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So, you can't refute it, just call me a hippie?

Hmmm, well, I'm on lunch break, let's take a minute and do some quick googling, shall we?

Iraq NEVER had WMD

"In March 1986 UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar formally accused Iraq of using chemical weapons against Iran. Citing the report of four chemical warfare experts whom the UN had sent to Iran in February and March 1986, the secretary general called on Baghdad to end its violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol on the use of chemical weapons. The UN report concluded that "Iraqi forces have used chemical warfare against Iranian forces"; the weapons used included both mustard gas and nerve gas..."

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/cw/program.htm

NEVER had any link to terrorists.

"Turkish intelligence agents told the agency that Baghdad's support of the PKK intensified especially during the last three months when Saddam's arms and equipment were supplied to PKK bases in Iraq by the Iraqi command.."

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6465/is_199912/ai_n25746892

"Saddam has supplied the PLO] with rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missile launchers and Russian-made anti-aircraft guns..."."

http://www.acpr.org.il/cloakrm/clk100.html

"For instance, how about their support for The Army of Muhammad, a known al-Qaeda subsidiary operating in Bahrain?"

"Nor was that Saddam's only support for an AQ subsidiary. Saddam put money into Egypt's Islamic Jihad."

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/03/14/saddam-supported-at-least-two-al-qaeda-groups-pentagon/comment-page-1/

"Beyond cash and diplomatic help, Saddam Hussein was the Conrad Hilton of the terrorist world. He provided a place for terrorists to kick back, relax, and reflect after killing people for a living. ..."

"Saddam Hussein's general store for terrorists included medical care, too..."

"According to dissidents, journalists who have visited, and even United Nations weapons inspectors, Saddam Hussein appears to have offered training to terrorists, in addition to funding, diplomatic help, safe haven and medical care. The Associated Press reports that Coalition forces shut down at least three terrorist training camps in Iraq. The most notorious of these was the base at Salman Pak, about 15 miles southeast of Baghdad. Before the war, numerous Iraqi defectors said the camp featured a passenger jet on which terrorists sharpened their air piracy skills...."

http://www.husseinandterror.com/

Apparently your definition of "NEVER" is not one used by the rest of the world!

Who cares, the idea that a single federal executive officer can be held to account for his positions changing ignores the many hands he has up his ass. Oboma may squirm more when he feels those fingers probing his anus but his vote for FISA belies any claim he is the felicitous champion of American or any other liberty. I think it is time to consider more executive positions being directly elected by the people. It is audacious to think that a single individual should be given such a wide latitude with enacting policies in the appointment of positions even in such an individual's own cabinet. Our democratic system has become mired by the limits inherent in its design and it may be time again to sit down and listen to those who may have more elegant designs for a democratic society. What must be done is an examination of the mechanisms both politically and economically that this country has

I don't think your edits materially changed the point I was making.

People are forgetting the threat that Saddam represented w.r.t. nuclear weapons in the light of the Bush administration screwups and lies in attempting to justify the 2nd gulf war. While people rightly point out that the second gulf war was a bad idea, the fact is that Iraq was frighteningly close prior to the first gulf war,

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/nuke/program.htm

and despite the fact that Saddam was not actively importing nuclear materials at the time of the second gulf war there was evidence that he was trying to lay the groundwork for this. The British have yet to repudiate the Butler report conclusions regarding the Niger visit by an Iraqi minister.

The Bush administration is a pack of bumbling idiots, but that doesn't mean that Saddam wasn't an extremely dangerous person.

The other aspect of this that has gotten inadequate coverage is the involvement of American and European countries in supplying the means for the Iraqi nuclear program and the UN supression of this information. Given corporate behavior in this regard (i.e. treason in my opinion) it is very hard for me to feel secure with the concept that Saddam would not ever be able to restart his nuclear program.

Did you actually read/view anything beyond the summary? This looks nothing like those. Absolutely nothing. It IS more of a first-person puzzle game than a first-person "shooter." In fact, if you look at the controls, there's not even anything to "shoot." You go through and find the necessary chemicals to activate the various parts of the immune system.

