1. Half the world — nearly three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day.
2. More than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where income differentials are widening.

3. The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.

4. According to UNICEF, 26,500-30,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”
5. Around 27-28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be underweight or stunted. The two regions that account for the bulk of the deficit are South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.If current trends continue, the Millennium Development Goals target of halving the proportion of underweight children will be missed by 30 million children, largely because of slow progress in Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

6. Based on enrolment data, about 72 million children of primary school age in the developing world were not in school in 2005; 57 per cent of them were girls. And these are regarded as optimisitic numbers.

7. Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.
8. Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.
9. Infectious diseases continue to blight the lives of the poor across the world. An estimated 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, with 3 million deaths in 2004. Every year there are 350–500 million cases of malaria, with 1 million fatalities: Africa accounts for 90 percent of malarial deaths and African children account for over 80 percent of malaria victims worldwide.

10. Water problems affect half of humanity:
    • Some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.
    • Almost two in three people lacking access to clean water survive on less than $2 a day, with one in three living on less than $1 a day.
    • More than 660 million people without sanitation live on less than $2 a day, and more than 385 million on less than $1 a day.
    • Access to piped water into the household averages about 85% for the wealthiest 20% of the population, compared with 25% for the poorest 20%.
    • 1.8 billion people who have access to a water source within 1 kilometre, but not in their house or yard, consume around 20 litres per day. In the United Kingdom the average person uses more than 50 litres of water a day flushing toilets (where average daily water usage is about 150 liters a day. The highest average water use in the world is in the US, at 600 liters day.)
    • Some 1.8 million child deaths each year as a result of diarrhoea
    • The loss of 443 million school days each year from water-related illness.
    • Close to half of all people in developing countries suffering at any given time from a health problem caused by water and sanitation deficits.
    • Millions of women spending several hours a day collecting water.
    • To these human costs can be added the massive economic waste associated with the water and sanitation deficit.… The costs associated with health spending, productivity losses and labour diversions … are greatest in some of the poorest countries. Sub-Saharan Africa loses about 5% of GDP, or some $28.4 billion annually, a figure that exceeds total aid flows and debt relief to the region in 2003.

11. Number of children in the world

    2.2 billion

    Number in poverty

    1 billion (every second child)

    Shelter, safe water and health

    For the 1.9 billion children from the developing world, there are:

    • 640 million without adequate shelter (1 in 3)
    • 400 million with no access to safe water (1 in 5)
    • 270 million with no access to health services (1 in 7)

    Children out of education worldwide

    121 million

    Survival for children

    Worldwide,

    • 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy)
    • 1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation

    Health of children

    Worldwide,

    • 2.2 million children die each year because they are not immunized
    • 15 million children orphaned due to HIV/AIDS (similar to the total children population in Germany or United Kingdom)

12. Rural areas account for three in every four people living on less than US$1 a day and a similar share of the world population suffering from malnutrition. However, urbanization is not synonymous with human progress. Urban slum growth is outpacing urban growth by a wide margin.

13. Approximately half the world’s population now live in cities and towns. In 2005, one out of three urban dwellers (approximately 1 billion people) was living in slum conditions.

14. In developing countries some 2.5 billion people are forced to rely on biomass—fuelwood, charcoal and animal dung—to meet their energy needs for cooking. In sub-Saharan Africa, over 80 percent of the population depends on traditional biomass for cooking, as do over half of the populations of India and China.

15. Indoor air pollution resulting from the use of solid fuels [by poorer segments of society] is a major killer. It claims the lives of 1.5 million people each year, more than half of them below the age of five: that is 4000 deaths a day. To put this number in context, it exceeds total deaths from malaria and rivals the number of deaths from tuberculosis.

16. In the developing world, the national share of consumption for the poorest fifth of people was just 3.9% in 2004.

17. 1.6 billion people — a quarter of humanity — live without electricity:Breaking that down further:
    

    Number of people living without electricity

    Region	Millions without electricity
    South Asia	706
    Sub-Saharan Africa	547
    East Asia	224
    Other	101

18. The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (567 million people) is less than the wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined.

