According to the memorandum, CYBERCOM “will reach initial operating capability (IOC) not later than October 2009 and full operating capability (FOC) not later than October 2010.”

Gates has recommended that this new Pentagon domain be led by Lt. General Keith Alexander, the current Director of the ultra-spooky National Security Agency (NSA). Under the proposal, Alexander would receive a fourth star and the new agency would be based at Ft. Meade, Maryland, NSA’s headquarters.

Gates’ memorandum specifies that CYBERCOM “must be capable of synchronizing warfighting effects across the global security environment as well as providing support to civil authorities and international partners.”

Ostensibly launched to protect military networks against malicious cyberattacks, the command’s offensive nature is underlined by its role as STRATCOM’s operational cyber wing. In addition to a defensive brief to “harden” the “dot-mil” domain, the Pentagon plan calls for an offensive capacity, one that will deploy cyber weapons against imperialism’s adversaries.

One of ten Unified Combatant Commands, STRATCOM is the successor organization to Strategic Air Command (SAC). Charged with space operations (military satellites), information warfare, missile defense, global command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as global strike and strategic deterrence (America’s first-strike nuclear arsenal), it should be apparent that designating CYBERCOM a STRATCOM branch all but guarantees an aggressive posture.

As Antifascist Calling reported in May, the Pentagon’s geek squad, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently building a National Cyber Range (NCR), a test bed for developing, testing and fielding cyber weapons.

In conjunction with “private-sector partners,” the agency averred in a January 2009 press release that NCR promises to deliver “‘leap ahead’ concepts and capabilities.”

The Armed Forces Press Service reported June 24, that Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell told journalists that CYBERCOM is “not some sort of new and necessarily different authorities that have been granted.” Obfuscating the offensive role envisaged for the command, Morrell told reporters: “This is about trying to figure out how we, within this department, within the United States military, can better coordinate the day-to-day defense, protection and operation of the department’s computer networks.”

Others within the defense bureaucracy are far more enthusiastic, and forthright, when it comes to recommending that cyber armaments be fielded as offensive weapons of war. Indeed, Armed Forces Journal featured a lengthy analysis advocating precisely that.

The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack. (Col. Charles W. Williamson III, “Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace,” Armed Forces Journal, May 2008)

We have heard these Orwellian arguments before; one can take it for granted that when militarists pontificate on the need for a “deterrent,” the bombers are preparing for take off.

As with other Pentagon schemes, the technological quick fix may prove as deadly as the alleged threat, particularly where botnets are concerned.

A botnet is a collection of widely dispersed computers controlled from one or more central nodes. Often built by cyber criminals to implant malicious programs or code, steal passwords and other encrypted data from targeted systems, botnets are the bane of the Internet.

In these endeavors, sophisticated hackers are aided and abetted by the miserable security code or lax practices of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) more concerned with facilitating commerce–and the bottom line–than in providing adequate protection against criminals.

Indeed in March, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) urged the Federal Trade Commission “to shut down Google’s so-called cloud computing services, including Gmail and Google Docs, if the web giant can’t ensure the safety of user data stored by these online apps,” The Register reported.

EPIC’s petition in part, was sparked “by a Google snafu that saw the company inadvertently share certain Google Docs files with users unauthorized to view them. Google estimates that the breach hit about 0.05 per cent of the documents stored by the service,” according to The Register.

Infected computers are referred to as “zombies” that can be controlled remotely from any point on the planet by “master” machines. Unwary users are often “spoofed” by hackers through counterfeit e-mails replete with embedded hyperlinks into “cooperating” with the installation of malicious code.

While criminals employ botnets to generate spam or commit fraudulent transactions, draining a savings account or running-up credit card debt through multiple purchases for example, botnets also have the capacity to launch devastating distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against inadequately defended computers or indeed, entire networks.

As many commentators have warned, the best defense is to write better security programs and exercise a modicum of common sense when using the Internet. The Pentagon however, has something else in mind.

