President Obama declared Friday that the country’s disparate efforts to “deter, prevent, detect and defend” against cyberattacks would now be run out of the White House, but he also promised that he would bar the federal government from regular monitoring of “private-sector networks” and the Internet traffic that has become the backbone of American communications.

Mr. Obama’s speech, which was accompanied by the release of a long-awaited new government strategy, was an effort to balance the United States’ response to a rising security threat with concerns — echoing back to the debates on wiretapping without warrants in the Bush years — that the government would be regularly dipping into Internet traffic that knew no national boundaries.

One element of the strategy clearly differed from that established by the Bush administration in January 2008. Mr. Obama’s approach is described in a 38-page public document being distributed to the public and to companies that are most vulnerable to cyberattack; Mr. Bush’s strategy was entirely classified.

But Mr. Obama’s policy review was not specific about how he would turn many of the goals into practical realities, and he said nothing about resolving the running turf wars among the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, the Homeland Security Department and other agencies over the conduct of defensive and offensive cyberoperations.

The White House approach appears to place a new “cybersecurity coordinator” over all of those agencies. Mr. Obama did not name the coordinator Friday, but the policy review said that whoever the president selects would be “action officer” inside the White House during cyberattacks, whether they were launched on the United States by hackers or governments.

In an effort to silence critics who have complained that the official will not have sufficient status to cut through the maze of competing federal agencies, Mr. Obama said the new coordinator would have “regular access to me,” much like the coordinator for nuclear and conventional threats.

Many computer security executives had been hoping that Mr. Obama’s announcement would represent a turning point in the nation’s unsuccessful effort to turn back a growing cybercrime epidemic. On Friday, several said that while the president’s attention sounded promising, much would depend on whom he chose to fill the role.

James A. Lewis, a director at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington group that published a bipartisan report last year calling on the president to appoint a cyberczar, said that the White House had now narrowed the list of candidates for the position to fewer than 10, but that choosing the right person would be difficult.

“There aren’t a lot of people who have the policy and the strategy skills and the technological knowledge to carry this out,” Mr. Lewis said. “If you’re talking about missiles and space, there are a lot of people who know policy and technology, but in cyber its such a new field we’re talking about a really small gene pool.”

For the first time, Mr. Obama also spoke of his own brush with cyberattacks, in the presidential campaign. “Between August and October, hackers gained access to e-mails and a range of campaign files, from policy position papers to travel plans,” he said, describing events that were known, though sketchily, at the time.

“It was,” he said, “a powerful reminder: in this information age, one of your greatest strengths — in our case, our ability to communicate to a wide range of supporters through the Internet — could also be one of your greatest vulnerabilities.”

Mr. Obama’s speech delved into technology rarely discussed in the East Room of the White House. He referred to “spyware and malware and spoofing and phishing and botnets,” all different approaches to what he called “weapons of mass disruption.”

Although the president did not discuss details of the expanding role for the military in offensive and pre-emptive cyberoperations, senior officials said Friday that the Pentagon planned to create a new cybercommand to organize and train for digital war, and to oversee offensive and defensive operations.

A lingering disagreement has been how to coordinate that new command with the work of the National Security Agency, home to most of the government’s expertise on computer and network warfare. One plan now under discussion would put the same general in charge of both the new cybercommand and the N.S.A. Currently, the security agency’s director is Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who would be expected to be the leading contender for the new, dual position.

Industry executives were generally supportive of the initiative Mr. Obama announced, but also cautious.

“There was nothing I was disappointed in,” said Mark Gerencser, a cybersecurity executive at Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm that deals extensively in the government’s cybersecurity strategy.

Mr. Hamilton noted that the United States had separated defense and offense in the cybersecurity arena, while its opponents, including Russia and China, had a more fluid strategy.

“It’s like we’re playing football and our adversaries are playing soccer,” he said.

