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The most proliferated Man Portable Air Defense System (MANPADS) is the SA-7, which has a range of roughly 4.6KM

In the late 1970s, reforms were made reflecting a cultural myth that we could draw an artificial line at the border to differentiate between the threats we faced. In accordance with this myth, officials charged with detecting and deterring those seeking to harm Americans were divided into separate and isolated camps. Barriers between agencies broke down cooperation. Compartmentalization hampered coordination. Surveillance technology was allowed to atrophy, eroding our ability to adapt to new threats. Information, once the best friend of law enforcement, became the enemy.

Intelligence gathering was artificially segregated from law enforcement, effectively barring intelligence and law enforcement communities from integrating their resources. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, a criminal investigator examining a terrorist attack could not coordinate with an intelligence officer investigating the same suspected terrorists. As compartmentalization grew, coordination suffered.

Reforms erected impenetrable walls between different government agencies, prohibiting them from cooperating in the nations defense. The FBI and the CIA were restricted from sharing valuable information. And as limitations on information sharing tightened, cooperation decayed.

FBI agents were forced to blind themselves to information readily available to the general public, including those who seek to harm us. Agents were barred from researching public information or visiting public places unless they were investigating a specific crime. And as access to information was denied, accountability deteriorated.

As information restrictions increased, intelligence capabilities atrophied. Intelligence-gathering techniques created in an era of rotary phones failed to keep pace with terrorists utilizing multiple cell phones and the internet. As technology outpaced law enforcement, adaptability was lost.

The culture of rigid information compartmentalization that took root in the 1970s continued, irrespective of changes in Administrations, throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As late as 1995, we found that the guidelines governing FISA procedures were tightened to a degree that effectively prohibited coordination between intelligence officers and prosecutors within the Department of Justice.

Based on this review, we concluded that our law enforcement and justice institutions and the culture that supports them must improve if we are to protect innocent Americans and prevail in the war against terrorism. In the wake of September 11, Americas defense requires a new culture focused on the prevention of terrorist attacks. We must create a new system, capable of adaptation, secured by accountability, nurtured by cooperation, built on coordination, and rooted in our Constitutional liberties.

Congress has already taken the first, crucial steps to adapt to our changing security requirements.

The passage of the USA-PATRIOT Act made significant strides toward fostering information sharing and updating our badly outmoded information-gathering tools. The Patriot Act gave law enforcement agencies greater freedom to share information and to coordinate our campaign against terrorism. Prosecutors can now share with intelligence agents information about terrorists gathered through grand jury proceedings and criminal wiretaps. The intelligence community now has greater flexibility to coordinate their anti-terrorism efforts with our law enforcement agencies.

Things you should note: There is no such thing as a multi-level secure (MLS) operating system (OS) that is in common use. Sun used to be certified, but it was always several years before the OS could be certified and by then the technology had moved on. Note also that there are various ancient versions of the Oracle DB that were certified MLS. No more. They typically run only in a "system high" mode where everything on the net is assumed to be at the same classification level.

The fine folk at NRL are producing something closer to a "High Assurance Guard" between networks of various security levels. An example is Radiant Mercury, which I have been informed is a PITA to use and a constant drain of funds because you have to go back to the vendor every time you need to open it up for an application. It's a very restrictive and expensive tool. Anything that will permit a cheaper, and faster guard will benefit them.

I know the poster and moderator who modded this "funny" are trying to be ironic jackasses, but the comment is absolutely dead on. Whatever faults or problems you have with the US, there can be no denying the freedom of speech we have and uphold.

Actually, my statement was a bit of a back-handed compliment. Yes, the US does have more freedoms than do most countries - and it seems that Singapore is coming up quite the jerks on this one. But with the feds looking at the possibility of prosecuting the NY Times for treason for reporting leaked classified information, and the prosecution of ordinary citizens under the espionage act for even possessing information that is considered classified...

Then add domestic spying, etc. - and you can see that we have a government of extreme secrecy that WILL go to measures to stop people from critisizing the current administration. How many times has the current Executive branch of this government used the State Secrets privledge to dismiss lawsuits against it that seek to check the power of the federal government against the Constitution?

Don't be surprised at Singapore. In at least one forseeable scenario, you're looking at the future of the United States.

They use front companies for that, like Halliburton did under Dick Cheney. They set up a shell corporation in the Cayman Islands and have all the transactions go through the shell corp. This way Halliburton was able to secure contracts in Iran in violation of US federal law.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2005/s299.html

Actually, the initiative to being SD/SDA landmines and to phase out "dumb" mines began in 1997 under Clinton.

