May. 25, 2002

 
NEW YORK (AP) - As visitors to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island board a ferry from Manhattan, a new surveillance system is taking their pictures and comparing them to a database of terror suspects compiled by the federal government.

The system was installed just ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, days after the FBI said it had received uncorroborated information that terrorists had threatened New York and some of its landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty.

``We're going to look at the facial recognition technology to see if it can be expanded for use in other parts of the city,'' Gov. George Pataki said on Saturday during a visit to the statue with his family.

``People are still coming to New York City, to the Statue of Liberty, from around our country and around our world because they appreciate that this is a secure, safe and free city,'' he said.

The facial recognition technology, provided by Visionics, of Jersey City, N.J., already is used in some airports and government buildings.

Mustafa Koita, a manager for Visionics, said the system searches 1 million images per second. ``It has not slowed any of the foot traffic and I think people feel a little safer, too,'' Koita said.

Several cameras at varying heights snapped tourists' photographs just before they walked through a security checkpoint to board a ferry to the statue and Ellis Island, both operated by the National Park Service. Koita said the cameras were positioned so it would be difficult for people to look away or hide their faces.

The system was received with enthusiasm by tourists waiting in line on Saturday.

``I think it's great. It's a good safety precaution that is definitely necessary,'' said Joe Scali, 57, of North Haven, Conn.

Surrounded in the ferry terminal by signs warning that facial recognition cameras were in use, Dave Miller, of Madison, Ala., accepted the increased security as part of post-Sept. 11 life in the United States.

``I've got nothing to hide, and neither should anyone else,'' said Miller, 49. ``Life changed on Sept. 11, and we're going to have to give up some freedoms so that we can continue to have freedoms.''

But the American Civil Liberties Union criticized the system, calling it ``ineffective'' and ``an insult to the American people.''

``To have such a system in place near the Statue of Liberty ... is both ironic and disheartening,'' said Barry Steinhardt, director of the group's Technology and Liberty Program, said in a statement on the group's Web site.

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By Dee Ann Divis and Nicholas M. Horrock
UPI Correspondents
From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk
Published 5/2/2002 9:11 PM


WASHINGTON, May 2 (UPI) -- Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge for the first time disclosed Thursday the Bush administration is studying ways to set national standards for driver's licenses that would assist in preventing fraudulent identification and expose aliens who overstayed their visas.

In a briefing for senators and the public arranged by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Ridge said the Office of Homeland Security is studying proposals by the National Governor's Association and other state groups to establish national standards for operator's permits. Ridge said the White House would consider legislation that would do that. "It may be helpful and appropriate at some time," Ridge said.

He said drivers' license expirations should also be linked to visa expirations.

Gordon Johndroe, Ridge's spokesman, told United Press International the Bush administration opposes a national identification card, but is working with several national associations including the governors and the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators on ideas to make vehicle operators permits more standard.

One idea, he said, would be to issue resident aliens driver's permits linked to their visas. If an alien had a visa to visit the United States for six months, he or she would not be able to obtain a driver's permit that exceeded six months, Johndroe said. This would require, he said, a way for state departments of motor vehicles to be linked up with the Immigration and Naturalization Service or for states to call up INS records. He said that Homeland Security is also studying proposals to help state motor vehicle agencies link up.

On Wednesday, two Virginia congressmen, Democrat Jim Moran and Republican Tom Davis, submitted legislation to standardize state-issued driver's licenses across the United States, mandating the licenses carry a computer chip and incorporate some kind of unique identifier such as a fingerprint. The bill would also mandate that state bases be linked.

Moran assured reporters Wednesday the bill he introduced was crafted so the new drivers license databases would not be the basis of a national ID card.

"The main concern was a national identity card, " Moran said about the crafting of the bill. "This puts in protections against this becoming that sort of a database. It's confined within the state. It's not one single database that you would check against.

"These are state motor vehicle departments that will have these databases. This is not a national database," he said.

Moran said that the database would not be centralized.

