Blogspot

Hello WordPress, God speed Blogger.

2009-11-23T21:05:00.000-06:00

I am happy to announce that I am finally moving my blog from Blogger to WordPress. Yes you heard it right, Roy Mitsuoka blog site will have a new look and a new domain name. I will be quite busy with this work, as such my blog will not be updated for about few weeks.

Even so, the new domain is still in progress. I am also searching and woking with old buddies of mine for a new design for my blog. If you have any new templates in mind, feel free to submit me a suggestion.

Few weeks, be on WordPress. See you at WordPress.

Iran: Preps for Strike on Nuke Sites

2009-11-23T11:32:00.001-06:00

Iran today began large-scale air defense war games aimed at protecting its nuclear facilities from attack, state TV reported, as an air force commander boasted the country could deter any military strike by Israel.

It said the five-day drill will cover an area a third of the size of Iran and spread across the central, western and southern parts of the country.

Gen. Ahmad Mighani, head of an air force unit in charge of responding to threats to Iran's air space, said Saturday the war games would cover regions where Iran's nuclear facilities are located.

The drill involves Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard, the paramilitary Basij forces affiliated with the Guard as well as army units.

The United States and its European allies accuse Iran of embarking on a nuclear weapons program. Iran denies the charge and insists the program is only for peaceful purposes.

Israel has not ruled out military action to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

The commander of the Guard's air force, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, meanwhile sought on Sunday to play down the significance of Israel's threats against his country, saying they amounted to psychological warfare.

"We are sure they are not able to do anything against us since they cannot predict our reaction," Hajizadeh was quoted as saying by the Guard's official Web site, Sephahnews.

"If their fighter planes could escape from Iran's air defense system, their bases will be hit by our devastating surface-to-surface missiles before they land," he said.

Also today, Iran's defense minister, Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, said Iran planned to pursue designing and producing its own air defense missiles, according to the official IRNA news agency.

His comments were apparently in response to the delay in the delivery from Russia of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, meant to be a key component of Iran's air defense.

Iran complains that the delay is apparently the result of Israeli and U.S. pressure.

Israel and the United States have opposed the missile deal out of fear Iran could use the system to significantly boost air defenses at its nuclear sites — including its main uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.

Commenting on this week's war games, a senior Obama administration official urged Iran to engage with the international community.

"We would prefer that the Iranian regime follow through on their offer to engage," said Ellen Tauscher, the U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

"It is more important for them to build confidence with the international community," she said at a news conference Sunday at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia.

Brazil: World Should Engage, Not Isolate Iran

2009-11-23T10:42:00.000-06:00

Engaging, not isolating Iran is the way to push for peace and stability in the Middle East, said Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva as he headed into private talks Monday with his increasingly alienated Iranian counterpart.

For Silva, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's first-ever visit to Brazil provides an opportunity to boost the international political clout of South America's largest nation.

For Ahmadinejad, it could provide some sorely needed political legitimacy for his nation as it engages in large-scale war games aimed at protecting its nuclear facilities from attack and refuses to back down from developing a nuclear program.

Oil prices rose above $78 a barrel Monday amid deepening tensions in the Middle East following the start of the war games and boasts by an air force commander that Iran could deter any military strike by Israel.

Silva, who has defended Iran's nuclear program, didn't mention the war games ahead of his meeting with Ahmadinejad but gave him a big bear hug and called for diplomacy to push for peace in the Middle East and ease tensions between Iran, the United States and other nations.

"There's no point in leaving Iran isolated," the Brazilian leader said on his weekly radio program hours before the two met. "It's important that someone sits down with Iran, talks with Iran and tries to establish some balance so that the Middle East can return to a certain sense of normalcy."

Ahmadinejad is the third high-ranking Middle Eastern leader to visit Brazil in recent weeks. Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestine Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas were here shortly before him. During his radio show, Silva proposed a soccer game next March pitting Brazil's national team against a team comprising Israelis and Palestinians.

Silva, a deft negotiator whose skills were honed as a union leader, says a new tact is needed with the Iranians. It may not be as embracing as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, a close ally whom Ahmadinejad will also visit during his South America tour.

But it also shouldn't be as punitive as the U.S. or European approach, Silva said.

"I told President (Barack) Obama, I told President (Nicolas) Sarkozy, I told (German) Chancellor Angela Merkel that we will not get good things out of Iran if we corner them. You need to create space to talk," Silva said last month.

The Iranian leader will next visit allies in Bolivia and Venezuela to shore up more South American support.

"With Brazil he gets more bang for his buck in the sense you're getting legitimacy from a more mainstream player," said Daniel Brumberg, an Iran expert at the Washington-based United States Institute of Peace. "One would hope Brazil's diplomacy would be skillful enough to get certain types of messages across to the Iranians and not just give Ahmadinejad the red-carpet treatment."

Ahmadinejad said Sunday that the two countries may discuss cooperation in the nuclear field, where Iran is under intense international pressure to stop uranium enrichment for fear that it is developing atomic weapons.

"We can build partnerships to build nuclear plants," he said in an interview with Brazil's Globo TV News. "Our two countries need nuclear power to generate electricity. Both Brazil and Iran are entitled to benefit from nuclear technology."

Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. Ahmadinejad said in Sunday's interview that critics are politically motivated and believe only wealthy countries should have the technology.

Several dozen Ahmadinejad supporters and opponents held demonstrations in Brasilia on Monday, a day after about 500 people gathered at Rio de Janeiro's Ipanema Beach to protest his visit.

Groups representing gays, Afro-Brazilian artists, Christians, Jews, and Holocaust survivors carried protest banners and a giant cage Sunday containing white balloons, which they said was a symbol of Iran's "repressed values."

The Iranian leader has called for the destruction of Israel and repeated in Sunday's interview that homosexuality goes against human nature.

Israel is voicing concern about Iran's push in Latin America. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman visited Brazil and Argentina in July and Israeli President Shimon Peres visited the same nations last week - the first such high-level visits in decades.

Brazil has the world's seventh-largest uranium reserves and enriches it for its own nuclear energy program. The nation has flatly said it would not sell enriched uranium to Iran, or any other nation.

In addition to encouraging Brazil to press Iran on its uranium enrichment, the U.S. State Department said it hopes Brazil raises the case of three American hikers being held in Iran after they crossed an unmarked border while hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan in July. Ahmadinejad didn't mention the hikers during his interview with Globo TV.

Security by Accident, or Security by Design? by Paul Ducklin

2009-11-23T08:04:00.001-06:00

I can't imagine blaming anyone other than the author for last week's iPhone virus outbreak. The virus wasn't an accident -- the self-confessed creator wrote and disseminated the virus quite deliberately.

However, the virus only infects apostate iPhones whose owners have removed Apple's restrictive software cocoon -- so-called jailbroken devices. Additionally, the virus only infects iPhones which have not been properly secured after liberation. So there are many who blame the virus on the the jailbreakers, claiming they brought the problem on themselves.

And a few observers have even blamed the virus author's mobile phone operator, claiming that the company should have been using Network Address Translation (NAT) on its 3G network as a security measure which would have prevented the virus.

This is a curious argument, and it begs two questions: what is NAT, and what security purpose, if any, is is supposed to serve?

You can read about traditional NAT, which was first codified as RFC1631 in 1994, in RFC3022, published in 2001. NAT's primary objective was to make 32-bit IP numbers go further, in order to buy us time to update to IPv6. (Given that IPv6 adoption is still very limited, 15 years later, NAT has obviously achieved this goal.)

The basic idea is simple: take a single, public IP number issued by your ISP, and assign this number to a router at your network edge. Give all the PCs inside your network a range of non-unique, private IP numbers, and let the router translate all outbound packets so they appear to come from the network address of the router itself. Similarly, let the router translate and redirect all reply packets to the network address of the originating PC. And there you have it: Network Address Translation.

One side-effect of this behaviour is that inbound connection requests must be aimed at the router, since it has your network's only public-facing IP number. Until you instruct the router which inbound requests should be forwarded to which internal servers, inbound connections can't be accepted -- the router simply doesn't know where to send them.

So, as RFC3022 points out, "traditional NAT can be viewed as providing a privacy mechanism, as sessions are uni-directional from private hosts and the actual addresses of the private hosts are not visible to external hosts." In other words, by default, NAT limits the extent to which your network structure is visible to outsiders, and prevents outsiders from connecting into your network.

However, it is a large -- and, in my opinion, unwarranted -- leap of faith to consider NAT to be a security measure. Indeed, the original RFC authors seem to agree, warning that "unfortunately, NAT reduces the number of options for providing security." In particular, NAT makes it much more difficult to track troublesome behaviour back to source -- including security violations -- since the IP address of any offending host is masked by the NATting router.

In short, NAT is a necessary evil in contemporary networking, since we don't have enough IPv4 addresses for every device on the internet. Used responsibly, NAT can increase your resilience to external attack, because of its systematic resistance to unwanted inbound connections. But it is a snake-oil substitute for a proper network security regimen. It was designed to help the internet stretch further, not to make it more secure.

In particular, the PCs inside a NATted network enjoy no protection from each other because of NAT. Even if NAT helps to stop a virus like Conficker from sneaking into your LAN through your router, it won't stop the virus from wandering around inside your LAN if it gets in via other means. Indeed, when Conficker was widespread earlier this year, most organisational outbreaks I dealt with seem to have entered quietly on infected USB keys, and then spread liberally across the intranet -- whether the network was NATted or not.

Remember: security doesn't happen by accident.

(Nor do viruses, so don't try to shift the blame away from the people who create them in the first place.)

Intego Security Memo – November 23, 2009 (Jailbroken iPhone Worm Creates Botnet, Copies Personal Data)

2009-11-23T07:48:00.000-06:00

Exploit: iPhone/iBotnet.A

Discovered: November 21, 2009

Risk: Medium

Description: For the third time this month, malware targeting the iPhone has surfaced. The first such malware changed wallpaper on iPhones1, and the second harvested personal data from iPhones2. This new malware, that Intego calls iBotnet.A, is by far the most sophisticated iPhone malware yet: it is not only a worm, capable of spreading across a network, but also hijacks iPhones or iPod touches for use in a botnet.

It is important to note that standard, non-jailbroken iPhones or iPod touches are not at risk; it is extremely dangerous to jailbreak an iPhone because of the vulnerabilities that this process creates. (Estimates suggest that 6-8% of iPhones are jailbroken.) Jailbroken iPhones at risk are those where ssh is installed, and where the default password has not been changed.

This worm starts by searching its local network, as well as a number of IP address ranges, for available devices to infect. The address ranges it scans include those of ISPs in the Netherlands, Portugal, Hungary, Australia, and if an appropriately unprotected iPhone is found, the worm can copy itself to these devices.

When active on an iPhone, the iBotnet worm changes the root password for the device (from “alpine” to “ohshit”), in order to prevent users from later changing that password themselves. It then connects to a server in Lithuania, from which it downloads new files and data, and to which it sends data recovered from the infected iPhone. The worm sends both network information about the iPhone and SMSs to the remote server. It is capable of downloading data, including executables that it uses to run and carry out its actions, as well as new files, providing botnet capabilities to infected devices. (A botnet is a network of infected computers or devices that can be controlled by hackers to attack other computers, serve malware, send spam, serve pages or images, and much more.)

The worm also gives each infected iPhone a unique identifier; this to be able to reconnect easily to any iPhones on which valuable information is found, but also to ensure that only infected iPhones can connect to the server. Finally, it changes an entry in the iPhones /etc/hosts file for a Dutch bank web site, to lead Dutch users who connect to this bank site to a bogus site, presumable to harvest user names and passwords.

Means of protection: Intego VirusBarrier X5 detects and eradicates this malware, which it identifies it as iPhone/iBotnet.A, on iPhones that it can scan from Macs with VirusBarrier X5 installed, with its virus definitions dated November 22, 2009 or later. The only other way to remove this malware is to totally wipe and restore the iPhone using iTunes.

We would like to stress that users who jailbreak their iPhones are exposing themselves to known vulnerabilities that are being exploited by code that is circulating in the wild. If users install ssh, they should change the default password, which is widely known. While the number of iPhones attacked may be minimal, the amount of personal data that can be compromised, and the ability of this new worm to create a botnet, strongly suggests that iPhone users should stick with their stock configurations and not jailbreak their devices.

Intego thanks Scott McIntyre, Chief Security Officer of the Dutch ISP XS4ALL, for his help in isolating and analyzing this worm.

Hasan had Intensified Contact with Cleric: Suspect Raised Prospect of Financial Transfers by Carrie Johnson, Spencer Hsu, and Ellen Nakashima

2009-11-22T02:55:00.000-06:00

In the months before the deadly shootings at Fort Hood, Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan intensified his communications with a radical Yemeni American cleric and began to discuss surreptitious financial transfers and other steps that could translate his thoughts into action, according to two sources briefed on a collection of secret e-mails between the two.

The e-mails were obtained by an FBI-led task force in San Diego between late last year and June but were not forwarded to the military, according to government and congressional sources. Some were sent to the FBI's Washington field office, triggering an assessment into whether they raised national security concerns, but those intercepted later were not, the sources said.

Hasan's contacts with extremist imam Anwar al-Aulaqi began as religious queries but took on a more specific and concrete tone before he moved to Texas, where he allegedly unleashed the Nov. 5 attack that killed 13 people and wounded nearly three dozen, said the sources who were briefed on the e-mails, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the case is sensitive and unfolding. One of those sources said the two discussed in "cryptic and coded exchanges" the transfer of money overseas in ways that would not attract law enforcement attention.

"He [Hasan] clearly became more radicalized toward the end, and was having discussions related to the transfer of money and finances . . .," said the source, who spoke at length in part because he was concerned the public accounting of the events has been incomplete. "It became very clear toward the end of those e-mails he was interested in taking action."

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said Friday that he would investigate the handling of the e-mails -- 18 or 19 in all -- and why military officials were not aware of them before the deadly attack. Levin told reporters after a briefing from Pentagon staff members that "there are some who are reluctant to call it terrorism, but there is significant evidence that it is."

Bits and pieces of Hasan's communications with Aulaqi have become public since the Fort Hood massacre, but the sources provided the most detailed description yet of the messages. The e-mails will help investigators determine whether Hasan's alleged actions were motivated by psychological deterioration or inspired by radical religious views he found online and through e-mail exchanges with Aulaqi.

The sources said the e-mail correspondence is particularly troubling because Aulaqi, who has been on the law enforcement radar for years, is considered by U.S. officials to be an al-Qaeda supporter who has inspired terrorism suspects in Britain, Canada and the United States. Lawmakers and counterterrorism experts have questioned why no one in the government interceded earlier given Aulaqi's history and Hasan's military position.

The disclosures came as investigators in the FBI and the Army's Criminal Investigation Division continue to interview witnesses and execute search warrants in and around the Army's largest post, in Killeen, Tex., and elsewhere.

This week Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates launched a department-wide review to determine whether military procedures hinder the identification of service members who pose a threat to their fellow troops.

Hasan faces 13 charges of premeditated murder. He is scheduled to have his first formal court hearing Saturday, in his hospital room in the intensive care unit at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where he is recovering from gunshot wounds that have left him paralyzed.

Hasan's contacts with Aulaqi were not publicly disclosed until after the shootings, which the cleric subsequently praised, calling the Army psychiatrist a "hero" in a posting on his Web site.

In the months before the shootings, the two discussed how Hasan could make several transactions of less than $10,000, a threshold for reporting to U.S. authorities, according to the source who spoke extensively. Hasan did not explicitly vow to fund terrorist activities or evade tax and reporting laws for contributions, the source said.

"I believe they were interested in the money for operational-type aspects, and knowing that he had funds and wouldn't be around to use them, they were very eager to get those funds," he said.

To date, investigators have not unearthed evidence that Hasan sent money to charities with strong or suspected ties to Islamist militant groups, but they are continuing to probe his financial dealings as one aspect of a many-pronged case, other sources cautioned.

The FBI obtained the e-mails pursuant to court-ordered wiretaps, according to a former intelligence official. After receiving a wiretap order, Internet providers generally set up accounts that allow cloned copies of e-mails to go to the government agency in real time. Stored e-mails also may be provided with a search warrant.

In this case, a first batch of Hasan's e-mails was sent by agents in San Diego to the bureau's Washington field office, where a terrorism task force began to assess them in December. But months later, additional messages emerged, according to government and congressional sources. Those e-mails were reviewed only in San Diego, where authorities determined they did not pose a national security risk. The FBI said last week, without going into details about the process, that "all of the e-mails were known."

Hasan's commanding officer ordered him to "pre-trial confinement" on Friday, John Galligan, the suspect's attorney, said in an interview at his Belton, Tex., office. Galligan described pre-trial confinement as the strictest confinement in military court and said it usually means the suspect is locked in a military jail. Because Hasan is paralyzed and has substantial medical needs, Galligan said he will ask for his client to remain in intensive care under guarded supervision.

"He's in a hospital bed," Galligan said. "He's not going to get up and walk away."

In several of their applications for search warrants, authorities are approaching the matter as a regular criminal investigation rather than invoking special legal authority available in terrorism cases, the sources said.

What, if anything, authorities on the task force and in the Army should have done differently after Hasan emerged as a possible problem is the subject of multiple congressional and executive branch investigations, including one ordered by President Obama.

At a congressional hearing Thursday, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said that Hasan had conducted a "homegrown terrorist attack" -- a conclusion investigators have yet to reach.

But several current and former investigators who handle high-profile cases said that not citing terrorism as a possible motivation for Hasan at this stage may be a function of the legal standards imposed by prosecutors preparing the search applications.

Investigators within the FBI and the Defense Department continue to operate on the theory that Hasan acted alone, though they have demonstrated interest in his relationships with other soldiers including Duane Reasoner Jr., a convert to Islam who dined with Hasan at a local restaurant in the months before the attack.

When the Iranian Clergy Switch Sides by Thomas Barnett

2009-11-21T19:21:00.001-06:00

ARTICLE: Future Perfect, By Geneive Abdo, Newsweek , Nov 18, 2009

This fits nicely with the mullahs-have-lost-power scenario unfolding. Khamenei has so sold his soul to the Revolutionary Guard that the clergy are slowly coming to the conclusion that the faith would be better served detached from the government.

When this happens, a major portion of the clergy then switch over to the green movement and we get a Poland / Solidarnosc scenario that moves with great power.

The LHC is back II (CERN)

2009-11-21T17:52:00.000-06:00

Particle beams are once again circulating in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, CERN1’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This news comes after the machine was handed over for operation on Wednesday morning. A clockwise circulating beam was established at ten o'clock this evening. This is an important milestone on the road towards first physics at the LHC, expected in 2010.

“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”

The LHC circulated its first beams on 10 September 2008, but suffered a serious malfunction nine days later. A failure in an electrical connection led to serious damage, and CERN has spent over a year repairing and consolidating the machine to ensure that such an incident cannot happen again.

“The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators, Steve Myers. “We’ve learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That’s how progress is made.”

Recommissioning the LHC began in the summer, and successive milestones have regularly been passed since then. The LHC reached its operating temperature of 1.9 Kelvin, or about -271 Celsius, on 8 October. Particles were injected on 23 October, but not circulated. A beam was steered through three octants of the machine on 7 November, and circulating beams have now been re-established. The next important milestone will be low-energy collisions, expected in about a week from now. These will give the experimental collaborations their first collision data, enabling important calibration work to be carried out. This is significant, since up to now, all the data they have recorded comes from cosmic rays. Ramping the beams to high energy will follow in preparation for collisions at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) next year.

Particle physics is a global endeavour, and CERN has received support from around the world in getting the LHC up and running again.

“It’s been a herculean effort to get to where we are today,” said Myers. “I’d like to thank all those who have taken part, from CERN and from our partner institutions around the world.”

Military Video System Is Like YouTube With Artillery by David Hambling

2009-11-21T17:48:00.001-06:00

Making footage shareable and searchable online has sparked a revolution in the cute animal, stupid human, and delicious tamale communities. New software just might mean a similar upgrade for military video intelligence: Think of it as a real-time YouTube with heavy artillery. The release of the new version has just been announced.

The U.S. military’s Task Force ODIN demonstrated the effectiveness of combining the video inputs from networked drones, aircraft and helicopters. When a roadside bomb went off, the team could wind back the video to see who planted it — and where they went. ODIN allegedly assisted in the takedown of thousands of insurgents in Iraq; their counterparts are starting work in Afghanistan.

The process of handling, archiving and then searching through a large number of video feeds is a challenging one. That’s one of the reasons why something like YouTube can be so helpful: Instead of having to search through a pile of videotapes, you can just type in a few keywords. Even better, you can search all your friends’ video collections and they can search yours. And this is where a system like adLib produced by EchoStorm Worldwide LLC comes in. It does the same sort of thing for the military by automatically archiving video feeds along with the associated telemetry data.

For example, suppose you want to find out what happened at point X at 8:30 yesterday. You don’t even have to know which platforms were in the area at the time.

“You can ask for video that matches a specific location using latitude and longitude or the MGRS (Military Grid Reference System) or by clicking and dragging on a map,” David Barton of EchoStorm told Danger Room. “You can even define a specific point and specify a radius to search from that point.”

Barton says that the system can take video feeds from all sorts of drones. It even works right down to the individual soldier level: FLIR Recon III binoculars have built-in video, GPS and a laser range finder which can feed straight into adLib.

The system requires some rack-mounted hardware, but once the data has been archived, it’s freely available to everyone: Like YouTube, users can access it on the internet without any special software. EchoStorm’s Multiplayer allows users to look at what’s happening right now. Looking into the past is one thing, but you might also want to look at how things are right now. It even allows for “Artillery Correction support,” so a fire support officer can redirect an barrage of shells from a video feed on his PC. Try doing that with your ninja cat videos.

The Illustrated Man: How LED Tattoos Could Make Your Skin a Screen by Charlie Sorrel

2009-11-21T17:43:00.000-06:00

The title character of Ray Bradbury’s book The Illustrated Man is covered with moving, shifting tattoos. If you look at them, they will tell you a story.

New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen.

The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolves away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about 1 millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick. The sheet of silk will keep them in place, molding to the shape of the skin when saline solution is added.

These displays could be hooked up to any kind of electronic device, also inside the body. Medical uses are being explored, from blood-sugar sensors that show their readouts on the skin itself to neurodevices that tie into the body’s nervous system — hooking chips to particular nerves to control a prosthetic hand, for example.

Chips are already used inside bodies, most notably the tiny RFID tags injected into pets. But the flexible nature of these “tattooed” circuits means they can move elastically with the body, sitting in places that a rigid circuit board couldn’t.

The first displays are sure to be primitive, but likely very useful for the patients that receive them. You won’t be getting the full-color, hi-res images that come with ink, but functional displays. This doesn’t mean that the commercial and artistic possibilities are being ignored. Philips, the electronics giant, is exploring some rather sexual uses:

It’s certainly rather creepy, but we’re sure that the inevitable next stage of playing adult movie clips on your partner’s back will be appealing to some. We, of course, are considering the geekier side of this tech. GPS, with a map readout on the back of the wrist would certainly be useful, as would chips that cover your eyeballs and can darken down when the sun is shining too bright.

And a full-body display will eventually be used for advertising. Combine this with bioluminescent ink, for example, and you could turn yourself into a small, walking version of Times Square. At least, unlike a real tattoo, you can switch this one off.

In fact, if you start to imagine the possible uses, they seems almost endless. Just like the stories that play across the body of the Illustrated Man.

Conflict and Computer Science by Aaron Mannes

2009-11-20T09:07:00.002-06:00

Conflict has often been a driver for technological advances and computer science has been no exception. The requirements of code breaking during World War II led to the construction of Colossus – the first totally electronic computer device, while the Internet was originally constructed to provide a secure communications network for the military in the event of a nuclear war. While terrorist use of technology, and particularly the Internet, receives tremendous press, the current conflict is also sparking important developments in computer science that will have impacts far beyond the security realm.

My employer, the Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics (LCCD) at the University of Maryland is one group seeking to develop the theory and algorithms required for tools to support decision-making in cultural contexts. LCCD has developed numerous systems including T-Rex, which can rapidly scan text in several languages and convert it into a database and SOMA (Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents) which can extract rules of likely behaviors by organizations from their past behaviors.

LCCD sponsors an annual conference, the International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics (ICCCD2009) – to be held this year on December 7-8 at the University of Maryland. Papers being presented include efforts to model insurgencies as well as piracy in Somalia, a tool used to map the Indonesian blogosphere, and SCARE (Spatial Cultural Abduction Reasoning Engine) which can help predict the locations of weapons caches in an urban environment. (See the full program here.)

Augmenting the Mind

The human brain is an impressive system, which also builds models. In some regards it far exceeds anything on the horizon in the realm of computer science. The ability of human beings to take information and place it in context and draw conclusions from it is profound. We build complex models of how the world works in order to function in it. But computers can process some forms of data far faster than humans and will do so systematically. Human minds cannot quickly process large quantities of data. In attempting to make sense of large amounts of information a human beings may discount or ignore information that does not fit in their model of how the world works – or alternately draw significant conclusions based on a very limited amount of data. Imagine an economist ignoring issues of ethnic identity in analyzing a nation’s policies or a political philosopher focusing on ideology while ignoring logistics in studying a terrorist group’s behavior. In short, computer systems are capable of substantially augmenting the power of human reason.