Some U.S. mines are designed to self-destruct after a preset deployment period. "All [scatterable] mines have a safe-arm time from (45 seconds to 2 minutes). When mines fail to arm they will self-destruct immediately. SD times are not exact, mines actually self-destruct in a window between 80 to 100 percent of their SD time ie. mines with a 4 hour SD time will start to SD in 3 hours 12 minutes." See http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/fascam.htm Also http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/pol icy/army/fm/20-32/index.html

Congratulations, we have real progress!

As of 1996, the US at least is using only self-destructing mines everywhere except for in some training situation and the Korean Peninsula. These new mines typically have a 4hr to 15 day lifespan.

For more information about our mine arsenal, check out

http://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/mines.htm

Hi, same Coward as before. A little context:

According to this Department directive by Rummy, intelligence employees are required to be shown this annually, or every 6 months, even--- I'm too half-assed to go back and check. Don't worry, these links aren't classified.

I thought it might have been at first. I viewed them through Google's cache and saw "classified" on the first PDF, but when I viewed it in PDF form on the website that had just been written in the clipart. I'm still a Coward because you can never be too safe.

Anyway, separating classified CPUs from unclassified ones is probably so that they won't accidentally use the wrong ones. Neato information there, about how they use WEP. Don't let the terrorists get wind of it! Incidentally, the verification word Slashdot required me to type was "grinning."

Compare the fictional Valkyrie specifications with the real one. The XB-70 could take off with a gross weight of 250 tons, and had a range of 8000 kilometers at Mach 3. It had variable geometry too. At subsonic speeds the wings were flat. At supersonic speeds wing tips folded down, to keep the lift constant at all speeds.

Isn't it funny how reality is better than fiction?

Compare the fictional Valkyrie specifications with the real one. The XB-70 could take off with a gross weight of 250 tons, and had a range of 8000 kilometers at Mach 3. It had variable geometry too. At subsonic speeds the wings were flat. At supersonic speeds wing tips folded down, to keep the lift constant at all speeds.

Isn't it funny how reality is better than fiction?

Sure, but google isn't very hard to use. Citing something that is common knowledge and readily acknowledged is rather redundant. But see here and here:

About half these resources were devoted to political and diplomatic intelligence, with the remainder equally divided between military and economic intelligence.

Sure, but google isn't very hard to use. Citing something that is common knowledge and readily acknowledged is rather redundant. But see here and here:

About half these resources were devoted to political and diplomatic intelligence, with the remainder equally divided between military and economic intelligence.

Does anyone else worry that the USA might use its intelligent services to give its corporate entities an advantage over foreign ones?

Microsoft Word XP/2003: Microsoft has attempted to remedy certain issues with Metadata in Office XP and up by including a menu option to remove personal information (metadata). There
is also a tool available for free from MS, Remove Hidden Data 1.0 (for XP) and 1.1 (for Office
2003), hereafter referred to as RHD, that allows batch removal information from Word
documents. None of these will remove sensitive information from the main document; neither
will they remove all metadata of possible concern. And RHD 1.0 suffered from stability issues.
Reliance of these tools may give a false sense of security.

Redacting electronic documents right is HARD. See, for example, The NSA's guide to redacting word documents as PDF.

I have heard for a number of years about the idea that American (or other foreign, for that matter) companies will be able to open new markets and profits by selling their products (whether they be tangible goods or IP) or services in the People's Republic of China because they represent an "almost untapped market of new customers." But does this really hold true, especially for IT companies?

In the seventeen years I have worked in the IT industry (mostly at companies which sold software, but also for a hardware vendor) I have seen varying degrees of interest in selling products in China. For example, in the late 1980s through early 1990s, I worked at McAfee Associates, which even then had a fairly global presence due to marketing the product as shareware. We had never had any sales in China and, as a matter of fact, would regularly receive copies of our own anti-virus software from which our copyright and contact information had been removed and replaced with messages saying it was from the Ministry of Public Security and to contact them if a virus was found. Of course, changing the messages in the software also set off its own anti-tamper checks for signs of damage/infection by a computer virus, so we received plenty of copies of our own software where the warning message had been edited as well and were infected by computer viruses. Still, it is very hard to sell a product in a country whose government itself is hacking and pirating the same software you are trying to sell. When Bill Larson took over the company from John McAfee he expressed a strong desire to sell products in China, but when I left in the mid-1990s there was still no sales coming in from over there, other than the occasional ex-pat who registered a copy of the software.

