Twenty five years ago, we saw the very first worm. Today, we find worms are but the first step in a possible cyber war. For those who want to know a little bit more about the underlying technology and how it works, this piece I did for the Hoover Institution, “From Worms to Cyberwar” is an easy reading introduction. Continue reading
John Adams. Adam’s Apple. In the US the Adams name is as American as apple pie.
Good thing then that a new DARPA project has the same name!
DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Project Administration) recently announced that it would be funding a project known as ADAMS (Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales). According the Homeland Security Newswire, “Researchers in a 2-year, $9 million project will create a suite of algorithms that can detect multiple types of insider threats by analyzing massive amounts of data — including email, text messages and file transfers — for unusual activity.”
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The Supreme Court today heard oral argument in the case of United States v. Antoine Jones. Jones was convicted of drug offenses based, in large part, on the evidence derived from a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking device that law enforcement had put on his car. The GPS tracker was live for 28 days, tracking Jones’ car 24/7. When they put the GPS on the car, the police did not have a valid warrant.
The government says that it didn’t need one. They argue that a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his travel on public roads. After all, they argue, the police could have tailed Jones in an unmarked vehicle and they wouldn’t have needed a warrant. Jones argues, however, that GPS tracking devices are uniquely intrusive — that they allow the government to collect a large volume of geo-location tracking data and use it to build a “mosaic” picture of a person, learning, for example, what church he goes to; what bar he drinks at; and whether or not he is a regular gym attendee. Continue reading
America’s spies, like the rest of the nation, are looking ahead to a period of austerity. The intelligence community is facing “double digit” budget cuts, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said today speaking at the annual the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s annual conference in San Antonio, Texas.
“Coincidentally today we handed in our homework assignment, if you will, to [the White House Office of Management and Budget], and it calls for cuts in the double-digit range with a ‘B’ over 10 years,” he said.
As the federal government attempts to find over $1 trillion in savings to meet budget-cutting goals, even intelligence spending is not immune to cuts. But the intelligence community does not normally divulge details of its budget, citing the need to keep its spending secret from foreign adversaries who might glean valuable information about the scope of activities. Continue reading
In 2003, an Iraqi woman named Jumana Michael Hanna became the public face of torture under the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein: her story of torture and rape was reported on the front-page of the Washington Post and cited in congressional testimony of Paul Wolfowitz.
None of her story, it was later revealed, was true.
But the ability of Hanna’s narrative to evoke emotion and sympathy and its rapid spread to an international audience proved an enduring truth: stories, ranging from urban myths to epic works of literature, exert a powerful influence over people and their beliefs.And in the era of social media, stories can spread with unprecedented speed to anywhere in the world, potentially influencing elections, protest movements or even revolutions. Continue reading
Ten years ago, the military buzzword was network centric warfare, a theory which posited that U.S. military power would be dramatically enhanced by communications systems and information-sharing technology. Now, it turns out, the network the Pentagon wants to master is other people’s, rather than its own.
The Pentagon’s premiere research agency announced last week that it is seeking to build a better science of social network analysis, a relatively new field of research that many believe could be used to deliver a fatal blow to terrorist and insurgent groups. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking proposals for a new program called GRAPHS, short for Graph-theoretic Research in Algorithms and the Phenomenology of Social networks program. The goal is to get researchers to come up with “revolutionary” ways to model—and predict—social networks.
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Imagine a future where a U.S. military drone flies over a foreign city, spots a group of people, swoops in close enough to see their faces, and then kills an identified terrorist. Sound scary?
It should, since indeed the Pentagon is working on a variety of technologies designed to do just that.
A recent Washington Post article recounted a recent military-sponsored experiment that could lay the “groundwork for scientific advances that would allow drones to search for a human target and then make an identification based on facial-recognition or other software.” Similarly, Wired’s DANGER ROOM blog reported on some half a dozen contracts recently given by the Army to develop software that can instantly recognize specific people based on unique identifiers, such as their face.
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There isn’t any. Honest.
My wife and I are on holiday in New Zealand and earlier today we took a domestic flight from Wellington to Nelson. It was a short commuter hop — 30 minutes, across the strait separating the North and South Islands. On the whole an utterly unremarkable experience, just like any number of flights we’ve taken before.
Save for one thing — no security. We arrived for the flights with our e-tickets in hand, scanned them at a kiosk, dropped our bags off on the conveyor and walked to the gate. No ID check; no metal detector; no X-ray of our carry on bags. Probably no X-ray of the checked luggage but we couldn’t tell for sure. We scanned our boarding passes again at the gate, but no ID check. Nothing. In short, it felt like something from before 9/11 — and possibly even before the 1980s and the advent of hijacking.
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A research arm of the U.S. intelligence community says it want to sweep up public data on everything from Twitter to public webcams in the hopes of predicting the future.
The project is the brainchild of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, a relatively new part of the spy community that is supposed to help investigate breakthrough technologies. While other projects exist for predicting political events, the Open Source Indicators program would be perhaps the first that mines data from social media websites.
The idea is to use automated analysis to sift through the deluge of publicly available data to help predict significant societal events, like a popular revolution Continue reading
Cloud Computing is the “new thing.” Everyone is rushing to it — the new Federal Cloud Computing Strategy isn’t called “Cloud First” for no reason. Indeed, the reasons to like the cloud are obvious With economies of scale it is often cheaper and more efficient at the same time — what’s not to like?
In the end, maybe more than we realize. Today’s cloud system uses “thin clients” — simple interfaces like Google’s Chrome system — with minimal independent computing power. All of the data, software, and operating systems, software, and processing resources are stored in the cloud, managed by a cloud system administrator. Continue reading
Medill/GlobalPost investigation sheds new light on $3.2 billion U.S. mine clearance and victim assistance effort.
Medill/USA TODAY investigation of U.S. international food aid programs finds significant, entrenched problems
Read about the project.
→ Continue to the story.EVANSTON, Ill. — The Robert R. McCormick Foundation has renewed a $1 million grant to fund the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative at Northwestern University over the next two years.
The NSJ program provides journalists-in-training and working journalists with the knowledge and skills necessary to report accurately, completely and with context on events and issues related to defense, security and civil liberties. The initiative began in January, 2009 with an initial three-year, $1.3 million McCormick Foundation grant. The grant was also renewed for $1 million over two years in 2011.
