[es] not know for sure" whether he was the "whistle-blower" who Hoekstra said brought the program to light. "But the timing would be about right, as I talked to [Hoekstra's] committee this past April."
"I have a feeling the answer is yes, the, 'unacknowledged,' 'waved' Special Access Programs (SAP)s I hinted to are the ones he refers to," Tice added. "The committees I have been allowed to talk [to] seemed shocked as to what I was telling them."
Tice met with Hoekstra's staff in early April -- and it didn't go well. "They had a lawyer there, and the lawyer said, 'If you tell us anything at the SAP [highly-classified Special Access Program] level you could be arrested,'" Tice recalled. "The rest of the meeting comprised of them twisting my arm trying to get me to tell them everything."
So, the question remains. "Who got Hoekstra so exercised? And what did they tell him?" TPMM asks. "And perhaps more importantly, why is it coming out now? Hoekstra's letter was made public after the administration briefed him on whatever secret programs he wanted to know about. Why did the letter come out now -- and why, if it wasn't supposed to be public, did he appear on Fox News Sunday to talk about it?"
Gaubatz told me that the program Hoekstra referenced Sunday, the "major" activity the Intelligence Committee wasn't briefed on, is a Defense Department program run out of the Air Force Research Lab. Gaubatz said that there were “several programs” there that the Congressman wasn't aware of, but “one major program” in particular. He wouldn't give too many details about the program, but said that "it pertains to WMD and ways to move the WMD..."
It fits with Chairman Hoekstra's recent preoccupation with the WMD issue. Hoekstra has recently been up in arms about a classified report that disclosed the existence of shells of chemical weapons in Iraq dating back to the first Gulf War.
White House NYT Bashers: Hypocrites
Since 9/11, nobody -- and I mean nobody -- has done more reporting on the government's attempts to track terrorists through their data trails than the National Journal's Shane Harris. (The guy ate Spam and knocked back Tequizas with John Poindexter, for chrissake!) So I couldn't be more psyched to welcome Shane to the Defense Tech family. This is the first of what I hope will be a long string of posts for the site.
Bush administration officials have been lining up to condemnThe New York Times for revealing a program to track financial transactions as part of the war on terrorism. But if the Times’ revelation about a program to monitor international exchanges is so damaging, why has the administration been chattering about efforts to monitor domestic transactions for nearly five years?
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, many journalists — including this one — were briefed by U.S. Customs officials on Operation Green Quest, an effort to roll up terrorist financiers by monitoring, among other things, "suspicious" bank transfers and ancient money lending programs favored by people of Middle Eastern descent.
I interviewed Marcy Forman, director of Green Quest, at her Washington offices in December 2001, when I was a writer for Government Executive magazine. Our meeting was sanctioned by Customs' public affairs office, and came at a time when the White House was eager to talk about all the work federal agencies were doing to hunt down terrorists. Forman told me the kinds of people, transactions, even locations that the government was targeting. (These are details, it should be noted, that the recent Times piece did not reveal.) Among the potentially sensitive items Forman told me, which were published:
“Operation Green Quest is focusing on the informal, largely paperless form of money exchange known as hawala, which is Arabic for ‘to change.’”
“Few undercover agents can penetrate Middle Eastern communities and money laundering rings because they look like outsiders and don't speak the language…. As a result, Green Quest has to be more clever, by setting traps on the Internet and working to flush currency traffickers out of their hiding places.”
“Treasury and FBI investigators have identified hawala as a means by which the alleged Sept. 11 terrorists may have received money from overseas.”
“Green Quest investigators, who've spent their careers dismantling money laundering rackets, were blindsided by the existence of the system. ‘Most of us couldn't spell hawala’ before Sept. 11,’ Forman said.”
“The agencies' [involved in Green Quest] cooperative efforts have recently culminated in raids of alleged money laundering operations that aid suspected terrorist networks.”
“Green Quest also wants to lower the threshold at which bank deposits and electronic funds transfers must be documented. Dropping the ceiling from $10,000 to $750, Forman said, may force money traffickers to try to get their cash out of the country by hand. They would then be subject to capture by a beefed-up cadre of Customs Service officers at border crossings, airports and seaports.”
