Air Force asks ESPN for help in analyzing drone footageSourceAir Force asks ESPN for help in analyzing drone footage Published December 20, 2012 Predators, Raptors and More: The Wide World of Drones The U.S. Air Force confirms a new addition to its unmanned arsenal. The Air Force is tapping ESPN to help sift and analyze the massive amounts of video footage from drone missions. As the number of unmanned aircraft around the world and the flood of footage being transmitted in real-time keeps expanding, the Air Force is faced with the task of pouring through the data. Enter: ESPN. "We need to be careful we don't drown in the data," David Deptula, a former Air Force lieutenant general, said, according to a report in USA Today. Drone video transmissions returned some 327,384 hours of surveillance video in 2011. Currently, much of what drones do is complete "pattern of life" missions, which involve recording compounds for days at a time. The Air Force turned to the sports cable network to see how it sorts through the large amounts of game footage it gets everyday, USA Today reports. A meeting between Air Force officials and ESPN did not, however, result in any technological breakthroughs. One Air Force official said the visit with ESPN had helped with developing skills and expertise, particularly in training.
Military turns to ESPN to help analyze drone footageSourceMilitary turns to ESPN to help analyze drone footage By Jim Michaels, USA TODAY11:54p.m. EST December 19, 2012 JOINT BASE LANGLEY-EUSTIS, Va. – Can SportsCenter teach the military something about combating terrorists? After rapidly expanding the number of drones around the world, the Air Force is now reaching out to ESPN and other experts in video analysis to keep up with the flood of footage the unmanned aircraft are transmitting. "They're looking at anything and everything they can right now," said Air Force Col. Mike Shortsleeve, commander of a unit here that monitors drone videos. The remote-controlled aircraft are mounted with cameras that transmit real-time video of terrorism suspects to military analysts in the USA. The amount of video streaming into this base, one of a number of sites that monitors and analyzes the images, is immense. Drone video transmissions rose to 327,384 hours last year, up from 4,806 in 2001. Given the huge amount of feeds, the Air Force has launched an aggressive effort to seek out technology or techniques that will help them process video without adding more people to stare at monitors. "We need to be careful we don't drown in the data," said David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and a senior military scholar at the Air Force Academy. Air Force officials have met with the sports cable network ESPN to discuss how it handles large amounts of video that stream in. The visit resulted in no technological breakthroughs, but helped in developing training and expertise, the Air Force said. Here at Langley, Air Force analysts sit for hours at a stretch in a vast room that is illuminated only by bank after bank of monitors. The drones are piloted elsewhere, often at a base in Nevada, but the video arrives here. The video is analyzed and fused with other types of intelligence, such as still photos or communications intercepts. Much of what drones do now are called "pattern of life" missions which involve staring down at a compound for days. That information can help avoid civilian casualties, for example, by determining when children leave for school every day before a raid is launched. It can also tell military analysts when something seems amiss, perhaps signaling the arrival of a terrorist leader. It's time consuming work that could be made more efficient if there were technology that could automate the monitoring of videos, looking for signs that seem out of the ordinary. "The real value added would be if I could have that tool go back and say, 'How many times has this vehicle appeared in this geographic area over the last 30 days?' and it automatically searches volumes of full-motion video," said Col. Jeffrey Kruse, commander of the 480th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing. The importance of video analysis is apparent in the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It took 6,000 hours of surveillance video to pinpoint the location of the al-Qaeda leader who oversaw a bloody insurrection in Iraq as drones followed the movements of his known associates. On June 7, 2006, two U.S. Air Force jets dropped two 500-pound bombs on the building in which he was located in Iraq. "You can't catch bad guys unless you know where they are and what they're doing," Deptula said.
