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 immediately after the domestic caller received a call from Pakistan or Afghanistan."
That's new. When the NSA's phone-monitoring programs came to light – first in December, then again two weeks ago – the projects were said to focus on "social network analysis." Who knows who, in other words. If Osama calls your friend, and he turns around and calls you, the logic goes, you and Osama and probably linked in a common plot. If you don't share anyone in common, you're in the clear.
But, for prominent social network analysts, something didn't quite add up. Building a database of "every call ever made" didn't really help find those personal connections. If anything, the additional records made things even harder.
Today, we learn why everyone's calls had to be in the target set. The NSA wasn't just conducting social network analysis. It was using a more controversial data mining technique, dragged into the popular imagination by Darpa's Total Information Awareness project. It focuses on prediction, not connections.
Under this approach, sophisticated algorithms hunt for patterns of terrorist behavior in information-trails, and then apply those patterns to average citizens, seeing which ones fit. It doesn't matter who you know. It's what you do that gets you in trouble. If you spend money and buy plane tickets like Mohammed Atta did, then maybe you're a terrorist, too. Same goes for the kind, and frequency, of phone calls you make.
Using computer programs, the NSA searches through the database looking for suspicious calling patterns, the officials say. Because of the size of the database, virtually all the analysis is done by computer. Calls coming into the country from Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Middle East, for example, are flagged by NSA computers if they are followed by a flood of calls from the number that received the call to other U.S. numbers.
The spy agency then checks the numbers against databases of phone numbers linked to terrorism, the officials say. Those include numbers found during searches of computers or cellphones that belonged to terrorists.
It is not clear how much terrorist activity, if any, the data collection has helped to find.
Take a different, but equally incendiary example. Suppose that we could semi-reliably create a statistical portrait of child molesters: their age, geographical location, gender, and calling and buying patterns...
Needless to say, the FBI could track these patterns using the same methods as the NSA and then exploit the results to create lists of "possible child molesters." And it might work. But would we be OK with the FBI tapping someone's phone just because they fit a statistical profile? Or staking out their house? Or investigating their friends?
And if we can do it for suspected terrorists and child molesters, how about tax evaders and unlicensed gun owners? ... And if not, why not? After all, if you're not doing anything wrong, why would you object to being investigated?
UPDATE 3:26 PM: Eric makes another great catch, unearthing these nuggets from an interview that First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams did on Charlie Rose's show the other night. Abrams, it turns out, was on a privacy panel overseeing TIA:
We basically said if you want to engage in data mining, which we said was a very good way to gather information to fight terrorism, you should go to the FISA court to get permission...
The panel presented its conclusions to Secretary Rumsfeld--who, it might be noted, is also a boss the NSA, since it's a military agency. Rummy thanked them, got some good P.R. and sent them on their way.
Asked by guest host Brian Ross, "Do you feel used?" Floyd said:
[I]t's one thing to be on a commission and then be ignored. That's --that's life. But not even to be told that the government was then engaged in the very activities that we were writing about does seem as if we were being used, yes.
NSA: "Total Access," or Info Overload?
Wired News has published the most definitive look yet at AT&T's secret room that supposedly let NSA spooks tap domestic phone calls. The info comes out of excerpts from internal Ma Bell documents, currently under court seal.
It's not the only news on the NSA's surveillance efforts that trickling out today. Seymour Hersh spoke with a "security consultant " who helped set up "a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center."
This link provided direct access to the carrier’s network core—the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. “What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records,” the consultant said. “They’re providing total access to all the data...."
Theoretically, [the agency could have gone] to the FISA court for a warrant to listen in. One problem, however, was the volume and the ambiguity of the data that had already been generated. (“There’s too many calls and not enough judges in the world,” the former senior intelligence official said.) The agency would also have had to reveal how far it had gone, and how many Americans were involved. And there was a risk that the court could shut down the program.
Instead, the N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other.
More than 1,000 wireless carriers, Internet service providers, rural phone companies, voice-over-IP service providers, and long distance companies handle phone calls. For a complete picture, the NSA would need to draw in much of that data, and the more data, the bigger the task. "The history of the intelligence community is information glut," says Mark Pollitt, a former FBI agent and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins' School of Professional Studies in Business and Education. "We're good at collecting stuff, but how do you figure out if any of it is any good? This is perhaps the toughest issue with regard to counterterrorism."
UPDATE 12:42 PM: Also, be sure to check out this fascinating New Republic story by ever-intrepid Spencer Ackerman. "Is U.S. intelligence getting dumber?" he asks.
Negroponte isn't just moving analysts from one office to another. He's also changing how they work. Analysis, say veterans, is becoming the study of the day's events rather than of the broader trend--the trees instead of the forest. "Their time horizons are very short," says Greg Treverton, a former NIC [National Intelligence Council] vice-chairman now at the Rand Corporation. "[Y]ou ask them, 'What about these longer-term questions, like how Al Qaeda is morphing?' They say, 'That's a great question. I wish we could do something on it, but we just don't have time.'" The CIA, apparently with Negroponte's approval, even eliminated the agency's premier center for long-range forecasting, the Strategic Assessments Group. While CIA spokesman Tom Crispell says there has been "no analytic capability lost," Robert Hutchings, the NIC chairman from 2003 to 2005, calls it "a retrograde step," noting that the group "did some of the most imaginative and strategic thinking in all of government."…
And, for Hutchings, the correlation between short-term analysis and the recent U.S. strategic blunders is unmistakable. "This administration has really undermined strategic analysis and strategic policy-making," he says. "You look at the course of our involvement in Iraq. It has just been adlibbing from almost the time main combat stopped." Nor is that happening by accident, he continues: "The administration has allowed strategic analytic capacity to erode because it doesn't want strategic analysis. It wants isolated facts and narrow analysis that it can draw upon to support its preferred policies."
UPDATE 2:07 PM: Ryan Singel and Kevin Poulsen pull out some of the best Slashdot reacts to the AT&T documents' release.
UPDATE 5:58: As Business Week reminds us, "the phone giants represent only one of many commercial sources of personal data that the government seeks to 'mine' for evidence of terrorist plots and other threats."
The Departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security spend millions annually to buy commercial databases that track Americans' finances, phone numbers, and biographical information, according to a report last month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Often, the agencies and their contractors don't ensure the data's accuracy, the GAO found.
Buying commercially collected data allows the government to dodge certain privacy rules. The Privacy Act of 1974 restricts how federal agencies may use such information and requires disclosure of what the government is doing with it. But the law applies only when the government is doing the data collecting.
"Grabbing data wholesale from the private sector is the way agencies are getting around the requirements of the Privacy Act and the Fourth Amendment," says Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington and a member of the Homeland Security Dept.'s Data Privacy & Integrity Advisory Committee.
(Big ups: JE)
Telcos Deny NSA Ties - And Allowed to Lie?
Verizon and BellSouth are denying the charges, that they've helped out the NSA. AT&T, on the other hand, finds itself back in court this morning, over its alleged cooperation with the spooks. The issue: Company whistleblower Mark Klein's notes about the 24-by-48 feet "secret room... [that] only people with security clearance from the National Security Agency can enter."
As the NYT puts it, a "senior government official confirmed" that the NSA has "access to records of most telephone calls in the United States." The Times hints at a possible explanation for the discrepancy: The spooks are tracking only long-distance calls, and Verizon and BellSouth hand those calls off to other providers, such as, say, AT&T, which is the one company named that has stayed mum.
I spoke to a friend in the business yesterday, a retired military intelligence officer who works at some beltway corporation that contracts big time with NSA.
He cautions that I shouldn't get ahead of themselves worrying about an all-seeing government and a seamless surveillance culture. Billions are being secretly spent annually for software development, network infrastructure, database management, etc., to build a dreamed for system that will be able to autonomously connect the dots and detect terrorists before they strike. But a seamless system, my always reliable and level headed friend assures, is still far away.
So that got me thinking: a fantastic system costing billions of dollars roping in scores of companies butting up against orthodoxy and even legality with the dreamed for end result of autonomous and perfect defense.
Data mining is the Bush administration's Star Wars.
UPDATE 12:18 PM: Back at Wired News, there's a look at "The Ultimate Net Monitoring Tool" -- Narus' Semantic Traffic Analyzer installed at AT&T, allegedly at the NSA's behest.
BellSouth subcontracts with an Israeli company known as Amdocs to handle its billing, as do several other U.S. phone companies. In 2001, U.S. intelligence officials were on record as saying that the information that Amdocs handled was so valuable that a great deal could be learned if sophisticated data-mining techniques were used against that information.
UPDATE 3:20 PM: Oh, this is rich. "Ordinarily, a company that conceals their transactions and activities from the public would violate securities law," ThinkProgess notes. "But an presidential memorandum signed by the President on May 5 allows the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, to authorize a company to conceal activities related to national security. (See 15 U.S.C. 78m(b)(3)(A))"
There is no evidence that this executive order has been used by John Negroponte with respect to the telcos. Of course, if it was used, we wouldn’t know about it.
(Big ups: TP)
LifeLog Trials Begin
Those kooky, possibly-creepy defense programs are awfully hard to kill. Take LifeLog, Darpa's controversial project to archive almost everything about people -- where they've gone, what they've said, how they're feeling. The agency seemed to pull the plug on the program, after some pesky reporters started looking into it. But seven months later, large portions of the electronic diary effort were back, under a new name: Advanced Soldier Sensor Information System and Technology, or ASSIST.
Now, Darpa is showing its LifeLogASSIST handywork off, at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Soldiers there, wearing a ton of cameras and sensors, are going on mock-patrol through a simulated Iraqi village -- and recording the whole thing.
The sensors are expected to capture, classify and store such data as the sound of acceleration and deceleration of vehicles, images of people (including suspicious movements that might not be seen by the soldiers), speech and specific types of weapon fire.
A capacity to give GPS locations, an ability to translate Arabic signs and text into English, as well as on-command video recording also are being demonstrated in Aberdeen. Sensor system software is expected to extract keywords and create an indexed multimedia representation of information collected by different soldiers. For comparison purposes, the soldiers wearing the sensors will make an after-action report based on memory and then supplement that after-action report with information learned from the sensor data.
"Not every link is as useful as the next," notes Jeff Jonas, who data-mined for both Washington and Las Vegas heavyweights. "Not only must one start with a bad guy but also pursue relationships in a very narrow manner."
Employees who handle cash who are roommates with gaming felons present some risk. Employees would be expected to disclose such. Is this a telltale sign of a criminal intent or a crime? Not in the least! Is this something worth a little more attention than my mom? Well when it comes to casinos, and their expected levels of due diligence, the answer is yes.
What kind of data proves useful in expressing a close personal relationship? Well this generally involves either shared resources (homes, cars, phones) or personal communications (e.g., calls, emails, care packages, money wires). There are a few others, but I will have to let your mind wander as I would hate to tip off any evil doers.
Even when starting with a bad guy, and following only close, personal relationships, the usefulness of the trail still degrades very quickly. That is unless the trail leads to another previously known bad guy … then of course, those in between are certainly a bit more interesting.
As the military scientist Robert Spulak has described it to me, you might not see your college roommate for 10 years, but if he were to call you up and ask to stay in your apartment, you'd let him. This is the principle under which sleeper cells operate: there is no communication for years. Thus for the most dangerous threats, the links between nodes that the agency is looking for simply might not exist.
If our intelligence agencies are determined to use mathematics in rooting out terrorists, they may consider a profiling technique called formal concept analysis, a branch of lattice theory. The idea, in a nutshell, is that people who share many of the same characteristics are grouped together as one node, and links between nodes in this picture — called a "concept lattice" — indicate that all the members of a certain subgroup, with certain attributes, must also have other attributes.
For formal concept analysis to be helpful, you need much more than phone records. For instance, you might group together people based on what cafes, bookstores and mosques they visit, and then find out that all the people who go to a certain cafe also attend the same mosque (but maybe not vice versa).
NSA: Not So Tough?