Title III of the wiretapping law "Title III authorizes only a court of "competent jurisdiction" to issue wiretap orders. The term is defined as a "court of general criminal jurisdiction of a State who is authorized by a statute of that State" to issue wiretap orders" (Reference: http://pd.co.la.ca.us/overv.htm)

Ok, lets do this slowly.. When ever you are attempting to quote context of a law, it is imperative that you look at the actual law instead of somebodies rendition of it. Perhaps you couldn't find it because it is Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act and not the wiretapping law (I know, I looked for the wiretapping act once too). Here is the relevant subsection describing the procedures to get a warrant. Please take a good look at section 7 where is says (paraphrasing) Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, If certain conditions are true or believed to be true, a law enforcement may intercept such wire, oral, or electronic communication if an application for an order approving the interception is made in accordance with this section within forty-eight hours after the interception has occurred, or begins to occur.

This clearly states that a wire tap can happen without a warrant. Granted If a warrant isn't present or applied for within 48 hours then the information cannot be used against the person. But it is clear enough that if the communications result in something usable, a Warrant can be sought after the fact as well as the cops could use any information to pursue other leads.

FISA, if I recall requires a FISA court to issue the order. Besides that, not al parts of the FISA bill are even constitutional.

FISA doesn't require a warrant when the other person is not a US citizen or in US jurisdiction. That part has always been open to the president. But I'm wondering what is unconstitutional about it. In 2002 the FISC review court ruled that it was constitutional and the patriot act was too. It lists many other cases in it's order including the famous Kieth case which the supreme court holds it as constitutional saying that it is the nature of the threat, not the nature of the government's response to the threat, that determines the constitutionality of national security surveillance.

In a sealed case under review by the same court, It mentions "The Truong court, as
did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent
authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information"

Both cases are an interesting read. You should at least check them out.

As for constitutional protection of non-citizens, you are correct that citizens are granted more protection than non-citizens, but MANY sites, including the ACLU website, among others, clearly state that the Bill of Rights applies to anyone within the borders of the United States

I don't go off of what other sites say when there is a good deal of question over the legitimacy of things. I look for the language in court decisions on the subject at hand. For instance, the courts have ruled that the 4th amendment doesn't apply to special law enforcement needs like searched at the borders because the need to secure the border out ways the protections. There are other cases too. For a non-citizen legally in the country, a good majority of the right apply because they don't give your right but restrict the government from infringing on them. However, non-citizens in the country illegally don't have that favor. Well until recently when the supreme court ruled in opposition of itself on Samson Dada but if you read the opinion, dissentin

you haven't been successful in finding anything else you could actually prove he did illegally?

Actually, there is, since the government fucked up and set a lawyer a copy of the transcript of his own phone calls.

It's just been wandering around the court system for a couple of years now.

http://fas.org/sgp/jud/statesec/ahif090706.pdf

How about this? http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/m071906.pdf
can you google? or are you just fucking lazy?

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3_07_1.pdf

It's $10.20 (paper back) on Amazon.

or you can get it on line from the us army at Us.army.mil.
see FMI 3-07.22

The FAS has the 2004-2006 version posted here

No story. move along.

Perhaps you should look beyond the party mindset. My passionate fondness for the doctor isn't because he's a Republican ('the new kind') but because he doesn't fit the mold of either party and, as has been said before, he doesn't fear speaking his because his arguments are based on reason, reasearch and principles.

I'm pretty aware of his past and voting record (more so than most I'd think) and whenever I'm puzzled by his vote (or even when they make perfect sense) I still try and find out about his particular motivations which always make perfect, logical sense. Perhaps you'd also like to know I read all his speeches and statements online which are in perfect accordance with his voting record. You should try reading some, perhaps you'll find them very revealing.

This video should be right up the street of the average slashdot reader: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5792391565012624048&hl=en (speech here: http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2007/cr0522107.htm ) or his recent speech on the farm bill should demonstrate his principal standing and familiarity with the issues: http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2008/tst060108.htm .

