Chinese Hacker “Community” Exposed

For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China’s government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has discovered it’s worse: It’s hundreds of thousands of everyday civilians. And they’ve only just begun.

At 8 a.m. on May 4, 2001, anyone trying to access the White House Web site got an error message. By noon, whitehouse.gov was down entirely, the victim of a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Somewhere in the world, hackers were pinging White House servers with thousands of page requests per second, clogging the site. Also attacked were sites for the U.S. Navy and various other federal departments.

Xiao Tian: In the male-dominated world of hacking

A series of defacements left little doubt about where the attack originated. “Beat down Imperialism of America, Attack anti-Chinese arrogance!” read the Interior Department’s National Business Center site. “CHINA HACK!” proclaimed the Department of Labor home page. “I AM CHINESE,” declared a U.S. Navy page. By then, hackers from Saudi Arabia, Argentina and India had joined in. The military escalated its Infocon threat level from normal to alpha, indicating risk of crippling cyber-attack. Over the next few weeks, the White House site went down twice more. By the time the offensive was over, Chinese hackers had felled 1,000 American sites.

The cyber-conflict grew out of real-world tensions. A month earlier, a U.S. EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft flying off the southern coast of China had collided with a Chinese F-8 fighter jet. The American pilot landed safely, but the Chinese pilot was killed. China’s hackers lashed out. It wasn’t the first foreign attack on American sites, but it was the biggest — “the First World Hacker War,” as the New York Times dubbed it.

The Chinese attacks were poorly coordinated, and it’s tempting to dismiss them as harmless online vandalism. But subsequent attacks have become more serious. In the past two years, Chinese hackers have intercepted critical NASA files, breached the computer system in a sensitive Commerce Department bureau, and launched assaults on the Save Darfur Coalition, pro-Tibet groups and CNN. And those are just the attacks that have been publicly acknowledged. Were these initiated by the Chinese government? Who is doing this?

Airborne Microwave Weapon Destroys Electronics

In modern warfare, where missions are sometimes over in minutes, a blind enemy is a defeated enemy. The electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon detonated miles above ground would zap an army’s surveillance equipment, but not without causing heavy collateral damage. Instead, a new Air Force tool will fry electronics using high-power microwaves emitted by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) a much more directed form of an EMP.

The U.S. Air Force recently secured $40 million for the project, and while program leader Robert Torres will confirm successful ground and in-flight tests of an earlier device, he’s tight-lipped on future details. Edl Schamiloglu, a high-power microwave expert at the University of New Mexico, speculates that the weapon would focus microwaves on a target, where they would induce a power surge in unshielded wires, destroying circuits in satellite dishes, radars and anything else electronic. This would clear the way for troops or airstrikes and could even wipe out gear in hidden bunkers.

A UAV, such as Boeing’s upcoming stealth Phantom Ray, will probably be the conveyance of choice, because it can fly into enemy territory without risking a pilot’s life. This raises a challenge for powering the instrument, Schamiloglu says. Although a UAV’s small engine could provide some power, it will take high-capacity batteries to produce the gigawatt microwave pulses. Torres will say that he expects a prototype to be ready for flight tests in 2012, during which his team will adjust the beam to ensure that it inflicts damage only on the target.

Im sure in time Police departments will eventually get a hold of a scaled down version of this technology and use it to stop your car during a car chase or what ever other reason they see fit. They will take no responsibility for damage done to your car of course.

The battery and engine generate 10 nanosecond-long, gigawatt bursts of power.

Each pulse produces an electron beam, which then enters a wider pipe (an alternative design involves an electromagnetic structure)

that causes the stream of electrons to scatter, slow down, and give off energy as microwaves

The microwaves’ electric field induces a current surge in unshielded wires that fries electronics.

The microwaves can even travel through pipes or ventilation ducts into bunkers.

Biological Weapons Research in Full Swing

The dystopian British sci-fi film 28 Days Later opens with animal rights activists breaking into the Cambridge Primate Research facility to free chimpanzees used in a secret weapons program.
Terrified by the intrusion, a scientist warns the raiders that the chimps are infected with a genetically-modified pathogen. Ignoring his admonition, the chimps are let loose from their cages and immediately attack everyone in sight, unleashing a plague of unimaginable proportions.
Despite the film’s fanciful scenario (with animal rights’ campaigners clearly focused in the cross-hairs) this grim, cautionary tale does contain a kernel of truth. While marauding gangs of flesh-eating zombies haven’t invaded our cities, a subtler threat looms on the horizon.
The sixth anniversary of the murder of British biological weapons expert Dr. David Kelly on July 17, 2003, lifted the lid on more than government lies that smoothed the way for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq; it exposed the shadowy world of germ warfare research in Britain and the United States.

Along with the 2001 anthrax attacks in America that murdered five people and exposed some 10,000 others to a weaponized form of the bacteria, Kelly’s death under highly questionable circumstances focused attention on the West’s bioweapons establishment. For a fleeting instant, all eyes were trained on an international network of medical researchers, corporate grifters and Pentagon weaponeers busy as proverbial bees experimenting with deadly microorganisms.

And then as they say, things went dark; as more bodies piled up, cases were “closed” and the money kept on flowing…

An Expansive Bioweapons-Industrial Complex

The production of biological weapons were ostensibly banned when the United States signed the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1975. However, the absence of any formal verification regime limited, some would argue purposely so, the effectiveness of the treaty from the get-go.

Indeed, a giant loop hole in the BWC allows for the production of “small quantities” of pestilential agents “for medical and defensive purposes.” Note however, it is is not the production of said agents that are prohibited as such but rather, their transformation into “weapons, equipment or means of delivery … for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.”