"You would have the capability, now that this is digitized, to check every state database. But you have to check individually. This is not a national data file," said Moran.

"We're deliberately preventing that from occurring. What'd you want to do is to check every state where the person says they have a drivers license, where the person says they used to live. So those are the ones you check. I don't know that you really need to check all 50 states."

The Patriot Act, passed late last year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, appears to open a way for federal, state and local databases to be linked. The bill authorized $150 million for the "expansion of the Regional Information Sharing System" to "facilitate federal-state-local law enforcement response related to terrorist acts."

There appears to be growing support in Congress for such an expansion of access. On Tuesday at a Brookings Institution discussion of counter-terrorism actions, Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., said she thinks the United States needs what she called "smart card technology."

"I think we need increased use of biometrics so that we're sure a person using some form of identification is in fact the person on the identification. Obviously to get there and to rely on it, you need to know the person who is applying for the piece of identification is in fact who she says she is."

Harman, a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence and an acknowledged expert on counter-terrorism, said the identification needs to be connected to national databases to check on the background of driver's permit applicants.

"I think this issue must be looked at. We don't automatically have to call it a national ID card, that's a radioactive term, but we can certainly think about smart cards for essential functions, but we need the database to support that."

Asked by a member of the audience if she felt there was political support for this technology, Harman said, "I think most people are really there. Keep in mind that if we have a second wave of attacks. The folks who are raising objections will probably lose totally. The better idea is to do right now what I call rebalance" Harman suggested meeting increased security needs but with "very justifiable civil liberties and privacy guarantees. "Congress did a pretty good job on the Patriot Act," she said. "...We disallowed some of the things (Attorney General John) Ashcroft wanted because they were excessive. There still is a balancing mechanism which is the courts."

Later in discussing proposals for national information sharing, Harman said, "We already have in a sense a private sector based information sharing system -- credit card companies run it. And the good news is, they're capable of collecting a lot of information and popping out things using state-of-the art technology.''

She used the example that the credit card companies come to know a pattern of a customer's charges so well that they can identify when the card is being used fraudulently and query the customers. "That's a private based system that works well. There's also a private based system that's abused," she said. She did not elaborate on abuses.


(Dee Ann Divis is UPI Science and Technology Editor and Nicholas M. Horrock is UPI's Chief White House Correspondent)

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By Gabriel Ash

YellowTimes.org Columnist (US)
7-17-2

One of the current Administration's "anti-terror" initiatives is slowly taking shape, and it isn't a pretty sight. TIPS, Terrorism Information and Prevention System (www.CitizenCorps.gov/tips.html)*, is a government plan for recruiting millions of Americans to spy and snitch on their neighbors. The recruitment focuses on people with access to homes and businesses, including letter carriers and utility employees.

According to Ritt Goldstein, who broke the news, the Justice Department plans that "the U.S. will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police." One in every 24 Americans will be a snitch, which means that, assuming your acquaintance list is 150 names long, you will know six rats personally.

This is an unprecedented level of government spying on citizens. But such spying has a long pedigree, which helps to make the new initiative seem almost innocuous. Bill Redden describes in his book Snitch Culture, the frightening extent to which Americans are addicted to snitching.

The scope of snitching goes way beyond direct governmental spy operations such as COINTELPRO and Senator McCarthy's "Unamerican" hearings. In public schools, students are invited to place anonymous calls and rat on other students, while teachers and counselors are encouraged to report "anti-social" tendencies to the police. At work, employers require workers to report on other workers, hire detectives to spy on workers and question neighbors on workers' private lives. Neighbors are asked to call the police if they suspect someone's child is crying too much. Hospital workers are asked to inform the police about the drug habits of patients. The IRS wants to know what you think of your neighbor's new Lexus, etc.

The media endorses the snitching culture with reality television shows in which participants assess one another for the camera, or shows like the Jerry Springer Show, in which guests are publicly humiliated by revelations from relatives and old lovers. Crime shows invite the public to report suspects they might know, and stories about relatives or spouses ratting on each other to law enforcement agencies are given prominent and sympathetic coverage in the news.

