DarkGovernment

New Spy Technology Pursued by DARPA

A new generation of spy technology designed to strengthen the U.S. military’s ability to detect and eliminate suspected insurgents in Iraq and elsewhere based on computer analyses of their movements and activities is being developed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has begun granting contracts to software firms to create algorithms that can be applied to the real-time video feeds from drone aircraft so the data can be sorted and stored on a wide range of human activities, from digging a ditch to climbing into a car to kissing someone.

The contracts represent the latest step in the Bush administration’s seven-year drive to develop high-tech spying capabilities that can be applied to a variety of situations and locales to detect terrorist or insurgent activities.

The new DARPA project would develop algorithms that would identify specific human activities – both by individuals and by groups – and evaluate if these actions suggested behavior that would justify a military response.

The list of activities that would draw attention to a single person include “digging, loitering, picking up, throwing, exploding/burning, carrying, shooting, launching, walking, limping, running, kicking, smoking, gesturing,” according to DARPA’s contract description.

For person-to-person activities, the project would identify and catalogue cases of “following, meeting, gathering, moving in a group, dispersing, shaking hands, kissing, exchanging objects, kicking, carrying together.”

Categories relating to vehicles include getting into or out of a car, opening or closing the trunk, driving, accelerating, turning, stopping, passing and maintaining distances.

According to DARPA’s description, the research project addresses challenges faced by intelligence analysts in processing and retrieving the vast amounts of visual data created by live video feeds from Predator drones and other aerial surveillance over Iraq and Afghanistan. By identifying and indexing specific actions, the analysts would be helped in evaluating potential threats and could retrieve video regarding similar behavior.

“The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems,” said the DARPA document, written in March but withheld from the public until September.

Kitware, a software company with offices in New York and North Carolina, won an initial $6.7 million contract for what is technically called Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool, or VIRAT.

In a statement about the contract award, Kitware projected that through its proposed system, “the most high-value intelligence content will be clearly and intuitively presented to the video analyst, resulting in substantial reductions in analyst workload per mission as well as increasing the quality and accuracy of intelligence yield.”

Anthony Hoogs, Kitware’s project leader, said, ”This project will really make a difference to the war fighter.”

To carry out the project, Kitware said it was teaming up with two leading military technology companies, Honeywell and General Dynamics, as well as a number of academic researchers. [See Kitware Awarded $6.7M DARPA Contract.]

Repression Works

Though this DARPA project is not expected to be completed until early next decade, other technological breakthroughs reportedly have helped U.S. forces identify and kill insurgents in Iraq.

In his latest book, The War Within, Bob Woodward writes that highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics allowed for rapid targeting and killing of Iraqi insurgent leaders, representing a more important factor in undermining the insurgency than President George W. Bush’s much touted troop “surge.” However, Woodward withheld details of these secret techniques so as not to undermine their effectiveness.

Still, there have been previous glimpses of classified U.S. programs that combine high-tech means of identifying insurgents – such as sophisticated biometrics and night-vision-equipped drones – with old-fashioned brutality on the ground, including on-the-spot executions of suspected insurgents. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Global Dirty War” and “Iraq’s Laboratory of Repression.”]

However, the marriage of advanced technology and military repression has raised concerns among some human rights advocates that these techniques could open the door to an Orwellian future in which authoritarian regimes repress popular resistance.

DARPA, with its mandate to push the envelope on the application of technology for military and intelligence purposes, also has been caught up before in controversies about balancing security against liberty.

In 2002, DARPA came under criticism when it unveiled plans for Total Information Awareness, a project that sought to detect terrorist activities by mining electronic data about virtually everyone on earth, anyone who participated in the modern economy.

The plan was to map out “transactional data” collected from every kind of activity – “financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary, country entry, place/event entry, transportation, housing, critical resources, government, communications,” according to the DARPA Web site.

The program would then cross-reference this data with the “biometric signatures of humans,” data collected on individuals’ faces, fingerprints, gaits and irises. To run the sensitive project, the Bush administration selected retired Admiral John Poindexter, who was convicted of five felony counts in the Iran-Contra Affair (though a conservative-dominated appeals court later reversed the jury verdicts).

Public and congressional outrage over this massive data-mining operation supposedly killed the TIA program in 2003, but the National Journal revealed in February 2006 that the project was ended in name only, kept alive within the secret budget of the National Security Agency.

One TIA component, called the Information Awareness Prototype System, was renamed “Basketball” at NSA, but still provided the basic architecture tying together information extraction, analysis and dissemination tools developed under TIA.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration began deploying similar advanced technology to Iraq with the goal of throttling the insurgency that was challenging the U.S. military occupation.

