October 2005 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Multiple passports?
by Bill Stewart 01 Nov '05

01 Nov '05

When I saw the title of this thread, I was assuming it would be about getting Mozambique or Sealand or other passports of convenience or coolness-factor like the Old-School Cypherpunks used to do :-) >On 10/30/05, Gregory Hicks <ghicks(a)cadence.com> wrote: > > The only people that I knew that had two passports were those with an > > "Official" (red) passport or a "Diplomatic" (black) passport. If they > > wanted to go play tourist, they had to also have a "tourist" (Blue) > > passport. A few years ago, before heading on an overseas trip, I was unable to locate my current passport. After dealing with a voicemail system adapted from a Kafka novel, and bringing myself, my previous expired passport and other id, a couple official-sized photographs and cash through the secret-handshake elevator into a big waiting room for a long morning, they made me a new passport. (If you need to replace a passport more than a month before your planned travel, you're supposed to use the regular process at the Post Office and maybe pay extra for Express Mail if you're impatient. If you need to replace a passport within 3 days of travel, they've got expedited processes at major passport offices like San Francisco. But if you need to replace your passport two weeks before the trip, there's no way to talk to a human being, just Kafka's voicemailbot, so you have to wait until 3 days before the trip to get an appointment for the emergency expedited process instead of going in when you and they aren't busy :-) They informed me that the lost passport was now invalid and I should turn it in if I find it, because if I were to use it to get back into the country it would be rejected with extreme prejudice, since its number is now on the "lost passports" list. Of course the next day when I was packing, the passport showed up on the closet floor under the suitcase, and unlike the previous passport which I took in to replace when it was about to expire, it doesn't have holes punched in it and Expired stamped on it. For domestic air travel since the recent military coup, I normally bring a passport as ID, since it's a request from the former United States government asking foreign governments like the current TSA White People to let me pass, and I'd rather carry the technically-invalid one with me instead of the valid one just in case I lose it. I think I've also used it to travel from the EU back to the US, but I'd expect that the La Migra thugs will eventually improve their databases, possibly even before my old one expires, especially because Homeland Security wants to RFIDize us. I was considering "losing" my current passport before the RFID things get started, but it doesn't look like there's time, so I've got about 5 years to hope that the Republicans get thrown out on their asses in the next election and the Democrats decide that returning to the Constitution will sell better than continuing the Permanent State of Yellowalertness. Given the previous Clinton Administration's behavior, I don't expect the Hillary Clinton Administration to do any better. >At 09:27 PM 10/29/2005, Jay Goodman Tamboli wrote: >I wasn't able to find a reference to support this on http://state.gov, >but I know it's possible to get two passports if you plan to travel to >both Israel and a country that refuses to admit people with Israeli >stamps in their passports. I don't think the US normally lets you have two passports, or if they do they almost certainly have the same number. But at least during the 1980s, Israel would be happy to give you a separate piece of paper with to carry with your passport that they'd stamp when you entered and left instead of stamping the passport itself. I don't remember if I did that or if I decided not to worry about it because I'd visited the Arab countries before going to Israel and didn't expect to get back any time soon.

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Re: [PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used
by cyphrpunk 01 Nov '05

01 Nov '05

> http://www.hbarel.com/Blog/entry0006.html > > I believe that for anonymity and pseudonymity technologies to survive > they have to be applied to applications that require them by design, > rather than to mass-market applications that can also do (cheaper) > without. If anonymity mechanisms are deployed just to fulfill the > wish of particular users then it may fail, because most users don't > have that wish strong enough to pay for fulfilling it. An example for > such an application (that requires anonymity by design) could be > E-Voting, which, unfortunately, suffers from other difficulties. I am > sure there are others, though. The truth is exactly the opposite of what is suggested in this article. The desire for anonymous communication is greater today than ever, but the necessary technology does not exist. For the first time there are tens or hundreds of millions of users who have a strong need and desire for high volume anonymous communications. These are file traders, exchanging images, music, movies, TV shows and other forms of communication. The main threat to this illegal but widely practiced activity is legal action by copyright holders against individual traders. The only effective protection against these threats is the barrier that could be provided by anonymity. An effective, anonymous file sharing network would see rapid adoption and would be the number one driver for widespread use of anonymity. But the technology isn't there. Providing real-time, high-volume, anonymous communications is not possible at the present time. Anyone who has experienced the pitiful performance of a Tor web browsing session will be familiar with the iron self-control and patience necessary to keep from throwing the computer out the window in frustration. Yes, you can share files via Tor, at the expense of reducing transfer rates by multiple orders of magnitude. Not only are there efficiency problems, detailed analysis of the security properties of real time anonymous networks have repeatedly shown that the degree of anonymity possible is very limited against a determined attacker. Careful insertion of packet delays and monitoring of corresponding network reactions allow an attacker to easily trace an encrypted communication through the nodes of the network. Effective real-time anonymity is almost a contradiction in terms. Despite these difficulties, file trading is still the usage area with the greatest potential for widespread adoption of anonymity. File traders are fickle and will gravitate rapidly to a new system if it offers significant benefits. If performance can be improved to at least approximate the transfer rates of non-anonymous networks, while allowing enough security to make the job of the content lawyers harder, that could be enough to give this technology the edge it needs to achieve widespread acceptance. CP

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Re: Multiple passports?
by Gregory Hicks 31 Oct '05

31 Oct '05

> Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 03:05:25 +0000 > From: Justin <justin-cypherpunks(a)soze.net> > > If I apply for a new one now, and then apply for a another one once > the gov starts RFID-enabling them, will the first one be > invalidated? Or can I have two passports, the one without RFID to > use, and the one with RFID to play with? I am not a State Dept person, but my experiences in this are... If you get a new one, the old one has to accompany the application and is invalidated when the new one is issued. (Invalidated by stamping the 'data' page with big red block letters "INVALID".) The old, now invalid is returned with the new one... The only people that I knew that had two passports were those with an "Official" (red) passport or a "Diplomatic" (black) passport. If they wanted to go play tourist, they had to also have a "tourist" (Blue) passport. As for applying for one now, I think the deadline for the non-RFID passwords is about 3 days away (31 Oct 2005), but I could be wrong. (In other words, if your application is not in processing by 31 Oct, then you get the new, improved, RFID passport.) Regards, Gregory Hicks > > -- > The six phases of a project: > I. Enthusiasm. IV. Search for the Guilty. > II. Disillusionment. V. Punishment of the Innocent. > III. Panic. VI. Praise & Honor for the Nonparticipants. --------------------------------------------------------------------- I am perfectly capable of learning from my mistakes. I will surely learn a great deal today. "A democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding on what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the results of the decision." - Benjamin Franklin "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." --Alexander Hamilton

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Passport Hell (was [Clips] Re: [duodenalswitch] Re: Konstantin)
by R.A. Hettinga 31 Oct '05

