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Considering what I knew to be project Looking Glass

Don't forget FISA with its 'secret court'

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/

I would add that up until the invasion of Kuwait, the former Bush Administration was selling arms to Saddam. Additionally, most of the WMD raw materials including bioweapons cultures came from Saddam's good buddies in the US. So it is really funny to watch all this criticism of the UN when it was the Regan Administration (and later the first Bush administration) who gave active support to Saddam's WMD ambitions.

I would add that up until the invasion of Kuwait, the former Bush Administration was selling arms to Saddam. Additionally, most of the WMD raw materials including bioweapons cultures came from Saddam's good buddies in the US. So it is really funny to watch all this criticism of the UN when it was the Regan Administration (and later the first Bush administration) who gave active support to Saddam's WMD ambitions.

I would add that up until the invasion of Kuwait, the former Bush Administration was selling arms to Saddam. Additionally, most of the WMD raw materials including bioweapons cultures came from Saddam's good buddies in the US. So it is really funny to watch all this criticism of the UN when it was the Regan Administration (and later the first Bush administration) who gave active support to Saddam's WMD ambitions.

Here's some more, via FAS.

--Ribald

The Keyhole series of satellites are similar to Hubble. The KH-12 has "a resolution approaching ten centimeters".

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is rumored to be a derivative of the KH-11/12 spy satellites. http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/kh-1 1.htm

Um, actually the US does sell a lot of weapons.

Related link:
http://www.fas.org/asmp/fast_facts.htm

I looked up some links after this.

There's a general article at
How Stuff Works.

A study of several cases at
Federation of American Scientists. Death rates will depend a lot on the thresholds for closing an area and moving people out. Meaning that cancer rates climb but not enough to evacuate the area. I think the numbers in the FAS article assume people stick around. Say rich people move out, poor people move in. FAS death rate numbers assume more things. Like no advance in cancer treatment in the next 40 years. And little protective measures.

And an article at
American Institute of Physics that says don't make such a fuss.

The Iraq war is about 177 M USD per day. That makes about 17 days of Iraq war.

Or 1.4 B2 stealth bombers.

So it's not really that lot.

I'm all for NSA making these classified networks more secure.

I'm all for NSA making these classified networks more secure.

8. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of:

(a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities;

(b) All ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities;

...
10. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally undertake not to use, develop, construct or acquire any of the items specified in paragraphs 8 and 9 above

...
12. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally agree not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons or nuclear-weapons-usable material or any subsystems or components or any research, development, support or manufacturing facilities related to the above;

...
32. Requires Iraq to inform the Security Council that it will not commit or support any act of international terrorism or allow any organization directed towards commission of such acts to operate within its territory and to condemn unequivocally and renounce all acts, methods and practices of terrorism;

Just the US has ignored its own weapons treaty obligations in the past.

And just what weapons treaties has the US ignored? Are you referring to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States? Because
#1- the other party to the treaty doesn't exist anymore, and
#2- we didn't ignore our obligations, we followed the defined protocol to withdraw from the obsolete treaty

The point of these treaties and enforced resolutions was to slow Sadaam down enough to contain him, and they were working fine according to Blix's team.

Again, I refer you to Resolution 687, which plainly states that the goal of the resolutions was the "establishment in the Middle East of a zone free of [WMD]," and to "restore international peace and security." And Blix specifically said that Iraq was not in compliance with his obligations.

Israel was in violation of several UN resolutions and the US took no action against *them*

I specifically said Chapter 7 UN Securit

Okay, "unaccounted for" is not the same thing as "we know where it is". Fragments of anthrax in warheads is a "historical document" not live, weaponized anthrax.

Between documented use against the Kurds and Iran, admittance by Iraq of some of these weapons, and discovery of others by UNSCOM, and Bush's invasion, did the statement 'there are no WMD's' become true? When was that? And why didn't whoever was in power at the time scream it from the mountaintops?