19. World gross domestic product (world population approximately 6.5 billion) in 2006 was $48.2 trillion in 2006.
    • The world’s wealthiest countries (approximately 1 billion people) accounted for $36.6 trillion dollars (76%).
    • The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).
    • Low income countries (2.4 billion people) accounted for just $1.6 trillion of GDP (3.3%)
    • Middle income countries (3 billion people) made up the rest of GDP at just over $10 trillion (20.7%).

20. The world’s low income countries (2.4 billion people) account for just 2.4% of world exports

21. The total wealth of the top 8.3 million people around the world “rose 8.2 percent to $30.8 trillion in 2004, giving them control of nearly a quarter of the world’s financial assets.”In other words, about 0.13% of the world’s population controlled 25% of the world’s financial assets in 2004.

22. For every $1 in aid a developing country receives, over $25 is spent on debt repayment.

23. 51 percent of the world’s 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are corporations.
24. The wealthiest nation on Earth has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation.
25. The poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money.
26. 20% of the population in the developed nations, consume 86% of the world’s goods.
27. In 1960, the 20% of the world’s people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% — in 1997, 74 times as much.
28. An analysis of long-term trends shows the distance between the richest and poorest countries was about:
    • 3 to 1 in 1820
    • 11 to 1 in 1913
    • 35 to 1 in 1950
    • 44 to 1 in 1973
    • 72 to 1 in 1992
29. “Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished, almost two-thirds of whom reside in Asia and the Pacific.”
30. For economic growth and almost all of the other indicators, the last 20 years [of the current form of globalization, from 1980 - 2000] have shown a very clear decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades [1960 - 1980]. For each indicator, countries were divided into five roughly equal groups, according to what level the countries had achieved by the start of the period (1960 or 1980). Among the findings:
    • Growth: The fall in economic growth rates was most pronounced and across the board for all groups or countries.
    • Life Expectancy: Progress in life expectancy was also reduced for 4 out of the 5 groups of countries, with the exception of the highest group (life expectancy 69-76 years).
    • Infant and Child Mortality: Progress in reducing infant mortality was also considerably slower during the period of globalization (1980-1998) than over the previous two decades.
    • Education and literacy: Progress in education also slowed during the period of globalization.
31. A mere 12 percent of the world’s population uses 85 percent of its water, and these 12 percent do not live in the Third World.
32. Consider the global priorities in spending in 1998
    

    Global Priority	$U.S. Billions
    Cosmetics in the United States	8
    Ice cream in Europe	11
    Perfumes in Europe and the United States	12
    Pet foods in Europe and the United States	17
    Business entertainment in Japan	35
    Cigarettes in Europe	50
    Alcoholic drinks in Europe	105
    Narcotics drugs in the world	400
    Military spending in the world	780

    And compare that to what was estimated as additional costs to achieve universal access to basic social services in all developing countries:

    Global Priority	$U.S. Billions
    Basic education for all	6
    Water and sanitation for all	9
    Reproductive health for all women	12
    Basic health and nutrition	13

    
    

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Preparation of Infrared Missile Launch Detection Satellite

The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ watchdog agency, is warning that the Pentagon needs to improve how it plans for and manages development of critical intelligence and surveillance systems.

In a report released April 23, the GAO said the military has struggled “to improve integration across DOD and national intelligence agencies” hampered by the widely differing missions and bureaucratic cultures of the intelligence agencies.

This is not an academic exercise. The report notes that the military plans to spend $28 billion over the next seven years to field a wide array of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems. That’s just airborne systems and does not include spy satellites, with their traditionally hefty price tags.

The GAO report cites one example where the Pentagon “had difficulty obtaining complete information” on top secret “national” assets - usually a veiled reference to highly classified radar and electro-optical satellites - “because of security classifications of other agency documents.” Also, budget wars have hampered the effort to improve coordination across the intelligence enterprise, the GAO report says. In classic understated fashion, the report says that “disagreements about equitable funding from each budget have led to program delays.”

The Pentagon has drawn up an “ISR Integration Roadmap” but it does not appear to help much, if the report’s language is parsed carefully. The roadmap does not “provide a long-term view of what capabilities are required to achieve strategic goals or provide detailed information that would make it useful as a basis for deciding among alternative investments.”

