The US army is planning to field “rubber bullets” for machine guns. Military officials claim the ammunition will allow them to more effectively quell violent protests without loss of life, but human rights campaigners are alarmed by the new weapon.

The final design for the XM1044 round has not been selected, according to an order placed on the Federal Business Opportunities website last month, but the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate has been working on a ring aerofoil projectile for some years. The round is a hollow plastic cylinder 40 millimetres across, looking something like a short toilet-paper roll. In flight its shape generates lift, giving it a longer range.

The army’s existing crowd-control rounds are single shots fired from handheld grenade launchers with a range of about 50 metres — the XM1044 would double this range. It would be supplied in belts for the Mk19 grenade launcher, a truck-mounted weapon that can fire almost six rounds per second. The Mk19 has been exported to some 30 countries, including Egypt.

“The US army has a requirement for a rapid-fire non-lethal capability,” says Ken Schulters, project manager for close combat systems at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. “All currently fielded non-lethal ammunition is single shot.”

Read more at: New Scientist

Using the available scientific evidence “it is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion” about the source of the anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax letter attacks which killed five people, according to a report issued Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings come two and a half years after the FBI said Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins was allegedly behind the anthrax mailings, and the spores could be genetically traced to a flask labeled RMR-1029 in his lab.

The scientific panel said the anthrax used in mailings to news organizations and members of Congress was the Ames strain Bacillus anthracis, and spores from those letters shared “a number of genetic similarities” with spores in Ivins’ flask. But the findings say the FBI did not fully explore other possible explanations for those similarities.

Ivins knew he was under suspicion by the FBI and committed suicide in July 2008 before any charges were filed against him. Ivins was involved in anthrax vaccine research at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.

Paul Kemp, a lawyer who represented Ivins, said that since August 2008, the Justice Department has maintained it had a “smoking gun” in the case against Ivins, citing the flask.

“Their smoking gun just turned into smoke and mirrors,” Kemp said of the report. “They said they had a smoking gun that would have convicted him (Ivins) in court and this report shows they didn’t.”

Kemp later added: “Over 200 people had access to the anthrax that came out of that flask.”

In response to the report, the FBI said, while the scientific investigation could not pinpoint the source of the anthrax, it helped its agents and the Justice Department to focus resources and conclude that Ivins was behind the attacks.

“Ultimately, the late Dr. Bruce Ivins was determined to be the perpetrator of the deadly mailings. The FBI and Department of Justice were preparing for prosecution at the time of Dr. Ivin’s death,” the FBI said.

Ivins maintained his innocence up until his death, Kemp said, adding that Tuesday’s report “just casts doubts” on the FBI’s conclusion that his former client was responsible.

The FBI praised the report for highlighting the value of what the FBI called “microbial forensics,” which it said “proved significant” in solving the case.

“Although there have been great strides in forensic science over the years, rarely does science alone solve an investigation. The scientific findings in this case provided investigators with valuable investigative leads that led to the identification of the late Dr. Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks,” the FBI said.

Throughout the anthrax probe, investigators grappled with questions about how much experience the perpetrator would have needed to make the anthrax and whether the material was “weaponized” with a silicon dispersant to allow it to float through the air, thus making it more likely the deadly spores would be inhaled.

The National Academy of Sciences panel said it found “no scientific basis on which to accurately estimate the amount of time or the specific skill set needed to prepare the spore material contained in the letters.” The panel said the time required to make the anthrax could range from two to three days to several months depending on the methods used to make the anthrax.

The group said it found no evidence the perpetrator intentionally added silicon-based dispersants to increase the flow of spores in the air. The panel said silicon was not detected on the outside of the spores which would be necessary as a dispersant. Silicon was found only inside the spores.

The FBI conducted a security review of the academy’s draft report in October 2010. The FBI subsequently asked to provide the panel some additional information. That material included an analysis of environmental samples taken from “an undisclosed overseas site at which a terrorist group’s anthrax program was allegedly located.” Investigators looked at the overseas site as part of the anthrax letters investigation. The Academy of Sciences report said samples from the site had inconsistent evidence of Ames strain B anthracis and further review was recommended.

The FBI also told the panel an analysis was done on human remains identified as belonging to 9/11 hijackers from United flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania. One test came up positive for anthrax but all other results were negative. Remains from the other 9/11 flights were not tested for anthrax.