In effect, Iraq was transformed into a test tube for modern techniques of repression, including use of night-vision optics on drone aircraft, heat resonance imaging, and firepower that is both deadly and precise.

The new techniques marked a modernization of tactics used in other counterinsurgencies, such as in Vietnam in the 1960s and in Central America in the 1980s.

In Vietnam, U.S. forces planted sensors along infiltration routes for targeting bombing runs against North Vietnamese troops. In Guatemala, security forces were equipped with early laptop computers for use in identifying suspected subversives who would be dragged off buses and summarily executed.

Last year, a conservative counterinsurgency expert sent me a video, spliced together by the U.S. military in Iraq, showing how some of the modern techniques worked in Iraq. The video showed night-vision aerial surveillance of suspected “terrorists” as they moved in the dark with what was described as a truck-mounted anti-aircraft gun, the muzzle still warm from firing.

The tiny figures of these “terrorists” then walked into a forested area where they were mowed down by miniguns from an AC-130. Their truck also was blown to bits.

Biometrics

Besides using Predator drones to monitor the movement of Iraqis from the sky, massive amounts of biometric data have been collected on the country’s people for use in identifying suspected insurgents.

Explaining the value of this computerized database, Pentagon weapons designer Anh Duong told the Washington Post that it gave valuable information to soldiers on the ground.

“A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?” Duong said.

Though Duong is best known for designing high-explosives used to destroy hardened targets, she also supervised this Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities project, known as a “lab in a box” for analyzing biometric data, such as iris scans and fingerprints, that have been collected on more than one million Iraqis.

The labs – collapsible, 20-by-20-foot units each with a generator and a satellite link to a biometric data base in West Virginia – let U.S. forces cross-check data in the field against information collected previously that can be used to identify insurgents.

Duong said the next step would be to shrink the lab to the size of a “backpack” so soldiers who encounter a suspect “could find out within minutes” if he’s on a terrorist watch list and should be killed. [Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2007]

By identifying and indexing a wide range of human activities captured on surveillance videos, the new DARPA project could augment some of these other security projects, already in place or in development.

Regarding the video analysis, however, DARPA specifically prohibited inclusion of biometric algorithms for identifying people by their gaits or other individual features. However, those elements, which are being developed separately, presumably could be added to the overall technological package at a later date.

Tags: Bush, CIA, DARPA, Intelligence, Military, NSA, spy, spying

IARPA Trolls Online Gaming

The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program has found a new, more accommodating home for its “mission” of “keeping America safe”–from the Constitution–at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA).According to McClatchy investigative journalist Warren Strobel, IARPA … is the U.S. intelligence community’s counterpart to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been in business for more than 35 years and is meant to be a small, flexible R&D agency that funds high-risk, but potentially high-payoff technologies. (”What’s IARPA?”, McClatchy Washington Bureau, June 30, 2008)

IARPA has been organized under the auspices of Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Mike McConnell, a former executive vice-president with spooky mega-contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. As Tim Shorrock reported in March,

As Booz Allen’s chief intelligence liaison to the Pentagon, McConnell was at the center of action, both before and after the September 11 attacks. During the first six years of the Bush administration, Booz Allen’s contracts with the U.S. government rose dramatically, from $626,000 in 2000 to $1.6 billion in 2006. McConnell and his staff at Booz Allen were deeply involved in some of the Bush administration’s most controversial counterterrorism programs. They included the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness data-mining scheme run by former Navy Admiral John Poindexter, which was an attempt to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases. (Congress cancelled the program over civil liberties concerns, but much of the work was transferred to the NSA, where Booz Allen continued to receive the contracts.) (”Carlyle Group May Buy Major CIA Contractor: Booz Allen Hamilton, CorpWatch, March 8, 2008)

According to the agency’s website, IARPA’s brief is centered on three program areas:

Smart Collection, “The goal of the programs in this office is to dramatically improve the value of collected data from all sources.”

Incisive Analysis, “The goal of the programs in this office is to maximize insight from the information we collect, in a timely fashion.”

Safe & Secure Operations, “The goal of the programs in this office is to be able to counter new capabilities implemented by our adversaries that would threaten our ability to operate freely and effectively in a networked world.”

There’s no argument that preventing sociopaths–state-sponsored or otherwise–using malware to cause the meltdown of a nuclear power plant’s uranium core or the sudden release of methyl isocyanate into the atmosphere should be a priority of any sane government. Certainly such laudatory goals would be optimized by writing better programs rather than through intrusive data-mining ops carried out by the state’s outsourced and well-paid private “partners.”