31 Oct '05

--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: clips(a)philodox.com Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 09:55:05 -0500 To: "Philodox Clips List" <clips(a)philodox.com> From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: [Clips] Re: [duodenalswitch] Re: Konstantin Reply-To: rah(a)philodox.com Sender: clips-bounces(a)philodox.com --- begin forwarded text Comment: DomainKeys? See http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys To: duodenalswitch(a)yahoogroups.com From: kstew111(a)aol.com Sender: duodenalswitch(a)yahoogroups.com Mailing-List: list duodenalswitch(a)yahoogroups.com; contact duodenalswitch-owner(a)yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list duodenalswitch(a)yahoogroups.com Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 09:11:08 EST Subject: Re: [duodenalswitch] Re: Konstantin Reply-To: duodenalswitch(a)yahoogroups.com it was time to renew my passport again (2nd renewal ,,not first) ..cause I want to go to Curitiba, Brasil in June to have my hernia repair and get some PS with Dr. C for loose skin and muscles... (a face lift would be nice.... hmmm) So I applied like everyone else does.... submit old passport with application, ... I get a letter back from the Department of Homeland Security that says .... I am refused because there is not enough info to prove my identity???? Thats all the proof normally required. They tell me with any further application to submit four documents all created b4 1985..... (b4 1985??? jessh!) So I do... my Birth Certificate ...my daughters B-certificate (cause my name is on it), my first marriage certificate, my first divorce papers and an original payroll register from the company I worked for in 1984 (with all my vitals on it). They then turned me down again saying its just not enough proof (????) And they were the ones who requested them. They have now asked me for ... all my medical records from before 1995, my second marriage certificate, all my school transcripts from 1959 till high school graduation, and a voter registration certificate from 1994. I also asked congressman Tom Lantos to intervene on my behalf and he tried..and they told him (nicely) to mind his own business.... I think.... I am to be trapped within this gilded cage forever.... I was to be sent by my corporation to China to represent them there (in January)... but apparently not now.... and it also looks like I will have to save up alot of money to have my PS done here in the states.... so I guess the Face lift is out.... I wonder if Dr. C does house calls? Sad, frustrated and Depressed Konstantin If you don't mind me asking, why are they rejecting your renewal? I have a friend who is an immigration attorney and I know he will ask when I bring it up to him. You can email me privately if you prefer. Jennifer --- In duodenalswitch(a)yahoogroups.com, kstew111@a... wrote: > > > I would love to learn the Rapier.... > and archery... > But right now I would settle for the Department of homeland Security to stop > rejecting my Passport renewal forms and let me travel (sigh) > Any one know a good reverse immigration attorney? > > Blessed be > Konstantin [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/duodenalswitch/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: duodenalswitch-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list Clips(a)philodox.com http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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RE: [smb@cs.columbia.edu: Skype security evaluation]
by Whyte, William 31 Oct '05

31 Oct '05

A similar approach enabled Bleichenbacher's SSL attack on RSA with PKCS#1 padding. This sounds very dangerous to me. William > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-cryptography(a)metzdowd.com > [mailto:owner-cryptography@metzdowd.com] On Behalf Of cyphrpunk > Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 5:07 AM > To: cypherpunks(a)jfet.org; cryptography(a)metzdowd.com > Subject: Re: [smb(a)cs.columbia.edu: Skype security evaluation] > > Wasn't there a rumor last year that Skype didn't do any encryption > padding, it just did a straight exponentiation of the plaintext? > > Would that be safe, if as the report suggests, the data being > encrypted is 128 random bits (and assuming the encryption exponent is > considerably bigger than 3)? Seems like it's probably OK. A bit risky > perhaps to ride bareback like that but I don't see anything inherently > fatal. > > CP > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > The Cryptography Mailing List > Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to > majordomo(a)metzdowd.com

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[Clips] How Tools of War On Terror Ensnare Wanted Citizens
by R.A. Hettinga 31 Oct '05