Snitches and informants are usually associated with authoritarian, and often totalitarian, regimes. The infamous Stasi police in East Germany has won notoriety for their extensive snitch files. Other brutal regimes invest in large secret police forces that specialize in recruiting and handling informants. The regimes of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Israel all rely extensively on such methods.

The official explanation is always that informants are needed to foresee and prevent security threats or violence. The justification for TIPS is no different. But there is another aspect of snitching that is equally important to the rulers, an aspect that George Orwell explored in depth in his acclaimed novel, 1984.

Snitching creates a culture of paranoia. It isolates people, breaks down social solidarity, and prevents exchange of information between members of society. Everyone becomes obsessed with watching their own back. Nobody is a friend. Nobody can be trusted.

Snitching creates a culture in which every encounter between two citizens is mediated by authority: Big Brother is always in the room with you. And even if it isn't, you have to behave as if it is. The ubiquity of authority is the essence of totalitarianism.

Many people, after reading the official Citizen Corps web page, will say that TIPS is really no big deal. After all, what can be so wrong about citizens notifying the government about what looks to them as terrorist related activity?

A lot, actually. People don't know what terror activity looks like. To the casual eye, preparing for a terror attack can look like just about anything. Professional terrorists don't look like professional terrorists. They look like me and you. Informants will report instead on whatever fits their prejudices - odd haircuts, books in Arabic, posters of Che Guevara, disparaging comments about the intelligence of the President, etc. Some of them will invent stories to harm people because they hold a grudge against them. Others will use their imagination to make themselves loved by their handlers.

TIPS will create new governmental files on citizens, useful for harassment and abuse, and not much else. It will increase the paranoia and suspiciousness of American society, driving it one step closer to George Orwell's dystopia. That is a high price to pay for pretending to increase our safety. It is a suicidal response to the terrorist suicide attack on September 11.

If TIPS doesn't seem outrageous, it is because Americans have already accepted a significant degree of totalitarianism and the decline of civil society that is totalitarianism's essential counterpart. The breakdown of sociability and the "crisis of trust" is one of the few things the left and the right in America agree upon**. The culture of snitching is both a symptom and a precipitant of this crisis.

During the last election campaign George W. Bush told us he found Jesus. If TIPS is any evidence, perhaps he found Judas, and, being under the influence, mistook him for Jesus.

(Rats disclaimer: the last sentence, and all other explicit and implied criticism of the government of the United States, were made in jest only. The author is actually a great admirer and fervent supporter of our great president and most pious leader, George W. Bush, hammer of terrorists and slayer of evil states. God bless him.)

* On July 16, 2002, after information on TIPS began attracting media attention, the content of the page changed. In particular, information relevant to calculating the size of TIPS was excised. This column as well as Goldstein's refer therefore to information that is no longer public. The old page will remain viewable for a while in the google cache.

** see Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and Francis Fukuyama's Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. ___

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is an unabashed "opssimist." He writes his columns because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword - and sometimes not. Gabriel lives in the United States.

Gabriel Ash encourages your comments: gash@YellowTimes.org http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=495

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By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 16, 2002; Page A03

The Navy won approval yesterday to deploy two ships that use controversial low-frequency sonar to detect faraway submarines, despite continuing questions about whether the system's loud blasts will injure whales and other ocean mammals.

The ruling by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grants the Navy an exemption from federal rules that guard marine mammals from incidental injury. The agency concluded that protective measures required of the Navy will ensure that the effects of the sonar will be "negligible" and will not undermine the long-term health of whales and other ocean mammals.

However, the five-year authorization requires the Navy to investigate unanswered questions regarding how the low-frequency sonar affects whale behavior, and whether it can silence the songs of large whales in particular. It also forbids the Navy from using the system when ocean mammals are within 1.1 nautical miles, since the force of the noise can damage their hearing and disrupt their activities within that range.