Col. Williamson proposes to transform the Air Force’s high-speed intrusion-detection systems into an offensive botnet by enabling “the thousands of computers the Air Force would normally discard every year for technology refresh, removing the power-hungry and heat-inducing hard drives, replacing them with low-power flash drives, then installing them in any available space every Air Force base can find.” In other words, creating thousands of zombie machines.

“After that,” Col. Williamson avers, “the Air Force could add botnet code to all its desktop computers attached to the Nonsecret Internet Protocol Network (NIPRNet). Once the system reaches a level of maturity, it can add other .mil computers, then .gov machines.”

Underscoring the risks posed by out-of-control military hackers to hold America’s, or any other nations’ communications infrastructure hostage to a militarized state, Williamson suggests that in order to “generate the right amount of power for offense, all the available computers must be under the control of a single commander, even if he provides the capability for multiple theaters. While it cannot be segmented like an orange for individual theater commanders, it can certainly be placed under their tactical control.” (emphasis added)

In other words, should an “individual theatre commander” desire to suddenly darken a city or wreck havoc on a nation’s electrical infrastructure at the behest of his political masters then by all means, go right ahead! A proposal such as this, should it ever be implemented, would in essence, be a first-strike weapon.

Other plans for “defending” Pentagon computer networks are even more extreme.

STRATCOM commander Gen. Kevin Chilton has even suggested that “the White House retains the option to respond with physical force–potentially even using nuclear weapons–if a foreign entity conducts a disabling cyber attack against U.S. computer networks,” according to a disturbing report published by Global Security Newswire. During a Defense Writers Group breakfast in May, Chilton told journalists:

“I think you don’t take any response options off the table from an attack on the United States of America. Why would we constrain ourselves on how we respond?” …

Should the breaches evolve into more serious computer attacks against the United States, Chilton said he could not rule out the possibility of a military salvo against a nation like China, even though Beijing has nuclear arms. He rejected the idea that such a conflict would necessarily risk going nuclear.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Chilton said.

At the same time, the general insisted that all strike options, including nuclear, would remain available to the commander in chief in defending the nation from cyber strikes.

“I think that’s been our policy on any attack on the United States of America,” Chilton said. “And I don’t see any reason to treat cyber any differently. I mean, why would we tie the president’s hands? I can’t. It’s up to the president to decide.” (Elaine M. Grossman, “U.S. General Reserves Right to Use Force, Even Nuclear, in Response to Cyber Attack,” Global Security Newswire, May 12, 2009)

While Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The New York Times that CYBERCOM’s launch “is not about the militarization of cyber,” how else can it be characterized?

Indeed, Whitman went on to say that CYBERCOM “is focused only on military networks to better consolidate and streamline Department of Defense capabilities into a single command.”

How then, should one interpret moves by the Pentagon to “consolidate and streamline” DoD “capabilities” under the purview of STRATCOM? Obviously, an entity defined as a “Unified Combatant Command” as clearly stated by General Chilton’s avowal to “leave all options on the table,” would combine cyber “defense” with STRATCOM’s global strike mission.

Antifascist Calling revealed last year, citing a U.S. Air Force planning document, that preparations are already underway to transform cyberspace into an offensive military domain. Indeed, Air Force theorists averred:

Cyberspace favors offensive operations. These operations will deny, degrade, disrupt, destroy, or deceive an adversary. Cyberspace offensive operations ensure friendly freedom of action in cyberspace while denying that same freedom to our adversaries. We will enhance our capabilities to conduct electronic systems attack, electromagnetic systems interdiction and attack, network attack, and infrastructure attack operations. Targets include the adversary’s terrestrial, airborne, and space networks, electronic attack and network attack systems, and the adversary itself. As an adversary becomes more dependent on cyberspace, cyberspace offensive operations have the potential to produce greater effects. (Air Force Cyber Command, “Strategic Vision,” no date, emphasis added)

Echoing Air Force strategy, SecDef Gates memo clearly states, since “cyberspace and its associated technologies … are vital to our nation’s security,” the United States will “secure freedom of action in cyberspace” by standing-up a unified command “that possesses the required technical capability and remains focused on the integration of cyberspace operations.”

