RIDGE GIVEN ARAB-AMERICANS' CENSUS INFO

The Census is a bit of a sacred compact. You tell the feds about yourself, to help the government divvy up its resources more fairly. And, in return for that information, the government agrees to not to use it to spy on you.

The Department of Homeland Security may have broken that trust, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). According to the papers, the Census Bureau gave Tom Ridge's crew "statistical data on people who identified themselves on the 2000 census as being of Arab ancestry."

According to EPIC, one data set shows "cities with 1,000 or more people who indicated they are of Arab ancestry. For each city, the tabulation provides total population, population of Arab ancestry, and percent of the total population that is of Arab ancestry. A second tabulation, more than a thousand pages in length, shows the number of census responses indicating Arab ancestry in certain zip codes throughout the United States."

It's unclear how all this information was – or still is being -- used. The documents EPIC pried out of the government have been edited heavily. But EPIC makes some dark allusions. "During World War II, the Census Bureau provided statistical information to help the War Department round up more than 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans and confine them to internment camps," the group said in a statement.

Earlier this year, EPIC discovered that NASA had also used census information, in an unusual attempt to build an anti-terror database.

"The census requires the trust and cooperation of the American public," EPIC added. "The Census Bureau should not become one-stop shopping for law enforcement agencies."

THERE'S MORE: File this under "yeah...right." A Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman told the New York Times that the census data was used "to help the agency identify in which airports to post signs and pamphlets in Arabic. 'The information is not in any way being used for law enforcement purposes,' she said. 'It's being used to educate the traveler. We're simply using basic demographic information to help us communicate U.S. laws and regulations to the traveling public." Fishy.

NEW SOLDIER TENT: COOL

Serving as a scout in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan can be brutal: it's blazing hot during the day, freezing at night, and -- if the bad guys happen to have some thermal or infrared sensors -- you stick out like a transvestite at the Republican National Convention.

So the good folks at the Army's Natick Soldier Systems Center have put together the Small Unit Solar Shade -- a four-man, camoflagued tent that "reduces both near-infrared and thermal signature while providing protection from temperature extremes that occur during day and night operations."

Scouts, special forces, and laser targeting teams, mostly work "at dawn and dusk but not typically during the day to avoid detection," a Natick website explains. "This break-through in concealment technology will enable teams to operate around the clock providing Battalion Commanders with a significant increase in reconnaissance information."

CRACKHEADS IN FOR A STINK

"Drug users and prostitutes are turning up their noses at the condemned buildings they once frequented in Richland County [South Carolina]," according to the AP. "Deputies here have begun using a chemical spray that makes the places smell like a skunk has come calling."

Skunk Shot, made in New Zealand, contains synthetic skunk oil in a gel-like substance and was originally intended as a cat and dog repellent.

It's a stinking solution for a disturbing problem in some neighborhoods. Vagrants' use of the buildings has taken a nose dive, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said.

"In the 11 places we've used it, it has been very successful," said Lott, who ordered 10 tubes of gel at $14.95 each in January...

"It's probably the worst thing I've ever smelled. It smells exactly like a skunk," Richland County sheriff's Cpl. Danny Brown said.

A growing number of law enforcement agencies across the country have turned to the product to ward off trespassers, said Duncan MacMorran, chief executive of Connovation, which manufactures and distributes the gel.

The Los Angeles County sheriff's department began using it 18 months ago, said Lt. Shaun Mathers. In the Compton area near Los Angeles, abandoned buildings had been a hot spot for people to hang out and drink until they got a whiff of Skunk Shot.

"There's nothing cool about sitting around drinking beer when it smells like a skunk," said Mathers, who sells the product to other agencies as a side job. (via Blue's News)

SILO FOR SALE

A few years back, I wrote about a tiny group of real estate agents who specialize in selling underground, Cold War-era missile bases.

Now, it looks like another one of these complexes -- a Titan I base -- is up for sale on eBay. For just a touch under $4 million, you can buy three 155-foot-deep silos, a pair of giant domes, and the adjacent control buildings -- all "built to withstand a 1 MEGATON blast within 3,000 feet and survive!" The 57 acre-complex in central Washington boasts, according to the eBay post, a "360 degree view. Few Neighbors. Private, secluded location."