Green Quest was only one of the administration’s efforts to combat terrorist financing which officials discussed publicly. More than two years after 9/11, federal officials testified before a congressional field hearing in Miami and "detailed efforts to stop the illegal financing of terrorist networks." A senior adviser for the Treasury Department "named several initiatives, such as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which is developing technology to let financial institutions report suspicious transactions more easily and quickly." The adviser also named the system FinCEN was developing to manage a database built to search financial transactions. And he said the department was working directly with financial institutions to help them "develop software to better identify potential terrorist-financing activities."
These details, provided by Customs and Treasury officials, undoubtedly gave terrorists some insight into how the U.S. government was tracking them, and what investigators knew about terrorism financing. These officials weren’t whistleblowers—they were sanctioned by the administration to dispense this information.
In the wake of the latest Times revelation, Rep. Peter King of New York, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, wants the attorney general to investigate and prosecute reporters and editors of the Times for “aiding the cause of our enemies.” What King and others critics haven’t addressed is how the publication of specific details, over the past half decade, about the techniques the government employees to track terrorists’ money doesn’t also aid their cause.
Bob Kerrey, a member of the 9/11 commission, [said] that if the news reports drive terrorists out of the banking system, that could actually help the counterterrorism cause.
"If we tell people who are potential criminals that we have a lot of police on the beat, that's a substantial deterrent," said Mr. Kerrey, now president of New School University. If terrorists decide it is too risky to move money through official channels, "that's very good, because it's much, much harder to move money in other ways," Mr. Kerrey said.
A State Department official, Anthony Wayne, made a parallel point in 2004 before Congress. "As we've made it more difficult for them to use the banking system," Mr. Wayne said, "they've been shifting to other less reliable and more cumbersome methods, such as cash couriers..."
Since [9/11], the Treasury Department has produced dozens of news releases and public reports detailing its efforts. Though officials appear never to have mentioned the Swift program, they have repeatedly described their cooperation with financial networks to identify accounts held by people and organizations linked to terrorism...
Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, convened a hearing in 2004 where Treasury officials described at length their efforts, assisted by financial institutions, to trace terrorists' money. But he has been among the most vehement critics of the disclosures about the Swift program, saying editors and reporters of The New York Times should be imprisoned for publishing government secrets.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. King said he saw no contradiction. "Obviously we wanted the terrorists to know we were trying to track them," Mr. King said. "But we didn't want them to know the details."
Bank Data "Motherlode" in Feds' Hands
At the end of today's Century Foundation round table on government snooping, a questioner asked if there were other government monitoring programs we didn't all know about, yet. The response from us panelists -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- was unanimous: you bet your ass there are.
Usually it takes more than seven hours to get proven right. Not this time.
"Under a secret Bush administration program," the Times' Risen and Lichtblau report, "counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States."
The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift...
"The capability here is awesome or, depending on where you're sitting, troubling," said one former senior counterterrorism official who considers the program valuable. While tight controls are in place, the official added, "The potential for abuse is enormous..."
Swift is a crucial gatekeeper, providing electronic instructions on how to transfer money between 7,800 financial institutions worldwide. The cooperative is owned by more than 2,200 organizations, and virtually every major commercial bank, as well as brokerage houses, fund managers and stock exchanges, uses its services. Swift routes more than 11 million transactions each day, most of them across borders...
The Swift data has provided clues to terror money trails and ties between possible terrorists and organizations financing them, the officials said. In some instances, they said, the program has pointed them to new suspects, while in others it has buttressed cases already under investigation.
Among the successes was the capture of a Qaeda operative, Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, believed to be the mastermind of the 2002 bombing of a Bali resort, several officials said. The Swift data identified a previously unknown figure in Southeast Asia who had financial dealings with a person suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda; that link helped locate Hambali in Thailand in 2003, they said...
Quietly, counterterrorism officials sought to expand the information they were getting from financial institutions. Treasury officials, for instance, spoke with credit card companies about devising an alert if someone tried to buy fertilizer and timing devices that could be used for a bomb, but they were told the idea was not logistically possible, a lawyer in the discussions said.
