Tag Archive for 'militaryindustrial'

DARPA brings Web 2.0 prowess to the battlefield

Published on 27 April 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

tigr

An interesting interview about TIGR, a recently deployed DARPA project in Afghanistan and Iraq. With a timeliness which is impressive for its contemporary awareness, TIGR integrates many layers of data (satellite photos, census data, road conditions) with metadata generated by military patrols (attack reports, experience with certain houses, etc). In this way, knowledge that is lost when units cycle out of a certain districts is able to be transferred to their replacements. The interview gives a sense of the development process, infrastructure and the uses of the system. I wonder if this sort of thing will be deployed in domestic law enforcement. In any event, it is interesting to observe how the widespread fervor and innovation of Web 2.0 technologies in the civilian realm prefigure military applications — almost a reverse dual use to the things.  [link]

A sampling of the post-war visual culture of tech

Published on 5 April 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

An assortment of science and technology ads from the 1950s and 60s has been collected on this flickr page. Many of the modernist illustrations used by the ad agencies are quite fantastic. I suppose that thoughts of intercontinental ballistic missiles, vacuum tubes, thin ties and cigarettes lend themselves to this sort of thing:

A hidden chronicle of horrific destruction

Published on 12 November 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

A rather entrancing article, published originally in the Guardian, meditates on the hidden images of America’s “last good war.” Following the surrender of Japan in WWII, the US issued a strict writ of censorship stating that “nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility.” Consequently, the atomic bombings in Japan have become, as the novelist Mary McCarthy wrote in 1946, “a kind of hole in human history,” unaccompanied by much of a visual record. The article follows the discovery of an amazing cache of photographs, previously unseen to the public, taken by the US Military’s Physical Damage Division at the end of the war:

One rainy night eight years ago, in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the curb, in front of a neighbor’s house, he spotted a pile of trash: old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. Amidst the garbage he caught sight of a battered suitcase. He bent down, turned the case on its side and popped the clasps.

He was surprised to discover that the suitcase was full of black-and-white photographs. He was even more astonished by their subject matter: devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges — snapshots from an annihilated city. He quickly closed the case and made his way back home.

At the kitchen table, he looked through the photographs again and confirmed what he had suspected. He was looking at something he had never seen before: the effects of the first use of the Atomic bomb. The man was looking at Hiroshima. [link]

Resolving the Golden Shield

Published on 28 October 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Throwing a bit dye into the geist, a group of programmers have developed a Firefox plugin that will route your websurfing through a Chinese server, thus allowing you to get sense of what sort of Internet the Chinese state security services have in mind for their citizens. [Link to the plugin project website]

The control that governments, and other interested parties, can exert over one’s websurfing can take a much more insidious form than simply block content. Through some form of packet injection, or server based cacheing, web pages can be changed en route to the web browser, thus allowing for the manipulation of the user’s trust and expectation.

For more information, The Atlantic published an interesting article during the 2008 Olympics about the limitations and scope of the system.

Discrete circuits; or, Trojan architecture

Published on 23 October 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

IEEE Spectrum published an article this past May about the growing concern within defense circles about the loss of oversight along the military hardware supply chain. With many of the semiconductor components manufactured in the People’s Republic of China, rumors and fears of maliciously implanted “backdoors” abound:

According to a U.S. defense contractor who spoke on condition of anonymity, a “European chip maker” recently built into its microprocessors a kill switch that could be accessed remotely. French defense contractors have used the chips in military equipment, the contractor told IEEE Spectrum. If in the future the equipment fell into hostile hands, “the French wanted a way to disable that circuit,” he said. Spectrum could not confirm this account independently, but spirited discussion about it among researchers and another defense contractor last summer at a military research conference reveals a lot about the fever dreams plaguing the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)…

Vetting a chip with a hidden agenda can’t be all that tough, right? Wrong. Although commercial chip makers routinely and exhaustively test chips with hundreds of millions of logic gates, they can’t afford to inspect everything. So instead they focus on how well the chip performs specific functions. For a microprocessor destined for use in a cellphone, for instance, the chip maker will check to see whether all the phone’s various functions work. Any extraneous circuitry that doesn’t interfere with the chip’s normal functions won’t show up in these tests…