Here's a bill sponsored my Dr Paul I'm particulary interested in, in seeing passed: http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2007_cr/hr3835.html H.R. 3835: To restore the Constitution's checks and balances and protections against government abuses as envisioned by the Founding Fathers

Excerpt:
SEC. 4. TORTURE OR COERCED CONFESSIONS.

            No civilian or military tribunal of the United States shall admit as evidence statements extracted from the defendant by torture or coercion.

EC. 9. USE OF SECRET EVIDENCE TO MAKE FOREIGN TERRORIST DESIGNATIONS.

            Notwithstanding any other law, secret evidence shall not be used by the President or any other member of the executive branch to designate an individual or organization with a United States presence as a foreign terrorist or foreign terrorist organization for purposes of the criminal law or otherwise imposing criminal or civil sanctions.

I'm not a republican supporter because it's the same as being a democrat supporter, supporting the same system which is so very flawed and which disgraces the country and treads freely on liberty. There's nothing wrong with being a libertarian either. What could anyone have against peace and liberty? I'm in fact very comfortable with people who call themselves libertarian because I know they have no inclination in telling me on how I should live my life.

Link to FY 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act

It authorizes $734,126,000 to the Director of National Intelligence for the 2008 fiscal year. I'm not sure if that's more or less than previous years.

At the bottom of the bill (always the most fun to read) is about 80 million in earmarks. They seem to cover the spectrum from modernizing the Air Force's RC-135s to funding the Naval Oceanographic Command to providing 23 million to the National Drug Intelligence Center.

As for the rest of it? Sec 309 seems to be the start of an affirmative action program in the intelligence community. The Director of National Intelligence would have to submit a report to congress on plans to increase diversity.

Sec 325 is titled "Extension of Authority to Delete Information About Receipt and Disposition of Foreign Gifts and Decorations"

After reading a chunk of it, there's quite a bit of other items in the bill. The torture provision was just one of the sections in it. After getting bored, I skimmed through the rest. Since I didn't see any mention of "hot pokers" followed by my name, my interest waned further.

I found this report from the EU parliament very interesting: http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/rapport_echelon_en.pdf At page 27 there is a list of all countries intercepting private communications, and basically everyone does it? I think some former FRA employee basically admitted they have done this sort of thing for a long time already too. I'm by no means saying this is ok, but it's kinda interesting how Google reacted on this for example. They said they can't put their servers in Sweden, but US/UK etc is fine? What is the differance?

And now the official move to let civilian authorities log all your telephonics just like the intelligenace srvvices do at Menwith hill http://cndyorks.gn.apc.org/mhs/ http://www.fas.org/irp/facility/menwith.htm

New labourt have introduced more than 4000 pieces of legislation since 1997 and thus in many ways have introduced the "patriot act" by increments instead of one big piece. this is an outrage and indeed people should be making a big noise about it.

To be fair, there are a few other differences between the two forums, but the point may still be valid.

I'll say.

My first suspicion was that one just reeked of horrid angry fruit salad 1999 intarwebs design (dancing Jesu & flying toasters with a midi track in octaves meant for torture timed with a blinking marquee tag). Honestly, they look about on par although I prefer the simplicity of YaBB though in my opinion it doesn't seem to be an issue here. Normally this is the biggest discriminator for a website's success, not the content.

I did find it interesting to note the slant to these message boards though. The 'uncensored' website has this text as it's homepage:

Did you know:

• The consensus view among scientists is that polygraph testing has no scientific basis?
• The FBI considered the creator of the lie detector test to be a phony and a crackpot?
• The man who started the CIA's polygraph program thinks that plants can read human thoughts?
• The foremost polygraph advocate in academia was discredited by a federal judge?
• A prominent past-president of the American Polygraph Association is a phony Ph.D., and this premier polygraph organization doesn't consider it an ethics problem?
• The longest polygraph school produces newly minted polygraphers in just 14 weeks -- less than half the time it takes to graduate from a typical barber college?
• The Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment (the erstwhile DoD Polygraph Institute) suppressed a study suggesting that innocent blacks are more likely to fail the polygraph than innocent whites?
• The researcher who developed the U.S. Government's polygraph Test for Espionage and Sabotage "thought the whole security screening program should be shut down?"
• The National Academy of Sciences concluded that "[polygraph testing's] accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies?"
• Spies Ignatz Theodor Griebl, Karel Frantisek Koecher, Jiri Pasovsky, Larry Wu-tai Chin, Aldrich Hazen Ames, Ana Belen Montes, and Leandro Aragoncillo all passed the polygraph?
• One of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history passed the polygraph and killed again?
• Al-Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents know full well that the lie detector is bogus?
• You don't have to be a psychopath, go to spy school, or somehow believe your own lies to fool the polygraph? (We'll reveal how it's done.)