The National Academy of Sciences report offers no opinion on Ivins’ guilt or innocence. It looks only at the scientific underpinnings of the FBI’s investigation. The scientists also did not have access to classified information.

The FBI asked the National Academy of Sciences to conduct an independent review of the science used in its investigation. That review began in 2009. The FBI’s investigation of the anthrax attacks was closed in February 2010 and some critics have said the bureau should have delayed that move until the release of the National Academy of Sciences report.

Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey who had criticized the FBI investigation, said he’s re-introducing legislation calling for a 9/11 style commission to look into the anthrax letter attacks.

“It would take a credulous person to believe the circumstantial evidence that the FBI used to draw its conclusions with such certainty,” Holt said in a press release. “The FBI has not proiven to me that this is an open and shut case.”

The anthrax letters were mailed from New Jersey, the state Holt represents.

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said the report “shows that the science is not necessarily a slam dunk.” Grassley called for an independent review of the FBI’s investigation.

At one time the FBI used Ivins as one of its scientific consultants in the anthrax investigation. After clues led investigators to focus on Ivins, the FBI performed surveillance on him, executed search warrants and studied lab records showing he had spent late hours alone in his lab prior to the time the anthrax letters were mailed. After his death, Justice Department and FBI officials released numerous documents from the investigation and said they believed Ivins bore sole responsibility for the attacks.

The anthrax-laced letters were mailed in fall 2001 — shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks — to then NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, the New York Post, Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Tom Daschle, who was the Senate Majority Leader at the time.

Five people died from inhalation anthrax which officials say was caused by contaminated mail. Two of those people were Washington area postal workers Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr. The other victims were Bob Stevens, a photo editor at American Media, Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida; Kathy Nguyen, a New York City hospital worker; and Ottilie Lundgren, an Oxford, Connecticut, widow. Seventeen other people became sick from either inhaling anthrax or skin exposure.

Source: CNN

For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The reasons are complicated and the accounting uncertain — for instance, should returning soldiers who take their own lives after being mustered out be included?

But the suicide rate is a further indication of the stress that military personnel live under after nearly a decade of war.

Figures released by the armed services last week showed an alarming increase in suicides in 2010, but those figures leave out some categories.

Overall, the services reported 434 suicides by personnel on active duty, significantly more than the 381 suicides by active-duty personnel reported in 2009. The 2010 total is below the 462 deaths in combat, excluding accidents and illness. In 2009, active-duty suicides exceeded deaths in battle.

Last week’s figures, though, understate the problem of military suicides because the services do not report the statistics uniformly. Several do so only reluctantly.

Figures reported by each of the services last week, for instance, include suicides by members of the Guard and Reserve who were on active duty at the time. The Army and the Navy also add up statistics for certain reservists who kill themselves when they are not on active duty.

But the Air Force and Marine Corps do not include any non-mobilized reservists in their posted numbers. What’s more, none of the services count suicides that occur among a class of reservists known as the Individual Ready Reserve, the more than 123,000 people who are not assigned to particular units.

Suicides by veterans who have left the service entirely after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan also are not counted by the Defense Department. The Department of Veterans Affairs keeps track of such suicides only if the person was enrolled in the VA health care system — which three-quarters of veterans are not.

But even if such veterans and members of the Individual Ready Reserve are excluded from the suicide statistics, just taking into account the deaths of reservists who were not included in last week’s figures pushes the number of suicides last year to at least 468.

That total includes some Air Force and Marine Corps reservists who took their own lives while not on active duty, and it exceeds the 462 military personnel killed in battle.

The problem of reservists’ suicides, in particular, has been a major concern to some lawmakers. A Pentagon study this year confirmed that reservists lack the support structure that active-duty troops have.

Some types of reservists are more cut off than others. Rep. Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, says that members of the Individual Ready Reserve and other categories of citizen-soldiers do not receive a thorough screening for mental health issues when they return from deployments.

One of those soldiers, a constituent of Holt’s named Coleman S. Bean, was an Army sergeant and Iraq War veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder but could not find treatment. He took his own life in 2008.

Moved by Bean’s story, Holt wrote a bill requiring phone contacts with these reservists every 90 days after they come home from war. The House adopted Holt’s provision as part of its defense authorization bills for both fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2011. But conferees writing the final version of the bills took it out both years.

