http://www.alternet.org/story/148211/hypersonic_death_5_shocking_weapon_programs_developed_for_assasination

Hypersonic Death? 5 Shocking Weapon Programs Developed for Assasination

Military researchers have turned their attention from mass destruction to a far more precise challenge: finding, tracking, and killing individuals
September 20, 2010  |  
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Popular Science magazine has a hair-raising article by reporter Sharon Weinberger about the Pentagon's shift of funding to focusing on technologies that can kill individuals -- at least $58 billion worth. While much of it is still in the research phase, there are indications that some of this is in use in the field, killing people right now.
1. Deadly Dust and Smart Fleas
Mass bombing techniques were developed by the US in WW II, and "perfected" in Southeast Asia, but until recently, technology for assassinating individuals was not as advanced.  The Clandestine Tagging, Tracking and Locating initiative is set to receive $210 million in on-the-books money over the next five years, Popular Science reports, and may well rake in much more in the classified budget.
We learn that there are "biodegradable fluorescent 'taggants' that can be scattered by UAVs." -- "Voxtel, a private firm in Oregon, has already made available a product called NightMarks, a nanocrystal that can be seen through night-vision goggles and can be hidden in anything from glass cleaner to petroleum jelly. Perhaps the most advanced tagging concept is 'smart dust,' clouds of 'motes,' tiny micro-electromechanical sensors that can attach themselves to people or vehicles.Thousands of these sensors would be scattered at a time to increase the chance of at least one of them reaching its target." Kris Pister, a professor at Berkeley created sensors the size of "rice grains" and imagined  "'smart burrs' that could attach to a target’s clothing as he or she brushed by, or 'smart fleas' that could jump onto their targets."
2. Project Anubis, up and Running?
 A video depicting "an explosives-laden drone dive-bombing and killing a sniper" from the Air Force Research Laboratory suggests that future micro un-manned aerial vehicles "might be equipped with 'incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads, or even explosives for precision targeting capability.'" Popular Science reports that military documents point to "Project Anubis (named for the ancient Egyptian god of the dead) is now complete, which means a lethal micro-drone could already be in the field."
3. Tracking Chips for Cash
Popular Science resurfaces a UK Guardian report that recounts how CIA handed over some kind of tracking "chips" to Pakistani tribe members to "plant in the homes of insurgents, who would later be killed by CIA drone strikes" and highlights that NBC revealed a videotaped confession of a Pakistani who says he took payment from the US in exchange for planting tiny chips.
4. Microwave Weapons
The article reports on "directed-energy weapons that can disarm or disable individuals, including the Counter-Electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), an effort ... to develop a UAV-mounted microwave weapon to fry enemy electronics." Popular Science resurfaces a USA Today article from earlier this year where Pentagon officials said the "U.S. was attempting to deploy an energy-beam weapon in Afghanistan that could detonate hidden explosives from a distance," which could include one program that is promoting how blast "microwaves to mimic the electromagnetic pulse released by a nuclear explosion."
5. Hypersonic Death
The Pentagon also has in the works "a hypersonic weapon, essentially a cruise missile capable of traveling at many times the speed of sound -- faster than anything in today’s conventional arsenal." The missile would launch into the "atmosphere by rockets and then glide back to Earth at hypersonic speeds," part of a Pentagon concept called Prompt Global Strike. Popular Science points to three other programs using "ramjets" and "scramjets," which "achieve rocket-like speeds without the heavy burden of liquid oxygen by mixing jet fuel with compressed air that enters the engine from the atmosphere."