BioWatch - another huge waste of government moneyOf course the Homeland Security Department disagrees with my statement and thinks the BioWatch program is a huge success.And from the point of being a fantastic government welfare program that gives billions of dollars in corporate welfare to companies in the military industrial complex the BioWatch program is a huge success. Troubled BioWatch program at a crossroads By David Willman, Los Angeles Times December 21, 2012, 4:14 p.m. WASHINGTON — Year after year, health officials meeting at invitation-only government conferences leveled with one another about Biowatch, the nation's system for detecting deadly pathogens that might be unleashed into the air by terrorists. They shared stories of repeated false alarms — mistaken warnings of germ attacks from Los Angeles to New York City. Some questioned whether BioWatch worked at all. They did not publicize their misgivings. Indeed, the sponsor of the conferences, the U.S. Homeland Security Department, insists that BioWatch's operations, in more than 30 cities, be kept mostly secret. Now, congressional investigators want Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to open the books on the 9-year-old program and explain why $3.1 billion in additional spending is warranted. The move by the House Energy and Commerce Committee — spurred by reports in the Los Angeles Times about BioWatch's deficiencies — puts the program at a crossroads. On one side is mounting evidence that the technology does not work. On the other are companies eager to tap federal contracts, politicians fearful of voting against any program created to fight terrorism, and a top Homeland Security official who says the program is functioning properly. Government records show that BioWatch signaled attacks more than 100 times when none had occurred. Nor is the system sensitive enough to reliably detect low yet infectious concentrations of such pathogens as anthrax, smallpox or plague, according to specialists familiar with test results and computer modeling. Another defect is BioWatch's inability to distinguish between particular pathogens that are genetically similar, but benign. Lab and field tests found similar problems in the latest technology intended for BioWatch, "Generation 3." The congressional investigators are seeking internal documents illuminating BioWatch's performance, plus the private comments of Napolitano's top science and technology advisor, Dr. Tara O'Toole, who recommended killing Generation 3. O'Toole's skepticism is shared by Dr. Donald A. Henderson, a renowned epidemiologist who led the global eradication of smallpox. Henderson, a federal anti-terrorism advisor when BioWatch was launched in 2003, says he has yet to see a "scientific justification" for it. "It has never stood the test of rationality," Henderson said. "This whole concept is just preposterous." Political ties But as Napolitano weighs whether to deploy Generation 3 — at the cost of $3.1 billion over its first five years — the program will not be easy to scale back. The company in line to install Generation 3, Northrop Grumman Corp., is a major donor to federal campaigns with a broad presence in Washington. From 2004 to 2012, the company's political action committee gave more than $6 million to congressional candidates, campaign finance records show. Northrop Grumman, a top defense contractor, ranked No. 10 this year among all PAC donors to congressional campaigns. Northrop Grumman also hired the former head of BioWatch, Dr. Jeffrey W. Runge, as an advisor to assist its pursuit of the Generation 3 contract. On Sept. 27, Runge told invitees to the Harvard Faculty Club that a survey he designed for what he called "homeland security related professionals" had found support for deploying the new technology, regardless of potential shortcomings. Rather than wait for more research to refine Generation 3, Runge told the gathering, "the respondents seem to be saying … 'Deploy the detectors, even if they can't pick up every intentional pathogen or genetic variation, and deal with the problems later.'" Runge, who provided his prepared remarks to The Times, said Northrop Grumman solicited his advice a few months after he left the government in 2008 and paid him an hourly rate. The consulting arrangement ended in summer 2009, he said. Runge said the company paid him to explain how the Homeland Security Department "is thinking, how Congress is thinking, about the future of biodetection." Among those he briefed, Runge said, was Northrop Grumman's project manager for Generation 3. In 2010 and 2011, Northrop Grumman donated a total of $100,000 to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, which, beginning in July, circulated three commentaries supporting federal funding for BioWatch and Generation 3. The donations were disclosed in the group's annual reports. Steven P. Bucci, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow, wrote on July 11, "BioWatch is far from an 'unnecessary expenditure.' Congress should thus continue to fund the program." The third Heritage essay, issued Dec. 12 and also written by Bucci, said that although BioWatch was "only marginally effective," Napolitano and President Obama should stay the course. "Cutting funding to this project," he wrote, "leaves us vulnerable in a way that will cripple our future security." Bucci said his writings were his own. Asked for comment, a spokesman for Northrop Grumman, Brandon R. Belote III, said the company "recognizes the