Holt said in December that Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain was responsible for that decision in the most recent bill. A spokeswoman for McCain, Brooke Buchanan, would not state his position on the provision. Instead, she said House members had removed it.

A House Armed Services Committee spokeswoman, Jennifer Kohl, said the House reluctantly pulled the provision from the bill because of the opposition of senators, whom she did not name.

Holt said a fuller reckoning of the number of suicides among military personnel and veterans is needed not so much to tell lawmakers and the public that there is a problem — that, he says, they know. Rather, it is needed to more accurately gauge the extent to which programs to help troubled troops are having an effect.

“In order to know whether the steps we’ve taken work,” Holt said, “we’re going to have to have more detailed knowledge of who’s out there.”

Source: Congress.org

The Navy has opened an investigation into how a series of raunchy videos, full of sexual innuendo and anti-gay remarks, were produced and shown to the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise while on deployment supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.Navy spokesman Cmdr. Chris Sims said the videos, which were shown to the crew in 2006 and 2007, are “inappropriate.”

Excerpts from the videos and descriptions of their content were first published Saturday by The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia.

The videos on the paper’s website, reviewed by CNN, feature a man identified by two Navy officials and The Virginian-Pilot as Capt. Owen Honors, who at the time was the executive officer, or second-in-command, of the Enterprise. He recently took command of the carrier, winning one of the most coveted assignments in the U.S. Navy, which has only 11 aircraft carriers.

Honors is shown cursing along with other members of his staff in an attempt to demonstrate humor, according to videos. There are also anti-gay slurs, simulated sex acts, and what appear to be two female sailors in a shower together.

The investigation was ordered Friday by Adm. John Harvey, the four-star head of the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command, after the videos were detailed in The Virginian-Pilot. The paper also posted a link to some of the material, but edited it so that expletives were censored and some identities of junior Navy crew were disguised.

CNN left a message for Honors on Saturday. The Virginian-Pilot said he did not respond to requests for comment.

The Navy issued a statement Saturday, saying in part “production of videos, like the ones produced four to five years ago on USS Enterprise and now being written about in the Virginian-Pilot, were not acceptable then and are still not acceptable in today’s Navy. The Navy does not endorse or condone these kinds of actions.”

The statement also said, “U.S. Fleet Forces Command has initiated an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the production of these videos; however, it would be inappropriate to comment any further on the specifics of the investigation.”

But the Saturday statement was an about-face from the initial military statement to the newspaper. In that statement, the Navy said the videos were “not created with the intent to offend anyone. The videos were intended to be humorous skits focusing the crew’s attention on specific issues such as port visits, traffic safety, water conservation, ship cleanliness, etc.”

Sims said senior officers had not yet seen the videos when they issued the first statement. It was after viewing them that the investigation was ordered, he said.

When the videos first came to light the “leadership” of the Enterprise was “directed” to make certain future videos were appropriate, the Navy said. Sims said he was not aware if Honors was ever reprimanded. In the videos, Honors repeatedly jokes that his superior officers were unaware of the content of the videos and “they should absolutely not be held accountable.”

The Virginian-Pilot says the videos were shown over the ship’s internal broadcast system to its nearly 6,000 crew.

Source: CNN

Enforcing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy forbidding openly gay soldiers from serving in the military got so complicated that military officials needed to paint a picture.

It has been suggested that the comic was indeed distributed among troops — and that opponents of the “don’t ask” ban hailed it as a valuable teaching tool. “We’d rather there not be a policy excluding gay service members,” Steve Rall, a spokesman for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, said at the time. “But given it is the law, we think it is a positive step for the Army to go the extra step to educate its troops. It is about eight years too late, but late is better than never.”

Read the rest of the comic book at: http://ep.tc/problems/38/cvr.html

The Army wants to issue every soldier an iPhone or Android cellphone — it could be a soldier’s choice.
And to top it off, the Army wants to pay your monthly phone bill.

To most soldiers, it sounds almost too good to be true, but it’s real, said Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC). He said the Army would issue these smartphones just like any other piece of equipment a soldier receives.

“One of the options potentially is to make it a piece of equipment in a soldier’s clothing bag,” Vane said.

Efforts are underway around the Army to harness smart phones to revolutionize the way the service trains and fights.