Unfortunately, we aren’t dealing with a sane government here in the United States. According to Virtual Worlds News, one IARPA program seeks to “mine” information from virtual worlds and online gaming sites for its potential to “model” terrorist activity.

Reynard, a data-mining project from Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), is an exploratory effort to monitor activity in virtual worlds and online games and then model what terrorist activity in those worlds would look like. The Director of National Intelligence recently released a Congressionally mandated report on various data-mining projects of which Reynard is just one. While it’s just an early effort right now, “If it shows early promise, this small seedling effort may increase its scope to a full project.”

Data-mining is defined as “a program involving pattern-based queries, searches or other analyses of 1 or more electronic databases” in order to “discover or locate a predictive pattern of anomaly indicative of terrorist or criminal activity….” and will now be ongoing “in a public virtual world environment. The research will use publicly available data and begin with observational studies to establish baseline behaviors.”

No word on what world that will be in, but we already know that the CIA has a presence in Second Life and that IARPA has investigated Linden Lab’s world as well. (”U.S. Project Reynard Mines Data Looking for Virtual Spies,” Virtual Worlds News, February 25, 2008)

One can only wonder what IARPA will do once “baseline behaviors” are mapped! But apparently there’s no need to fret since “the government understands that ‘applications of results from these research projects may ultimately have implications for privacy and civil liberties,’ so ‘IARPA is also investing in projects that develop privacy protecting technologies,’” Secrecy News reports.

We bet they are! But as Strobel points out, “IARPA’s ancestry is a wee bit interesting”:

In the beginning, there was Total Information Awareness, a DARPA information-gathering program run by none other than former Iran-Contra figure and Reagan national security adviser John Poindexter. Critics saw the program as a major, post-9/11 intrusion on American’s privacy and civil liberties, and Congress killed funding for it in 2003. But there were persistent reports–confirmed by yours truly in conversations with former U.S. intelligence officials–that portions of the Total Information Awareness research had simply been shunted off to other agencies.

As readers undoubtedly recall, Total Information Awareness (TIA) was “terminated” by Congress when it learned that Poindexter was setting up a program that would sift through “public databases storing credit card purchases, rental agreements, medical histories, e-mails, airline reservations, and phone calls for electronic ‘footprints’ that might indicate a terrorist plot in the making,” according to Shorrock’s excellent read, Spies for Hire.

And to whom did DARPA turn to manage TIA? Why none other than Booz Allen Hamilton, of course! Joining SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), Booz Allen “won” some $63 million in contracts to run Poindexter’s pet project. While the program–and contracts–were allegedly cancelled, portions of TIA had simply been spun-off to other agencies including the FBI and NSA.

Where else did TIA migrate? It turns out, many of its data-mining projects, including the Scalable Social Network Analysis (SSNA) operation, which seeks to model networks of connections like social interactions, financial transactions, telephone calls, and organizational memberships into a coherent analytical tool, were “assimilated” by the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), managed by NSA.

Strobel reports that “ARDA was later renamed, given the ominous-sounding name of the Disruptive Technology Office.” And now ARDA and DTO along with a “new and improved” TIA, have apparently been folded into IAPRA.

Which just goes to show, you can’t kill off that which the state decrees is necessary for “your protection.” As Wired’s Ryan Singel advises online gaming enthusiasts, you’d better “be careful who you frag”!

Tags: CIA, DARPA, DOD, gaming, IARPA, TIA

Information Warfare Push

The Pentagon is to spend $30 Billion building a super secret “National Cyber Range” in order to prepare for all out cyber warfare by using it to conduct mock online battles with realistic info-warriors.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), previously responsible for the development of electronic surveillance programs such as Total Information Awareness and MATRIX, LifeLog and the Brain Machine Interfaces enterprise, has been ordered by Congress to create what is essentially a new internet as a cyberspace battleground.

Wired.com has reported “According to a defense official familiar with the program: ‘Congress has given DARPA a direct order; that’s only happened once before — with the Sputnik program in the ’50s’”

The NCR will not only allow for defense from electronic attack, but will also allow offensive strikes against “adversaries online”. It is rumored to be the keystone of a so called “Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative”, created via a secret presidential order in January.

A request for proposals, released by DARPA yesterday outlined how the agency wants the NCR to be able to “realistically replicate human behavior and frailties,” and feature “realistic, sophisticated, nation-state quality offensive and defensive opposition forces”.