Simply put, the Pentagon intends to build an infrastructure fully-capable of committing high-tech war crimes.

Under NSA’s Operational Control

Meanwhile in the heimat, CYBERCOM will effectively be under the day-to-day control of the National Security Agency. This is hardly good news when it comes to civil liberties.

Leaving aside considerations of bureaucratic trench warfare with the Department of Homeland Security, charged with defending the state’s .gov and .com domains, the unprecedented power of CYBERCOM to conduct offensive military and surveillance operations within the United States itself is underlined by the preeminent role NSA will assume.

Authorized by the criminal Bush regime to carry out massive electronic surveillance of Americans’ private communications in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, various driftnet spying operations continue under Obama’s purported “change” administration. As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, the only “change” that’s come to the White House has been the color of the drapes hanging in the Oval Office.

The New York Times revealed June 17, that the “National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged.” According to the Times, “The agency’s monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said.”

I take issue with the Times’ characterization that such a breach of constitutional norms merely represent “logistical difficulties.” As with a Times’ report in April which alleged that NSA’s driftnet spying under Obama was simply a problem of “overcollection,” far from being mere technical issues, first and foremost, these violations represent political decisions made at the highest levels of the national security state itself.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation. (James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress,” The New York Times, June 17, 2009)

Last year, congressional Democrats, including Senator now President, Obama, handed the NSA virtually unchecked power to spy on the private communications of Americans. In addition to granting retroactive immunity to telecom grifters who profited from their conspiracy to illegally spy on citizens for the state, the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FIA) gave NSA the legal cover to intercept Americans’ communications “so long as it was done only as the incidental byproduct of investigating individuals ‘reasonably believed’ to be overseas,” as the Times delicately put it.

CYBERCOM’s brief, and its deployment inside NSA with full access to the agency’s powerful computing assets, and with a mission to conduct global Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) at the behest of their STRATCOM masters, mean that despite bromides about “privacy concerns,” the Pentagon will most assuredly be interested in developing an attack matrix that can just as easily be turned inward. After all as General Chilton asserts, “it’s up to the president to decide.”

“One thing that is pretty clear,” Wired reports, “NSA will be leading this emerging command.” Indeed, NSA “may also come to dominate the wider government cyber defense effort, as well.” As The Wall Street Journal revealed, the Defense Department’s 2010 budget “envisions training and graduating more than 200 cyber-security officers annually.” In contradistinction to DoD, “the Department of Homeland Security has 100 employees dedicated to civilian cyber security, with plans to reach 260 next year,” the Journal reports.

In other words, right from the get-go NSA will be assuming operational control of CYBERCOM. This is driven home by the fact that the Pentagon is already receiving the vast majority of appropriations for state cybersecurity initiatives and have thousands of cyberwarriors across all branches of the military, including outsourced private contractors who labor for DoD, ready, willing and able to staff the new command.

As Antifascist Calling revealed in April, with billions of dollars already spent on a score of top secret cyber initiatives, including those hidden within Pentagon Special Access or black programs, the issue of oversight is already a moot point.

Defense analyst William M. Arkin in his essential book, Code Names, described some three dozen cyberwar programs and/or exercises, currently being pursued by the Pentagon. Since the book’s 2005 publication, many others undoubtedly have come on-line.

While NSA Director Alexander has explicitly stated that he does “not want [NSA] to run cybersecurity for the United States government,” CYBERCOM’s stand-up, and Alexander’s near certain appointment as commander, all but guarantees that the agency will be a ubiquitous and silent gatekeeper answerable to no one.