Army-issued smartphones are already in the schoolhouse and garrison, or on post, in the hands of some students at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.; Fort Lee, Va.; and at Fort Sill, Okla., under an Army program called Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications. CSDA’s next step, already underway at Fort Bliss, Texas, is testing for the war zone.

In February, the Army plans to begin fielding phones, network equipment and applications to the first Army brigade to be modernized under the brigade combat team modernization program. That test will not be limited to smart phones but will include any electronic devices that may be useful to troops.

“We’re looking at everything from iPads to Kindles to Nook readers to mini-projectors,” said Mike McCarthy, director of the mission command complex of Future Force Integration Directorate at Fort Bliss.

The Army plans to roll out wireless Common Access Card readers for the iPhone in January and for Android phones in April. This would give soldiers secure access to their e-mail, contacts and calendars.

At war, smartphones would let soldiers view real-time intelligence and video from unmanned systems overhead, and track friends and enemies on a dynamic map, officials said. But the Army must first work through the complex task of securing the data and the network before it sanctions smart phones on the battlefield.

The goal is for soldiers to get information when they need it, wherever they are.

“What we’re doing is fundamentally changing how soldiers access knowledge, information, training content and operational data,” McCarthy said. “The day you sign on to be a soldier, you will be accessing information and knowledge in garrison and in an operational environment in a seamless manner. We’re using smart phone technologies to lead this.”

Open to multiple phones, the Army has not conducted testing of the concept over classified networks. The service first had to prove it could combine the phones and applications with a mobile infrastructure capable of offering service in an austere environment.

“We had to prove that we could make the electrons flow from one end to the other successfully,” McCarthy said. “We took a little bit of license in not going over classified networks. Once it works, we can start working on the information assurance piece.”

The Army is open to using multiple phones, according to Rickey Smith, the director of ARCIC-Forward.

“We’re not wedded to a specific piece of hardware. We are open to using Palm Trios, the Android, iPhone or whatever else is out there,” Smith said.

The Army probably won’t develop its own phone or do much to alter the commercial phones it buys.

It would rather make minor tweaks and “ruggedize” existing phones, which as long as the phones’ shapes and electronic guts aren’t modified, will place them at close to retail prices, said Tony Fiuza of the Army’s Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center.

Vane said the Army is still figuring out the dollars and cents of buying smartphones and apps. One option, though, is giving the purchasing power to the soldier.

Soldiers could receive a monthly stipend — what Vane called a “maintenance fee” — to spend on both minutes and apps, allowing each soldier to personalize his phone with the training and tactical apps he needs.

“If you did it that way, the advantage would be to pay for the phone once and then you pay a maintenance fee to the soldier … and then the soldier can buy whatever iPhone, Android or hardware that he or she likes,” Vane said. “Then the challenge is just figuring out how we pay for the minutes each month.”

Army officials want soldiers to bring the phones to the war zone, where their intelligence sharing and communications capabilities could revolutionize battlefield tactics.

A widespread deployment of the phones to the battlefield could come as soon as next year, Vane said.

What the Army found is that soldiers with smartphones are more likely to collect data and share it.

Vane said he wants to use the phones to collect biometrics on enemy combatants.

“Can we connect this to biometrics? Well, that’s the direction we’re headed,” he said.

The technology is there, but “the challenge will be to work through the policy issues of sharing data and information assurance,” Vane said. “Army officials remain concerned of enemy forces hacking into the phones, but don’t want that fear to paralyze the use of these phones.”

The Obama administration is considering disabling cell phones in American cars, aiming to cut down on distracted drivers and cell-phone-related road deaths.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the nation’s preeminent anti-distracted-driving crusader, said in an interview on MSNBC yesterday that federal officials are looking at technology to disable cell phones inside cars.

“I think it will be done,” LaHood said. “I think the technology is there and I think you’re going to see the technology become adaptable in automobiles to disable these cell phones. We need to do a lot more if were going to save lives.”

Also on Thursday, the SecTrans launched a new “Faces of Distracted Driving” video campaign that features people who have been killed or lost loved ones because of inattentive drivers. The video features heartwrenching stories of children killed in crashes because of text messaging, and new videos are expected to be added every few weeks, according to the New York Times.

More than 5,500 people were killed last year by distracted drivers, and another 500,000 were injured, according to the Department of Transportation. LaHood has said it is never safe to talk on a cell phone while driving, hands-free or not, because it is a “cognitive distraction.”