Tomorrow's editions of Time and Newsweek put the NSA's phone database on their covers. Time's story is emminently skippable, if you've been following the story at all. Newsweek does a much smarter job, offering a neat history of the NSA, and providing a needed antidote to the myth of the agency's omnipotence.
But increasingly, there has been talk of the agency's "going deaf." The NSA had its best luck monitoring Soviet lines of communication—for example, a microwave transmission from Moscow to a missile base in Siberia. But the new enemy is more shadowy and elusive. In 2002, General Hayden told NEWSWEEK, "We've gone from chasing the telecommunications structure of a slow-moving, technologically inferior, resource-poor nation-state—and we could do that pretty well—to chasing a communications structure in which an Al Qaeda member can go into a storefront in Istanbul and buy for $100 a communications device that is absolutely cutting edge, and for which he has had to make no investment for development."
According to most accounts, the NSA remains behind the telecommunications curve. A December 2002 report by the Senate intelligence committee noted that only a "tiny fraction" of the NSA's 650 million daily intercepts worldwide "are actually ever reviewed by humans, and much of what is collected gets lost in the deluge of data." Hayden told NEWSEEK that year that the NSA had been slow to catch up to new technology, and that he was obsessed with turning the enemy's "beeps and squeaks into something intelligible."
One of Hayden's most ambitious initiatives was called Trailblazer. It was a program aimed at helping the NSA make sense of its many databases—to put them to use. By more efficiently locating and retrieving messages, Trailblazer could help the NSA "data-mine," to find patterns in the huge volume of electronic traffic that might help lead sleuths to a terror suspect. Instead, the program has produced nearly a billion dollars' worth of junk hardware and software. "It's a complete and abject failure," says Robert D. Steele, a CIA veteran who is familiar with the program. Adds Ed Giorgio, who was the chief code breaker for the NSA for 30 years: "Everybody's eyes rolled when you mentioned Trailblazer."
What went wrong? The NSA apparently tried a clunky top-down approach, trying to satisfy too many requirements with one grand solution, rather than taking a more Silicon Valley-like tack of letting small entrepreneurs compete for ideas. John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, Calif., a renowned "network" intelligence expert, says: "The real problem Big Brother is having is he's not making enough use of the Little Brothers"—the corporations that have become expert at manipulating databases for commercial use.
"Data mining" has been a boon to credit-card companies that can match customers and products. It has also helped the Feds track drug dealers who constantly buy and throw away cell phones (the technology can monitor frequent phone-number changes). Identifying and tracking terrorists may be a taller order. For one thing, terrorists have learned not to even use phones. A computer disk or message between, say, Osama bin Laden and Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is hand-delivered. Some terrorists have learned to leave messages hidden in Web sites. Others are given passwords to go on the Web sites and find the messages. Since that process involves no electronic communication—no e-mail or phone call—the NSA is kept in the dark.
The likelihood of success, Northwestern University's Kris Hammond said, is higher if agents have specific questions, such as hypothetically what mobile phones in Washington, D.C., made calls to Tehran during a given period, and whether calls were made from those phones to San Francisco during another period.
But if officials don't know what they're looking for, they can't expect a data mining program to connect all the dots.
"If you approach the data without specific questions and just look for patterns, you can find hundreds of millions of patterns," Hammond said.
Despite advances in artificial intelligence, computers aren't like human detectives who can make inferences and shift assumptions on the fly, said Yali Amit, a University of Chicago professor of statistics and computer science.
Government agents may not understand this, he said.
"They have records from millions of innocent people and perhaps a few thousand terrorists who might make phone calls," said Amit. "The size of the data set of interest--the terrorists--is too small. You get reliability rates that make the whole endeavor pretty ridiculous."
The White House hasn't confirmed the NSA program, but in December, an official of DARPA, a Defense Department agency that funds advanced research, published a paper in an academic journal that suggests an ambitious role for link mining.
"Metaphorically, link mining offers the potential not only for connecting the dots, but for determining which dots to connect, a far more difficult task," wrote Ted Senator, who stipulated he was expressing his own views, not those of DARPA or the government.
I'll tell you where this story probably will go next. Notice the USA Todayarticle doesn't mention whether the Internet service providers or cellphone providers or companies operating transatlantic cables like Global Crossing cooperated with the NSA. That's the next round of revelations. The real vulnerabilities for the NSA are the companies. Sooner or later one of these companies, fearing the inevitable lawsuit from the ACLU, is going to admit what it did, and the whole thing is going to come tumbling down...
The newest system being added to the NSA infrastructure, by the way, is called Project Trailblazer, which was initiated in 2002 and which was supposed to go online about now but is fantastically over budget and way behind schedule. Trailblazer is designed to copy the new forms of telecommunications -- fiber optic cable traffic, cellphone communication, BlackBerry and Internet e-mail traffic.
People working together on projects tend to interact in fairly predictable ways -- whether that project is installing a new computer system, or blowing up a building. So looking only at the links between people won't tell you much about what those folks are up to. At times, the links can be rather deceptive, in fact. Especially if your data set is huge, like the NSA's ginormous database of phone records. Other information is needed, to fill in the gaps.
Here's an example, below. Can you tell which cluster is from a Fortune 500 company, and which one is from Al-Qaeda? Network analysis guru Valdis Krebs shows this slide to corporate and government audiences. Their answers are usually pretty scattershot. Take your guesses in the comments section. Valdis will be back later on with the right answer.
NSA Sweep "Waste of Time," Analyst Says
It'd be one thing if the NSA's massive sweep of our phone records was actually helping catch terrorists. But what if it's not working at all? A leading practitioner of the kind of analysis the NSA is supposedly performing in this surveillance program says that "it's a waste of time, a waste of resources. And it lets the real terrorists run free."
Re-reading the USA Todaypiece, one paragraph jumped out:
This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it's been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for 'social network analysis,' the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.
So I called Valdis Krebs, who's considered by many to be the leading authority on social network analysis -- the art and science of finding the important connections in a seemingly-impenetrable mass of data. His analysis of the social network surrounding the 9/11 hijackers is a classic in the field.
Here's what Krebs had to say about the newly-revealed NSA program that aims to track "every call ever made": "If you're looking for a needle, making the haystack bigger is counterintuitive. It just doesn't make sense."
"Certain people are more suspicious than others," he adds. They make frequent trips back-and-forth to Afghanistan, for instance. "So you start with them. And you work two steps out. If none of those people are connected, you don't have a cell. Because if one was there, you'd find some clustering. You don't have to collect all the data in the world to do that."
The right thing to do is to look for the best haystack, not the biggest haystack. We knew exactly which haystack to look at in the year 2000 [before the 9/11 attacks]. We just didn't do it...
The worst part -- the thing that's most disappointing to me -- is that this is not the right way to do this. It's a waste of time, a waste of resources. And it lets the real terrorists run free.
UPDATE 2:30 PM: Shane Harris broke this story, in broad strokes, back in March, Patrick reminds us. Harris also offers a possible explanation for some of the NSA program's massive size:
To find meaningful patterns in transactional data, analysts need a lot of it. They must set baselines about what constitutes "normal" behavior versus "suspicious" activity. Administration officials have said that the NSA doesn't intercept the contents of a communication unless officials have a "reasonable" basis to conclude that at least one party is linked to a terrorist organization.
To make any reasonable determination like that, the agency needs hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of call records, preferably as soon as they are created, said a senior person in the defense industry who is familiar with the NSA program and is an expert in the analytical tools used to find patterns and connections. Asked if this means that the NSA program is much broader and less targeted than administration officials have described, the expert replied, "I think that's correct."
Harris also fingers a likely program set of research efforts to help the NSA better comb through all this data: "Novel Intelligence from Massive Data," or NIMD. Its goal is to develop "techniques and tools that assist analysts not only in dealing with massive data, but also in interactively making explicit - and modifying and updating - their current analytic (cognitive) state, which includes not only their hypotheses, but also their knowledge, interests, and biases."
You'll be shocked to hear that NIMD's website has been taken offline. But you can find Goggle caches about the program here, here, here, and here.
UPDATE 5:19 PM: "To me, it's pretty clear that the people working on this program aren't as smart as they think they are," says former Air Force counter-terrorist specialist John Robb. "Some top level thinking indicates that this will quickly become a rat hole for federal funds (due to wasted effort) and a major source of infringement of personal freedom." John gives a bunch of reasons why. Here's just one:
It will generate oodles of false positives. Al Qaeda is now in a phase where most domestic attacks will be generated by people not currently connected to the movement (like we saw in the London bombings). This means that in many respects they will look like you and me until they act. The large volume of false positives generated will not only be hugely inefficient, it will be a major infringement on US liberties. For example, a false positive will likely get you automatically added to a no-fly list, your boss may be visited (which will cause you to lose your job), etc.
UPDATE 6:23 PM: And now, the rebuttal. I just got off the phone with a source who has extensive experience in these matters. And he disagrees, strongly, with Krebs and Robb.
Really, the source said, there are two approaches to whittling down massive amounts of information: limiting what you search from the beginning -- or taking absolutely everything in, and sifting through it afterwards. In his experience, the source said, the approach of using "brute force... not optimally, not smartly" on the front end, and "cleaning [the data] up later" worked the best. Often times, other people don't know what you're searching for (or they don't have the same super-slick data-mining algorithms you've got). Better just to get it all.
In everything from speech analysis to sensor fusion, he argued, when you've got a weak signal masked by a lot of noise, "more data seems to be the answer... More data is what's going to allow you to get to ground truth."
Of course, there's a price to pay with this approach: a ton of false alarms. Several stages of filtering should fix that, he argued. Besides, "it's not like you call the FBI every time you get a hit."
Think of it as the Google approach. Wouldn't you rather have everything available on the search engine, and then do queries yourself?
UPDATE 05/12/06 8:52 AM: The rebuttal gets rebutted.
"I find it almost impossible to believe that the NSA has a system good enough to beat human int[elligence], selective tapping, and the kind of progressive extension that Krebs cites," an MIT professor says, who also passes along this handy graphic.
You need to have a good understanding of the "classifiers" and functions appropriate for your data set -- developing the knowledge and techniques around finding those classifiers has taken [computer] vision [research] 30 years to get where it is (able to drive a car through a pre-set path in a desert, recognize one face out of a thousand with good rejection but many, many false positives)... Meaning fine, but not great... We have almost no idea how complex this issue is, but it's probably similar.
One thing about your "extensive experience" source is that he doesn't really specify what kind of search he was doing. People doing data mining may be looking in many different ways. For instance, if you have six million examples of successful stock price changes and six million examples of unsuccessful ones, you might look for other variables (past performance, location, etc.) that signal a difference -- any difference. Large data sets are definitely helpful for this. Getting machine learning to discover a specific thing -- like a familial bond based on telephone calls -- may or may not work at all. If all you have is frequency, there may be a half dozen other types of relationships that lead to numerous calls. There may never be a way of discerning relationship based on a single modality of communication. That's why most of the people I know are using millions of other sensors, like GPS, accelerometers, recording the voice, reading heart rate, etc. Then they may be able to say with moderate certainty that they can tell something from phone calls. The NSA can't do that with what USA Today says they're collecting.
UPDATE 05/12/06 11:48 AM: Click here to see if you can spot the difference between an Al-Qaeda cluster, and on from a Fortune 500 firm.
"Every Call Ever Made" in NSA Database
We've known for years that the NSA sits on Himayalan storehouses of information - untold millions of phone calls and e-mails, both inside the United States and out.
But, until recently, those databases didn't seem particularly intimidating, because NSA snoops were sworn to purge the identities of American citizens, as soon as they got caught in the surveillance net. As one former signal intelligence specialist told me a few months back:
"It's drilled into you from minute one that you should not ever, ever, ever, under any fucking circumstances turn this massive apparatus on an American citizen," one source says. "You do a lot of weird shit. But at least you don't fuck with your own people."
Now we know different. And that's one major reason why thisUSA Today revelation so unnerving.
