Tag Archive for 'militaryindustrial'

A hidden chronicle of horrific destruction

Published
by
marc
on 12 November 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

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
by
marc
on 28 October 2008
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

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
by
marc
on 23 October 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

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
by
marc
on 20 September 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

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
by
marc
on 17 September 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

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
by
marc
on 5 September 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

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
by
marc
on 1 September 2008
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

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
by
marc
on 17 July 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

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?

When does one capitalize “Never”?

Published
by
marc
on 16 July 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

In a bizarre twist brought about by the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Pripyat (((1985: population 50,000))) is getting a new lease on life. People will never move back into the deteriorating Soviet-era apartments. Instead, scientists are planning to use the radioactive ghost town as a unique laboratory for modeling the dispersal of radionuclides by the detonation of a dirty bomb. [Article from Science: PDF]

Will people never live there again? 24,000 years from now - if the zone’s keepers are right, and if the reactor’s extra-human carcinogenic hell raising center is safely interred, not having leaked into the River Dneiper, then half of the plutonium 239 buried at Chernobyl will still be there. If this does not inspire the journalist to capitalize the designation never, can it ever in good grammar suffer such aggrandizement? To capitalize a letter out of turn, what is this act of writing? The shortest answer would be for emphasis. But to do so to a common word is to possibly conflate it with a Proper noun (if this is the case, then what the hell is an iPhone?). Is such a conflation desirable under any circumstance? What would the proper noun Never refer to? Is it a collective will of humanity? A hope for a collective will expressed by an author? But who except the most depraved amongst the humans would contradict a foreclosure of such disaster? Is this not a natural position of the human? An indelible position that suffers no history and knows no abberation?

Well let US meditate on the matter, recalling the facts at hand:

Nobody has to twist the facts of Chernobyl. One by one the Ukrainian, Belarus and Russian health chiefs recite their litanies of loss. The figures are on an unimaginable scale. Some 23 per cent of the land of Belarus is contaminated, and on that land live 20 per cent of the population. More than 250,000 hectares of farmland have been closed down; 130,000 have had to be resettled.

Childhood thyroid cancer is 90 times the levels before 1986. There will be 140 cases of thyroid cancer every year. Breast cancer is on the increase; so are disorders of the blood circulation. Almost 2 million people in 3,331 towns and villages need “special attention”. The republic needs “clean” food, diagnostic equipment, radiation instruments and rehabilitation centres, and will need to spend $400-500m between now and 1995.

The Ukrainians tell a similar story: 190 people have acute radiation sickness; 20,000 have lost the capacity to work; there are 130,000 evacuees; there are 1.5 million children whose thyroid glands received radiation doses. There are people with respiratory disease, heart troubles and nervous system disorders. There are increased digestive problems, tonsilitis, anaemia and stress. There is an increase in suicide. There are children with “Chernobyl syndrome”.

The Russians, too, tell of 2.6 million people in 7,608 contaminated towns; of a 25 per cent increase in tumours; of a 50 per cent increase in cardiovascular disorders; of locomotor apparatus diseases.

Scientists refer to the zone as a “unique laboratory” and scientists from 28 nations have worked there. But it is difficult to feel objective about it. Here is a landscape so contaminated by its only heavy industry that it has been turned inside out: used as its own graveyard, buried within itself. Most of the iodine 131 disappeared long ago. In another 20 years, the strontium 90 will have fallen to half its original burden. In another 20 years, half of the caesium 137 will have disintegrated.

But 24,000 years from now - if the zone’s keepers are right, and the stuff is safely interred, and hasn’t leaked into the River Dneiper - half of the plutonium 239 buried in it will still be there. [link]

An abandoned village house near Chernobyl

There are even tantalising footprints of a bear, an animal that has not trodden this part of Ukraine for centuries.

“Animals don’t seem to sense radiation and will occupy an area regardless of the radiation condition,” says radioecologist Sergey Gaschak.

“A lot of birds are nesting inside the sarcophagus,” he adds, referring to the steel and concrete shield erected over the reactor that exploded in 1986. [link]

The Red Forest is located in the “zone of alienation”: this area received the highest doses of radiation from the Chernobyl accident and the resulting clouds of smoke and dust. The name ‘Red Forest’ comes from the ginger-brown colour of the pine trees after they died following the absorption of high levels of radiation from the Chernobyl accident on April 26, 1986. In the post-disaster cleanup operations, the Red Forest was bulldozed and buried into ‘waste graveyards’. The explosion and fire at the Chernobyl No. 4 reactor contaminated the soil, water and atmosphere with the radiation equivalent to 20 of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A compendium of new airship projects

Published
by
marc
on 15 July 2008
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