Things to Come

The impacts of these technologies will be profound. Real-time data collection and processing will potentially improve decision-making in many ways. Beyond providing better intelligence, it will allow the creation of in-depth virtual environments, which facilitate training to operate in different cultures. The Marines and Army have built mock Afghan and Iraqi villages staffed by actors for this kind of training. These are terrific facilities, but a computer simulation could inexpensively augment the real world training.

According to the late Alexander George, a renowned scholar of the presidency, many foreign policy accidents have occurred because leaders were unable to see the situation from the perspective of their counterpart. Leaders make assumptions about their opposite number and his (or her) actions based on an intuited model of their behavior. Models not operating on limiting assumptions may provide alternate explanations for behaviors and thereby give leaders the insight to avoid escalating conflicts that arose from misunderstandings.

But these systems will also have civilian applications. Game theory systems used to predict the behavior of adversaries may also be used to understand the behavior of business competitors. Tools that can analyze the opinions expressed on jihadi websites could also be used to analyze public opinion for marketing research. Models that identify the outbreak of terrorism and insurgency may also be turned to studying the outbreak of disease.

But this focuses on applications designed for policy-makers – and no doubt there will be many such tools. But only twenty years ago, very few people imagined a ubiquitous, international system that facilitated instantaneous communications and put vast amounts of information virtually at every user’s fingertips. Models and game theory will not remain in the realm of executives and professional analysts. They will also become everyday tools used by regular people to better plan their activities and make decisions about their lives.

In this vein, ICCCD2009 could prove to be a fascinating glimpse into the future.

Liquid Battery Big Enough for the Electric Grid? by David L. Chandler

2009-11-20T08:17:00.000-06:00

There’s one major drawback to most proposed renewable-energy sources: their variability. The sun doesn’t shine at night, the wind doesn’t always blow, and tides, waves and currents fluctuate. That’s why many researchers have been pursuing ways of storing the power generated by these sources so that it can be used when it’s needed.

So far, those solutions have tended to be too expensive, limited to only certain areas, or difficult to scale up sufficiently to meet the demands. Many researchers are struggling to overcome these limitations, but MIT professor Donald Sadoway has come up with an innovative approach that has garnered significant interest — and some major funding.

The idea is to build an entirely new kind of battery, whose key components would be kept at high temperature so that they would stay entirely in liquid form. The experimental devices currently being tested in Sadoway’s lab work in a way that’s never been attempted in batteries before.

This month, the newly established federal agency ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency, Energy) announced its first 37 energy-research grants out of a pool of 3,600 applications, and Sadoway’s project to develop utility-scale batteries received one of the largest sums — almost $7 million over five years. And within a few days of the ARPA-E announcement, the French oil company Total — the world’s fifth-largest — announced a $4 million, five-year joint venture with MIT to develop a smaller-scale version of the same technology, suitable for use in individual homes or other buildings.

Because the technology is being patented and could lead to very large-scale commercialization, Sadoway will not discuss the details of the materials being used. But both Sadoway and ARPA-E say the battery is based on low-cost, domestically available liquid metals that have the potential to shatter the cost barrier to large-scale energy storage as part of the nation's energy grid. In announcing its funding of Sadoway’s work, ARPA-E said the battery technology “could revolutionize the way electricity is used and produced on the grid, enabling round-the-clock power from America's wind and solar power resources, increasing the stability of the grid, and making blackouts a thing of the past.”

Andrew Chung, a principal at Lightspeed Venture Partners in Menlo Park, Calif., which has no equity stake in Sadoway’s project at this point, says that “grid-scale storage is an area that’s set to explode in the next decade or so,” and is one that his company is following closely. The liquid battery concept Sadoway is developing “is an exciting approach to solving the problem,” he says.

Big is Beautiful

Most battery research, Sadoway says, has been aimed at improving storage for portable or mobile systems such as cellphones, computers and cars. The requirements for such systems, including very low weight and high safety, are very different from the needs of a grid-scale, fixed-location battery system. “What I did was completely ignore the conventional technology used for portable power,” he says. The different set of requirements for stationary systems “opens up a whole new range of possibilities.”

A large, utility-owned system “doesn’t have to be crash-worthy; it doesn’t have to be ‘idiot-proof’ because it won’t be in the hands of the consumer.” And while consumers are willing to pay high prices, pound-for-pound, for the small batteries used in high-value portable devices, the biggest constraint on utility-sized systems is cost. In order to compete with present fossil-fuel power systems, he says, “it has got to be cheap to build, cheap to maintain, last a long time with minimal maintenance, and store enormous amounts of energy.”

And so the new liquid batteries that Sadoway and his team, including graduate student David Bradwell, are designing use low-cost, abundant materials. The basic principle is to place three layers of liquid inside a container: Two different metal alloys, and one layer of a salt. The three materials are chosen so that they have different densities that allow them to separate naturally into three distinct layers, with the salt in the middle separating the two metal layers —like novelty drinks with different layers.

The energy is stored in the liquid metals that want to react with one another but can do so only by transferring ions — electrically charged atoms of one of the metals — across the electrolyte, which results in the flow of electric current out of the battery. When the battery is being charged, some ions migrate through the insulating salt layer to collect at one of the terminals. Then, when the power is being drained from the battery, those ions migrate back through the salt and collect at the opposite terminal.

The whole device is kept at a high temperature, around 700 degrees Celsius, so that the layers remain molten. In the small devices being tested in the lab, maintaining this temperature requires an outside heater, but Sadoway says that in the full-scale version, the electrical current being pumped into, or out of, the battery will be sufficient to maintain that temperature without any outside heat source.

While some previous battery technologies have used one liquid-metal component, this is the first design for an all-liquid battery system, Sadoway says. “Solid components in batteries are speed bumps. When you want ultra-high current, you don’t want any solids.”

Inspiration from Aluminum

The initial inspiration for the idea came from thinking about a very different technology, Sadoway says: one of the biggest users of electrical energy, aluminum smelting plants. Sadoway realized that this was one of the few existing examples of a system that could sustain extremely high levels of electrical current over a sustained period of years at a time. “It’s an electrochemical process that runs at high temperatures, and at a current of hundreds of thousands of amps,” he says. In a sense, the new concept is like an aluminum plant running in reverse, producing power instead of consuming it.

Chung says that from the point of view of a venture capitalist, the research is particularly intriguing for several reasons. Not only does it offer the potential to significantly lower the cost and increase cycle life [the number of times it can be charged and discharged] of large-scale electricity storage, but it also suggests that the risk typically associated with an early stage research project may be lower because the system draws on decades of experience in the design and operation of aluminum production facilities. “That gives us added confidence that some of the targets around cost, scalability and safety have merit,” he says.

The team is now testing a number of different variations of the exact composition of the materials in the three layers, and of the design of the overall device. Sadoway says that thanks to initial funding through the Deshpande Center and the Chesonis Family Foundation, he and his team were able to develop the concept to the point of demonstrating a proof-of-principle at the laboratory scale. That, in turn, made it possible to get the large grants to develop the technology further.

“It’s an example of work that sprang from basic science, was developed to a pilot scale, and now is being scaled up to have a real transformational impact in the world,” says Ernest Moniz, director of the MIT Energy Initiative.

The laboratory tests have provided “some measure of confidence,” Sadoway says. But many more tests will be needed to “demonstrate that the idea is scalable to industrial size, at competitive cost.” But while he is very confident that it will all work, there are a lot of unknowns, he says, including how to design and build the necessary containers, electrical control systems, and connections.

“We’re talking about batteries of a size never seen before,” he says. And the system they develop has to include everything, including control systems and charger electronics on an unprecedented scale.

For Sadoway, the project is worth pursuing despite its daunting challenges, because the potential impact is so great. “I’m not doing this because I want another journal publication,” Sadoway says. “It’s about making a difference … It’s an opportunity to invent our way out of the energy problem.”

Leaked UK government plan to create "Pirate Finder General" with power to appoint militias, create laws by Cory Doctorow

2009-11-19T16:52:00.001-06:00

A source close to the British Labour Government has just given me reliable information about the most radical copyright proposal I've ever seen.

Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson -- or his successor in the next government) the power to make "secondary legislation" (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).

What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright. Mandelson elaborates on this, giving three reasons for his proposal:

1. The Secretary of State would get the power to create new remedies for online infringements (for example, he could create jail terms for file-sharing, or create a "three-strikes" plan that costs entire families their internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)

2. The Secretary of State would get the power to create procedures to "confer rights" for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement. (for example, record labels and movie studios can be given investigative and enforcement powers that allow them to compel ISPs, libraries, companies and schools to turn over personal information about Internet users, and to order those companies to disconnect users, remove websites, block URLs, etc)

3. The Secretary of State would get the power to "impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement" (for example, ISPs could be forced to spy on their users, or to have copyright lawyers examine every piece of user-generated content before it goes live; also, copyright "militias" can be formed with the power to police copyright on the web)

Mandelson is also gunning for sites like YouSendIt and other services that allow you to easily transfer large files back and forth privately (I use YouSendIt to send podcasts back and forth to my sound-editor during production). Like Viacom, he's hoping to force them to turn off any feature that allows users to keep their uploads private, since privacy flags can be used to keep infringing files out of sight of copyright enforcers.

This is as bad as I've ever seen, folks. It's a declaration of war by the entertainment industry and their captured regulators against the principles of free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence, and competition.

This proposal creates the office of Pirate-Finder General, with unlimited power to appoint militias who are above the law, who can pry into every corner of your life, who can disconnect you from your family, job, education and government, who can fine you or put you in jail.

More to follow, I'm sure, once Open Rights Group and other activist organizations get working on this. In the meantime, tell every Briton you know. If we can't stop this, it's beginning of the end for the net in Britain.

What They Really Believe by Thomas L. Friedman

2009-11-19T12:57:00.001-06:00

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.

But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.

Yes, the opponents of any tax on carbon to stimulate alternatives to oil must believe all these things because that is the only way their arguments make any sense. Let me explain why by first explaining how I look at this issue.

I am a clean-energy hawk. Green for me is not just about recycling garbage but about renewing America. That is why I have been saying “green is the new red, white and blue.”

My argument is simple: I think climate change is real. You don’t? That’s your business. But there are two other huge trends barreling down on us with energy implications that you simply can’t deny. And the way to renew America is for us to take the lead and invent the technologies to address these problems.

The first is that the world is getting crowded. According to the 2006 U.N. population report, “The world population will likely increase by 2.5 billion ... passing from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050. This increase is equivalent to the total size of the world population in 1950, and it will be absorbed mostly by the less developed regions, whose population is projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050.”

The energy, climate, water and pollution implications of adding another 2.5 billion mouths to feed, clothe, house and transport will be staggering. And this is coming, unless, as the deniers apparently believe, a global pandemic or a mass outbreak of abstinence will freeze world population — forever.

Now, add one more thing. The world keeps getting flatter — more and more people can now see how we live, aspire to our lifestyle and even take our jobs so they can live how we live. So not only are we adding 2.5 billion people by 2050, but many more will live like “Americans” — with American-size homes, American-size cars, eating American-size Big Macs.

“What happens when developing nations with soaring vehicle populations get tens of millions of petroleum-powered cars at the same time as the global economy recovers and there’s no large global oil supply overhang?” asks Felix Kramer, the electric car expert who advocates electrifying the U.S. auto fleet and increasingly powering it with renewable energy sources. What happens, of course, is that the price of oil goes through the roof — unless we develop alternatives. The petro-dictators in Iran, Venezuela and Russia hope we don’t. They would only get richer.

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

Green hawks believe otherwise. We believe that in a world getting warmer and more crowded with more “Americans,” the next great global industry is going to be E.T., or energy technology based on clean power and energy efficiency. It has to be. And we believe that the country that invents and deploys the most E.T. will enjoy the most economic security, energy security, national security, innovative companies and global respect. And we believe that country must be America. If not, our children will never enjoy the standard of living we did. And we believe the best way to launch E.T. is to set a fixed, long-term price on carbon — combine it with the Obama team’s impressive stimulus for green-tech — and then let the free market and innovation do the rest.

So, as I said, you don’t believe in global warming? You’re wrong, but I’ll let you enjoy it until your beach house gets washed away. But if you also don’t believe the world is getting more crowded with more aspiring Americans — and that ignoring that will play to the strength of our worst enemies, while responding to it with clean energy will play to the strength of our best technologies — then you’re willfully blind, and you’re hurting America’s future to boot.

A bipartisan push is needed to tame ballooning national debt by Evan Bayh

2009-11-19T11:48:00.001-06:00

America's national debt cannot grow beyond a limit imposed by Congress known as the "debt ceiling."

In 1919, just after World War I, the limit on U.S. borrowing was $43 billion.

By 2001, it had grown to $5.9 trillion.

Today, the debt ceiling is at an all-time high of $12.1 trillion.

When President George W. Bush took office in 2001, our public debt amounted to 33 percent of our economy. Today, it is 60 percent of our gross domestic product. If we do nothing, our debt is projected to swell to over 70 percent by 2019.

To put those numbers in perspective: If you divided the debt equally among all Americans, every man, woman and child living in the United States today would owe more than $39,000.

Next month, members of Congress will be asked to vote to raise the roof on our allowable debt for the ninth time this decade.

Before such votes, it has become customary for Treasury officials to write members of Congress warning of the dire consequences of restricting the federal government's ability to borrow. There should be no mistake: These consequences are real.

What those letters often fail to mention, however, are the equally dire consequences of the status quo. Long-term deficits drive up interest rates for consumers, raise prices of goods and services, and weaken our country's financial competitiveness and security.

The bigger our deficits, the fewer resources we have to make critical investments in energy, education, health care and tax relief for small businesses and middle-class families.

The bigger our deficits, the more we must borrow from foreign creditors like China, allowing governments with competing interests to influence our economic and trade policies in ways that run counter to our national interest.

Last week, I was joined by a handful of my colleagues at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on strategies for reining in our exploding debt. United in our concern that Congress lacks the will to get our fiscal house in order, we mounted what I termed an "institutional insurrection."

Our unsustainable debt is neither a Democratic nor a Republican problem. It is rooted in the DNA of both political parties. Some in Congress like to spend more than we can afford, and some like to cut taxes more than we can afford. The easy path is simply to borrow until the credit markets will no longer allow it.

This approach violates something fundamental in the American character. Every generation before us has been willing to make the tough decisions and hard sacrifices required to ensure our children and grandchildren inherit a better way of life and stronger country. Now, it is our turn.

The path of least resistance that we have trod for so long is the path to national weakness. If you have the same people and the same process, you are going to get the same results.

For this reason, I will vote "no" on raising the debt ceiling unless Congress adopts a credible process to balance our books and eliminate the red ink.

The proposal I am supporting with Sens. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, and Judd Gregg, R-New Hampshire, would create a new debt-fighting commission. Conventional wisdom in Washington is that commissions are something politicians create to defer hard decisions. But our bipartisan panel would put all options on the table, including spending cuts and revenue raisers. Congress would then be compelled by law to debate the recommendations and take an up-or-down vote on the entire plan.

A debt commission will force members of Congress to take -- or reject -- a single gulp of politically difficult medicine to treat the fiscal problems that are ailing our country. Those who choose not to take that medicine would be forced to explain to their constituents why a $12 trillion national debt doesn't make them queasy.

There is precedent to create this type of commission with real teeth. President Ronald Reagan created a commission, chaired by Alan Greenspan, to shore up Social Security in the early 1980s. Congress created a special process to take parochial politics out of decisions on military base closures, and it worked.

Some of my colleagues in Congress believe that efforts to reduce the deficit should go through the regular committee system, but the national debt has doubled this decade. The existing process has not only failed to respond to this problem, it has made it worse.

There are rare moments of leverage in Congress when a few resolute members can force fundamental change. The upcoming vote to raise the debt ceiling is one of them.

Before we borrow more money from our children and grandchildren, we need to commit to a new fiscal process that ensures a legacy of which all Americans can be proud.

Apple Researching Methods for 'Pushing' User Interfaces to Accessories from Media Devices by Eric Slivka

2009-11-19T11:22:00.000-06:00

In a patent application filed in May 2008 and published today, Apple discloses that it has been researching methods to allow media devices such as the iPod to "push" their graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to accessory devices for the purposes of controlling the media devices remotely. In pursuing this technology, Apple notes that while remote control accessories for media devices are common, the interfaces are generated by the accessory itself, leading to incomplete functionality and varying experiences when multiple devices are used with a single accessory or a single device is used with multiple accessories.

But existing remote GUIs are defined and controlled by the remote control device, and consequently, they may bear little resemblance to a GUI supplied by the portable media device itself Certain functions available on the portable media device (such as browsing or searching a database, adjusting playback settings, etc.) may be unavailable or difficult to find. Thus, a user may not be able to perform desired functions. Further, GUIs provided for the same portable media device by different remote control devices might be quite different, and the user who connects a portable media device to different accessories with remote control may find the inconsistencies frustrating.

As a response to these issues, Apple proposes methods for media devices to "push" their own GUIs to accessory devices, allowing for full functionality and a consistent user experience across compatible devices and accessories.

The portable media device can provide the accessory with an image to be displayed on the video screen; the image can include various user interface elements that can resemble or replicate a "native" GUI provided directly on the portable media device. The accessory can send information to the portable media device indicative of a user action taken in response to the displayed image; such information can indicate, for example, that a particular button was pressed or that a particular portion of a touch-sensitive display screen was touched by the user. The portable media device can process this input to identify the action requested by the user and take the appropriate action. The action may include providing to the accessory an updated GUI image to be displayed, where the updated GUI image reflects the user action.

The lead inventor on the patent application is William Bull, former iPod User Interface manager at Apple and currently Senior Director of Mobile User Experience at Yahoo. Also among the inventors is former Apple executive Tony Fadell, the "father of the iPod".

Look out! Outlook Wants to become your New Social Media and Collaboration Hubby by Sebastian Anthony

2009-11-18T18:25:00.004-06:00

It's been a long time coming, and perhaps a little too late, but you can now track your friends' and colleagues' social networking activity in Outlook 2010. Dubbed the 'Outlook Social Connector' (OSC), the functionality is available right now to all Office 2010 Beta testers.

The list of much-needed features that OSC brings to Outlook is long and juicy. 'Activity Feeds' is the new social media technology, collating the activities of your contacts into your Outlook screen. LinkedIn support is included in the current beta version, but there's no mention of anything like Twitter or Facebook support yet.

There's also neat functionality to show you all of the attachments sent between you and another contact, a communication history that shows you your recent emails with that contact, Next year, there will be added connectivity with Windows Live Messenger! There are numerous mentions of 'extensibility' and an easy-to-use developer kit, however, so I'm sure lots of other add-ons will emerge in due course.

World Tries to Buck Up Dollar by Joanna Slater, William Mallard, and Bob Davis

2009-11-18T16:57:00.001-06:00

Governments around the world stepped up efforts to stem the U.S. dollar's slide, as officials grow increasingly concerned about the impact of the weak greenback on their nascent economic recoveries.

Thailand, South Korea, Russia and the Philippines have been snapping up dollars this week in order to hold down the value of their currencies, traders said Wednesday, as the U.S. currency wallowed near 15-month lows.

China is one of the few exceptions among developing nations, seeing continued strong exports despite its currency's tie to the dollar.

In Latin America, Brazil's finance minister said the country's currency remained too strong, sparking speculation that the government would intensify recent efforts to curb the real's ascent. On Tuesday, Taiwan banned foreign investors from parking time deposits in the country in an effort to ease upward pressure on the local currency.

The fresh buzz over the dollar's fall prompted Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, visiting Tokyo on Wednesday, to repeat the Obama administration's commitment to a strong dollar. Still, Washington hasn't taken any concrete steps to arrest the slide. The weaker dollar is actually benefiting the U.S. as it struggles to come out of recession by helping keep U.S. exports competitive.

China is coming under new pressure from Pacific Rim countries to let its dollar-linked currency rise in value. On Wednesday, China's central bank made a nod to concerns about the declining dollar and yuan by issuing a rare change to the official language of its exchange-rate policy. The central bank said it would take major currency trends into account in setting policy, though it wasn't clear what impact that may have on the yuan's future value.

The U.S. wants to see a stronger yuan, though Washington has avoided explicit public pressure on China to abandon its policy of managing its currency. But in the jargon of finance ministers, Mr. Geithner has made clear that's what he thinks should happen. In an op-ed piece in Thursday's Wall Street Journal Asia, he emphasized the advantages of "market oriented exchange rates in line with economic fundamentals."

On Wednesday, the dollar briefly sagged to a 15-month low against a basket of major currencies before recovering slightly. It fell slightly against the euro, which was quoted at $1.4982 at 4 p.m. in New York. So far this year, the dollar is down 7% against the European currency.

Asian finance ministers, now gathered in Singapore for a meeting of the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, are expected to raise their concerns about both the dollar's decline and the inflexibility of the Chinese yuan.

The fear is two-fold. If currencies surge against the dollar, it damages the ability of countries in the region to compete in world markets, by making their exports more expensive. What's more, one of their major competitors -- China -- ties its currency to the dollar. As the yuan sinks in tandem with the dollar, China is able to keep its export prices low and price out competition.

A concluding statement from the assembled APEC officials is expected to underline the importance of flexible exchange rates to sustainable global growth -- generally viewed as code for a rise in the Chinese yuan. Such efforts are unlikely to bear fruit in the near term, which means these countries must act on their own to slow their currencies' rise.

Experts estimate that some of the largest emerging economies may have spent as much as $150 billion on currency intervention over the past two months, judging from the growth of their international reserves, according to data from Brown Brothers Harriman. While that's not a huge amount in the currency markets, which have turnover of more than $3 trillion a day, traders pay keen attention to what the authorities are doing and where they are likely to intervene.

Thailand alone has bought $15 billion trying to push the dollar higher against the baht, Korn Chatikavanij, Thailand's finance minister, said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires.

"Quite clearly, all Asian central banks have found it necessary to intervene, and it's costing us," Mr. Korn said.

The Chinese authorities aren't going to tip off financial markets in advance of a move in their currency, said Jim O'Neill, head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. But the fact that they adjusted the phrasing of their exchange-rate policy in a quarterly report Wednesday could be a response to the growing attention to the yuan, particularly from fellow developing nations.

"It's one thing for the Chinese to ignore the U.S. and Europe," he said. "But when they start ignoring the developing G-20 it's a bit trickier."

For the last three years, the International Monetary Fund has been pressing China to revalue its currency. At the recent meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations in Scotland, the IMF once again said the yuan "remains significantly undervalued from a medium-term perspective."

Emerging nations are recovering from the global slump far faster than their developed counterparts and investors are flocking to buy their stocks and bonds. That in turn puts upward pressure on their currencies.

Efforts to stem the flow of foreign capital or to intervene in currency markets pose serious challenges for governments and aren't always successful. Unless a government takes radical steps, it can't affect a U-turn in its currency. However, it "can lean against the wind," says Win Thin, a currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman, in this case by slowing the pace of currency strengthening.

Developing nations aren't the only ones uncomfortable with the dollar's slide. European governments, especially Germany, will be increasingly uneasy if the euro continues to gain on the dollar.

Governments that try to check the rise of their currency often end up accumulating dollars which they may not need.

"I'm convinced that in the long term the dollar is more likely than not to decline in value, so we're building up assets that are declining in value over time," says Mr. Korn of Thailand. "That's not healthy."

Lost There, Felt Here by Thomas L. Friedman

2009-11-15T16:36:00.003-06:00

Belem, Brazil

“One million dollars?”

The question was asked with eyes wide and a voice of incredulity. The person asking was Antonio Waldez Góes da Silva, the governor of the Amazonian state of Amapá, which has the biggest national park in the world. I had just shared with Gov. Waldez Góes a recent news article in The Hill, the Congressional newspaper, which said the total cost of stationing one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for one year is $1 million.

What if we kept just one soldier back from Afghanistan and gave you the money, I asked the governor? What would it buy you? Gov. Waldez Góes mulled that over: “If you kept three soldiers back, that would be enough for me to keep the State University of Amapá running for one year, so 1,400 students could take different courses on sustainable development for the Amazon.”

O.K., I know. It is a bit misleading to take a war budget and assume that if it weren’t spent on combat, it would all go to schools or parks. And we do have real enemies. Some wars have to be fought, no matter the cost. But such comparisons are still a useful reminder that our debate about Afghanistan is not taking place in a vacuum. We will have to make trade-offs, and there are other hugely important projects today crying out for funding, as my colleague Nick Kristof has pointed out regarding health care.

Well, if America is going to assume the primary burden of fixing Central Asia, maybe, say, China, could help pick up the tab for saving what is left of the Amazon and the world’s other great tropical forests. Could President Obama raise that idea in Beijing?

An intergovernmental working group for saving the rainforests estimates that for about $30 billion we could reduce deforestation in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo by 25 percent by 2015. After that, financing from global carbon markets, plus these countries’ own resources, could save much of the rest. China now has $2.2 trillion in reserves. How about it, Beijing? Why don’t you step up and provide some public goods for the world for once — not because you get a direct benefit, but just because it would make the world a better place for everyone?

Sure, America should still lead such efforts. But China’s days as a global free-rider should be over. China should pay its fair share — and more — since it will benefit every bit as much as the U.S., Europe and Japan. Indeed, the U.N. Foundation estimates that because living tropical forests are such huge storehouses of carbon — which gets released when we chop the trees down — if we just stop deforestation, we get a big chunk of the carbon-emissions reductions the world needs between now and 2020.