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In fact, the “suspicious” transaction searches are so loosely defined, that BATF agents ended up questioning a Houston area pastor who previously purchased two handguns for target practice, which is then flippantly chalked up as “hard to believe”. Additionally, interagency cooperation between the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the BATF have led to warrantless airplane surveillance of vehicles along the border.

After speaking to five offices within the agencies and being told by several agents they felt “uncomfortable” with my line of questioning, Special Agent, Public Information Officer Perot of the BATF, indicated that aerial surveillance does not require a warrant due to it taking place with the “public sphere” thereby meaning individuals should have no expectation of privacy.

Perhaps even more alarming to Constitutionalists and civil libertarians than an “eye in the sky” with carte blanche authority to surveil, is the fact that the door to door firearms checks come at the behest of a foreign government. In 2008 alone, the Mexican government requested the BATF track down the original owner of 7,500 firearms used in drug crimes at American taxpayer expense.

“Ever turning up the heat on cartels, our law enforcement and military partners in the government of Mexico have been working more closely with the ATF by sharing information and intelligence,”

Kenneth Melson
Acting Director
BATF

Moreover, federal agents lament the tedious difficulty in conducting door to door firearm checks due to a current federal law prohibiting the use of a centralized database for gun owners. Alternatively, Mr. Eric Pratt of “Gun Owners of America” believes that a centralized database would only end up further infringing upon the inherent rights of law abiding gun owners. He goes on to state that criminals will still develop and expand avenues in order to arm themselves regardless of a behemoth centralized registry, just as they have after each previous “needed” addition to the nation’s gun laws. Further, by his analysis this is merely another attempt by federal authorities to scapegoat lawful gun owners when the crux of the issue is really one of border control, or lack thereof.

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This scenario never happened — except in planning exercises by British civil servants, who meticulously rehearsed how they would govern Britain in the days before, and after, World War III. The details are included in the “War Book,” a secret Cold War manual declassified this month for the first time.

The book, which featured the doomsday scenario in a 1970 version, is a step-by-step guide for dealing with a crisis, from the first stages of conflict to “R hour,” the designation for the release of all Britain’s nuclear weapons.

“It’s a manual of how to go to war,” William Spencer, military history specialist at Britain’s National Archives, said Tuesday.

“It’s a technical manual in a way, for the people who needed to know,” he added. “But it could be seen as a horrific document for some people.”

Britain became a nuclear power in 1952 and British politicians were under no illusions about the devastating effects of nuclear war. A 1955 report, kept secret until 2002, estimated that an attack by Soviet hydrogen bombs would kill 12 million people instantly.

So every two years during much of the Cold War, British civil servants participated in a dry run for the end of the world, practicing how they would do everything from crack down on subversives to evacuate art treasures from London.

The exercises, played out over weeks, included daily mock news briefings from intelligence chiefs. Senior civil servants played the prime minister and Cabinet, deciding how to respond.

The 1968 exercise, revealed in the newly released manual, imagined Soviets landing on the moon as tensions mounted along the Iron Curtain. Day by day, the crisis escalated: Soviet troops invaded Austria, West Germany, Finland, Turkey, Greece and Italy, eventually invading “Danish islands.” Britons got more and more nervous — first writing letters to newspapers, then staying home from work, stocking up on food and buying supplies to build bomb shelters.

In calm bureaucratic language — loaded with code words to render the book meaningless to those not in the know — the document describes how as the crisis worsened, civil servants would introduce censorship, evacuate all but the sickest patients from hospitals and eventually be sent to one of 12 underground bunkers scattered around the country.

Britain was to be governed from these bunkers after a nuclear attack, with officials exercising powers of martial law over the remaining population.

Peter Hennessy, a historian who has studied the book and pushed for its release, said it provided a glimpse into “one of the darker bits of the British secret state in the Cold War.”