John Adams Project Lawyer confronted by 'The O'Reilly Factor' video 9/8/09 (Valerie Plame-Dick Cheney mentioned)
http://www.freedomslighthouse.com/2009/09/john-adams-project-lawyer-confronted-by.html


http://library.thinkquest.org/27158/concept2_1.html
EXCERPT:
History
After World War II, the U.S. Government, and many U.S. companies began to pick up the development of encryption. For the public, there was little to cryptography outside the ciphers printed in the Sunday paper, but there was great public interest. Despite this public interest, most of the communications for civilians were written on paper, and often sealing wax was security enough for communications. The revolution in computers and electronic communication blew the doors wide open for civilian research into cryptography. As wired and wireless communication grew, so did the need for encryption that governments had long recognized.
In the late 1960’s, IBM’s chairman Tomas Watson, Jr., set up a cryptography research group at his company’s Yorktown Heights research laboratory in New York. The group, led by Horst Feistel, developed a private key encryption system called ‘Lucifer’. IBM’s first customer for Lucifer was Lloyd’s of London, which bought the code in 1971 to protect a cash-dispensing system that IBM had developed for the insurance conglomerate.
IBM then created a group to turn the cipher into a commercial product. The team was lead by Dr. Walter Tuchman, a 38-year-old engineer with a doctorate in information theory, and Dr. Carl Meyer, a 42-year-old electrical engineer. They wanted to put Lucifer on a silicon chip. In the process of development, the algorithm was tested, some flaws were discovered and the cipher was strengthened against cryptanalyic attacks. By 1974, the cipher algorithm and chip were ready for market. Lucifer was not unique, however. At that time in history, many companies sold codes and ciphers; mostly to overseas governments, each was different, there were no standards involved, no independent body to certify their security. Thanks to the US govt. things were about to change.
In 1968, the National Bureau

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher
EXCERPT:
History
Lucifer is generally considered to be the first civilian block cipher, developed at IBM in the 1970s based on work done by Horst Feistel. A revised version of the algorithm was adopted as a US government FIPS standard, the Data Encryption Standard (DES). It was chosen by the US National Bureau of Standards (NBS) after a public invitation for submissions and some internal changes by NBS (and, potentially, the NSA). DES was publicly released in 1976 and has been widely used.



Cryptography    

Originated with early 1970's IBM effort to develop banking security systems; 1970's - Dr. Horst Feistal invented DES. RSA 1977. Rivest-Shamir-Adelman ...
www.cs.gsu.edu/~cscyqz/courses/aos/slides08/ch8.4-Fall0... www.cs.gsu.edu/~cscyqz/courses/aos/slides08/ch8.4-Fall08.ppt


http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/science-scope/building-a-real-world-web-with-smart-dust/1673/
EXCERPT:
With ’smart dust,’ a trillion sensors scattered around the globe
By Boonsri Dickinson |
Kris Pister has been fiddling with smart dust since the 1990s. Originally, the idea was to deploy dust-sized sensors randomly around the environment, so the Earth could be monitored in real-time.
“It’s exciting. It’s been a long time coming,” Pister, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told CNN News. “I coined the phrase 14 years ago. So smart dust has taken a while, but it’s finally here.”
It’s here, but in a bigger and more controlled way. Enter HP Lab’s Central Nervous System for Earth (CeNSE), a plan to send out a trillion sensors around the globe.
The small matchbook sized monitors will have sensors that are similar to what is in the iPhone but are much more powerful. After the smart dust is packaged with a protecting layer, it’s not exactly the size of a dust particle. It’s more like the size of a VHS tape.
In a couple years, HP will work with Royal Dutch Shell to install 1 million of the smart dust sensors to measure rock vibrations and movements to give them a smarter way to look for oil. Currently, half the oil wells turned out to be dry, so knowing where the abundant places to drill would help.

http://www.pakalertpress.com/2010/10/10/what-kind-of-top-secret-assassination-tech-does-58-billion-buy/
EXCERPT:
Tagging and Tracking: The U.S. military may already be surreptitiously “tagging” enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan with chemicals, sensors or bioreactive agents and then tracking them from a distance. It may also be using wireless-enabled sensors smaller than a grain of rice, each complete with a minuscule computer chip, to do the same thing. Kris Pister, a researcher who conducted early work on “smart dust”—tiny tracking devices that can be showered onto people or vehicles—says that scattering sensors onto targets from drones is “straightforward.”  Jon Proctor

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/31unboxed.html
EXCERPT:
Smart Dust? Not Quite, but We’re Getting There
By STEVE LOHR