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY. [Qwest turned 'em down, Glenn Greenwald notes.]
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.
"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added...
In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."
As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.
Sources, however, say that is not the case.
No wonder former NSA chief Bobby Ray Inman says the program was "not authorized."
Now, some people might find some small measure of comfort in the fact that this particular NSA effort is only looking at calling patterns -- not the contents of the calls themselves. Don't be. Back in January, we learned that this data-mining is directly leading to a "flood" of tips, given to the FBI, virtually all of which have led "to dead ends or innocent Americans."
UPDATE 11:08 AM: Slashdot has a great little primer on "trap and trace" systems, like the on the NSA is using here. The site also points out that the NSA has effectively squashed a Justice Department inquiry into its eavesdropping.
UPDATE 12:30 AM: Sen. Arlen Specter has a history of talking tough -- and then getting rolled by the White House. Let's see if this time is any different. "Specter, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said today that he would call telephone executives to testify about a newspaper report describing a massive effort by the National Security Agency to compile records of phone calls." Other lawmakers are pissed, too.
Ex-NSA Chief Blasts Taps, Calls for CIA Breakup
Former NSA director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman lashed out at the Bush administration Monday night over its continued use of warrantless domestic wiretaps – and called for the CIA to be broken up in two. It's one of the first times a former high-ranking intelligence official has criticized the program in public, analysts say.
"This activity is not authorized," Inman said, as part of a panel discussion on eavesdropping, sponsored by the New York Public Library. The Bush administration "need[s] to get away from the idea that they can continue doing it."
Since the NSA eavesdropping program was unveiled in December, Inman – like other senior members of the intelligence community – has been measured in the public statements he's made about the agency he headed under President Jimmy Carter. He maintained that his former analysts "only act in accordance with law." When asked whether the president had the legal authority to order the wiretaps, Inman replied, "someone else would have to give you the good answer."
But sitting in a brightly-lit, basement auditorium at the Library, next to James Risen, the New York Times reporter who broke the surveillance story, Inman's tone changed. He called on the President to "walk into the modern world" and change the law governing the wiretaps – or abandon the program altogether.
"The program has drawn a lot of criticism, but thus far former military and intelligence officials have not spoken up. To have Admiral Inman – the former head of the NSA -- come forward with this critique is significant," said Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, who sat on the panel with Inman and Risen. "Because of the secrecy surrounding this type of activity, much of the criticism has come from outsiders who don't have a firm grasp of the mechanics and the utility of electronic intelligence. Inman knows whereof he speaks."
UPDATE 5:02 PM: While Inman was generally supportive of General Michael Hayden, George Bush's pick for CIA director, and Inman's NSA successor -- despite the fact that the Hayden was the guy running the questionable domestic surveillance project. Even his critics, Inman said, have given Hayden "high marks" for refocusing the agency on terrorism.
Most of 'em, anyway. NSA whistleblower Russ Tice, to put it mildly, hates Hayden's guts. Echoing TPM Muckrakerallegations that "between 1999 and 2005, the NSA bungled two key technology programs and... has been burning through billions -- billions -- of dollars," Tice tells Defense Tech:
Through his mismanagement, many critical SIGINT missions were not funded and the intelligence needed and depended on was not collected. Perhaps 911 could have been avoided if NSA had those assets in place and did not waste all that money...
He lied about the NSA being involved in domestic spying and continues to lie about the enormous scope of those programs. He stated NSAer know about the Forth Amendment to the Constitution and in the same breath proved that he did not have a clue about it hinging on "probable cause" not reasonableness. He forgot to mention that he also violated the FISA Act and NSA's own policy on domestic Spying (USSID-18).
To be frank, he is a self promoter, an ass-kisser, an accomplished liar, an oath breaker, an extremely poor manager, a sadist, a criminal, and a proven domestic enemy of the Constitution of the United States. Oh, and a piss-poor all-source intelligence officer to boot. He should have remained an air opps officer restricted to the flight ready-room.
To sum Hayden up in a few words, he is dishonorable and without integrity.
In would appear that the president will not tolerate a lap-dog like Porter Goss that barks now and again. Hayden will lift his leg and squat all over the constitutional carpet, but while in the lap of the man who sits the newly erected thrown, Hayden will wag his tail and only open his mouth to lick his master's face.
Lord help us!
UPDATE 6:35 PM: Inman also emphasized something Defense Tech has been saying since the start of this scandal: that your average spook finds the idea of spying on Americans downright revolting.
One of Inman's "proudest moments" as NSA director was when senior employees told him not to pursue a legally fishy operation, he noted. "It's deeply ingrained in you that you operate within the law."
UPDATE 6:40 PM: In addition, Inman put to bed the notion that the NSA's domestic eavesdropping program only examined the links between terror suspects -- not the contents of the conversations themselves. Is this all about who-called-who? "No, it isn't," he answered, on his way out the door (he had to leave quick, because of a bout of food poisoning). For voice communications, which are tough to search, that might be the case, he added. But with e-mail? No way.
Hello, Hayden
It's official: General Mike Hayden has been nominated to head the CIA. Republican lawmakers are already spooked by the choice -- and not just because of his domestic wiretap project, or his shaky grip on the 4th amendment says. But one military intelligence specialist tells Defense Tech that he likes Mike:
If we leave aside the obvious political arguments over the NSA program which are sure to come up at any confirmation hearings, Hayden is a great pick. One of the big talking points on both sides of the aisle is how CIA needs to be fixed... Hayden did the same thing at NSA, dragging it kicking and screaming into the 21st century. He overcame a lot of bureaucratic inertia to accomplish that. I would say he is the best candidate to do just the same at CIA. Additionally, being a in the military might afford him a little extra protection from some of the political sniping that comes with a regular political appointee. Time will tell, but if we are serious as a nation about our security and having competent intelligence services to help provide that security, I don't think we could fins anyone better for this job at this time. If certain Senators want to play politics and kill this nomination (if it comes) to make some partisan points, what we will inevitably end up with running the CIA is a milquetoast, non-threatening figurehead who is acceptable to everyone, and such a person will have no leverage to produce any reforms in the Agency. That result would be the intelligence equivalent of FEMA/Michael Brown. That should be unacceptable to us all.
Meanwhile, check it constantly with Laura Rozen and TPM Muckraker, who are all over the CIA transition story.
UPDATE 12:14 PM: I've been away for a few days (more on that in a bit), so I didn't get a chance to comment on the downright hilarious spin whizzing around Porter Goss' departure from the CIA. I didn't work in Washington all that long. But I was there long enough to know that top-level guys like him do not get fired suddenly over long-standing turf battles or routine staff shake-ups. Frankly, the poker-and-hooker theory makes a whole lot more sense.
New Detectors Sniff Terrorists' Scents
The Pentagon's fringe science arm wants to keep track of potential enemies-of-the-state in every way imaginable: not just by sight, or by sound, or by their e-mail; but by their smell, as well.
Darpa's "Unique Signature Detection Project (formerly known as the Odortype Detection program)" aims to sniff out genetic markers in "human emanations (urine, sweat, etc.)" that "can be used to identify and distinguish specific high-level-of-interest individuals within groups of enemy troops."
"Recent experimental results" show that chemical compounds in a mouse's "urinary" scent produces an "odortype" that's unique to each individual rodent, Darpa observes in its original solicitation for the project. "Although experimental data for humans is far less quantitative," the agency is hoping that a similarly "genetically determined," "exploitable chemosignal" can be found in people, too.
Once that marker is found, Darpa's proposed 2007 budget notes, the agency wants to know what "the impact of non-genetic factors (e.g., diet, stress, health, age) [have] on the signal." That could help figure out how to "robustly extract" the signal "from a complex and varied chemical background."
The sniffing-out process has already begun in the lab, one professor told Business Week last year. A person's smell "is a cocktail of hundreds of molecules... The question is whether it's a gin and tonic or a margarita." Making those distinictions out in the odorifically-complex real world won't be easy, he added.
Darpa's smell detector is part of a larger, $15 million-per-year effort to develop "novel sensors" for U.S. troop operating in "urban settings." The goal of the Urban Vision program is "to enable the warfighter to 'see' movers within a building using a variety of fused multi-spectral techniques." The "Enemy Dismount Intrusion Detection program," on the other hand, "will develop a chemical sensor that is capable of providing an advanced warning of the presence of enemy troops or combatants by detecting the chemical emissions... that are common to all humans."
And this effort is, itself, only a small part of Darpa's ongoing push to "observe our adversaries and their environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week, week-in and week-out – and that implies a multiplicity of platforms, sensors and sensor types – on the ground, in the sea, in the air, and also in space," explained the agency's Dr. Ted Bially in a recent speech. Other components include the development of a giant blimp that can watch over an entire city at once, a network of minature sensors which spot adversaries using radar, and software programs that comb for potential terrorists in the web traffic and e-mails of ordinary people.
UPDATE 04/18/06 8:01 AM: In the comments, Jutta posts a transcript of an old Voice of America broadcast, which notes that:
DURING THE COLD WAR, THE STASI [East German secret police] ALSO KEPT WHAT MR. LEGNER DESCRIBED AS "SMELL SAMPLES" OF PEOPLE -- CLOTH SAMPLES CONTAINING THE SCENT OF INDIVIDUALS THAT COULD BE USED FOR DOG TRACKING AND IDENTIFICATION PURPOSES. WE FOUND THESE SAMPLES IN SEALED GLASS BOTTLES.
According to a statement released by Klein's attorney, an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T's #4ESS switching equipment, which is responsible for routing long distance and international calls...
"While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T's internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal," Klein wrote.
The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein's statement.
The secret room also included data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400, "known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets."
UPDATE 04/10/06 9:10 AM: Lots more on Naurus' data-sniffing products here, including one "capable of monitoring 10 billion bits of data per second."
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.
Spotting insurgents, sorting out friend from foe – it's beyond tough in today’s guerilla war zones. So tough, that no single monitor can be counted on to handle the job. The Pentagon's answer: build a set of palm-sized, networked sensors that can be scattered around, and work together to “detect, classify, localize, and track dismounted combatants under foliage and in urban environments.” It’s part of a larger Defense Department effort to establish “military omniscience” and “ubiquitous monitoring.”
The military has been working on gadgets for a while, now, that can be left behind in a bad neighborhood or a jihadist training site, and monitor the situation. These Camouflaged Long Endurance Nano-Sensors (CLENS) would be an order of magnitude smaller than previous surveillance gear of its type -- just 60 milimeters long, and 150 grams.
Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, also wants the monitors to take up a 10,000th of the power of previous sensors. That would give the CLENS enough juice to keep watch over an area for up to 180 days.
The way they'd keep watch would be different, too. Not as a individual sensors, but as a network of monitors, communicating with ultra wideband radios. The same frequencies could be used as a kind of radar, to track objects and people within the sensor net.
"The best way to learn about an adversary – what he’s done, what he’s doing, and what he’s likely to do - is through continual observation using as many observation mechanisms as possible. We call this persistent surveillance," Dr. Ted Bially, head of Darpa's Information Exploitation Office, told a conference last year. "We’ve learned that occasional or periodic snapshots don’t tell us enough of what we need to know. In order to really understand what’s going on we have to observe our adversaries and their environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week, week-in and week-out."
According to its recently-released budget, Darpa hopes to hand over its new, minature, persistent sensors to Special Operations Command by the end of fiscal year 2007.
UPDATE 8:50 AM: Speaking of military omniscience, Darpa's "Combat Zones That See" effort, meant to network together an entire city's worth of surveillance cameras, gets $5 million in next year's budget.
Defense Update spots an Israeli surveillance tool that I hadn't heard of before: a rifle-mounted, sensor-filled projectile called "Smart Arrow." Shoot it into a wall, and a "video camera is activated, sending live images from the target for up to seven hours."
The Smart Arrow comes with "an option for small explosive heads to assist the projectile embedding in the hardest surfaces," Defense Daily notes. "Once the tip of the Arrow is embedded, the body -- containing a small video camera -- pivots from a ball joint and hangs below the head. Then it begins to transmit live images from the surrounding area to a remote display and control unit."