31 Oct '05

--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: clips(a)philodox.com Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 07:35:05 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List <clips(a)philodox.com> From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: [Clips] How Tools of War On Terror Ensnare Wanted Citizens Reply-To: rah(a)philodox.com Sender: clips-bounces(a)philodox.com <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB113072652621883932.html> The Wall Street Journal October 31, 2005 PAGE ONE New Dragnet How Tools of War On Terror Ensnare Wanted Citizens Border, Immigration Agencies Tap Into FBI Database; Questions About Privacy Mr. Samori's Speeding Ticket By BARRY NEWMAN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL October 31, 2005; Page A1 Driving in from Mexico last March, Jaime Correa was stopped by federal inspectors at a border post near San Diego. They fed the 21-year-old U.S. citizen's name into a computer with a fast link to the federal government's huge database of criminal files. Readout: Wanted in Los Angeles for attempted murder. Another citizen, Issah Samori, walked into a federal office in Chicago the previous year. He is 60, a cabbie, and was there to help his wife get a green card. An immigration clerk fed his name into the same computer. Readout: Wanted in Indiana for speeding. The border guards handed Mr. Correa over to the San Diego police, who locked him up. The Chicago police came to collect Mr. Samori. He spent the night on a concrete slab in a precinct cell. Detentions of American citizens by immigration authorities for offenses large and small are becoming routine -- and have begun to stir a debate over the appropriate use of the latest technologies in the war on terror. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, immigration computers have been hooked up to the expanding database of criminal records and terrorist watch lists maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The computers are now in use at all airports, most border crossings, and even in domestic immigration offices, where clerks decide on applications for permanent residence and citizenship. The screenings are mainly meant to trap foreigners, and especially foreign terrorists, but they have also proved to be a tool in the hunt for American citizens wanted by the police. In 2003, U.S. Customs and Border Protection says that it alone caught 4,555 Americans this way. In 2004, the number rose to 6,189. Some law enforcers applaud that tally. Citizens with nothing to hide, they argue, shouldn't care if their names are put through a criminal search, and criminals should have no "expectation of privacy." The arrests have brought in some serious offenders, like Mr. Correa, a Los Angeles gang member, who was accused of a drive-by shooting. He was convicted this month of assault with a firearm, and sentenced to eight years in prison. There have been others like him: citizens wanted for armed robbery, murder and sex crimes. But some legal scholars and defenders of privacy worry that easy access to criminal databases is giving rise to indiscriminate detentions of citizens for minor offenses, and to a "mission creep" that is blurring the line between immigration control and crime control. Routine encounters like Mr. Samori's, some say, shouldn't give civil servants a "free shot" to fish for records unrelated to the administrative purpose at hand. It isn't as if those the computer snags are being "pulled over for a broken tail-light," says former Atlanta policeman Mark Harrold, who teaches law at the University of Mississippi. Rather, as he sees it, they are being caught as they engage in civil pursuits "like going in for a marriage license." Born in Ghana, Mr. Samori has lived for 35 years in a brick house on Chicago's South Side. When he and his new Ghanaian wife, Hilda, sat down in an immigration clerk's cubicle in mid-2004, Mr. Samori knew that as a citizen he had a right to sponsor her for permanent residence. The two came ready to show that their marriage was genuine. But the clerk just stared at his computer. "He said we can't do the interview," Mr. Samori recalls. "I asked why. He said, because we have an arrest warrant on you. I told him, whatever it is, I'm ready to face it." The clerk reached for his phone. Two officers appeared. Hilda Samori cried as her husband was led out. He spent three nights in jail on his way to Indiana court, where his reckless-driving charge, a misdemeanor, was eventually set aside. Mrs. Samori had to wait a year and a half for her green-card application to be reopened. Immigration service officials say reporting wanted citizens has become standard procedure. "If you have unfinished business with the police, it's best to take care of that before you come in asking for a service or a benefit," says Christopher Bentley, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the border-protection agency's domestic sister. Apart from confirming a citizen sponsor's identity, he says, clerks search for warrants to make sure that no one on federal property poses "a threat to public safety or national security." On the borders, the same principles have long applied. Like the immigration service, the border agency now belongs to the Department of Homeland Security. Border inspectors, who wear uniforms and carry guns, are the first line of defense against terrorists, drug smugglers and illegal immigrants trying to enter the U.S. When they face suspicious people -- mostly with dubious documents -- they used to hold them for long security checks. Today, border inspectors need only swipe passports through readers for warrants and watch lists to pop up. Millions of citizens returning from abroad now have their names scanned this way. Behind the new dragnet is the FBI's National Crime Information Center, a repository of 40 million records covering everything from terrorists to stolen boats. On a single day in 2005 -- May 28 -- the center handled a record 5.3 million queries. Its biggest user now, with 1.5 million daily searches, is Customs and Border Protection. "There was authority before 9/11 to stop people, but the software makes it easier than ever," says Jeffrey Lustick, a lawyer in Bellingham, Wash., a town near the Canadian border where these arrests are commonplace. "What was theoretical has become real." The same FBI database is also available now to clerks who carry out the duties of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service. Each year, the clerks, who wear street clothes and sit behind a desk, evaluate over a million applications for citizenship and permanent residence, most sponsored by green-card holders and citizens. While clerks at other federal agencies rarely have reason to see FBI files, the immigration-service's clerks do. Because lawbreaking can disqualify applicants, all must submit to fingerprinting and a full criminal-history check. The job used to be done by hand with the FBI's help. Now fingerprints have gone digital, and immigration clerks can hunt for applicants by name on the FBI warrants list. Citizen sponsors aren't fingerprinted, but "in the course of doing our business," says Mr. Bentley, their names are checked against the warrants list as well. "When an individual comes into our office," he adds, "if there's an outstanding warrant, we will call local law enforcement and let them know the person's here." The policy hasn't been announced, but immigration lawyers around the country say they have slowly been made aware of it over the past two or three years -- often by surprise. Paul Zoltan, a Dallas immigration lawyer, says his foreign client's citizen wife was arrested in 2003 at her marriage interview and charged with shoplifting. "My trust in your office has been deeply shaken," the lawyer wrote the immigration service, complaining that the arrest had nothing to do with the immigration service's job. He got no reply, and the service has no comment. A citizen husband at an interview in Chicago was held for hours on a Georgia cocaine-possession warrant, says his wife's lawyer, Rebecca Reyes. The warrant was "years old," she says. Georgia wasn't interested; the husband was released. Jim Austin watched as his client's citizen wife was arrested for trespassing in Kansas City, Mo. Rebecca White took her foreign client's two children into a bathroom in Seattle so they wouldn't see their citizen father taken away; the charge was failure to return household rental equipment. Also in Seattle, a citizen sponsoring his wife's application was jailed overnight on a warrant for someone else. "They apologized," says Diana Moller, a lawyer who represented the wife, explaining why the man preferred not to give an interview. "He wants to leave it at that." Arrests of this kind have become common enough that many lawyers now quiz citizens about warrants before sending them into immigration interviews. The service doesn't count the citizens it arrests; if any dangerous criminals have been among them, it can't say. Customs and Border Protection can. When it nets citizens on their way into the country who are wanted for serious crimes, it puts out press releases. Two standouts from the Mexican border: a man from North Carolina wanted for multiple sex crimes against children in Arizona and Massachusetts; and a young couple on the run from Colorado, both wanted for committing a double murder. And one from the Canadian border: an escaped robber from Seattle driving a stolen car with a shotgun in the trunk and an Uzi in his luggage. "This technology is a fast, effective weapon in the war on terror," one announcement quotes the agency's chief, Robert C. Bonner, as saying, "but also gives our agents a means to apprehend criminals and fugitives of every kind." At airports, the border agency's screening for fugitives has become still more efficient with the passage of a new antiterror law requiring flights from overseas to transmit passenger lists before landing. Now, inspectors can organize welcoming parties in advance. "They're surprised, let me tell you," says a former inspector at Los Angeles Airport who asked not to be named. Often, his warrants were for Las Vegas gambling debts. "Couples come back from Canczn and the husband has to explain. The wife says, 'Why didn't you tell me?' I've seen tears. I've seen breakdowns." In 2003, the Transportation Security Administration, also part of Homeland Security, floated the idea of screening all passengers for warrants, citizens included, before they board domestic flights. The TSA's goal was to "ensure that passengers do not sit next to known terrorists and wanted murderers." After an outcry across the board -- from the American Civil Liberties Union to the American Conservative Union -- it backed off, and now is rolling out a system that limits such searches to terrorist-watch lists. At the immigration service, the authority to run checks on citizens dates back to at least 2002, the service says in a statement. That's when the FBI granted the old INS access to "certain" files "for the purpose of adjudicating immigration-benefit applications." The new service says it derives limited access to files on citizens from that deal with the FBI. The arrangement comes as news to legal experts and law-enforcement officials, including Judson Barce, the prosecutor in Benton County, Ind. "A civil authority ran a criminal check?" he says. "How do they do that?" It was thanks to the search run by a Chicago immigration clerk that Mr. Barce was able to bring Issah Samori to justice. As soon as the clerk said the word "warrant," Mr. Samori guessed what it was about. Six months earlier, on a Sunday drive to visit a relative, he was heading south in his Camry on a state highway when a Benton County police car pulled him over. The patrolman said Mr. Samori had hit 86 miles per hour in a 55 mph zone, fast enough to be reckless in Benton. Mr. Samori says he called the county to get a court date, but no appointment letter ever reached his house. That was the last he thought about the ticket until he and his wife went in for their marriage interview. After the immigration clerk found the warrant Benton County issued because Mr. Samori had missed his court date, he spent two nights in Chicago-area jails. Then Benton's sheriff arrived to drive him, in handcuffs, 70 miles to Indiana, where Mr. Samori spent his third night in a cell. In court the next day, he didn't contest the charge. "I just wanted to get it over," he says. In return for a $400 bond, he was set free. He returned a month later with proof that he had taken a defensive-driving course. The reckless-driving charge was dismissed. Less the sheriff's expenses for driving down from Chicago, he got a refund of $203.98. At the end of July, after an 18-month pause, the Samoris sat down once again at a clerk's desk in Chicago's federal building to complete their green-card interview. They brought a pile of papers and an album of wedding pictures to prove their marriage is real. They are still waiting for the immigration service to make its decision. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list Clips(a)philodox.com http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[Clips] Christopher Hitchens: What Goes Around Comes Around
by R.A. Hettinga 31 Oct '05