The NCR’s operators should be able to “integrate, replicate, or simulate” military satellite and digital radio communications, mobile ad-hoc networks, physical access control systems, U.S. and foreign “unmanned aerial vehicles, weapons, [and] radar systems” — even “cyber cafes” and “personal digital assistances [sic].” the proposal states.

A previous notice outlined that the NCR would allow the Pentagon to:

• Conduct unbiased, quantitative and qualitative assessment of information assurance and survivability tools in a representative network environment.
• Replicate complex, large-scale, heterogeneous networks and users in current and future Department of Defense (DoD) weapon systems and operations.
• Enable multiple, independent, simultaneous experiments on the same infrastructure.
• Enable realistic testing of Internet/Global-Information-Grid (GIG) scale research.
• Develop and deploy revolutionary cyber testing capabilities.
• Enable the use of the scientific method for rigorous cyber testing.

The project is so secret that it has been referred to as an electronic“Manhattan Project“. The Senate Homeland Security committee, a key Senate oversight panel has cited concerns about the secrecy around the project and has been forced to write to the DHS to request basic information on the project.

Commentators have speculated that the entire project may be a huge new part of the federal government’s so called “terrorist surveillance program”, which has so far only been shown to constitute cyberwarfare against everyday Americans via warrantless wiretapping and interception of communications.

“Why might citizens be worried about privacy and civil liberties? Consider that the whole initiative appears to have been launched after the Director of National Intelligence told the President Bush that a cyber attack might wreak as much economic havoc as 9/11 did. Consider that the NSA, which currently protects classified networks, wants to expand into protecting all non-classified federal government networks. Consider that Congress is set to legalize the NSA’s monitoring rooms in the nation’s phone and internet infrastructure. For its part, the FBI says it also needs access to the internet’s backbone, while the Air Force is hyping its own efforts at cyber defense and offense. […]

Now it seems the only question is whether the government will be able to turn the net into a controllable, monitorable and trackable pre-internet AOL-type service or whether the chaotic net will live on as just another frontier for the military-industrial complex to start an arm’s race and rake in billions of government dollars.”

Could this be the Pentagon’s ultimate “solution” to counter the internet, an arena of freedom and progress that military strategists now view as a bastard child they let slip from their grasp some twenty or so years ago?

While Homeland Security head Chertoff has denied that the project is part of a vast effort to restrict or “sit on the internet”, the Pentagon has previously made it clear that the internet, free of restriction and holding such potential for free speech, is in direct opposition to their goals.

The Pentagon has stressed that the internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy “weapons system”.

Recently, a document entitled Information Operation Roadmap (PDF) was declassified by the Pentagon due to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

One portion of the document states:

“Information, always important in warfare, is now critical to military success and will only become more so in the foreseeable future….. Information operations should be centralized under the Office of the Secretary of Defence and made a core military competency.”

“Objective: IO [information operations] becomes a core competency. The importance of dominating the information spectrum explains the objective of transforming IO into a core military competency on a par with air, ground, maritime and special operations. The charge to the IO Roadmap oversight panel was to develop as concrete a set of action recommendations as possible to make IO a core competency, which in turn required identifying the essential prerequisites to become a core military competency.”

Another section of the document focuses on what is referred to as “Computer Network Attack”:

“When implemented the recommendations of this report will effectively jumpstart a rapid improvement of CNA [Computer Network Attack] capability.” - 7

“Enhanced IO [information operations] capabilities for the warfighter, including: … A robust offensive suite of capabilities to include full-range electronic and computer network attack…” - 7

While other sections urge the Department of Defense to “Fight the Net”:

“We Must Fight the Net. DoD [Department of Defense] is building an information-centric force. Networks are increasingly the operational center of gravity, and the Department must be prepared to “fight the net.” ” - 6

“DoD’s “Defense in Depth” strategy should operate on the premise that the Department will “fight the net” as it would a weapons system.” - 13

A previous document that echoes such sentiments is the now infamous Rebuilding America’s Defences by The Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In this 2000 document those that would go on to become the nucleus of the Bush administration stated:

“It is now commonly understood that information and other new technologies… are creating a dynamic that may threaten America’s ability to exercise its dominant military power.” - 4

“Control of space and cyberspace. Much as control of the high seas - and the protection of international commerce - defined global powers in the past, so will control of the new “international commons” be a key to world power in the future. An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the “infosphere” will find it difficult to exert global political leadership.” - 51

“Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and “combat” likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the world of microbes.” - 60

The importance of information warfare is clearly laid out in both these documents. Brent Jessop, a regular contributor to Infowars.net and Prisonplanet.com has exhaustively documented the phenomenon of “Full Spectrum Information Warfare” in a four part series of articles.