This... allows the operator to view an "out of sight" area, such as an alley, before friendly ground troops overtake the position--a process that could be dangerous and time consuming, Kattan said.
"It can also be shot into the wall above a window then...[swivel down and] transmit what's going on inside," Gal said.
The display and control unit is small and highly portable and allows the operator to rotate the camera on the Smart Arrow while video is transmitted continuously. The LCD display screen is about six and a half inches in size and the unit can operate for about three hours continuously on a single charge.
The video transmission range is about 300 meters outdoors, and several hundred feet if, for example, the system was shot through a window and embedded in an interior wall or ceiling...
The Arrow can transmit the image to several receivers [and] has a 60-degree field of view with a frame rate of 25 per second and a resolution of 420 TV lines (tvl) in black and white and 320 tvl in color.
A Smart Arrow system includes two projectiles, one control unit and a charger in a rugged transport case.
There are a couple of services that can match Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses to physical locations. But the technique isn't exactly iron-clad. Routing traffic through a server in some other country, for example, can throw these programs off the trail.
The NSA approach, "Network Geo-location Technology," is different, Military Information Technology magazine notes. It relies on latency, instead. By looking how long traffic on one computer takes to get to another, it can tell where that first PC is.
"The most common use of Internet geo-location technology is in the area of ad-serving. When users do a Google search, for example, the technology will show ads to them that are localized depending on their geographic location," the magazine says. "The technology is also used for on-line verification of identity. If a user is registering on-line to buy an airline ticket, for instance, and the user claims to be located in a certain place, the technology can determine whether that user is actually located there or in a different place and then either block the transaction or ask for additional verification."
We all knew that Total Information Awareness and its uber-database progeny weren't going away. It was just a question of what names TIA's bastard children were now using, and what government agencies had decided to give 'em a home.
Today, we find out about two of the not-so-little stinkers. Newsweek, in a brutal assessment of the NSA and other intelligence agencies ("Wanted: Competent Big Brothers"), tucks in this nugget:
Today, very quietly, the core of TIA survives with a new codename of Topsail... two officials privy to the intelligence tell NEWSWEEK. It is in programs like these that real data mining is going on and—considering the furor over TIA—with fewer intrusions on civil liberties than occur under the NSA surveillance program. "It’s the best thing to come out of American intelligence in decades," says John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "It is truly Poindexter’s brainchild. Of all the people in the intelligence business, he has the keenest appreciation of using advanced information technology for intelligence gathering." Poindexter, who lives just outside Washington in Rockville, Md., could not be reached for comment on whether he is still involved with Topsail.
Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor has discovered a new data-mining program over at the Homeland Security Department. It's called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement -- "ADVISE," for short.
What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.
But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA [Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment] portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.
For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.
Another component of ADVISE that the Monitor doesn't pick up on: The project seems closely tied towards WMD defense. It'll "incorporate a comprehensive encyclopedia of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive threat and effects data," DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology Charles McQueary told the House Committee on Science last year. This report sketches out one way ADVISE might use that information:
A radiation detector at a Canadian border crossing may pick up an anomalous reading that might be too ambiguous to trigger an alarm, but the incorporation of additional data (e.g., the driver is associated with a group known to be collecting nuclear materials or the same anomalous reading appears every week from the
same driver and truck) would greatly improve the threat detection ability of these systems.
UPDATE 9:42 AM: "After seven weeks of refusing to provide Congress with details of its secret domestic spying program," the L.A. Times reports, "the White House changed course Wednesday and began to describe the operations of the controversial surveillance to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees." And the WaPo notes that "twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court."
[Osama] probably isn’t clicking around on Amazon. The bad guys are smart enough to adapt to the environment in which they live. They know when our satellites are passing over. They know that we monitor their communications and work to counter that. They’ll counter this too. I’m not saying that something like this won’t produce useful intelligence. I’m sure it will, but we’ll still be left with gaps.
NSA: How They Spy
Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache have put together a fascinating pair of stories for News.com that outline what the NSA's domestic spying program might look like. Part one surveyed telecom companies, to find out which ones cooperated with the spooks. Part two sketches out how the NSA might be able to listen in. A few excerpts are below. But do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.
99 percent of the world's long-distance communications travel through [undersea] fiber links... It's easiest to tap those underwater cables when they make landfall instead of trying to do it underwater, analysts say.
"The easiest thing to do would be to somehow get an agreement with a provider and just simply co-exist in a building, one of the main fiber stations, (peering) points or whatever. In other words, work out something with either a long-haul provider or with an employee." ...
Phill Shade, a network engineer for WildPackets who is the company's director of international support services, says such interception would be easy, at least for the NSA. WildPackets sells network analysis software.
An eavesdropper could just "take something off the shelf and use it to make copies of traffic and just save the copies," Shade said. "Our software captures packets; the data recorder stores terabytes of information. We use it for forensic analysis and troubleshooting networks. When you call back and say, 'I was hacked Tuesday night at 11:30,' we look back and see what was going on Tuesday night."
Making sense of that massive volume of data is not exactly trivial. While it may be easy to perform keyword searches and identify flagged names and phone numbers, detailed analysis typically takes human intervention. "For the near future, at least, our ability to gather info through various surreptitious and open means is going to be a lot better than our ability to analyze it," said Richard Hunter, vice president of executive programs at Gartner Group...
Because of the way that the Internet backbone and the telecommunication network are structured, NSA operatives likely would not have to leave the country to install taps. The vast majority of Internet traffic is routed through switches on American soil, which can be directly monitored with (or without) the cooperation of backbone providers...
In 2005, an estimated 94 percent of that "inter-regional" traffic passed through U.S. switches, Mauldin said. Many other communications links run around in the U.K., a country that has a history of sharing communications intelligence with U.S. spy agencies.
That's a boon to the NSA, which reportedly carries out its surveillance activities in a "wholesale" way. That means it potentially scoops up millions of phone calls and e-mail messages and feeds the data to its supercomputers--considered some of the most powerful and plentiful in the world--to comb for red flags and people on a so-called watch list.
Rummy Shuffles on Domestic Spying
Rummy went to the National Press Club yesterday, and answered some questions. Am I the only one that found his responses kind of lame?
Check out the Defense Secretary on the Pentagon's efforts to keep tabs on home-grown peace groups, for example. First, he says he didn't know anything about it. Then he says it was "perfectly understandable." Then he invokes 9/11, and the prevetion of sabotage. Finally, he concludes, the whole thing is "no big deal."
SALANT: This questioner writes about a recent report about the Defense Department monitoring antiwar protesters and wants to know why the Defense Department is doing that.
RUMSFELD: Well, I wasn't aware of it at all, but it turns out that -- this is no surprise to anyone here -- the Department of Defense has the responsibility in the United States for force protection. We don't have the responsibility for homeland security. That's with the Department of Homeland Security.
We do have the responsibility, however, to protect our own forces. And apparently, what took place was a perfectly understandable thing.
They decided that the way -- given the assignment to do that -- they decided to establish a program whereby they would be able to observe and do the kind of countersurveillance to see who was taking pictures of military installations or sensitive activities, and who was observing them, and gather information of that type, so that we would not be accused of failing to protect our forces and their families and the military installations in the country. And so, they began this process.
According to the people who briefed me on it, to do that, you obviously end up scooping up information, whether it's names or films, or whatever, to protect your base. And that information then comes into a data bank.
And, you know, think of 9/11. Everyone accused the government of not connecting the dots. You didn't connect the dots before the fact, and you weren't able to stop it.
So, here they are trying to connect the dots, and someone looks at it and says, oh, my goodness gracious! Isn't that terrible! You're collecting information on people in the United States.
And, of course, if you look at it, that's what it is. It's information about people who are physically in the United States, who were observing a base in some way. And so, they put in some new rules whereby the people doing this have to purge the system periodically, so we don't end up with massive data that we don't need and don't want and didn't intend to keep in the first place.
And they then review what there is and see, is there a threat to that base of some kind? Is there something that should be turned over to the FBI?
And it's no different, in a sense, than a private business that has a building or a factory or facility, and has a security force, and they have surveillance of it to see who's looking at it and what's being done.
But because of the sensitivity of it, obviously, it became a big cause celebre, and I think -- at least I'm told -- that they now think they've put in place the kinds of procedures, so that the information that's gathered will not become a permanent record, and will be purged appropriately. And to the extent they connect any dots, they obviously turn them over to the FBI, or whoever local law enforcement, if they're concerned about some security.
In short, it's no big deal...
But, as bad as he fumbled this question, I found this answer to even worse:
QUESTION: A lot of questions about Iraq. First one from this questioner.
What do you say to a young G.I. on his or her third tour of duty in Iraq?
RUMSFELD: Well, first of all, G.I., if you mean by that a soldier, Army, there are to my knowledge no Army people who are back for their third one-year tour that weren't volunteers.
First of all, everybody in the military today is a volunteer.
So, the first thing I would say, though, to them is, thank you for volunteering. Thank you for deciding you wanted to serve the country. Thank you for putting up your hand and say, send me.
The tour lengths are quite different. The Army has a year -- up to a year -- in Iraq. The Marine Corps has seven months, up to seven months. The Navy deployments tend to be six months in and 12 months back.
The Air Force differs widely. Some are a year. Some are three months rotation where they go back in frequently.
But anyone who's there on a third tour for a year, you can be absolutely certain volunteered. And I say, thank you for volunteering.
These Cameras Don't Forget a Face
I've got a story in today's New York Times. Here's how it starts:
Management at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco had been suspicious for weeks. James, a houseman on the graveyard shift was not the most productive worker, and trying to reach him on his walkie-talkie was usually a lost cause. So when James (not his real name) could not be found one summer night, his bosses went to their new video surveillance system.
The camera network - using software from 3VR Security Inc., a San Francisco company that makes surveillance technology - already knew what James looked like; facial recognition algorithms had built a profile of him over time. With a couple of mouse clicks, managers combed through hours of videotape taken that night by the hotel's 16 cameras, and found every place he had been - including the back entrance he slipped out of, three hours into his shift. He never came back to work; the next day, James became one of 10 employees dismissed from the hotel since 3VR's surveillance package was installed last June.
Until recently, the only place where an employee could have been caught that easily was in a Hollywood script. Digital spy cameras can instantly pick people out of crowds on "24." Real-world video surveillance was stuck in the VCR age, taking countless hours to sift through blurry black-and-white tapes. Stopping a problem in progress was nearly impossible, unless a guard just happened to be staring at the right video monitor.
But surveillance companies, using networks of cheap Web-connected cameras and powerful new video-analysis software, are starting to turn the Hollywood model into reality. Faces and license plates can now be spotted, in almost real time, at ports, military bases and companies. Security perimeters can be changed or strengthened with a mouse click. Feeds from hundreds of cameras can be combined into a single desktop view. And videotape that used to take hours, even days, to scour is searched in minutes.
Some experts question the effectiveness of such "intelligent video" systems, which are sold by ObjectVideo, Verint and VistaScape as well, and worry about the privacy implications. But Brian Russell, chief of the Drake's engineering and maintenance departments, is happy with the results. "People know we're watching," he said. "Word travels fast. Fear travels as well."
There are a ton of problems with data mining for potential enemies of the state. Privacy is one, of course. But another is its questionable utility. It doesn't make you a jihadist, because you've e-mailed Chris Allbritton, who interviews guerillas sometimes. Or because you've said "bomb" and "trainwreck" in the same overseas call. Just look at all the hijinks with our "no-fly" lists, to see what an imprecise science we're talking about here.
More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret eavesdropping program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.
"We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration..."
Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. In other cases, lists of phone numbers appeared to result from the agency's computerized scanning of communications coming in and out of the country for names and keywords that might be of interest. The deliberate blurring of the source of the tips caused some frustration among those who had to follow up.