31 Oct '05

--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: clips(a)philodox.com Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 06:48:56 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List <clips(a)philodox.com> From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: [Clips] Christopher Hitchens: What Goes Around Comes Around Reply-To: rah(a)philodox.com Sender: clips-bounces(a)philodox.com <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB113072864998883959.html> The Wall Street Journal ? October 31, 2005 COMMENTARY What Goes Around Comes Around By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS October 31, 2005; Page A16 The Republicans who drafted and proposed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in the early days of the Reagan administration, in a vain attempt to end the career of CIA defector Philip Agee, could not have known that their hasty legislation would one day paralyze the workings of a conservative wartime administration. Nor could the eager internationalist Wilsonians who rammed through the 1917 Espionage Act -- the most repressive legislation since the Alien and Sedition laws -- have expected it to be used against government officials making the case for an overseas military intervention. But then, who would have thought that liberals and civil libertarians -- the New York Times called for the repeal of the IIPA as soon as it was passed, or else for it to be struck down by the courts -- would find these same catch-all statutes coming in handy for the embarrassment of Team Bush? The outrage of the left at any infringement of CIA prerogatives is only the least of the ironies in the indictment of Lewis Libby for discussing matters the disclosure of which, in and of itself, appears to have violated no known law. To judge by his verbose and self-regarding performance, containing as it did the most prolix and least relevant baseball analogy ever offered to a non-Chicago audience, Patrick Fitzgerald is not a man with whom the ironic weighs heavily. Nor does he seem discountenanced by his failure to find any breach in the IIPA or even the more broadly drawn Espionage Act. Mr. Libby stands accused of misstating his conversations with almost every journalist in Washington except for the only one -- Robert Novak -- who actually published the totemic name of Valerie Plame. "We have not made any allegation that Mr. Libby knowingly and intentionally outed a covert agent," Mr. Fitzgerald contentedly confirmed. If -- and one has to say "if" -- the transmission of any classified information is a crime, then as Mr. Fitzgerald also confirmed, one would be in the deep waters of the Espionage Act, which is "a very difficult statute to interpret." Actually, it is a very easy act to interpret. It declares that even something very well-known is secret if the state defines it as secret: the same principle as the dreaded British Official Secrets Act. As to the critical question of whether Mr. Plame had any cover to blow, Mr. Fitzgerald was equally insouciant: "I am not speaking to whether or not Valerie Wilson was covert." In the absence of any such assertion or allegation, one must be forgiven for wondering what any of this gigantic fuss can possibly be about. I know some apparently sensible people who are prepared to believe, still, that a Machiavellian cabal in the White House wanted to punish Joseph Wilson by exposing his wife to embarrassment and even to danger. So strong is this belief that it envisages Karl Rove (say) deciding to accomplish the foul deed by tipping off Robert Novak, one of the most anti-Iraq-war and pro-CIA journalists in the capital, as if he were precisely the pliant tool one would select for the dastardly work. And then, presumably to thicken the plot, Mr. Novak calls the CIA to confirm, as it readily did, that Ms. Plame was in the agency's employ. Meanwhile, and just to make things more amusing, George Tenet, in his capacity as Director of Central Intelligence, tells Dick Cheney that he employs Mr. Wilson's wife as an analyst of the weird and wonderful world of WMD. So jealously guarded is its own exclusive right to "out" her, however, that no sooner does anyone else mention her name than the CIA refers the Wilson/Plame disclosure to the Department of Justice. Mr. Fitzgerald, therefore, seems to have decided to act "as if." He conducts himself as if Ms. Plame's identity was not widely known, as if she were working under "non official cover" (NOC), as if national security had been compromised, and as if one or even two catch-all laws had been broken. By this merely hypothetical standard, he has performed exceedingly well, even if rather long-windedly, before pulling up his essentially empty net. However, what if one proposes an alternative "what if" narrative? What if Mr. Wilson spoke falsely when he asserted that his wife, who was not in fact under "non-official cover," had nothing to do with his visit to Niger? What if he was wrong in stating that Iraqi envoys had never even expressed an interest in Niger's only export? (Most European intelligence services stand by their story that there was indeed such a Baathist initiative.) What if his main friends in Niger were the very people he was supposed to be investigating? Well, in that event, and after he had awarded himself some space on an op-ed page, what was to inhibit an employee of the Bush administration from calling attention to these facts, and letting reporters decide for themselves? The CIA had proven itself untrustworthy or incompetent on numerous occasions before, during and after the crisis of Sept. 11, 2001. Why should it be the only agency of the government that can invoke the law, broken or (as in this case) unbroken, to protect itself from leaks while protecting its own leakers? All worthwhile information in Washington is "classified" one way or another. We have good reason to be grateful to various officials and reporters who have, in our past, decided that disclosure was in the public interest. None of the major criticisms of the Bush administration would have become available if it were not for the willingness of many former or serving bureaucrats to "go public." But this widely understood right -- now presumably in some jeopardy -- makes no sense if supporters of the administration are not permitted to reply in kind. Logic and history suggest that there will be a turn of the political wheel, and that Dems will regain control of the White House or the Congress. Will they be willing to accept the inflexible standard of secrecy that they have exacted in the Wilson imbroglio? Will they forbid their own civil servants to put a case, in confidence, to members of the press? Will they allow their trusted loyalists to be dragged before grand juries, and the reporters to be forced to open notebooks to the gaze of any prosecutor? The answer today is presumably "yes," which brings me back to where I began, and to the stupid acquiescence of Republicans in the passage of a law that should never have allowed to hollow out the First Amendment in the first place. Mr. Hitchens, columnist for Vanity Fair, is the author of "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America" (Eminent Lives, 2005). -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list Clips(a)philodox.com http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[Clips] The myth of "suitcase nukes."
by R.A. Hettinga 31 Oct '05