“And forest-rich developing countries, like Brazil, are now ready to do their part because they depend on the water that the rainforests provide for energy and agriculture, and because they see a new model for growth based on their natural capital,” said Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president with Conservation International and my traveling companion here. “Brazil has developed the science, political will and basic rules and institutions for preserving its rainforests. What Brazil and other rainforest nations like Indonesia lack, though, are the funds to take this new economic model to scale.”

I was struck by how many of the building blocks for “natural capitalism” that Gov. Waldez Góes — whose state sits at the mouth of the Amazon — is putting in place, so that he can have an economy based on preserving the rainforest rather than stripping it. He’s building on the three P’s — creating protected forest areas, improving productivity on lands that have already been cleared so farmers there will not need more, and establishing property rights for Amazonian lands, which are a legal mess, inviting Wild West land grabs and scaring off investors in sustainable agriculture.

Gov. Waldez Góes has already protected 75 percent of his state as rainforest and has enacted the laws and created a technical college to provide for sustainable logging and eco-tourism and for developing medicinal and cosmetic products from rainforest plants. But he needs funds to implement and monitor at scale and prove that “natural capitalism” can deliver more than the extractive version.

“I am the son of a rubber tapper,” he explains. “I was born and raised in the jungle, so even before becoming a politician I had a strong connection to nature.” The world is facing this relentless “development path that brings pollution and degradation and deforestation,” he added. He and other Brazilians want to prove you can do better by bringing “conservation and development together.”

Tropical forests represent some 5 percent of the earth’s surface but harbor 50 percent of all living species. Conservation International has a motto: “What is lost there is felt here.” If we lose what is left of the Amazon, we’ll all feel the climate effects, changing rainfall and loss of biodiversity that enriches our world. Brazil seems ready to do its part. Are we? What about you, China?

Triumph of a Dreamer by Nicholas D. Kristof

2009-11-15T16:27:00.003-06:00

Any time anyone tells you that a dream is impossible, any time you’re discouraged by impossible challenges, just mutter this mantra: Tererai Trent.

Of all the people earning university degrees this year, perhaps the most remarkable story belongs to Tererai (pronounced TEH-reh-rye), a middle-aged woman who is one of my heroes. She is celebrating a personal triumph, but she’s also a monument to the aid organizations and individuals who helped her. When you hear that foreign-aid groups just squander money or build dependency, remember that by all odds Tererai should be an illiterate, battered cattle-herd in Zimbabwe and instead — ah, but I’m getting ahead of my story.

Tererai was born in a village in rural Zimbabwe, probably sometime in 1965, and attended elementary school for less than one year. Her father married her off when she was about 11 to a man who beat her regularly. She seemed destined to be one more squandered African asset.

A dozen years passed. Jo Luck, the head of an aid group called Heifer International, passed through the village and told the women there that they should stand up, nurture dreams, change their lives.

Inspired, Tererai scribbled down four absurd goals based on accomplishments she had vaguely heard of among famous Africans. She wrote that she wanted to study abroad, and to earn a B.A., a master’s and a doctorate.

Tererai began to work for Heifer and several Christian organizations as a community organizer. She used the income to take correspondence courses, while saving every penny she could.

In 1998 she was accepted to Oklahoma State University, but she insisted on taking all five of her children with her rather than leave them with her husband. “I couldn’t abandon my kids,” she recalled. “I knew that they might end up getting married off.”

Tererai’s husband eventually agreed that she could take the children to America — as long as he went too. Heifer helped with the plane tickets, Tererai’s mother sold a cow, and neighbors sold goats to help raise money. With $4,000 in cash wrapped in a stocking and tied around her waist, Tererai set off for Oklahoma.

An impossible dream had come true, but it soon looked like a nightmare. Tererai and her family had little money and lived in a ramshackle trailer, shivering and hungry. Her husband refused to do any housework — he was a man! — and coped by beating her.

“There was very little food,” she said. “The kids would come home from school, and they would be hungry.” Tererai found herself eating from trash cans, and she thought about quitting — but felt that doing so would let down other African women.

“I knew that I was getting an opportunity that other women were dying to get,” she recalled. So she struggled on, holding several jobs, taking every class she could, washing and scrubbing, enduring beatings, barely sleeping.

At one point the university tried to expel Tererai for falling behind on tuition payments. A university official, Ron Beer, intervened on her behalf and rallied the faculty and community behind her with donations and support.

“I saw that she had enormous talent,” Dr. Beer said. His church helped with food, Habitat for Humanity provided housing, and a friend at Wal-Mart carefully put expired fruits and vegetables in boxes beside the Dumpster and tipped her off.

Soon afterward, Tererai had her husband deported back to Zimbabwe for beating her, and she earned her B.A. — and started on her M.A. Then her husband returned, now frail and sick with a disease that turned out to be AIDS. Tererai tested negative for H.I.V., and then — feeling sorry for her husband — she took in her former tormentor and nursed him as he grew sicker and eventually died.

Through all this blur of pressures, Tererai excelled at school, pursuing a Ph.D at Western Michigan University and writing a dissertation on AIDS prevention in Africa even as she began working for Heifer as a program evaluator. On top of all that, she was remarried, to Mark Trent, a plant pathologist she had met at Oklahoma State.

Tererai is a reminder of the adage that talent is universal, while opportunity is not. There are still 75 million children who are not attending primary school around the world. We could educate them all for far less than the cost of the proposed military “surge” in Afghanistan.

Each time Tererai accomplished one of those goals that she had written long ago, she checked it off on that old, worn paper. Last month, she ticked off the very last goal, after successfully defending her dissertation. She’ll receive her Ph.D next month, and so a one-time impoverished cattle-herd from Zimbabwe with less than a year of elementary school education will don academic robes and become Dr. Tererai Trent.

The Evolution of the God Gene by Nicholas Wade

2009-11-15T15:32:00.003-06:00

In the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.

During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.

This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.

For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.

But the evolutionary perspective on religion does not necessarily threaten the central position of either side. That religious behavior was favored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the existence of gods. For believers, if one accepts that evolution has shaped the human body, why not the mind too? What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of their community, just as they are predisposed to learn its language. With both religion and language, it is culture, not genetics, that then supplies the content of what is learned.

It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.

The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without chiefs or headmen. Religion served them as an invisible government. It bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs ahead of their own self-interest. For fear of divine punishment, people followed rules of self-restraint toward members of the community. Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it, and genes that prompted the mind toward ritual would eventually have become universal.

In natural selection, it is genes that enable their owners to leave more surviving progeny that become more common. The idea that natural selection can favor groups, instead of acting directly on individuals, is highly controversial. Though Darwin proposed the idea, the traditional view among biologists is that selection on individuals would stamp out altruistic behavior (the altruists who spent time helping others would leave fewer children of their own) far faster than group-level selection could favor it.

But group selection has recently gained two powerful champions, the biologists David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, who argued that two special circumstances in recent human evolution would have given group selection much more of an edge than usual. One is the highly egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies, which makes everyone behave alike and gives individual altruists a better chance of passing on their genes. The other is intense warfare between groups, which enhances group-level selection in favor of community-benefiting behaviors such as altruism and religion.

A propensity to learn the religion of one’s community became so firmly implanted in the human neural circuitry, according to this new view, that religion was retained when hunter-gatherers, starting from 15,000 years ago, began to settle in fixed communities. In the larger, hierarchical societies made possible by settled living, rulers co-opted religion as their source of authority. Roman emperors made themselves chief priest or even a living god, though most had the taste to wait till after death for deification. “Drat, I think I’m becoming a god!” Vespasian joked on his deathbed.

Religion was also harnessed to vital practical tasks such as agriculture, which in the first societies to practice it required quite unaccustomed forms of labor and organization. Many religions bear traces of the spring and autumn festivals that helped get crops planted and harvested at the right time. Passover once marked the beginning of the barley festival; Easter, linked to the date of Passover, is a spring festival.

Could the evolutionary perspective on religion become the basis for some kind of detente between religion and science? Biologists and many atheists have a lot of respect for evolution and its workings, and if they regarded religious behavior as an evolved instinct they might see religion more favorably, or at least recognize its constructive roles. Religion is often blamed for its spectacular excesses, whether in promoting persecution or warfare, but gets less credit for its staple function of patching up the moral fabric of society. But perhaps it doesn’t deserve either blame or credit. If religion is seen as a means of generating social cohesion, it is a society and its leaders that put that cohesion to good or bad ends.

Act II: Half Way Around the LHC (CERN)

2009-11-14T07:02:00.000-06:00

The LHC operations teams are preparing the machine for circulating beams and things are going very smoothly. ALICE and LHCb are getting used to observing particle tracks coming from the LHC beams. During the weekend of 7-8 November, CMS also saw its first signals from beams dumped just upstream of the experiment cavern.

Operators in the CMS control room observe the good performance of their detector.

Particles are smoothly making their way around the 27 km circumference of the LHC. Last weekend (7-8 November), the first bunches of injection energy protons completed their journey (anti-clockwise) through three octants of the LHC’s circumference and were dumped in a collimator just before entering the CMS cavern. The particles produced by the impact of the protons on the tertiary collimators (used to stop the beam) left their tracks in the calorimeters and the muon chambers of the experiment. The more delicate inner detectors were switched off for protection reasons.

Six of the eight sectors of the LHC have now been hardware commissioned to allow the passage of beams at 1.2 TeV. The remaining two (Sectors 3-4 and 8-1) will be powered up in the coming week.

If all goes well, in just over one week from now, the beams could circulate in both pipes of the LHC. The first low-energy collisions should follow shortly after.

PARADIGM SHIFTS IN SECURITY STRATEGY: Why Does It Take Disasters to Trigger Change? by Dominic D. P. Johnson and Elizabeth M. P. Madin

2009-11-13T19:05:00.004-06:00

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.
- Samuel Coleridge.

Prior to 9/11, U.S. counterterrorism policy and intelligence suffered from numerous problems. The striking feature about this is not the flaws themselves, but rather that these flaws were long appreciated and nothing was done to correct them. It took a massive disaster—3000 American deaths—to cough up the cash and motivation to address what was already by that time a longstanding threat of a major terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland.

A second striking feature is that this failure to adapt is no novelty. Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War were also belated wake up calls to adapt to what in each period had become major new challenges for the United States.

Just as the military is accused of “fighting the last war,” nations fail to adapt to novel security threats. The status quo persists until a significant number of lives or dollars are lost. Only at these times can we be sure that nations, institutions, and elected representatives will fully adapt to novel security threats. If we understand why this is so, we will be better able to avoid further disasters in the future.

We suggest that it takes disasters to trigger change because (1) dangers that remain hypothetical fail to trigger appropriate sensory responses, (2) psychological biases serve to maintain the status quo, (3) dominant leaders entrench their own idiosyncratic policy preferences, (4) organizational behavior and bureaucratic processes resist change, and (5) electoral politics offers little incentive for expensive and disruptive preparation for unlikely and often invisible threats.

The Curse of the Status Quo

Even a highly adaptable state might be able to prevent only 99 out of 100 disasters from happening. Such successes rarely make the news. By contrast, the 1% of disasters that do occur will be dramatic and visible and may therefore attract undue attention. Even so, the argument of this chapter is that human nature, and the nature of the institutions that humans create, exhibits a number of self-defeating phenomena that impede efficient adaptation to novel security threats, increasing the probability of periodic disasters. Indeed, under certain unfavorable conditions, we may be pathologically and institutionally unable to avoid disasters. This curse is sustained by a number of biases rooted in biology, psychology, advocacy, organizational behavior, and politics, all of which converge to preserve the status quo.

The same phenomenon is evident in everyday life. Accident prone highways, dangerous machinery, or hazardous flight paths are often not altered until after significant numbers of people are killed or injured, or significant financial losses are incurred. In one sense this is logical: since disasters are hard to predict, only cumulative data exposes whether the costs of occasional disasters outweigh the costs of change (Perrow 1999). However, this logic is often flawed or inapplicable for two reasons. First, the costs of dis- asters, if they are measured in human lives, may be unacceptable. We cannot simply wait to see if or how often they happen. Second, the costs of disasters, however they are measured, are often known beforehand to outweigh the costs of not acting, yet still nothing is done to prevent them.

This phenomenon has parallels in other disciplines, including the history of science, epistemology, policy analysis, and economics, suggesting that it is a common denominator of human nature and human institutions, not something specific to a particular issue, culture, or context. For example, Thomas Kuhn described how scientific progress is characterized by lengthy periods of relative stasis where established models reign supreme, but that this status quo is punctuated by “paradigm shifts” that follow from exceptional findings such as those by Gallileo or Einstein (Kuhn 1970). Similarly, Michael Foucault argued that history itself does not proceed smoothly as a steady, linear continuum but is defined, rather, by moments of rupture that overturn prevailing systems of knowledge (Foucault 1970, 1977). Another example is the “punctuated equilibrium” theory in policy analysis, which describes how U.S. domestic policy follows periods of relative stasis during which decision processes and bureaucracies act to preserve a status quo, but this is punctuated by major periods of reform following the adoption of innovations, attention-riveting external events that grab government or public attention, and windows of opportunity when conducive factors coincide or when advocacy groups rise to prominence (Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 2002; Busenberg 2003). Finally, economics is famous for its quip that the field progresses only with each funeral.

PARADIGM SHIFTS IN SECURITY STRATEGY

Individuals corroborate, advertise, and propagate their favored theories as they grow older and more powerful. Only when they are gone can fresh alternatives take solid root. The same is true of other disciplines and organizations.

In many aspects of human endeavor, it appears that we fail to adapt to changing circumstances until there is a major event that wrenches us from established paradigms. We argue that this failure to adapt is, if anything, more likely in the domain of international politics than other domains because the ambiguity inherent in judgments of other cultures, ideologies, and motives allows false interpretations to prosper and persist at especially high levels (Johnson and Tierney 2006). We are, simply put, doomed to periodic foreign policy disasters.

The good news is that research in biology, psychology, organizational behavior, and political science reveal systematic causes of this phenomenon, offering the opportunity to predict when and where it will occur, and ways to correct it in the future. Policy makers may therein find ways to improve national security as well as maximize public and congressional support. Before expanding on the biases at work, we outline a series of events that illustrate the failure to adapt to novel security threats: the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Examples of Disasters Triggering Change

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 is widely regarded as a colossal U.S. intelligence failure spanning the lowest to the highest levels of command (Iriye 1999; Kahn 1999). The striking thing is not that U.S. intelligence and strategic posture were inadequate, it is that they were known to be inadequate and yet failed to be changed. Although U.S. intelligence had no specific information or dates regarding the raid on Pearl Harbor, Japanese diplomatic codes had been broken, and a number of sources pointed to the likelihood of some kind of Japanese attack on the United States. It was the failure of the U.S. government to recognize the changing motives and intentions of the Japanese decision makers that led to a poor level of readiness in the U.S. Pacific Fleet. These inadequacies reflect a status quo bias in U.S. strategy toward Japan in the prewar period, summed up by historian of intelligence David Kahn (1999, 166): American officials did not think Japan would attack their country. To start war with so superior a power would be to commit national hara-kiri [suicide]. To Western modes of thought, it made no sense. This rationalism was paralleled by a racism that led Americans to underrate Japanese abilities and will. Such views were held not only by common bigots but by opinion-makers as well. These preconceptions blocked out of American minds the possibility that Japan would attack an American possession. . . . An attack on Pearl Harbor was seen as all but excluded. Though senior army and navy officers knew that Japan had often started wars with surprise attacks, and though the naval air defense plan for Hawaii warned of a dawn assault, officials also knew that the base was the nation’s best defended and that the fleet had been stationed that far west not to attract, but to deter, Japan.

Having committed errors of planning and intelligence that heightened both the probability and severity of the Pearl Harbor attack, the shock and moral outrage following the “day of infamy” led to major changes in U.S. security strategy. The entire foundations of U.S. intelligence were uprooted. The National Security Act of 1947 established the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency, in large part to ensure the integration of military and diplomatic intelligence so that such a disaster could never befall the country again. The Pearl Harbor disaster was exacerbated by the status quo bias in U.S. policy, but the shock of the attack itself caused a paradigm shift in U.S. security strategy.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 also represented a massive failure of U.S. intelligence (Allison and Zelikow 1999). When Soviet SS-4 and SS-5 missile sites were discovered on the island in October 1962, it sparked a major diplomatic crisis and military standoff in which the superpowers came perilously close to war. “American leaders,” wrote Robert Jervis, “were taken by surprise in October 1962 because they thought it was clear to the Soviet Union that placing missiles in Cuba would not be tolerated” ( Jervis 1983, 28). The U.S. deterrence strategy, in other words, had failed. War was in the end averted through a negotiated agreement, but the popular memory of U.S. victory masks the significant concessions that the United States also made, and the brinkmanship that could so easily have resulted in war (Johnson and Tierney 2004). Khrushchev is widely regarded, by Soviet as well as western contemporaries and historians, as having taken an enormous risk in deploying mis- siles on Cuba (Lebow 1981; Fursenko and Naftali 1997). In the face of such extreme risk taking, U.S. deterrence was based on faulty premises. The crisis sparked significant changes in U.S. policy, including opening direct lines of communication between the White House and the Kremlin, and a major restructuring of chain of command authority in the U.S. military (including the President’s control over nuclear weapons). The Cuban Missile Crisis was exacerbated by the status quo bias in U.S. policy, but the shock of the crisis itself caused a paradigm shift in U.S. Cold War security strategy.

The Vietnam War also represented a failure of U.S. policy and intelligence. Policy suffered from the Cold War obsession with halting the spread of communism and failed to address the root cause of the insurgency as a war of national liberation (Gilbert 2002). Military strategy suffered because it sought to replicate traditional tactics of open combat. Intelligence suffered because it focused on conventional war metrics, such as body counts and weapons captured, and only belatedly shifted to address the key elements of nationalist sentiment and counterinsurgency (Gartner 1997). The realities of guerilla war were widely understood after the experience of the British in Malaya (1948–1960) and the French in Vietnam (1946–1954), but this had little impact on U.S. policy. The U.S. leaders believed that the gradual escalation of American military power combined with coercive diplomacy, which seemed to have worked well in the past, would work just as well in Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s press secretary, Bill Moyers, said after resigning in 1967 that in Johnson’s inner circle “there was a confidence, it was never bragged about, it was just there—a residue, perhaps of the confrontation over the missiles in Cuba—that when the chips were really down, the other people would fold” (Janis 1972, 120). It came as a major shock for the United States to lose a war for the first time in its history. Fol- lowing the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 1973, and the fall of Saigon in 1975, the “Vietnam syndrome” made the U.S. public, Congress, and subsequent administrations especially wary of military intervention overseas (limiting the country to small-scale actions, such as in Grenada and Panama). When the next big confrontation did occur, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force and limited military objectives represented an enormous shift in strategy (Powell 1995). The Vietnam War was exacerbated by the status quo bias in U.S. policy, but the shock of defeat caused a paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy with a legacy that survives to this day.

This now familiar pattern repeated itself on September 11, 2001. As William Rosenau put it, “although some policymakers and analysts have tried, it is impossible to deny that the events of 11 September 2001 represented a massive failure of intelligence” (Rosenau 2007, 143). The 9/11 commission and other sources reveal that a major terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland was by no means unexpected (Simon and Benjamin 2000; 9/11 Commission 2004; Clarke 2004). Intelligence agencies and counterterrorism experts had long argued that al-Qaeda presented a growing and significant threat in the 1990s—indeed, major terrorist plots of the scale of 9/11 had already been averted—but U.S. policy makers failed to adapt to meet this new threat (Gell- man 2002; Rosenau 2007). In a replica of Pearl Harbor, the precise timing and method of attack was of course not predicted, but not preparing for an attack of this kind was the result of a huge intelligence failure. The structure and function of government agencies, as well as many key individuals, were stuck in a Cold War mindset, and had not adjusted adequately to the new threats of transnational terrorism. It took 9/11 to set in motion—too late of course—sweeping changes of government and intelligence organization that many had clamored for years to achieve (the U.S. Commission on National Security for the Twenty-first Century, for example, had warned of terrorist attacks on the United States in early 2001 and recommended the creation of a Department of Homeland Security). Today, “combating al-Qaida has become the central organizing principle of U.S. national security policy” (Rosenau 2007, 134). Why did it take 9/11 to get it there?

Common Patterns

Although the examples above have much to distinguish them—different periods, locations, opponents, ideologies, geopolitics, and administrations— they nevertheless share common properties. In each event (1) the United States was faced with a novel threat, (2) the potential consequences of this threat were evident, and (3) the United States failed to adapt to this new threat. Nor are these cases anomalies in an ocean of otherwise efficient adaptation; numerous other such cases throughout history could fill several volumes (see, e.g., Dixon 1976; Perlmutter 1978; Snyder 1984; Tuchman 1984; Gabriel 1986; Cohen and Gooch 1991; Regan 1993; Perry 1996; David 1997; Hughes-Wilson 1999). All sides in World War I expected the war to be short and victorious, despite copious evidence to the contrary, and only the carnage of the war itself brought the end of an era in military thinking and the establishment of the League of Nations (Snyder 1984). In the 1930s, the allies thought Hitler had limited goals, despite his accumulating gains, and the horrors of World War II led to the dismemberment of Germany, an open-ended commitment to U.S. military deployments overseas, and the establishment of the United Nations. Similarly, the U.S. reliance on the use of force as a tool of policy was significantly curtailed by the Presidential War Powers Act (triggered by the shock of defeat in Vietnam), and the Goldwater-Nicholls Department of Defense Reorganization Act (triggered by the failed Iranian hostage rescue attempt in 1980). The need for these changes was well appreciated long before they came about, but only major disasters actually made them happen.

It is not only the United States that is subject to these failures. The same phenomenon is common in the history other nations. For example, the 1973 Yom Kippur War exposed a massive failure of Israeli intelligence. There were numerous warning signs of a joint Egyptian and Syrian attack that Israeli military and political leaders failed to acknowledge (Blum 2003; Rabinovich 2004). Following the hugely successful 1967 Six-Day War, and Israeli preconceptions of what it would take for the Arabs to fight Israel again, war was believed to be all but impossible. It took a full-scale invasion for Israel to reject these faulty beliefs. Following the war, Israel’s security and foreign policy shifted dramatically. Prime minister Golda Meir resigned along with much of her cabinet, and both the military chief of staff and the chief of intelligence were dismissed. Not only did Israelis tend to see the war as a disaster (even though they won a military victory on the ground), the Yom Kippur War paved the way to a peace process that Israel would never have considered prior to the war (Johnson and Tierney 2006).

Relying on massive shocks to trigger change in security policy is bad for at least seven reasons. First, it increases the probability of disasters happening in the first place (because the victim fails to act to prevent them). Second, it increases the costs of disasters when they do happen (because the victim is unprepared). Third, it limits future policy options because Congress and/or public opinion disallow similar policies or ventures, even in unrelated contexts (e.g., the “no more Vietnams” rhetoric significantly constrained U.S. military power). Fourth, enemies perceive the victim as vulnerable and ill prepared, encouraging future exploitation or attacks (e.g., 9/11 proved that the U.S. homeland can be struck). Fifth, enemies and allies alike perceive that the victim’s deterrence pol- icy has failed, leading them to reconsider their own strategies (e.g., NATO allies were rattled by the Cuban Missile Crisis). Sixth, suffering a disaster compromises a state’s credibility, which can demote its effective influence in subsequent international relations (e.g., following the Vietnam war, communists in Southeast Asia could do what they wanted with- out fear of U.S. intervention, as exemplified by their take over of Cambodia and Laos in 1975). Seventh, the immediate consequences of the disaster give the opponent a first-mover advantage (e.g., the naval losses at Pearl Harbor meant the United States was unable to engage Japanese forces in the Pacific for several months, giving them free reign to conquer the Philippines, Malaya, Hong Kong, Thailand, and numerous Pacific islands, making the Pacific war harder for the United States once it was under way). Any or all of these seven factors can undermine a state’s immediate national security, its future influence and power, and the electoral success of its leaders.

Does It Always Take Disasters to Trigger Change?

Our hypothesis is not that adaptation to novel security threats only ever occurs after major disasters, but rather that they often do. But perhaps the United States usually does, in fact, adapt appropriately to new security threats before disaster strikes, and the examples above are merely prominent exceptions to the norm. Further work is needed to provide a comprehensive test of these competing claims. Nevertheless, we offer here a minitest of our hypothesis, as a way of checking how universal the basic problem may be. In order to test the hypothesis that adaptation to novel security threats tends to occur after major disasters, we need an unbiased sample of case studies. For this purpose, we use a list of “watersheds” or turning points in U.S. security policy since World War II, a list that originated in the National Security Department of the U.S. Air War College and has been used in other studies since (True 2002). Table 13.1 lists these cases and, for each, tests the following predictions.

