FROM DANGER ROOM
Darpa’s Star Hacker Looks to WikiLeak-Proof Pentagon

Tomorrow’s WikiLeakers may have to be sneakier than just dumping military docs onto a Lady Gaga disc. The futurists at Darpa are working on a project that would make it harder for troops to funnel classified material to WikiLeaks — or to foreign governments. And that means if you work for the military, get ready to have your web, email and other network usage monitored even more than it is now.

Darpa’s new project is called CINDER, for Cyber Insider Threat. It’s lead by a legendary hacker-turned-Darpa-manager. CINDER may have preceded Pfc. Bradley Mannings’ alleged disclosure of tens of thousands of documents about the Afghanistan war from Defense Department servers. But the idea is to find someone just like him. By hunting for poker-like “tells” in people’s use of Defense Department computer networks, Darpa hopes to find indications of indicate hostile intent or potential removal of sensitive data. “The goal of CINDER will be to greatly increase the accuracy, rate and speed with which insider threats are detected and impede the ability of adversaries to operate undetected within government and military interest networks,” according to the defense geeks’ request for contractor solicitations on the project.

That took on an increased urgency last month after WikiLeaks dropped 77,000 Afghanistan field reports into the public domain. While Admiral Mike Mullen’s furious blood-on-its-hands reaction got all the press coverage, Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ response appears to have been the more lasting one, policy-wise. Gates fretted that a casualty of WikiLeaks’ document dump would be the Defense Department’s years-long initiative to push vital information down to the front lines, so lower ranking officers and enlisted men had the sort of high-level battlefield views that used to be the province of their commanders. All that’s been jeopardized by Manning, he said, the soldier accused of being WikiLeaks’ inside man.



“We want those soldiers in a forward operating base to have all the information they possibly can have that impacts on their own security, but also being able to accomplish their mission,” Gates mused in a July press conference. “Should we change the way we approach that, or do we continue to take the risk” of future leaks? Gates partially answered his own question — however cryptically — by adding, “There are some technological solutions,” though “most of them are not immediately available to us.”

That’s where CINDER comes in. But the program Darpa envisions would establish patterns of malign behavior, distinct and quietly detectable from the normal Defense Department information user, to “expose hidden operations within networks and systems.” That carries with it the likelihood of a big data or meta-data-mining operation. Or, as Steve Aftergood, an intelligence-policy expert at the Federation of American Scientists puts it, “a sort of system-wide surveillance of Pentagon networks.” After all, how else to tell normal network usage from abnormal usage?

Indeed, Darpa expressly recognizes CINDER’s likelihood of intercepting false positives. So Darpa doesn’t want CINDER from focusing on any individual user — it wants the program’s as-yet-unbuilt algorithms to uncover the “malicious missions” that they undertake. “If we were looking for the insider actor himself, we might not detect someone who performs a single, isolated task and we run the risk of being inundated with false positives from events being triggered without context of a mission,” Darpa explains. It gives instructions for would-be designers to expressly identify the kinds of missions its detectors will hunt so as to minimize inundation with a glut of benign data.

But some of the examples Darpa gives of those fiendish activities sound difficult to distinguish from normal usage. “Anomalous missions [may] be comprised of entirely ‘legitimate’ activities, observables and the data sources they will be derived from,” Darpa notes. So CINDER researchers should “make use of logs and accounting information that tracks allowed activities rather than depending entirely on alerts from monitoring systems focused on anomalous or disallowed activities.” Feel any more comfortable executing your boss’ order to find him information on roadside bombs in your area?

Then again, Darpa has people on hand who know the difference between benign and malicious online actions. In February, the agency hired Peiter “Mudge” Zatko –one of the hackers of Boston’s L0pht collective, who famously told a congressional committee in 1998 that they could shut down the internet in 30 minutes — as a program manager for cybersecurity. “I don’t want people to be putting out virus signatures after a virus has come out,” he told CNet when Darpa hired him. “I want an active defense. I want to be at the sharp pointy end of the stick.” Next month, Zatko, CINDER’s program manager, holds a pair of conferences with potential researchers.

And not all traditional privacy advocates are so concerned about CINDER, since it’s not hunting the private Internet. CINDER’s might indeed “involve the automated collection of lots of benign, incidental data about individual users in order to establish a baseline of ‘normal’ activity,” notes Aftergood, an anti-secrecy critic of WikiLeaks). “But I would think that the privacy implications are limited, since most employees should not be conducting personal business on classified or other official networks anyway.”

A full-blown CINDER application is still years away. But at least one precursor effort will be the Defense Department’s forthcoming cybersecurity strategy, due out, according to Deputy Secretary William Lynn, before year’s end. How much internal monitoring will that strategy’s “active defense” authorize?



Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/darpas-star-hacker-looks-to-wikileak-proof-the-pentagon/#ixzz0yJmGXt00
 
 
DARPA's video search push gets another $11m

By Lewis Page from the REGISTER

Pentagon R&D chiefs at DARPA have awarded $11m to discover a technical secret for which, one may be sure, Google executives would pay a substantially larger sum - that of true video search.

Google would like to make video searching work as well as text searching does, the better to serve ads alongside the ensuing results and as a way of making its huge pile of video gumble at YouTube more useful and hence more valuable. But the problems of sifting the odd decent/useful vid out from among endless footage of comical cats, doleful teenagers in their bedrooms etc are as nothing compared to those of the US Defense Department.

The US military (and intelligence community) have been generating video archives over the past decade which make YouTube look like a home video collection. Mere HD movies and TV are small and tightly compressed compared to the high resolution, full-motion imagery which pours in such mighty streams from every Predator or Reaper roboplane: and dozens of these are airborne above southwest Asia every minute of every day.

Often, all these mountains of super-quality video (often featuring mountains, appropriately enough) are seen just once, briefly, by the pilot and sensor operator handling a given drone via satcomms from Nevada. In future, as the machines become more automated, large amounts of perhaps useful video will never be seen by human eyes at all: there is simply too much to assign intelligence analysts to watch it all in the hope of catching something significant.

DARPA says:

Currently, video analysis for Predator and other aerial video surveillance platforms is very labor intensive, and limited to metadata queries, manual annotations, and “fastforward” examination of clips.Or in other words the US military has bitten off more video than it can chew here. DARPA's solution, of course, is basically to invent a tremendous, powerful pair of robotic chewing jaws with steely automatic teeth. Rather than VID-CHOMP*, for some reason, DARPA has chosen to dub the project Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT):

The software tools developed under VIRAT will radically improve the analysis of huge volumes of video data by: 1) alerting operators when specific events or activities occur at specific locations or over a range of locations and; 2) enabling fast, content-based searches of existing video archives.VIRAT has been underway since 2008, and there have been previous awards: but on August 27 the Pentagon notified that New York firm Kitware Inc had received a $10,962,069 add-on to a previous cost-plus deal - indicating that DARPA feel worthwhile progress is being made.

Just as DARPA gave birth to the internet and thus to Google's original business model, so it seems that the military boffins may in time build the search colossus a new one.

 
 
Picture
Israeli Education Ministry Approves New ‘Whites-Only’ Settlement School
August 26, 2010 by politicaltheatrics   
Filed under Israel/Palestine, Recent Articles

Several months ago, a religious school in the illegal Israeli settlement of Immanuel was criticized for segregating white Jewish students from non-white Jewish students in classes.

Ethiopian Jewish student – not allowed to study at new school (photo by Jewish Middlesex)

Originally, the school was fined for this policy of racial segregation, because the school was state funded. Now, the Israeli education ministry has agreed with the white parents’ request to allow the school to continue with its racial discrimination under private funding.

There is no law preventing racial discrimination by private organizations, even schools, in Israel.

The Israeli court has interpreted these laws to also apply to illegal West bank settlements, like Immanuel, which are located in areas that are supposed to be under Palestinian control. The Palestinian Authority does not allow racial discrimination, but due to the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian Territories, it has no authority over the area in question.

74 white girls who have been studying in a building next to the school will now be allowed to study in whites-only classrooms that are privately funded, as their parents claim they do not want their girls to study in racially-mixed classrooms.

READ MORE

Did the Nazis just kill and deport other Nazis in WW2? Apparently so... You mean to tell me WW2 was merely a battle between two forces who in reality both ultimately wanted the same thing? So you mean the whole charge of being a "Nazi" or a "Jew" is merely a ploy to keep people well fastened to either side of a trivial socio-political divide? You mean to tell me we are as easily construed as the demonic "Nazis" too for supporting this directly with apathy and indirectly through tax dollars? There is a silent liberal truth that all silently house in their minds, although its never fully expressed for what it is, its that they are bad and must change their way of life, all of that feeling stems from the dissonant reality they suppress that THEY IN FACT ARE THE NAZIS, and not just victims of a system.
 
 
Picture
FROM the Telegraph

Russia orders £2000 inflatable copies of planes, tanks and missiles to fool enemies

The Russian Defence Ministry has ordered elaborate inflatable copies of its most ubiquitous planes, tanks and missiles at a cost of almost £2,000 per model to fool its enemies in future conflicts.


The purchase has drawn sharp criticism from military analysts, who say the Kremlin should be spending its oil wealth on buying real military hardware rather than rubber copies.

"Inflatable military hardware is most effective in conflict situations when there is a need to confuse the enemy," the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda
nespaper argued on tuesday.