31 Oct '05

--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: clips(a)philodox.com Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 07:24:09 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List <clips(a)philodox.com> From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: [Clips] The myth of "suitcase nukes." Reply-To: rah(a)philodox.com Sender: clips-bounces(a)philodox.com <http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007478> OpinionJournal WSJ Online AT WAR Baggage Claim The myth of "suitcase nukes." BY RICHARD MINITER Monday, October 31, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST "It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God." --Osama bin Laden, May 1998 "Bin Laden's final act could be a nuclear attack on America." --Graham Allison, Washington Post "One hundred suitcase-size nuclear bombs were lost by Russia." --Gerald Celente, "professional futurist," Boston Globe Like everyone else rushing off the Washington subway one rush-hour morning, Ibrahim carried a small leather briefcase. No one paid him or his case much mind, except for the intern in the new Brooks Brothers suit who pushed past him on the escalator and banged his shin. "What do you have in there? Rocks?" Ibrahim's training had taught him to ignore all provocations. You will see, he thought. The escalator carried him up and out into the strong September sunlight. It was, as countless commentators would later say, a perfect day. As he walked from the Capitol South metro stop, he saw the Republican National Committee headquarters to his right. Two congressional office buildings loomed in front of him. Between the five-story structures, the U.S. Capitol dome winked in the sun. It was walled off in a mini-Green Zone of jersey barriers and armed police. He wouldn't trouble them. He was close enough. He put the heavy case down on the sidewalk and pressed a sequence of buttons on what looked like standard attachi-case locks. It would be just a matter of seconds. When he thought he had waited long enough, he shouted in Arabic: "God is great!" He was too soon. Some passersby stared at him. Two-tenths of a second later, a nuclear explosion erased the entire scene. Birds were incinerated midflight. Nearly 100,000 people--lawmakers, judges, tourists--became superheated dust. Only raindrop-sized dollops of metal--their dental fillings--remained as proof of their existence. In tenths of a second--less time than the blink of a human eye--the 10-kiloton blast wave pushed down the Capitol (toppling the Indian statute known as "Freedom" at the dome's top), punched through the pillars of the U.S. Supreme Court, smashed down the three palatial Library of Congress buildings, and flattened the House and Senate office buildings. The blast wave raced outward, decapitating the Washington Monument, incinerating the Smithsonian and its treasures, and reducing to rubble the White House and every office tower north to Dupont Circle and south to the Anacostia River. The secondary, or overpressure, wave jumped over the Potomac, spreading unstoppable fires to the Pentagon and Arlington, Va. Planes bound for Reagan and Dulles airports tumbled from the sky. Tens of thousands were killed instantly. By nightfall, another 250,000 people were dying in overcrowded hospitals and impromptu emergency rooms set up in high school gymnasiums. Radiation poisoning would kill tens of thousands more in the decades to come. America's political, diplomatic and military leadership was simply wiped away. As the highest-ranking survivor, the agriculture secretary took charge. He moved the capital to Cheyenne, Wyo. That is the nightmare--or one version, anyway--of the nuclear suitcase. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, this nuclear nightmare did not seem so fanciful. A month after September 11, senior Bush administration officials were told that an al Qaeda terrorist cell had control of a 10-kiloton atomic bomb from Russia and was plotting to detonate it in New York City. CIA director George Tenet told President Bush that the source, code-named "Dragonfire," had said the nuclear device was already on American soil. After anxious weeks of investigation, including surreptitious tests for radioactive material in New York and other major cities, Dragonfire's report was found to be false. New York's mayor and police chief would not learn of the threat for another year. The specter of the nuclear suitcase bomb is particularly potent because it fuses two kinds of terror: the horrible images of Hiroshima and the suicide bomber, the unseen shark amid the swimmers. The fear of a suitcase nuke, like the bomb itself, packs a powerful punch in a small package. It also has a sense of inevitability. A December 2001 article in the Boston Globe speculated that terrorists would explode suitcase nukes in Chicago, Sydney and Jerusalem . . . in 2004. Every version of the nuclear suitcase bomb scare relies on one or more strands of evidence, two from different Russians and one from a former assistant secretary of defense. The scare started, in its current form, with Russian general Alexander Lebed, who told a U.S. congressional delegation visiting Moscow in 1997--and, later that year, CBS's series "60 Minutes"--that a number of Soviet-era nuclear suitcase bombs were missing. It was amplified when Stanislav Lunev, the highest-ranking Soviet military intelligence officer ever to defect to the United States, told a congressional panel that same year that Soviet special forces might have smuggled a number of portable nuclear bombs onto the U.S. mainland to be detonated if the Cold War ever got hot. The scare grew when Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who served as an assistant secretary of defense under President Clinton, wrote a book called "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe." In that slim volume, Mr. Allison worries about stolen warheads, self-made bombs and suitcase nukes. Published in 2004, the work has been widely cited by the press and across the blogosphere. Let's walk back the cat, as they say in intelligence circles. The foundation of all main nuclear suitcase stories is a string of interviews given by Gen. Lebed in 1997. Lebed told a visiting congressional delegation in June 1997 that the Kremlin was concerned that its arsenal of 100 suitcase-size nuclear bombs would find their way to Chechen rebels or other Islamic terrorists. He said that he had tried to account for all 100 but could find only 48. That meant 52 were missing. He said the bombs would fit "in a 60-by-40-by-20 centimeter case"--in inches, roughly 24-by-16-by-8--and would be "an ideal weapon for nuclear terror. The warhead is activated by one person and easy to transport." It would later emerge that none of these statements were true. Later that year, the Russian general sat down with Steve Kroft of "60 Minutes." The exchange could hardly have been more alarming. Kroft: Are you confident that all of these weapons are secure and accounted for? Lebed: (through a translator) Not at all. Not at all. Kroft: How easy would it be to steal one? Lebed: It's suitcase-sized. Kroft: You could put it in a suitcase and carry it off? Lebed: It is made in the form of a suitcase. It is a suitcase, actually. You can carry it. You can put it into another suitcase if you want to. Kroft: But it's already in a suitcase. Lebed: Yes. Kroft: I could walk down the streets of Moscow or Washington or New York, and people would think I'm carrying a suitcase? Lebed: Yes, indeed. Kroft: How easy is it to detonate? Lebed: It would take twenty, thirty minutes to prepare. Kroft: But you don't need secret codes from the Kremlin or anything like that. Lebed: No. Kroft: You are saying that there are a significant number that are missing and unaccounted for? Lebed: Yes, there is. More than one hundred. Kroft: Where are they? Lebed: Somewhere in Georgia, somewhere in Ukraine, somewhere in the Baltic countries. Perhaps some of them are even outside those countries. One person is capable of actuating this nuclear weapon--one person. Kroft: So you're saying these weapons are no longer under the control of the Russian military. Lebed: I'm saying that more than one hundred weapons out of the supposed number of 250 are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia. I don't know their location. I don't know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they've been sold or stolen. I don't know. Nearly everything Lebed told visiting congressmen and "60 Minutes" was later contradicted, sometimes by Lebed himself. In subsequent news accounts, he said 41 bombs were missing, at other times he pegged the number at 52 or 62, 84 or even 100. When asked about this disparity, he told the Washington Post that he "did not have time to find out how many such weapons there were." If this sounds breezy or cavalier, that is because it is. Indeed, Lebed never seemed to have made a serious investigation at all. A Russian official later pointed out that Lebed never visited the facility that houses all of Russia's nuclear weapons or met with its staff. And Lebed--who died in a plane crash in 2002--had a history of telling tall tales. As for the small size of the weapons and the notion that they can be detonated by one person, those claims also been authoritatively dismissed. The only U.S. government official to publicly admit seeing a suitcase-sized nuclear device is Rose Gottemoeller. As a Defense Department official, she visited Russia and Ukraine to monitor compliance with disarmament treaties in the early 1990s. The Soviet-era weapon "actually required three footlockers and a team of several people to detonate," she said. "It was not something you could toss in your shoulder bag and carry on a plane or bus" Lebed's onetime deputy, Vladimir Denisov, said he headed a special investigation in July 1996--almost a year before Lebed made his charges--and found that no army field units had portable nuclear weapons of any kind. All portable nuclear devices--which are much bigger than a suitcase--were stored at a central facility under heavy guard. Lt. Gen. Igor Valynkin, chief