TABLE 13.1. The Seven Post–World War II “Policy Watersheds” in U.S. Security Strategy and Their Conformity to, or Violation of, The Predictions of Our Hypothesis
Truman Doctrine; Marshall Plan, 1947–1949 [Hogan 1998]
Rearmament for U.S. containment policy, 1950–1953 [Hastings 1987]
Kennedy defense buildup, 1961–1963 [Allison and Zelikow 1999]
Precipitating Event
Postwar Soviet influence in Europe
Korean War
Berlin and Cuban crises
Disaster?
Yes (Iron Curtain falls; spread of communist insurgencies)
Yes (South Korea invaded)
Yes (Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba; West Berlin threatened)
Predictions
Unexpected?
Partially (e.g., Truman doubted implications)
Yes (as Dean Acheson assured Congress 5 days before the invasion)
Yes (Kennedy surprised; deterrence strategy failed)
Unprepared?
Yes (massive U.S. policy goals took many years)
Yes (U.S. troops unavailable to assist)
Yes (no plans for a superpower crisis of this type)
Americanization, 1964–1968 [Kaiser 2000]
Vietnamization, 1969–1973 [Wirtz 1991]
Reagan defense buildup, 1979–1985 [Hayward 2001]
Reordering of entire U.S. strategic posture, 1990–1991 [Gaddis 1988]
Vietnam War
Vietnam War
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
Dissolution of the Soviet Union; Gulf War
Yes (communist expansion in Asia)
Yes (Tet offensive in 1968; ultimate defeat)
Yes (Soviet expansion)
Mixed (collapse of U.S.S.R.; Kuwait invaded)
No (but the cost of the war was)
Yes (Tet was a major intelligence failure; U.S. didn’t expect to lose war)
Yes (full-scale invasion not expected)
Yes (end of Cold War and invasion of Kuwait unexpected)
Yes (badly aligned goals, methods and strategy)
Yes (at Tet troops deployed in wrong places; war strategy misguided)
Yes (realignment of budget and forces)
Yes (U.S. policy changed overnight; Kuwait undefended)
note: From True 2002. Conformity to predictions is indicated by plain text, and violation of predictions is indicated by boldface text.

1. Disasters tend to precede major changes in security policy. 2. Disasters tend to be unexpected (confirming a failure to foresee it). 3. Disasters tend to be unprepared for (confirming a failure to plan for it).

These predictions are tested against the null hypothesis that the seven policy watersheds resulted from events that were not disasters, and that the United States both expected and was prepared for—in other words, representing a rational, timely adaptation to shifting security threats.

As is clear from Table 13.1, all seven policy watersheds followed dramatic disasters, none of which the United States expected, and for all of which the United States was unprepared. There are just three partial exceptions (boldface text): (1) Postwar Soviet influence in Europe was not entirely unexpected, although the United States and western European allies did not fully recognize Stalin’s wider goals until late in World War II. (2) The Vietnam War itself was not unexpected—the United States had already been escalating its commitment under two previous administrations (Eisenhower and Kennedy). Nevertheless, the fighting was far more costly than had been expected. Therefore, the Vietnam War was no less an unexpected disaster than any of the other cases. (3) The collapse of the Soviet Union was a disaster only for the U.S.S.R.; it was the opposite for the United States. However, associated events such as the invasion of Kuwait (along with the spread of civil conflicts in Europe, Asia, and Africa) were very much disasters.

Why Does It Take Disasters to Trigger Change?

Although states rarely face extinction, their failure to adapt to novel security threats incurs significant costs in blood and treasure. With such a premium on effective adaptation, the pattern of repeated failure in human history begs the question: why does it take disasters to trigger change? It would surely be better to adapt to novel threats incrementally as they arise. Waiting for disasters to happen before adapting begets and worsens those disasters in the first place, and signals weakness to enemies and allies.

Three basic factors impede change. First, change is hard to assess—the consequences are unknown and disasters are rare. Second, change brings uncertainty—if the status quo has worked until now, why risk an uncertain outcome over a familiar one? Third, change entails costs—the reorganization or acquisition of extra resources adds weight to the argument to do nothing.

Beyond these three basic factors, however, a failure to adapt is powerfully exacerbated by converging biological, psychological, organizational, and political phenomena, summarized in Figure 13.1 and explored in detail below.

Ideal Process: Direct Adaptation Over Time

Actual Process: Impeded Adaptation Until There is a Disaster

Figure 13.1 scheme of our hypothesis that adaptation to novel security threats tends to occur after major disasters. The causal mechanism is that key biases pre- serve the status quo and impede adaptation until there is a disaster.

Sensory Bias

A number of sensory and physiological biases predispose us to maintain the status quo and to avoid expending resources on threats outside our personal realm of experience (see also Blumstein, this volume). Humans have a biological predisposition to react to stimuli that reach our five senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch), and not to stimuli that remain beyond our personal experience. The machinery of the brain does not fully react to something until we experience it in the flesh. This is unsurprising. Our sensory organs, cognitive architecture, and mental processing evolved in order to respond to real threats and opportunities in our immediate local environment, not to abstract, vague, distant, or hypothetical threats that happen else- where, or to others. Of course, our brain does generate vicarious emotional reactions to events that we observe or learn is happening to others, but not as powerfully as if we experience them for ourselves (Simonsohn et al. 2006). Such effects are evident in international relations as well. Decisions about military intervention were found to be influenced more by a state’s own experience than merely observing the experience of others (Levite et al. 1992). The United States, for example, was unperturbed about the French experience of war in Vietnam—Kennedy reminded a reporter, “That was the French. They were fighting for a colony, for an ignoble cause. We’re fighting for freedom” (Tuchman 1984, 287). Later on, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, citing French errors and indecision in the conflict, noted wryly, “The French also tried to build the Panama Canal” (U.S. Department of Defense 1971, Vol. 3, 625).

Adaptation

More likely if disaster: •Deadly •Expensive •Dramatic

•Novel

Novel Security Threat
Sensory bias
Disaster

More likely if state: •Undemocratic •Weak •Uninnovative •Inattentive

Psychological bias
Leadership bias
Organizational bias
Political bias

Also very important is the general principle, across a wide range of psychological phenomena, that negative events and information are processed more thoroughly and have greater impact than positive events, and negative impressions and stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than positive ones (Baumeister et al. 2001). In terms of the effects of experience on human psychology, “bad is stronger than good.” In international politics as well, failure, as opposed to success, appears to have an intrinsic leverage: “People learn more from failure than from success . . . past success contributes to policy continuity whereas failure leads to policy change” (Levy 1994, 304). This appears to result from an interaction with expectations. “Outcomes that are consistent with expectations and achieve one’s goals generate few incentives for a change in beliefs, whereas unexpected results and those that fall short of one’s goals are more likely to trigger a change in beliefs and policy. Thus the most likely outcomes to trigger learning are failures that were either unexpected at the time or unpredictable in retrospect” (Levy 1994, 305). A classic study by Dan Reiter found that alliance behavior was most influenced by a state’s experience of success or failure in previous wars, and ignored actual cur- rent threats (Reiter 1996). States switched their policy only if it was deemed a failure in the past.

In summary, we are most likely to react to a threat (1) if it reaches us through first-person experience (rather than via newspapers, radio, the Inter- net, or television), and (2) if it is a negative event (such as a disaster) rather than a positive one. It may therefore take a Pearl Harbor of 1941, a threat of nuclear holocaust as in 1962, defeat in war, or a 9/11 to surmount our sensory barriers, acknowledge major new threats, and goad us into action.

Psychological Bias

A number of psychological biases also predispose us to maintain the status quo and to avoid expending resources on threats outside our normal realm of perception. Perhaps most important is cognitive dissonance. Conflicting information must be resolved in order to generate a coherent interpretation, and cognitive dissonance tends to select, organize, or distort incoming information so that it matches our preferred or preexisting beliefs (Vertzberger 1990; Tetlock 1998; Sears et al. 2003; McDermott 2004). Even experts often discount potential problems due to the cognitive demands of complex events (Dorner 1996). For example, Irmtraud Gallhofer and Willem Saris found that despite at least seven distinct strategies being floated during the Cuban Missile Crisis executive committee meetings, decision makers tended to con- sider only two at a time (Gallhofer and Saris 1996).

Experimental research in cognitive and motivational psychology reveals a vast array of biases that tend to preserve the status quo: deformation professionelle (a tendency to see things from the perspective of the conventions of one’s profession); the mere exposure effect (a preference for things that are more familiar); the availability heuristic (a tendency to make predictions that are based on perceived rather than actual salience); projection bias (a tendency to assume that others share similar beliefs to oneself); the band- wagon effect (a tendency to do or believe the same as others); false consensus effect (a tendency to expect others to agree with oneself); discounting (to prefer immediate over long-term payoffs); and, finally, the well-documented and pervasive effects of in-group favoritism and out-group derogation, groupthink, and overconfidence (Janis 1972; Jervis 1976; Kahneman et al. 1982; Vertzberger 1990; Tetlock 1998; Johnson 2004).

Overconfidence appears to have a particular importance. We tend to hold positive illusions of our abilities, our control over events, and of the future, all of which lead to overconfidence about our vulnerability to risk, and therefore to discount the need for change (Johnson 2004). Positive illusions in U.S. decision making may account for the failure to deter Japan in 1941, the Soviet Union in 1962, and Saddam Hussein in 2003, among other cases. However, harking back to the importance of sensory biases, once personally involved in a disaster, optimistic illusions disappear. Psychologists found that Californians were overly optimistic about the risk of earthquakes until they lived through one (Burger and Palmer 1992). Yechiel Klar’s study of Israelis living with the threat of terrorist attacks found that people maintain positive illusions as long as threats are “hypothetical” and “psychologically unreal.” But, “when the group to which people belong is the target of some significant ongoing calamity, even when the participants themselves are currently not the direct victims, the unreality of the event dissolves and optimism (both absolute and comparative) decreases or vanishes altogether” (Klar et al. 2002, 216). Disasters serve to wake us up to reality. They are very effective at doing so, but, by definition, the wake up call comes too late.

Leadership Bias

Particular leaders and their ideas often compel us to maintain the status quo and to avoid expending resources on threats outside the accepted realm of attention. These individuals’ preferences can also become institutionalized such that they persist beyond their worth until, or sometimes even after, the original proponent falls from power, resigns, or dies. It has been a recurrent historical theme for leaders to derail their own intelligence services by favoring positive reports, punishing the bearers of bad news, setting different agencies in competition with each other, and interfering with the methods and targets of information gathering (Handel 1989; Van Evera 2003). A recent example is the Bush administration’s use of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and the postwar challenges of Iraq in order to support their favored policy (Clark 2003; Jervis 2003; Fallows 2004; Woodward 2005). With such strong incentives to control information and policy, and to protect their political reputation, leaders can exert enormous impediments to effective adaptation.

Organizational Bias

Numerous organizational biases also predispose us to maintain the status quo and to avoid expending resources on threats outside the realm of standard operating procedures. Bureaucratic procedures, vested interests, competition for promotions, sunk costs, access to the elite, and turf wars over budgets and responsibilities favor a rigid focus on past events and successes, and a rigid avoidance of rocking the boat to advocate some new and unproven revision of strategy (Kovacs 1997; Allison and Zelikow 1999; Van Evera 2003). An entire literature has built up around this principle (orga- nizational learning) and forms the classic “bureaucratic politics model” of decision making in political science—a default explanation for bizarre or failed policies (Allison and Zelikow 1999). Although organizational biases may create problems, these very characteristics are to some extent inten- tional: “Indeed, the value of institutions typically lies in their persistence or ‘stickiness,’ which allows actors to make plans, invest and organize their affairs around institutions and, in general, lends certainty and predictability to their interactions” (Viola and Snidal 2006, 5).

At times, however, the costs will outweigh the benefits. Prior to 9/11, the machinery, professionals, and mindsets of the Cold War era still exerted a significant legacy. There was a “failure of imagination”—a dearth of lateral thinking or fresh ideas—in the intelligence community even though the threats of transnational terrorism were evident (Simon and Benjamin 2000; Rosenau 2007). In addition to the failures to actually plan for novel threats, Stephen Van Evera has laid out reasons why institutions have little incentive to self-criticize or evaluate their own performance at all (Van Evera 2003). The entire institutional environment is hostile to adaptation: “Myths, false propaganda, and anachronistic beliefs persist in the absence of strong evaluative institutions to test ideas against logic and evidence, weeding out those that fail” (Van Evera 2003, 163). The maintenance of bureaucracy itself can sometimes become an all engrossing task. When Donald Rumsfeld took over at the Pentagon, for example, he began issuing numerous white memos (“snowflakes”) around the Pentagon demanding information on who actu- ally does what and how they do it, until some people were spending more time answering snowflakes than doing normal work (Woodward 2005).

A further problem with organizations is that the “sensors”—the people with their ears to the ground—are disjointed from the decision-making structure (in an interesting corollary to the sensory failures noted above). Leaders are sometimes the last to know about impending (or even actual) disasters. The middle managers or those below them are the ones who deal on an everyday basis with the outside world and are therefore more likely to detect novel threats, or to recognize that old methods are no longer appropriate. For example, when a minor flaw was found in the Pentium processor in 1994, Intel suffered half a billion dollars of damage in under six weeks. The fault caused a rounding error in division just once every nine billion times, however, this tiny flaw quickly became significant—the news spread rapidly on the Internet and was amplified by Intel’s new global prominence and identity. According to Intel CEO Andrew Grove, “I was one of the last to understand the implications of the Pentium crisis. It took a barrage of relentless criticism to make me realize that something had changed—and that we needed to adapt to the new environment” (Grove 1999, 22).

This echoes the intelligence situation before 9/11 and the reaction of administration officials. CIA director George Tenet and terrorism expert Cofer Black say they could not have laid out the serious possibility of a major attack on U.S. soil any clearer to Condi Rice in a meeting in July 2001. “The only thing we didn’t do,” according to Black, “was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head” (Woodward 2005, 79). If the National Security Adviser is unreceptive to such an issue, then it is unlikely to win the President’s attention. The administration as a whole was simply not geared to respond to the growing threat of al-Qaeda (Gellman 2002; Clarke 2004). Even if they had been receptive, as one insider noted, “The U.S. government can only manage at the highest level a certain number of issues at one time—two or three. You can’t get to the principals on any other issue” (Gellman 2002).

Organizational and bureaucratic impediments to security appear to be severe. Eventually, budgets or political obstacles get in the way. Richard Betts’s analysis of surprise attacks in international relations found that “most of the options available to the West for reducing vulnerability to surprise are limited by political or financial constraints” (Betts 1983, 311). Effective readiness against major threats was simply too expensive or complicated to maintain on a regular basis.

Political Bias

Electoral politics also predispose us to maintain the status quo and to discount genuinely important threats in favor of politically salient ones. There is no reason to expect efficient adaptation (or sometimes any adaptation at all) to address the most important national security threats. What is threatening in secret intelligence reports is irrelevant to an oblivious public— or rather, an oblivious electorate. Politics provides numerous alternative motivations for individual leaders, political parties, lobby groups, and the public to steer policy and incentives in their own preferred direction, often to the detriment of adaptation to national security threats. The reality of politics means that radical shifts in policy, especially toward a novel hypo- thetical threat (about which the key intelligence information may be known only to elites) are often indefensible in Congress, hard to obtain the necessary budget to initiate or complete, and politically suicidal. There are few points to be scored (or as many to lose) in pushing for rapid or comprehensive change, for admitting mistakes, or for adapting. As long as the threat is at least four years away, or can be blamed on extraneous causes or opposing political parties, other concerns are likely to take precedence.
Incumbency is an important component of this problem. A high turnover of civil servants or politicians allows for continual and gradual adaptation to changing circumstances over time. By contrast, a low turnover reduces the ability and inclination to adapt, gradually bottling up problems until the whole system collapses under the pressure of a major disaster. In the U.S. government, a number of factors operate to empower incumbents and entrench particular elites and procedures. Disasters may be particularly effective at bringing down an incumbent regime, whose failings—real or perceived—often become a central motivation and electoral strategy for opposition parties or congressional inquisitions.
To summarize this section, numerous features of human nature and the nature of institutions that humans create limit our ability to detect and react appropriately to novel security threats. Because these features stem from independent sources at different levels of analysis (e.g., individual behavior, organizational behavior, elite decision making, etc.), they are likely to generate a status quo bias across a wide range of circumstances. For example, even a forward-looking bureaucracy may have to work against a short sighted leadership, or vice versa. To put it bluntly, society seems pre- disposed to preserve the status quo until something goes wrong. As Henry Petroski noted in his book Success through Failure, “Good design always takes failure into account and strives to minimize it. But designers are human beings first and as such are individually and collectively subject to all the failings of the species, including complacency, overconfidence, and unwar- ranted optimism” (Petroski 2006, 193–194).

When Are Disasters More or Less Likely to Trigger Change?

When are states more likely to suffer disasters? And what types of disasters are more or less likely to generate appropriate and lasting change? In other words, what are broad-brush circumstances (or “independent variables”) that work to exacerbate or suppress the biases we have noted above? Such sources of variation are crucial to future tests of our hypothesis. But they also have practical significance: if we can get a handle on the basic conditions that make disasters more or less likely, we can attempt to steer our behavior and institutions toward those conditions that reduce the probability of being the victim of disaster. Below we consider characteristics (of both states and disasters) that are most and least likely to cause adaptation to novel security threats.

Characteristics of States That Promote Adaptation

Democracy. Democracies promote journalistic inquiry, congressional review, opposition criticism, and the regular turnover of political representatives. By contrast, authoritarian regimes deter or silence messengers of bad news and favor long-term incumbents. Hitler’s generals, for example, rarely told him the truth about the impending disasters such as at Stalingrad (Handel 1989; Beevor 1998). The influence of democracy is a matter of degree, however, rather than just a binary distinction between democracy and tyranny. For example, the Bush administration’s handling of intelligence prior to the Iraq War served to undermine the Washington system of checks and balances, handing the authority to wage war to the President— exactly what the founding fathers designed the U.S. government to avoid (Fisher 2003).
Power. Powerful states can create expensive and extensive intelligence agencies, equipment, and personnel. By contrast, weak states are more likely to be constrained by the resources they have to detect, prepare for, and react to disaster. Of course, 9/11 and many other examples given above demonstrate that even massive amounts of resources available to powerful states such as the United States do not solve the problem. Power must be applied effectively. Nevertheless, on average, more powerful states should be more likely to achieve effective adaptation.

Innovation. Security strategies adapt more effectively in a more innovative culture. For example, Germany and Britain were far more innovative in developing their military strategies and tactics than the French in the interwar period, and this directly led to differential combat outcomes in World War II (Posen 1984).

Attention. When a state is focused and committed to dealing with a potential threat, it has a much higher chance of adapting to meet it. By contrast, when a state is mired in serious domestic or international crises, it is far less likely to detect or respond appropriately to novel threats.

Characteristics of Disasters That Promote Adaptation

Deadly. High numbers of casualties, especially civilians. Expensive. High levels of damage (or lost opportunity). Dramatic. Symbolic or salient targets. Novel. Not just a big version of an existing threat.
Can Change Occur without Disaster?

Our hypothesis is that adaptation to novel security threats tends to occur after major disasters. Like any hypothesis, this does not mean that policy changes only ever occur following major disasters. We only suggest that it may be more commonly the case than the other way around. But there are likely to be exceptions. Indeed, our discussion above sets out explicit conditions under which we may expect major policy change to occur without disaster—powerful, democratic states that are innovative and attentive, especially ones with minimal biases in their psychology, organizational behavior, leadership, and politics. Therefore, not only do we expect there will be exceptions, but we propose specific variables that will characterize these exceptions. Future studies could test this hypothesis with, for exam- ple, matched pairs of otherwise similar cases: one that adapted successfully, and one that did not.

One can think of a number of potential counterexamples in which security strategy changed significantly without any disaster. For example, people often cite the remarkable lack of a disaster following the break up of the Soviet Union and the democratization of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, it is important to realize that this is a distinctly western perspective. From the perspective of the U.S.S.R., it was the biggest disaster of its history—indeed, it signaled its own extinction. Even from a western perspective, though, the lack of disaster may be misleading: the new security environment represented the collapse of a formidable enemy, followed by a power vacuum, not the emergence of a new threat per se. There was no agent to bring disaster (barring a renegade general with Soviet nuclear missiles, or something along those lines). Similar problems arise with many other prominent examples of major security changes that appeared to escape disaster: the fall of the British Empire, the reunification of Germany, the nuclear armament of India and Pakistan. Such cases deserve further scrutiny in the context of our hypothesis.

It is easier to think of counterexamples that do not reside in the realm of security. For example, numerous social, economic, and technological trans- formations occur without disaster, ranging from awarding women the right to vote, to the introduction of the Euro, to the space race. One could also argue that major environmental efforts are underway to avert the looming disaster of global climate change (as evidenced by such forward thinking as the Stern Review). However, it is not at all clear that anywhere near enough is actually being done, whatever the proposals and plans.

Perhaps, then, there is something special about the domain of security that links change and disaster. After all, lapses in security are almost by definition associated with violence, death, and destruction, so security disasters may be more dramatic, more visible, and more likely to compel policy makers and organizations to change.

Even if adaptation is rare in the domain of security, future studies can identify cases where adaptation was more successful than others. One example might be the Malaya Emergency of 1948–1960 (see Johnson and J. Madin, this volume). In that conflict, the British and Malayan counterinsurgency forces revealed themselves as organizations able to learn and adapt—though tellingly this occurred through a series of disasters. According to a recent survey, “one of the things that allowed the British army to innovate and adapt during its counterinsurgency operations in Malaya in the 1950s (and thus attain success) was its willingness at all levels to admit failure” (Metz and Millen 2004, 26; Nagl 2002). The key comparison may therefore be between states that do learn from disasters, and states that do not learn even from disasters. On that note, we now turn to possible solutions to minimize the likelihood of disasters.

Solutions

The bright side of this story is that the reasons for our failure to adapt are systematic, not random. Empirical evidence from cognitive and social psychology offers a taxonomy of causes and consequences of key biases (reviewed in Jervis 1976; Tetlock 1998; Sears et al. 2003; Van Evera 2003). We therefore have scientific tools to identify when, where, and why we fail to adapt to new threats, who is most susceptible, and how to make corrections to compensate (or even overcorrections as insurance policies against these biases). It is likely, however, to be a difficult task—we are often bliss- fully unaware of these biases in the first place, and that is precisely why we fall prey to their influence. Moreover, solutions require us to look beyond our typical experience and plan for things that seem unlikely and far- fetched—hardly things that motivate urgent action. Nevertheless, a careful study of causes and consequences can, in principle, help to design institutions and decision-making procedures that will improve adaptation to novel security threats.

Some of the problems outlined above are already well recognized by the policy community. Indeed, many of the key problems are already being addressed by the post-9/11 reorganization of the intelligence services. For example, the U.S. National Intelligence Council was set up to look ahead at emerging threats that remain “over the horizon.” Other changes include more scenario-based planning exercises, more “red teaming” (role-playing the enemy), and recruiting lateral and imaginative thinkers such as the novelist Tom Clancy to think through possible future threats. However, reforms may be more successful if they exploit the scientific insights emerging from biology and psychology. If history is any guide, the same mistakes will be repeated unless we try something new. We need innovative solutions if we are to escape the recurrent failures of imagination that litter the past so liberally. We discuss a number of potential solutions below.

Lessons from Evolutionary Biology

The best model of successful adaptation to changing security threats may lie in evolutionary biology, where adaptation is the core process underlying billions of years and millions of examples of survivors. Adaptive processes in nature are magnificently diverse, fine tuned over countless generations of trial and error, and well documented. In his analysis of security insights from biological evolution, Vermeij (this volume) notes seven key strategies that can be employed in the face of novel security threats: tolerance, active engagement, increase in power or lifespan, unpredictable behavior, quarantine and starvation of the threatening agent, redundancy, and adaptability. He finds that “the most successful attributes of life’s organization—redundancy, flexibility, and diffuse control—are also the characteristics of human social, economic, and political structure that are best suited to cope with unpredictable challenges.” We list Vermeij’s conclusions in Table 13.2, along with some suggested applications to security.

Vermeij’s key insight is that adaptations to everyday threats often also turn out to be effective adaptations to unpredictable threats. The owners of these serendipitous adaptations will be more likely to avoid or withstand rare and unpredictable disasters. As Vermeij puts it, a trait that enabled an organism to “endure the extraordinary conditions prevalent during times of mass extinction cannot be considered an adaptation to those circumstances but is instead an accidental if welcome consequence of adaptation to more commonplace phenomena” (Vermeij, this volume). There are numerous examples in human history in which commonplace adaptations were used to deal with novel threats. For example, when Soviet tanks escort- ing convoys in Afghanistan discovered they could not elevate their guns high enough to engage hostile forces high on the mountainsides, the Soviet Army resorted to using self-propelled anti-aircraft artillery instead (Beckett 2001). States that accumulate diverse and flexible technologies, practices, or institutions over time are more likely to be able to fall back on a broader range of alternatives in unusual circumstances.

Lessons

There will always be unpredictable threats, and no adaptations to them can ever be perfect.

Adaptation to threats comes with costs and constraints.

Passive resistance, though highly effective, is inconsistent with activity and the exercise of power and by itself is not an acceptable option for most human societies.

Exclusively active engagement exposes entities to ecological collapse engendered by interruptions in resource supplies and, therefore, by itself is an unreliable long-term strategy.

Redundancy and a modular structure of semiautonomous parts under weak central control provide the most flexible, adaptable, and reliable means of making unpredictable challenges predictable.

The history of life in general, and of extinction in particular, shows that adaptation to everyday as well as unpredictable circumstances has improved over the course of time.