importance of participating in the democratic process." For politicians determined to appear resolute against terrorism, fully funding BioWatch might carry less risk than scaling it back. "If somebody cancels the program, and a week later there's a release, they'll never, ever recover from making that decision," said George Mason University microbiologist Stephen Prior, who co-wrote a 2004 National Defense University study of BioWatch. "If they don't make that decision, they can't be wrong." Meanwhile, the Homeland Security Department's chief medical officer, Dr. Alexander Garza, has assured Congress that BioWatch is performing effectively. In March, Garza told a House subcommittee that the Generation 3 system was "right where it needs to be," but he did not cite the deficiencies found by the tests of prototype sensors. On Sept. 13, Garza told another congressional hearing that, in his view, none of the existing system's mistaken detections of benign organisms as lethal pathogens were false alarms. Though each of the laboratory-confirmed results signaled potential terrorist attacks, Garza asserted that they were not false alarms because authorities never ordered evacuations or other emergency measures. The panel members voiced concerns about BioWatch. None, however, pressed Garza to explain his basis for defending BioWatch's misidentifications of the harmless organisms. Nor did they question Garza about the system's poor sensitivity. Eroded confidence When he announced the program in his 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush said BioWatch would "protect our people and our homeland." He called it "the nation's first early-warning network of sensors to detect biological attack." BioWatch units placed in public places suck air through composite filters all day and night. Once every 24 hours, the filters are delivered to public health laboratories, where technicians search for the DNA of the targeted pathogens. Under Generation 3, BioWatch would be converted to automated sensors, each a "lab in a box," designed to both capture and test samples of air. The first false alarms occurred soon after BioWatch's deployment, demonstrating that it could not distinguish between the most commonly signaled pathogen, tularemia, and "near-neighbor" organisms that pose no life-threatening harm. Previously unpublicized Homeland Security materials show that the Houston area alone racked up more than 30 false alarms as of mid-2008, nearly all for the germ that causes tularemia, also known as rabbit fever. The many false alarms nationwide — including results that caused tense deliberations among health officials at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and at championship sporting events — have eroded confidence in the system. Local, state and federal officials faced with a BioWatch alarm have not once evacuated an area or dispensed antibiotics or other emergency medicines. They have instead monitored hospitals for days or weeks in search of potential victims before deciding to disregard the alarms, a wait-and-see approach counter to the rationale for BioWatch. The Homeland Security Department's emphasis on keeping the details quiet is reinforced at the annual BioWatch conferences, according to attendees and government documents. The 2008 conference included such workshops as "Loose Lips Sink Collectors! Managing Media Inquiries about BioWatch," and "Psychology of Press Releases." Last month, leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee said Homeland Security had withheld key documents that the panel had asked for in July. In a letter to Napolitano, the committee said the episode raised "serious questions about the department's willingness to cooperate." The department has pledged cooperation, and Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona, has delegated the public defense of BioWatch to Garza, also a presidential appointee. Garza has said that scientists are working "to improve BioWatch to keep the nation safe from any potential biological threats." In recent interviews, more than a dozen specialists who have worked with or examined BioWatch said it should be independently assessed, and scaled back or dismantled. Dr. Arthur L. Kellermann, a physician and public health researcher at Rand Corp. who studied BioWatch from 2007 to 2009 as a member of a National Academy of Sciences committee, said it "has generated nothing but false alarms." Kellermann and other specialists said the money spent on BioWatch could have paid for training and equipment to help medical professionals more quickly diagnose a patient exposed to an attack. The many false alarms, they said, invite complacency. "After you hear a certain amount of car alarms in your neighborhood, you stop worrying about them," Kellermann said. david.willman@latimes.com
Washington Post articles on guns & gun controlAfter this weeks shooting in Connecticut on Sunday, December 23, 2012 the Washington Post ran a number of articles on guns and gun control.I am too lazy to cut and past all the text so here are some links to the articles: Tiny URLs: The full links:
Corrupt lab techs guarantee you won't get a fair trialReview of FBI forensics does not extend to federally trained state, local examinersYou're going to get a fair trial??? Don't make me laugh!!!!It's not about a fair trial, it's about making cops look like heroes!!!! Review of FBI forensics does not extend to federally trained state, local examiners By Spencer S. Hsu, Published: December 22 Thousands of criminal cases at the state and local level may have relied on exaggerated testimony or false forensic evidence to convict defendants of murder, rape and other felonies. The forensic experts in these cases were trained by the same elite FBI team whose members gave misleading court testimony about hair matches and later taught the local examiners to follow the same suspect practices, according to interviews and documents. In July, the Justice Department announced a nationwide review of all cases handled by the FBI Laboratory’s hair and fibers unit before 2000 — at least 21,000 cases — to determine whether improper lab reports or testimony might have contributed to wrongful convictions. But about three dozen FBI agents trained 600 to 1,000 state and local examiners to apply the same standards that have proved problematic. None of the local cases is included in the federal review. As a result, legal experts say, although the federal inquiry is laudable, the number of flawed cases at the state and local levels could be even higher, and those are going uncorrected. The FBI review was prompted by a series of articles in The Washington Post about errors at the bureau’s renowned crime lab involving microscopic hair comparisons. The articles highlighted the cases of two District men who each spent more than 20 years in prison based on false hair matches by FBI experts. Since The Post’s articles, the men have been declared innocent by D.C. Superior Court judges. Two high-profile local-level cases illustrate how far the FBI training problems spread. In 2004, former Montana crime lab director Arnold Melnikoff was fired and more than 700 cases questioned because of what reviewers called egregious scientific errors involving the accuracy of hair matches dating to the 1970s. His defense was that he was taught by the FBI and that many FBI-trained colleagues testified in similar ways, according to previously undisclosed court records. In 2001, Oklahoma City police crime lab supervisor Joyce Gilchrist lost her job and more than 1,400 of her cases were questioned after an FBI reviewer found that she made claims about her matches that were “beyond the acceptable limits of science.” Court filings show that Gilchrist received her only in-depth instruction in hair comparison from the FBI in 1981 and that she, like many practitioners, went largely unsupervised. Federal officials, asked about state and local problems, said the FBI has committed significant resources to speed the federal review but that state and local police and prosecutors would have to decide whether to undertake comparable efforts. FBI spokeswoman Ann Todd defended the training of local examiners as “continuing education” intended to supplement formal training provided by other labs. The FBI did not qualify examiners, a responsibility shared by individual labs and certification bodies, she said. Michael Wright, president of the National District Attorneys Association, said local prosecutors cannot simply order labs to audit all or even a sample of cases handled by FBI-trained examiners, because such an undertaking might be time- and cost-prohibitive for smaller agencies. ------------- Here are some more articles on how corrupt or incompetent forensic technicians help cops make themselves look like heroes by framing almost everybody the cops accuse of a crime. washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/local/forensic-analysis-methods
U.S. moves to sell advanced spy drones to South Korea Jim Wolf Reuters 8:21 p.m. CST, December 25, 2012 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration formally proposed a controversial sale of advanced spy drones to help South Korea bear more of its defense from any attack by the heavily armed North. Seoul has requested a possible $1.2 billion sale of four Northrop Grumman Corp RQ-4 "Global Hawk" remotely piloted aircraft with enhanced surveillance capabilities, the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in a statement dated on Monday and distributed on Tuesday. South Korea needs such systems to assume top responsibility for intelligence-gathering from the U.S.-led Combined Forces Command as scheduled in 2015, the security agency said in releasing a notice to U.S. lawmakers. "The proposed sale of the RQ-4 will maintain adequate intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities and will ensure the alliance is able to monitor and deter regional threats in 2015 and beyond," the notice said. The United States has agreed with Seoul to turn over the wartime command of Korean troops later this decade. Current arrangements grew from the U.S. role in the 1950-1953 Korean War that repelled a North Korean takeover of the South. Seoul has shown interest in the high-altitude, long-endurance Global Hawk platform for at least four years. The system, akin to Lockheed Martin Corp's U-2 spy plane, may be optimized to scan large areas for stationary and moving targets by day or night and despite cloud cover. It transmits imagery and other data from 60,000 feet at near real-time speed, using electro-optical, infrared and radar-imaging sensors built by Raytheon Co. The possible sale has been held up by discussions involving price, aircraft configuration and a go-slow on release of such technology subject to a voluntary 34-nation arms control pact. The Defense Department began informally consulting Congress on the possible Global Hawk sale in the summer of 2011, only to withdraw it pending further work on the make-up of the proposed