This video depicts the day to day operations of operatives from the U.S. NNSA (nuclear national security agency)
who apparently fly around “target” cities and other areas of interest using state of the art detection equipment to seek out nuclear devices, there are also ground units who can close directly onto the weapon once detected from the air.

China had a less than happy reaction to a US congressional report that accused Beijing of developing sophisticated cyber warfare and militarising its space program. The annual China report to Congress of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission was aimed at misleading the public and impeding bilateral cooperation, foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.

“The commission has all along seen China through dark glasses and has deliberately attacked China with slanderous accusations aimed at misleading public opinion and obstructing the development of Sino-US relations,” Qin said.

“The report is unworthy of rebuttal and the aims of the commission are doomed to failure,” he said in a statement on his ministry’s website.

The report issued in Washington Thursday accused China of developing a sophisticated cyber warfare program aimed at penetrating US computer networks to extract sensitive information.

“China has an active cyber espionage program,” the report said.

“China is targeting US government and commercial computers.”

The panel also criticized Beijing of exercising “heavy handed government control” over its economy and “continuing arms sales and military support to rogue regimes” such as Sudan, Myanmar and Iran.

The commission also issued a warning about China’s space program. “China continues to make significant progress in developing space capabilities, many of which easily translate to enhanced military capacity,” it said.

Qin urged the commission to stop issuing such reports and refrain from interfering in China’s internal affairs.

The arrival of practical and usable Quantum Computing Systems seems now to be much more than science fiction, it is in fact inevitable, just a matter of time, this article describes another step that has been achieved which will bring us closer to the computational singularity

For years, physicists have been heralding the revolutionary potential of using quantum mechanics to build a new generation of supercomputers to create unbreakable codes and ultra-fast and secure communication networks.The brave new world of quantum technology may be a big step closer to reality thanks to a team of University of Calgary researchers that has come up with a unique new way of testing quantum devices to determine their function and accuracy. Their breakthrough is reported in Science Express, the advanced online publication of the prestigious journal Science.

“Building quantum machines is difficult because they are very complex, therefore the testing you need to do is also very complex,” said Barry Sanders, director of the U of C’s Institute for Quantum Information Science and a co-author of the paper.

“We broke a bunch of taboos with this work because we have come up with an entirely new way of testing that is relatively simple and doesn’t require a lot of large and expensive diagnostic equipment.”

Similar to any electronic or mechanical device, building a quantum machine requires a thorough understanding of how each part operates and interacts with other parts if the finished product is going to work properly.

In the quantum realm, scientists have been struggling to find ways to accurately determine the properties of individual components as they work towards creating useful quantum systems. The U of C team has come up with a highly-accurate method for analyzing quantum optical processes using standard optical techniques involving lasers and lenses.

“It is a completely different approach to quantum characterization than we have seen before,” said post-doctoral researcher Mirko Lobino, the paper’s lead author. “This process will be able to tell us if something is working correctly and will hopefully lead the way towards a quantum certification process as we move from quantum science to making quantum technology.”

The development of quantum computers is considered the next major advancement in computer processing and memory power but is still in its infancy. Unlike regular silicon-based computers that transmit information in binary units (bits) using 1 and 0, quantum computers use the subatomic physical processes of quantum mechanics to transmit information in quantum bits (qubits) that can exist in more than two states.

Computers based on quantum physics are predicted to be far more powerful than computers based on classical physics and could break many of the most advanced codes currently used to secure digital information. Quantum physics is also being used to try and create new, unbreakable encryption systems.

China has developed a sophisticated cyber warfare program and stepped up its capacity to penetrate US computer networks to extract sensitive information, a US congressional panel warned on Thursday.”China has an active cyber espionage program,” the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in its annual report to the US Congress. “China is targeting US government and commercial computers.”

In its 393-page report, the panel also criticized Beijing for exercising “heavy-handed government control” over its economy and “continuing arms sales and military support to rogue regimes” such as Sudan, Myanmar and Iran.