Lessons from the Immune System

Application

We should expect ongoing arms races rather than perfect solutions.

Even imperfect adaptations lead to improved strategies.

Adaptation may be costly, but stasis may be worse.

Adaptation must be allocated rolling budgets (not one-off lump sums). Proactive strategies are essential if a state wants to play other international roles. U.S. isolationism is inconsistent with its defense. Unlimited commitment to active engagement is risky and may be counterproductive.

Policy making, military, and intelligence resources should be decentralized, granted independence, and have back-up systems.

Adaptations that can be co-opted to alternative uses offer dual protection against commonplace and unpredictable threats.

TABLE 13.2. Vermeij’s Lessons from the History of How Biological Organisms Evolved to Deal with Unpredictable Threats in Nature (Vermeij, this Volume), and Some Possible Applications to Security

Policy Derived from Our Study

Immune systems also offer intriguing models for human security. They are especially interesting because of their efficiency, lying low in normal times but wielding an extraordinary capacity for an enormous surge in response to a threat. As Villarreal (this volume) writes, “Biological systems are inherently local, rapid, robust and adaptable systems. They are able to rapidly marshal all the needed diverse and central resources, but inherently reduce resource consumption when no longer needed. They are capable of search- ing for, finding, destroying, and sterilizing threats, both hidden and apparent. They are even able to respond to threats never before seen.” The prominence of immune responses in nature attests to the advantages of flexibility and adaptability in the face of novel threats. However, the immunity model presents an additional point: locally focused responses may be far more adept at contending with new threats than those requiring central control or approval. This has potential implications for security strategy in human systems; central command and control structures are often less able to detect, understand, and respond adequately to new threats than local organizations in direct and immediate contact with the threat. Interestingly, there are cases in which the immune system can overreact, drain significant resources, and become dangerous to the organism itself. This also has parallels in human security, in which perceived threats can initiate overblown and costly responses (Mueller 2005; Blumstein, this volume).

Lessons from Institutional Design

Institutions and organizations could be redesigned to hard wire mechanisms for effective adaptation, just as DNA and the process of natural selection assure adaptation in biology. A recent study by Viola and Snidal (2006) argues that evolutionary mechanisms offer a “potentially powerful way to account for the persistence, adaptation, and abandonment of international institutions” (Viola and Snidal 2006, 3). Although current international institutions exhibit many features that arose by design, they also exhibit many other features that arose from a process of “decentralized emergence” over time, without conscious planning. For example, norms of sovereignty, diplomacy, and customary international law arose largely “from the on-going practices of states” (Viola and Snidal 2006, 1). Ideally, institutions would include such organic attributes in order to “adapt and respond to unanticipated elements in their environment” (Viola and Snidal 2006, 4). Designers could identify how these processes of adaptation occur, the conditions under which they are successful, and ways to exploit them. Of course, adaptability often already exists: some degree of flexibility is granted in most organizations, decisions may be delegated to lower level units, and mechanisms are often in place to seek and respond to feedback. Nevertheless, an evolutionary approach may help to identify successful adaptive processes, their likely causes, and their likely consequences.

In addition, the methods and quantitative tools developed in biology to study adaptation may prove useful in understanding the adaptation of human institutions as well. Viola and Snidal note that “it is unlikely that institutions would develop without growing in some way out of the previous institutions,” and “in a given issue area it is common to see institutions with family resemblances” (Viola and Snidal 2006, 8). These echo the notions of common ancestry and evolutionary legacy central to evolutionary biology, for which there are well-developed statistical methods to test for evidence of adaptation, correlations with associated traits, and points of divergence, all while controlling for characteristics shared by common ancestry.

In a fast-moving world of rapid communication, some have argued that even forward planning is no longer the best strategy to prepare for the future. Instead, organizations can be structured to be automatically adapt- able and flexible by nature, so that the system is self-geared to adapt and exploit change as it happens (Brown and Eisenhardt 1998). This violates many traditional views of organizational design, but at least one prominent firm is based on this kind of unstructured system: Google (Lashinsky 2006). Google actively promotes innovation and experimentation through the independence of its subunits and workers. One strategy is encouraging its engineers to spend one day a week working on pet projects and submit- ting new ideas for product development to the Google “ideas list” (Elgin 2005). This list is monitored by the upper levels of management (as opposed to first passing through multiple middle levels) and screened for highly innovative and potentially investment-worthy ideas.

Finally, even if an organization itself cannot easily be restructured, incen- tive structures can be created within it (via financial, budgetary, or professional rewards) to encourage flexibility, adaptation, and review instead of rigidity, policy stasis, and nonevaluation.

Lessons from the Insurance Industry

In order to remain financially viable, insurance companies must be able to either predict or build in buffers against novel catastrophes. The insurance industry thus provides another interesting model for contending with future threats—both known and unknown. In a sense, these companies provide a form of “preadaptation” to novel threats—a guarantee of being able to rebuild following damage. Although it is inherently costly, adopting insurance strategies can provide the necessary buffers against occasional disasters. Although the disasters themselves may not be possible to avoid, their negative consequences can be mitigated. However, it is important to recognize that insurance companies have the luxury of passing on these costs to their clients; government agencies do not.

Lessons from Futures Markets

If humans are bad at detecting novel threats, an alternative is to maximize the number of individuals contributing to assessment. It is a well- recognized phenomenon that the average of a large number of estimates can be extremely accurate—the so called “wisdom of crowds” (Surowiecki 2004). As long as the group is diverse, independent, and decentralized, then individual biases will cancel each other out, leaving available information from a wide range of sources to converge on the correct assessment. For exactly this reason, even expert analyses by intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, may be expected to be inaccurate, because they are not diverse (analysts are all Americans), not independent (analysts share methods, sources, and information), and not decentralized (they work for the same organization). By contrast, an ideal assessment would include opinions from across the globe, including the full spectrum of ideological, cultural, and political differences, and exploiting multiple sources of local information. This has direct practical applications. Harnessing this phenomenon and using it for predictions can be achieved by the use of “futures markets,” in which one buys a contract that will pay, say, $10 if a given event occurs by a certain date. The market price of these futures contracts then reveals a probability that the event will happen (Leigh et al. 2003). For example, on February 14, 2003, the price of $10 futures on Saddam Hussein no longer being president of Iraq on June 30 were trading at $7.50 on tradesports.com, suggesting the probability of war was 0.75.

The Pentagon proposed a “Policy Analysis Market” to exploit the opportunities of futures prediction in 2003. The idea was to use futures markets to evaluate growth, political stability, and military activity in eight nations, four times a year. The project swiftly attracted the misnomer of “terrorism futures” and was scrapped by nervous politicians— yet another example of institutional bias working against innovation. Nevertheless, a number of political futures markets do exist on commercial web sites. One can bet, for example, on the likelihood of U.S. military action against North Korea, air strikes against Iran, or the capture of Osama bin Laden. If these futures markets can be expanded, they may well outperform expert assessments of the likelihood of important events in national security, bypassing the impediments and biases to adaptation outlined above.

Conclusions

If humans, institutions, and states were rational, security policy would change in step with the shifting threats of the day. Our examples of Pearl Harbor, Cuba, Vietnam, and 9/11 indicate that this logic is often violated, and the United States failed to adapt to novel security threats until they caused a major disaster. Our mini case study suggests that these examples are not unusual (Table 13.1). On the contrary, all seven U.S. security policy “watersheds” since World War II were initiated by major disasters, which the United States neither expected nor prepared for. This is further supported by the fact that the U.S. defense budget has not changed in line with shifting threats but rather as significant step-changes after major international events (True 2002). Adaptation to novel security threats is most likely to occur when a state suffers a major disaster—especially among states that are democratic, powerful, innovative, and attentive, and especially if the disaster is deadly, expensive, dramatic, and novel. In other, “normal” times, adaptation to novel security threats is severely impeded because (1) dangers that remain hypothetical fail to trigger appropriate sensory responses, (2) psychological biases serve to maintain the status quo, (3) dominant leaders entrench their own idiosyncratic policy preferences, (4) organizational behavior and bureaucratic processes resist change, and (5) electoral politics offers little incentive for expensive and disruptive preparation for unlikely and often invisible threats. The sudden disasters that break intervening periods of stasis are analogous to the paradigm shifts that Thomas Kuhn (1970) noted in the progress of science, and the punctuated equilibrium theory that Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (1993, 2002) proposed to explain the dynamics of U.S. policy making.

Even when adaptations do follow disasters, they often turn out to be short-lived. Soon enough the powerful impediments to change, whether psychological, organizational, or political, come to the fore. The human brain tends to cast our perception of past events in an overly positive light (Greenwald 1980; Schacter 1995). Even after the unprecedented carnage of World War I, for example, John Stoessinger noted that the “old people to whom I spoke about the war remembered its outbreak as a time of glory and rejoicing. Distance had romanticized their memories, muted the anguish, and subdued the horror” (Stoessinger 1998, xii). Organizations and soci- eties also work to downplay failure and construct myths that deflect blame and reinterpret history (Van Evera 1998; Schivelbusch 2004; Johnson and Tierney 2006). For example, German society embraced the myth after World War I that the army was undefeated on the battlefield and had been stabbed in the back by politicians. Meanwhile, political elites go through the motions, creating the image of change without any intention of bearing its real costs, or doing just enough to tick the boxes in the eyes of Congress or the public. Even with 9/11, for example, the disaster appears to have paled enough into the past that essential reforms have fallen far below the recommendations of the 9/11 commission (9/11 Public Discourse Project 2005). A similar process occurred after the bombing of the London Underground: “The atrocities of July 7th 2005 turn out to have been the kind of alarm call that is followed by intemperate grunts and a collective reaching for the snooze button” (Economist 2006). It is noticeable that political, media, and public attention has already strayed from terrorism and the war on terror in favor of a new sensory-rich disaster on which everyone is focused: Iraq.

Fortunately, cumulative major disasters such as 9/11 usually generate a kind of ratchet effect, such that even after the initial impact wears off, we are still left with some, perhaps imperfect, novel adaptations (e.g., improved airport security, or the U.K. Civil Contingencies Secretariat to “prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies,” see www.ukre- silience.info). It is often noted that in Chinese, the word for “crisis” includes the notion of opportunity as well as danger. If humans are not good at avoiding disasters, we should at least learn to react to them in ways that best utilize the opportunity for change. Cumulative change can be maximized even if it is frustratingly imperfect.

TABLE 13.3. Policy Prescriptions to Maximize Effective Adaptation in Each of the Key Problem Areas
Policy Prescriptions

Ensure decision makers see frontline personnel and victims
Ensure decision makers hear opposing viewpoints Ensure decision makers travel to places at issue
Increase diversity and sources of information Increase turnover in appointees and decision making groups
Install high-level devil’s advocates in policy discussions
Limit power
Limit terms of office
Insist on periodic reevaluation of existing policies
Encourage “bottom-up” development and communication of ideas (Google model)
Solicit recurring internal and external review
Create incentives for continual change Increase public information (so that electorate and government see the same threats)
Increase congressional oversight of security policy
Reduce campaign financing and duration

Bias
Sensory bias
Psychological bias
Leadership bias Organizational bias
Political bias

Democratic, powerful, innovative, and attentive states may have the best chance of avoiding security disasters. But whether a state meets these con- ditions or not, there are a number of policy prescriptions that could improve effective adaptation to novel security threats (Table 13.3). Future studies will be able to improve, expand, and test these ideas, and there is clearly a wealth of models from which to derive effective tricks of adapta- tion, including evolutionary biology, the immune system, institutional design, futures markets, and insurance.

Although there is room for improvement, history suggests that humans need disasters to occur before waking up to novel security threats, whether they are disasters of national security, disease, starvation, poverty, or environmental change. This does not bode well for the future. Even when a threat poses a clear and present danger, such as global climate change, political actors do almost nothing to adapt to the threat until it is too late. As a recent New Scientist editorial recognized (New Scientist 2006): “The world will one day act with urgency to curb greenhouse gases: the likely violence of the atmosphere’s reaction to our emissions makes that inevitable. Climate change awaits its 9/11.”

Hypothesis and Predictions

HYPOTHESIS Adaptation to novel security threats tends to occur after major disasters.

PREDICTIONS Disasters tend to precede major changes in security policy.

Disasters tend to be unexpected (confirming a failure to foresee it). Disasters tend to be unprepared for (confirming a failure to plan for it).

We thank Rafe Sagarin and Terence Taylor for their ideas, advice, criticism, and invitation to join the Working Group on Ecological and Evolu- tionary Models for Homeland Security Strategy; and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis for hosting us. Dominic Johnson is indebted to the Branco Weiss Society in Science Fellowship, the Interna- tional Institute at UCLA, and the Society of Fellows and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Elizabeth Madin would like to thank the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and Steve Gaines. We also owe our thanks to Richard Cowen, Robert Mandel, Dominic Tierney, and all the members of the working group for excellent comments and criti- cisms on the manuscript.

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AMES Scientist Develops Cell Phone Chemical Sensor (NASA)

2009-11-12T22:19:00.000-06:00

Jing Li, a physical scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., along with other researchers working under the Cell-All program in the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, developed a proof of concept of new technology that would bring compact, low-cost, low-power, high-speed nanosensor-based chemical sensing capabilities to cell phones.

The device Li developed is about the size of a postage stamp and is designed to be plugged in to an iPhone to collect, process and transmit sensor data. The new device is able to detect and identify low concentrations of airborne ammonia, chlorine gas and methane. The device senses chemicals in the air using a "sample jet" and a multiple-channel silicon-based sensing chip, which consists of 16 nanosensors, and sends detection data to another phone or a computer via telephone communication network or Wi-Fi.

The latest-generation of the chemical detector board, about the size of a postage stamp, sensing chip facing down.

The latest-generation of the chemical detector board, about the size of a postage stamp, sensing chip facing up.

The chemical sensing prototype plugged into an iPhone 30-pin dock connector with the display-side up.

The Afghanistan Conundrum: How to Proceed When Both Sides Are Right? by Douglas Farah

2009-11-12T13:30:00.000-06:00

The U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W. Ikenberry has reportedly raised serious concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan because of the unreliability of the Karzai government.

Others in the Pentagon and Obama administration feel strongly that nothing can be won on the ground until there are enough troops to do the job properly, if the mission is defined as remaking Afghanistan. They also argue (rightly, I believe) that if Afghanistan were again controlled by the Taliban, al Qaeda would have a safe haven of operation that we would rue, and a public relations and psychological victory that would help revive their cause.

The problem is that both sides are right. I am not an Afghanistan expert, but I have spent years in war zones where the government is viewed as corrupt and illegitimate (including the drug wars in Colombia, and the 1980s conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua and then, West Africa). Without state legitimacy there is no way one can create conditions on the ground for that government to take ownership of any sort of popularly supported programs.

The Karzai government, with its top-down corruption, disdain for action and embrace of massive fraud in an electoral process, appear to embody the worst of all the elements that drive people to take up guns in the first place.

Yet without the necessary resources, the war is lost and the most brutal option available -- hardliners who feel they have achieved the right to govern through military victory -- takes root. The Taliban in their earlier incarnation showed this. Either outcome leaves the U.S. vital interests damaged and the Afghanistan people thrown to the predatory wolves of either side.

The only real option (and it seems to be something Obama personally is asking about and thinking about) is to bypass the central government. A tribal/regional focus, as was initially done in Iraq, is the only way to stand up a fighting force against the Taliban while having a shot a helping to nurture local political and economic progress that brings some sense of legitimacy to the tribal leadership.

Once the security is established, one can move on the education fronts, economic fronts and all the other myriad issues that must be addressed. The draw back is that many of these tribal and sub-tribal groups are extremely conservative and do not share a vision of anything like a society in which women are equals, the education of girls is valued, and the rule of law (rather than the rule of the leader) is valued.

Such a path will also reinforce the tendencies in the nation toward separation and division, rather than create movement toward a unified country under a central government. But until that government is willing to give people something worth fighting for, their legitimacy won't be recognized anyway. The central government, to most in Afghanistan, is an alien and predatory force that has no positive relationship to their lives, and may have many negatives.

Clearly there are no good or easy answers. It seems to me that the local option is by the most viable in the short term. In the longer term, clearly issues of nationhood must be addressed. But Afghanistan won't get there with this government. It is too rotten, too corrupted and too illegitimate to bring anyone into the fold. Bypassing it to work with local leaders, with all the risks, is a better option.

Google hopes Go will give a browser boost by Stephen Shankland

2009-11-12T11:21:00.003-06:00

Google, ever eager to renovate the computing industry for the benefit of the Web and its own business, is working to link two nascent but potentially significant projects, its experimental Go programming language and its Chrome Web browser.

Specifically, the company is building a foundation to let programs written in Go run directly within a Web browser endowed with Google's Native Client software. Native Client is designed to let browser-based programs run faster than is possible with today's widely used JavaScript; though it's still in its early stages, it's built into Chrome and available as a plug-in for other browsers.

A little poking around the Go source code reveals a reference to NaCl, the abbreviated name for Native Client. And Native Client is indeed on the Go agenda, said Rob Pike, one of the five core members of the Go team, in a Wednesday interview.

"We have an embryonic implementation of the NaCl support for Go using 8g," a compiler that produces code for x86 chips such as Intel's Core line, Pike said. "It's restricted by a couple of details of NaCl's implementation, but we hope to see changes to NaCl one day that will make Go a full-fledged language in that environment."

The Native Client compiler--the tool that converts what people write into software a computer can run--is specially modified to screen out a variety of software instructions that could expose a computer to an attack from a Native Client module downloaded off the Web. And the Native Client software itself checks such modules before they run. The result, if the security approach stands up to security scrutiny, is browser-based software that runs close to the speed of ordinary software that runs natively on a PC.

Native Client has been maturing, the most recent stage being inclusion of NaCl within Google's Chrome browser, though disabled by default for now. Google is using Chrome as a vehicle to distribute other Web technology, too, including Gears, which can let people use Gmail while offline, and WebGL, which gives hardware acceleration to 3D graphics in the browser.

Go is only experimental at this stage, but Google hopes to use it to produce some of the software running on its vast array of servers. Google's scale makes even academic projects potentially commercially relevant, which is enviable to many companies who've tried to get projects off the ground.

Indeed, an episode earlier in the Go team's history is illustrative. Pike, Unix co-inventor Ken Thompson, and Russ Cox all worked on the Plan 9 operating system project that, like Unix, began at Bell Labs. (Yes, Plan 9 is named after Ed Wood's famously bad movie, "Plan 9 from Outer Space.")

Unlike Unix, Plan 9 didn't have much commercial success, although Vita Nuova does sell a version called Inferno. Getting a mainstream operating system off the ground is hard: you must convince programmers, software companies, and hardware makers to embrace it; you must convince people to use it in the real world; and you must keep pace with the evolution of entrenched operating systems.

A bit of Plan 9 lives on inside the Go project, with various Plan 9 tidbits appearing in the Go source code. Pike, though, says there's not much.

"The 6g/8g/5g compilers are almost completely new but are tied to the open-source Plan 9 compiler suite's C compilers and linker," Pike said. "That's really about it except for the obvious historical connection for some of the protagonists: Ken, Russ, and myself."

Programming languages face similar challenges as operating systems in getting off the ground: A lot of interdependent elements in the ecosystem must all be built simultaneously. It's what's known in the trade as the chicken-and-egg problem: you can't make a chicken without an egg or vice versa.

But Google makes things different for Go. It's devoting real resources to the project and believes it could be useful on its own servers to run software such as the Gmail service Web browsers tap into. It's got the chicken and the egg under its own roof.

And with the money Google could save by increasing the performance or efficiency of its servers even just a fraction of a percent, it has abundant financial incentive to make things work.

Marrying Go to browsers is just another aspect of the same issue. Assuming Go and Native Client mature enough to be useful, Google can't mandate that Web developers embrace them; indeed, they generally haven't embraced Gears even though it can help with some Web site matters. But again, Google has a browser and some awfully big Web sites it can use to get the ball rolling.

Military to Obama: We Heart Our Nukes, Don’t Give ‘Em Up by Nathan Hodge

2009-11-12T10:48:00.000-06:00

President Barack Obama’s vision of a nuclear-free world has won a fair amount of attention — and a Nobel Prize. So how long, exactly, will it take to get to zero? According to the general in charge of the nukes, 40 years at the very minimum.

Speaking Tuesday on Capitol Hill, Gen. Kevin Chilton, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, said: “When looking into the future a basic question is … will we still need nuclear weapons 40 years from now? I believe the answer to that question is yes.”

Chilton’s remarks come as the administration prepares to unveil a much-awaited Nuclear Posture Review. But even with a nuclear abolitionist in charge, advocates of modernizing the arsenal are pushing back.

Take, for instance, Adam Lowther, a faculty researcher and defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute. Lowther just published a new monograph, “Challenging Nuclear Abolition,” arguing for the continued relevance of nuclear weaponry, two decades years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Lowther, of course, does not represent Air Force policy; his paper is supposed to be independent analysis of issues of potential importance to Air Force commanders and their staffs. But his paper does reflect many of the concerns within the military establishment about maintaining — and possibly modernizing — the nuclear deterrent.

“As with every new administration, the realities of office overcome the rhetoric of the campaign,” Lowther wrote. “President Obama can be convinced that a safe, secure, and modern nuclear arsenal is the best way to protect the American people and promote peace and stability internationally. As with the American people and Congress, success will be determined by the strength of the argument presented to the president. Convincing President Obama is made much easier if the American people and Congress are already supportive of the policies advocated by modernizers.”

“Challenging Nuclear Abolition” was recently presented at a Naval Postgraduate School conference for political scientists who specialize in security studies; the paper provoked a fair amount of discussion. But this is more than just an academic debate: The president’s “no nukes” push has exposed a rift within the administration between the proponents of abolition and powerful supporters of modernization, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Content VS Context: Asymmetric Warfare - it's not just for the other guys (Internet | OSINT | HaYishuv)

2009-11-12T10:40:00.000-06:00

When it comes to threat assessment, where someone is hanging out online - context - is likely to be more important than what, if anything, they say online - content. I have seen people online who subsequently became involved in terrorist activity, who a: very clearly expressed their terrorist intentions, b: gave no clear expression to their terrorist intentions beyond adherence to radical Islamist ideological positions, and c: said little if anything prior to blowing themselves up, at which point someone who knew them would announce to the rest of the community that one of their brothers had died as a martyr in the cause of Allah. The common element was that they were all spending time on just a handful of jihadi websites.

Allow me to try and explain this by analogy:

If I'm a regular customer at a bar, that's one thing. Maybe I have a drinking problem, or maybe I just don't want to drink alone.

If, on the other hand, you see me regularly entering a bar, and the bar is owned by a guy who is affiliated with an organized crime family, and the bartender is dealing in meth amphetamine, the bus boys are selling crack cocaine, and one of the cocktail waitresses has a good connection for heroin - and you see me entering that bar because you have it under surveillance - don't you think it's a good idea to find out who the f*ck I am and why the f*ck I'm spending my time at that bar? What else am I up to, and with whom?

And that, my friends, is all I'm going to say about Major Hasan right now, except to offer up my current bibliography...

[Microsoft's Bing + x(Wolfram|Alpha)] > Google? by Ryan Singel

2009-11-12T09:23:00.000-06:00

Microsoft’s search engine Bing will soon feature results from the innovative Wolfram|Alpha web service that attempts to compute answers to searchers’ questions, rather than link to web pages.

Bing and Wolfram announced Wednesday that Microsoft would begin using Wolfram Alpha’s service to power certain queries about math, health and nutrition as part of Bing’s attempt to differentiate itself from Google, which still controls 70 percent of the search market.

That’s what Bill Gates is betting after checking out the answers from Wolfram’s computational search engine. Evidently, Gates questioned whether the search engine from math genius Stephen Wolfram could actually do math right, and once satisfied, signed a deal to pay Wolfram|Alpha for answers.

So for instance, Bing users who want to compare the nutritional value of a banana versus an orange will get a computed answer piped in from Wolfram|Alpha. Wolfram|Alpha will also be there for users who want the search box to be a very functional calculator or find some computable health information.

Microsoft’s decision to try out some of Wolfram|Alpha’s answers is yet another step in an industry-wide march towards returning more than just links as the answer to most search query. Search engines now routinely blend in maps, music, videos and reviews, in order to give better results to user queries.

Wolfram|Alpha also just released a $50 iPhone app that has proven unexpectedly popular. Microsoft is the first commercial user of the company’s API.

Integration with a major search engine is a smart move for Wolfram|Alpha, given the narrow, but occasionally impressive and useful answers it returns. Don’t be surprised if this leads to an acquisition down the road, if Bing finds that users are drawn to what Epicenter has called a search engine for Rain Man.

Most. Realistic. War Game. Ever. by Noah Shachtman

2009-11-11T16:14:00.002-06:00

Government Will Pay $3 Million in Coffee Table Spying Suit by Kim Zetter

2009-11-11T15:56:00.002-06:00

The U.S. has agreed to pay $3 million to a former government worker who accused officials with the CIA and State Department of spying on him with a bugged coffee table.

Rather than comply with a court order to provide lawyers in the case with what the U.S. government says is classified information, the government has agreed to settle to end the 15-year-old suit.

