Hyper Velocity Projectile program: the Navy’s electrically fired 5,600 mph GPS-guided bullet

The Office of Naval Research – the same entity which runs the Naval Research Laboratory, developers of the unbelievable Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot (SAFFiR) – apparently was not satisfied with their already astounding Electromagnetic Rail Gun.

A 5,600 mph electrically fired bullet apparently wasn’t enough, thus forcing the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to create one which also can be guided by Global Positioning System (GPS).

To set the bar even higher, if such a thing is possible, the United States Navy also wants to make this technology compatible with all of the Navy’s current artillery guns.



This technology apparently has so much promise that Admiral Gary Roughead, former top officer in the Navy, said of technology like this, as well as lasers, (which have already cost the taxpayer billions), “You’re beginning, maybe, to see the end of the dominance of the missile.”

Roughead even told Wired’s Danger Room last year that the rise of lasers will create a global military division between “countries that can afford to go into directed energy and countries that can’t,” with the countries that can afford the research having the obvious upper hand.

Read more: Activist Post

Pre-Crime Software Moves One Step Closer to Reality

The era of Big Data is upon us. Major corporations in the areas of advertising, social media, defense contracting, and computing are forming partnerships with government agencies to compile virtual dossiers on all humans.

This data integration initiative is taking place across the board in our largest federal agencies and departments as part of an Office of Science and Technology outline (PDF) that includes a $200 million upfront investment, as well as a $250 million annual investment by military departments into human-computer interaction.

The $200 million in the Obama program will be spread among the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Geological survey, and DARPA to see that the information they collect will move quickly "from data to decisions."

Seeing the vast potential of Big Data management and applications, Oblong Industries - the actual creator of the software that appeared in the movie Minority Report, (known by its propriety name g-speak) - is now offering a commercial version in the marketplace. An AFP article posted at Raw Story is quick to point out that the software has been stripped of its "pre-crime" detection analytics. But should this blanket dismissal by a mainstream news agency be comforting in light of stated U.S. government goals that seek to turn science fiction into science reality?

John P. Holdren, Obama's science czar, and author of the controversial eugenics tome, Ecoscience, is one of those directing the solution to the data overload problem. This alone should force us to be hyper-vigilant.

We also know that the NSA is constructing a massive new $2 billion data center that aims to expand its spy activities by September, 2013:

A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.

(...) 

Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter. It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration... (Source)

The FBI has recently announced that facial recognition will be coming to a state near you:

Recently-released documents show that the FBI has been working since late 2011 with four states—Michigan, Hawaii, Maryland, and possibly Oregon—to ramp up the Next Generation Identification (NGI) Facial Recognition Program. When the program is fully deployed in 2014, the FBI expects its facial recognition database will contain at least 12 million “searchable frontal photos.” (p. 6) (Source)

While Oblong Industries claims to have disabled the analytics portion of the software that could be used in pre-crime screening taken right from the Minority Report film, they state that private companies and law enforcement agencies could certainly augment their scaled-back version by introducing their own analytics.

Furthermore, the earlier-mentioned AFP article downplays the significance of the software by stating that "Oblong currently has no government customers in the United States or abroad but offers itself as 'a core technology provider.'"

However, two of Oblong's current clients are Boeing - the world's second largest defense contractor and drone specialists; and #12 General Electric - specialists in electronic warfare components and military communication systems. Their combined annual sales are more than $35 billion, which makes it quite likely that new technology will be embraced and proliferated. (Source)

Oblong's own website states that their company "works with Global Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and universities to develop custom g‑speak solutions." Their application areas include:

• financial services
• network operations centers
• logistics and supply-chain management
• military and intelligence
• automotive
• natural resource exploration
• data mining and analytics
• bioinformatics
• trade shows and theatrical presentations
• medical imaging
• consumer electronics interfaces

(Source: Oblong Industries "Client Solutions")

To reinforce the obvious, Oblong's Chief Executive, Kwin Kramer, has stated flatly that, “We think law enforcement and intelligence are big data users and we think our technology is the leader.”

It is also worth noting that the g-speak "Minority Report" technology was developed at MIT and has been 30 years in the making. MIT has quite a storied history of connections to intelligence agencies; the CIA having actually started the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies (MIT-CIS) in 1950. (Source)

The implied connections are in plain view on MIT's own website: http://web.mit.edu/policies/14/14.5.html

And Orwell smiles.

Until recently, we might have held out hope that it was the vastness of data collection that was the weakest point for potential tyrants, as it was nearly impossible to sift through, manage, and apply all of it. With the birth of Big Data applications that are literally coming straight from science fiction, however, we might do well to accept the possibility of a truly dystopian reality descending upon us even faster than the speed of thought.