The GAO reviewed 19 intelligence and reconnaissance systems proposals and found that 12 “sponsors” - (this could be a combatant command, an intelligence agency or a service) — “did not complete assessments, and the completeness of the remaining seven sponsors’ assessments varied.” Perhaps most worrying, was the office’s finding that the entity charged with overseeing these crucial decisions - the Battlespace Awareness Functional Capabilities Board — “lacks adequate numbers of dedicated, skilled personnel to engage in early coordination with sponsors and to review sponsors’ assessments.”

The report’s authors recommend that Defense Secretary Robert Gates tells Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and James Clapper, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, to work together and develop “a comprehensive source of information on all ISR capabilities.” Also, Gates should also put in place a monitoring process to make sure the capabilities board and those it works with do a better job. Finally, the report’s authors say the capabilities board’s staffing levels and their expertise should be reviewed.

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Information Leaks

Classified Information is defined as data, regardless of form that includes sensitive information that its disclosure is restricted by law or regulation to particular group of people. Information is classified at one of three levels based on the amount of danger that its unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause to national security.

The highest basic level of classified information is Top Secret. Top Secret information is defined as information that if disclosed would reasonably be expected to cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security. The next to highest level of classified information is Secret. Secret information is defined as information that if disclosed would cause “serious damage” to national security. The third level of classified information is Confidential. Confidential is defined as information that if disclosed could cause “damage” to national security.

There are other restrictions on information such as NTK - need to know and SSI - sensitive security information. In these dangerous times, a slip or accidental disclosure of classified information can easily result in loss of life and billions of dollars of damage.

The extraordinary sensitivity of our intelligence and defense organizations’ mission requires the extraordinary protection against possible unauthorized disclosure of classified information. Any information coming to your attention concerning the loss or unauthorized disclosure of classified information should be reported immediately to proper government officials. Due to a number of recent security incidents involving the unauthorized disclosure of classified information training programs like “Handling Classified Information” has seen a significant increase in demand according to Spy-Ops. Organizations are taking additional steps to inform employees and contract workers of their responsibilities when handling sensitive information.

The most widely known case of leaking classified information came when the identity of a secret agent was disclosed. CIA covert operative Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, had her identity publicly disclosed in multiple newspapers back in July of 2003. Since then, disclosures of classified information seem be become known monthly.
A Few Examples:
Jul 15, 2008 The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is exploring into how confidential and extremely sensitive information on airline security and the state of airports were leaked to the press.
April 2008 A Defense Department official who worked as a weapons policy analyst pleaded guilty to disclosing classified military information that was later passed on to China.
August 2007 A Congressman revealed a budget cut in the classified portion of the 2008 Intelligence Authorization Bill dealing with the human intelligence programs.
July 2007 Millions of documents containing sensitive and sometimes classified information have been floating about freely on file sharing networks after being inadvertently exposed by individuals downloading P2P software on systems that held the data. Among these documents were the Pentagon’s classified (secret) network infrastructure diagrams, complete with IP addresses as well as information on five separate Department of Defense information security system audits.
October 2006 A report published on the front page of the New York Times included a classified one-page slide “Iraq: Indications and Warnings of Civil Conflict” from an Oct. 18 military briefing.
August 2006 A Navy lawyer could be put behind bars for 30 years after Navy officials charged him with passing along secret information while he was stationed at Guantanamo Bay.

April 2006 The CIA fired an officer who acknowledged, after failing a polygraph examination, giving classified information to a reporter.

April 2005 The Justice Department launched an investigation into leaks to the media about the National Security Agency’s classified domestic surveillance program.

These incidents and many others have triggered multiple ongoing investigations by the FBI and many other federal entities. One would think that the people who have been authorized to handle classified information would take divulging this information more seriously. We should all be outraged when our country’s secrets are disclosed for whatever reason. After all, it puts all of us at risk.

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Denver Police, Riot Ready!

Police, the FBI and Secret Service in Denver were investigating the possibility they had foiled an assassination plan against Barack Obama after two men were arrested close to the Democratic convention center in Denver Colorado with two rifles, a high-powered telescopic scope and also in possession of methamphetamine.

The men were arrested in a routine traffic stop for a moving violation.

Tharin Gartrell, 28, was the driver who was initially stopped and charged with suspicion felony possession of a weapon after police found the rifles in his car.