Strangely enough, the only company I've worked for which has had some success in China is a telecommunications manufacturer, who makes equipment like VoIP PBXs, phones and so forth. They have had a few wins over there and even have a small sales office in Beijing. I was always surprised they never had problems like Cisco did with Huawei. But that's just one company and sales from other countries in the region (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) outstripped those. I haven't worked there since last year, but I doubt things have changed much.

So, where are the foreign IT companies which are making money in China? Cisco may have had some success there in the past, but Huawei and their "Cisco-like" products look like they are to overshadow them, and services like Alibaba, Baidu and QQ in China are already servicing the markets that Western ecommerce, search and community/messaging have had only limited success in reaching.

What the hell did 9/11 change? There has always been a threat from this group or that group. The threat has always been relatively small, but the groups do what they do to instill fear that however small the risk, it could happen to you. That's why they're called "terrorists". The only difference is that the attack on 9/11 claimed more lives than those before it or since. There is no moral or ethical difference in the world today from that on 10 September, and there should be no difference in the judgements and responses of a rational, objective person.

What happened on 9/11 only claimed more lives than any other terrorist act? The US killed far more American Indians than died in the WTC. Four thousand Cherokee died when Andrew Jackson broke a treaty and forced them to march from the Carolinas and northern Georgia on the Trail of Tears. More recent then? How about the thousands of Chileans who were killed and the tens of thjousands who "disappeared" when Pres Ford and Kissinger supported Gen. Penochet and his coup against the democratically elected president of Chile? Do you know that September 11 has another meaning to Chileans? That's when the military launched it's attack on the civilian government. And what about the approximately 200,000 who were killed after Ford and Kissinger supported Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975? Falcon

You can know for sure. Here are the declassified documents:

Declassified case appendix which contains the allegedly sensitive documents, via Federation of American Scientists: http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/reynoldspetapp.pdf

Also that kind of under-cover spy information has not been what the SSP has been used for. Read the Wikipedia articles about Siebel Edmonds for an example of the modern abuses.

-molo

The article left out the address for the Immune Attack Website. Go here to learn more about the game! I'll try to answer questions about the game in this thread, if people have any.

Can data mining identify terrorists?

No.

But it can identify people with large extended families who have relatives overseas and get an important call about a death in the family, notify all their North American relatives, and then have government agents show up on their door.

Every single pattern-based terrorist screening method I have heard about sounds like something dreamed up in an air-conditioned office by some dork who never gets out very much and thinks all people are basically like him (and anyone who isn't ought to be subject to government investigation.)

Hanging around public buildings taking pictures? Must be a terrorist. As opposed to say, just interested in taking pictures of public buildings because modern-day monumental architecture happens to turn you on.

Want to learn to fly a 747 but don't have any interest in a career as a pilot? Must be a terrorist. Unless you happen to be fascinated by aircraft and think that a few weeks of flight school would give you bragging rights to die for at your local RC club.

Like to pay with cash, even for purchases in the thousands like furniture or maybe a car? Must be a terrorist. Or maybe you don't qualify for a chequing account, or are just a little bit paranoid, or just don't fucking feel like doing anything else.

These sorts of unvalidated, non-empirical, "feels like the right thing to me", ad hoc, imaginary "patterns of suspicious activity" are a major threat to freedom because they demonize and may even criminalize deviancy from the norm. It is a characteristic of unfree societies that deviancy from the norm is not just looked at asscance by the majority of the population, but is viewed as grounds for suspicion of the most heinious acts.

Furthermore, such datamining solutions are not able to identify terrorists reliably even when they have all kinds of intelligence data entered into them. A report on the chilling-named MATRIX system indicates that the system was only able to identify 5 of the original 9/11 hijackers in a retrospective test, a 75% false negative rate, and it further identifed 120,000 other Americans who had a "high terrorism factor." Supposedly "scores of arrests" resulted from that list, although no one knows what the arrests were for or how many of those were sucessfully prosecuted. The odds are most of them were for drug possession charges that were laid as a result of the increased scrutiny certain individuals got by virtue of wholey baseless suspicions of terrorism. But let us grant 60 successful prosecutions for terrorist-related activities. That's a false positive rate of over 99.9%

And that was when the system was loaded with specific intelligence data, which is no longer the case.

Given the complete failure of such systems to detect terrorists in retrospective studies, and the horrifically high false positive rate, and the chilling effect such programs have on the freedom to be different, it is very hard to believe that their real purpose is to spy on Americans and impose a high degree of conformity on American society.