F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor, who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs, said intelligence officials turning over the tips "would always say that we had information whose source we can't share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Al Qaeda operative." He said, "I would always wonder, what does 'suspected' mean?"...
Aside from the director, F.B.I. officials did not question the legal status of the tips, assuming that N.S.A. lawyers had approved. They were more concerned about the quality and quantity of the material, which produced "mountains of paperwork" that was often more like raw data than conventional investigative leads.
"It affected the F.B.I. in the sense that they had to devote so many resources to tracking every single one of these leads, and, in my experience, they were all dry leads," the former senior prosecutor said.
Of course, any wide-spread investigation is going to mean a ton of dead ends. But, under normal circumstances, if there's a problem with the information you get, you can go back to your sources, ask more questions, hit them up again. If all you're getting is a list of names and numbers, however, there's no follow-up possible. No chance to prioritize the information. No way of telling whether this run of the algorithm is actually going to work, this time.
UPDATE 01/01/06 12:29 PM: Al Gore was one of my least-favorite presidential candidates of all time. But he's got this NSA thing nailed.
President Lincoln, of course, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by President Wilson during and after World War I, with the notorious red scare and "Palmer Raids."
...But in each of these cases throughout American history, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, our nation recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.
But there are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing so that this cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power....
A second reason to believe that we may be experiencing something new, outside that historical cycle, is that we are, after all, told by this administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to last, in their phrase, "for the rest of our lives."
And so we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other presidents to justify arrogations of power will in this case persist in near perpetuity.
Third, we need to be keenly aware of the startling advances in the sophistication of eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to easily sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and then mine it for intelligence. And this adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies grows.
Those technologies do have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways that are both subtle and profound.
Don't misunderstand me. The threat of additional terror strikes is real and the concerted efforts by terrorists to acquire weapons of mass destruction does indeed create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the executive branch with swiftness and agility.
Moreover, there is an in fact an inherent power conferred by the Constitution to any president to take unilateral action when necessary to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat. And it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not.
But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for many years and producing a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.
NSA Spying: Two Views
What's behind the NSA domestic eavesdropping program? And how bad it is, really? Defense analyst Willliam Arkin and law professor Orin Kerr have competing theories.
Arkin takes a peek at section 126 of the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act Of 2005, which requires the Attorney General to submit a report to Congress "on any initiative of the Department of Justice that uses or is intended to develop pattern-based data-mining technology." He wonders if that data-mining might be what the NSA is up to.
Patterns of activity associated with actual terrorists in the past are derived from investigations and debriefings -- let's say, for example, visas from certain countries, calls from public phone booths to Pakistan, renting of cars with newly acquired driver's licenses, one-way airline tickets. Patterns are used to trigger "tip-offs."
Massive amounts of collected data -- actual intercepts of phone calls, e-mails, etc. -- together with "transaction" data -- travel or credit card records or telephone or Internet service provider logs -- are mixed through a mind-boggling array of government and private sector software programs to look for potential matches...
The law says "the search does not use personal identifiers of a specific individual or does not utilize inputs that appear on their face to identify or be associated with a specified individual to acquire information," I take it to mean the new computer-based data mining isn't looking for an individual per se, it is looking at information about all individuals (at least all who make international telephone calls or send e-mails overseas or travel to foreign countries according to the government) to select individuals who may be worthy of a closer look.
In other words, with the digitization of everything and new computer and software capabilities, the government couldn't go to the Court or the Congress and say, "hey, we'd like to monitor everyone on a fishing expedition to find the next Mohamed Atta."
But Kerr, leafing through James Risen's new book, says that "it seems less likely to me than it did before that this is a TIA-like data-mining program."
"As best I can tell, the NSA program was not actually recording domestic Internet traffic, putting it in a database, and then 'mining' it for key words and the like," he writes. Instead, what went on is packet-sniffing -- "installing a monitoring device on a steam of traffic that looks for specific sequences of letters, numbers, or symbols... [like] phone numbers and e-mail accounts... For those with criminal law experience, this was basically a large-scale pen regsister/trap-and-trace or wiretap, depending on how the filters are configured."
Which, of course, would be a whole lot less scary than some ginormous profiling project. We'll see.
UPDATE 10:50 AM PST: FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley calls BS on claims that the courts somehow got in the way of catching Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker." NSA whistle-blower Russ Tice, says he wants to talk about the agency's "highly classified Special Access Programs." A little birdie tells me that he won't be the last.
NSA Eavesdropping: Old Hat
Imagine this: A super-secret government organization is caught eavesdropping on countless thousands of conversations going in and out of the country. Outraged, Senators demand hearings into the project.
"Decades before 9/11, and the subsequent Bush order that directed the NSA to eavesdrop on... U.S. citizens... they did the same thing with telegrams," Bruce Schneier notes. "It was called Project Shamrock, and anyone who thinks this is new legal and technological terrain should read up on that program."
One of the big legal reforms to come out of Shamrock was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set up the series of courts that the Bush Administration is now circumventing with its current eavesdropping effort.
A lot of people are trying to say that it's a different world today, and that eavesdropping on a massive scale is not covered under the FISA statute, because it just wasn't possible or anticipated back then. That's a lie. Project Shamrock began in the 1950s, and ran for about twenty years. It too had a massive program to eavesdrop on all international telegram communications, including communications to and from American citizens. It too was to counter a terrorist threat inside the United States. It too was secret, and illegal. It is exactly, by name, the sort of program that the FISA process was supposed to get under control. UPDATE 12:41 PST: Check out this WaPo op-ed, on the difference between World War II's eavesdropping efforts and today's.
The difference between Bletchley Park [the UK's codebreaking center in the 40's] and Crypto City [the NSA HQ] has as much to do with the very different nature of their tasks as with the way they are viewed. By today's standards, the mission at Bletchley Park was well-defined. The targets of the surveillance were clear: the German high command and intelligence service. The signals collectors had a good fix on what communications to monitor. The greatest challenge lay in breaking the extremely complex Enigma code.
By contrast, the NSA conducts broad-based surveillance indiscriminately over communications lines that few bad guys even use any longer. "Big Noddy," as those in the know call the NSA's vast "Ear in the Sky," has capabilities that dwarf the Bletchley Park World War II enterprise, but it isn't picking up much because the smartest terrorist groups have long since stopped talking about their plans over cell phones or land lines -- or to the extent they do, it's probably to plant disinformation. Today the challenge isn't decoding an intercepted message from a known enemy; instead it's figuring out what is and isn't a message and who the enemy is.
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged...
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.
"All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in that area," said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.
The N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.
This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.
The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system... [which was] ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.
But the Bush administration regards the N.S.A.'s ability to trace and analyze large volumes of data as critical to its expanded mission to detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out, officials familiar with the program say. Administration officials maintain that the system set up by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not give them the speed and flexibility to respond fully to terrorist threats at home.
Some will say this story is old news. The NSA has long been rumored to have the ability to vacuum up huge swaths of data at once.
"They have a capacity to listen to every overseas phone call," added Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University."
But the question has been: how do you turn all that data into something useful? You've got to find a realtively simple way to get rid of 99.99999% of the calls and e-mails quickly. Otherwise, it's like drinking from a firehose.
But as link analysis and data mining programs have become more sophisticated, that sifting process has gotten easier. And, I'll bet, it is simpler still when the telecom companies are playing ball.
Wiretap Mystery: Spooks React
A few current and former signals intelligence guys have been checking in since this NSA domestic spying story broke. Their reactions range between midly creeped out and completely pissed off.
All of the sigint specialists emphasized repeatedly that keeping tabs on Americans is way beyond the bounds of what they ordinarily do -- no matter what the conspiracy crowd may think.
"It's drilled into you from minute one that you should not ever, ever, ever, under any fucking circumstances turn this massive apparatus on an American citizen," one source says. "You do a lot of weird shit. But at least you don't fuck with your own people."
Another, who's generally very pro-Administration, emphasized that the operation at least started with people that had Al-Qaeda connections -- with some mass-spying master list. As the Times, in its original story, noted:
The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said....In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said....Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
But this call chain could very well have grown out of control, the source admits. Suddenly, people ten and twelve degrees of separation away from Osama may have been targeted.
Deputy Director for National Intelligence Michael Hayden hinted at what might be going on in a press conference yesterday:
And here the key is not so much persistence as it is agility. It's a quicker trigger. It's a subtly softer trigger. And the intrusion into privacy -- the intrusion into privacy is significantly less. It's only international calls. The period of time in which we do this is, in most cases, far less than that which would be gained by getting a court order.
As I reflected on the meeting today, and the future we face, John Poindexter's TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the Administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance.
TIA, of course, would be "Total Information Awareness," Darpa's effort to find potential enemies of the state in the data trails of ordinary folks. The program was cancelled a few years back. But a whole bunch of similar efforts continue throughout the government.
A former sigint type -- who also talked to Ryan, apparently -- suggests a different technological approach: the NSA "may have compromised a hardware manufacturer -- say Motorola or a satellite phone manufacturer, a telecom carrier or a satellite(s)."
I'll keep my ears open.
UPDATE 11:27 AM: There's a ton of surveillance-related news that has come out in the last day, including:
In the spring of 2001, NSA began to change direction in its counter-terrorism targeting under Lt. Gen. Hayden: rather than analyzing the mass of what was collected hoping for the gem in the growing mass of available material, NSA began a methodical process of dissecting terrorist target communications practices and network to determine what to collect. This is commonly referred to at NSA as hunting rather than gathering. It was a procedure that was in its infancy on 9/11.
So what happened? The perceived shackles of domestic collection were removed, the gathering process began again to overwhelm the hunting process, new software, data-mining and link analysis methods were applied to isolate potential domestic targets.
Take Cisco. The company "earns $500 million a year in revenues [in China] and holds 60 percent of the Chinese market for routers, switches, and other sophisticated networking gear."
And it includes Policenet,
which "connects officials of the Public Security Bureau — a national agency with local branches that handle security, immigration, 'social order,' and law enforcement — to each other and to electronic records that store a wealth of information on every citizen in China."
Cisco marketed Policenet at China's 2002 Information Infrastructure Expo (a trade show for potential suppliers to the Golden Shield [uber-database] project) by touting how the technology helped police in California match the faces of criminal suspects with images captured through surveillance cameras in department stores. [Here's a brochure] It's hard to get upset about devices that help law enforcement officials lock up shoplifters. Yet the technology itself seems to change when, rather than being operated by police who are subject to the constraints of search warrants and evidence rules, it is used by security forces concerned primarily with suppressing dissent. Policenet may be effective against crime in California, but it also lets China's Public Security Bureau obtain information about the political beliefs and Internet use of innocent people and their family members...
Public law — the criminal and civil statutes and case law that shape corporate conduct — would be clumsy and probably ineffective in trying to [stop Cisco from this kind of thing]. Far more promising would be... shareholder pressure and lawsuits. Though no law required it to do so, Nike adopted a code of conduct to improve working conditions at its sneaker factories abroad. It succumbed to pressure from labor rights groups and from lawsuits that claimed the company had committed false advertising by misrepresenting working conditions. Boston Common Asset Management, which holds 67,000 of the billions of Cisco shares outstanding, filed a shareholder resolution with the Securities and Exchange Commission in May 2004 demanding that Cisco consider human rights issues when choosing wholesalers for its products. The investment firm said it worried that "corporations doing business with repressive governments face serious risks to their reputation and share value." Cisco argued that the human rights policies set forth in its code of business conduct were enough to ensure proper behavior and asked the SEC to exclude the resolution. The SEC refused, allowing shareholders to decide in effect whether Cisco should balance individual freedoms with the goal of earning profits.
New Tech Behind NSA Snoop Case?
There's more to the NSA domestic spying case than the current storyline -- that much is clear. The idea that the Bush Administration needed to bypass the courts to get wiretaps quickly makes no sense; under the current system, you can start eavesdropping, and get a warrant later. The notion that disclosing the surveillance would somehow tip off potential terrorists is laughable, too; Al Qaeda types know they're being monitored.