While the 'censored' board has this as its opening text:

The Polygraph Place

Incorrect. From http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/jdam.htm
"Guidance is accomplished via the tight coupling of an accurate Global Positioning System (GPS) with a 3-axis Inertial Navigation System (INS). The Guidance Control Unit (GCU) provides accurate guidance in both GPS-aided INS modes of operation (13 meter (m) Circular Error Probable (CEP)) and INS-only modes of operation (30 m CEP). INS only is defined as GPS quality hand-off from the aircraft with GPS unavailable to the weapon (e.g. GPS jammed). In the event JDAM is unable to receive GPS signals after launch for any reason, jamming or otherwise, the INS will provide rate and acceleration measurements which the weapon software will develop into a navigation solution."

The military does not depend solely upon GPS for any navigational necessity. We had a half dozen GPS devices in my squad in Afghanistan, but we also had a map and compass and knew how to use them. It's like that all the way up to the B-2 Spirit: use GPS, but don't make it your only resource.

This is not disimilar to the ESA's approach. Their Rosetta probe is a development of a Matra Marconi (now part of Astrium) geostationary communications satellite bus. In turn, the Mars and Venus Express probes both used a design derived from Rosetta, with many subsystems (e.g. power) also shared.

This is a little silly on the face of it. There is little doubt that Israel could obliterate them right back and that is BEFORE we chuck a MIRV or two in their general direction. Israel has reliable delivery systems and there is very little doubt they have nukes of their own. And more than one or two nukes. It's probably more like 30. Israel can annihilate the cities of any Middle Eastern state of their choosing and still have a stick to wave afterwards.

One Defense Intelligence Agency estimate puts the number of Israeli nukes at 65 to 85 weapons.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction

If Iran were so foolish as to attempt to "obliterate" Israel, Iran would cease to exist within hours of the attempt.

Middle Eastern leaders talk of destroying Israel because it plays well to the masses and the Iranian leadership are crazy like foxes in this regard. These leaders themselves live comfortable privileged lives and will not act like the young suicide bombers they employ as cannon fodder. The mad-dog Arab who will do anything is a propaganda tool meant to scare the shit out of the West. And it works.

I love how the linked report has a large section labled "Seismics", with all the text redacted. The NSA are such teases.

They do release a lot of interesting things though. I've been reading 'Spartans in Darkness', a well-written history of SIGINT in the Vietnam War, by an NSA historian.

http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/spartans/index.html

So, today the Bush administration is brilliant, and they came up with a genius plan to make email go away, while appearing incompetent.

Well, yeah, except: what happened to the final backup tapes of the first installation?

Since it's the last backup of that system it should definitely be marked for retention. And surely, as they realized that they had a retention issue with the new system, they would have ensured to maintain those tapes due to the Presidential Records Act that Bush himself amended?

Also, doesn't it concern anyone that he changed the law regarding what communications can be released and when on Nov 1 2001, just three weeks after 9/11? Coincidence and circumstantial, perhaps, but concerning...

Yeah, but the Coast Guard has really only used the Predators under a trial program run with the Air Force. They did get a neat orange stripe on them for a few months.

The CG was planning on using a tilt-rotor (think V-22 Osprey) UAV called the "EagleEye" http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/TRUSground1.jpg as part of their Deepwater acquisition project. They even planned on buyin 45 of them, along with 4 Predators for longer range stuff.

However, it looks like funding has stalled out, and I don't see any mention of it in HR 2830 budget authorization the House just passed. (Though the President may veto this one anyway, it's got some pretty controversial provisions)

while the drone cost is hypothetical.