The commission also issued a warning about China’s space program. “China continues to make significant progress in developing space capabilities, many of which easily translate to enhanced military capacity,” it said.

“Although some Chinese space programs have no explicit military intent, many space systems — such as communications, navigation, meteorological, and imagery systems — are dual use in nature,” the commission said.

The commission, which was established by Congress in 2000 to analyze the economic and national security relationship between the two nations, said China was investing heavily in cyber warfare.

“Since China’s current cyber operations capability is so advanced, it can engage in forms of cyber warfare so sophisticated that the United States may be unable to counteract or even detect the efforts,” the commission said.

It said Chinese hacker groups may be operating with government support.

“By some estimates, there are 250 hacker groups in China that are tolerated and may even be encouraged by the government to enter and disrupt computer networks,” the commission said.

It quoted Colonel Gary McAlum, chief of staff for the US Strategic Command’s Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations, as saying China has recognized the importance of cyber operations as a tool of warfare and “has the intent and capability to conduct cyber operations anywhere in the world at any time.”

“China is aggressively pursuing cyber warfare capabilities that may provide it with an asymmetric advantage against the United States,” the commission said. “In a conflict situation, this advantage would reduce current US conventional military dominance.”

The commission recalled that unclassified US military, government and government contractor websites and computer systems were the victims of cyber intrusions in 2002 codenamed “Titan Rain” and attributed to China.

And earlier this month The Financial Times, citing an unnamed senior US official, reported that Chinese hackers — possibly with backing by the Beijing government — had penetrated the White House computer network and obtained emails between government officials.

The commission made 45 recommendations to Congress including possible “additional funding for military, intelligence and homeland security programs that monitor and protect critical American computer networks.”

On the economic front, the commission said “China relies on heavy-handed government control over its economy to maintain an export advantage over other countries.”

“The result: China has amassed nearly two trillion dollars in foreign exchange and has increasingly used its hoard to manipulate currency trading and diplomatic relations with other nations,” it said.

“Rather than use this money for the benefit of its citizens — by funding pensions and erecting hospitals and schools, for example — China has been using the funds to seek political and economic influence over other nations,” said Larry Wortzel, chairman of the commission.

Beijing’s “continuing arms sales and military support to rogue regimes, namely Sudan, Burma, and Iran, threaten the stability of fragile regions and hinder US and international efforts to address international crises, such as the genocide in Darfur,” the commission added.

The commission acknowledged some progress by China, specifically its adherence to non-proliferation agreements and involvement in the six-party talks to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons production capacity.

But it criticized China’s use of prison labor to produce goods for export and an “information control regime” that it said regulates the print and broadcast media, Internet, entertainment and education.

Full Report: 2008-annual-report-to-congress-concerning-china (PDF)

Brain test could be used for next polygraph

A Seattle scientist who has developed an electronic brain test that he says could improve our ability to force criminals to reveal themselves, identify potential terrorists and free those wrongly convicted may have finally broken through the bureaucratic barriers that he believes have served to stifle adoption of the pioneering technique.

“There seems to be a renewed surge of interest in this by the intelligence agencies and the military,” said Larry Farwell, neuroscientist and founder of Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories based at the Seattle Science Foundation.

Contrary to the Hollywood image of law enforcement always employing the latest science to track down the bad guys, Farwell’s years of struggle suggest that law enforcement and intelligence agencies are just about as reluctant to change as any other entrenched government bureaucracy.

“There is always this ignorance, inertia and active resistance by those who benefit from the status quo,” Farwell said.

The technique he calls “brain fingerprinting” is an electronic test of a specific kind of brain wave that he says can identify incriminating information despite an individual’s attempt to conceal the knowledge.