That's all assuming, of course, that the wiretaps in this case are the same as in any other. But maybe they're not. Maybe there's something different about this surveillance. It could be in its scope, as Laura suggests. But I'm guessing -- and this is just a guess -- that the real difference is in the technology of the wiretaps themselves.
Look at what former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who was briefed on the eavesdropping program, told the Washington Post:
"I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy," Graham said, with new opportunities to intercept overseas calls that passed through U.S. switches.
Or what New York Times editor Bill Keller had to say about the paper's year-long delay in breaking the story:
In the course of subsequent reporting we satisfied ourselves that we could write about this program -- withholding a number of technical details -- in a way that would not expose any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record.
So maybe the NSA wiretaps were using a new kind of capability; one that terror suspects might not have know about; one that might have even made the FISA court uncomfortable, somehow.
It's a lot of mights and maybes, I know. But the current threads of this story are so thin, it's time to start considering some alternatives.
Wiretaps' Fishy Rationale
It's no surprise that the President defended the NSA's domestic eavesdropping this morning; the guy backs every decision he makes, to the death. And it's no surprise to learn that the President had "reauthorized the program more than 30 times since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and plans to continue doing so," according to the AP.
But what's odd is why the Administration felt they needed to avoid geting warrants for the wiretaps, in the first place. As Josh notes:
[T]he prime rationale for this program appears to have been to avoid the time and bureaucratic hurdles involved in getting warrants.
In the abstract, there sounds like there might be some merit in that argument, especially considering the importance of speed in counter-terrorism work.
The problem is that the FISA Court -- the secret court set up to handle just such warrant requests -- is designed for speed. And it is known for being extremely indulgent of government applications for warrants...
It turns out that FISA specifically empowers the Attorney General or his designee to start wiretapping on an emergency basis even without a warrant so long as a retroactive application is made for one "as soon as practicable, but not more than 72 hours after the Attorney General authorizes such surveillance." (see specific citation, here)...
All of this, of course, is separate from the issue of the president overruling a federal statute by executive order -- something that by definition a president cannot do. But something seems fishy about the rationale itself.
But that's not the only fishy thing here. In his radio address today, the President said:
The existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk.
Which implies that, somehow, suspected jihadists might not have known before that the government could be eavesdropping on them. Realistically, what are the chances of that?
UPDATE 2:05 PM EST: Also, if the Administration thinks it basically has the power to do whatever it damn pleases -- detain Americans indefinitely, torture terror suspects, eavesdrop without a warrant -- then why bother pushing for the Patriot Act? What do you need new laws for, if you're already allowed to use every trick in the book?
UPDATE 12/18/05 AM: Ryan says the same thing, but better. And be sure to check out this WaPo page one analysis:
In his four-year campaign against al Qaeda, President Bush has turned the U.S. national security apparatus inward to secretly collect information on American citizens on a scale unmatched since the intelligence reforms of the 1970s.
UPDATE 12/18/05 PM: Be sure to check out Glenn Greenwald on whether or not these warantless wiretaps were legal or not. (Hint: no.)
We’re not talking here about an unconvincing or erroneous legal argument. This is something different entirely – it is an argument based upon a fundamental misquoting of the law in question designed to make illegal behavior look legal.
Sorting through satellite imagery is tough. There are tons and tons of material, only a fraction of which can be reviewed in anything resembling a timely fashion. And very little of that is of any military use at all. Software systems can help, a bit. But, according to the mad scientists at Darpa, "the human visual system is still the best target detection apparatus" there is.
The agency would like to harness that system better. Not just the conscious mind. But the automatic and instant firing of neurons that goes on every time we take a look at something.
"Preliminary research shows that an analyst’s brain registers the discovery long before the [imagery] analyst becomes cognitively aware of it. Thus, the brain can signal the discovery three times faster than the analyst can respond," agency program manager Amy Kruse told the DarpaTech conference last August.
As part of her "Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts" (NIA) effort, Kruse wants researchers to "discover and characterize the neural signatures for target detection events in the human brain." The goal of the year-long study is to demonstrate "an image 'triage' system in which subjects are rapidly shown static imagery. Signals are classified in real time and the corresponding imagery shown is then sorted based on the classification of the neural signatures into sets of images that contain targets/regions of interest versus those that contain none."
Lotsa luck.
Dogs 1, Sensors 0
The U.S. government is pouring a ton of cash into new-jack sensors that can sniff out hidden explosives. But the Customs and Border Protection agency has decided to stick with a more tried-and-true method. The agency has increased its 1400-dog K-9 force by more than 200 in the last two years, says National Defense magazine.
THERE'S MORE: In the comments, Edward wonders if the new litter of bomb-sniffing pooches is at good as the old one. They're not, replies Kelly, who has been working with the dogs for three years.
New Sensor: Naturally Rad
Ohio State is working on a simple new sensor that could one day put other detectors out to pasture.
Unlike X-ray machines or radar instruments, the sensor doesn't have to generate a signal to detect objects – it spots them based on how brightly they reflect the natural radiation that is all around us every day.
There is always a certain amount of radiation – light, heat, and even microwaves – in the environment. Every object – the human body, a gun or knife, or an asphalt runway – reflects this ambient radiation differently.
Paul Berger, professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at Ohio State and head of the team that is developing the sensor, likened this reflection to the way glossy and satin-finish paints reflect light differently to the eye.
Once the sensor is further developed, it could be used to scan people or luggage without subjecting them to X-rays or other radiation. And if the sensor were embedded in an airplane nose, it might help pilots see a runway during bad weather.
(Big ups: Schneier. And yeah, that's a screen grab from Total Recall)
Lockheed Martin will lead a team of contractors in creating an "integrated electronic security system" that will include closed-circuit television cameras, motion detectors and "intelligent video" software that can automatically determine if a package has been left on a train or if a person is in a restricted area.
The MTA could have gone the London route, stringing tons of cameras throughout the subway, and only paying careful attention to the footage once something bad went down. Instead, by using software to detect suspicious behavior, New York transit officials seem to want their thousand new cameras and three thousand electronic sensors to serve as deterrents, tipping cops off to potential bad guys before they act.
The system is a long, long time in coming. Back in 2002, the MTA was given $591 million to shore up New York's mass transit security. As of last month, it had spent just $30 million of that. Finally, the London tube bombings shamed the MTA into making a move.
THERE'S MORE: Bruce Schneier thinks the subway cams are a waste, dealing with the "'movie plot threat'" of the moment... The terrorists bombed a subway in London, so we need to defend our subways."
New York City officials are [also] erring on the side of caution. If nothing happens, then it was only money. But if something does happen, they won't keep their jobs unless they can show they did everything possible. And technological solutions just make everyone feel better.
B.O. = Terror Sensor?
In the wake of the London bombings, BusinessWeek has put together a cover story on "The State of Surveillance." Most of the tech discussed in the piece should be pretty familiar to Defense Tech readers -- face scanners, RFID tags, yadda yadda.
But the article also mentioned a sci-fi sounding research thrust I hadn't heard of before: "a little chemical lab analyzes the sweat, body odor, and skin flakes in the human thermal plume -- the halo of heat that surrounds each person."
In the quest to sort bad guys from good, scientists are poking ever more intimately at the core of each person's identity -- right down to the DNA. One day people's distinctive body odor, breath, or saliva could serve as an identifier, based on the subtle composite of chemicals that make up a person's scent or spit. One's smell "is a cocktail of hundreds of molecules," says Frank V. Bright, a chemistry professor at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. "The question is whether it's a gin and tonic or a margarita." While some of these sensors perform well in the lab, he adds, the real world may be different: "The technology is still in its infancy."
Science today is hard put to identify smells a beagle could nail in an instant. "We want to show there is a set of underlying odors in people independent of perfume and what they ate that day," says Gary K. Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center at the University of Pennsylvania, a pioneer of odor prints.
Urban surveillance networks
I didn’t know, until the terrorist bombing attacks, that most London buses have video cameras installed on them. There are thousands of cameras in London and increasing numbers in New York, Chicago and other major cities. Large swaths of the downtown areas are covered. Coverage goes up significantly if you include private cameras that monitor stores, parking lots and office buildings.
Camera surveillance networks have real benefits – crime and traffic fatalities go down, and they generate useful evidence for a post-facto investigation – but the limitations are obvious – thousands of hours of tape that look like Warhol’s “Empire State” (Warhol pointed a camera at the building for 8 hours – when a pigeon flew by at hour six, audiences burst into applause since it was the first thing to happen).
the key to better surveillance is to replace human watchers with computers. Once the imagery has been translated into bits, software can look for patterns – has that car circled us twice, how did that pile of trash get to the roadside - and can merge imagery with data from other sensors (infrared or sniffers). Some call this intelligent video surveillance. London’s transit system already links fixed cameras to an “Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)” computer system to identify cars that park or drive in bus lanes.
Using urban surveillance networks to prevent attacks (rather than to prosecute the attackers after the fact) is in the too-hard category for now. Some prototype systems will notify an operator when the network detects a suspicious pattern, but this works best when tracking cars rather than people. A lot more code would need to be written to make urban sensor networks able to warn in advance of a mass transit attack. This is the false negative problem – the attacker walks by the camera without triggering an alert. So where we are now is that a city could deploy a sensor network but it couldn’t make use of the data generated for early warning and prevention of attacks. Putting lots of cameras on subway lines might have a deterrent effect, but my guess is that this would be minimal for suicide bombers.
The usual concerns are (1) privacy and (2) false positives, where a system would incorrectly flag a face or a behavior pattern as suspicious. Some people worry about the use of this technology for political control, and the place where this seems to be happening is (surprise) China, where the “Golden Shield” project includes constructing a digital surveillance network in China’s cities.
It's an age-old problem: How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys?
Hard enough on the traditional battlefield, where even the most advanced combat identification technologies can't always penetrate the fog of war.
Harder still when the enemy can be anyone, anywhere, in a place like Iraq, where soldiers must constantly be on the lookout for improvised explosive devices and other threats -- including suicide bombers.
What to do? Check out this proposed Army study:
The face of the threat has changed from the armored turret of a tank to a human being with a weapon and hostile intent. This human being poses a threat to our military because around this threatening being are other people who do not pose a threat but are indeed innocent civilians who share common features with the hostile person. The peacekeeper/soldier must be able to distinguish those who posed a threat from the multitude of innocent non-hostile civilian personnel, many of whom may possess weapons as a cultural norm.
The study proposal notes that "recognition of combat vehicles" software helps train soldiers to pick out good tanks and trucks from bad. There's no similar tool for human faces, although some promising work is apparently under way in projects like the search for anti-personnel landmine alternatives.
This study will provide a review of research related to behavior (hostile vs. non-hostile) derived from a variety of disciplines (such as computer simulations, behavioral psychology) and sensor parameters in various wavebands and their potential for various cues. The study will provide a way forward to implementing the appropriate cues for a software training program to discriminate combatant vs non-combatant in imagery of humans for force protection, area denial, and other military scenarios.
The Army chief information officer wants the study funded in fiscal year 2006, the proposal states. (Sorry, can't link to it.)
Londoners are seen on the city's vast amalgam of surveillance cameras an average of 300 times a day. Which means that the terrorists behind yesterday's bombings almost certainly knew they'd be caught on tape -- and went ahead with their attacks anyway.
Before Britain began installing its network of 4.2 million spycams, before spycams were even invented, backers of surveillance were arguing that people are less likely to do horrible things when they know they're being watched. That's the reason Jeremy Bentham in 1791 proposed in 1787 a "Panopticon" -- a jail in which the warden could always see what his prisoners were doing. It's the reason Chicago is linking together more than two thousand cameras into a single surveillance network.
But whether bad guys actually act differently under watch is debatable. After dozens of studies of England’s Close Circuit Television spycam system, there is "very little substantive research evidence to suggest that CCTV works," the U.K.’s National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders reports.