A close review of the case suggests that the Justice Department also decided to pay off the plaintiff in order to quash the series of damaging legal rulings issued by the influential judge overseeing the case that would have forced them to disclose the classified information. Those decisions may have a bearing on the “state secrets privilege” that the Bush and Obama administrations have used to try and thwart a high-profile lawsuit in California over illegal wiretapping conducted in the war on terror.

The government has filed a motion to vacate the potentially damaging rulings in the coffee table case. As part of the settlement agreement, filed November 3 in the U.S. District court in the District of Columbia, the plaintiff has agreed not to oppose the government’s motion to vacate.

In the settlement agreement (.pdf), Justice Department attorneys acknowledged that “the opportunity to seek vacatur is a significant reason why the Government is entering into settlement.”

But lawyers filing on behalf of the California spy suit plaintiffs are urging the D.C. judge to let his rulings stand. The lawyers say the rulings are important to the California case — Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation vs. Obama — challenging the legality of the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program.

“The opinions will be a valuable resource for litigants and courts as these issues arise in other cases,” the lawyers wrote in their brief (.pdf) Friday.

The Al-Haramain case accuses the government of violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by illegally wiretapping two lawyers for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation without a warrant. The government has asserted the “state secrets privilege” in that case in an effort to keep the alleged wiretap victims from introducing into evidence a classified document the government gave them by mistake, which purportedly backs their claims that they were spied on.

The Justice Department is “willing to pay absolute top dollar [in the D.C. case] to get out from some very damaging opinions” says Jon Eisenberg, attorney for the plaintiffs in the Al-Haramain case. “They are desperate to make the decisions go away and to deprive me of the ability to cite those decisions in the future.”

Although district court opinions aren’t binding elsewhere, they are regularly published and cited in other cases.

The D.C. rulings could help convince the California court to let plaintiffs view and use the classified document in their case, Eisenberg says. He notes that the D.C. rulings could be particularly persuasive to the San Francisco judge in the Al-Haramain case because they come from U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, head of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court until 2002, who is overseeing the coffee table case. The intelligence court is responsible for approving government requests for wiretaps and other types of surveillance in the U.S. in cases involving foreign spying and terrorism.

“When Judge Lamberth speaks on a matter of national security, people listen,” Eisenberg told Threat Level.

Earlier this year, Lamberth ruled in the coffee table case that a judge has authority to determine whether lawyers in a state secrets case have a “need to know” classified information. He ordered the government to give security clearances to lawyers on both sides of the lawsuit –including the private attorneys for the government employees accused of spying — in order to give them access to information the government claimed was classified so they could better represent their clients.

Obama’s Justice Department, which had asserted the state secrets privilege in the case, called the judge’s decision at the time “an unprecedented departure from the Executive’s exclusive authority to control access to classified information.”

The government was in the process of appealing Lamberth’s rulings when it announced the settlement agreement.

The D.C. case, Horn v. Huddle, was first filed in 1994 and involves listening devices purportedly used by the Central Intelligence Agency in Burma in the 90s, including a coffee table said to be an eavesdropping transmitter.

Richard Horn, formerly a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, alleged that Franklin Huddle, Jr, who was the State Department’s mission chief at the U.S. embassy in Burma, and Arthur Brown, who worked for the CIA there, planted listening devices in his home in 1992 while he was stationed in Burma (now Myanmar).

Horn claims that one day in November 1992, while he was at work at the U.S. embassy, someone entered his residence and replaced a government-issued coffee table with an oval table without consulting him.

He later came to believe that the oval table was a listening device, after discovering that Huddle and Brown were privy to details of conversations he’d had while in the room where the table resided. He’d also learned from a former NSA official that similar oval tables were placed in the homes of all U.S. diplomats and officials assigned to the U.S. embassy in Burma. Horn was led to believe there was a reason these particular tables were installed in the homes.

Horn claimed the defendants spied on him to obtain information to discredit him with his DEA superiors and convince the agency to recall him from Burma. He asserted that through discovery he would prove the table he received was a listening device.

The Justice Department vigorously fought the case for more than a decade, and in 2000 invoked the state secrets privilege. In 2004, Judge Lamberth dismissed the case, in large part because the CIA had asserted that Brown was a covert operative whose association with the agency could not be disclosed.

The government notified the court in 2008, however, that it had made an error and that Brown’s work for the CIA had actually been publicly disclosed in 2002. The case resumed, and when the government re-asserted the state secrets privilege, the judge accused the CIA of deliberately misleading the court about Brown’s covert nature to get the case dismissed the first time. He unsealed hundreds of documents that had been sealed since 1994.

Then in August, Lamberth ordered the government to give the lawyers security clearances to view other confidential data, saying the government’s misrepresentation of Brown when it first asserted the state secrets privilege effectively nullified that privilege.

Eisenberg says Lamberth’s opinion and ruling could have great significance for his case in California, since the government has also admitted to an inaccuracy in the Al-Haramain case.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, who is presiding over that case, ordered the government to process the plaintiff attorneys for security clearances to view the classified document in that case, but the government resisted, saying the lawyers did not have a “need to know.” Walker ultimately skirted the issue and decided instead to allow the case to proceed, but without the classified document, effectively thwarting the plaintiff’s case.

But earlier this year, after President Obama took office, Justice Department lawyers admitted to an inaccuracy in their assertion of the state secrets privilege in the Al-Haramain case. The actual filing explaining the nature of the inaccuracy is classified and has only been disclosed to Judge Walker. But Eisenberg says that if the inaccuracy turns out to be a misrepresentation of fact, then the case would have parallels to the coffee table spying case, and Lamberth’s decision to allow attorneys to see classified documents in that case could sway Walker to allow the same in the Al-Haramain case.

“There’s a secret filing owning up to an inaccuracy,” Eisenberg says. “We don’t know what it is, but we’d surely like to know.”

On Veterans’ Day 2009, Help Out Ft. Hood Families

2009-11-11T14:03:00.000-06:00

Today is Veterans’ Day, as most of you know. Which means there’s added incentive to help out the families of the Ft. Hood massacre. Here’s a list of charities lending a hand. My favorite: Fisher House, a “home away from home” for military families during a medical crisis like this one.

Veteran's Day 2009 by Jim Thomas

2009-11-11T07:01:00.002-06:00

This one strikes closest to home. More so even than the debt the nation owes our veterans, I owe two vets, my parents, for my existence and for inspiring my accomplishments. Veterans Day, thankfully, is generally well-observed, with many personal and societal ceremonies and tributes, even if it is not a day-off for many. That military service is a sacrifice borne by few for the benefit of many is all too clear this year. So, as legal holidays go, we seem to do right by Veterans Day; I'm more concerned about the other 364 days, but first the legal history.

Originally Armistice Day, the 11th day of the 11th month, commemorated the end of the Great War, the "war to end all wars" (was there ever a slogan you more wanted to be true?), and honored those who served in it. After World War II, which forced us to drop the slogan and recognize the Great War as World War I, and then the Korean "Conflict" (legal semantics for political purposes), Congress, in 1954, seeing the need to honor all who serve, gave the holiday its present name, Veterans Day.

Congress did a major disservice to Veterans Day when, in 1971, it separated the holiday from its roots by moving the observance to the 4th Monday in October. The American people tolerated that for only a few years and the original date was restored in 1978. But if "we must keep our covenant with them" as President Obama proclaims, then Veterans Day must be a year-long commitment.

I mentioned my parents both served. They enlisted, as many Americans do, as recent high school graduates. I am particularly indebted to an unknown designer of recruiting posters. My mother marched into the recruiting office fully intending to join the Navy, but an Air Force poster showing young people at the Eiffel Tower changed her mind. The poster was prophetic. My parents would have their first date in Paris, France.

So it was that I and my three siblings would grow-up on and around Air Force bases. So it also was that we would see our parents each earn a Bachelor's and then a Master's Degree as beneficiaries of the GI Bill. "The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944," otherwise known at the GI Bill or the GI Bill of Rights, not only carried out the covenant between this nation and its defenders, it transformed my family as it transformed the nation. Home-ownership and college lay beyond the grasp, both economically and psychologically, of much America before the GI Bill; after, everything changed.

On a recent walk around Denver's Fort Logan National Cemetery, I am struck, not by the lives cut short by war, a tragic consequence of military service, but by the long lives of many who served and the great blessings they brought to us. I imagine them, like my parents, young people who leveraged their country's investment in them to transform America. Veterans raise expectations, not just for themselves, but for their children and their children's children, and, in the process, for us all. I imagine the Fort Logan vets as entrepreneurs, teachers, police, firefighters, doctors, nurses, builders, engineers, and even lawyers. I imagine them as mothers and fathers. I see the life you and I live as defended and enabled by their ideals.

Our covenant with our vets, like all agreements, needs to be kept current. The GI Bill has been updated a few times and as recently as 2008, but still we struggle. One-third of America's homeless men are veterans. The economy facing discharged servicemen and women today is all too similar to that facing the World War I veterans whose political and literal battles with our government inspired that first GI Bill. If our investment in that "bonus army" gave birth to a transformed America, we should expect that doing our best for our modern heroes will prove more essential to our current economic reformations than any business bailout. Besides, it is the right thing to do.

Venezuela Ramps Up its Border Security and Presses on with Iran by Douglas Farah

2009-11-10T13:22:00.000-06:00

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is militarizing his border and urging his people to prepare for war, while at the same time lavishing billions of dollars to an essentially parallel government in Nicaragua and announcing yet another summit with Iran's Ahmadinejad.

None of these are good signs, given his creation of militia units that are responsible to solely to him while at the same time moving aggressively, as the International Crisis Group notes, to further shrink the democratic spaces in Venezuela in the face of growing unpopularity and discontent.

At the same time the support for the FARC and ELN (both designated terrorist organizations) is unabated and drug trafficking is booming.

According to the ICG, the Chávez government has progressively abandoned core liberal democracy principles guaranteed under the Inter-American Democratic Charter and the American Convention on Human Rights. The executive has increased its power and provoked unrest internally by further politicising the armed forces and the oil sector, as well as exercising mounting influence over the electoral authorities, the legislative organs, the judiciary and other state entities. At the same time, Chávez’s attempts to play a political role in other states in the region are producing discomfort abroad.

The proximate cause of Chávez's attempts to set the region on fire is his deep-held belief that the United States and Colombia (or through Colombia) are preparing to attack him. He seems to sincerely believe, as only true meglomaniacs can, that he is the center of U.S. policy and world policy.

While he may not like the U.S. use of existing bases in Colombia (and many Latin American nations are sympathetic to his view on this), there are few demands for transparency in Venezuela's dealings with Iran, Russia, Libya, the FARC or anything else. It is desirable that external actors in the region be forced into some transparency in their military activities in the region, but that should be across the board.

There are other inconsistencies.

Venezuela's agricultural production is so low that it imports more than two-thirds of its foodstuffs, yet Chávez talks of his relationship with Ahmadinejad in terms of Venezuela providing much needed food products to Iran. When Chávez ordered 10 battalions of troops to the border of Colombia in 2008 it quickly became apparent that his military did not have more than two or three equipped and ready to roll. As the International Crisis Group recently reported, his oil production is in steep decline and the money being used to buy friends abroad, exacerbating his severe social problems at home.

This may help explain El Comandante's insatiable desire to regionalize the conflict, his support for the FARC and tolerance for drug trafficking through Venezuelan national territory. As his own situation deteriorates, he wants to tie his fate to the fate of the continent. To help them all stand together, he has pumped some $7 billion into Nicaragua, where virtually none of it is accounted for, does not pass through congress, is not audited and at under the personal care of Daniel Ortega.

There is little doubt the Colombians can handle whatever Chávez were to dish out militarily. But he is more likely to take a less direct route, given the state of his army. The FARC, ELN and Emerging Criminal organizations are all good proxies to bleed the Colombian efforts to reestablish state control, and have the endless source of revenue in the cocaine trade and other criminal activities.

But that doesn't mean one should not take the clearly-articulated efforts to destabilize the region military lightly. Chávez will do whatever is best for Chávez, and the rest of the region (and hemisphere) need to clearly understand that.

Backlash Hogwash by Mona Charen

2009-11-10T09:57:00.000-06:00

"U.S. Homeland Security officials are working with groups around the United States to head off any possible anti-Muslim backlash following the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas."

The Department of Homeland Security is in good company in its confusion. Gen. George Casey, the Army's top general, also worried that "this increased speculation could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. And I've asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that." And President Obama cautioned against "jumping to conclusions."

The backlash trope is trotted out after every episode of terrorist violence. But it is as false as it is dangerous. This image of a nation on a hair trigger for violence against Muslims is a calumny. Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, though millions were inflamed by grief and outrage, there was no broad-based "backlash" against Muslim Americans. There were a handful of crimes including the murder of a Sikh who may have been mistaken for a Muslim, a few broken windows, some insults, and some hurt feelings. But the overwhelming majority of Americans did not seek out scapegoats, nor engage in vigilantism.

The repeated invocation of this libel has had an effect, though. It has succeeded in intimidating many Americans about the proper bounds of discussion. Gen. Casey reinforces this timidity when he frets that "our diversity" may be a casualty of the attack at Fort Hood. He and the Obama administration are obscuring the real challenge Americans face.

Our challenge is not to transcend the demons of vengeance clawing at our souls. Our challenge is to deal intelligently with a threat that arises from religious convictions. Non-bigoted observers can see that while the vast majority of the world's Muslims are not extremists, a significant minority are. And it matters what people believe.

We don't like to pass judgment on others' religious convictions. That's fine. But when a religious belief spurs violence and mass murder, it becomes political, and it becomes a proper concern of the military and security services.

Worldwide, Muslims believing themselves to be advancing the faith have committed more than 14,000 acts of violence just since 9/11. You know the litany: Madrid, London, Bali, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Amman. The list is long and bloody -- and it includes many innocent Muslims.

Many hit home. In 2003, Hasan Akbar, a Muslim convert, rolled a grenade into the tent of his fellow soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. In June, Abdulhakim Muhammad, another convert, killed one Army recruiter and wounded another in Little Rock. Naveed Haq shot six women at the Seattle Jewish Federation office in 2006.

Federal agents have thwarted planned terror attacks on Fort Dix, N.J., folded up a terror ring in Lackawanna, N.Y., and uncovered plots against the nation's financial centers, the World Bank, the Sears Tower, the New York subway system, the Los Angeles airport, the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles, 10 airliners landing in the U.S. (the liquid bomb plot), JFK airport, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Prudential Building in Newark, N.J., among others.

So shall we arrest all the Muslims in America? That's the caricature that is encouraged by the "backlash" peddlers. Obviously not. But what we must do is to discriminate -- that is, to make distinctions based on what kind of Islam Muslims embrace. We have created a climate in which members of the military were afraid to raise questions about the bald and blatant Islamist comments Major Nidal Hasan expressed over many years. He was overhead saying, "maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Times Square." He was caught proselytizing his patients. He argued frequently to colleagues that the U.S. was engaged in a "war against Islam."

Yet no one raised a red flag. Might be interpreted as anti-Muslim bigotry. And so the military took no action against a man who loudly advertised his extremist sympathies. Thirteen Americans paid for that with their lives.

If any good were to come out of the Fort Hood massacre, it would be a new clarity about what we are fighting. Islamism is the enemy. Moderate Muslims are allies in the cause. We should no more shrink from confronting and battling Islamism than we would from any of the "isms" we destroyed in the 20th century.

Muddled thinking and misplaced delicacy have proved deadly.

Japan plans additional $5 billion for Afghanistan by Jay Alabaster

2009-11-10T08:19:00.000-06:00

Japan on Tuesday announced $5 billion in fresh aid to Afghanistan even as it plans to bring home refueling ships supporting U.S.-led forces there. The pledge comes just days before President Barack Obama arrives in Tokyo for talks that are sure to focus on the countries' military alliance.

The announcement appears to be a way for Japan, which is barred from sending troops for combat by its pacifist constitution, to show support for Afghanistan's reconstruction while Obama reviews his options for a new strategy in the conflict.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's government, which wants to put Tokyo's ties with Washington on more equal footing, doesn't plan to extend Japan's refueling mission in the Indian Ocean when it ends in January, partly because it lacks a mandate from the United Nations. Some members of Hatoyama's party also say the mission violates the country's constitution.

Japanese officials said the aid shouldn't be seen as simple replacement for the refueling mission, but aimed at creating jobs and supporting its development.

"The refueling mission and the $5 billion aid are separate issues," Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada said. "Japan puts emphasis on nonmilitary support. We'll try to explain our principle so we can gain international understanding."

The aid, squeezed out despite Japan's budget constraints, "purely reflects Japan's commitment to fulfill its global responsibility because of the importance of Afghanistan," Okada said.

Japan will give up to $5 billion in aid for Afghanistan over five years, beginning later this year. The funds are to be used in areas such as building up the police force and on agriculture and other infrastructure projects. In April, Japan had also pledged $1 billion in aid to Pakistan.

"It is our hope that the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, while effectively putting this support from our country to use, will strive for reforms in anti-terrorism and their domestic economies," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano told reporters.

The Japanese self-defense force deployed a 600-strong force to southern Iraq in early 2004 on a humanitarian mission that ended in 2006.

Since 2002, Tokyo has provided nearly $2 billion for Afghanistan, including six months of salaries for 80,000 Afghan policemen that Tokyo pledged in March.

The news comes even as the U.S. and Japan wrangle over how to carry out a 2006 agreement to reorganize the 47,000 U.S. troops in Japan under a security pact. That topic, as well as climate change and economic issues, will likely be on the agenda when Obama and Hatoyama meet on Friday.

A major sticking point in the U.S. military reorganization plan, agreed to by the previous Liberal Democratic government that lost August elections to Hatoyama's party, has been the future of U.S. Futenma Marine base in Okinawa.

The plan was to relocate it to a less crowded part of the southern island, but some members of Hatoyama's government want it moved off Japanese territory entirely. Some Okinawan residents have complained the bases cause too much noise and crime.

A procession of high-ranking U.S. officials, including Pentagon chief Robert Gates, have visited Tokyo in recent weeks to press for a quick resolution, but officials from both sides say a resolution of Futenma's future isn't going to happen during Obama's Friday meeting with Hatoyama.

Google Has Acquired Gizmo5 (Google Voice) by Michael Arrington

2009-11-08T22:03:00.002-06:00

Last month Skype was in talks to acquire VoIP startup Gizmo5. It was a perfect backup plan in case all that IP litigation didn't work out. Gizmo5's SIP infrastructure could theoretically replace Skype's proprietary P2P back end.

After the Skype settlement, though, Gizmo5's strategic value to Skype sort of plummeted. In the meantime, Google bought them, say multiple sources with knowledge of the deal, for around $30 million in cash. The deal is done, say our sources, and will be announced shortly.

Gizmo5 is a good fit with a number of Google products. Google Talk allows voice calls between users but has no PSTN link to allow incoming or outbound calls to real phones. Gizmo5 does this well already.

And Google Voice is a great VoIP and phone identity service, but they have no endpoint for calls. Gizmo5, which by the way already integrates with Google Voice, is a soft phone end point for Google phone users. In other words, you will be able to make and receive calls to your Google Voice phone number from your computer.

This looks to me like Gizmo5 will be the glue that puts Google Voice and Google Talk together into a single product. And that product looks a lot like a Skype competitor.

Gizmo5, which was founded in April 2003, has raised $6 million to date, plus an unspecified amount from founder/CEO Michael Robertson. Prior to Gizmo5, Robertson gained notoriety with his founding of MP3.com and later MP3tunes (which has led to big music suing both the company and himself personally.)

ZiiLABS Introduces ZMS-08: The World’s First 1080p Blu-ray Quality Handheld Media Processor

2009-11-08T07:57:00.000-06:00

ZiiLABS, a media processor and platforms company and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Creative Technology Ltd. today announced, the ZMS-08, its 3rd generation media-rich applications processor that brings 1080p Blu-ray quality H.264 decode to low-power devices. Delivering more than four times the performance of previous generation devices, the ZMS-08 combines the flexible multi-format media processing capabilities of ZiiLABS’ StemCell Computing array with an 1GHz ARM® Cortex™ processor to deliver the low-power, high performance media-rich processing required of next-generation connected devices such as web tablets, netbooks, connected TVs, video conferencing systems and home media hubs.

The ZMS-08 is sampling now to certain customers and is supported by ZiiLABS’ optimized Linux-based Android™ and native Plaszma™ operating systems and development platforms.

The ZMS-08’s proven StemCell Computing array provides the media processing capabilities to deliver full HD 1080p high-profile H.264 video decode, simultaneous H.264 encode and decode at 720p, 1080p 24fps encode, accelerated OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics at up to 1 Gpixels/sec, 2D processing, compositing, image processing and advanced Xtreme Fidelity™ X-Fi Audio effects. With the low-power ARM Cortex processor running at up to 1GHz, the ZMS-08 is aimed at small form factor devices that enable content currently accessed via the PC to spread to mobile and low-energy devices.

“Combining advanced ARM technology with its own media processing IP has enabled ZiiLABS to deliver the high performance and low-power consumption required to enable the next leap in the mobile internet revolution” said Ian Drew, EVP Marketing, ARM.

“The ZMS-08 processor confirms the flexibility and scalability of our architecture and enables our customers to develop richer mobile and connected devices that are four times faster and twice as power efficient as previous solutions,” said Hock Leow, President of ZiiLABS. “Its new capabilities such as Blu-ray quality playback, 720p simultaneous encode and decode of H.264 video, accelerated OpenGL ES 2.0 and rich peripheral integration such as dual USB controllers and HDMI are blurring the boundary between the capabilities of the traditional PC and connected device.”

High Quality HD Video Encode and Decode

Full HD video playback at 1080p supporting H.264 High Profile at up to 40Mbps means users can experience Blu-ray quality video playback direct to their 1080p TV utilizing the integrated HDMI controller. Crystal clear 720p H.264 video encode and decode at 30 fps enables users to keep in touch with their friends and colleagues via videoconferencing.

Accelerated 3D Graphics

Support for OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics and 1 Gpixels/sec fill rate enable a new class of user experiences including enhanced user interfaces, PC-like 3D gaming and Adobe® Flash® 10.

Enhanced Audio and Voice

The inclusion of Xtreme Fidelity™ X-Fi audio technology delivers a great sounding audio experience. Crystalizer intelligently restores audio detail lost during file compression and CMSS-3D adds the surround sound experience to headphones and stereo speakers and up-mixes stereo to sound great on surround sound speaker systems. The Smart Volume, Dialogue Enhancer, Acoustic Echo Cancellation, graphic equalizer, microphone beam former and noise reduction modules offer customers a complete portfolio of advanced audio processing that make their products sound better.

ZMS-08 Features

The ZMS-08 flexible StemCell Computing array features 64 fully programmable floating point processing elements that off-load the media processing from the ARM CPU to deliver superior media capabilities coupled with improved application performance. The flexible array architecture enables users to experience the widest range of community generated and commercial content including H.264, Microsoft® WMV9, MPEG2, MPEG4, OpenGL ES and Adobe Flash.

The tightly coupled 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 provides a secure, high performance main CPU that features a 256K L2 cache, NEON™, TrustZone® security technology and 1 GByte addressable RAM.

A wide range of integrated peripheral functions help to reduce system costs, complexity and device footprint. Dual USB 2.0 OTG controllers with PHY and ULPI interfaces provide direct connection to USB hosts, peripherals and high-speed modems. Four HD video processing units support camera and display input and output processing with the integrated HDMI and Analog video encoders supporting HD-TV 1080p output at 60fps. The secure Boot ROM, three SDIO/MMC ports, UARTs, SPI, GPIO and advanced 64-bit and 32-bit memory controller supporting mDDR and DDR2 at up to 333MHz provide the interfaces and memory bandwidth required for today’s media rich connected devices.

Availability

The ZMS-08 is sampling to certain customers now and is scheduled for volume shipment in the 1st quarter of 2010. The chip is housed in a 13x13mm, 424-pin FBGA package.

What are Iran's Intentions for Hajj? by Tariq Alhomayed

2009-10-29T10:25:00.001-05:00

In what was clear escalation at the highest level, Tehran, through Iran’s Supreme Leader and president, threatened the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei demanded that Riyadh gives special treatment to citizens of his country, even though he used the term “Shia”. Khamenei said that the Hajj pilgrimage this year is an opportunity that must be benefited from through “being close to the Masjid al Haram, the Prophet’s Mosque, shrines of the Imams of Guidance and the Companions [of the Prophet] in order to strengthen the value of faith and morality and submission to God the Creator.”

As for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he went further than this in the game of allocating clear-cut roles, as he said that the Hajj pilgrimage this year “is an extraordinary opportunity for defending Islamic values and if the Muslims come together, the Iranian pilgrims especially, they will thwart any enemy conspiracies and increase the unity of Muslims.” He reiterated the need to make the most of this [religious] rite in order to be free from those who attribute partners to God. Ahmadinejad concluded his comments with a clear threat to Riyadh saying that if his citizens are not treated in the right way then his country would take the appropriate steps towards Saudi Arabia!

Both statements simply mean that Iran intends to exploit the [Islamic] rite of Hajj this year because of goals and political slogans and this is contradictory to the values and teachings of the Hajj pilgrimage, as there are no sexual acts, no debauch and no arguments in the holy land and during the holy months. Moreover, this holy rite is for worship and not in any way for political exploits.