Apparently Extraterrestrials destroyed the Tunguska meteorite to protect our planet from devastation, stated Russian scientist Yuriy Lavbin about the 100 year old mystery surrounding the massive Siberian explosion. He showed 10 quartz crystals that he found at the place of the meteorite’s crash. Several of the crystals have holes in between, so they can be united in a chain.

“What could this chain be for? Besides, some crystals have strange drawings on them. We don’t have any technologies that can print such kind of drawings on crystals. We also found ferrum silicate that can not be produced anywhere, except in space”, – the scientist stated.

The meteorite’s crash took place a long time ago, in the summer of 1908. An enormous volcanic ball rushed over the sky with terrifying wallop and thunder-like sound. All the citizens were frightened to death and scared to move out of their houses. A flight of a “flamy alien” ended up in an hour in the deserted taiga area. In a matter of seconds an explosive wave spread for 40 kilometers, devastating everything living around.

It was not until many years later that a Siberian scientist set up an expedition to the place of the meteorite’s crash. They searched carefully through the river banks and found unusual quartz boards. Mr. Lavbin states that such solid stones do not exist on our planet Earth. He told of an experiment that was done on the crystals: scientists tried to put some of the same drawing that were on the stones initially with a sophisticated laser machine.

How surprised they were to realize that the laser (that usually cuts metal objects into pieces) managed to put just some faint stripes, barely visible. The stones, have an entire system of different lines and circles on them. Scientists suppose that the stones used to be a part of the navigational system of a spaceship. All stones united form a map, which they could have used to cruise through the Universe.

In 1908, the UFO is thought to have hit the meteorite that weighed over 1 billion tones. If the meteorite fell down on Earth, all the people would have been dead, extinct. Scientists believe the aliens had interfered and put their lives on the line to make sure there isn’t a direct impact with Earth.

A strange portrait of an extraterrestrial person on one of the stones proves this hypothesis – concluded Mr Lavbin.

About 50 feet before a car from Canada reaches the border inspection booth, the screenings begin.

A camera snaps your license plate.

An electronic card reader mounted on a yellow post scans your car for the presence of any radio-frequency ID cards inside. If there is an enhanced driver’s license embedded with biometric information, its unique PIN number is read without you offering it.

The Customs and Border Protection computer connects with your province’s database and in less than a second – .56 to be exact – your personal information is uploaded to a screen in the booth. A second camera snaps the driver’s face.

Welcome to the United States of America.

If Canadians were under the impression that the Canada-loving U.S. President Barack Obama would heed pleas to loosen border controls to ease trade and traffic, there should no longer be any confusion. He has not.

Beginning June 1, you’d better have that passport ready. Or if you have an enhanced driver’s licence from British Columbia, Manitoba or Quebec, make sure it’s in your wallet, ready to show. (Ontario is now processing applications for the cards.)

Some Canadian MPs, border state lawmakers and Detroit-Windsor area businesses expect the worst when the new controls kick in.

“Either it’s going to cause a massive backup, or it’s going to cause a dramatic decrease in travellers across the border, or it’s going to cause both,” says Melissa Roy of the Detroit Regional Chamber, the largest chamber of commerce organization in the U.S. “It’s an absolute nightmare.”

Obama’s top officials – Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – signed off long ago on the June 1 deadline for the infamous Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. That’s the George W. Bush-era policy that Congress pushed through under the 9/11 intelligence reform bill, which requires every person entering the United States by air, sea or land to carry a passport or U.S. government-approved secure identity document.

Napolitano says Canadians had better get used to it. “The future is that there will be a real border,” she told a trade group last month.

This is what that border already looks like:

A post-mounted scanner screens your vehicle for radioactive material that could be used to build a “dirty bomb” – a probe so sensitive it will detect if you’ve recently had a medical test that used isotopes.

As you pull up to the booth, a computer monitor may be filling with information about you, even before the guard asks, “Where are you coming from? What’s your citizenship? Where are you headed? Why?”