What JFK did or did not is irrelevant because, at the time, wiretapping-at-will was legal. Telephone conversations were not considered private at the time (you know, with manually operated switchboards, crosstalk, reconnections, you could not reasonably expect your conversation to be private. Kinda same way as if you screw your wife in the park, then sue the city for 'violating your privacy': there is no expectation of privacy at the setting.

NOW, since 1978, due to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/ warrantless spying on Americans became illegal.

To be fair, Clinton had tried same shit, but was bitchslapped back into behaving... because warrantless spying was illegal since 1978! ... that was back when we had REAL conservatives.

With Bush, REAL conservatives turned into kookservatives, the general public is happy with 9/11 excuse...

Q: Why did we invade Iraq, W?
A: terrorism

Q: why do you torture people?
A: 9/11

Q: why does the gas cost $4?
A; bin Laden

Q: why is the sky blue?
A: terrorism?

But hell, people like you know better, people like you know the Truth, people like you have all the answers, even before you hear the question.

Megadildoes, asshole! Good luck to you with all that.

But he is in it up to his neck for the same reason Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld are: he's an oil man. Nothing more and nothing less. Oil and oil shares are the only things he cares about and he's as happy as the rest of them to kill a few hundred or thousands (especially if they are foreigners) to get them.

IAAME/FD*

My brother pilots 747s. He says an amateur pilot would be capable of pulling the flight manoeuvres that took down the towers.

However, the manoeuvre that supposedly took out the Pentagon is another matter altogether. If you believe the gov, the pilot managed to pancake the jet onto the ground about 50-100 yards from the edge of the Pentagon and then "skip" the plane into the side of the pentagon, a bit like skipping a stone off a pond. He says an amateur would NEVER be able to pull off a manoeuvre like that.

-Too steep a flight angle and you crater.
-Too shallow a flight angle and you miss the rooftop.
The government's version would require SUPREME, almost autopilot like, control and accuracy at the speed the aircraft was flying.

The chances of an amateur pilot landing a 737(?) on its belly at near full cruising speed without it breaking up on impact is EXTREMELY small. Notice that the nose cone in the first frame is 100% INTACT. Landing a 737 on its belly, at near full cruising speed WITHOUT damaging the nose cone?

Aircraft are often pancaked during crash landings but these jets CRUISE at about mach 0.8. Crash landing at (0.66/0.8)= ~90% of cruising speed without damaging the nose cone seems very unlikely?

It would be worth looking at a local high-resolution elevation map of the area. If it is ANYTHING other than billiard-table flat, the government's version of the landing sequence is suspicious.

Some have said the nose cone looks like a missile, unlikely:
http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=get&tp=414 794

Proof #1:
-Security video frame rate ~0.5s
-Nose cone to explosion: One frame
-Nose cone to building distance from nose cone frame ~100m
=> Impact velocity ~ 200 m/s ~ mach 0.66

That's too slow for a missile ... a missile travelling at mach 0.66 would have been seen by many people.

If you knew the model of the security camera you could get another estimate of the jet's pre-impact velocity by back calculating from the apparent pixel blur of the nose cone image.

Proof #2:
Calculate vertical height of nose cone using simple trigonometry, i.e. compare height of Pentagon (known height) in pixels to height of nose cone in pixels as security camera is nearly normal to the flight path.
=> Check this height against the actual nose cone dimensions of the jet-type that is claimed to have hit.

Without actually doing the calcs, it looks about the right size for a 737(?) nose cone...

A ~3m diameter missile flying at mach 0.66 would be VERY conspicuous. There is no such missile in the current US military arsenal... http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/index.h tml

The nose cone does look distorted/elongated into a "needle-like" shape but remember that at 200 m/s the nose cone would blur in a 0.5 s exposure.

Proof #3:
Missiles don't fly stably in contact with the ground :)

There are many other opportunities to use the available physical/visual evidence to check whether mass, momentum and energy are conserved for the Pentagon crash... e.g. the fire plume, damage to Pentagons structure (~equivalent to car safety "crash testing").

I'm normally the first to laugh at conspiracy theories but the pentagon hit looks dodgy as hell...

IAAME/FD*: I am a mechanical engineer / fluid dynamicist ...