Personally, I was figuring more on a cruise missile than a drone* for such a high risk target. Still, it's not like we can't make an educated guess.
~$500k for a tomahawk.
$40 million for a set of 4 predators, including ground systems.

Figure half the cost is the ground station and sat link, and that's $5 million each for the preds. $3 million for a more disposable drone isn't out of sight. Or for a much more capable cruise missile, for that matter.

*The difference being that you at least hope to get the drone back.

More information on the role of the F-117 can be found at Frontline, AirToAirCombat.com, FAS as well as other sources on the intertubes. Last link has pictures of the aircraft as well as pictures and a non-Flash video of the aftermath of the only F-117 to ever be shot down. In this case, over Serbia.

These higher powered laser devices can incapacitate pilots and inflict eye injuries when viewed at closer ranges. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) documented two such cases in which pilots sustained eye injuries and were incapacitated
during critical phases of flight. In one of these events, the pilot experienced a burning sensation and tearing. A subsequent eye examination revealed "multiple flash burns" in the pilot's cornea. In a few other documented incidents, pilots provided safety reports indicating that injuries were sustained from exposure to laser lights. In one case, a copilot received burns on the outer coating of the eye and broken blood vessels.6 In another incident, a pilot was struck several times by a laser beam and was diagnosed as having a "burned retina." In about a dozen other cases, pilots reported short term visual impairment that did not require further medical attention.

FAA researchers have compiled a database of more than 400 incidents since 1990 in which pilots have been startled, distracted, temporarily blinded, or disoriented by laser exposure. To date no aviation accidents have been attributed to laser lights, although there have been crashes caused by similarly debilitating glare and flashblinding from natural sunlight. Flight simulator studies conducted by the FAA found that exposure to bright lasers can result in unacceptable levels of visual and operational problems, but concluded that enforcing already established limits to protect pilots from laser exposure when operating near airports provides an adequate margin of safety.

of the NRX program. NRX (NERVA [NERVA - Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application] Reactor-Experimental Research) was the engine that would power the spacecraft that was supposed to take us to Mars and beyond. Unfortunately it was cancelled because of 'environmental concerns' http://www.fas.org/nuke/space/kiwi.gif.

I work in this field and actually I am sadly not surprised by this at all. It is a bit of a chicken and an egg problem. Without a solid example of a good educational game it is hard to show educators the benefits of educational gaming. Without by-in from educators it is hard to get funding to build a good game.

Meanwhile the government sees little reason to look at funding R&D in education to look at innovative approaches to teaching this new generation.

However, a lot of people are working on this problem. I work for the Federation of American Scientists http://www.fas.org/programs/ltp/index.html and we have a couple of decent examples of educational games.

Also you might find this link to the educational games summit (way back in 2006) interesting. http://www.fas.org/programs/ltp/publications/summit/index.html

I work in this field and actually I am sadly not surprised by this at all. It is a bit of a chicken and an egg problem. Without a solid example of a good educational game it is hard to show educators the benefits of educational gaming. Without by-in from educators it is hard to get funding to build a good game.

Meanwhile the government sees little reason to look at funding R&D in education to look at innovative approaches to teaching this new generation.

However, a lot of people are working on this problem. I work for the Federation of American Scientists http://www.fas.org/programs/ltp/index.html and we have a couple of decent examples of educational games.

Also you might find this link to the educational games summit (way back in 2006) interesting. http://www.fas.org/programs/ltp/publications/summit/index.html

For anybody who thinks that the scientific basis of the polygraph is anything other than 100%, weapons-grade bullonium, I got a couple of names names for you:

Aldrich Ames:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames

Gary Leon Ridgway (AKA green river killer)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_river_killer

Both of them passed a polygraph. With Ames, he passed numerous polygraphs while he was working for the USSR.

Apologists for polygraph testing say that Ames was given big, bad, scary, 'sophisticated countermeasures' by his KGB contacts, but he says that all his KGB guy told him was to get a good night's sleep and try to relax.