It became true in the 1990s, starting in July 1991. It wasn't shouted from the mountaintops because there were questions about verification, and because it would have interfered with continuing sanctions. That's if you accept that the US intended sanctions to bring down the Hussein government, not simply to block WMD creation.

Your first quote references Hussein Kamel, who I also referenced. In 1995, Hussein Kamel said: "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed."

Iraq admitted the program, and had tried to conceal the program, but by the time of the speech had already destroyed the WMD in question. This had been reported in real time - the point of the speech (as far as I know) was to push for continued inspections and verification of the Iraqis, not claiming that there were 'secret stocks'.

Do you know what the shelf life of the Iraqi anthrax was, anyway?

Well, it's a little late in the discussion when i was browsing through this thread.

Still i wonder about one thing and i didn't see it discussed yet.

Who and upon what criteria is decided, that one country or another is eligable to posses wmd's? How can it be some countries like the US, UK, France and others can tell other countries to not persuade the development of wmd's if they themselves sit on a whole bunch of them?

Anyone up for an answer other than: "Because they are evil!"

Here's a list http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/wmd_state.htm/ showing 33 countires that have wmd capabilities.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. You can find pretty much the same facts and more from the Federation of American Scientists.

They are scrupulously fact-oriented and are probably the least biased source you can find on these matters. See also: About FAS

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. You can find pretty much the same facts and more from the Federation of American Scientists.

They are scrupulously fact-oriented and are probably the least biased source you can find on these matters. See also: About FAS

If we weren't engaged in illegal wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, this would never have happened.

To quote Fugazi: Ahistorical, you think this shit dropped right out of the sky? My analysis; it's time to harvest the crust from your eyes

Nuclear tests are now conducted underground. Above ground testing was banned by the UN decades ago and any country who has nuclear weapons has always tested them below ground. The exception being Israel who was testing its nuclear weapons with South Africa when sanctions were on South Africa for its apartheid policies.

No known large-scale tests were evidenced but there is some evidence to support small tests as seismic data indicated unusual earthquake-like motion.

As far as seismic data is concerned with North Korea, since they gave their info to Pakistan, who successfully set off at least one nuclear device, it would be reasonable to assume that North Korea knows its design will work.

Here are some links which show the before and after photos of Pakistans underground nuclear tests:

Link 1
Link 2

This link has a very nice and detailed story, with pics, about Indias nuclear tests as does this link.

In the case of Indias tests, there were some clouds thrown up but nothing near like one is used to seeing from the nuclear tests the U.S. performed in the Nevada desert.

It might have worked in the 60's before society was hugely invested in MOS microchip technology. Nowadays, unless you're launching from the south pole, congratulations on breaking everything. For more information on the effect of nuclear blasts in space, look up the Starfish test shot. And even that one took the Hawiian power grid offline.

This co-ordinate encoding scheme sounds similar to one used by US (and other) military forces for air targeting.

See this description of GEOREF co-ordinates for example. Basically you divvy the world up in to a grid and use letters to reference the major fractions of the co-ordinates and numbers the minor fractions. So 106 25' 44" W 310 48' 06" N becomes EJPB 3448.

HAARP isn't really about pretty light shows.

It's about military-industrial applications:

* Detection and Imagine of Underground Structures Using ELF/VLF Radio Waves

* Angels Don't Play This Haarp

-kgj

It seems that the practical physics of the NASP made it impractical. See this for a good history of the NASP. In most cases, the "spaceplane" concept is driven by 1950s science fiction, rather than actual science.

Plaintiff's FOIA requests in that case related to the Rathbuns, their attorneys, Hubbard, an independent or special counsel, Germans, schools in a submarine village in Great Salt Lake, and Rosemarie Bretschneider. That case was dismissed on the ground that it failed to state a claim on which relief could be granted and was frivolous or malicious. The Court concluded that the complaint was "not based on legally arguable challenges to actions on Plaintiff's FOIA requests. Rather, it [was] based on Plaintiff's misunderstanding of reality and therefore must be dismissed because it both fail[ed] to state a claim on which relief can be granted and [was] frivolous.