1918: View from a French dirigible approaching a boat

There has been a recent flurry, coming up here and there, of interest in dirigibles as a carbon-neutral stand in’s for the usual high-octane, bone-soup, fire-eating jetplanes. While this seems to be no more than a nostalgic, steam-punk, flight of the imagination, return to earlier fantasies of a domesticated airspace (see also: 1. Problems with Hellium sourcing (its an expensive strategic resource, suffering, like all other commodities, a 50% price increase in 2007), 2. the fact that airships can only travel about 100mph and despite there very large size, 3. hold only a small fraction of the passengers that commercialaircraft do, 4. Turbulent weather saftey issues yet to be resolved), some interesting military-industrial and plutocratic appropriations and reinventions of airship technology have been circulating in the recent weeks\months. For an overview, see below.

Tactical spy derrigibles for any occasion

BAE intends to test-fly a 22-meter-long airship designed by balloonist Per Lindstrom(((That is the same Per who flew around in a balloon with Richard Branson, with whom he briefly got stranded  when their balloon crashed in the Canadian tundra)))). Known as the GA22, it is scheduled to fly in September.The vehicle could become a regular feature of the skyline, providing civil and military surveillance and communications-relay capabilities.BAE started out looking for a platform that could provide communications relay for the military, Williams said, but quickly realized the airship could have a great future as a civil surveillance platform - policing events like the Olympics and shipping lanes like the English Channel. [via]

Hello Sky Hook, good-bye “Ice-Road Truckers”

The Boeing Company and SkyHook International have engaged in a joint venture to develop the JHL-40 (Jess Heavy Lifter), a new commercial heavy-lift rotorcraft designed to address the limitations and expense of transporting equipment and materials in remote regions. The neutrally buoyant feature allows SkyHook to safely carry payloads unmatched by any rotorcraft in existence today.

The helium-filled envelope is sized to support the weight of the vehicle and fuel without payload. With the empty weight of the aircraft supported by the envelope, the lift generated by four rotors is dedicated solely to lifting the payload, leaving the aircraft neutrally buoyant.

The SkyHook JHL-40 aircraft will be capable of lifting a 40-ton sling load and transporting it up to 200 miles without refueling in harsh environments such as the Canadian Arctic and Alaska (((see also the History Channel’s ethnography\demographic-pandering reality TV show, Ice Road Truckers))).  [via]

Blimp or Battlespace Command Center de Luxe?

The Lockheed Martin High Altitude Airship (HAATM), an un-tethered, unmanned lighter-than-air vehicle, will operate above the jet stream in a geostationary position to deliver persistent station keeping as a surveillance platform, telecommunications relay, or a  weather observer.  The HAA also provides the Warfighter (((thats with a capital W))) affordable (((yep, even warfighters got to watch the old AmEx… wait, no they dont))), ever-present Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance and rapid communications connectivity over the entire battle space. The technology is available now and ready for integration and flight test ((((yippy?))).

This updated concept of a proven technology takes lighter-than-air vehicles into a realm that gives users capabilities on par with satellites at a fraction of the cost (1 to 2 orders of magnitude less).  The HAA will also integrate reconfigurable, multi-mission payload suites.  HAA is significantly less costly to deploy and operate and other airborne platforms, and supports critical missions for defense, homeland security, and other civil applications.  Its operational persistence eliminates the need for in-theater logistic support.  In position, an airship would survey a 600-mile diameter area and millions of cubic miles of airspace.

High-strength fabrics to minimize hull weight, thin-film solar arrays for the regenerative power supply, and lightweight propulsion units are key technologies ready to make a high-flying airship a reality.  The combination of photovoltaic and advanced energy storage systems delivers the necessary power to perform the airship functions.  Propulsion units will maintain the airship’s geostationary position above the jet stream, propel it aloft and guide its takeoff and landing during ascent and descent.  Lighter-than-air vehicles, operating at altitudes above controlled airspace under the control of a manned ground station, give users the flexibility to change payload equipment when the airship returns to its operational base to perform different tasks. [link] [brochure]

Prototype air-yacht for those ponderous sky cruises over the mercury filled skies of Shanghai

Set to be launched next month, the whale-like Aeros ML866 uses a combination of buoyancy (like a blimp) and lift (like a plane) to cruise comfortably through the air with over 5,000 square feet of interior room. It can take off vertically, without taking up runway time at crowded airports, which is perfect for your plutocrat on the run who cannot be bothered with the delays of mere millionaires. And although the Aeros ML866 is designed to fit a “business center” with video conferencing, perhaps it should rather perfer to have a swimming pool with adjoining hot tub, and a few of those 103-inch plasmas that Panasonic is so proud of.