You can read Ames' letter to the federation of American Scientists here:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/polygraph/ames.html

as an answer to researchers hired out for this bs.

http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/datamining.pdf

Somehow, I don't foresee sending a JDAM into some clueless n00b's family room window as being good publicity.

Cleaning up the mess of any conceivable "dirty bomb" is a mop and bucket affair.

Mopping every square centimeter of every surface in a large area would be quite an undertaking. Then, how do you dispose of the slop?

Think clean-up from a toxic bomb would be easy? Seventy-five recovery workers from the WTC site have been diagnosed with blood cell cancers that were likely caused by their exposure to the toxic stew of Ground Zero, while the EPA said everything was honky-dory. The total number of cancer cases caused by the toxic cloud may be in the hundreds. That wasn't even at attack designed to be toxic.

We can also look to the "clean up" in New Orleans to see just how well we could expect the government to respond to such a disaster. If a dirty bomb just needs a mop and a bucket, surely some spilled water would be even easier, right? Ha, ha. It's funny because it's tragic.

Shit, a full-on nuclear weapon exploded at altitude didn't render Hiroshima uninhabitable.

No, but it killed a whole lot of people - disproportionately children, who were working outdoors clearing firebreaks at the time of the attack - in very nasty ways. Then those who survived the first few years after the bombing had about a 9% chance of dying from cancer. (This study didn't start until 1950, so probably misses the worst of it - people who survived the initial blast and radiation exposure, but got fatal cancers in the first years afterwards.)

If you took a small amount of quality radiologicals, wrapped it around some semtex, and made it go boom! in the middle of Manhattan, you'd kill a couple of people in the explosion, create several score cancer patients, and for years you'd have an area of maybe a square kilometer where few people would be willing to live or work. That's a pretty significant impact.

According to FAS, with a one-foot-long chunk (about a kilogram and a half, if I calculated right) of radioactive cobalt from a food irradiation plant, you could contaminate 1,000 square kilometers and raise the cancer risk for everyone who stayed in Manhattan to 1 in 100. Manhattan real estate would get really cheap.

Now imagine a Ryder truck full of fuel oil, fertilizer, and various other common nitrate/hydrocarbon mixes to make up an explosive sundae, and for the cherry on top, say 8 kilograms of high grade uranium. Place in a highly populated area, preferably on a breezy day, and let the good times roll.

Here's the book; http://www.amazon.com/Secret-That-Exploded-Howard-Morland/dp/0394512979
and a background artcile by Howard on his deductions and something of the legal case http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/cardozo.html

oh yeah - even Greenpeace seem to have pretty pictures - wouldn't trust those guys to assemble one though http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/nukes/fig05.gif

peter xyz

note: really http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/940224.htm

It is 2.1 billion, not 1.2 billion according to what I read http://www.fas.org/man/gao/nsiad97181.htm/

Someone else pointed out that the marginal cost is lower, but the cost of starting up the production line again might even make it higher.

But if they only crash one ever 10 years, then we can probably hold out until the fully robitized versions designed and built in Bangladesh (or somewhere) get cheap...

And it will continue to be 'teh shit' until 2037 when they intend to retire the B-2 and B-1B.
See some info here on the proposed B-3.

Laurie is an international consultant on internet security. Earlier he set up a business that bought two military bunkers, at the abandoned US base at Greenham Common, and at an old RAF radar station in Kent. His company rents them out to firms and banks who want to protect their servers from attack. The Kent bunker is deep underground: "The radar operators were supposed to survive 30 days after a nuclear strike."

Laurie cautions that Wikileaks' vaunted encryption is not completely unbreakable. Codebreakers such as the US National Security Agency could prob

Laurie is an international consultant on internet security. Earlier he set up a business that bought two military bunkers, at the abandoned US base at Greenham Common, and at an old RAF radar station in Kent. His company rents them out to firms and banks who want to protect their servers from attack. The Kent bunker is deep underground: "The radar operators were supposed to survive 30 days after a nuclear strike."