The decision was a blow to environmentalists who fear that growing noise pollution in the oceans will harm whales, dolphins, porpoises and other sea creatures that have been at the center of global preservation efforts. It was welcomed by those worried about how environmental and endangered-species laws have been affecting military preparedness.

"The monitoring will be extensive and research will continue," said Rebecca Lent, deputy assistant administrator with NOAA Fisheries. "The goal is to make sure that marine mammals are protected as much as [is] feasible."

The long-awaited ruling is not expected to settle the issue. Environmental groups have strongly opposed the low-frequency sonar plan, and Michael Jasny of the Natural Resources Defense Council said his group is actively considering a lawsuit to stop it. The NRDC's protests helped stop the Navy's early low-frequency sonar experiments and led to the Navy's 1999 request for an exemption from the Marine Mammal Act.

Jasny yesterday criticized the agency for "permitting global use of the system without assessing its potential to kill marine mammals and without providing any effective way of ensuring that none are killed."

A lawsuit, however, could also result in congressional action to move ahead anyway. The Bush administration has been exploring legislation to make sure that environmental and animal protection rules not be allowed to supersede military preparedness.

According to Lt. Cmdr. Pauline Storum, the Navy expects to receive its formal permission to begin using the sonar in a month, and hopes to deploy the system soon after. She said the Navy "remains committed to the environmentally responsible deployment" of the sonar "to balance the national imperatives of military readiness and environmental conservation."

The new sonar, part of the Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS), would allow the Navy to detect and track quiet submarines -- which don't create the noise that can be followed through "passive" sonar -- and to do it at a much longer range. The low frequencies are essential to the system because they travel much farther underwater than the higher frequencies now employed.

The new sonar system creates a noise roughly equivalent to that of a Boeing 747 engine at takeoff, and would clearly injure many marine mammals if they were close by. But under the NOAA permit, the Navy would use visual sighting, and the kind of passive sonar used by commercial fishing fleets, to make sure no marine mammals are within the prohibited zone around the noise blast. The sonar would also not be allowed within 12 nautical miles of coastlines.

The permit issued yesterday gives the Navy permission to injure some whales and other ocean mammals should its monitoring system fail. But NOAA officials said they did not expect that to happen.

NOAA officials acknowledged they still don't have answers to some key questions regarding how the sonar system will affect these whales and their long-term behavior. According to Roger Gentry, coordinator of the NOAA acoustics team, large whales -- including blue, fin and humpback -- communicate at the same low frequencies as the new sonar, and so their ears would be particularly sensitive to it.

Concern about noise pollution in the oceans has grown as researchers learn more about how marine mammals rely on sound to avoid dangers, to find food and to interact with each other. Much of the problematic noise comes from commercial shipping and underwater oil and gas exploration, but Navy sonar has also proven to be deadly.

That became clear after the March 2000 stranding of 17 whales and dolphins in the Bahamas. The Navy initially denied its sonar caused the subsequent deaths of six beaked whales, but later acknowledged responsibility after unusual tests -- made possible by the freezing of several dead whales -- showed the animals had suffered internal injuries from the noise. The Navy and NOAA said the Bahamas incident involved mid-frequency sonar, which is more harmful under certain unusual circumstances than the low-frequency sonar now permitted.

The Navy had initially requested a permit to deploy four ships with the low-frequency sonar, but yesterday's permit allows two. One ship has been completed and one is under construction.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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BY LEV GROSSMAN


Sunday, Jul. 21, 2002

The U.S. armed forces don't do much shooting anymore. Even in Afghanistan, they engage in more advising and guiding than gunplay. Soldiers today are asked more often to keep the peace or defuse demonstrations, and the last thing they want in those situations is to fire a lethal weapon. That's why the Pentagon is spending more and more research-and-development dollars on weapons that stun, scare, entangle or nauseate — anything but kill.
The U.S.'s nonlethal-weapons programs are drawing their own fire, mostly from human-rights activists who contend that the technologies being developed will be deployed to suppress dissent and that they defy international weapons treaties. Through public websites, interviews with defense researchers and data obtained in a series of Freedom of Information Act requests filed by watchdog groups, TIME has managed to peer into the Pentagon's multimillion-dollar program and piece together this glimpse of the gentler, though not necessarily kinder, arsenal of tomorrow.