When police escorted Gartrell to his hotel in Denver, another man saw them coming and jumped from four story window and was injured in the fall. That man was also arrested.

So far details are sketchy since Denver police refused to comment on reports that they might have foiled an assassination plot, but have scheduled a press conference for tomorrow, which in and of itself lends credibility to the possibilty that this was an assasination attempt against Obama that was stopped dead in its tracks.

Mr Obama, who will accept the Democratic presidential nomination in Denver on Thursday, has been under Secret Service protection for over a year after receiving credible death threats.

UPDATE:

Tharin Gartrel (left) and Nathan Johnson (right)

Law enforcement sources told CBS station KCNC-TV in Denver that one of the suspects “was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative.”

One of the suspects told authorities they were “going to shoot Obama from a high vantage point using a … rifle … sighted at 750 yards,” reported KCNC.

Overnight, U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said in a prepared statement that the case was under investigation, but that he was “absolutely confident there is no credible threat to the candidate, the Democratic National Convention, or the people of Colorado.”

Obama will be in Denver this week to accept the Democratic nomination for president.

FBI spokeswoman Kathy Wright confirmed the FBI was investigating the reports but declined to elaborate. The Joint Information Center - a command set up by Denver, state and federal authorities to field media inquiries during the Democratic convention - had no immediate comment.

Aurora Police Detective Marcus Dudley said that 28-year-old Tharin Robert Gartrell was arrested early Sunday in a routine traffic stop in the Denver suburb of Aurora. He is being investigated for possible methamphetamine and firearms violations, officials said.

Subsequently, KCNC reports, authorities went to the Cherry Creek Hotel to contact an associate of Gartrell’s, 33-year-old Shawn Robert Adolf.

Adolf, who police said was wanted on numerous warrants, jumped out of a sixth floor window of the Denver area hotel. Law enforcement sources said he broke an ankle in the fall and was captured moments later. Those sources say he was wearing a ring with a swastika, and is thought to have ties to white supremacist organizations.

A third man - an associate of Gartrell and Adolf was also arrested. Nathan Johnson, 32, also taken into custody at a hotel in suburban Denver, told authorities that the other two men “planned to kill Barack Obama at his acceptance speech.”

Johnson, along with his girlfriend, Natasha Gromek, were also under arrest on drug charges.

Law enforcement in Denver was trying to find out whether the reported threats to Obama were valid. “It could also turn out that these were nothing but a bunch of knuckleheads, meth heads,” the U.S. government official said.

Gartrell was being held at the Arapahoe County jail on $50,000 bail on a felony charge of special offender, drug violations. The jail said he did not have a lawyer yet but was due in court Thursday.

U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said in a statement that federal charges were anticipated. Eid did not elaborate, but officials with the FBI; Secret Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and Aurora police set a news conference for Tuesday afternoon.

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Can Diebold be Trusted

This incredible and inexcusable garbage about the possibility that the Diebold voting machines may be dropping votes, or that they are in any way faliable enough to make the difference between a win and a loss of an election has been going on for years now.
Diebold should have been thrown out of the contract immediately after their second strike, especially considering the importance of the very serious “game” of voting.

A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.

See: How to Hack a Diebold Voting Machine Via Huffington Post

The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold.

The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier and the problem with vote counts is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that feed many memory cards to a central counting database rapidly.

Riggall said he was “confident” that elections officials through the years would have realized votes had been dropped when they crosschecked their tallies to certify final elections results and would have reloaded cards so as not to lose votes. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has said no Ohio votes were lost because the nine Ohio counties that found the problem caught it before primary results were finalized. As recently as May, Premier said the problem was not of its making but stemmed from anti-virus software that Ohio had installed on its machines. It also briefly said the mistakes could have come from human mistakes. Further testing by Ohio elections officials and then high volume tests by Premier uncovered the programming error.