The F.B.I. began acquiring financial records from Western Union and its parent company, First Data Corporation. The programs were alluded to in Congressional testimony by the F.B.I. in 2003 and described in more detail in a book released this week, "The One Percent Doctrine," by Ron Suskind. Using what officials described as individual, narrowly framed subpoenas and warrants, the F.B.I. has obtained records from First Data, which processes credit and debit card transactions, to track financial activity and try to locate suspects.
Similar subpoenas for the Western Union data allowed the F.B.I. to trace wire transfers, mainly outside the United States, and to help Israel trace the financing of about a half-dozen possible terrorist plots there, an official said.
The idea for the Swift program, several officials recalled, grew out of a suggestion by a Wall Street executive, who told a senior Bush administration official about Swift's database. Few government officials knew much about the consortium, which is led by a Brooklyn native, Leonard H. Schrank, but they quickly discovered it offered unparalleled access to international transactions.
Swift, a former government official said, was "the mother lode, the Rosetta stone" for financial data.
ARDA continued vetting new tools and even kept the aggressive experiment schedule... But it discontinued some programs, most notably a multimillion-dollar effort to build privacy-protection technologies. ARDA also abandoned the effort to build audit trails in TIA, which would have permanently recorded any abuse by users. The experimental network’s name was changed from TIA, to erase any connection to its past. Today it’s called the Research Development and Experimental Collaboration (RDEC, pronounced ARdeck). The NSA is the biggest player...
In an interview, Lewis Shepherd, the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Requirements and Research Group, said that RDEC is "the most successful attempt at bringing together a wide variety of analysts and agencies to work and think outside of the box collaboratively," specifically on counter-terrorism. "[It] opens access to a variety of data sources to different tools that haven’t been able to access that data."
"TIA" Techniques in NSA Sweeps
It's not just about who calls who. The NSA phone-monitoring project looks at how terrorists place their calls – and then applies that model to everyone, to see who else might be a suspect. It's a form of predictive data mining made famous by the notorious Total Information Awareness project.
"Armed with details of billions of telephone calls, the National Security Agency used phone records linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to create a template of how phone activity among terrorists looks," according to USA Today. "The template, officials say, was created from a secret database of phone call records collected by the spy agency. It has been used since 9/11 to identify calling patterns that indicate possible terrorist activity. Among the patterns examined: flurries of calls to U.S. numbers placed imm
First, the attorney general referred to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge who issued this recent authorization as “he,” when Gonzales said, “He was very careful.” That means that the presiding judge, 
Great news: The NSA's domestic spying program is finally being 
"The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States," the Times reports. It's "part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering. And the CIA is joining in, also "issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies."
The article's main thrust is that the Pentagon is readying itself for a "low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor." There's an "assumed need to be in the urban Iraqs of the future, [so] the question for the U.S. military becomes a practical one: How to deal with these uppity children of the third world."
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 stated purpose to educate DNI officials, their technologists, and civil liberties watchdogs on what current and emerging technologies could be used to protect privacy rights during the collection and analysis of intelligence. These broad — and largely informal — discussions are being held against the backdrop of increased surveillance and electronic monitoring by the government as it pursues terrorist suspects.
Video cameras keep getting smaller and smaller; look at what you can see these days on your cell phone, or on a TV poker show. The military's way-out research arm wants 'em to get 
But figuring out what a group of people is doing, or being able to ID a face within that group, that takes brains today's digital video software still doesn't have. U.S. Special Operations Command (
The document, which is a description of the Tangram program for potential contractors, describes other, existing profiling and detection systems that haven't moved beyond so-called "guilt-by-association models," which link suspected terrorists to potential associates, but apparently don't tell analysts much about why those links are significant. Tangram wants to improve upon these methods, as well as investigate the effectiveness of other detection links such as "collective inferencing," which attempt to create suspicion scores of entire networks of people simultaneously.
So no one tell Lucy about 
Since 1953, the federal government has asked courts 60 times to drop cases because of threats to national security. In 55 of those cases, the courts agreed. So when the government invoked the so-called "
So House Intel Committee chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) has 
Bush administration officials have been lining up to 
Bottom line: after Congress 
"Armed with details of billions of telephone calls, the National Security Agency used phone records linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to 