“The surprise really is the width and magnitude of it — 16 chapters to get the nation from a peacetime footing to a total war footing. It is a remarkable enterprise,” he told the BBC.

“When you consider where this road of decision-taking is leading to, it’s the end of the world. There’s no other way of looking at it. You would expect it to be cold print, coldly analytical, but this is sheer hell, really, the thought of it.”

Retired senior civil servant David Omand said he played the prime minister in one planning exercise and recalled the experience as “quite scary.”

“It just gives you a sense of humility that we expect our political leaders to take that kind of responsibility,” he told the BBC.

He told the broadcaster about what he called his “favorite measure” — the introduction of censorship for private correspondence — saying it “always aroused a lot of debate when we played these exercises.”

The document is the latest in a chilling series of Cold War artifacts that have recently been made public. In October, the National Archives released the scripts of statements the government planned to broadcast over the BBC in the event of nuclear war in the 1970s.
“This is the wartime broadcasting service,” the announcement began. “This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons.”

The government’s first “War Book” was created in 1911, and it was updated regularly as warfare and the threats to Britain changed. Its contents were top secret — Spencer said only 96 copies were made of the 1964 book.

It’s not known how many copies were made of the 1970 version. Parts of it were published in 2000, but the whole book was only released by the National Archives this month. Later versions remain classified.

The government no longer plans for war with the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991, but it still keeps a “War Book” and rehearses for disasters such as a major terrorist attack.
A Cabinet Office spokesman would give no details of the current plans, saying only that there are “lots of contingency plans to deal with lots of different crises we face today.”

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The Pentagon’s  wacky tech chiefs’ name for this initiative is “Physical Intelligence”, and full details were released last week. According to DARPA, humanity at present has only a dim grasp of what intelligence actually is and how it came into existence:

For the past 50 years, the dominant paradigm for intelligence supposes that the brain is the seat of intelligence and is functionally equivalent to a computer capable of executing any algorithm… the goal of true machine intelligence remains distant… our understanding of the evolution of life is rooted primarily in observations of the natural world… With some exceptions, current approaches to understanding intelligence, conciousness and evolution are disconnected and often lack grounding in fundamental physical principles.
The idea behind “physical intelligence” seems to be to achieve a much better, hard-science understanding of what intelligence and life actually is and how it evolves as a matter of physics. And now DARPA, being who they are, intend to harness this almost God like intellectual toolkit as their own.

Although the idea that life is “a struggle for entropy” (Boltzmann) has been supposed for more than a century… applications to engineered systems are scarce. The Physical Intelligence program aspires to change this situation… The objective is to demonstrate the first human-engineered open thermodynamic systems that spontaneously evolve non-trivial “intelligent” behavior…
Specifically, bidders for DARPA Physical Intelligence cash will be invited to design one of two things: electronic gizmos or “basic units that might be described variously as ‘gates’ or ‘cells’ or ‘neurons’”, or alternatively “an open chemical environment”.

The electronic “units”, which may initially exist only in a simulated environment “comparable in complexity to simple video games (eg, Tetris)” are expected to “self organise” and “evolve” into a complex configuration, presumably one demonstrating some non-trivial aspects of intelligence. As a starter for ten, the super Tetris-block electronic neurocells should be able to spontaneously form into “a continuously self-organizing router for internet traffic or similarly complex application”. One should then be able to “extract the algorithm, and map it to a conventional computer” – effectively turning that computer into an intelligent lifeform.

As for the vat full of smart-chemicals, they’re expected – without human intervention – to be able to form themselves into drugs, organic fuel cells, solar powered biofuel supercrops or “a similarly complex system”.

It won’t have escaped alert Reg readers that the Physical Intelligence DARPA wonder-ware will be quite capable of becoming intelligent life – potentially much more capable life than humanity itself. The AI algorithms which evolve from the spontaneously self-organising Tetris blocks might far outclass the human noggin: the fuel-celled, solar-powered, self-medicating lifeforms which emerged from the smartware vats would be immeasurably superior to us physically.