Possible Uses: Ultra Secure, Ultra Private, Personal/Corporate Retreat
World Class Winery - Plant Vineyard above, Store Vintage below
Backup Data, or other long term storage
Year Round Youth Camp or Boarding School
1 silo could be a 155' Rock Climbing Wall
1 silo could be a 100' deep SCUBA Training Pool (Thanks to John for the tip)

MEDICAL MISSILE PREPPED FOR LAUNCH

A soldier gets seriously hurt in some lonely corner of Afghanistan or Iraq. There's no medic around for miles and miles. And the area is so hot that any medical helicopter flying over it has a good chance of getting shot.

What to do? Army researchers have an idea: fire off a missile, loaded with medical supplies, at the wounded G.I.

Built by the Aviation and Missile Command in Huntsville, Alabama, the 20 lb., 8-inch-wide, 32-inch-long Quick-MEDS projectile would be packed on an unmanned plane. The drone would linger over the battlefield. And if a soldier got seriously hurt, the flying robot would shoot the medical missile in his direction. It'd be packed with blood, bandages, an oxygen generator, burn packs, critical-care supplies, vaccines and bio-chem antitodes.

"The idea is to avoid losing rescue teams flying into heavily defended areas," Aviation Week notes. An Army researcher began working on Quick-MEDS after he "read an account of an Air Force medic, Senior Airman Jason Cunningham, who bled to death after tending others for 7 hours. He was a member of a relief force that was shot down searching for a missing Navy SEAL and was isolated until the fighting subsided."

There are expected to be two versions of the medical missile, according to the magazine. "The first and cheapest version (an $800,000 program) would have no precision guidance during its flight and would use its waffle-iron-like fins for stabilization. However, there also are plans for a GPS-guided version (a $3.5-million project) with fin actuators allowing the missile to make a precision landing within the perimeter (about 35 X 75 ft.) of a special forces team in contact with the enemy. [The Army] hopes to conduct flight testing in Fiscal 2005 with delivery to begin before year's end."

DARPA'S U-HAUL IN THE SKY

Relying on deep-water ports and billion-dollar airports to move its men and machines keeps the Army stuck in molasses mode. It can take weeks -- even months -- to get a division ready to fight. Take the 4th Infantry Division, for example; it missed out on the first months of the Iraq war, waiting for its gear to take the slow boat in from Turkey.

Darpa, the Pentagon's mad science division, has a typically far-out solution: a gi-normous airship that can take an 1,800-person "unit of action" anywhere in the world, without infrastructure, in four days.

The scheme, code-named Walrus, is just, er, getting off the ground. But the agency is clear about what it wants: a prototype "tri-phibian" (air, land, sea) zeppelin with a range of 6,000 nautical miles, ready to go aloft by 2008.

My Wired magazine article has a few details. The Darpa website used to have even more -- but the agency yanked most of its Walrus material. Luckily, I downloaded it first. So you can read about the blimp project here.

THERE'S MORE: The Office of the Secretary of Defense is pushing a heavy-lift blimp plan of its own. But Rummy's lighter-than-air crew doesn't think the Pentagon can -- or should -- do zeppelin-development on its own. Instead, they're trying to encourage a whole industry to come together to build these airborne behemoths, so both soldiers and civilians can benefit.

FLYING SAUCER BUS: ALL ABOARD

From "flying saucer buses" to personal helicopters to
a "transplanetary subway" that would stretch from New York to L.A., this on/offline exhibit on "Transportation Futuristics" from Cal Berkeley is pretty rad. And it's more than a little thought-provoking.

Like WorldChanging says, "for those of us who make thinking about how the future could unfold our profession, exhibitions like 'Transportation Futuristics' hold an almost fetishistic fascination."

While some of the designs featured in the show are clearly hand-waving "wouldn't it be great if..." sketches, many are the result of long hours of debate, research, and informed speculation. They were not offered up in expectation of failure. These vehicles and systems were considered to be plausible -- or at least possible -- extrapolations into a future yet to unfold.