DIRECTED ENERGY WEAPONS

Imagine a cross between a microwave oven and a Star Trek phaser: a tight, focused beam of energy that flash-heats its target from a distance. Directed energy beams do not burn flesh, but they do create an unbearably painful burning sensation. The Air Force Research Laboratory has already spent $40 million on a humvee-mounted directed-energy weapon. Expect to see it in the field by 2009.

ANTITRACTION MATERIAL

Sometimes keeping an enemy down but not out is good enough. The Southwest Research Institute in Texas has created a sprayable antitraction gel for the Marines that is so slippery it is impossible to drive or even walk on it; one researcher describes it as "liquid ball bearings." Spray the stuff on a door handle, and it becomes too slippery to turn. The antitraction gel is mostly water, so it dries up in about 12 hours. It is also nontoxic and biodegradable.

MALODORANTS

Working for the Pentagon, the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia has formulated smells so repellent that they can quickly clear a public space of anyone who can breathe — partygoers, rioters, even enemy forces. Scientists have tested the effectiveness of such odors as vomit, burnt hair, sewage, rotting flesh and a potent concoction known euphemistically as "U.S. Government Standard Bathroom Malodor." But don't expect to get a whiff anytime soon. Like all gaseous weapons, malodorants once released are hard to control, and their use is strictly limited by international chemical-weapons treaties.

PROJECTILES

No one likes rubber bullets — not the people being fired at nor the people doing the firing. "It's very easy to put out an eye, to blind someone," says Glenn Shwaery, director of the Nonlethal Technology Innovation Center. "How do you redesign a projectile to avoid that?" The answer is, with softer, flatter bullets, beanbags and sponges that spread out the impact and hit like an open-handed slap from Andre the Giant. Shwaery's team is looking into an even more radical solution: "tunable" bullets that can be adjusted in the field to be harder or softer as the situation warrants. "We're talking about dialing in the penetrating power," he says. ?It's the difference between 'Set phasers on stun' and 'Set phasers on kill.'"

WEBS AND NETS

Spider-man has competition. A firm called Foster-Miller, based in Waltham, Mass., has created the WebShot, a 10-ft.-wide Kevlar net. Packed in a cartridge and fired from a special shotgun, the WebShot can entangle targets as far away as 30 feet. Bigger nets can work on bigger targets. The Portable Vehicle Arresting Barrier, developed for the Pentagon by General Dynamics in Falls Church, Va., is a tough, elastic web that springs up from the ground in an instant to block a road. It can stop a 7,500-lb. pickup truck traveling 45 m.p.h. and then wrap around it to trap the occupants inside.

REAL RAY GUNS

Further out on the horizon, the line between weapons development and science fiction becomes perilously thin. Mission Research Corp. of Santa Barbara, Calif., is working on a pulsed energy projectile (PEP) that superheats the surface moisture around a target so rapidly that it literally explodes, producing a bright flash of light and a loud bang. The effect is like a stun grenade, but unlike a grenade the pep travels at nearly the speed of light and can take out a target with pinpoint accuracy. Or picture this: a flashlight-size device, currently in development at HSV Technologies in San Diego, that transmits a powerful electric current along a beam of ultraviolet light. Shine that light on a human target, and you have a wireless taser that can paralyze targets as far away as 2 km.