In America, some cities have reported short-term crime drops after the cameras have been installed. But English studies suggest that these dips are temporary, at best. Why? My guess is that crooks get used to the spycams -- and, after a while, realize that no one's watching, at least in real time. There are just too many cameras to keep track of. And the average monitor jockey can only watch six to eight video feeds, for about twenty minutes, before he starts to lose focus. It makes for an awfully weak deterrent.
Now, there's certainly some forensic value to having all those electronic eyes installed. As the AP, among many others, have noted, "the British capital's ubiquitous closed-circuit TV cameras may hold the key to determine who was behind Thursday's series of terrorist strikes." But as a preventive measure, the 7/7 attacks have shown the spycams to be flimsy, at best.
If there's a hope for surveillance-as-deterrent, it may lie in places like Chicago. Instead of forcing squads of monitor jockeys to make sense of confusing, overlapping video feeds, the city is installing video understanding algorithms into its spycam network. Come too close to a restricted government building, leave a package on an El platform, or even hang out for too long on a ghetto street corner and - smile! - you're on Criminal Camera.
But it's going to take years for the software to get installed. And no one's really sure whether it can work on a massive, city-wide scale. For now, we're stuck with the same old systems -- and the same old results.
RFID sensors... will be installed in fake little rocks. These 'rocks,' which will be the size of golf balls, will be sent from an aircraft and will detect enemies by 'listening' to them from 20 to 30 meters. These sensors should be operational within 18 months and they should be cheap enough to leave them on the battlefield after they completed their tasks.
Buried Camera for Hidden Foes
Okay. Let's say you want to keep watch over a terrorist hide-out -- a close watch. You can't just hook a surveillance camera to the side of the building, or the belly of the cave. You've got to hide it somewhere. A new Israeli invention might be able to help.
The Mini Unattended Ground Imager (MUGI) is a 9-pound, jug-sized "multispectral, medium-range surveillance system designed to detect, identify and optionally target individuals on the move," according to Defense News. But the best part is that the device can be "buried underground, with only its periscope viewfinder protruding some four inches above ground. The finger-sized protrusion is then easily concealed by any number of camouflaged items or environmental debris and remains in place from 10 days to three months, depending on the operational life of the lithium batteries and external power packs.
Designed in response to Israeli military requirements and endorsed by... Israel’s Ministry of Defense, MUGI features a daytime color camera and nighttime infrared sensor for round-the-clock recognition of suspected terrorists or intruders.
During the day, MUGI has a range of some 3,000 meters, but at night is limited to about 1,000 meters. A mechanical device holding both cameras within the MUGI’s carbon fiber canister enables rotation and tilting, for horizontal and vertical scanning as well as zooming.
[In addition to being buried,] the MUGI also can be prepackaged in Hollywood-style props that don’t have to be buried, but are strategically positioned along streets, valleys or terraces in high-threat areas. Whether partially buried or disguised by props, the only element that must remain unobstructed is a small 1.2 inch-by-3.2 inch surveillance slit.
WHEN T.V. WATCHES YOU
"If you're inside a building, a GPS receiver cannot find you. But a $40 radio chip from Rosum Corporation will do it, with the help of TV signals," notes Roland Piquepaille. The CIA-backed start-up says TV signals are 10,000 times stronger than the ones from GPS, according to the Mercury News.
Rosum founder James Spilker, one of the original architects of the GPS satellite... realized a synchronization feature in digital and analog television signals could be used for other purposes than to lock the vertical hold for older TVs.
The engineers created a radio receiver chip that could zero in on the TV signal and get the synchronization information. Using precision timing, they figure out how far a TV signal travels before it is picked up by a device equipped with Rosum chips. Next, they compare the measurements against other data that they collect with their own listening stations and then finally calculate the device's position. The Rosum engineers call this process "multilateration," which is akin to navigational triangulation...
Rosum's vice president of engineering, Greg Flammel, says tests of the technology show it can track someone in the basement floor of the San Francisco Public Library. It also found a person in the heart of San Francisco's financial district...
Rosum is best used with a GPS system, mainly because TV signals don't reach into places such as the Nevada desert or the middle of the ocean. The technology also isn't useful for tracking someone vertically. So it can locate a person in an office tower but can't determine what floor they're on unless the building is ringed with a set of Rosum antennas. (thanks to JF for the tip)
SNOOP PROGRAM RETURNS
Everyone at Defense Tech HQ did a little hat dance after we heard about the demise of MATRIX, the far-flung, state-run, terrorist-profiling database. But it looks like we danced too soon.
That system "allowed law enforcement to search a centralized database populated with records collected by states -- including criminal history, driver's license photos, property deeds and fishing licenses -- and billions of commercial data records," Ryan writes. To that, MATRIX II's architects would like to see insurance and financial information added.
That's a giant red flag, Ryan notes.
Though scores of companies sell data-mining and searching technology, only ChoicePoint, currently under media and government scrutiny for allowing identity thieves to harvest hundreds of thousands of records on Americans, has search technology and centralized insurance claim information.
Supposedly, Florida officials need all this information to fight terror. But of the 1,866,202 original MATRIX searches between July 2003 and April 2005, "less than 3 percent were related to terrorism investigations," Ryan says.
Kinda makes you wonder what they'll do if MATRIX II ever gets off the ground.
CITY-SNOOP PROGRAM RETURNS?
Back in the summer of 2003, I wrote a little story for the Village Voice on the Pentagon's plan to track everything that moves in a city. Since then, there hasn't been much word from the Defense Department about "Combat Zones that See," or CTS. A planned demonstration at Ft. Belvoir never came about – or was kept very quiet. Last year, Congress moved to yank funds from the program's budget.
But now, CTS may be on the way back, if Tony Tether -- the head of Defense Department far-out research arm Darpa -- has his way. The agency's proposed 2006 budget calls for $20 million over three years for CTS. It's part of an expanded, $340 million push by Darpa to develop technologies for urban battles (see Falluja, Najaf, etc.)
Here's what Tether told the Senate Armed Services committee last week about CTS:
We need a network, or web, of sensors to better map a city and the activities in it, including inside buildings, to sort adversaries and their equipment from civilians and their equipment, including in crowds, and to spot snipers, suicide bombers, or IEDs (improvised explosive devices). We need to watch a great variety of things, activities, and people over a wide area and have great resolution available when we need it. And this is not just a matter of more and better sensors, but just as important, the systems needed to make actionable intelligence out of all the data. Closely related to this are tagging, tracking, and locating (TT&L) systems that help us watch and track a particular person or object of interest. These systems will also help us detect the clandestine production or possession of weapon of mass destruction in overseas urban areas. There was a recent incident in Iraq where one of our UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] spotted some insurgents firing a mortar. Then the insurgents climbed back into their car and drove away. The good news was that the UAV was able to track the car so U.S. helicopters could go after it and destroy it. The bad news was that, at one point, some of the passengers got out. Then we had to decide whether to follow those individuals or the car because we simply did not have enough coverage available. If we’d had other sensors available, we would have had a better chance of getting all of those insurgents.
If we could quickly track-back where a vehicle came from, it would greatly help us deal with suicide car bombers. It is difficult, if not impossible, to deter the bombers themselves, just as you cannot deter a missile that has already been launched. But, one key to deterrence that has been missing is reliable attribution, or a “return address.” If we knew where the car came from, using, for example, RSTA [reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition] systems that allowed us to quickly trace the car carrying the explosives back to the house or shop it came from, we could then attack that place and those people.
CTS is one of a bunch of Darpa urban ops programs that skates the fine line between creepy and cool. The agency would also like $10 million to build robotic, flying spies that weight less than 10 grams and are just two inches across. The "Home Field" program would "develop networked video and LADAR [laser radar] processing technology that rapidly and reliably updates a 3D model of an urban area. [Such an] urbanscape will provide 3D situational awareness with sufficient detail and accuracy to remove the 'home field advantage' enjoyed by opponents." Meanwhile, the "Pre-Conflict Anticipation and Shaping" (PCAS) could help American counterinsurgents predict where conflicts might boil up next.
The project will combine computational social science modeling and simulation, scenario generation, evolutionary programming, planning, and multiplayer gaming. When integrated, these technologies allow combatant commanders and senior decision makers to understand and anticipate the societal/regional indicators that precipitate instability and conflict within an area of responsibility, then mitigate the impact of that instability... The goal of PCAS' more powerful societal/regional models is an integrated perspective encompassing, in a consistent way, all the dimensions of social change.
SURVEILLANCE IS FUN!
Being Big Brother can be such a drag, staring at walls of black-and-white security monitors all day. It's a one-way trip to napville. And it doesn't exactly make for tight security, either. One person can only watch six to eight surveillance screens for about twenty minutes before everything goes blurry, according to the watcher's rule of thumb.
An Atlanta start-up, Vistascape, has been livening things up for monitor jockeys, with a bowl full of eye candy, to keep them engaged in what they're doing. Screen banks are replaced with a single, 3D-view of a facility that lets a security officer "fly" around the area from his desktop, and focus on a single intruder. The U.S. Navy, the port of Corpus Christi, and several private energy companies are all using the system. About 20 other installations – including Boston's Logan Airport -- are scheduled to get in on the fun soon. My article in this month's Wired magazine has an example of how it works.
THERE'S MORE: Patrick Di Justo has a hot article in today's Times on the dangers of unsecured webcams. Teenagers in panties are mentioned.
SATELLITE SNOOPING ON THE RISE
It wasn't too long ago that only soldiers and spies could afford GPS trackers. Now, Declan McCullaugh tells us, the "devices now are readily available to jealous spouses, private investigators and local police departments for just a few hundred dollars." What's more, "a federal judge in New York ruled last week that police [do] not need court authorization" before snooping on a suspect via satellite.
THERE'S MORE: In April, the L.A. Sherriff's Department is going to be testing out model airplane-sized drones on surveillance missions. Unmanned mini-fliers like these -- the Navy's Silver Fox and the Marines' Dragon Eye, for example -- have been used with more than a little success in Iraq.
PAKISTAN PRINTS
The State Department has awarded Lockheed Martin a $9.4 million contract to develop state-of-the-art fingerprint identification system to help Pakistan to quickly identify suspected criminals and terrorists.
Where do I chip in?
The Pakistan Automated Fingerprint Identification System (PAFIS) comprises a central fingerprint database, criminal history system, and geographically distributed access stations to serve police forces throughout the country. PAFIS will link Pakistani law enforcement community with Interpol and national police agencies such as the FBI. The United States has a similar program with the Republic of the Philippines.
Can you tell a "tented arch" (right) from a "whorl" (below)?
PAFIS is a variant of a similar systems used by the FBI and the Defense Department, which use a software suite developed using Red Hat Linux 7.3 running on National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) clusters. Although the code is open-source, it is also export controlled. "It's free, but it's export controlled, which means if you get it outside the U.S. or you post it on the Internet, the export control people will come get you," an NIST manager told NewsForge.
Um, yeah. The two countries have little tradition of protecting software. An estimated 83% of software in Pakistan and 72% in the Philippines, according to one study, are pirated (compared with twenty-two percent in the United States). Good luck with those export controls.
--Jeffrey Lewis
TSA WANTS "SUSPICIOUS" SPOTTER
As if you weren't nervous enough in the airport. The Transportation Security Administration has started to hunt for technologies that'll secretly spot "suspicious behavior" in passengers.
The request for information, filed by the minds of the William J. Hughes Technical Center in the Atlantic City Airport, hopes to find ways to "sense patterns of individuals' physiological response(s) and/or overt behavior that are reliably associated with malicious intent."
Proposed technologies may be applicable to the screening of travelers or of employees of transportation facilities (e.g., airports, rail stations, and bus terminals) and carriers.
Ideally, proposed technologies will be non invasive, remote, covert, passive, automatic, and suitable for area, as well as portal use. However, alternatives requiring contact, interaction (challenge-response, for example), manual operation, etc. will also be considered.
"Problems in searching fingerprint databases have left the American military unable to check fully the identities of thousands of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, raising concerns that they might be releasing suspects prematurely, according to Pentagon officials and documents," the Times reports.