“We are indeed distressed that our previous analysis of this issue was in error,” Premier President Dave Byrd wrote Tuesday in a letter that was hand-delivered to Brunner. Premier and Brunner are in an ongoing court battle over the voting machines and whether Premier violated its contract with the state and warranties. Half of the Ohio’s 88 counties use the GEMS system. Brunner has been a vocal critic of electronic voting machines,

Both Brunner and Premier said that remedies to the problem will be in place for the November presidential election. A nationwide customer alert with recommended actions was issued Tuesday by Premier. Approximately 1,750 jurisdictions use the flawed system, Riggall said. Both Maryland and Virginia use it, he said, although Virginia does not relay its votes to a central counting point, which is where the problem surfaces, Riggall said. Maryland does use a central count, he said. The District of Columbia does not use the GEMS system.

The problem is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that upload multiple memory cards during counts, Riggall said. The GEMS system is supposed to save information from one card at a time to be counted in order as the cards are read by a database that Riggall described as the “mother ship.” But a logic error in the program can cause incoming votes to essentially shove aside other votes that are waiting in the electronic line before they are counted. The mistake occurs in milliseconds, Premier’s customer notice says.

The mistake is not immediately apparent, Riggall said, and would have to be caught when elections officials went to match how many memory cards they fed into a central database against how many show as being read by that database. Each card carries a unique marker.

Officials in Butler County, Ohio — north of Cincinnati — were the first to raise the issue when 150 votes from a card dropped in March. Brunner’s office originally said that 11 counties had the same problem but has since revised that to nine. Her office was not able to say how many dropped votes were discovered in those jurisdictions.

“I can’t provide odds on whether dropped votes were not recognized” during the decade GEMS has been used, Rigall said, “but based on what we know about how our customers run their elections and reconcile counts we believe any results not uploaded on election night would have been caught when elections were being certified.”

In his letter to Ohio’s Brunner, Premier’s president said, “Voters in jurisdictions Premier serves, both in Ohio and throughout the country, can be assured that election officials employing standard canvass and crosscheck procedures will count their votes completely and accurately.”

Unlike other software, the problem acknowledged by Premier cannot be fixed by sending out a coding fix to its customers because of federal rules for certifying election systems, Rigall said. Changes to systems must go through the Election Assistance Commission, he said, and take two years on average for certification and approval — and that is apart from whatever approvals and reviews would be needed by each elections board throughout the country.

Brunner said she appreciated “the forthrightness” of Byrd in his letter to her and commended Butler County officials “who went above and beyond the call of duty” to pursue the problem.

“As far as I know, we have not seen that problem,” with dropped votes, said Ross Goldstein, deputy administrator for Maryland’s State Board of Elections. Maryland counties do upload results to a central system — which is what generates county vote totals on election night — but state procedures call for counties to reload every memory card the day after the election to doublecheck results, Goldstein said.

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2018 Bomber

The Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin have teamed to perform studies and system development efforts including collaborative research and development in pursuit of the anticipated U.S. Air Force 2018 Bomber program

This collaborative effort for a long-range strike program (Possibly the B-3) will include work in advanced sensors and future electronic warfare solutions including advancements in network enabled battle management, command and control, and virtual warfare simulation and experimentation.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin are working closely at all levels to capture the best of industry to develop and provide an effective and affordable solution for the warfighter. The work performed by the Boeing/Lockheed Martin team is designed to help the Air Force establish capability-based roadmaps for technology maturation and date certain timelines for the 2018 Bomber program.

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Military technology isn’t really our bag, but you have to admit that this is pretty cool: This week, the Army awarded Boeing a $36 million contract to continue development of a truck-based, high-energy laser-based weapon system. The laser will be used to destroy rockets, mortars and artillery shells.

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Uncle Sam Spying

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Moving on, the aforementioned executive order was issued by President Bush on July 31, and is in the words of one official, “exceptionally complex,” 26 or 28 pages long, single-spaced (”depending on how you print it”). It is a sweeping revision of an order issued by Ronald Reagan in 1981, which laid out the structure and responsibilities of U.S. intelligence offices.

In a phone call with reporters the day the order was issued, a senior White House official (who refused to be identified) said, “the President is anxious to institutionalize a number of important tools that he and his successors are going to need to fight and win the war on terrorism.” He described it as being in the same vein as the recently passed FISA law (”an important milestone”). This is “another significant step in that direction.”

If you didn’t see much about this rather important executive order — the senior official called it a “foundational document” — that’s no accident. Reporters were not even provided a copy before the weirdly anonymous briefing. (”This conference call would have been much more useful … if we’d had this in advance,” said one reporter.) Despite (or perhaps because of) its significant implications for U.S. intelligence, many in Congress were not even aware of it until the day it was issued.