And with the September 11 and anthrax attacks as a pretext, the United States embarked on a systematic and reckless program to expand research into the creation of prohibited weapons systems. Along with renewed interest in these dodgy projects, now euphemistically dubbed “biodefense” to avoid breaching the BWC, came a huge increase in funding as new facilities are built and older ones “upgraded.” A May 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimates that overall government spending has “increased from $690 million in FY2001 to $5.4 billion in FY2008.”

According to the Washington D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation since the 2001 terrorist attacks “the U.S. government has spent or allocated nearly $50 billion among 11 federal departments and agencies to address the threat of biological weapons. For Fiscal Year 2009 (FY2009), the Bush Administration proposes an additional $8.97 billion in bioweapons-related spending, approximately $2.5 billion (39%) more than the amount that Congress appropriated for FY2008.” … Continue Reading

Transparent Aluminum Created

Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminium’ previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science nuclear fusion and of course the unavoidable and obvious military applications.

In Nature Physics, an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

”What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,’ said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. ‘Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of ‘miniature stars’ created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.’

The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world (such as the UK’s Diamond Light Source). The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.

The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminium turned transparent.

Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period – an estimated 40 femtoseconds – it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.

Professor Wark added: ‘What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminium into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser. For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminium atom into silicon: it’s almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light!’

The researchers believe that the new approach is an ideal way to create and study such exotic states of matter and will lead to further work relevant to areas as diverse as planetary science, astrophysics and nuclear fusion power.

A report of the research, ‘Turning solid aluminium transparent by intense soft X-ray photoionization’, is published in Nature Physics. The research was carried out by an international team led by Oxford University scientists Professor Justin Wark, Dr Bob Nagler, Dr Gianluca Gregori, William Murphy, Sam Vinko and Thomas Whitcher.

Boeing Develops Phantom Ray

The Boeing Company is reviving the X-45 unmanned aerial system to be used for testing and demonstration of advanced unmanned air system technologies, under a company funded research program code-named ‘Phantom Ray’. First flight of the Phantom Ray is expected in December 2010. The Boeing Phantom Works organization is employing rapid-prototyping techniques that facilitate the speed and agility needed to meet the 2010 flight schedule. Lab testing for the Phantom Ray air vehicle is scheduled for late 2009, followed by ground testing and first flight in 2010. The completion of the Phantom Ray demonstration tests are scheduled to complete before the beginning of carrier suitability tests of a parralel Navy program – the X-47B developed by Northrop Grumman’s. Under the Phantom Ray technology demonstration program the unmanned aircraft will conduct 10 flights over a period of approximately six months, supporting missions that may include intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, suppression of enemy air defenses, electronic attack, hunter/killer, and autonomous aerial refueling.

Phantom Works’ rapid prototyping capability will have an instrumental role in the company’s ability to develop and demonstrate these capabilities over a short time and with limited resources. “We have mobilized our assets to continue the tremendous potential we developed under J-UCAS, and now will fully demonstrate that capability.

” Phantom Works President Darryl Davis said. “What is particularly exciting about Phantom Ray is that we will incorporate the latest technologies into the superb X-45C airframe design,” said Dave Koopersmith, vice president of Boeing Advanced Military Aircraft, a division of Phantom Works. “As we gradually expand the vehicle’s flight envelope, potential users will have access to a full range of unique capabilities that only this type of autonomous platform can provide.”

The original X-45C Unmanned Combat Aerial System (UCAS) developed by Boeing with funding from DARPA was competing with Northrop Grumman for the Joint UCAS program. Phantom Ray will pick up where the UCAS program left off in 2006 by further demonstrating Boeing’s unmanned systems development capabilities in a fighter-sized, state-of-the-art aerospace system. The Boeing UCAS program began with the X-45A, which successfully flew 64 times from 2002 to 2005. Those flights included a demonstration exercise with two X-45A aircraft that marked the first unmanned, autonomous multi vehicle flight under the control of a single pilot. Boeing also designed a larger UCAS aircraft, the X-45C, which will serve as the basis for the Phantom Ray demonstrator.

Picture above: Mark Witsken, a Boeing X-45A test pilot, simulates a test flight from a station console at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. Witsken was the pilot on the programs graduation combat demonstration flight August 10, 2005.

Below: Boeing developed a larger unmanned combat aircraft designated X-45C, for the DARPA J-UCAS Program. All Photos on this page by Boeing

The introduction of unmanned combat aircraft with air force, and naval service, particularly on board aircraft carriers will open revolutionary new capabilities for military aviation and naval aviation capability in particular. Scott Winship, Northrop Grumman vice president and Navy UCAS-D program manager defines the new capability as ’sea change in military aviation’. Captain Martin Deppe, the U.S. Navy Unmanned Combat Aircraft System Program Manager explains the Navy’s vision “We look forward to a time when we can introduce a new long range, persistent, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) — strike capability to the carrier decks of tomorrow.”

The first Unmanned Combat Air Systems (UCAS) developed by Northrop Grumman for the U.S. Navy was unveiled December 16, 2008 at the company’s manufacturing plant at Palmdale, California. The new aircraft, designated the X-47B is the first of two aircraft Northrop Grumman will produce for the Navy to demonstrate unmanned combat aircraft operations from the deck of an aircraft carrier. The Navy awarded the demonstration contract to Northrop Grumman in 2007 and aircraft assembly was completed in just over a year.

Following the roll out, the UCAS will undergo subsystem and structural testing through 2009, leading to the first flight scheduled in fall 2009. Carrier suitability tests and demonstration will be carried out during the sea trials planned to begin in late 2011.

The X-47B UCAS is produced by Northrop Grumman and industry teammates including Dell, Eaton Aerospace, GE Aviation, GKN Aerospace, Goodrich, Hamilton Sundstrand, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Moog, Parker Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, Rockwell Collins and Wind River.