Full details are available here (https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=eae3b7e276226b092f17fe69359f31d4)

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The drive had belonged to a Fairfax, Virginia, employee who still works for the company and contained “hundreds and hundreds of documents about government contracts,” said Peter Klein, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia, who led the investigation for the Public Broadcasting Service show Frontline. He would not disclose details of the documents, but he said that they were marked “competitive sensitive” and covered company contracts with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Transportation Security Agency.

The data was unencrypted, Klein said in an interview. The cost? US$40.

Northrop Grumman is not sure how the drive ended up in a Ghana market, but apparently the company had hired an outside vendor to dispose of the PC. “Based on the documents we were shown, we believe this hard drive may have been stolen after one of our asset-disposal vendors took possession of the unit,” the Northrop Grumman said in a statement. “Despite sophisticated safeguards, no company can inoculate itself completely against crime.”

A Northrop Grumman spokesman would not say who was responsible for disposing of the drive, but in its statement the company noted that “the fact that this information is outside our control is disconcerting.”

Some of the documents talked about how to recruit airport screeners and several of them even covered data security practices, Klein said. “It was a wonderful, ironic twist,” Klein said. “Here were these contracts being awarded based on their ability to keep the data safe.”

According to Klein, it’s common for old computers and electronic devices to be improperly dumped in developing countries such as Ghana and China, where locals scavenge the material for components, often under horrific working conditions.

Last year the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that a substantial amount of the country’s e-waste ended up in developing countries, where it was often dangerously disposed of.

The reporters bought seven hard drives, Klein said. The other drives contained sensitive information about their previous owners, including credit-card numbers, resumes and online account information.

Off-camera, sources in Ghana told the reporters that data thieves routinely scour these hard drives for sensitive information, Klein said.

Although that may be worrying to some, security experts say that there is already a vast quantity of this type of information available online from criminals who have stolen it from hacked computers.

Compared to hacking, stealing data from old hard drives is pretty inefficient, said Scott Moulton, an Atlanta data-recovery expert who teaches classes on data recovery. “It’s a tremendous amount of work, so it’s only going to be the bottom-of-the-barrel guys who would do that,” he said. “It’s happening on a small scale.”

Still, it’s easy for criminals to find data on drives, even when they’ve been legitimately wiped clean, Moulton said. He buys used hard drives by the hundreds for his classes. These drives have been professionally wiped, but his students always find at least one drive in each class with information still on it.

That’s because it’s easy for a drive to get missed during the wiping process or improperly wiped. Compounding the problem, the software that some recycling companies use doesn’t actually remove all data from the drive, especially data that may be hidden on corrupted parts of the hard drive known as bad blocks, he explained.

The surest way to get your data off of a hard drive is to physically destroy it, Moulton said.

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More than 200 companies sell spy-phone software online, at prices as low as $50 (a few programs cost more than $300). Vendors are loath to release sales figures. But some experts—private investigators and consultants in counter-wiretapping, computer-security software and telecommunications market research—claim that a surprising number of people carry a mobile that has been compromised, usually by a spouse, lover, parent or co-worker. Many employees, experts say, hope to discover a supervisor’s dishonest dealings and tip off the top boss anonymously. Max Maiellaro, head of Agata Christie Investigation, a private-investigation firm in Milan, estimates that 3 percent of mobiles in France and Germany are tapped, and about 5 percent or so in Greece, Italy, Romania and Spain. James Atkinson, a spy-phone expert at Granite Island Group, a security consultancy in Gloucester, Massachusetts, puts the number of tapped phones in the U.S. at 3 percent. (These approximations do not take into account government wiretapping.) Even if these numbers are inflated, clearly many otherwise law-abiding citizens are willing to break wiretapping laws.