In computing, the vision always precedes the reality by a decade or more. The pattern has held true from the personal computer to the Internet, as it takes time, brainpower and investment to conquer the scientific and economic obstacles to nudging a game-changing technology toward the mainstream.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Peter Hartwell of Hewlett-Packard Labs compares today’s computers to brains that are blind to their surroundings. But development of low-cost sensors, he says, is “closing that gap.”
The same pattern, according to scientists in universities and corporate laboratories, is unfolding in the field of sensor-based computing. Years ago, enthusiasts predicted the coming of “smart dust” — tiny digital sensors, strewn around the globe, gathering all sorts of information and communicating with powerful computer networks to monitor, measure and understand the physical world in new ways. But this intriguing vision seemed plucked from the realm of science fiction.
Smart dust, to be sure, remains a ways off. But technology’s virtuous cycle of smaller, faster and cheaper has reached the point that experts say sensors may soon be powerful enough to be the equivalent of tiny computers. Some ambitious sensor research projects provide a glimpse of where things are headed.
Last year, Hewlett-Packard began a project it grandly calls “Central Nervous System for the Earth,” a 10-year initiative to embed up to a trillion pushpin-size sensors around the globe. H.P. researchers, combining electronics and nanotechnology expertise, announced in November that they had developed sensors with accelerometers that were up to 1,000 times more sensitive than the commercial motion detectors used in Nintendo Wii video game controllers and some smartphones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_RQ-11_Raven
EXCERPT:
The AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven is a small hand-launched remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle (or SUAV) developed for the U.S. military, but now adopted by the military forces of many other countries.
The RQ-11 Raven was originally introduced as the FQM-151 in 1999, but in 2002 developed into its current form.[2] The craft is launched by hand and powered by an electric motor. The plane can fly up to 6.2 miles (10.0 km) at up to altitudes of 10,000 feet (3,000 m) above ground level (AGL), and 15,000 feet (4,600 m) mean sea level (MSL), at flying speeds of 28-60 mph (45–97 km/h).[3]

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/tag/project-anubis/

All posts tagged ‘Project Anubis’

Air Force Completes Killer Micro-Drone Project


070820-N-4774B-052
The Air Force Research Laboratory set out in 2008 to build the ultimate assassination robot: a tiny, armed drone for U.S. special forces to employ in terminating “high-value targets.” The military won’t say exactly what happened to this Project Anubis, named after a jackal-headed god of the dead in Egyptian mythology. But military budget documents note that Air Force engineers were successful in “develop[ing] a Micro-Air Vehicle (MAV) with innovative seeker/tracking sensor algorithms that can engage maneuvering high-value targets.”
We have seen in recent years increased strikes by larger Predator and Reaper drones using Hellfire missiles against terrorist-leadership targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But these have three significant drawbacks.
First, you can never be quite sure of what you hit. In 2002’s notorious “Tall Man incident,” CIA operatives unleashed a Hellfire at an individual near Zhawar Kili in Afghanistan’s Paktia province. His unusual height convinced the drone controllers that the man was Bin Laden (who stands 6 feet, 5 inches). In fact, he was merely an innocent (if overgrown) Afghan peasant.
A second problem is that the Hellfire isn’t exactly the right weapon for the mission. Originally designed as an anti-tank missile, it’s not especially agile, nor is it designed to cope with a target that might swerve or dodge at the last second (like cars and motorbikes).
And thirdly, such strikes tend to affect a number of others, as well as the intended target. It raises the risk of killing or injuring innocent bystanders.
This was the rationale for Project Anubis. Special Forces already make extensive use of the Wasp drone made by AeroVironment. This is the smallest drone in service, weighing less than a pound. It has an endurance of around 45 minutes, and line-of-sight control extends to 3 miles.
It might seem limited compared to larger craft, but the Wasp excels at close-in reconnaissance. Its quiet electric motor means it can get near to targets without their ever being aware of its presence.
Continue Reading “Air Force Completes Killer Micro-Drone Project” »
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/04/smart-dust-aims-to-monito_n_562339.html