Nor can chip makers afford to test every chip. From a batch of thousands, technicians select a single chip for physical inspection, assuming that the manufacturing process has yielded essentially identical devices. They then laboriously grind away a thin layer of the chip, put the chip into a scanning electron microscope, and then take a picture of it, repeating the process until every layer of the chip has been imaged. Even here, spotting a tiny discrepancy amid a chip’s many layers and millions or billions of transistors is a fantastically difficult task, and the chip is destroyed in the process…

The Pentagon is now caught in a bind. It likes the cheap, cutting-edge devices emerging from commercial foundries and the regular leaps in IC performance the commercial sector is known for. But with those improvements comes the potential for sabotage. “The economy is globalized, but defense is not globalized,” says Coleman. “How do you reconcile the two?” [link]

With respect to recent news pertaining to electronic security and surveillance see also:

An elegy thought over the carrion of a nighthawk

Published on 20 September 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

This was really such a startling picture to come across. The F-117 Nighthawk was certainly for me, and I think at least for many boys growing up around the collapse of the Soviet Union, the quintisential icon of the infinite possibility of American military technology. It was The Stealth Fighter, invisible, invincible, built of a super high tech material that would absorb radar and make the whole plane look no bigger than a sparrow upon an enemy’s screen. It was super top secret, and even knowing about it gave one the sense of some how being included in all of that intrigue and magic. But, if WE know about THIS, can you just imagine all the things they are not telling us? They must even more fantastic things, maybe even X-Files and secret UFO technology. They did, after all, develop and test it at Area 51.

But now here it is. Torn apart by an ordinary Caterpillar excavator, reduced to a formless tangle of industrial material, like one saw in the pictures dispatched from New Orleans, or South Ossetia. Giving up the ghost, the spell is broke, the charm is flown. There was so much promise in you, oh Nighthawk. Yours was a special place, a harbinger from the coast, signaling the floods would soon recede and Eden would be reclaimed. But as they have stripped you of your feathers, we too must go naked for a season.

[link]

On farming data shadows and other aluminium sleakness

Published on 17 September 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Schneier on Security has an interesting bit on identity farming today. The idea essentially runs that one can incubate rock solid fake identities if they have 25 years during which to fabricate the birth of children, open bank accounts in their names, fill out the relevant paper work to have them home schooled, and otherwise scatter little bread crumbs here and there (apparently this is also a premise common in Highlander fan faction as a plot technique through which the immortals continue to stay integrated in human society). It is through these techniques that one creates, as Schneier nicely phrases it, a data shadow for the fictitious identity. This all could work, right, because it is the data shadow itself that is the salient aspect of one’s existence as a citizen-consumer and not really their corporeal person as such.

As a good case in point – one that also reveals the absurdity of the US’s paper tiger homeland security initiatives — a Quebec business man who had his identity stolen, consequentially winding up on a US terror watch list, was ultimately able to circumvent the travails of security check point purgatory by changing his name from Mario Labbé to François Mario Labbé . It seems its created a bit of a fresh start for him:  F. Mario Labbé can now pass through airport security unaccosted because of a vulnerability in, what we can perhaps refer to in a bit of biblical sounding legalese. the Several Databases.

It seems that this idea of a data shadow can be potentially quite powerful. It certainly has the ring of one of those buzz phrases that, like a sleak aluminum frame, can house either a powerbook or a fighter jet. Now what is wanting is for the notion to get caught in an updraft and to be transformed into the cynosure of public attention. At least, that would be nice.

Tall tales emerging from the shadows

Published on 5 September 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Wow is this real? Or some sort of misinformation about US military technologies? Perhaps being spread in some attempt to reflect the total fear of terrorism that is nurtured within the US as a tool to demoralize those communities abroad that the US considers its enemies.