However, what’s clear to us is that Iran decided on escalation with Saudi Arabia so that it can move on and leave behind its internal crisis and the international pressure that is being put on it. Since the crisis of the last presidential elections, the Iranian regime has been practicing escalation in the media and elsewhere against Saudi Arabia in a continuous manner, as we saw how the Iranian Foreign Minister sought to drag Riyadh’s name [in the mud] in the UN, or via Iranian media, every time international pressure on Tehran regarding the nuclear file negotiations intensified.

The simplest example of this was when the Supreme Leader used the term “Shia” in a clear attempt to mobilise the followers of this sect through inciting sectarianism and this is an Iranian game par excellence that we are witnessing in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and in the Gulf countries.

There is the saying that not every time the jar falls it breaks; but the mistake committed by the Iranians today will have detrimental consequences, as the Iranian threat to exploit the Hajj season is not only incitement against the Saudis but the mistake that Tehran committed in its threat against the Hajj pilgrimage and Saudi Arabia lies in the fact that it incites religious sentiments of Muslims everywhere. Religious sentiment, which Saudi Arabia serves in the best way, is not a platform for slogans and for eliminating opponents; it is a pure place for those performing the circumambulation, those spending the night in worship and those praying to God.

Therefore, the Iranian threat against Saudi Arabia to exploit the Hajj season – unless Iran follows the right approach – means it is a clear Iranian attack on one of Islam’s religious rites and an attack on religious sentiment. This is a very dangerous matter and there will be major consequences, and the Saudis are most aware of this as they have a long history of confronting Iranian attempts to exploit sentiment towards one of the pillars of Islam, i.e. Hajj.

Makeshift Bombs Spread Beyond Afghanistan, Iraq by Thom Shanker

2009-10-29T10:05:00.002-05:00

Improvised explosive devices, as the military calls them, have been the largest killer of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, showing up with devastating effect in Pakistan and India, but also with less notice in Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Colombia, Somalia and parts of North Africa.

Even Russian security forces have faced the devices in the republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan, although attacks in Chechnya have fallen.

“There is a robust and constant I.E.D. effort among violent extremists who are using it as their weapon of choice,” said Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, director of the Pentagon’s organization in charge of seeking ways to counter improvised explosives. “That won’t change for decades. We are in this fight for a long time.”

General Metz, who will discuss the spread of improvised bombs during testimony on Thursday before a House Armed Services subcommittee, said global I.E.D. cases outside Iraq and Afghanistan averaged about 300 per month. The count includes detonations and the discovery of intact devices. The military’s global statistics on the bombs remain classified, to prevent extremists from knowing what the United States knows. But a compilation of worldwide episodes from private-sector security consultants illustrates the threat.

Jonathan M. George, of HMS Inc., a private company that analyzes the use of improvised explosive devices and consults on countermeasures, maintains a database on cases, gathered from public documents and news reports, that military officers consider reliable enough to cite in public statements.

Mr. George said the count of improvised bombs in Afghanistan had grown from 515 in 2006 to 705 in 2007, 828 in 2008 and 955 so far this year. In Iraq, the annual figures show the count has diminished, from 4,718 in 2006 to 3,275 in 2007, 3,253 in 2008 and 1,135 so far this year.

But his compilation also tracks the larger number of I.E.D.’s that explode or are found in the rest of the world: 3,267 in 2006, 4,027 in 2007, 4,273 in 2008 and 2,121 so far in 2009.

“Recent events show that although the number of I.E.D. attacks has fallen, the number of high-casualty and high-profile attacks continue to rise,” he said.

He said that Pakistan had experienced the worst problem after a rise that began in 2007, after the Pakistani military mounted an eight-day siege to end a standoff that lasted for months with Islamic extremists holed up at the Red Mosque in Islamabad. India has the second-highest number of I.E.D.’s, and the level there remains constant, Mr. George said. Thailand is third, but the number has decreased following a peak in 2007.

Extremists are not only increasing the power of their devices but also showing a grim cleverness in the delivery systems. Raids on a Tamil Tigers base in Sri Lanka uncovered an experimental, remotely controlled boat that could be loaded with explosives to slip alongside the hull of a ship for detonation.

Other American military officers say that the improvised bombs are being studied as a military tool by some state powers.

The senior American commander in South Korea, Gen. Walter L. Sharp, said that the North Koreans were studying the weapons and their uses.

“We started to work very hard, to make sure we’re learning the lessons out of Iraq and Afghanistan with I.E.D.’s and other types of devices,” General Sharp said in Washington last month.

Then, in referring to the North Korean government, he added, “I’m pretty confident that they have learned” from observing how insurgents used devices in Iraq and Afghanistan. The American military now believes that North Korean special operations forces are training to use improvised explosives.

“I’m confident they will use those capabilities,” General Sharp said. “So we’re working very hard on that now.”

He did not elaborate on how North Korea might employ the bombs. But other American government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described the assessments: While conflict with the North appears remote, the United States and South Koreans anticipate that if war breaks out, North Korean conventional forces will plant I.E.D.’s to maul any allied advance from south to north, and that North Korean commandos will try to infiltrate the south to plant them along major roadways to wound and kill civilians and allied troops.

Senior military officers confirm that American and South Korean forces on the peninsula are now incorporating countermeasures in updated war plans and practicing them in war games.

General Metz, who will retire from the military in the coming weeks, acknowledged that while the public had focused on the threat that the bombs posed to American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, part of his reason for describing the risk of spreading improvised bombs was to argue for continued financing for his organization’s work on countering them.

“What the American people do not realize is that this weapon of choice by violent extremists is being used for strategic purposes,” he said. “The United States cannot be beaten tactically by the I.E.D. — but strategically, these extremists hope to wear down our will.”

Feds’ Smart Grid Race Leaves Cybersecurity in the Dust by Kim Zetter

2009-10-29T09:58:00.002-05:00

Amid the government-funded rush to upgrade America’s aging electric system to a smart grid comes a strange confluence of press releases this week by the White House and the University of Illinois.

Tuesday morning, President Obama, speaking at Florida Power and Light (FPL) facilities, announced $3.4 billion in grants to utility companies, municipal districts and manufacturers to spur a nationwide transition to smart-grid technologies and fund other energy-saving initiatives as part of the economic stimulus package.

FPL will receive $200 million to install 2.6 million smart meters and other technologies that promise to reduce energy costs for customers. CenterPoint Energy in Houston, Texas, gets $200 million to install 2.2 million smart meters (.pdf) and more than 550 sensors and automated switches. Baltimore Gas and Electric in Maryland is another $200-million recipient.

Strange, then, that another press release distributed Monday by the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois announces a grant of $18.8 million to four academic institutions to fund a five-year research project into securing the power grid. The project is supposed to make certain that the smart meters and other devices implemented by power companies can resist hackers and other attackers.

The latter grant, from the U.S. Departments of Energy and Homeland Security, provides funding to the Institute, along with Dartmouth College, the University of California at Davis in California and Washington State University for a research program called Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid.

“It reflects a strong consensus that cybersecurity and resilience will be critical to the realization of a modernized, reliable, and efficient power grid, so that it will be able to guarantee delivery of electricity to consumers and maintain critical operations, even when malicious cyber attacks occur,” reads the press release.

The only problem is, by the time the research project is completed, most of the nation will have already adopted untested and unsecured technologies.

Richard Clarke

How do we know they’re insecure?

Earlier this year IOActive, a computer security firm in Washington state, was contracted to examine the security of smart meters deployed by an unnamed utility company in the northwest. Mike Davis, an IOActive security consultant, and his fellow researchers developed a malicious worm that, in a simulated attack, was able to spread from meter to meter to take out power in more than 15,000 homes in 24 hours. Davis says IOActive submitted his findings to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS, in response to a Threat Level FOIA request, said it can’t find the report in its files.

“Given the degree of seriousness that the Obama administration is applying to cybersecurity and the smart grid, we can look forward to the kind of things happening here that happened to Brazil, where hackers successfully brought down the power,” says Richard Clarke (at right), chairman of the Good Harbor security consulting firm and former special adviser to President George W. Bush on cybersecurity.

Clarke is referring to veiled reports made last year by the CIA’s chief cybersecurity officer, Tom Donahue, that extortionists had taken down the power grid in multiple regions outside the United States. The location of those outages has never been publicly identified.

“Smart grid” refers to the transition from the current, outdated power-grid infrastructure to a more technologically advanced structure that allows expanded real-time monitoring and energy delivery that’s more efficient and cost effective for utilities and consumers. The technology promises to solve a number of problems, but it also (as the Illinois press release states) could “introduce new problems, such as increasing the vulnerability to cyber attack as power grid resources become increasingly linked to the internet.”

“The concern is that the existing technologies can’t offer [security] guarantees, and that we could even open the door to new risks if we carelessly put together new systems that don’t have resilience and security guarantees built in from the ground up,” explained Ilesanmi Adesida, dean of the College of Engineering at Illinois, in the Information Trust Institute’s press release.

So why would the federal government accelerate the adoption of insecure technologies at the same time it touts cybersecurity as one of the nation’s biggest national security concerns?

According to the Department of Energy, the government has the smart-grid security issues under control.

Spokeswoman Jen Stutsman said all the entities awarded smart-grid funds under Obama’s $3.4 billion stimulus grant were required to submit a cybersecurity plan with their proposal.

“Each application was examined by at least two interoperability and cybersecurity experts, and it was a central component to the selection criteria for each of the awards,” Stutsman said.

Stutsman wouldn’t identify the experts who reviewed the cybersecurity plans or provide details about the plans applicants submitted.

According to the grant-proposal requirements, each applicant was required to submit a summary of known cybersecurity risks (.pdf) and explain how the applicant would mitigate them. They also had to identify the cybersecurity criteria they used for selecting vendors and technologies and the cybersecurity standards or best practices they planned to follow. And they had to explain how they would adapt to new standards that might emerge — such as those being developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Stutsman, addressing why the government would urge the move to smart meters before researchers had fully examined them, said that DoE “has spent years researching cybersecurity issues” and is “constantly and on a continuing basis … putting in place policies and programs that will help us gather more information.”

While the department is modernizing the electrical grid and using knowledge it already has, she said it will continue to apply new information as it becomes known. The government, she said, will continue to monitor utilities and others “to ensure that we are taking every step we can to secure the country’s electric grid.”

Himanshu Khurana, principal scientist for the Information Trust Institute’s power-grid research project, noted that many of the grants to utility companies and municipalities are for a three-year period.

“So there is still time between something being announced and everything being deployed for making sure that the technologies” are evaluated, he said.

Separate to his Institute’s research grant, Khurana belongs to a team that has been contracted by one of the utility companies that received a federal grant. His team’s job will be to help evaluate the utility company’s network and the technologies it plans to deploy and perhaps develop needed software.

“So people have reached out to cybersecurity experts and formed appropriate teams,” he said. “Now, it’s hard to provide assurance right now that everything is going to go safe. But the plan is feasible and there has been a lot of weight given to cybersecurity in the administration’s grants.”

Clarke is not so confident.

“We have no way of having any confidence that there’s any cybersecurity plans since we don’t know anything about the qualifications of the experts who examined them or the criteria they’re using to judge them,” he said. “In the absence of someone like the NSA or the cybercenter at DHS [to certify every smart-grid proposal], there’s no reason to believe they’re taking security seriously.”

More important than asking companies to submit a cybersecurity plan for future technologies, he says, is to require that utility companies and energy distributors pass an audit for their current state of security.

He says he’s spoken with auditing firms that have examined utility companies and energy distributors and found that — in every case — they were able to infiltrate the company’s production SCADA system (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) from the public internet in less than an hour.

“No grant should be given to any company that doesn’t pass an audit today with its existing system,” he said. “Paper audits are worthless. Real-world audits are what count. So if the company today has flagrantly bad performance with regard to cybersecurity, then it shouldn’t win an award for new technology until it fixes that problem.”

ICANN Set to Approve Web Addresses Using Non-Latin Characters by Caleb Johnson

2009-10-29T08:45:00.000-05:00

Despite what some might say, it's not often that an opportunity comes along to change the lives of billions of people. But that's just what the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will do by changing the rules of Web addresses, shaking up the Internet like never before.

According to the Daily Mail, the ICANN board will pass a resolution this Friday that will allow entire Web addresses to be written in non-Latin alphabets. Those languages could be anything from Japanese to Arabic, or Hindi to Greek. The change means that many people around the world could more easily navigate the Web, and even create Web sites in their native tongue. Of the 1.6 billion people who use the Internet, about half are native speakers of languages that do not use the Latin alphabet. "This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," said ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush at a press conference in Seoul, South Korea yesterday. If approved, the first non-Roman domain names should hit the Web sometime in mid-2010.

But why now? For years, the group has been testing a new translation system to convert multiple scripts into a single address, and it finally feels ready to put the system to use.

We don't want to count our chickens before they hatch, but this is big news, folks. It's akin to the introduction of a three-point line in basketball, or the forward pass in football. This resolution will totally change the game, so you might want to brush up your Arabic or Chinese.

Net Neutrality: Net Neutrality Worst Case

2009-10-28T18:55:00.000-05:00

The Net Neutrality argument is fairly nebulous for the average user but this image from a Reddit reader shows the effects of the law in a way everyone can understand. If you’re tired of paying tiered pricing for stuff like cable and Internet access, how would you like to pay tiered pricing for the websites you visit. Want to watch Hulu? Add $10. Need eBay, even for a month? $5, please.

While this is obviously a worst case scenario, this sort of bundling is a favorite pastime of most stream providers. For years voicemail was a privilege, not a right, and there are still grannies out there renting phones from the phone company. While month-to-month the costs might not seem like much, this sort of thing adds up to delicious profit.

Announcing Google Maps Navigation

2009-10-28T11:28:00.001-05:00

Since 2005, millions of people have relied on Google Maps for mobile to get directions on the go. However, there's always been one problem: Once you're behind the wheel, a list of driving directions just isn't that easy to use. It doesn't tell you when your turn is coming up. And if you miss a turn? Forget it, you're on your own.

Today we're excited to announce the next step for Google Maps for mobile: Google Maps Navigation (Beta) for Android 2.0 devices.

This new feature comes with everything you'd expect to find in a GPS navigation system, like 3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance and automatic rerouting. But unlike most navigation systems, Google Maps Navigation was built from the ground up to take advantage of your phone's Internet connection.

Here are seven features that are possible because Google Maps Navigation is connected to the Internet:

The most recent map and business data
When you use Google Maps Navigation, your phone automatically gets the most up-to-date maps and business listings from Google Maps — you never need to buy map upgrades or update your device. And this data is continuously improving, thanks to users who report maps issues and businesses who activate their listings with Google Local Business Center.

Search in plain English
Google Maps Navigation brings the speed, power and simplicity of Google search to your car. If you don't know the address you're looking for, don't worry. Simply enter the name of a business, a landmark or just about anything into the search box, and Google will find it for you. Then press "Navigate", and you're on your way.

Search by voice
Typing on a phone can be difficult, especially in the car, so with Google Maps Navigation, you can say your destination instead. Hold down the search button to activate voice search, then tell your phone what you want to do (like "Navigate to Pike Place in Seattle"), and navigation will start automatically.

Traffic view
Google Maps Navigation gets live traffic data over the Internet. A traffic indicator light in the corner of the screen glows green, yellow or red, depending on the current traffic conditions along your route. If there's a jam ahead of you, you'll know. To get more details, tap the light to zoom out to an aerial view showing traffic speeds and incidents ahead. And if the traffic doesn't look good, you can choose an alternate route.

Search along route
For those times when you're already on the road and need to find a business, Google Maps Navigation searches along your route to give you results that won't take you far from your path. You can search for a specific business by name or by type, or you can turn on popular layers, such as gas stations, restaurants or parking.

Satellite view
Google Maps Navigation uses the same satellite imagery as Google Maps on the desktop to help you get to your destination. Turn on the satellite layer for a high-resolution, 3D view of your upcoming route. Besides looking cool, satellite view can help you make sense of complicated maneuvers.

Street View
If you want to know what your next turn looks like, double-tap the map to zoom into Street View, which shows the turn as you'll see it, with your route overlaid. And since locating an address can sometimes be tricky, we'll show you a picture of your destination as you approach the end of your route, so you'll know exactly what to look for.

The first phone to have Google Maps Navigation and Android 2.0 is the Droid from Verizon. Google Maps Navigation is initially available in the United States. And like other Google Maps features, Navigation is free.

Click here to learn more and browse a gallery of product screenshots. Take Google Maps Navigation for a spin, and bring Internet-connected GPS navigation with you in your car.

Iran Does What It Wants by Tariq Alhomayed

2009-10-28T10:20:00.000-05:00

Two important news stories about Iran [surfaced] on the same day; the first was that Pakistani authorities had arrested 11 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] the moment they crossed onto Pakistani territory, and the second news item was the announcement that Yemeni security authorities had seized an Iranian ship carrying anti-tank shells, which Yemeni authorities believed was destined for Houthi rebels in the north. The five crew members on the Iranian ship were arrested.

As stated above, the two news items came out on the same day. Even if it was reported that the five Iranian officers had entered Pakistan by mistake, Iranian officials in the IRGC had previously threatened that Iran might pursue elements of the Jundullah organization (which claimed responsibility for the suicide operation that took place in Iran) on Pakistani territory. This raises questions about the alleged story that the IRGC had entered Pakistan by mistake!

What’s important about both news stories is that Iran is moving around in the region without being monitored or supervised. The two incidents in Pakistan and Yemen would not have been brought to light had it not been for the authorities of both countries. What if Iraqi authorities declared the degree of Iranian interference in Iraq? Or what if the Iraqi authorities disclosed documents and images revealing what the Quds Force did and is still doing [in Iraq], especially as some Iraqi officials have close ties with head of the Quds Force Qassem Suleimani and, in fact, meet with him both inside and outside of Iran and at the highest levels?

What if the Lebanese authorities revealed the magnitude of Iranian interference in their country, not only via the support of Hezbollah but through the pumping of money and weapons, and the mobilizing of leaderships and men and even through interference on the cultural level?

The problem with the Iranian regime is that it is yet to learn the harsh lesson, as for a long time, Iran has been interfering, directly and indirectly, in the region’s causes and internal affairs, and today Iran wants everyone to leave it and its affairs alone. Furthermore, they [the Iranians] are surprised at what is written about them in the media, despite that they ridicule the media and media figures to serve their own goals. The best example of this is when Tehran was alarmed by the news that was leaked about an energy meeting being held in Cairo attended by an Iranian official who spoke to an Israeli official about nuclear weapons. After all of that, Iran wants to pursue anybody who does anything on its territory, without realizing that its own illegitimate interference in other countries is what made others do the same.

The problem is that even though Iran’s actions represent a violation of international laws, it contradicts what it says in its criticism of US interference in Iraq or Afghanistan, or [what it says about] the uproar that Israel is causing in Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories, and even [what it says about] Israeli talk of striking Iranian nuclear plants. Iranian interference in the affairs of regional states, whether militarily or by supporting armed groups, contributes to supporting or in fact legitimizing chaos in our region.

Has the time come for Tehran to grasp the danger of what it is doing in our region?

Counter Terrorism Gains by Michael Sheehan

2009-10-27T09:52:00.000-05:00

In today's debates about how to proceed in Afghanistan, the relationship between counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism operations needs to be clearly understood. First and foremost, we should acknowledge that, in light of our original counter-terrorism goals, our Afghan and Pakistan policies have been remarkably effective. There is no need to panic.

We invaded Afghanistan eight years ago to prevent another terrorist attack on our nation, and we have been successful. Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacked us three times in three years: at our African embassies in August 1998; the USS Cole incident in October 2000, and finally on our homeland on Sept. 11, 2001. In the eight years following Sept. 11, they have failed to attack us on our soil. In fact, al Qaeda can count only one terrorism attack in the entire West (London, 2005), with perhaps "partial credit" for another (Madrid, 2004).

This, by any standard, is a failure on the part of al Qaeda and a testament to the effectiveness of our worldwide counter-terrorism programs. And that success is a product of aggressive intelligence operations that reach from the mountains of Afghanistan, through foreign capitals around the world, and all the way to the streets of New York City. It has been no accident; the U.S. military, the CIA, FBI, the New York Police Department, and others should be credited.

However, in Afghanistan, we have continually moved the "goal posts" of our counter-terrorism success in the name of a counterinsurgency campaign. The initial objective of kicking out al Qaeda has now morphed into an ambitious program of "reinventing Afghanistan" as a modern state.

We have gotten ourselves bogged down into a complex insurgent war that the Taliban can sustain at some level almost indefinitely, even though they have no real prospects of actually winning.

Without transforming Afghanistan into a stable and modern state, some reason, the Taliban will return to power and provide al Qaeda a sanctuary to enable it to restore its pre-Sept. 11 operational capability.

But this assumption does not stand up to careful scrutiny.

A major reason for our post Sept. 11 counter-terrorism success has been the enormous pressure on al Qaeda's first- and second-tier leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And yes, we must be ruthless in continuing to deny al Qaeda the ability to plan, train and launch worldwide operations from a "sanctuary of impunity" they enjoyed in Afghanistan and Pakistan prior to Sept. 11.

But our success in throttling the strategic al Qaeda was achieved without pacifying Afghanistan and without occupying western Pakistan. Instead, we have used a massive intelligence operation to find and destroy al Qaeda's strategic capability there and denied them the ability to mount terrorist attacks outside of their immediate operational area.

The U.S. Army's recent "rediscovery" of its counterinsurgency doctrine was long overdue and certainly increased their effectiveness and will hasten the withdrawal from Iraq.

But in relearning counterinsurgency doctrine, the Army must recall its most fundamental principles, and not just apply its tactics and techniques. One of those principles is the critical importance of using local militia and constabulary units to do the primary fighting of local insurgents and keeping the foreign "footprint" as small as possible.

The "Sunni Awakening" in Iraq was successful largely due to the mobilization of local militia forces to fight insurgents on their own terms, in what was often nasty and brutish affairs. For those that call for a smaller U.S. presence and an increase of Afghan responsibility for the war, they should brace themselves for an ugly war. This is not a strategy of weakness, as claimed by some who reject any troop withdrawals.

In transferring security to the Afghans, the war will get more messy and brutish in the short term, and we will need to support our imperfect allies. It will call for a different type of toughness from American policymakers.

Today in Afghanistan, the U.S. Army is still the main fighting force in the country. In essence, it remains an occupational force with counterinsurgency doctrine sprinkled on top. While U.S. conventional soldiers are kicking in doors of mud homes in poor Afghan villages, it is hard to envision long-term success, no matter how many health clinics they build the next day.

Our interests in Afghanistan may require a long-term and robust presence in that country, and this article is certainly not a call for a fast drawdown at this critical time. We will require a massive economic, security and diplomatic assistance package that will guarantee the viability of the central government.

We will also need substantial conventional forces in Afghanistan to guarantee the viability of the central government, support Afghan forces in extreme situations, and to protect bases to launch counter-terrorism operations in the region.

Our intelligence programs and special operation strikes against strategic al Qaeda (not the local insurgent fighters) will remain our highest priority in the theater. And that is the recipe for a policy that aligns with our primary national security interests and will be the basis for the continued success of our global counter-terrorism strategy.

New Processor Will Feature 100 Cores by Priya Ganapati

2009-10-27T08:23:00.000-05:00

Forget dual-core and quad-core processors: A semiconductor company promises to pack 100 cores into a processor that can be used in applications that require hefty computing punch, like video conferencing, wireless base stations and networking. By comparison, Intel’s latest chips are expected to have just eight cores.

“This is a general-purpose chip that can run off-the-shelf programs almost unmodified,” says Anant Agarwal, chief technical officer of Tilera, the company that is making the 100-core chip. “And we can do that while offering at least four times the compute performance of an Intel Nehalem-Ex, while burning a third of the power as a Nehalem.”

The 100-core processor, fabricated using 40-nanometer technology, is expected to be available early next year.

In a bid to beat Moore’s law (which states number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years), chip makers are trying to either increase clock speed or add more cores to a processor. But cranking up the clock speed has its limitations, says Will Strauss, principal analyst with research and consulting firm Forward Concepts.

“You can’t just keep increasing the clock speed so the only way to expand processor power is to increase the number of cores, which is what everyone is trying to do now,” he says. “It’s the direction of the future.”

In fact, Intel’s research labs are already working on a similar idea. Last year, Intel showed a prototype of a 80-core processor. The company has promised to bring that to consumers in about five years.

Tilera, a start-up that was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, started in 2007. It says its product will be available in the next few months, which means the company, if successful, will have gone from zero to shipping a powerful chip in just about three years — a very fast time frame in the semiconductor world. That’s because it has created a chip architecture that removes the challenges present in Intel’s x86 design.

As the number of cores on a chip multiplies, a major challenge is how to connect the chip to memory without choking up the processor. That’s why Agarwal says Tilera has used a mesh network architecture. It eliminates the “on-chip bus interconnect,” a central intersection found in most multi-core CPUs through which information must flow through to get between the cores of a chip. That central interconnect presents bandwidth issues of its own, and also forces engineers to limit the number of cores on a chip to avoid information gridlock.

Instead, Tilera places a communication switch on each processor and arranges them in grid-like fashion on the chip. Because the overall bandwidth is greater than that of a central bus, and because the distance between individual cores is smaller, Tilera says it can cram in as many as 100 cores on a processor without running into bus-bandwidth congestion.