Incidentally, a lot of people seem to agree with this sentiment – a new poll released Thursday shows nearly two-thirds of American support a national ban on the use of cell phones while driving, even if the driver is using a hands-free device. But the poll didn’t ask how people feel about government-issued mobile phone scramblers or other disabling devices.

Source: PopSci

Mythbusters compares driving on cell phones to driving drunk.

A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.

Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.

The report also documents divisions within the government over the effort and the legal pitfalls in relying on testimony from Holocaust survivors that was decades old. The report also concluded that the number of Nazis who made it into the United States was almost certainly much smaller than 10,000, the figure widely cited by government officials.

The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006. Under the threat of a lawsuit, it turned over a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group, the National Security Archive, but even then many of the most legally and diplomatically sensitive portions were omitted. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.

The Justice Department said the report, the product of six years of work, was never formally completed and did not represent its official findings. It cited “numerous factual errors and omissions,” but declined to say what they were.

More than 300 Nazi persecutors have been deported, stripped of citizenship or blocked from entering the United States since the creation of the O.S.I., which was merged with another unit this year.

In chronicling the cases of Nazis who were aided by American intelligence officials, the report cites help that C.I.A. officials provided in 1954 to Otto Von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolf Eichmann who had helped develop the initial plans “to purge Germany of the Jews” and who later worked for the C.I.A. in the United States. In a chain of memos, C.I.A. officials debated what to do if Von Bolschwing were confronted about his past — whether to deny any Nazi affiliation or “explain it away on the basis of extenuating circumstances,” the report said.

The Justice Department, after learning of Von Bolschwing’s Nazi ties, sought to deport him in 1981. He died that year at age 72.

The report also examines the case of Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who ran the Mittelwerk munitions factory. He was brought to the United States in 1945 for his rocket-making expertise under Operation Paperclip, an American program that recruited scientists who had worked in Nazi Germany. (Rudolph has been honored by NASA and is credited as the father of the Saturn V rocket.)

The report cites a 1949 memo from the Justice Department’s No. 2 official urgingimmigration officers to let Rudolph back in the country after a stay in Mexico, saying that a failure to do so “would be to the detriment of the national interest.”

Justice Department investigators later found evidence that Rudolph was much more actively involved in exploiting slave laborers at Mittelwerk than he or American intelligence officials had acknowledged, the report says.

Some intelligence officials objected when the Justice Department sought to deport him in 1983, but the O.S.I. considered the deportation of someone of Rudolph’s prominence as an affirmation of “the depth of the government’s commitment to the Nazi prosecution program,” according to internal memos.

The Justice Department itself sometimes concealed what American officials knew about Nazis in this country, the report found.

In 1980, prosecutors filed a motion that “misstated the facts” in asserting that checks of C.I.A. and F.B.I. records revealed no information on the Nazi past of Tscherim Soobzokov, a former Waffen SS soldier. In fact, the report said, the Justice Department “knew that Soobzokov had advised the C.I.A. of his SS connection after he arrived in the United States.”

Source: NY Times

It sounds like something a wild-eyed basement-dweller would come up with, after he complained about the fit of his tinfoil hat. But military bureaucrats really are asking scientists to help them “degrade enemy performance” by attacking the brain’s “chemical pathway[s].” Let the conspiracy theories begin.

Late last month, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 711th Human Performance Wing revamped a call for research proposals examining “Advances in Bioscience for Airmen Performance.” It’s a six-year, $49 million effort to deploy extreme neuroscience and biotechnology in the service of warfare.

One suggested research thrust is to use “external stimulant technology to enable the airman to maintain focus on aerospace tasks and to receive and process greater amounts of operationally relevant information.” (Something other than modafinil, I guess.) Another asks scientists to look into “fus[ing] multiple human sensing modalities” to develop the “capability for Special Operations Forces to rapidly identify human-borne threats.” No, this is not a page from The Men Who Stare at Goats.

But perhaps the oddest, and most disturbing, of the program’s many suggested directions is the one that notes: “Conversely, the chemical pathway area could include methods to degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities.” That’s right: the Air Force wants a way to fry foes’ minds — or at least make ‘em a little dumber.