IAAME/FD* My brother pilots 747s. He says an amateur pilot would be capable of pulling the flight manoeuvres that took down the towers. However, the manoeuvre that supposedly took out the Pentagon is another matter altogether. If you believe the gov, the pilot managed to pancake the jet onto the ground about 50-100 yards from the edge of the Pentagon and then "skip" the plane into the side of the pentagon, a bit like skipping a stone off a pond. He says an amateur would NEVER be able to pull off a manoeuvre like that. -Too steep a flight angle and you crater. -Too shallow a flight angle and you miss the rooftop. The government's version would require SUPREME, almost autopilot like, control and accuracy at the speed the aircraft was flying. The chances of an amateur pilot landing a 737(?) on its belly at near full cruising speed without it breaking up on impact is EXTREMELY small. Notice that the nose cone in the first frame is 100% INTACT. Landing a 737 on its belly, at near full cruising speed WITHOUT damaging the nose cone? Aircraft are often pancaked during crash landings but these jets CRUISE at about mach 0.8. Crash landing at (0.66/0.8)= ~90% of cruising speed without damaging the nose cone seems very unlikely? It would be worth looking at a local high-resolution elevation map of the area. If it is ANYTHING other than billiard-table flat, the government's version of the landing sequence is suspicious. Some have said the nose cone looks like a missile, unlikely: http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=setandget& tp=414794&poll_id=0&category_id=20&warned=y Proof #1: -Security video frame rate ~0.5s -Nose cone to explosion: One frame -Nose cone to building distance from nose cone frame ~100m => Impact velocity ~ 200 m/s ~ mach 0.66 That's too slow for a missile ... a missile travelling at mach 0.66 would have been seen by many people. If you knew the model of the security camera you could get another estimate of the jet's pre-impact velocity by back calculating from the apparent pixel blur of the nose cone image. Proof #2: Calculate vertical height of nose cone using simple trigonometry, i.e. compare height of Pentagon (known height) in pixels to height of nose cone in pixels as security camera is nearly normal to the flight path. => Check this height against the actual nose cone dimensions of the jet-type that is claimed to have hit. Without actually doing the calcs, it looks about the right size for a 737(?) nose cone... A ~3m diameter missile flying at mach 0.66 would be VERY conspicuous. There is no such missile in the current US military arsenal... http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/index.h tml The nose cone does look distorted/elongated into a "needle-like" shape but remember that at 200 m/s the nose cone would blur in a 0.5 s exposure. Proof #3: Missiles don't fly stably in contact with the ground :) There are many other opportunities to use the available physical/visual evidence to check whether mass, momentum and energy are conserved for the Pentagon crash... e.g. the fire plume, damage to Pentagons structure (~equivalent to car safety "crash testing"). I'm normally the first to laugh at conspiracy theories but the pentagon hit looks dodgy as hell... IAAME/FD*: I am a mechanical engineer / fluid dynamicist ...

Cite?

It's hard to come up with reputable testimony about what are secret programs.

But note that the NSA has been around since 1981. The size of its budget is secret, but it is known to be larger than the CIA's budget since at least the mid-1990s. It employs at least a few thousand mathematicians and computer scientists. The electricity bill for its headquarters is several million dollars a year -- considerably larger than one would expect for a building of its size. [link]

Just what has it been doing in all that time? It's a secret. There are no credible, verifiable resources that can explain. If you insist on asking for a "cite" then no one can give you any.

But I think it's not such a tremendous leap to suppose that they have been spying on electronic communications on an unprecedented scale. What else could they possibly have been up to for the last 25 years? And if they haven't been spying, then have they just been pissing away a few hundred billion dollars on nothing??

*Sigh*

Military action to enforce Iraqi compliance with Security Council resolutions was authorized in Resolution 678

Opponents of the No fly zone argue that operative clause 2 should only apply to resolutions cited in the preamble. This ignores the language "all subsequent relevant resolutions" - which clearly applies to resolutions passed after 678, as well as before.

Iraq did not comply with resolution 688, hence military action (implemented in the form of the no fly zone) was authorized.

You'll note Resolution 678 specifically authorizes military force to implement resolution 660, and All subsequent resolutions

Now, obviously, this was originally meant to apply to all of the resolutions listed in the preamble. However, being the legal bastards we are, we've noticed that it applies even to resolutions passed after 678.

Meaning, Military force is authorized against Iraq for noncompliance with any Security Council resolution passed before or after.

Second, Resolution 688 makes it clear the Iraqi regime is to play nice with the Kurdish population.

Since Iraq did not comply with resolution 688, military action (implemented in the form of the no-fly zone) is thus authorized.

You'll note Resolution 678 specifically authorizes military force to implement resolution 660, and All subsequent resolutions

Now, obviously, this was originally meant to apply to all of the resolutions listed in the preamble. However, being the legal bastards we are, we've noticed that it applies even to resolutions passed after 678.

Meaning, Military force is authorized against Iraq for noncompliance with any Security Council resolution passed before or after.

Second, Resolution 688 makes it clear the Iraqi regime is to play nice with the Kurdish population.