Funny, you would think that since less and less work goes into FOIA requests, simple if you only have to write letters to deny access, there would be plenty of time to do thorough searches for the few that are still granted. But then again FBI digital document projects arent inspirational unless you are a contracter ofcourse.

For those who want to know what kind of requests this is about, lists of FOIA request are subject the the freedom of information act and are avaiable here. Its funny to see the "all little green men info" requests right next to legitimate historical research inquaries. (or should that be other historical research ;-) )

To stay up to date on what data is kept secret there is always secrecy news run by the federation of american scientist. You can join their fight to open up overall budget totals of the inteligence agencies.... during the cold war! Its always the paranoid lunies that want an open goverment. Its like these people think they know better what they are talking about then the politicians...

There is good news as well, cryptome.org demonstrates that classification policy is often that, policy(weekly DHS memo`s) ;-) And this will only get better when more and more information gets digital.

Anyway, this is an ongoing battle and since shrub and gang are past half time, have pissed of everyone who has to keep these secrets, demonstrated just how powerfull a political tool classification policy is and the 911 rapport was pro-openness things can only get better from here right?

Funny, you would think that since less and less work goes into FOIA requests, simple if you only have to write letters to deny access, there would be plenty of time to do thorough searches for the few that are still granted. But then again FBI digital document projects arent inspirational unless you are a contracter ofcourse.

For those who want to know what kind of requests this is about, lists of FOIA request are subject the the freedom of information act and are avaiable here. Its funny to see the "all little green men info" requests right next to legitimate historical research inquaries. (or should that be other historical research ;-) )

To stay up to date on what data is kept secret there is always secrecy news run by the federation of american scientist. You can join their fight to open up overall budget totals of the inteligence agencies.... during the cold war! Its always the paranoid lunies that want an open goverment. Its like these people think they know better what they are talking about then the politicians...

There is good news as well, cryptome.org demonstrates that classification policy is often that, policy(weekly DHS memo`s) ;-) And this will only get better when more and more information gets digital.

Anyway, this is an ongoing battle and since shrub and gang are past half time, have pissed of everyone who has to keep these secrets, demonstrated just how powerfull a political tool classification policy is and the 911 rapport was pro-openness things can only get better from here right?

John, I *must* be more careful with my articles and subjects. When I said "we", I was referring to "we, the United States". I'm very sorry for any misunderstanding.

Anywho, check out these google hits:

MIRACL laser. It appears to be 2m across to answer your earlier question.

story. Notice the "partial success" quote since the data flow stopped.

From this, this picture.

Finally, from this:

United Press International
April 03, 2000
By PAMELA HESS

WASHINGTON, April 3 (UPI) -- A panel of defense industry experts will recommend the Pentagon develop new anti-satellite weapons and techniques that would block enemies' use of spy satellites, GPS and commercial communication systems, according to an as-yet-unreleased report by the Defense Science Board.

The panel envisions a laser weapon that could, at different power levels, temporarily "blind" or physically destroy an adversary's satellite in times of war or when "detrimental to U.S. or coalition interests," according to the report, which was obtained by "Inside the Pentagon," an independent news weekly.

The Defense Department has been developing missiles and lasers that can do just that, but has yet to deploy one. Congress has kept alive an Army effort to develop an anti-satellite missile with infusions of cash every year since 1993, the last year the Pentagon budgeted money for the program on its own. Manufacturer Boeing is expected to have three prototypes completed this June, ready for flight testing in 2001.

The Army also has the MIRACL laser, a massive and powerful laser designed to destroy or blind enemy satellites in space. It was first tested against an Air Force satellite in 1997 despite the expressed concerns of then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin to President Clinton.