It’s the kind of official statement that’s seized on by anyone who is sure that the CIA planted a microchip in his head, or thinks that the Air Force is controlling minds with an antenna array in Alaska. The same could be said about the 711th’s call to “develo[p] technologies to anticipate, find, fix, track, identify, characterize human intent and physiological status anywhere and at anytime.”

The ideas may sound wild. They are wild. But the notions aren’t completely out of the military-industrial mainstream. For years, armed forces and intelligence community researchers have toyed with ways of manipulating minds. During the Cold War, the CIA and the military allegedly plied the unwitting with dozens of psychoactive drugs, in a series of zany (and sometimes dangerous) mind-control experiments. More recently, the Pentagon’s most revered scientific advisory board warned in 2008 that adversaries could develop enhancements to their “cognitive capabilities … and thus create a threat to national security.” The National Research Council and Defense Intelligence Agency followed suit, pushing for pharma-based tactics to weaken enemy forces. In recent months, the Pentagon has funded projects to optimize troop’s minds, prevent injuries, preemptively assess vulnerability to traumatic stress, and even conduct “remote control of brain activity using ultrasound.”

The Air Force is warning potential researchers that this project “may require top secret clearance.” They’ll also need a high tolerance for seemingly loony theories — sparked by the military itself.

Photo: U.S. Army

Source: Wired

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.”

Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.

This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for “testing, training, and evaluation purposes.” The agency says, however, that those capabilities are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports.

Body scanners penetrate clothing to provide a highly detailed image so accurate that critics have likened it to a virtual strip search. Technologies vary, with millimeter wave systems capturing fuzzier images, and backscatter X-ray machines able to show precise anatomical detail. The U.S. government likes the idea because body scanners can detect concealed weapons better than traditional magnetometers.

This privacy debate, which has been simmering since the days of the Bush administration, came to a boil two weeks ago when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that scanners would soon appear at virtually every major airport. The updated list includes airports in New York City, Dallas, Washington, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, has filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to grant an immediate injunction pulling the plug on TSA’s body scanning program. In a separate lawsuit, EPIC obtained a letter (PDF) from the Marshals Service, part of the Justice Department, and released it on Tuesday afternoon.

These “devices are designed and deployed in a way that allows the images to be routinely stored and recorded, which is exactly what the Marshals Service is doing,” EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg told CNET. “We think it’s significant.”

William Bordley, an associate general counsel with the Marshals Service, acknowledged in the letter that “approximately 35,314 images…have been stored on the Brijot Gen2 machine” used in the Orlando, Fla. federal courthouse. In addition, Bordley wrote, a Millivision machine was tested in the Washington, D.C. federal courthouse but it was sent back to the manufacturer, which now apparently possesses the image database.

The Gen 2 machine, manufactured by Brijot of Lake Mary, Fla., uses a millimeter wave radiometer and accompanying video camera to store up to 40,000 images and records. Brijot boasts that it can even be operated remotely: “The Gen 2 detection engine capability eliminates the need for constant user observation and local operation for effective monitoring. Using our APIs, instantly connect to your units from a remote location via the Brijot Client interface.”

This trickle of disclosures about the true capabilities of body scanners–and how they’re being used in practice–is probably what alarms privacy advocates more than anything else.

A 70-page document (PDF) showing the TSA’s procurement specifications, classified as “sensitive security information,” says that in some modes the scanner must “allow exporting of image data in real time” and provide a mechanism for “high-speed transfer of image data” over the network. (It also says that image filters will “protect the identity, modesty, and privacy of the passenger.”)

“TSA is not being straightforward with the public about the capabilities of these devices,” Rotenberg said. “This is the Department of Homeland Security subjecting every U.S. traveler to an intrusive search that can be recorded without any suspicion–I think it’s outrageous.” EPIC’s lawsuit says that the TSA should have announced formal regulations, and argues that the body scanners violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable” searches.

TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz told CNET on Wednesday that the agency’s scanners are delivered to airports with the image recording functions turned off. “We’re not recording them,” she said. “I’m reiterating that to the public. We are not ever activating those capabilities at the airport.”

The TSA maintains that body scanning is perfectly constitutional: “The program is designed to respect individual sensibilities regarding privacy, modesty and personal autonomy to the maximum extent possible, while still performing its crucial function of protecting all members of the public from potentially catastrophic events.”

Source: CNet