Since Iraq did not comply with resolution 688, military action (implemented in the form of the no-fly zone) is thus authorized.

You'll note the reason the no-fly zone was instituted, preventing the mass slaughter of the Kurdish population, was legitimate.

The Wikipedia article on the subject shows obvious bias, and you'll note the Wikipedia link to Security Council resolution 688 quotes a single line out of context, and is horribly biased.

http://www.fas.org/news/un/iraq/sres/sres0688.htm

For the actual text of the resolution.

Very low frequency (VLF) has an extremely low data rate, yet it has a great ability to penetrate earth and water. The Navy has been using it for a long time to communicate with submarines.

Premise: if you let the stronger guy set the rules for a fight, you will lose that fight.
Conclusion: make up your own rules!

Examples: 1) a 300 lb body-builder tries to fist-fight? you bring a knife
2) A martial arts expert offers a sword-fight? you pull out a pistol.
3) A neighbourhood thug waits for you with a handgun? Pick him off with a scoped rifle from 1000 yards.

So what could be effective against a 1 MW directed A-SAT beam?
An EMP field generated by a high-altitude nuclear explosion http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/effects.htm . While this will probably not affect the shielded laser itself, it will fry the civilian infrastructure, comm and power utilities for 100s of miles, as well as the civilian sattelites for 1000s of miles around... And see how long that laser can maintain its power level without a functional power grid.

Follow that up with a polite promise to "rinse and repeat" as needed...

lol

The current FAS page says it's a tracking facility (sounds like how Starfire is used for now), and the ASAT thing was a US theory that was inaccurate.

Do you know of any reliable information that it is an ASAT system?

Here's a pic of the installation from before 1988, courtesy of the Federation of American Scientists.

Umm, read some history. There's even a picture of one National Socialist German Labor Party nuke design.

Imperial Japan had nuclear bomb programs too.

Personally, I'm glad America got there first.

The Soviets took the easy route. They had some Useful Idiots steal the technology.

The Soviets had ASAT programs too. ASAT weaponry is old news, it's just that now they're using lasers rather than missiles. Heck, even that's not all that new, though making it work would be.

Don't you think the way for the US to really ensure its population's security would be to try to track down the arsenal of the former USSR?

Don't you think Putin ought to take nuclear security more seriously? The Russians built the damn things and they're not so poor that they can't deal with them if they want to, especially with high oil prices pouring hard currency into Russian state coffers.

"We need that ability to protect our assets" in orbit.

Ok, call me an X files conspiracy theory type, but we've already got space defense systems and this is merely meant as an upgrade or additional weapons systems.

Lets examine the facts.

-we currently have more than 20 GPS sattelites in orbit. Besides helping you find the closest Starbucks, these are also used to help our soldiers find their way throug remote mountain passes and help missiles find their targets.

-Military doctrine is to control the media as soon as you can in any conflict. A large part of the media is broadcast via sattelite

-Our military insists on protecting its assets. Quick, name any military asset of regional significance that we don't guard?

-We've already have antisattelite missles. in the mid 80s, an ASAT took out a satellite in a successful test.

-China is interested in anti-satellite technology.

-Squadrons of fully operational stealth fighters were deployed and used for more than half a decade before being made public. Our military clearly is able to keep very large opperations secret for quite some time.

When I add this all up, I come to the conclusion that we already have space-based weapons designed, at a minimum, to disrupt an incoming missile. Others may have similar, which would explain why we'd be interested in lasers. The only question I really have is why they'd bother to make it public.

TW

From FAS (and a submitted yet rejected post)... The FAS has obtained a CRS report titled Patent Reform: Issues in the Biomedical and Software Industries (PDF warning) which discusses some of the evil that is software patents. From TFPDF:

"...computers are ubiquitous -- and as a result, so is software authorship...Thus, a patent on a drug creates potential liability for those companies in the pharmaceutical business, while a software patent creates potential liability for any company with its own website or software customizations, regardless of its business."

How is it that every time one of these "NSA Surveillance" articles pops up, nobody chimes in about FISA Court? (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)

All you tinfoil hat people need to read this pdf document.

Some talking points:
Page 3: "In so doing, the Court of Review recognized that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, "as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information."

More Page 3: ""perhaps most crucially, the executive branch not only has superior expertise in the area of foreign intelligence, it is also constitutionally designated as the pre-eminent authority in foreign affairs. The President and his deputies are charged by the constitution with the conduct of the foreign policy of the United States"

Page 4: In addition, substantial authority indicates that the President has inherent constitutional authority over the gathering of foreign intelligence--authority that Congress may not circumscribe. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review suggested that, even after FISA, the President possesses inherent constitutional Authority that FISA could not limit.