Indeed, even the White House has taken a stand against anti-satellite weapons. In a 1997 letter to Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, President Clinton said he did not see a need for deployment of such a weapon. "I do not believe any threat yet justifies the near-term deployment of an operational ASAT capability," he wrote.

Clinton used his line-item veto power to delete almost $40 million for the program Congress inserted into the Pentagon's 1998 budget. The Defense Science Board report was completed in February but has not yet been publicly

(yes it does cut off there). Again, so sorry for any confusion. It was just an interesting story to me all those years ago, and it found its way into this thread. I in no way meant to indicate I took part in that test. I just thought it had high "coolness factor".

What building could say "no" to a 30mm gatling gun firing at 3900 rounds per minute?

That is, a 2.5 megawatt laser from the surface of earth would generate the same energy flux at the satellite as a 80W lightbulb would from a distance of 1 meter..

The nice thing about admitting your ignorance publicly, is that you have to do it less often as you go on. Thanks to those who've explained how to work it out.

It's looking pretty darn unlikely then that anyone even could have targeted a satelite with such a weapon. I was never suggesting that this had occured, but I remembered the US military doing tests of this nature. I've done some more digging and for anyone interested, they used this. The laser is in the megawatt range and powered by rocket fuel. Pretty impressive, but as you've calculated, all it did was "illuminate" the satelite.

Shame the USAF didn't post an "Ask Slashdot" first. ;)

There have been several CIA and DOD investigations into the landscape of other planets using "remote viewing", also known colloquially as "astral projections". Under the auspices of the CIA, remote viewing was used to accurately predict world events as well as extraterrestrial events (asteroid encounters, etc).

So when you say "no human being has ever seen before", you are halfway correct. No human being has been to Titan before, but there have been humans that have "seen" Titan before.

Try telling that to the Military. http://www.fas.org/news/reference/lexicon/acronym. htm

"we did find at least one artillery shell with traces of Sarin gas, so there were, strictly speaking, WMDs found in Iraq."

one shell? traces of chemical? mass destruction?

That's like saying a bottle of water is a weapon of mass destruction, because if you had a billion times as much water as you do, you could drown lots of people. (apologies to anyone who's recently been drowned)

At last count (1997), the USA had 30,000 tons of chemical weapons. That's what you call 'weapons of mass destruction'. Not an antique shell that nobody even knew existed until 300,000 people went looking for it. I know farmers' fields in the UK which probably have more unexploded ordnance than that in them.

However, those 'in the know' were prohibited from sharing this knowledge. In the trade, it's called 'need to know', and there was no justifying Hubble's team's need to know.

You are saying people designing a satelite do not "need to know" how to fix solar pannels to the thing? (Really?) I would say not only do they need to know, they will find how to do it! Its a matter of finding it out the hard or the easy way.... Or rather the cheap or the milion dollar failure way. (million dollars from the same taxpayer that is funding skunkworks two for the price of two projects that is)

Oh and if you want to build a spysat (who doesn`t, provided it gets fricken lasers and can nuke a site from orbit ofcourse, or maybe just as part of a real army like the french or israeli one), go and have a talk with some of the hubble people. They know most you will "need to know" and didn`t have to sign a single NDA to learn it.

Goverment secrecy stems from just reasons and from arrogance/political manouvering. These arent mutually exclusive for most people but if you look at US classification policy you wont see only just couse classification going on.

From here.

At a distance of 200m, the width of the radar beam can usually cover all 4 lanes of traffic travelling in both direction

From space I guess that would be pretty nondirectional.

And from here

The practical implication of this is that one must greatly increase the output power to get a modest increase in performance. For example, in order to double the range, the transmitted power would have to be increased 16-fold.

Which is related to the signal dispersion as it travels the extra distance.