of the Russian Defense Ministry's 12th Main Directorate, which oversees all nuclear weapons, denied that any weapons were missing. "Nuclear suitcases . . . were never produced and are not produced," he said. While he acknowledged that they were technically possible to make, he said the weapon would have "a lifespan of only several months" and would therefore be too costly to maintain. Gen. Valynkin is referring to the fact that radioactive weapons require a lot of shielding. To fit the radioactive material and the appropriate shielding into a suitcase would mean that a very small amount of material would have to be used. Radioactive material decays at a steady, certain rate, expressed as "half-life," or the length of time it takes for half of the material to decay into harmless elements. The half-life of the most likely materials in the infinitesimal weights necessary to fit in a suitcase is a few months. So as a matter of physics and engineering, the nuclear suitcase is an impractical weapon. It would have to be rebuilt with new radioactive elements every few months. Gen. Valynkin's answer was later expanded by Viktor Yesin, former chief of staff of Russia's Strategic Missile Forces. Mr. Yesin was asked by Alexander Golts, a reporter at the Russian newspaper Ezhenedelny Zhurnal: "The nuclear suitcases--are they myth or reality?" Let's start by noting that "nuclear suitcase" is a term coined by journalists. Journalistic parlance, if you wish. The matter concerns special compact nuclear devices of knapsack type. Igor Valynkin, commander of the 12th Main Directorate of the Defense Ministry responsible for nuclear ordnance storage, was absolutely honest when he was saying in an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta in 1997 that "there have never been any nuclear suitcases, grips, handbags or other carryalls." As for special compact nuclear devices, the Americans were the first to assemble them. They were called Special Atomic Demolition Munitions (SADM). As of 1964, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps had two models of SADM at their disposal--M-129 and M-159. Each SADM measured 87 x 65 x 67 centimeters [34 by 26 by 26 inches]. A container with the backpack weighed 70 kilograms [154 pounds]. There were about 300 SADMs in all. The foreign media reported that all these devices were dismantled and disposed of within the framework of the unilateral disarmament initiatives declared by the first President Bush in late 1991 and early 1992. The Soviet Union initiated production of special compact nuclear devices in 1967. These munitions were called special mines. There were fewer models of them in the Soviet Union than in the United States. All of these munitions were to be dismantled before 2000 in accordance with the Russian and American commitments concerning reduction of tactical nuclear weapons dated 1991. [When the Soviet Union collapsed, Boris Yeltsin reiterated the commitment in January 1992.] Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said at the conference on the Nuclear Weapons Nonproliferation Treaty in April 2000 that Russia had practically completed dismantling "nuclear mines." It means that Russia kept the promise Yeltsin once made to the international community. Mr. Yesin added that all "portable" nuclear weapons were strictly controlled by the KGB in the Soviet era and were held in a single facility on Russian soil, where they were regularly counted before they were dismantled. The special mines that the press calls "nuclear suitcases" are no more. American officials, including Ms. Gottemoeller, insist that there is no evidence that any are missing, stolen or sold. American experts charged with monitoring the destruction of these weapons have repeatedly testified to Congress that no special mines are unaccounted for. What about the Russian army units trained to use the special mines? Is it possible that a few such weapons remain in their hands? According to Mr. Yesin, "they always used simulators and dummy weapons. Needless to say, the latter looked like the real thing--the same size and weight, the same control panel. Instead of nuclear materials, however, they contained sand." Despite Lebed's many changing accounts, his reputation for exaggeration, and the denial of nearly every Russian official with knowledge of Russian nuclear weapons, his tale lives on in breathless newspaper articles and Web posts. Perhaps the most amusing was an article in London's Sunday Express claiming that al Qaeda bought twenty "nuclear suitcases for 25 million pounds" (roughly $45 million) from "Boris" and "Alexy." What, not Natasha? Still, Graham Allison puts his faith in Lebed's story. How does Mr. Allison account for the high-level rebuttals? He makes two brief arguments. "Moscow's assurance that 'all nuclear weapons are accounted for' is wishful thinking, since at least four nuclear submarines with nuclear warheads sank and were never recovered by the Soviet Union." (One was recovered by the U.S. in 1974.) This is true, but beside the point; the subs were carrying nuclear missiles, not nuclear suitcases. Mr. Allison's more pointed rebuttal is this: The Russian government reacted to Lebed's claim in classic Soviet style, combining wholesale denial with efforts to discredit the messenger. In the days and months that followed, official government spokesmen claimed that (1) no such weapons ever existed; (2) any weapons of this sort had been destroyed; (3) all Russian weapons were secure and properly accounted for; and (4) it was inconceivable that the Russian government could lose a nuclear weapon. Assertions to the contrary, or even questions about the matter, were dismissed as anti-Russian propaganda or efforts at personal aggrandizement. Mr. Allison is unfairly summarizing the official Russian view. There is no contradiction between points (1) and (2) because (1) refers to suitcase nukes, a journalist term for a weapon that never existed. The portable nuclear devices--the special mines that filled three footlockers and weighed hundreds of pounds--were destroyed as required by U.S.--Russia treaties. We don't have to take Russia's word for this; the disposal and destruction of these weapons were supervised by expert American officials like Ms. Gottemoeller. So point (2) checks out. As for points (3) and (4), Russia's claims have been independently verified by U.S. officials. If Mr. Allison has specific evidence of misplaced nuclear suitcases, he doesn't provide it in either the hardcover or paperback edition of his book or in his speeches to the Council on Foreign Relations or elsewhere. What about the testimony of Soviet defector Stanislav Lunev? Certainly his tale is cloaked in high drama. Mr. Lunev entered the congressional hearing room in a black ski mask and testified behind a tall screen. He described a portable nuclear device that was "the size of a golf-club bag" and testified that "one of my main directives was to find drop sites for mass destruction weapons" that would be smuggled into the U.S. using drug routes and detonated by special teams. Mr. Lunev did not testify that he saw those weapons, only that, as a TASS reporter working in Washington (his cover as a military intelligence officer), his job was to scout for "drop sites." I tracked Mr. Lunev down in suburban Maryland, where he is battling lymphatic cancer. Over the phone, he sounds like a bear of a man, with a charming Russian accent. He calls me "Riche," as in "Riche, you must switch off all recording devices." When I say I have no such devices, only a bad line, he agrees to call back. When he does, I ask him if he has ever seen a portable nuclear device. "No," he says. Then he asks if I have ever heard of Albuquerque, N.M. There is a museum there, he explains, that displays America's portable nuclear device, the SADM. "The Soviet model probably looks similar," he says, adding that he is not an expert in such things. Finally, there is Graham Allison's book. It is a serious and valuable work, with many practical suggestions for arresting the spread of nuclear technology. Still, Mr. Allison's concerns about a nuclear suitcase-sized device rest on three shaky pillars: that Lebed was right about the missing suitcase nukes, that Stanislev Lunev's account is persuasive, and that Russian nuclear security is lax. As we have seen, Lebed's changing story is highly questionable, and the nuclear mines have long since been dismantled. Mr. Allison himself concedes that nuclear suitcases might not be operative. Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations conference in September 2004, Mr. Allison said that the weapons Lebed referred to are now at least seven years old and that "many of these would be beyond warranty," requiring extensive refurbishing to function at full power. Allison does not refer to Mr. Lunev by name, possibly because he does not know it. Mr. Lunev is not named in his congressional testimony and discovering his identity requires a bit of sleuthing. Mr. Allison does not cite Mr. Lunev's book or even acknowledge talking to him. (Mr. Lunev, a friendly and direct fellow, has never heard of Mr. Allison.) As for Mr. Allison's contention that the Russians do not keep their nuclear weapons as secure as we do, he is quite right. But the Russians probably do well enough. Allison cites a number of cases in which nuclear material--though not bombs--was stolen from Russian reactors. Yet in each of the cases he cites, the thieves were caught before they could transfer the material. And the small amounts stolen could not have been, even if combined, converted into a single bomb. And there is no evidence that any of the Soviet Union's "special mines" have gone missing. No one seriously doubts Osama bin Laden's intense desire for nuclear weapons, suitcase-size or otherwise. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's bin Laden station (and an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror), said that the CIA was aware of "the careful, professional manner in which al Qaeda was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons" since 1996. There is a plethora of human and documentary intelligence to support Mr. Scheuer's conclusion. Perhaps the most chilling is a fatwa that bin Laden asked for and received from Shaykh Nasir bin Hamid al-Fahd in May 2003. It was called "A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels." The Saudi cleric concludes: "If a bomb that killed 10 million of them and burned as much of their land as they have burned Muslims' land were dropped on them, it would be permissible." Fatwas are not enough. There are only three ways for al Qaeda to realize its atomic dreams: buy nuclear weapons, steal them or make them. Each approach is virtually impossible. Buying the bomb has not worked out well for al Qaeda. The terror organization has tried and, according to detainees, been scammed repeatedly. In Sudan's decrepit capital of Khartoum, an al Qaeda operative paid $1.5 million for a three-foot-long metal canister with South African markings. Allegedly it was uranium from South Africa's recently decommissioned nuclear program. According to Jamal al-Fadl, an al Qaeda leader later detained by U.S. forces, bin Laden ordered that it be tested in a safe house in Cyprus. It was indeed radioactive, but not of sufficient quality to be weapons-grade. One American intelligence analyst said that he believed the material was taken from the innards of an X-ray machine. It is not clear what it actually was, but the canister was ultimately discarded by al Qaeda. Al Qaeda's next attempt to buy bomb-making material involved Mamduh Mahmud Salim, a nuclear engineer. He was captured in Germany in 1998, before he could obtain any nuclear material. In a third case, al Qaeda paid the Islamic Army of Uzbekistan for some radioactive material. It turned out that the uranium al Qaeda received was not sufficiently enriched to create an atomic blast, though it could be used in a "dirty bomb." For what it is worth, there are actually no documented cases of the Russian Mafia or Russian officials selling nuclear weapons or material. Given that Russian gangsters have sold everything from small arms to aircraft carriers, this might seem surprising. Michael Crowley and Eric Adams, writing in Popular Science magazine, theorize that Russian security forces may be less tempted by money than is commonly assumed or that Russian mobsters find other illicit material more profitable than nuclear material. Whatever the reason, there is simply no known case of the Russian mob selling nuclear devices or parts to anyone, let alone to al Qaeda. What about theft? Stealing a bomb--or its component parts--is far more difficult than it sounds. The International Atomic Energy Agency maintains a detailed database of thefts of highly enriched uranium, the kind needed to make an atomic bomb. There have been 10 known cases of highly enriched uranium theft between 1994 and 2004. Each amounted to "a few grams or less." The total loss is less than eight grams, and even these eight grams, which have differing levels of purity, could not be productively combined. To put these quantities in perspective, it takes some 15,900 grams--roughly 35 pounds--to make a highly enriched uranium bomb. Stealing highly enriched uranium is extremely difficult. Every nation with an active nuclear weapons program guards access to its breeder reactors and enrichment plants. Employee backgrounds are scrutinized and workers are under near-constant surveillance. Transporting radioactive material invites detection and is a constant danger to those moving it without shielding. If it were shielded, the immense weight of the small container would be a giveaway to authorities. Could terrorists storm a reactor and steal the radioactive material? Not likely. An investigation by Forbes magazine reveals the difficulties: Assuming attackers could shoot their way past the beefed-up phalanx of armed guards, traffic barriers and guard towers that now surround every nuclear plant, they'd still have to fight their way into the reactor building through multiple levels of remote-activated blast doors--where access requires the right key card and palm print--to get to the spent-fuel pond, says Michael Wallace, president of Constellation Energy's generation group, which operates five nuclear reactors. The pond where highly radioactive used fuel rods sit in 14-foot-long stainless steel assemblies cooling under 40 feet of water. Terrorists couldn't just grab this stuff and run because, unshielded, it gives off a lethal dose of radiation in less than a minute. To avoid exposure, terrorists would have to force workers to use a giant crane inside the reactor to load the assemblies into huge transfer casks, then open the mammoth doors of the reactor building and use another crane to lift the cask onto a waiting truck--all the while being shot at by the National Guard. It may be easier to steal radioactive material outside the U.S.--but not much. What about hijacking a plane and crash-diving it into a nuclear reactor? It would make a spectacular movie scene, but as Forbes explains, it would not cause much harm to those outside the plane: Assume that terrorists could get past tightened airport security and fight off passengers to get through new, improved cockpit doors and take control of a plane. Even then they'd have to crash the jet directly into a reactor to have any chance of breaking containment. In 2002 the Electric Power Research Institute performed a $1 million computer simulation to assess such a risk. Conclusion: A direct hit from a 450,000-pound Boeing 767 flying low to the ground at 350 mph would ruin a plant's ability to make electricity but not break the reactor's cement shield. Reason: A reactor, smaller in profile than the Pentagon or World Trade Center, would not absorb the full force of the plane's impact. And, for all the force behind it, a plane, built of aluminum and titanium, has far less mass than the 20-foot-thick steel-and-concrete sarcophagus enclosing a nuclear reactor. It would be like dropping a watermelon on a fire hydrant from 100 feet. Another problem with theft is fencing the goods. Most uranium thieves have been caught when they tried to sell the small amounts of radioactive material they have stolen. And the difficulties of theft do not end once al Qaeda gets its prize. Even if al Qaeda terrorists managed to steal a nuclear device or bought one from those standby villains of choice, Russian mobsters, they would still have to figure out how to break the codes and overturn the fail-safes. All Russian and American devices have temperature and pressure sensors to defeat unauthorized use. Since intercontinental missiles are designed to pass through the upper atmosphere before descending to their targets, the terrorists would have to find a laboratory facility that could mimic the environment of the outer stratosphere. Good luck. Council on Foreign Relations fellow Charles Ferguson told the Washington Post that "you don't just get it [a nuclear weapon] off the shelf, enter a code, and have it go off." So could al Qaeda make its own bomb? It appears that the terror network has tried and failed. In August 2001, bin Laden was envisioning attacks bigger than what happened on September 11. Almost a month before the attacks on New York and Washington, bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri met with Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majeed, two officials once part of Pakistan's nuclear program. Mr. Mahmood had supervised the plant that enriched uranium for Pakistan's first bomb and later managed efforts to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Both scientists were arrested on Oct. 23, 2001. They remain under house arrest in Pakistan. At their meeting with bin Laden, they discussed plans to mine uranium from plentiful deposits in Afghanistan and talked about the technology needed to turn the uranium into bomb fuel. It was these scientists who informed bin Laden that the uranium from Uzbekistan was too impure to be useful for bomb making. Al Qaeda will keep trying, no doubt. But there is no evidence that they are near succeeding. A wide array of documents and computer hard drives found in al Qaeda safe houses reveals a serious effort to build weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. military also obtained a document with the sinister title of "Superbomb." In addition, CNN discovered a cache of documents at an al Qaeda safe house that outlined the terror network's WMD plans. David Albright, a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, was retained by CNN to evaluate the al Qaeda documents. In "Al Qaeda's Nuclear Program: Through the Window of Seized Documents," a research paper for a think tank linked to the University of California at Berkeley, Albright concluded: "Whatever al Qaeda had accomplished towards nuclear weapon capabilities, its effort in Afghanistan was 'nipped in the bud' with the fall of the Taliban government. The international community is fortunate that the war in Afghanistan set back al Qaeda's effort to obtain nuclear weapons." For now, suitcase-sized nuclear bombs remain in the realm of James Bond movies. Given the limitations of physics and engineering, no nation seems to have invested the time and money to make them. Both U.S. and the USSR built nuclear mines (as well as artillery shells), which were small but hardly portable--and all were dismantled by treaty by 2000. Alexander Lebed's claims and those of defector Stanislev Lunev were not based on direct observation. The one U.S. official who saw a small nuclear device said it was the size of three footlockers--hardly a suitcase. The desire to obliterate cities is portable--inside the heads of believers--while, thankfully, the nuclear devices to bring that about are not. Mr. Miniter is author of "Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror" (Regnery, 2005), from which this article is excerpted. It is available from the OpinionJournal bookstore. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list Clips(a)philodox.com http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[Clips] Security 2.0: FBI Tries Again To Upgrade Technology
by R.A. Hettinga 31 Oct '05