“We were only shown the document after it was complete and on its way to the president for his signature,” Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of the House intelligence committee told the Washington Post. “After seven years of a go-it-alone presidency, perhaps I should expect nothing more from this White House. But this order will be binding on future administrations as well.”

I have not read all 26 to 28 pages of the executive order. But among its revisions is a clause stating that the CIA must “provide specialized equipment, technical knowledge or assistance of expert personnel” to local law enforcement. As a member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, one of several groups who it was recently revealed were being spied on by Maryland police in the past few years, and living in a city whose police infiltrated activist groups across the country in the run-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention, it is chilling to think how these resources could be used against groups that are exercising their right to dissent. To say nothing of the potential implications for Arabs or Muslims.

According to the Post, The DOJ proposal, which was also released on July 31, says that “law enforcement agencies would be allowed to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch a criminal intelligence investigation based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists.”

“They also could share results with a constellation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and others in many cases.”

“Criminal intelligence data starts with sources as basic as public records and the Internet, but also includes law enforcement databases, confidential and undercover sources, and active surveillance.”

Read the full article. This is more than a last power grab for the Bush administration. It is a massive codification of the executive overreach implemented under the so-called “war on terror.”

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush’s successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

The deputy executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police would disagree. The DOJ initiative simply “moves what the rules were … to the new world we live in,” he told the Post — “but it maintains civil liberties.”

According to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, these are just “some of the tools necessary to keep us safe.”

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A hacker broke into a Homeland Security Department telephone system over the weekend and racked up about $12,000 in calls to the Middle East and Asia.

FEMA Phone System Hacked

The hacker made more than 400 calls on a Federal Emergency Management Agency voicemail system in Emmitsburg, Md., on Saturday and Sunday, according to FEMA spokesman Tom Olshanski.

FEMA is part of Homeland Security, which in 2003 put out a warning about this very vulnerability.

The voicemail system is new and recently was installed. It is a Private Branch Exchange, or PBX, a traditional corporate phone network that is used in thousands of companies and government offices. Many companies are moving to a higher tech version, known as Voice Over Internet Telephony.

This type of hacking is very low-tech and “old school,” said John Jackson, a St. Louis-based security consultant. It was popular 10 to 15 years ago. Telecommunications security administrators now know to configure security settings, such as having individual users create unique passwords and not continue to use the password assigned to users in the initial setup.

“In this case it’s sort of embarrassing that it happened to FEMA themselves — FEMA being a child of DHS, with calls going to the Middle East,” Johnson said.

Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, India and Yemen are among the countries calls were made to, Olshanski said. Most of the calls were about three minutes long, but some were as long as 10 minutes.

Sprint caught the fraud over the weekend and halted all outgoing long-distance calls from FEMA’s National Emergency Training Center in Emmitsburg.

FEMA’s chief information officer is investigating who hacked into the system and where exactly the calls were placed to. At this point it appears a “hole” was left open by the contractor when the voicemail system was being upgraded, Olshanski said. Olshanski did not know who the contractor was or what hole specifically was left open, but he assured the hole has since been closed.

In 2003, Homeland Security and the FBI investigated multiple reports about private industry being breached by these types of hackers.

“This illegal activity enables unauthorized individuals anywhere in the world to communicate via compromised U.S. phone systems in a way that is difficult to trace,” according to a department information bulletin from June 3, 2003.

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US Anthrax Scientist Bruce Ivins

Growing doubts from scientists about the strength of the government’s case against the late Bruce Ivins, the military researcher named as the anthrax killer, are forcing the Justice Department to begin disclosing more fully the scientific evidence it used to implicate him.

In the face of the questions, FBI officials have decided to make their first detailed public presentation next week on the forensic science tracing the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks to a flask kept in a refrigerator in Ivins’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Many scientists are awaiting those details because so far, they say, the FBI has failed to make a conclusive case.

“That is going to be critically important, because right now there is really no data to make a scientific judgment one way or the other,” Brad Smith, a molecular biologist at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “The information that has been put out, there is really very little scientific information in there.”