Microwaves are _not_ necessarily non-directional

If you can pinpoint microwaves to the level that we can pinpoint lasers there are a number of companies who manufacture microwaves for running chemical reactions who would love to chat with you. Uneven heating is still their biggest problem and it could be resolved by having a focal point scanning the reaction vessel the way a CRT scans the screen.

which section of the constitution are you referring to?

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

Spending money on the CIA that Congress appropriated to Air Force procurement clearly violates the requirement that money be drawn from the treasury only according to appropriations made by law. Similarly, the intentional false reporting of CIA spending as something else clearly violates the requirement of a "regular Statement and Account."

A passing ship will report to the buoy 'This is me'. That ID can be looked up in a database, of where it came from, who owns it, and what it (supposedly) carries. These new buoys extend that ID farther out.

As far as reusing the SOSUS buoys, a) what makes you think they are not still useful in their original role? and b) they are generally on the ocean floor to track subs. Not really useful for surface ships.

This report, backs up the factual statement that Israel has been the biggest recipiant of US $ than any nation since 1976, and has recived, by far, the largest total amount of any nation.

Oh, and also that Jews are planning to take over the world via Hollywood.

As far back as 1981, the British Royal Navy tested a top secret weapon system called 'Laser Dazzle Sight,'(LDS). and they used it during the Falklands War where high speed, wave-skipping Argentinean pilots, met a dazzling array of laser beams designed to blind them.

According to this Royal School of Artillery paper 'The most likely choice of lasers for a dazzle weapon would be
Argon (458 - 515 nm, blue/green) or Ne YAG freq doubled(532 nm, green).'

According to the Federation of American Scientists In the 1970's it was claimed that Chinese soldiers were blinded by Soviet-built laser systems during the China-Vietnam war. During the Iran-Iraq War, over 4,000 Iranian soldiers sustained injuries due to Iraqi laser systems. Throughout the 1980's, the Soviet Union were long suspected of directing lasers at US spyplanes. Today anti-personnel laser weapons are inexpensive, sold openly by the Third World, have line-of-sight aiming, and are capable of producing catastrophic results if used against aircrews and sensors in flight.

In 1989 a US-USSR bilateral agreement imposed restrictions on the use of low-energy lasers. In 1989 the International Committee of the Red Cross called for multi-lateral controls.

On 13 October 1995 the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons (Protocol IV) was proposed. In 1998 it became international law but Human Rights Watch is concerned that the US is developing Dazzle weapons that do not cause permanent blindness and would circumvent the blinding weapons agreement.

Now while the threat from laser weapons are real, I think the odds are greater that a real terrorist would use a man portable anti-aircraft missle.

Yes, it's encrypted.

The actual conversation itself is encrypted, but the traffic passes through the AF central message server, where it's decrypted and read by analysis software. If any keywords pop up, *then* it will be flagged for an operator to examine and determine if they need to intervene or cut off the conversation.

The monitoring software and the hardware supporing it is incredibly fast. You never notice the delay.

Once the text is approved by the software at the central server, it's then passed to the NIPR servers and sent over the NIPRnet. The NIPRnet is passed to trunks encrypted using FASTLANES, but they're upgrading to TACLANES, which have a much higher capacity and more goodies, and can be trusted for use in a tactical environment, where equipment not only needs to be hardend, but electronically destroyed quickly and easily.

All NIPR trunks pass to a SATCOM link, which then gets passed to one of the three NCTAMS, DISA or other communications stations, where it's decrypted and passed to their internal networks. From there, all traffic is copied and the copied traffic sent to the spooks for analysis, while the original signals proceed to their destination.

ALL of it. Every single one and zero is monitored. As you can imagine, this level of monitoring engenders it's own problems, but understand that it *IS* monitored.

If you do something stupid, it may take a while before you're caught, depending on what you're trying to do. If you're stupid, you'll get balled out by your chain of command and lose your priviledges. If you're smart-or just THINK you are-then they will watch you in silence, monitoring your every single move, as well as everything being done by those you're talking to.