There have been moves to kill off the internet as we know it today by the federal government.

Note that the enemy is never specifically named, it is merely whoever uses the net, because the enemy IS the net. The enemy is the freedom the net provides to billions around the globe and the threat to militaristic dominance of information and the ultimate power that affords.

Tags: cyber warfare, DARPA, Homeland Security, information warfare, pentagon, war, warfare

DARPA Takes a Tip From Arthur C. Clarke

Science fiction inspires DARPA weapon
The late Arthur C Clarke is famous for having popularised the geostationary communications satellite in 1945. Now the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working to turn one of his more dangerous ideas into reality.

Clarke’s 1955 novel Earthlight climaxes in battle between a lunar fortress and three attacking spacecraft. At the height of the battle the defending commander unleashes “The Stiletto”, which resembles “a solid bar of light” and pierces one spacecraft “as an entomologist pierces a butterfly with a pin.”

Clarke’s Stiletto is actually: “a jet of molten metal, hurled through space at several hundred kilometres per second by the most powerful electro-magnets ever built.”

Now DARPA are working on a weapon called MAHEM - Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition - that uses the same principle as Clarke’s fictional device.

Using magnetic fields it will propel either a narrow jet of molten metal or a chunk of molten metal that morphs into an aerodynamic slug during flight. Unlike Clarke’s Stiletto, they will come from a device that generates a powerful electromagnetic field from an explosion, not giant capacitors.

The concept resembles existing weapons which use an explosive charge to squirt out a jet of high-velocity molten metal on impact. Known as High-Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT), this type of round has been widely used since the WWII bazooka.

Like HEAT devices, MAHEM is currently envisaged as something delivered by a warhead rather than a cannon: “MAHEM could be packaged into a missile, projectile or other platform and delivered close to target for final engagement and kill,” says DARPA.

MAHEM would apparently be useful against tanks and other missiles. And who knows, it might even work against spaceships. Notch up another one to Clarke - but here’s hoping his next idea to see reality is less hazardous to health.

Tags: DARPA, earthlight, mahem, weapon

DARPA CHOOSES CONTRACTORS FOR VULTURE PROGRAM

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected Aurora Flight
Sciences, Boeing and Lockheed Martin as contractors for the first phase of the Vulture program.
The Vulture contractors will design and develop an unmanned aerial system able to fly on station
and perform its mission for five years without interruption.

The Vulture program envisions a system carrying a 1,000-pound payload drawing five
kilowatts of power that is able to stay airborne for an uninterrupted period of at least five years
while remaining in the required mission airspace 99 percent of the time.
During the program’s first phase, a 12-month analytical effort, the three contractor teams
will conduct trade studies to determine the design concept that best satisfies the operational tasks
and optimizes design capability. They will also explore various vehicle configurations while
concentrating on reliability and mission assurance design aspects. The phase will conclude with
a concept design review of sub-scale and full-scale demonstration vehicles and the supporting
technology development plan to reduce risk on key technologies.
Vulture will leverage space satellite operations and design paradigms, in which long life
and extreme reliability are routine, and bring this concept to the realm of aircraft operations in
order to provide a level of mission reliability previously unknown in aircraft operations. Vulture
will provide pseudo-satellite benefits such as increased platform availability and consistent and
persistent coverage, and allow smaller fleet sizes.

The Vulture program will focus on developing innovative technologies and approaches
for in-flight energy collection or refueling and ultra-reliable systems or systems able to be
repaired in-flight. Other new technologies that will be developed and that are key to the ability
of the Vulture system to provide the desired mission reliability include multi-junction
photovoltaic cells, high specific energy fuel cells, extremely efficient propulsion systems, in-
flight precision autonomous material transfer and docking, extremely efficient vehicle structural
design, mitigation of environmentally induced loads, and innovative vehicle control concepts.
The Vulture program is not developing payloads, but is focused on development of the airborne
system able to provide the objective mission reliability. A system able to remain on station for
five years could have utility in a variety of missions such as communications relay, surveillance
and reconnaissance, and signals intelligence.
In the program’s second phase, DARPA contractors will refine the demonstrator designs,
continue technology development and risk reduction efforts, and conduct an uninterrupted three-
month flight test of a sub-scale demonstrator. The third and final phase of the program will

consist of a flight test of the full-scale demonstrator vehicle, during which the Vulture system
will demonstrate the ability to operate continuously for 12 months.

Tags: DARPA, uav, vulture program