"But at a time of peace, duping foreign intelligence networks with such expensive toys is a questionable luxury."

Alexander Talanov, the director of the scientific research centre that makes the rubber models, told state TV that the defence ministry was particularly keen on acquiring more copies of the truck-mounted Soviet-era S-300 surface-to-air missile system.

He said such models were designed to fool satellite and air reconnaissance and that the United States and China had invested heavily in replicas of their own hardware.

The precise number of rubber models ordered byRussia's defence ministry is a military secret, but the inflatable missiles are expected to be ready by the end of next year.

Russian designers boast that the tanks can be inflated in just four minutes, while replicas of missile systems take only five minutes to set up.

The models are allegedly indistinguishable from the real thing from as little as 350 feet away. The controversial shopping spree comes as Russia rushes to upgrade 75 per cent of its real military hardware by 2020.

REAL MORE

 
 
Picture
 
 
 
 
The video below is catchy, but lets be honest... did the "Internet really kill Israeli PR", even that which claims to support the cause can sometimes be misleading...
Picture
 
 
Picture
FROM DEBKAFILE

Russian S-300s in Abkhazia block possible Israeli air route to Iran

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report August 12, 2010, 10:12 PM (GMT+02:00)

Russian S-300 interceptors now in Abkhazia US and Israeli military sources told debkafile Thursday, Aug. 12, that a threat from Georgia was not the reason why Russian posted advanced S-300 interceptor batteries Russia in Abkhazia and air defense weapons in South Ossetia on the northern shore of the Black Sea -as Moscow officially maintained, but rather possible moves by the US and/or Israel against Iran and its nuclear facilities.
Georgia's armed forces do not run to the sophisticated warplanes, missiles or drones that would warrant establishing the high-powered S-300 interceptors for defending the breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia.Ordinary air defense batteries would do for deterrence.

Therefore, US military sources believe Moscow placed the sophisticated batteries on the Black Sea shore more as a counterweight for the US Sixth Fleet warships present in the Mediterranean and Black Seas and the two big American bases close to the latter waterway - the Mikhail Kogalniceanu Air Base near Constanta, Romania, and the Bezmer Air Base used by the US Air Force just 50 kilometers from the southern shore of the Black Sea.
Their location gives the US Air Force the freedom to operate over both the Mediterranean and Black Seas.
Our military sources disclose that attention was drawn in Moscow and Tehran to the exercises the Israeli Air Force has been conducting from the two American bases to simulate strikes against Iran's concealed nuclear sites.

They noticed in particular the Israeli Yasur CH-53 helicopter which crashed in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania on July 26, killing six Israeli airman and a Romanian flight captain. It was obvious to Russian and Iranian observers from the way the CH-53 crashed and the veil of secrecy clamped down by Israeli authorities that it had been engaged in practicing touch-and-go attacks on nuclear sites which the Iranians have holed up in tunnels burrowed in the sides of lofty mountain precipices.


READ MORE
 
 
Picture
From BBC
Stabbing suspect to return to Michigan to face charges


Elias Abuelazam was stopped at an Atlanta airport as he tried to board a flight to Israel
A man arrested in connection with a series of nearly 20 stabbings in three US states has agreed to return to Michigan from Georgia to face charges in one of the attacks.


Elias Abuelazam told a judge in Atlanta he wanted to stay in Georgia, but was told he should go to Michigan to fight the attempted murder charge there.


He is expected to face more charges in other states, officials said.


Mr Abuelazam, an Israeli citizen, was arrested in Atlanta on Thursday.


Mr Abuelazam's lawyer, who was not present at the morning hearing, requested a second one for later on Friday.


Man held over US serial stabbings
Mr Abuelazam agreed to waive an extradition hearing, a proceeding in which the state of Michigan could have argued why he should be returned.


On Thursday, a judge in Flint, Michigan, where 16 attacks took place, signed a warrant charging Mr Abuelazam with assault with intent to commit murder in connection with a stabbing on 27 July.


Mr Abuelazam is being linked by police to stabbings in Ohio, Virginia, and Michigan.


Meanwhile, Israeli police said on Friday that Mr Abuelazam had also been linked to a separate stabbing attack in Israel earlier this year. Charges were never filed over the incident.


Mr Abuelazam is an Israeli citizen and permanent US resident, a Michigan official told the Associated Press.


He grew up in a Christian Arab community in Ramla, in central Israel, newspaper reports in Israel say.


The suspect was arrested at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport as he tried to board a Delta Air Lines flight to Tel Aviv in Israel.


The stabbings have occurred on average about once every four days since the end of May.


Because the victims have mostly been black in the US, police suspect the attacks in the three US states may have been racially motivated.


More on This Story