Spyware thrives on iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smart phones because they have ample processing power. In the United States, the spread of GSM networks, which are more vulnerable than older technologies, has also enlarged the pool of potential victims. Spyware being developed for law-enforcement agencies will accompany a text message and automatically install itself in the victim’s phone when the message is opened, according to an Italian developer who declined to be identified. One worry is that the software will find its way into the hands of criminals.

The current predicament is partly the result of decisions by Apple, Microsoft and Research In Motion (producer of the BlackBerry) to open their phones to outside application-software developers, which created the opening for spyware. Antivirus and security programs developed for computers require too much processing power, even for smart phones. Although security programs are available for phones, by and large users haven’t given the threat much thought. If the spying keeps spreading, that may change soon.

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“This administration — and our military — is fully prepared for any contingencies,” Obama said in an interview with CBS television when asked about reported North Korean intentions to fire a missile toward Hawaii on or about July 4.

Pressed on whether his comments were a warning of a military response, Obama said no.

“It’s just we are prepared for any contingencies,” he said. “I don’t want to speculate on hypotheticals. But I do want to give assurances to the American people that the T’s are crossed and the I’s are dotted in terms of what might happen.”

North Korea conducted a nuclear test on May 25 and may be looking to launch a long-range missile toward Hawaii after the United Nations punished Pyongyang by toughening sanctions.

Obama said the international community was united in its approach to North Korea.

“One of the things that we have been very clear about is that North Korea has a path toward rejoining the international community,” he said.

“We hope they take that path. What we’re not going to do is to reward belligerence and provocation in the way that’s been done in the past.”

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After four months of searching about 335 freezers and refrigerators at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, investigators found 9,220 samples that hadn’t been included in a database of about 66,000 items listed as of February, said Col. Mark Kortepeter, the institute’s deputy commander.

The vials contained some dangerous pathogens, among them the Ebola virus, anthrax bacteria and botulinum toxin, and less lethal agents such as Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus and the bacterium that causes tularemia. Most of them, forgotten inside freezer drawers, hadn’t been used in years or even decades. Officials said some serum samples from hemorrhagic fever patients dated to the Korean War.

Kortepeter likened the inventory to cleaning out the attic and said he knew of no plans for an investigation into how the vials had been left out of the database. “The vast majority of these samples were working stock that were accumulated over decades,” he said, left there by scientists who had retired or left the institute.

“I can’t say that nothing did [leave the lab], but I can say that we think it’s extremely unlikely,” Kortepeter said.

Still, the overstock and the previous inaccuracy of the database raised the possibility that someone could have taken a sample outside the lab with no way for officials to know something was missing.

“Nine thousand, two hundred undocumented samples is an extraordinarily serious breach,” said Richard H. Ebright, a professor at Rutgers University who follows biosecurity. “A small number would be a concern; 9,200 . . . at an institution that has been the focus of intense scrutiny on this issue, that’s deeply worrisome. Unacceptable.”

The institute has been under pressure to tighten security in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks, which killed five people and sickened 17. FBI investigators say they think the anthrax strain used in the attacks originated at the Army lab, and its prime suspect, Bruce E. Ivins, researched anthrax there. Ivins committed suicide last year during an investigation into his activities.

Kortepeter noted that since 2001 the lab has imposed multiple layers of security to check people entering and leaving, that there are now cameras in the labs, and that employees are subjected to a reliability program and random inspections.

“The bottom line is, we have a lot of buffers to prevent anybody who shouldn’t be getting into the laboratory,” Kortepeter said.

Sam Edwin, the institute’s inventory control officer, said most of the samples found were vials with tiny amounts of pathogens that would thaw quickly and die once they were taken out of a freezer, making smuggling something off the base difficult.

The probe began in February, when a problem accounting for Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus triggered the suspension of most research at the lab. A spot check in January found 20 samples of the virus in a box of vials instead of the 16 listed in the institute’s database. Most work was stopped until the institute could take a thorough inventory of its stock of viruses and bacteria.