“The lack of acceptance has been more about turf than science,” said Drew Richardson, a former top anti-terrorism investigator with the FBI in Virginia who teaches forensic science and also consults with Farwell. “If this had just been about the science, I think this technique would have advanced much more quickly.”

Law enforcement and other investigatory agencies still routinely use the standard lie detector “polygraph” stress test today even though most scientific organizations (including the National Academy of Sciences) have found the polygraph to be highly unreliable — a finding that makes it legally inadmissible in court.

The disturbing news that some in the military and intelligence community have resorted to waterboarding or other forms of “physical” interrogation of prisoners appears to have provided a potential breakthrough for brain fingerprinting.

“Torture, or doing the kind of things that approach torture, might get someone to say what you want them to say but it’s been shown time and again that it is not a good way to get accurate or reliable information,” Farwell said.

The Seattle native, son of a University of Washington physics professor, added that he personally regards such methods as a fundamental violation of human rights.

On Monday, Farwell and Richardson will be in Washington, D.C., to make a concerted pitch for brain fingerprinting as one of five semi-finalists in an international contest known as the Global Security Challenge. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, and the prize is $500,000 plus more support from venture capital firms. Winners of the U.S. competition will head to London in November for the final contest.

“We’ve already done some testing with experts in national security and showed, for example, that we could accurately identify people who were FBI agents from experts in bomb-making,” Farwell.

He said he couldn’t go into too much detail but that military officials and others in federal government have shown interest lately in seeing if the technique could be used to identify those making the improvised bombs in Iraq that are used against soldiers.

“It’s all based on well-established science,” Farwell said. Trained as an undergraduate at Harvard University and as a graduate student at the University of Illinois, he initially pursued studies in cognitive science and in the 1990s worked on one of the first demonstrations of brain-computer interaction.

As part of this research, Farwell ran across what would become the scientific basis of brain fingerprinting. It is a type of signal in the brain known as a P300 wave, so-called because it is an involuntary response to a recognized object or piece of information that happens within 300 milliseconds.

It’s been a well-known and widely accepted phenomenon within neuroscience. What Farwell did is connect it with another related electrical brain response that he dubbed a MerMer (for “memory and encoding related multifaceted electroencephalographic response”) that he contends provides a foolproof method for testing an individual’s knowledge — or lack of knowledge — of a criminal act.

“It’s 100 percent reliable and has been ruled admissible in court,” Farwell said.

That was in Iowa, during a court case in which a man, Terry Harrington, was found innocent of murder and in 2003 released after spending 24 years in prison. Brain fingerprinting played a role, Farwell emphasized, but was not the only reason for Harrington’s exoneration. And in another case, that of Jimmy Ray Slaughter in Oklahoma, Farwell’s brain fingerprint finding that Slaughter was likely innocent did not persuade the court or prevent his execution.

“There is still a lot of resistance to accepting this in law enforcement,” Farwell said.

Richardson said he sees brain fingerprinting as being viewed by the courts and many in law enforcement as where DNA fingerprinting was back in the 1980s — exotic, not fully proved legally and too complicated for regular use. Today, he said, DNA testing is considered fairly routine and hardly even that high tech.

“Similarly, we’re just in the early phases of brain fingerprinting,” Richardson said. But he agreed with Farwell that a confluence of events seems likely to speed up adoption of the technique.

The recent suicide of Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins, subsequently identified by the FBI as the lead suspect in the 2001 anthrax poisonings, is another example of a case in which brain fingerprinting could have helped either confirm the FBI’s suspicions or perhaps exonerate Ivins, Richardson said.

“My understanding is that they did polygraph testing and Ivins passed them,” he noted. Unlike the indirect and unreliable nature of polygraph testing, Richardson said, brain fingerprinting can directly identify if a subject is aware of incriminating knowledge or information.

“We’ve proven this can work and is based on science,” Farwell said. Now, he added, all they need is to see if they can get the bureaucracy to budge a bit. “That part has taken a lot longer than I would have expected.”