For a glimpse into the cool sales pitch behind Oblong Industries' Big Data management software, please view the following video. While we should keep an open mind to how advancements in computer tech can be exciting and rewarding, while offering novel ways of human interaction, it is most important to ensure that these technologies are not hoarded by governments and elites who have a clear history of negatively impacting true human development, as well as freedom of movement, expression and self-determination.



Source: Activist Post

Europe Already Has Draft Standard For Real-Time Government Snooping On Services Like Facebook And Gmail

As the old joke goes, standards are wonderful things, that's why we have so many of them. But who would have thought that ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, has already produced a draft standard on how European governments can snoop on cloud-based services like Facebook and Gmail -- even when encrypted connections are used?

ETSI DTR 101 567, to give it the full title, was pointed out to us by Erich Moechel, who has written an excellent exploration of its elements (original in German). Here's the summary from the draft standard (Microsoft Word format):

The present document provides an overview on requests for handover and delivery of real-time information associated with cloud/virtual services. The report identifies Lawful Interception needs and requirements in the converged cloud/virtual service environment, the challenges and obstacles of complying with those requirements, what implementations can be achieved under existing ETSI LI [Lawful Interception] standards, and what new work may be required to achieve needed Lawful Interception capabilities. Cloud Services in whichever forms they take (Infrastructure, Software, Platform or combinations of these) are often trans border in nature and the information required to maintain Lawful Interception (LI) capability or sufficient coverage for LI support may vary in different countries, or within platforms of different security assurance levels. This work aims to ensure capabilities can be maintained while allowing business to utilise the advantages and innovations of Cloud Services and was undertaken cooperatively with relevant cloud security technical bodies.

As that makes clear, this is being presented as "maintaining" interception capabilities in a world where cloud computing makes previous approaches inapplicable. The new standard specifically mentions social networking, file sharing and video conferencing as new areas that need to be addressed.

One key section spells out how this is to be achieved:

If the traffic is encrypted, the entity responsible for key management must ensure it can be decrypted by the CSP [Communication Service Provider] or LEA [Law Enforcement Agency].

In order to maintain LI coverage the cloud service provider must implement a Cloud Lawful Interception Function (CLIF). This can be by way of Applications Programming Interface (API) or more likely ensuring presentation of information in a format recognisable to interception mechanisms. Deep packet inspection is likely to be a constituent part of this system.

As this makes clear, along with the intercepted information, the standard envisages encryption keys being handed over routinely. Just to make things complete, DPI -- deep packet inspection -- is also regarded as a likely element of the system.

Since this is currently a draft, the threat it represents might be seen as purely theoretical; but a recent article in the Guardian confirms that the UK government "quietly agreed to measures that could increase the ability of the security services to intercept online communication" -- a reference to the ETSI draft. The Guardian also provides us with some explanation of why this draft just happens to be available at precisely the moment when the UK government is announcing a plan that seems likely to use it:

Etsi has faced criticism in the past for the pre-emptive inclusion of wiretapping capabilities, a decision that critics say encouraged European governments to pass their wiretapping laws accordingly. According to Ross Anderson, professor in security engineering at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, the institute has strong links with the intelligence agencies and has a significant British contingent, along with a number of US government advisers.

It's a classic case of policy laundering; here's how it will probably work.

The British government insists now that it will "only" gather communications data, and not content. At the same time, it will require that ISPs adopt the new ETSI cloud interception standard (once it's been finalized) in the "black boxes" that they must install under the proposed snooping legislation. That will put in place all the capabilities needed for accessing encrypted streams -- since those providing cloud services will be required to hand over the encryption keys -- and hence the content. The UK government may not intend accessing content today, but thanks to the wonders of function creep, when it decides to do it tomorrow the facility will be there waiting for it.

Meanwhile, European governments will be able to point to the UK's adoption of the ETSI standard as just "good practice"; they will ask their own ISPs to implement it, while insisting that they too have no intention of accessing the contents of people's Internet streams either. Until, that is, the day comes -- probably in the wake of some terrorist attack or pedophile scandal -- when the governments will note that since the capability is available, it would be "irresponsible" not to use it to tackle these terrible crimes. The US government will then bemoan the fact that Europe is taking better care of its citizens than it can, and will therefore pass laws requiring US ISPs to install similar real-time access to their systems, and for cloud-based services to hand over the encryption keys. Luckily, there will be a well-tried European standard that can serve as a model....

Source: Tech Dirt