export to Seoul amid lawmakers' arms-control concerns. The formal notification to Congress came less than two weeks after a North Korean space launch of a satellite atop a multi-stage rocket, a first for the reclusive state, widely seen as advancing its ballistic missile program. A White House statement denounced the December 12 launch as a "highly provocative act" that would bear consequences for violations of United Nations resolutions. The North is banned from testing missile or nuclear technology under international sanctions imposed after its 2006 and 2009 nuclear weapons tests. In October 2008, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters that the United States was "very sympathetic" to South Korea's interest in Global Hawk. But he cited issues that had to be overcome because of the so-called Missile Technology Control Regime, or MTCR. The pact, established in 1987, has been credited with slowing the spread of ballistic missiles and other unmanned delivery systems that potentially could be used for chemical, biological and nuclear attacks. Pact members, including the United States, agree to curb their exports of systems capable of carrying a 500-kilogram (1,102-pound) payload at least 300 kilometers (186 miles). The Global Hawk falls under a strong presumption against export under MTCR guidelines. The notification to Congress did not mention that a U.S. government waiver for such an export would be required. Arms-control advocates fear that this could fuel instability and stir regional arms-race dynamics as well as provide diplomatic cover for an expansion of such exports by Russia, China and others. The Obama administration agreed earlier this year to let South Korea, a treaty ally, stretch the range of its ballistic missile systems to cover all of North Korea, going beyond the voluntary pact's 300 km (186 miles). The congressional notification is required by U.S. law and does not mean that a deal has been concluded. If a sale takes place, it would be for the third generation of Global Hawk drones known as Block 30, the security agency's notice to Congress said. The Pentagon, in its fiscal 2013 budget request, proposed mothballing its own Block 30 Global Hawks and ending plans to buy more of that generation. Doing so would have no effect on the administration's plans to acquire other versions of the long-range drone. South Korea's possible Global Hawk purchase would mark the system's first sale in the Asia-Pacific region. It has already been sold to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Australia, Japan and Singapore each have shown interest in buying Global Hawk systems, Northrop Grumman officials have said. Company representatives had no comment on the Christmas holiday on the proposed sale to Seoul. (Reporting by Jim Wolf; Editing by Sandra Maler)
The Dawning of Domestic Drones Published: December 25, 2012 The drones are coming to a neighborhood near you. The unmanned aircraft that most people associate with hunting terrorists and striking targets in Pakistan are on the brink of evolving into a big domestic industry. It is not a question of whether drones will appear in the skies above the United States but how soon. Congress has ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to quickly select six domestic sites to test the safety of drones, which can vary in size from remote-controlled planes as big as jetliners to camera-toting hoverers called Nano Hummingbirds that weigh 19 grams. The drone go-ahead, signed in February by President Obama in the F.A.A. reauthorization law, envisions a $5 billion-plus industry of camera drones being used for all sorts of purposes from real estate advertising to crop dusting to environmental monitoring and police work. Responding to growing concern as the public discovers drones are on the horizon, the agency recently and quite sensibly added the issue of citizens’ privacy to its agenda. Setting regulations under the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unlawful search is of the utmost importance. But since the F.A.A.’s primary mission is safety, Congress should take the matter in hand by writing privacy safeguards for the booming drone industry. The anticipated market includes tens of thousands of police, fire and other government agencies able to afford drones lighter than traditional aircraft and costing as little as $300. Several surveillance drones are already used for border patrol, and the F.A.A. has allowed a few police departments to experiment narrowly, as in a ceiling of 400 feet for surveillance flights over the Everglades by the Miami Police Department. Privacy worries in California prompted Alameda County officials to postpone drone plans for further study. The local sheriff insisted that what he had in mind was disaster response, not random snooping, but the local American Civil Liberties Union office claimed the plan would have permitted extensive intelligence gathering. The A.C.L.U.’s national office is warning that while drones could have many benefits like search-and-rescue work and tracking dangerous criminal situations, the law’s lack of privacy mandates will inevitably invite “pervasive surveillance” of the public. The idea of watchful drones buzzing overhead like Orwellian gnats may seem far-fetched to some. But Congress, in its enthusiasm for a new industry, should guarantee the strongest protection of privacy under what promises to be a galaxy of new eyes in the sky.
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