Laurie cautions that Wikileaks' vaunted encryption is not completely unbreakable. Codebreakers such as the US National Security Agency could prob

There is also some interesting analysis done by the Federation of American Scientists that suggests this is just an excuse to test out some anti-satellite missiles. An interesting read.

http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2008/02/us_plans_test_of_anti-satellit.php

You had me until there... you realize we, no joke, have more nukes in a single submarine than they do in their entire military.

I'm not saying they'll never be at that point, hell that point might even be soon... but in an all out war no one can come close to the US.

Interesting side note: Total number of warheads are now back to pre-1960s levels (though admittedly those that remain are much more powerful).

I helped build a titanium belly 747 a few years back to hold one of these. http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/program/abl.htm/

These are downres versions of 15yo tech.

http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/kh12_1.htm
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/kh11m_1.htm
Original res was about ten centimeters.

http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/kh-12.htm

These are downres versions of 15yo tech.

http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/kh12_1.htm
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/kh11m_1.htm
Original res was about ten centimeters.

http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/kh-12.htm

These are downres versions of 15yo tech.

http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/kh12_1.htm
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/kh11m_1.htm
Original res was about ten centimeters.

http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/kh-12.htm

The Soviet Almuz space spy stations, which were disguised as the Salyut research stations the USSR was also launching at the time, had a much smaller primary objective than the Hubble. There is no way they could have matched the Hubble's angular resolution. That's just journalists looking for some handy example of another telescope in space.

Resolution is limited by distance from the object, objective or mirror size, and wavelength. At visible wavelengths, for a satellite in a 500 km orbit with a 2.4 m diameter primary mirror like the Hubble, the best resolution possible is about 6 inches. Diffraction prevents you from doing any better (consider the famous single-slit experiment for a simple example). This optical limit has been established and understood for over a century, and the same physics apply for NASA, the Russians, the Air Force, and even consumer digital cameras.

Because of this, even though the Air Force is extremely protective of all details about their spy satellites, even about what orbit they're in (although some nerdy spotters have done a good job of tracking them), we still can get a pretty good idea of their capabilities. Both the Hubble and the Keyhole spy satellites were built by Lockheed and transported from assembly to launch facilities in similar containers. That constrains their size to be pretty close to that of the Hubble. In fact, there's some decent speculation that the basic geometry of the Hubble was copied from the Keyholes, meaning they would also have 2.4 m diameter mirrors.

So we know they can't count fleas on your dog, since they can only distinguish between objects 6 inches apart. This isn't the same as actually identifying objects 6 inches across (no, they can't read license plates). Supposedly it's good enough to distinguish between men and women based on proportion (is that Pamela Anderson?). It might be possible to do very slightly better using computers to compare multiple images of the same target, but the practicallity would be limited.

They also can't look through your roof. Visible light doesn't go through roofs. I believe some far infrared does, but because of the longer wavelength, the resolution is probably somewhere on the order of the size of the house itself, and the signal would no doubt be lost amidst the heat of the house.

The 6" resolution is also only under ideal conditions. That means calm, clear skies (incidentally, the Soviets liked to build smokey factories next to their submarine and strategic bomber bases...go figure) and filming straight down. Because changing the orbit to go directly over a target means burning precious fuel, a lot of shots are made obliquely, increasing the effective distance to the target.

Incidentally, most of the imagery from the 60's and early 70's was declassified in 2002. This confirmed that the early satellites had a resolution of about 20 feet (enough to spot airplanes, perhaps identify ships) and later versions of Corona could resolve at about 7 feet (spot the movements of military units, mobile nuclear missile launchers, identify planes). The first satellites with 6 inch resolution or close to that probably launched in the late 70's with improvements since mainly in guidance, manueverability, and low light sensitivity rather than resolution. Being already able to resolve people, it's not cost effective to go bigger from space on those rare occassions that you need to, when typically you can send in a Predator drone or a special forces team for a fraction of the price.

By the way, the Federation of American Scientists has an online primer on reconnaissance imagery. It's pretty interesting and shows samples of photos at differing resolutions. It really illustrates just how good 6" is from a strategic analysis viewpoint. At that scale, a good analyst can even tell what kind of missiles are hanging from a parked fighter jet (The plane in the sample pictures is MiG-25. The missiles are probably AA-6 Acrids).