The list of quotes goes on
So, for all you people wondering why the hell nobody has got any legal dirt on all these 'illegal activities', you need to read your history book. Its come up before, FISA court shot the president down, FISA court of review shot FISA court down, and the Supreme Court Won't even hear the case because its been settled already. This is all democratic dragging through the mud.

/rant off

How is it that every time one of these "NSA Surveillance" articles pops up, nobody chimes in about FISA Court? (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)

All you tinfoil hat people need to read this pdf document.

Some talking points:
Page 3: "In so doing, the Court of Review recognized that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, "as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information."

More Page 3: ""perhaps most crucially, the executive branch not only has superior expertise in the area of foreign intelligence, it is also constitutionally designated as the pre-eminent authority in foreign affairs. The President and his deputies are charged by the constitution with the conduct of the foreign policy of the United States"

Page 4: In addition, substantial authority indicates that the President has inherent constitutional authority over the gathering of foreign intelligence--authority that Congress may not circumscribe. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review suggested that, even after FISA, the President possesses inherent constitutional Authority that FISA could not limit.

The list of quotes goes on
So, for all you people wondering why the hell nobody has got any legal dirt on all these 'illegal activities', you need to read your history book. Its come up before, FISA court shot the president down, FISA court of review shot FISA court down, and the Supreme Court Won't even hear the case because its been settled already. This is all democratic dragging through the mud.

/rant off

While maybe not about Iraq, the US government is currently involved in the largest, most far reaching classification nightmare since Nixon. Aside from having made up dozens if not hundreds of new sensitive but unclassified classifications of documents that exempt millions of documents from the FOIA despite their unclassified status, the government was recently caught re-classifying some 55,000 historical documents out of the National Archive for no apparent reason other than to cover up historical embarassment on the part of the government.

Classification and secrets in this country are on par with several countries that we criticize for this very thing. The wind is slowly being taken out of the sails of the FOIA, and our right to know as citizens is being whittled away at an unbelievably alarming rate.

This is the most secret administration in the history of the US. Not only have they classified millions of new documents at a cost of billions to the taxpayer that normally would have been declassified in the past (1950s budget information for the CIA, for instance) but the secret re-classification of tens of thousands of documents that have been public for years is a scary, scary precident.

Take the words of the Memorandum of Understanding issued in regards to the now uncovered secret reclassification of documents from the national archive: "It is in the interests of both the CIA and the National Archives and Records Administration to avoid the kind of public notice and researcher complaints that may arise from removing from the open shelves for extended periods of time records that had been public available."

The GP was hardly out of perspective.

Fribble. Sure, the US sells "demilitarized scrap". In the US. To US citizens. Now ask who can buy Russian, Chinese, etc. weapons in the open global weapons market.

The point this guy was making is that anybody can go to a USAF scrap auction and buy several railway flat-car loads of scrap. Unfortunately his experience was that if you rifle through a few carefully selected loads of such 'junk' you are more or less bound to come up with some components of sensetive systems whose intelligence value can be very high to countries like China, Russia and worse still Iran and N-Korea for reasons that are perhaps not immediately obvious. You don't need access to an entire F-16/F-15/F-18 to cause major trouble for the USAF in a future conflict. All you need is access to a few key components from the radar to calibrate your ECM-pods and it seems that such components can occasionally be found in the stuff the USAF sells of as scrap despite the fact that such material should without exception be shipped off for secure disposal. Why do you think the USA sent several helicopter loads of boffins into a minefield in the Kosovo to salvage the radar unit of a shot-down Mig-29? It's not as if a radar that crashed to the ground from several thousand meters altitude can be made to run again but it is still valuabe for research into radar warning recievers and for creating jamming profiles for your ECM-pods and the same goes for any missiles it might have been carrying. Only fools fail to realize the signifigance of this kind of intelligence gathering and it also is the reason why the loss of that F-117 over Serbia probably hurt the US more than the Pentagon is willing to admit. I'd be willing to bet good money that parts of that wreck found it's way into laboratories in Russia and possibly China.

You're ignoring the fact that the B-29 engines had electrical systems, and the plane had a radio and other electronic equipement. EMP could easily have disrupted both.

I also submit that the bombs dropped over Japan were a rather different animal than modern thermonuclear weapons, and wouldn't have the same EMP "performance". This is an area I'm not well informed about, but nevertheless I'd hesitate to draw parallels.