If a border lookout, arrest warrant or criminal record pops up on the guard’s screen, or if something doesn’t quite add up – maybe you’re sweating bullets on a cold day – expect to get hauled over for a secondary inspection.

The port of entry at the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit – the busiest commercial land crossing in North America, through which a quarter of all Canada-U.S. trade passes – has strict controls, as does the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.

Border agents, packing pepper spray, collapsible batons and 9-mm automatic pistols, are the first point of contact for people and cargo alike. Sometimes their supervisors order vehicle sweeps at random. Then for 30 minutes, agents will pop every trunk, just for a look-see.

Down below the 80-year-old bridge, dozens of long-haul transport trailers are queued up to go through the same checks, and possibly pass through a giant gamma-ray screening facility that peers inside suspicious 18-wheelers.

Between the legal crossing points, all along the Canada-U.S. border, there’s a new reality.

While the U.S. is not constructing an 1,100-kilometre fence between itself and Canada, as it is doing along its southern border with Mexico, the makings of a virtual fence are in place along what was once known as the world’s longest undefended border.

High in the sky over North Dakota, an unmanned Predator drone is on patrol, equipped with an infrared security camera that looks forward 16 miles.

The drone is not authorized to fly in Canadian airspace, but it can peer across into Manitoba. Another one is to be stationed near Detroit next year to scan the Michigan-Ontario boundary.

More daytime and nighttime infrared camera, radar surveillance towers and remote motion sensors are being erected across the northern U.S. border with Canada.

And there are more boots on the ground than ever. Before 9/11, the U.S. had 340 Border Patrol agents along its Canadian border. By next year, there will be more than 2,000.

The Detroit–Port Huron–Sault Ste. Marie regional border patrol operation boasts a fleet of prop planes, small helicopters, a bigger Black Hawk helicopter, speedboats, Coast Guard vessels, even a small Cessna Citation jet.

In Windsor, it makes MPs like the NDP’s Brian Masse nervous about “the militarization of the border.”

He points to the helicopters and drones, and Canada’s willingness to accept U.S. Coast Guard training exercises on the Great Lakes, where boats are equipped with machine guns that fire more than 600 bullets a minute.

It’s all “really changed the nature of the border itself,” Masse says.

Edward Alden, a Canadian journalist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, wrote The Closing of the American Border, which documented the toll of overzealous border policies on the U.S. economy.

He argues “the biggest mistake of the post-9/11 period” was the decision to blur the lines between the fight against terrorism and the fight against illegal immigration.

Alden does not see any evidence of change under Obama. Democrats don’t want to be seen as soft on homeland security, and have been “hawkish since Day One.” But they also are under pressure by a strong Hispanic voting bloc to treat the southern and northern border with what Napolitano calls “parity.”

Chief Ron Smith, public affairs liaison for Customs and Border Protection in Detroit, concedes that when it comes to the northern border, “A lot of people overstate the security threat. If somebody’s trying to sneak into the United States along the northern border, it doesn’t mean they are a terrorist. We get people trying to sneak across the northern border for the same reasons people try to sneak across the southern border.”

Above is a sketch of  the Pentagon’s  far-out research arm Darpa’s plan to track down and tag “elusive targets” — adversaries who can move, hide and blend in with cluttered environments. And that means more than just next-generation sensors that can penetrate foliage or peer inside “urban canyons.” It means stitching together information collected by different sensors to track a moving object.

Darpa’s 2009 strategic plan offers a fascinating overview of  the different approaches the agency is taking to better track and identify these elusive targets. Some of these, like the Forester foliage- penetrating radar, tackle a specific problem: detecting enemy troops moving under the cover of dense jungle canopy. But another program, called NetTrack, would provide more persistent reconnaissance by linking together and comparing information from different sensors to track a target, even if it moves behind a solid obstruction.