Some futurists study these failed visions in hopes of figuring out what subtle element was missing, which line of speculation had the broken link, so as to avoid making the same mistakes. In most cases, the problems arise not from errors in physics or engineering, but in the overly-simplistic -- or simply ignorant -- social and economic speculations. Those promising personal helicopters, for example (a promise which ran rampant in American culture in the late 1940s/early 1950s), never seemed to ask how likely it was that people would accept heli-cars crashing with anything near the frequency of auto accidents. And, as the exhibit points out, the proposed underground maglev train between NYC and LA would be so expensive that the entire population of each city would have to use it every day for the finances to work out...

I love looking at futures that never were as stories of how easy it is to be wrong, but also as stories of how easy it is to be wrong for the right reasons.

G.I.S GET ARMOR ADD-ONS

A G.I.'s body armor is designed, mostly, to stop head-on attacks, or to keep a soldier from getting shot in the back. But in Iraq, insurgents aren't coming straight at the soldiers. So roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades are hurting U.S. troops in places the Pentagon never thought to toughen up.

That's why the Army and Sandia National Laboratories are rolling out new body armor add-ons, designed to shield troops' flanks and arms.

But before G.I.s start strapping on the new gear in Baghdad, dead pigs had to try it on. Defense News explains:

Gunners standing in a Humvee’s circular roof opening are particularly vulnerable to the blasts of grenades and improvised explosive devices. The menacing blast creates a superheated armor that forms tiny liquid balls of metal that melt the skin, muscle and tendons right off and expose the bone to be destroyed by shrapnel, leaving a limb so mangled it must be amputated.

The brainchild of a retired Army colonel and [Sandia] scientist, the Sandia Gauntlet is a Kevlar sleeve with armor plate inserts intended to protect troops in Humvees. Six layers of Kevlar will block the heat from an explosion, and the carbon composite armor plates shield the forearm and biceps. Each sleeve weighs 4 pounds and does not interfere with operating the machine gun, Jones said. A quick-release buckle allows for easy removal...

A small shop at the Sandia lab built a handful of the devices and shipped them to soldiers and airmen in Iraq to try out…

Before being shipped to Iraq, a Gauntlet encasing a dead pig’s leg was subjected to an anti-tank round detonated 2½ feet away. After the explosion, the pig’s leg was almost pristine...

Despite the porcine success, "no formal orders from the Pentagon have yet materialized. Nor has a manufacturer with the ability to quickly produce large quantities been identified," Defense News notes.

Further along in development is the Deltoid and Axillary Protector -- a removable attachment to Interceptor Body Armor that covers the shoulder and underarm. Those are areas that are "especially vulnerable when soldiers ride in convoys," the magazine says, because "improvised explosive devices often hit the sides of vehicles."

Body armor experts at the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office (PEO) Soldier began their search for an arm protector in March, after soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq came up with the idea, developed a design and hired a private company to ship them a custom-made version.

The Army experts looked at nine different prototypes and selected one that should provide protection without severely hampering mobility, they said. Still, the attachments will be hotter and heavier… The Interceptor, with plates, weighs about 16 pounds. The attachment on each shoulder will increase the total weight of armor up to 22 pounds, he said.

The Army plans to field 50,000 sets of attachments to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan this year, and 138,000 by January.

"WORK-FREE SAFE ZONE"

Wanna understand the conflict at the core of the Los Alamos security debacle? Then read this article from Sunday's Los Angeles Times:

Some of the scientists and engineers who design the nation's nuclear bombs are sporting an odd bumper sticker on their cars in the remote mountain community at Los Alamos National Laboratory: "Striving for a Work-free Safe Zone."

The message — which has angered managers all the way to Washington — underscores a feeling among some workers that the people running the lab care more about security and safety than scientific research. And it is a glaring reflection of the gulf that has opened between executives at Energy Department headquarters in the Forestall Building on Independence Avenue and the iconoclastic scientists at the lab 1,900 miles away...