Each core has a full-featured, general-purpose processor that includes L1 and L2 caches, and a distributed L3 cache. The cores are overlaid with the mesh network, which provides extremely low-latency, high-bandwidth communications between the cores, memory and the processor’s input and output.

“If you need huge computing power, say for instance to encode and decode multiple video streams, our processor can do it at much more efficiency than Intel chip or a digital signal processor,” Agarwal says.

And unlike GPU-based computing systems, programmers can recompile and run applications and programs designed for Intel’s x86 architecture on Tilera’s processor.

“Tilera has put forth a novel approach to massively parallel programming,” Strauss says. “The 100-core processor is closer to a generic processor than anything else we have seen before.”

Don’t expect it to run Windows 7 on it though. For that, consumers will have to wait for Intel’s version in a few years.

Google Releases Voice Light for Any Mobile Number by Ryan Singel

2009-10-27T03:15:00.001-05:00

Mobile phone users who love their phone number but still want the cool features of Google Voice — including computer translations of voicemail messages — will get their wish Tuesday, as Google announces a light version of its innovative phone service (and a new feature for full-blown users).

Google Voice is a Swiss Army knife of cool and free phone service add-ons — including free SMSes, an online mailbox for voice messages, the ability to have one number ring all of your phone numbers simultaneously, low international rates and a customized voicemail messages for every contact. It’s not phone service per se though, since you still need a mobile phone or landline.

But using Google Voice requires users to use their Google Voice number as their main number. That’s a not-inconsiderable burden, given that some mobile phone users have thousands of contacts who know their number and don’t want the hassle of changing business cards and forcing others to update their contacts.

Google’s solution?

Create a light version that gives phone-number-huggers better voicemail. Using a mobile carrier’s call-forwarding codes, Google Voice Light will send a mobile phone’s unanswered calls to a Google-powered mailbox. When callers leave a message there, Google records and transcribes it, and saves it in an online mailbox. The roughly translated text and a link to an online recording can be sent via SMS or e-mail.

The capability will also benefit those who have migrated to Google Voice, since currently the voicemail feature only kicks in when people call the Google Voice number, which forwards the call to a user’s mobile phone. Currently, those who call the mobile phone directly leave a message using the mobile carrier’s network, but with the new system, those calls can be diverted as well.

The voice messages can be stored in perpetuity, forwarded to family or friends, and they can be saved, even if you decide to switch mobile carriers.

German Limits on War Facing Afghan Reality by Nicholas Kulish and Stefan Pauly contributed reporting from Berlin

2009-10-26T14:10:00.000-05:00

Forced to confront the rising insurgency in once peaceful northern Afghanistan, the German Army is engaged in sustained and bloody ground combat for the first time since World War II.

Soldiers near the northern city of Kunduz have had to strike back against an increasingly fierce campaign by Taliban insurgents, while carrying the burden of being among the first units to break the German taboo against military combat abroad that arose after the Nazi era.

At issue are how long opposition in Germany will allow its troops to stay and fight, and whether they will be given leeway from their strict rules of engagement to pursue the kind of counterinsurgency being advocated by American generals. The question now is whether the Americans will ultimately fight one kind of war and their allies another.

For Germans, the realization that their soldiers are now engaged in ground offensives in an open-ended and escalating war requires a fundamental reconsideration of their principles.

After World War II, German society rejected using military power for anything other than self-defense, and pacifism has been a rallying cry for generations, blocking allied requests for any military support beyond humanitarian assistance.

German leaders have chipped away at the proscriptions in recent years, in particular by participating in airstrikes in the Kosovo war. Still, the legacy of the combat ban remains in the form of strict engagement rules and an ingrained shoot-last mentality that is causing significant tensions with the United States in Afghanistan.

Driven by necessity, some of the 4,250 German soldiers here, the third-largest number of troops in the NATO contingent, have already come a long way. Last Tuesday, they handed out blankets, volleyballs and flashlights as a goodwill gesture to residents of the village of Yanghareq, about 22 miles northwest of Kunduz. Barely an hour later, insurgents with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades ambushed other members of the same company.

The Germans fought back, killing one of the attackers, before the dust and disorder made it impossible to tell fleeing Taliban from civilians.

“They shoot at us and we shoot back,” said Staff Sgt. Erik S., who, according to German military rules, could not be fully identified. “People are going to fall on both sides. It’s as simple as that. It’s war.”

The sergeant added, “The word ‘war’ is growing louder in society, and the politicians can’t keep it secret anymore.”

Indeed, German politicians have refused to utter the word, trying instead to portray the mission in Afghanistan as a mix of peacekeeping and reconstruction in support of the Afghan government. But their line has grown less tenable as the insurgency has expanded rapidly in the west and north of the country, where Germany leads the regional command and provides a majority of the troops.

The Germans may not have gone to war, but now the war has come to them.

In part, NATO and German officials say, that is evidence of the political astuteness of Taliban and Qaeda leaders, who are aware of the opposition in Germany to the war. They hope to exploit it and force the withdrawal of German soldiers — splintering the NATO alliance in the process — through attacks on German personnel in Afghanistan and through video and audio threats of terrorist attacks on the home front before the German elections last month.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior American and allied commander in Afghanistan, is pressing NATO allies to contribute more troops to the war effort, even as countries like the Netherlands and Canada have begun discussing plans to pull out. Germany has held out against pleas for additional troops so far.

Ties between Germany and the United States were strained last month over a German-ordered bombing of two hijacked tanker trucks, which killed civilians as well as Taliban. Many Germans, from top politicians down to enlisted men, thought that General McChrystal was too swift to condemn the strike before a complete investigation.

Germany’s combat troops are caught in the middle. In interviews last week, soldiers from the Third Company, Mechanized Infantry Battalion 391, said they were understaffed for the increasingly complex mission here. Two men from the company were killed in June, among 36 German soldiers who have died in the Afghan war.

The soldiers expressed frustration over the second-guessing of the airstrike not only by allies, but also by their own politicians, and over the absence of support back home.

While the intensity of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan’s south has received most attention, the situation in the Germans’ part of the north has deteriorated rapidly. Soldiers said that just a year ago they could patrol in unarmored vehicles. Now there are places where they cannot move even in armored vehicles without an entire company of soldiers.

American officials have argued that an emphasis on reconstruction, peacekeeping and the avoidance of violence may have given the Taliban a foothold to return to the north.

German officers here said they had adjusted their tactics accordingly, often engaging the Taliban in firefights for hours with close air support. In July, 300 German soldiers joined the Afghan Army and National Police in an operation in Kunduz Province that killed more than 20 Taliban fighters and led to the arrests of half a dozen more.

The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the operation “a fundamental transition out of the defensive and into the offensive.”

Germany’s military actions are controlled by a parliamentary mandate, which is up for renewal in December. The German contingent has unarmed drones and Tornado fighter jets, which are restricted to reconnaissance and are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.

German soldiers usually stay in Afghanistan for just four months, which can make it difficult to maintain continuity with their Afghan partners. The mandate also caps the number of troops in the country at 4,500.

A NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, called the mandate “a political straitjacket.”

A company of German paratroopers in the district of Chahar Darreh, where insurgent activity is particularly pronounced, fought off a series of attacks and stayed in the area, patrolling on foot and meeting with local elders for eight days and seven nights.

“The longer we were out there, the better the local population responded to us,” said Capt. Thomas K., the company’s commander. Another company relieved them for three days but then abandoned the position, where intelligence said that a bomb was waiting for the next group of German soldiers.

“Since we were there, no other company has been back,” the captain said.

Robotic Hand That Senses Touch by John Messina (Ikaros)

2009-10-25T15:31:00.002-05:00

Developed by researchers at Lund University in Sweden and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Italy, the Smart Hand project has given patient, Robin af Ekenstam (see video) the sense of touch in his new prosthesis hand.

The Smart Hand is an intricate prosthesis that incorporates four motors and forty sensors designed to provide practical motion and senses to the person using it. This is the first device of its kind that sends signals back to the brain, allowing the user to have feelings in their fingers and hand.

The Smart Hand takes advantage of the phantom limb syndrome which is the sensation amputees have that their missing body part is still attached.

(Video Credit: BBC News)

By using the impulses from the brain that travel down the neurons to the site of amputation, scientists can use these signals and direct them to a mechanical device. This makes Smart Hand unique because it takes advantage of the phantom limb pathways that are available. By connecting sensors in the hand to the nerve endings in the stump of the arm, patients can feel and control the Smart Hand.

The Smart Hand project is far from creating a limb that functions as a normal hand since there are millions of nerves in a biological hand. The Smart Hand prototype represents more than 10 years of dedication and team work. Contributors from other countries include researchers in Denmark, Israel, Ireland, and Iceland.
Considering it has taken 10 years of hard work to come this far, it will take much less time to make large improvements. Whether improvements are made in the Smart Hand Project or other projects, we can expect to see substantial improvement in prosthetic work within a short amount of time.

One day those suffering from missing limbs may be able to recover at a rate beyond their expectation. Within the next decade, prostheses may be able to feel as natural as our biological part.

So Iran Caved on the Bomb. What Now? by Thomas Barnett

2009-10-23T18:05:00.001-05:00

The deal going down in Tehran and Washington tomorrow — the one that, after days of (clearly terse) negotiations in Austria, forces Iran to ship three-quarters of its (clearly loaded) "known stockpile" of uranium to Russia for medical enrichment — is a significant feather in our Nobel-winning president's cap. No, it doesn't come anywhere close to getting Iran to give up its nuclear program — that'll never be on the table. But it does buy just enough time (one year, by all accounts) for a more reasonable diplomatic path to emerge along the bitter grounds between Iran and Israel (who aren't afraid to meet each other, by new accounts).

And that's what these kinds of negotiations have always been about: When you rightly cast aside as peacenik nonsense all this rhetorical bullshit about a "nuclear-free" Middle East (or world, as Obama likes to dream), how do you navigate Israel's unsanctioned monopoly on weapons of mass destruction? Because that's a strategically unstable situation by any historical standard.

This 365-day accord, then, would seem to be a sign that all sides involved view both Iran's enduring "breakout capacity" and Israel's missile-defense shield as constituting just enough deterrence against the region's "existential threats" — namely, Tehran's fear of U.S.-engineered regime change and Jerusalem's fear of being "wiped off the map." But how much do these two antagonists — and the Obama administration — really stand to gain over the course of the next allegedly dialed-down year? Let me count the ways.

Israel: Time to Build Up the Shield

It's stunning that Israel has gone nearly four decades unchecked with all these WMDs. But it's more stunning still that this stockpile, even as an effective deterrent against country-on-country conflict since the Yom Kippur War, hasn't really brought the Israelis any lasting peace. Meanwhile, the true Arab threat has shifted from demagogic (Ahmadinejad's big talk notwithstanding) to demographic (Israel's low birthrate relative to Palestine), and no number of nuclear warheads can balance that increasingly unfavorable correlation of forces. It was only a matter of time before the region's pre-eminent rivalry (Persian Shia versus Saudi Sunni) yielded an embryonic challenge to Israel's two hundred-plus nukes.

And so, after almost a quarter-century of quiet cooperation with the Americans, Israel is now on the verge of perfecting a multi-layered missile-defense shield that protects against short-range rockets coming out of southern Lebanon and Gaza, plus anything Iran can toss its way. Not only will Israel remain on the map following a potential first strike, it'll have second-strike capabilities secure enough to wipe off the map any fantasy-league roster of neighboring Islamic regimes you care to name.

Iran may be just getting on the playing field, but Israel will remain — for the foreseeable future — the only team that can professionally compete on both sides of the ball.

Israel's impressive achievement already creates a quiet confidence among its military ranks. Don't believe me? Check out Juniper Cobra, the two-week combined U.S.-Israeli missile-defense exercise that began this week. It's the latest in a series of biennial war games that stretch all the way back to 2001, and it lays the groundwork for next year's debut of Israel's Iron Dome system, designed to shut down those over-the-transom threats from Hamas and Hezbollah. No, this comprehensive defense package does not rule out the suitcase-bomb scenario, but that one has been around for many years and nobody has more operational experience there than Israel's intelligence agency Mossad.

The key thing to remember, once you get past Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's fantastical comparisons to Nazi Germany, is that Iran's nuclear program cannot rise to the level of an existential threat — something Defense Minister Ehud Barak has already said enough times to make Tehran's Revolutionary Guard squirm.

Iran: Time to Round Up the Bullies

Speaking of which, not enough attention was paid to two bombings on Sunday morning that served as a warning to Tehran's very power-hungry Revolutionary Guard. The message? Your bullying may have worked in the wake of the Iran election, but it's go-for-broke time for the opposition.

Iran may be 90 percent Shia, but barely a majority of its citizens speak Farsi, meaning today's version of the Persian Empire isn't all it's cracked up to be — or becoming. Tehran may reflexively accuse its preferred villains (U.S., U.K.) of "meddling" in its internal affairs, but its near-term fears involve Pakistan's military push into South Waziristan, which brings Islamabad's fight with the Pakistani Taliban right to the doorstep of the restive Baluchistan region it shares with Iran and Afghanistan (which is where those bombs went off). Under the right conditions, what has long been a low-grade insurgency inside Iran could blossom into something far more destabilizing.

So with everything Ahmadinejad has on his domestic plate, it's clear that his administration could use a lengthy breather from all this Western pressure on its nuclear program — if only for the Revolutionary Guards to fully consolidate their power grab. The key for the regime has always been to thread the needle between its citizenry's pride in defying the West over enrichment and growing popular demands for more openness to the world. If this week's deal can substitute for the West's standing "freeze-for-freeze" offer (Iran freezes enrichment and the West freezes sanctions), then Ahmadinejad and Co. can claim a victory of sorts — more openness and the right to enrichment preserved.

The key to the new enrichment accord will be Tehran's willingness to hand over the bulk of its low-grade uranium all at once rather than piecemeal. The bulk shipment would indicate that Iran is at least a year off from replenishing its supplies from still-unknown enrichment facilities, like that of the "new" site that's suddenly up for inspections. So we'll see.

Obama: Time to Make a Deal

As far as the White House is concerned, the Vienna deal obviates what would have been a humiliating diplomatic failure to enlist the support of either Russia or China for truly harsh economic sanctions — something Ahmadinejad's regime just can't afford right now. Yes, some in the Obama administration surely dream that another year's time might just be enough to convince Beijing that other Gulf oil providers can cover China's energy imports from Iran in the event of any seriously going-to-the-mattresses scenario, but, as I've said in this space before, such diplomacy is a fool's errand. Beijing isn't worried about Iran lashing out against Israel but Saudi Arabia, its single biggest source of imported oil. So no matter how America seeks to shuffle the deck chairs, China's Titanic-sized fears will never be extinguished.

In the end, for all of Obama's grand rhetoric on ridding the world of nuclear weapons, history has doomed him to preside over the emergence of two rogue nuclear regimes (North Korea and Iran). China is clearly in charge of managing the true nutcase that is Kim Jong-Il, but Obama has a real opportunity with Iran. With his Nobel providing diplomatic top cover, the president should eventually be able to demand and obtain a regional security dialogue that calms down Tehran over regime change while drawing it into talks with both nuclear Israel and the inevitably nuclear Saudi Arabia.

Yes, it's a scary path. But the world has to walk down it, and this week was a big step.

Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released by Kim Zetter

2009-10-23T17:45:00.000-05:00

A group working to produce an open and transparent voting system to replace current proprietary systems has published its first batches of code for public review.

The Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) announced the availability of source code for its prototype election system Wednesday night at a panel discussion that included Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; California Secretary of State Debra Bowen; Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan; and Heather Smith, director of Rock the Vote.

The OSDV, co-founded by Gregory Miller and John Sebes, launched its Trust the Vote Project in 2006 and has an eight-year roadmap to produce a comprehensive, publicly owned, open source electronic election system. The system would be available for licensing to manufacturers or election districts, and would include a voter registration component; firmware for casting ballots on voting devices (either touch-screen systems with a paper trail, optical-scan machines or ballot-marking devices); and an election management system for creating ballots, administering elections and counting votes.

“How we vote has become just as important as who we vote for,” Miller told the audience of filmmakers and technologists who gathered at the Bel-Air home of film producer Lawrence Bender to hear about the project. “We think it is imperative that the infrastructure on which we cast and count our ballots is an infrastructure that is publicly owned.”

Miller said the foundation wasn’t looking to put voting system companies out of business but to assume the heavy burden and costs of research and development to create a trustworthy system that will meet the needs of election officials for reliability and the needs of the voting public for accessibility, transparency, security and integrity.

“We believe we’re catalyzing a re-birth of the industry … by making the blueprint available to anyone who wants to use it,” Miller said.

The foundation has elicited help from academics and election officials from eight states as well as voter advocacy groups, such as Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters, to guide developers in building the system. Technology bigwigs such as Oracle, Sun and IBM have also approached the group to help with the project.

“That was unexpected,” Miller said.

The code currently available for download and review represents only a small part of the total code and includes parts of an online voter registration portal and tracking system, election management software and a vote tabulator. Prototype code for producing ballots has been completed and will be posted soon. Code for auditing is still being designed.

The voting firmware and tabulator program are built on a minimized Linux platform (a stripped down version of Sharp) and the election management components are built with Ruby on Rails.

The foundation already has California, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington interested in adopting the system and is in talks with 11 other states. Florida, which has been racked by voting machine problems since the 2000 presidential debacle, has also expressed interest, as has Georgia, which uses machines made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) statewide.

“Currently two vendors impact 80 percent of the vote” nationwide, Miller said, referring to Premier/Diebold and Election Systems & Software, which recently merged in a sale. But if all the states that have expressed interest in adopting the open source system follow through with implementing it, about 62 percent of the nation’s electorate would be voting on transparent, fully auditable machines he said.

The foundation is especially interested in getting a system that would be workable in Los Angeles County, the nation’s largest and most complex election district with 4.3 million voters casting ballots in seven languages.

“If Los Angeles County figures this out, we will have solved the problems for the rest of the country,” Miller said.

Kapor called the project “a breath of fresh air” and said it symbolized the kind of “disruptive innovation” that has characterized all of the best technological developments over the last thirty years.

Slick NASA iPhone App Puts Space in Your Pocket by Betsy Mason

2009-10-23T16:42:00.001-05:00

Can there ever be too many space photos? Here at Wired Science, we believe the answer is no, there can never be too many, or even enough, space photos. And now NASA is aiding our addiction by putting its huge collection of mind-blowing space photos in our pockets.

The new NASA iPhone app means that even when you are away from your computer (or telescope), you can gawk at nebulas and sunspots. NASA’s image-of-the-day and astronomy-photo-of-the-day collections are right there in searchable thumbnail grids. (We like the “nebula” and “mass ejection” searches.) Plus, you can e-mail or save them to your phone. It’s hard to think of a better way to get nerdy/sublime backgrounds than this app.

You can also watch videos from NASA TV of science updates, mission activity, rocket launches and other events. Another fun option is checking in on NASA’s various missions with status updates and live countdowns clocks. And if you need to know exactly where the International Space Station or space shuttle is right now, NASA has you covered with their orbit tracks overlain on Google Earth or a map with political boundaries, or both.

The New Untouchables by Thomas L. Friedman

2009-10-23T06:31:00.000-05:00

Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about — our struggling public schools — was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.

In our subprime era, we thought we could have the American dream — a house and yard — with nothing down. This version of the American dream was delivered not by improving education, productivity and savings, but by Wall Street alchemy and borrowed money from Asia.

A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won’t be just a passing phase, but our future.

“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”

This problem will be reversed only when the decline in worker competitiveness reverses — when we create enough new jobs and educated workers that are worth, say, $40-an-hour compared with the global alternatives. If we don’t, there’s no telling how “jobless” this recovery will be.

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.

As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

Israel, US rehearse state of the art air defence umbrella by Gavin Rabinowitz

2009-10-22T14:06:00.001-05:00

A massive air defence drill under way in Israel will join Israeli and US systems to create the world's most advanced anti-missile umbrella to protect the Jewish state, officials said on Thursday.

The Juniper Cobra 10 exercises, the fifth in a series of joint air defence drills between the allies, began this week and comes amid heightened tension between Israel and arch-foe Iran.

Some 1,000 US soldiers will take part in the two-week exercise combining Israeli and US systems to "create the world's most advanced air defence system to protect our citizens and homes from attack," the commander of Israel's Air Defence Corps, Brigadier General Doron Gavish, told reporters. Israeli and US commanders refused to describe the scenarios they are simulating, but said they would practise merging different anti-missile systems that defend simultaneously against long-, medium- and short-range missiles.

Israeli media reported that the exercise would likely include a scenario of a combined attack from Iran together with shorter range barrages from Syria and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Rear Admiral John Richardson, the commander of the US forces, said systems used would include the American THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence), the ship-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defence System, and the Patriot anti-aircraft system, as well as the Israeli Arrow (Hetz) II.

Israel and the US have cooperated in missile defence since the US sent batteries of Patriot missiles to Israel during the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein fired dozens of Scud missiles at Israel.

Israel's air defences have since been further tested. Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into Israel during the 2006 conflict in Lebanon and Palestinian militants have lobbed thousands of improvised rockets from the Gaza Strip.

The exercises were purely defensive and, planned nearly two years in advance, were not in reaction to any current world events, the generals said. But they come amid heightened tensions between Israel and Iran. Israel, the sole if undeclared nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, has never ruled out a resort to military action to stop Iran's nuclear drive which the West suspects is aimed at making nuclear weapons but Tehran insists is only for peaceful ends.

Iran for its part has recently tested missiles that put Israel within range and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said that the Holocaust was a "myth" and that Israel was doomed to be "wiped off the map."

NCS Develops Material That Could Boost Data Storage, Save Energy by J. Narayan, Sudhakar Nori, S. Ramachandran, and J.T. Prater, and NCSU

2009-10-22T12:01:00.000-05:00

North Carolina State University engineers have created a new material that would allow a fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text, far exceeding the storage capacities of today’s computer memory systems.

Led by Dr. Jagdish “Jay” Narayan, John C.C. Fan Family Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and director of the National Science Foundation Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures at NC State, the engineers made their breakthrough using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material that changes its properties. The process also shows promise for boosting vehicles’ fuel economy and reducing heat produced by semiconductors, a potentially important development for more efficient energy production.

Working at the nanometer level — a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers — the engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers, a 90 percent size reduction compared to today’s techniques and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity.

“Instead of making a chip that stores 20 gigabytes, you have one that can handle one terabyte, or 50 times more data,” Narayan says.

Information storage is not the only area where advances could be made. By introducing metallic properties into ceramics, Narayan says engineers could develop a new generation of ceramic engines able to withstand twice the temperatures of normal engines and achieve fuel economy of 80 miles per gallon. And since the thermal conductivity of the material would be improved, the technique could also have applications in harnessing alternative energy sources like solar energy.

The engineers’ discovery also advances knowledge in the emerging field of “spintronics,” which is dedicated to harnessing energy produced by the spinning of electrons. Most energy used today is harnessed through the movement of current and is limited by the amount of heat that it produces, but the energy created by the spinning of electrons produces no heat. The NC State engineers were able to manipulate the nanomaterial so the electrons’ spin within the material could be controlled, which could prove valuable to harnessing the electrons’ energy. The finding could be important for engineers working to produce more efficient semiconductors.

Working with Narayan on the study were Dr. Sudhakar Nori, a research associate at NC State, Shankar Ramachandran, a former NC State graduate student, and J.T. Prater, an adjunct professor of materials science and engineering. Their findings are published as “The Synthesis and Magnetic Properties of a Nanostructured Ni-MgO System,” which appeared in the June edition of JOM, the journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society. The research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

An abstract of the paper follows.

Title: “The Synthesis and Magnetic Properties of a Nanostructured Ni-MGO System”

Authors: J. Narayan, Sudhakar Nori, S. Ramachandran, and J.T. Prater, NC State University

Published: June 2009 in JOM

Abstract: We have investigated the magnetic properties of the Ni-MgO system with an Ni concentration of 0.5 at.%. In as-grown crystals, Ni ions occupy substitutional Mg sites. Under these conditions the Ni-MgO system behaves as a perfect paramagnet. By using a controlled annealing treatment in a reducing atmosphere, we were able to induce clustering and form pure Ni precipitates in the nanometer size range. The size distribution of precipitates or nanodots is varied by changing annealing time and temperature. Magnetic properties of specimens ranging from perfect paramagnetic to ferromagnetic characteristics have been studied systematically to establish structure-property correlations. The spontaneous magnetization data for the samples, where Ni was precipitated randomly in MgO host, fits well to Bloch’s T3/2-law and has been explained within the framework of spin wave theory predictions.

Novatel MiFi 2200 Firmware Update Available Now for Verizon MiFi

2009-10-22T11:12:00.002-05:00

The Verizon MiFi 2200 was the first to launch back in May. At the time of the launch, a few quirks were noted, the wierdest being the fact that the Verizon version would always be a live hotspot when plugged into a/c power.

New firmware for Verizon MiFi is now available. If you only ever connect to your MiFi via WiFi, its entirely possible you will never see a notice that the firmware upgrade is available.

Verizon has yet to put out any official release notes to explain what the new firmware changes... but there are rumors out there, and we have been able to confirm the following:

The Verizon MiFi will not automatically turn on its WiFi hotspot feature when plugged into its a/c wall charger.

The Verizon MiFi's web admin now shows an animated battery icon while it is being charged.