Here is a good page on EMP. What we're discussing here is SREMP, and that associated with thermonuclear weapons is no different from that associated with fission weapons. It is strictly dependent on the size of the blast, the atmospheric conditions, and the geometry of the receiver with the blast.

The 20 KT explosions in WWII were small by today's standards, but the B-29 was also much closer to the blast than would be a modern bomber. Five times longer standoff distance would make up for a 25 times stronger blast, which would be 500 KT. Our largest weapons are 10 MT, and IIRC there are no plans to use anything larger than 1 MT from the B-2. (Larger weapons fell out of fashion, as they are inherently less efficient than smaller weapons.)

If the weapon is delivered on something like the ALCM, the standoff distances get much larger.

TFA sounds a lot like the early descriptions of the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System for defense of ships against low-flying antiship missiles like the infamous Exocet. I recall the Phalanx being described around the time of the Falklands War as throwing up a "wall" of bullets in front of an incoming missile through its extremely high rate of fire (up to 75 rounds per second). The widget in TFA may do much the same with a "force field" of fragments from the explosion of a shaped charge.

That is, I surmise "force field" is a metaphor here. Marketspeak, to forcefully (as it were) convey the impression of how the device works.

the latter video is just a small scale variation on this

note they refer to it as a 'virtual' force field.

Now, if they were able to brute-force decrypt 1000 IPSec connections in real time - this would be something to worry about.

DES cracked in less than 3 days (circa 1999 public knowledge technology).

One of many IPSEC crackers, IKEcrack.

Who knows what is possible with a budget of... oh wait, that's classified, although we do know it was over 70 Million in 1972 ($319,277,570.21 of today's dollars or 1277 of the EFF's 1999 machines.)

I'd say they can.

Surprisingly few of our Defense Contractors' engineers are actually qualified pilots. That's why our DC ANG F-16 pilots complain that the F-16 is an airplane "designed by engineers, not pilots." That's why Lockheed had to pay so much money to the wives of German fighter pilots after the F-104 fighter failed so miserably as to break up under stress. (Our own government didn't do anything extra for the US F-104 widows.)

The Boeing B-1 Lancer was a good plane when they designed it, but the engineers then overloaded with so much gear that they either stall on climb or go into an unrecoverable dive. Naturally, the Reagan DoD claimed we needed the B-1 to win the Cold War. I guess that's why they're still flying B-52s.

Pointing to a DoD press release doesn't help your case, and neither do ad-hominem attacks, (to which I shall never stoop). This is the same DoD that claimed we had a missile gap in 1960, that East Germany had a higher standard of living than West Germany in the 1980s, and that we're winning the war in Iraq. The first version of the M-1 tank couldn't even shoot and move at the same time. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle? Another triumph of military engineering so great they had to make a movie about it.

The Moab desert robot drive challenge was successfully completed only last year. AI isn't as advanced as you might think. UAVs certainly do NOT have to follow all the rules of passenger aircraft under Parts 61, 91, 141 or 142 of FAA regulations. When UAVs fly, the FAA issues a NOTAM and restricts the airspace around it so no airplanes with humans on board fly anywhere near them. A surprisingly large amount of U.S. airspace is restricted, including most of the airspace over Nevada, for instance. Thus, the military and defense contractors get whatever exemptions they want from civil airspace rules. Don't believe me? Fly over Area 51 and see what happens.

The FAA controllers regularly complain about military bozos who want to restrict all US airspace to military traffic only. After 9/11, the Pentagon almost seized Washington's Reagan National airport and were stopped only when members of Congress figured out how long it would take them to drive to other airports.

Those of you who are ready to fly in airliners piloted by AI should:
1) take a class in AI
2) get a pilot's license, or at least take a flight lesson.
I have done both (not at MIT, though), and those designing these aircraft, for the most part, have not.

The main point of this is, don't believe everything you read in a press release.

Of course, since UAV communications are though an open standard, you could always try to hook in yourself. Then you can see what 'big brother' is looking at.

This is the TCS specification. Used in the U.S.

This is the NATO standard, a bit newer.

Of course, people should use VPN or similar, but it isn't required.

Smile! AMRAAMs love you!

Smile! AMRAAMs love you!

I hadn't seen that Natl Review article but I think it is BS. The writing style seems sarcastic and tongue in cheek, and it is written by the known fabricator Michael Ledeen. I don't know what to make of it, but even if the conversation imagined here actually happened, it doesn't refute any of the points I made. There was open pressure by the likes of Hayes and Hoekstra (and also Santorum) for release of these documents, not a shadowy government conspiracy.