Lab managers — including Los Alamos Director G. Peter Nanos — members of Congress and Washington bureaucrats see the bumper stickers as more proof of a "cowboy culture" in which scientists treat security and safety rules like a joke...

Nanos says that many of his employees are engaged in "suicidal denial," failing to grasp that the very existence of the lab is at risk. At the polar extreme are some employees who say the lab has devolved into a snake pit of retribution and that managers are preoccupied with minor security problems.

THERE'S MORE: "This makes me wonder about a larger meltdown of culture in the US," says Defense Tech reader DS. "Is Los Alamos a canary of sorts? Is sitting at your desk doing nothing while trying to appear to be doing something that happens when you're too worried about being watched?"

PAIN RAYS, SLIPPERY GOO: FEEL THE LOVE

"The less killing we do, the better."

That's the quote, from a deputy undersecretary of defense, which kicks off the New York Times Magazine's article on non-lethal weapons -- arms designed to hurt or to incapacitate, not to kill.

In the story, University of Georgia professor Stephen Mihm surveys the non-lethal landscape, from microwave-like pain rays to slippery goo to sting balls. And, along the way, he meets a bunch of Pentagon people, who tell him that there's a "moral imperative to suppress the violence of statecraft." These non-lethal weapons, they argue, are the way to fulfill that imperative.

It's a neat sentiment. But, reading the article, one might get the impression that this is the dominant point-of-view in the American military community. It's not. Out of the Defense Department's $400 billion budget, only $44 million or so is devoted to its Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate.

What's more, the article doesn't devote much time to finding out whether the troops in the field -- the guys actually firing the weapons -- share it or not. My experience has been that, when you talk to folks who have used non-lethal ammunition in places like Iraq, a different story line emerges. Sure, non-lethals are great, they say. But when someone's shooting a rocket-propelled grenade at you, or planting a roadside bomb, setting those metaphorical phasers to stun just isn't an option.

THERE'S MORE: Speaking of non-lethals, The Sunshine Project is a super resource on so-called "calmatives" and other, allegedly harmless chemical weapons. The site would be even more informative, if the Marines hadn't bullied the Project into removing some of its material on these non-lethal programs.

NO SECRET DISKS FOR NUKE LABS

Stop using classified disks -- everywhere.

That's the order Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham handed down today, telling the country's entire nuclear weapons complex to lay off the use of classified CDs, Zip disks, floppies and portable hard drives until new training and procedures are put in place.

As Defense Tech readers know, both the Los Alamos and Sandia national labs have had problems in recent weeks keeping track of their secrets. The problem has gotten so bad at Los Alamos that the entire place is shut down, pending a security review.

"Under the plan approved by Secretary Abraham, each DOE [Department of Energy] facility will conduct a stand-down of operations involving CREM [Classified Removable Electronic Media] beginning Monday July 26," according to a department press release. The plan includes:

* A 100% initial physical inventory of accountable CREM and weekly inventories thereafter.

* After operational restart is approved, sites will formally enter all CREM containing Secret Restricted Data or above into accountability.

* All accountable CREM will be maintained in approved repositories under the direct control of authorized and trained custodians.

* A formal checkout process for all accountable CREM will be initiated. Access to repositories storing accountable CREM will be strictly limited to authorized custodians.

* Prior to restart, an independent validation team will verify that the protocols are in effect.

* Exceptions will be allowed only under extraordinary circumstances. All exceptions and restarts will be approved by the Deputy Secretary of Energy personally.

LOS ALAMOS STORE RAIDED

The FBI has seized several items from a Los Alamos-area business, including a laptop computer hard drive marked 'secret,'" according to KOB-TV.

The owner of the Black Hole Surplus Store and Museum, Ed Grothus, says agents also have confiscated two rolls of tape stickers labeled "secret" and a Verbatim eight-millimeter tape with case.

FBI Special Agent Bill Elwell of Albuquerque confirms that agents executed a search warrant. He says it’s based on information the agency received and as a result of items that agents had seen bearing Los Alamos National Laboratory secret stickers.

Elwell says no arrest warrants have been issued.

Investigators are looking into security and safety breaches at the lab, including the disappearance of two computer disks with classified information.