If life in the U.S. hasn’t already been downgraded enough by the economy caused mainly by the Iraqi and Afghanistan Conflicts then it is about to get worse if washington has its way by importing thousands of Iraqi Refugees into the U.S., Please somebody tell me, are they CrAzY!

The United States has surpassed its goal of admitting 12,000 Iraqi refugees this year and expects more, perhaps tens of thousands, next year, the State Department said on Friday.

The United States expects to admit a minimum of 17,000 Iraqi refugees in fiscal 2009, which begins October 1, the department’s senior coordinator for refugees said. Thousands more Iraqis and their family members could arrive through a special visa program for people who worked for the United States or its contractors.

“I think you’ll see the U.S. government admitting over the course of fiscal 2009 tens of thousands of Iraqis into the United States,” coordinator James Foley told reporters.

Up to 3,000 could come from Baghdad, where the United States began interviews this year, he said.

So far this year, 12,118 Iraqi refugees have arrived and 1,000 more are booked to travel to the United States by the end of this month, when the U.S. fiscal year ends, he said.

That marks a huge leap from just 1,600 Iraqis admitted in the previous year. That number drew widespread criticism from refugee groups that said Washington should do more to help millions of Iraqis who have fled instability and violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

The number is still lower than what some other countries have taken. Sweden, a country of 9 million people, has admitted over 40,000 Iraqis since 2003.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates 2 million Iraqis are living abroad, mostly in neighboring Jordan and Syria. Some 2.5 million are internally displaced.

One refugee advocacy group, Human Rights First, said it welcomed the news Washington had met its target for Iraqi arrivals in 2008 but that the “low” goal of resettling 17,000 refugees in fiscal 2009 should be raised to at least 30,000.

“The number of Iraqi refugees we have welcomed to our shores is still just a fraction of those in need,” said Amelia Templeton of the New York-based group. She said the U.N. refugee agency estimated that 85,000 Iraqi refugees from the most vulnerable groups would need resettlement next year.

Foley called on the government of oil-rich Iraq to do more to help Iraqi refugees abroad as well as plan for returning Iraqis by addressing their needs for security, social services and property compensation.

So far, he said, Iraq had spent only about $25 million to help its refugees abroad, and provided about $200 million for an initiative to help returning refugees. The latter amount was “rather small,” considering the number of Iraqi refugees and the improving security situation inside Iraq, Foley said.

“One cannot rule out in these situations the possibility that the refugees in large numbers themselves will decide it’s time to go back, but will the Iraqi government be ready for that? That’s what we have to prepare for I think,” Foley said.

The United States spent over $318 million in humanitarian aid for Iraqi refugees this year, Foley said. Washington sought support from other donors, “particularly in the region, not to mention, the government of Iraq itself.”

Foley said he was grateful that Syria, a country with which the United States has strained relations, had agreed to a new facility for refugee processing, which would enable Washington to handle larger numbers of refugees.

The creators of the in-development technology say they’ll be able to crack GSM encryption with only about $1,000 worth of equipment.

Security researchers presenting recently at the Black Hat D.C. conference in Washington, D.C., demonstrated technology in development that they say will be able to greatly decrease the time and money required to decrypt, and therefore snoop on, phone and text message conversations taking place on GSM networks.

Many mobile operators worldwide use GSM networks, including T-Mobile and AT&T in the United States. The 64-bit encryption method used by GSM, known as A5/1, was first cracked in theory about 10 years ago, and researchers David Hulton and Steve, who declined to give his last name, said today that expensive equipment to help people crack the encryption has been available online for about 5 years.

Until now, however, it’s been prohibitively expensive for people to get their hands on this technology. If it works, the technology Hulton and Steve are developing should be able to crack GSM encryption in less than 30 minutes with about $1,000 worth of equipment, or in about 30 seconds with $100,000 worth of equipment. The technology could potentially be helpful to law enforcement investigators, but could also be taken advantage of by malicious hackers. Hulton says he plans to commercialize the more expensive version of the technology.

Other hardware Hulton and Steve referenced uses two different techniques to snoop on GSM calls and can cost between $70,000 and $1 million. So-called “active” systems simulate a GSM base station and don’t rely on encryption because they trick phones into connecting to the GSM network through them. Other, so-called “passive” systems snoop on the traffic and are far more expensive.

Hutton and Steve’s technology relies on the use of an array of devices known as field programmable gate arrays to first create a table of all the possible encryption keys — in this case 288 quadrillion — and then decrypt each of those over the course of three months. The resulting tables of keys could then be used by software to decrypt GSM communications, which first have to be intercepted using a receiver that can listen in on GSM frequencies.

During their talk, Hulton and Steve also discussed the vulnerabilities of mobile device SIM cards, noting that GSM networks broadcast SIM cards’ unique IDs in unencrypted text, which can tell attackers or law enforcement what kind of phone someone is using. The GSM network also can tell snoopers how far a phone is from a base station, within 200 meters of error. They noted that SIM cards run Java Virtual Machines that operators have access to, and suggested that it could be possible for malicious attackers to install applications on user’s phones without them ever knowing, potentially rerouting traffic to a third party who listens in to phone conversations.

The GSM Association, a trade group representing more than 700 GSM operators, said it could not comment on the specific claims Hulton and Steve are making. However, spokesman David Pringle said in an e-mailed statement that while researchers have showed how A5/1 could be compromised in theory, none of their academic papers have led to “practical attack capability that can be used on live, commercial GSM networks.” He also noted that more advanced encryption is beginning to be deployed for GSM networks and that other networks, including 3G networks, don’t use A5/1.