'Smart Dust' Aims To Monitor Everything

First Posted: 05- 4-10 09:16 AM   |   Updated: 05- 4-10 09:25 AM

Smart Dust
These "smart dust" particles, as he called them, would monitor everything, acting like electronic nerve endings for the planet. Fitted with computing power, sensing equipment, wireless radios and long battery life, the smart dust would make observations and relay mountains of real-time data about people, cities and the natural environment.
Now, a version of Pister's smart dust fantasy is starting to become reality.
Read the whole story: cnn.com
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http://cryptome.sabotage.org/0001/diffie-nsa.htm
EXCERPT:
2 January 2010. Cryptome: By comparing redactions of the Tom Johnson document at the National Security Archive with redactions in the one released by NSA to Cryptome, a number of differences were seen which revealed additional information. See NSA document updated after Diffie's comments were received.
2 January 2010
Martin Hellman on NSA and the Joseph Meyer letter: http://cryptome.sabotage.org/hellman/hellman-nsa.htm


Whitfield Diffie writes 1 January 2010:
Here are my comments on the NSA document you received. It turns out to be from Book III: Retrenchment and Reform of Tom Johnson's multi-volume history of NSA released under a different FOIA request in 2008. On balance this document is less heavily redacted than Johnson's full history but that version does answer some questions about this one. Some of the interlinear commentary was written before I figured out what this was and may look a little odd in that light.
I have put in line breaks where they were in the original in an attempt to produce a type facsimile.
My comments are indented one tab stop [marked Diffie:].


Begin NSA document. [--------------] Indicates redactions in original text.
DOCID: 3417193
[One-half page redacted.]
(U) PUBLIC CRYPTOGRAPHY
(U) Modern cryptography has, since its earliest days, been associated with governments. Amateurs there were, like Edgar Allan Poe, who dabbled in the art, and it has held a certain public fascination from the earliest days. But the discipline requires resources, and only governments could marshal the resources necessary to do the job seriously. By the end of World War II, American cryptology had become inextricably intertwined with the Army and Navy's codebreaking efforts at Arlington Hall and Nebraska Avenue. But this picture would begin changing soon after the war.

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-bat-bombs
EXCERPT:
America's Incredible Plan To Bomb WW2 Japan With Napalm Armed Bats
Mexican free tailed batPhoto: Ron Groves
Not even Tom McGuane and Albertus Magnus and Richter C. Perky all brainstorming together with Jack Daniels and George Dickel could have dreamed up an idea so robustly demented as this napalm-bat thing. It took a dental surgeon from Philadelphia named Lytle S. Adams.~ David Quammen
I admit that the idea of tying incendiary bombs to bats and releasing them over Japan sounds like a hoax on the level of the War of the Worlds debacle but it is absolutely, stunningly true - and to the tune of $2 million U.S. worth of research in 1940.
Tadarida brasiliensis outflight Hristov Carlsbad Caverns

http://www.techlearning.com/article/22410
In a recent post, Alan Levine discussed the use of a web tool called Your Flowing Data. Your Flowing Data(YFD), is a Twitter application that lets you collect data about yourself. It allows you to use direct messages from your Twitter account to track different types of data. Basically, once you have set up your account, you just send a direct message to YFD to note and track just about anything. In Alan's post he noted some of his uses including keeping track of his blood sugar readings, his bike trips and his running mileage. Basically anything you want to track you can do so.

Alan's post got me thinking of how I might use this tool. As a principal I make many visits to classrooms each day. Using the method that Alan discussed I am thinking I can use this to keep track of classroom visits throughout the school day. On my iPhone I use the Twitter application Tweetie to follow and post to Twitter. I anticipate using Tweetie to post direct messages to Your Flowing Data as I visit classrooms. I believe I will find this a pretty quick method to note and track which classrooms I have visited and help me to recognize patterns and make sure I am visiting all classrooms equally.

This morning I was testing this and posted some sample data. Once you have some data, you can use the tools on Your Flowing Data to look at that information in a calendar view, a cloud view, a timeline view and a treemap view. The screenshot below shows the treemap view for the sample data i submitted. I'm looking forward to following Alan's examples and utilize this tool to keep track of other things including the types of tasks I find myself doing during the school day.