By analyzing the movements of human shadows in aerial and satellite footage, JPL engineer Adrian Stoica says, it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk – a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person’s walking style is very hard to disguise. [link]

It would be rather challenging to do, but quite interesting to see how stories like this propagate on the ground in places like Afganistan. That portion of the blogosphere that concerns itself with technoscience and national security have certainly been abuzz with this story, and there has been quite solid propagation of it. But at what point, if really ever, do these types of stories jump the fence, as it were, and enter the rumor mill of the third world? Do the US intelligence services study this sort of thing?

The implications of this are rather wild, in any event. On the one hand, it is another expression of the contemporary’s interest in reducing phenomena to a statistical trace. You are an aggregation of variables that correlate only in your instance. You went to that coffee shop today because there was an 80% chance of it.

Maybe terrorists will start wearing big puffy suits to obscure their shadows. Actually it sounds like a great market opportunity, selling surplus Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory costumes to terrorists…

You can see it in the eyes, phantom planet syndrome it is

Published on 1 September 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Brainloop is an interactive performance platform that utilizes a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system which allows a subject to operate devices merely by imagining specific motor commands. These mentally visualized commands may be seen as the rehearsal of a motor act without the overt motor output; a neural synapse occurs but the actual movement is blocked at the corticospinal level. Motor imagery such as “move left hand”, “move right hand” or “move feet” become non-muscular communication and control signals that convey messages and commands to the external world. In Brainloop the performer is able – without physically moving – to investigate urban areas and rural landscapes as he globe-trots around virtual Google Earth. Through motor imagery, he selects locations, camera angles and positions and records these image sequences in a virtual world. In the second half of the performance, he plays back the sequence and uses Brainloop to compose a custom soundtrack by selecting, manipulating and re-locating audio recordings in real time into the physical space. [link]

Mercenary optics come to a blog post near you

Published on 17 July 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Attributor, a silicon valley start up a few years and 32-million dollars in the making, provides an impressive panorama of cyberspace. Employing similar techniques to Google’s search indexing process, Attributor dispatches spiders across the web that search all new content published in the blogosphere and social networks. Its objective in this exploration is to monitor the usage and propagation of copyrighted material and to use this information either to intervene or to study the pathology of viral content.

As might be expected, this business model has quite a bit of traction in the market today. Indeed, Attributor has scored some large contracts for their wide-net surveillance system including Reuters, The Associated Press and the Conde Nast Group.

But what does this type of system foretell about the relationship between the producers of media and those who comment upon and critique it? The arguments posed on the web run rather simply: A. Surveillance technologies like Attributor impede the flow of information by creating circumstances of a de facto, abusive restriction of fair use OR B. Content management technologies like Attributor allow content creators to benefit from their work by having total knowledge of its online uses and either (1) being able to collect credit\revenue from it or (2) to better appreciate the reception of their own work by the public.

Both sides certainly have some points in their favor, but regardless of the synthetic arguments that can be eloquently presented on the issue, there are some underlying creepy forces at play. Marketing materials for Attributor proclaim a near real time awareness of content across 19 Billion pages throughout the web. What are the implications of such a vast, mercenary optics? What do the designators private and public mean when one is applying them to discourse on the web? Certainly everything published and accessible by means of an open hyper text transfer protocol is offered up to the public, but what about an industrial-automated surveillance robot? Is such an entity entitled to interface with the public? Does it have rights? An old world analogue of what Attributor does would involve, let us say, an author writing about new airship technology who quotes a Boeing press release. Consequent to this, Boeing dispatches a van to sit in front of said author’s house and photograph it for a few minutes before driving off.

One must ask, is this a reasonable research initiative on the part of Boeing so that they may understand the architectural and design environments of those people that write about them, or a a type of coercive invasion? How do things change when the case becomes one computer connecting to another instead of men in vans with cameras? Is it more seemly because it is simply a relationship of two machines? Or is something of the first moment preserved? Since it is an actor upon the stage, who is this virtually unknown visitor, what is Attributor?