DRUGS, BUGS AND BEYOND

Even their supporters agree that "nonlethal weapons" is a dangerous misnomer and that any of these devices has the potential to injure and kill. What is more, some of them may not even be legal. Over the past three months, a chemical-weapons watchdog organization called the Sunshine Project has obtained evidence that the U.S. is considering some projects that appear to take us beyond the bounds of good sense: bioengineered bacteria designed to eat asphalt, fuel and body armor, or faster-acting, weaponized forms of antidepressants, opiates and so-called "club drugs" that could be rapidly administered to unruly crowds. Such research is illegal under international law and could open up terrifying scenarios for abuse. "This is patently quite dangerous and irresponsible," says human-rights activist Steve Wright, who, as director of the Omega Foundation, works with Amnesty International to monitor nonlethal weapons. "What the U.S. invents today, others, including the torturing states, will deploy tomorrow." Just how much is that magic rubber bullet worth to us? Maybe some science fiction should remain fictional. — With reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington

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 UK To Create Army Of Robo-Soldiers By 2008

July 2, 2002

LONDON: Britain’s infantrymen are to be turned into high-tech “robo-soldiers” in a 1-billion-pounds project to create one of the world’s most technologically advanced armies.

The scheme will see the army’s traditional helmets, uniforms and rifles scrapped. Instead, soldiers will bristle with gadgets including a gun capable of shooting around corners, a computerized helmet that can download maps, and a whisper-sensitive radio implanted in the ear.

The project will be confirmed next month by the Ministry of Defense. The officer overseeing the project, Lt Col Dave Stewart, said the project, codenamed Fist (for Future Integrated Soldier Technology), aimed to turn everything a soldier wears or carries into an “integrated fighting system” with every component linked to the rest. The first such kits could be introduced from 2008, with the whole army modernized by 2012.

At its heart will be a computerized gun capable of firing grenades or bullets and equipped with a display screen enabling a soldier to aim it from around corners or over walls without exposing his head or body.

The gun, equipped with laser rangefinders and thermal-imaging equipment, may even have voice controls and a radio link enabling it to be fired remotely from several feet away. The soldier’s helmet will include a pull-down visor capable of displaying aerial views of the battlefield with the soldier’s position and those of colleagues.

The Sunday Times, London via The Times of India

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Chinese look to weather manipulation to ensure optimum conditions for Olympics

Aug. 5 issue — A year ago Beijing won its bid to host the 2008 Olympics, and it’s been consumed with a frenzy of preparation ever since. Weather is a particular concern, since the city’s eye-searing pollution almost nixed China’s bid. So now Beijing is banishing polluting factories from city limits, planting trees to keep out dust blown in from the Gobi Desert and clamping down on vehicle emissions in hopes of guaranteeing blue skies by 2008.
BEIJING’S BUREAUCRATS HAVE also embarked on a Great Leap Forward in manipulating the weather by dispelling rain and fog, trying to ensure that nothing, er, clouds China’s achievements and image during important public events. “We’ll definitely be consulted on how to create beautiful conditions for the Olympics,” says Wang Wang, one of China’s foremost experts at Beijing’s Study Institute of Artificial Influence on the Weather.
Chinese officials’ interest in controlling weather dates to the 1950s, when Beijing had access to “cloud seeding” expertise from the U.S.S.R. Since then, provincial bureaucrats all across northern China have learned to induce rainfall yearly between April and June to combat the region’s chronic drought, says Wang. Using aircraft, rockets and even land-based furnaces, experts propel tiny amounts of silver iodide into certain types of cloud formations to accelerate condensation, creating rain on demand—and averting showers during later scheduled events. Depending on the type of cloud, liquid nitrogen, dry ice and sodium chloride (yes, salt) can also be used.
Does it work? Wang proudly relates how he helped provoke rainfall to douse a Heilongjiang forest fire in 1987. Around the same time, he says, “we experimented for a month to disperse fog and rain for China’s Oct. 1 National Day Parade.” Rain was also successfully averted at least three times in the past decade, twice for public sporting events and once during a panda festival, he says. And Beijing has now started trying to control those who would control the weather. Regulations unveiled two months ago stipulate that “artificially induced weather cannot take place whenever people want,” especially since “dangerous missiles” are sometimes used. Indeed, one rain-making attempt went awry earlier this year when a rocket fell through a villager’s roof in northern China. “It’s still not a mature art,” says Wang.
—Melinda Liu
 

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