The NetTrack overview on the Darpa website gives few details, but the strategic plan gives a better idea of how it might work. Using software tools, the system could stitch together information from a variety of sensors (synthetic aperture radar, optical, video, acoustic sensors, moving target indicators), and hand off to the right platform when appropriate. For instance, if a Predator lost a video feed on a vehicle that entered a forest, the networked system would cue a laser radar sensor to search for the target. Fusing or comparing sensor information can also help map out better routes for surveillance aircraft to ensure full-time coverage.

Airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance is a big focus of current operations; the Air Force, for instance, is speeding the deployment of the MC-12W aircraft — a converted Beechcraft King Air twin turboprop that captures full-motion video and signals intelligence. But finding ways to combine sensor information in more sophisticated ways would be the next step toward getting the hooks in a target — and not letting go.

You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it.

That’s the upshot of the rules the agency has followed for years to monitor licensed television and radio stations, and to crack down on pirate radio broadcasters. And the commission maintains the same policy applies to any licensed or unlicensed radio-frequency device.

“Anything using RF energy — we have the right to inspect it to make sure it is not causing interference,” says FCC spokesman David Fiske. That includes devices like Wi-Fi routers that use unlicensed spectrum, Fiske says.

The FCC claims it derives its warrantless search power from the Communications Act of 1934, though the constitutionality of the claim has gone untested in the courts. That’s largely because the FCC had little to do with average citizens for most of the last 75 years, when home transmitters were largely reserved to ham-radio operators and CB-radio aficionados. But in 2009, nearly every household in the United States has multiple devices that use radio waves and fall under the FCC’s purview, making the commission’s claimed authority ripe for a court challenge.

“It is a major stretch beyond case law to assert that authority with respect to a private home, which is at the heart of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure,” says Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Lee Tien. “When it is a private home and when you are talking about an over-powered Wi-Fi antenna — the idea they could just go in is honestly quite bizarre.”

The rules came to attention this month when an FCC agent investigating a pirate radio station in Boulder, Colorado, left a copy of a 2005 FCC inspection policy on the door of a residence hosting the unlicensed 100-watt transmitter. “Whether you operate an amateur station or any other radio device, your authorization from the Commission comes with the obligation to allow inspection,” the statement says.

The notice spooked those running “Boulder Free Radio,” who thought it was just tough talk intended to scare them into shutting down, according to one of the station’s leaders, who spoke to Wired.com on condition of anonymity. “This is an intimidation thing,” he said. “Most people aren’t that dedicated to the cause. I’m not going to let them into my house.”

But refusing the FCC admittance can carry a harsh financial penalty. In a 2007 case, a Corpus Christi, Texas, man got a visit from the FCC’s direction-finders after rebroadcasting an AM radio station through a CB radio in his home. An FCC agent tracked the signal to his house and asked to see the equipment; Donald Winton refused to let him in, but did turn off the radio. Winton was later fined $7,000 for refusing entry to the officer. The fine was reduced to $225 after he proved he had little income.

Administrative search powers are not rare, at least as directed against businesses — fire-safety, food and workplace-safety regulators generally don’t need warrants to enter a business. And despite the broad power, the FCC agents aren’t cops, says Fiske. “The only right they have is to inspect the equipment,” Fiske says. “If they want to seize, they have to work with the U.S. Attorney’s office.”

But if inspectors should notice evidence of unrelated criminal behavior — say, a marijuana plant or an unregistered gun — a Supreme Court decision suggests the search can be used against the resident. In the 1987 case New York v. Burger, two police officers performed a warrantless, administrative search of one Joseph Burger’s automobile junkyard. When he couldn’t produce the proper paperwork, the officers searched the grounds and found stolen vehicles, which they used to prosecute him. The Supreme Court held the search to be legal.

In the meantime, pirate radio stations are adapting to the FCC’s warrantless search power by dividing up a station’s operations. For instance, Boulder Free Radio consists of an online radio station operated by DJs from a remote studio. Miles away, a small computer streams the online station and feeds it to the transmitter. Once the FCC comes and leaves a notice on the door, the transmitter is moved to another location before the agent returns.