Edwin said about 50 percent of the samples that had been found were destroyed. The rest were added to the catalog. Because the lab will now conduct an inventory every year, “it’s really less likely that we will be in a situation like this again,” he said.

Procedures have changed, too. Scientists who have worked at the lab said that in the past, departing scientists turned over their logbooks to their successors, but records were sometimes incomplete or complex. As generations of scientists passed through, the knowledge of what was in the freezers was lost. With a comprehensive database, every sample is now tracked until it is destroyed or transferred.

But some scientists are skeptical. Unlike uranium or chemical weapons, pathogens are living materials that can replicate and die. A small amount can easily be turned into a large amount. They said the strict inventories slow their work without guaranteeing security.

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Unlike most police departments, this particular police force is also equipped with 2 grenade launchers, 4 M-14 semi-automatic rifles and one M-21 sniper rifle.

According to the Boston Globe, West Springfield is one of 82 Massachusetts police departments that have obtained military surplus weapons over the last 15 years as part of a federal program.

West Springfield Police Chief Thomas Burke told 22News, the grenade launchers can be used to fire tear gas in the event of a riot or a standoff.

He says his officers are trained to use them if needed. “We haven’t had to use this particular type of weapon but we have it in case we did,” he said.

Chief Burke added that taxpayers already paid for the guns and it would be a waste to have them destroyed.

For the department, owning these weapons also means not having to wait for State Police to respond to a major emergency.

The bottom line, he said it’s better to be prepared than sorry.

There are a handful of western Massachusetts police departments that have obtained military weapons from this federal program. Westfield has more than 30 rifles. Monson has 6 and Belchertown has 4.

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The lightweight handheld unit uses high frequency microwaves to see through clothes and pick up “reflections” of concealed guns or knives from a distance of several metres.

Intelligent software then interprets the images and only alerts officers to potential weapons – clearly distinguishing between everyday objects like keys and mobile phones.

It is hoped the scanner will reduce the number of attacks on officers who will no longer need to perform a risky stop and search to detect weapons.

Officers will also be able to remain at a safe distance and call for back-up before confronting armed criminals.

The research is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office Scientific Development Branch.

The Metropolitan Police Force is currently testing the scanner which is hoped to operational within two years.

Experts are keeping precise details of the unit secret for security reasons.

Stuart Ibbotson, Metropolitan Police head of engineering, said the results of early tests were “very encouraging”.

He said: “This kind of device would be of great service to officers, helping them to catch people carrying guns and knives without putting themselves in increased danger.

“It could also help to target stop and search to further increase its effectiveness.”

Nick Bowring, professor of electronic engineering at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Engineering and Technology department, is leading the project.

He said fixed scanners, as seen in airports, worked well in controlled environments but a portable micro version was needed for a street environment.

The professor said the new technology uses a combination of high frequency electromagnetic waves – microwaves – to pick up ‘reflections’ from concealed weapons.

It also uses neural network technology – which mimics human problem-solving processes to make diagnoses – to identify weapons and ignore everyday items.

And the device is billed as non-intrusive as no reflective image of the subject’s body is produced, only of the weapon upon their person.

Prof Bowring heralded the success of the project. He said: “This is a world first and a success for British science.

“This device means UK police will be able to lead the way in accurate mobile gun and knife detection without putting themselves in the line of attack.”

The project also involved researchers from Manchester University, Newcastle University and Queen Mary University of London.

Catherine Coates, EPSRC head of innovation, said the scanner would save lives and create efficiency savings.

She said: “This represents a great return on public research investment.

“This device could save lives and free up valuable policing time currently taken up with gun and knife detection.”

The EPSRC is the UK’s main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences.

The Police Federation yesterday welcomed news that its officers could soon be issued with Robocop style scanners to detect weapons concealed on criminals.

A spokesman said: “Any technology which seeks to improve the safety and effectiveness of officers on the beat would be supported and welcomed by the Federation.”

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