The Defense Department, in the field, has used a mobile system that records fingerprints of suspects, but it cannot always search for a match in other government databases.
In a memorandum last February, the Pentagon said the fingerprinting "problem must be rectified as soon as possible" to fight terrorism more effectively. It required that all new electronic fingerprinting systems comply with accepted standards.
The situation has improved since then, said John D. Woodward Jr., the director of the Defense Department's Biometrics Management Office. But he added, "We still need to improve..."
Mr. Woodward, citing "national security concerns," declined to say how many prints had gone unprocessed as a result. Another official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the information, said it exceeded 16,000 at the time of the memorandum.
DALEY DOES DARPA ONE BETTER
Last year, I took at look at a Darpa proposal to keep an entire city under watch. The idea was to network together surveillance cameras, and use computer algorithms to watch out for suspicious behavior.
"Cameras are the equivalent of hundreds of sets of eyes," Mr. Daley said when he unveiled the new project this month. "They're the next best thing to having police officers stationed at every potential trouble spot."
Police specialists here can already monitor live footage from about 2,000 surveillance cameras around the city, so the addition of 250 cameras under the mayor's new plan is not a great jump. The way these cameras will be used, however, is an extraordinary technological leap.
Sophisticated new computer programs will immediately alert the police whenever anyone viewed by any of the cameras placed at buildings and other structures considered terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in circles, lingers outside a public building, pulls a car onto the shoulder of a highway, or leaves a package and walks away from it. Images of those people will be highlighted in color at the city's central monitoring station, allowing dispatchers to send police officers to the scene immediately.
The Times notes that Daley & Co. "designed the system after studying the video surveillance network in London." It's an odd choice. Because the British camera systems' role in reducing crime has been, at best, inconclusive.
It's one of several ways that biometric technology is now "creeping into everyday life," the AP notes.
The Nine Zero, an upscale hotel in Boston, recently began letting guests in its $3,000-a-night Cloud Nine suite enter and exit by looking into a camera that analyzes their iris patterns. Piggly Wiggly Co. grocery stores in the South just launched a pay-by-fingerprint system, though pilot tests elsewhere have had lukewarm results...
Feelings seemed mixed about the lockers at the Statue of Liberty on a muggy New York afternoon last week.
Some people were befuddled by the system and had to put their fingers on the reader several times before a scan was properly made. Others forgot their locker number upon their return, or didn't remember which finger they had used to check it out. One young woman accidentally put her ticket to the statue in the locker, requiring her to open it and then re-register it all over again with another finger scan.
With all the confusion, lines at the three touchscreen kiosks that control the bank of 170 lockers frequently stretched six or seven people deep, requiring a five-minute wait.
CONGRESS POKES ALL-SEEING EYE IN SKY
It's a spook fantasy: an all-seeing, always-on, rain-or-shine constellation of satellites, able to keep track of every plane, truck, and person below.
"We need to know something about everything all the time," undersecretary of defense for intelligence Stephen Cambone told a conference last year. "We need an illuminator, throwing into relief all the pictures and activities on the Earth's surface. And then we need to be able to switch on the spotlight, or alert other systems, to dive deep."
For years, U.S. intelligence and defense officials have been pouring money into such a system, the Space Based Radar, or SBR. The goal was to have the satellite array up and running by 2012.
Now, Congress is telling the Pentagon to go back to the drawing board. The House Appropriations Committee has cut the Air Force’s 2005 budget request for Space Based Radar from $327 million to $75 million, ISR Journal notes. Instead of being treated as a project that's about to be built, the committee added, SBR should be approached as a research and development effort.
"When weighed against military operations in Iraq and the ongoing war against terrorism, the SBR program 'simply cannot be afforded,'" the magazine quote the committee as saying.
The Air Force has yet to settle on many of the technical details of the proposed radar satellite constellation such as the size of the spacecraft and the orbits they would use. Very preliminary estimates for budget planning call for nine satellites in low Earth orbit.
Air Force officials estimate that a constellation of that size could cost at least $30 billion. That figure is more than the Air Force’s combined budget for nearly all of its other satellite efforts with the exception of the development of the laser-linked Transformational Communications satellites…
Even that figure may not show the true price tag of the satellites, given the Air Force’s difficulty in forecasting the cost of its space programs, the committee stated. One example is the troubled Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) High missile warning program, which is now expected to cost 450 percent more than the Air Force estimated when it was at about the same point of development as the Space Based Radar system is now.
THESE GLASSES KNOW WHEN YOU'RE LOOKING
A Queen's University researcher has developed glasses that can tell when someone's looking at you. These sensors then trigger a video camera, mounted on the shades, which will auotmatically "videoblog" the conversation.
A ring of infrared light-emitting diodes on the glasses produce a red eye effect in the onlooker's eyes. The LEDs also produce a glint on the cornea. When the glint lines up with the center of the pupil, the glasses know that eye contact has been made.
The interaction is then sent to "eyeBlog," a program which "uses this information to record and publish face-2-face conversations without dividing the user's attention between the event being recorded, and the device being used to record it," the researcher, Connor Dickie, explains. "Moreover, becasue eyeBlog uses eye-contact to start and stop recording, users do not need to sift through hours of footage to find interesting segments."
"The case arose from a 2001 FBI surveillance operation in Las Vegas, in which agents obtained a court order compelling a telematics company to secretly activate the stolen vehicle recovery feature in a customer's car. The feature, designed to listen-in on car thieves as they cruise around in a stolen auto, turns on a dashboard microphone and pipes conversations out over a cellphone connection -- normally to the company's response center, but in this case to an FBI listening post. "
THERE'S MORE: Congress yesterday gave the FBI "greater authority to demand records from businesses in terrorism cases without the approval of a judge or a grand jury," the Times reports. "While banks, credit unions and other financial institutions are currently subject to such demands, the measure expands the list to include car dealers, pawnbrokers, travel agents, casinos and other businesses."
The cameras are already in place. The computer code is being developed at a dozen or more major companies and universities. And the trial runs have already been planned.
Everything is set for a new Pentagon program to become perhaps the federal government's widest reaching, most invasive mechanism yet for keeping us all under watch. Not in the far-off, dystopian future. But here, and soon.
The military is scheduled to issue contracts for Combat Zones That See, or CTS, as early as September. The first demonstration should take place before next summer, according to a spokesperson. Approach a checkpoint at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, during the test and CTS will spot you. Turn the wheel on this sprawling, 8,656-acre army encampment, and CTS will record your action. Your face and license plate will likely be matched to those on terrorist watch lists. Make a move considered suspicious, and CTS will instantly report you to the authorities.
Fort Belvoir is only the beginning for CTS. Its architects at the Pentagon say it will help protect our troops in cities like Baghdad, where for the past few weeks fleeting attackers have been picking off American fighters in ones and twos. But defense experts believe the surveillance effort has a second, more sinister, purpose: to keep entire cities under an omnipresent, unblinking eye.
This isn't some science fiction nightmare. Far from it. CTS depends on parts you could get, in a pinch, at Kmart.
Read more about CTS in my cover story (!!!!) for the Village Voice.
SURVEILLANCE: WHAT'S RIGHT, WHAT'S WRONG
Not all domestic surveillance and biometric technologies are created evil, says the Cato Institute's Wayne Crews, in an e-mail to privacy advocates.
Here's his framework for distinguishing between the mildly creepy surveillance efforts and the truly invasive:
1) BAD: Mandatory National ID cards encoded with biometric identifiers, or compulsory databases for data mining purposes.
2) NOT (NECESSARILY) BAD, but can be wholly abused and require extensive 4th amendment safeguards that do not yet exist: Gov't run face cameras (and related technologies like iris scanners) that ride on top of a database of criminals or wanted individuals. These should **not** collect data on individuals other than those already in the database (presumably there thru appropriate 4th amendment procedures). Incidental data collected on random individuals cannot be retained. Problem is the guarantee. This is where I think the real future fight lies, and the most risk for sensible evolution of these technologies.
3) GOOD: Countless private uses of biometrics that offer the opportunity for extraordinary security by preventing others from posing as us. This is where the market can shine. However, these must not be allowed access to data gleaned by gov't coercion, or they move into category 1 or 2 and give the entire industry (biometric or data mining) a black eye, and make it impossible to defend the industry from regulation. Let's keep it self-regulated.
Nutshell: (1) avoid mandatory databases (2) ensure 4th amendment protections even for public surveillance, and (3) avoid mixing public and private databases.
Millions of 25-year-old secret documents, set to be declassified next month, will be kept clandestine until the end of 2006.
President Bush's executive order, however, doesn't alter the Clinton Administration's basic structures of declassification. Under that arrangement, about a billion pages of historical documents have been brought out into the open over the last seven years.
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 
It's not the only news on the NSA's surveillance efforts that trickling out today. Seymour Hersh 
Ryan Singel, as usual, has the 
Now, Darpa is showing its 
But, until recently, those databases didn't seem particularly intimidating, because NSA snoops were 
Former NSA director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman 
Darpa's "Unique Signature Detection Project (formerly known as the Odortype Detection program)" aims to sniff out genetic markers in "human emanations (urine, sweat, etc.)" that "can be used to identify and distinguish specific high-level-of-interest individuals within groups of enemy troops."
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 
Spotting insurgents, sorting out friend from foe – it's beyond tough in today’s guerilla war zones. So tough, that no single monitor can be counted on to handle the job. The Pentagon's answer: build a set of 
The way they'd keep watch would be different, too. Not as a individual sensors, but as a network of monitors, communicating with 
Defense Update spots an Israeli surveillance tool that I hadn't heard of before: a rifle-mounted, sensor-filled projectile called "
There are a 
Rummy went to the 
The camera network - using software from 
So I guess I'm not surprised to learn from tomorrow's New York Times that the 
Arkin takes a peek at section 126 of the 
Last month? Nope. 
"The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States... by 
All of the sigint specialists emphasized repeatedly that keeping tabs on Americans is way beyond the bounds of what they ordinarily do -- no matter what the conspiracy crowd may think.
Take Cisco. The company "earns $500 million a year in revenues [in China] and holds 60 percent of the Chinese market for routers, switches, and other sophisticated networking gear."
The agency would like to harness that system better. Not just the conscious mind. But the automatic and instant firing of neurons that goes on every time we take a look at something.
The U.S. government is pouring a ton of cash into new-jack sensors that can sniff out hidden explosives. But the Customs and Border Protection agency has decided to stick with a more tried-and-true method. The agency has increased its 1400-dog K-9 force by more than 200 in the last two years, says National Defense magazine.
Ohio State is working on a 
But the article also mentioned a sci-fi sounding research thrust I hadn't heard of before: "a little chemical lab analyzes the sweat, body odor, and skin flakes in the human thermal plume -- the halo of heat that surrounds each person."
It's an age-old problem: How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys?
Before Britain began installing its network of 4.2 million spycams, before spycams were even invented, backers of surveillance were arguing that people are less likely to do horrible things when they know they're being watched. That's the reason Jeremy Bentham in 1791 proposed in 1787 a "
Sooooo sneaky. The Pentagon is working with North Dakota researchers to turn 
The 
"If you're inside a building, a GPS receiver cannot find you. But a $40 radio chip from Rosum Corporation will do it, with the help of 
Officials in Florida -- who helped run the original data-mining effort -- have put out a 
But now, CTS may be on the way back, if Tony Tether -- the head of Defense Department far-out research arm Darpa -- has his way. The agency's 
It wasn't too long ago that only soldiers and spies could afford GPS trackers. Now, Declan McCullaugh tells us, the "devices now are readily available to jealous spouses, private investigators and local police departments for just a few hundred dollars." What's more, "a federal judge in New York ruled last week that police [do] not need court authorization" before 
Last year, I took at look at a Darpa proposal to 
It's a spook fantasy: an all-seeing, always-on, rain-or-shine constellation of satellites, able to keep track of every plane, truck, and person below.