FBI officials say they are confident that their scientific evidence against Ivins, who killed himself last month as the Justice Department was preparing an indictment against him, will withstand scrutiny, and they plan to present their findings for review by leading scientists. But the scrutiny may only raise further questions.

The bureau presented forensics information to congressional and government officials in a closed-door briefing held in the past week, but a number of listeners said the briefing left them less convinced that the FBI had the right man, and they said some of the government’s public statements appeared incomplete or misleading.

For instance, the Justice Department said this month in unsealing court records against Ivins that he had tried to mislead investigators in 2002 by giving them an anthrax sample that did not appear to have come from his laboratory. But FBI officials acknowledged at the closed-door briefing, according to people who were there, that the sample Ivins gave them in 2002 did in fact come from the same strain used in the attacks. Because of limitations in the bureau’s testing methods and Ivins’s failure to provide the sample in the format requested, the FBI did not realize that it was a correct match until three years later.

In addition, people who were briefed by the FBI said a batch of misprinted envelopes used in the anthrax attacks - another piece of evidence used to link Ivins to the attacks - could have been much more widely available than bureau officials had initially led them to believe.

Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who has followed the anthrax case closely and requested the briefing from the FBI, said in an interview that he was not ready to draw any firm conclusions about the investigation. But he said: “The case is built from a number of pieces of circumstantial evidence, and for a case this important, it’s troubling to have so many loose ends. The briefing pointed out even more loose ends than I thought there were before.”

Naba Barkakati, an engineer who is the chief technologist for the Government Accountability Office and who also attended the briefing, said of the FBI’s forensics case against Ivins: “It’s very hard to get the sense of whether this was scientifically good or bad. We didn’t really get the question settled, other than taking their word for it.”

The bureau’s laboratory work has come under sharp criticism in recent years for problems over DNA analysis, bullet tracing and other important forensic technology. In 2004, the laboratory mismatched a fingerprint taken from the Madrid terror bombings to a lawyer in Portland, Oregon, Brandon Mayfield, who was then arrested. He won a $2.8 million settlement.

With their main suspect in the anthrax killings dead, FBI officials say they realize they will again face tough scrutiny over the strength of their scientific evidence against Ivins. Indeed, conspiracy theories are already flourishing on many Web sites, with skeptical observers asking whether the Maryland scientist was set up to take the fall for the attacks or, worse yet, was a murder victim. The fact that the bureau pursued another scientist, Steven Hatfill, for years before agreeing to pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit he had filed and then later exonerating him has only fueled the skepticism.

In its case against Ivins, the FBI developed a compelling profile of an erratic, mentally troubled man who could be threatening and obsessive, as in his odd fascination with a sorority from his college days. But investigators were never able to place him at the New Jersey mailboxes where the anthrax letters were dropped, and the case against him relied at its heart on the scientific evidence linking the anthrax in Ivins’s laboratory to the spores used in the attacks.

It took the FBI several years to develop the type of DNA testing that allowed them to trace the origins of the “attack strain,” as it was called, and they concluded that the anthrax that Ivins controlled was the only one of more than 1,000 samples they tested that matched it in all four of that strain’s genetic mutations.

Dwight Adams, a former director of the FBI laboratory who was deeply involved in managing the anthrax genetic research until he left the bureau in 2006, said he was confident that the groundbreaking forensic effort would be validated by the broad scientific community.

Recalling the early skepticism that a genetic fingerprint of an anthrax could ever be obtained, Adams said, “I think the bureau and the national assets, including the national labs and others, that were applied as a team can very easily defend what they did and the results.”

But had Ivins lived and faced trial for the anthrax killings, Thomas DeGonia 2nd, one of his lawyers, said, his legal team would have quickly tried to have the genetic testing of the anthrax strains thrown out of court as unreliable. The type of testing the FBI developed, he said “has never been proven or tested by the courts.”

Even if a jury had heard evidence about the genetic testing, DeGonia said, the lawyers would have tried to show that many other scientists had access to that same strain of anthrax. He said the fact that the Justice Department had Ivins under investigation for perhaps two years or longer - and that it was executing search warrants in the case even after his death - suggests that the department itself had doubts.

“It’s interesting that they’re still attempting to gather evidence,” he said, “if the case is as strong as they say it is.”

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