If you are *really* smart, you will stick to snail-mail. THAT is something they don't have the time or the manpower to read, and it all just passes through the system, mostly ignored. Occassionally, they will open a few hundred letters to make a stab at things, see if anyone is being blatantly obvious or trying to use some sort of cipher.

But because everyone is so keen on "instant communication", the chances of someone going for a written letter instead of instant gratification are low. They have the bait and know where to find the fish.

IF thats true, then why did US companies purchase a farily substantial quantity of the RD-180 engines for US rockets? The Russian rocket engine tech is actually on par, and exceeds in some cases, US and ESA tech. Oh, and the reason noone can build a Saturn5 is that the plans nolonger exist. There have been several rockets designed and flown that equal or outperform the S5, the Energia for example.

Source 1
Source 2

Small Diameter Bomb uses GPS for guidance. Also, how about the Joint Direct Attack Munition

Uhhuh? Are you saying that there are no cost due to the present levels of pollution? And as long as it's not an acute problem (as in an extinction-level problem), there's no need to deal with it?

surprisingly similar to what's in Revelations

Yes. Us greenie scientists are all religious nuts...

The above is an example of western prejudices. The Russians have some of the world's best technologies and they do not go arround trumpeting their achievements.

If the best American scientists can rely on Russian technology, who are you not to? The Soyuz has done more than 1,600 flights over several decades without a single glitch, yet the exercise is very complex.

The world knows that without Russian expertise, the US would not have been able to handle the ISS project, even with all the help of the rest of the world. No wonder, the "best" technology in the world failed in Vietnam, and might still fail in Iraq!

When it was time to retire the MIR space station, I remember American pundits doubting the ability of Russians to "land" it in the wanted spot in the Pacific ocean. As usual, the Russians kept a very low profile, eventually crashig MIR as scheduled, with pin point accuracy into the Pacific.

After that, I remember Americans wanting to withdraw their skeptism. To see how Americans "respect" the Russians, the Russians should just make a deal supplying some nuclear knowledge to some country. Lately, Putin told the world that though the American idea of a missile shield is wonderful, it will NOT work. Because Americans want money, they go ahead with it. In the coming decades, Russians will be proven right just as the predicted with the Space Shuttle. Go figure!

Before I go...remember that when the Chinese "captured" some American aircraft and demanded that it NOT be flown out of China, the Americans used...you guessed right: a Russian made Antonov http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/row/an-124.h tm. Once again, the worlds greatest country relied on "out-dated" Russian technology to transport the crippled aircraft! I guess the software you use also has some Russian input, thanks to out-sourcing.

Looks like reentry streaks, but not bright. For instance This photo and this photo seen here. I wonder what such streaks would look like in daylight, though?

Looks like reentry streaks, but not bright. For instance This photo and this photo seen here. I wonder what such streaks would look like in daylight, though?

Looks like reentry streaks, but not bright. For instance This photo and this photo seen here. I wonder what such streaks would look like in daylight, though?

Over lunch one day, he told me that there are at least five "global Internets" that he knows of.. and how the govt gave the worst one to the public to play with.

Off the top of my head, would SIPRNET be one of the global networks he was referring to?

I can't think of any other networks that might qualify as a global network worth noting these days. Internet2 seems to be mostly an experimental system at this point, and I have no clue what happened to the Mbone or 6bone. I wonder what the other networks are, and who controls them...

Because there was no need for such calls. They passed such a law quietly, with little Congressional debate or public discussion. This 1996 law encountered no opposition and there was little public discussion following it, and it laid the groundwork for many of the abuses of the PATRIOT Act.

It turns out that Polystyrene (aka styrofoam) is also a viable and cost-effective building material, currently being planned for deployment in Afghanistan by the Federation of American Scientists. According to this blog entry, "the New Harmony House (in New Harmony, Indiana) was built using this material as a demonstration, with impressive results (including the house using 50-70 percent less energy than a conventionally-constructed home)."