31 Oct '05

--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: clips(a)philodox.com Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 07:29:37 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List <clips(a)philodox.com> From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: [Clips] Security 2.0: FBI Tries Again To Upgrade Technology Reply-To: rah(a)philodox.com Sender: clips-bounces(a)philodox.com <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB113072498332683907.html> The Wall Street Journal October 31, 2005 Security 2.0: FBI Tries Again To Upgrade Technology By ANNE MARIE SQUEO Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL October 31, 2005; Page B1 As the fifth chief information officer in as many years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Zalmai Azmi faces a mystery: How to create a high-tech system for wide sharing of information inside the agency, yet at the same time stop the next Robert Hanssen. Mr. Hanssen is the rogue FBI agent who was sentenced to life in prison for selling secret information to the Russians. His mug shot -- with the words "spy, traitor, deceiver" slashed across it -- is plastered on the walls of a room at FBI headquarters where two dozen analysts try to track security breaches. Mr. Hanssen's arrest in February 2001, and his ability to use the agency's archaic system to gather the information he sold, led FBI officials to want to "secure everything" in their effort to modernize the bureau, Mr. Azmi says. But then, investigations after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks showed that FBI agents had information about suspected terrorists that hadn't been shared with other law-enforcement agencies. So then "we said, 'Let's share everything,'" Mr. Azmi says. Since then, the FBI spent heavily to upgrade its case-management system, from one that resembled early versions of personal computers -- green type on a black computer screen, requiring a return to the main menu for each task -- to a system called Virtual Case File, which was supposed to use high-speed Internet connections and simple point-and-click features to sort and analyze data quickly. But after four years and $170 million, the dueling missions tanked the project. FBI Director Robert Mueller in April pulled the plug on the much ballyhooed technology amid mounting criticism from Congress and feedback from within the bureau that the new system wasn't a useful upgrade of the old, rudimentary system. As a result, the FBI continues to use older computer systems and paper documents remain the official record of the FBI for the foreseeable future. Highlighting the agency's problems is the recent indictment of an FBI analyst, Leandro Aragoncillo, who is accused of passing secret information to individuals in the Philippines. After getting a tip that Mr. Aragoncillo was seeking to talk to someone he shouldn't have needed to contact, the FBI used its computer-alert system to see what information the analyst had accessed since his hiring in 2004, a person familiar with the probe said. The system didn't pick up Mr. Aragoncillo's use of the FBI case-management system as unusual because he didn't seek "top secret" information and because he had security clearances to access the information involved, this person said. The situation underscores the difficulties in giving analysts and FBI agents access to a broad spectrum of information, as required by the 9/11 Commission, while trying to ensure rogue employees aren't abusing the system. It's up to Mr. Azmi to do all this -- without repeating the mistakes of Virtual Case File. Much is at stake: FBI agents and analysts are frustrated by the lack of technology -- the FBI finished connecting its agents to the Internet only last year -- and Mr. Mueller's legacy depends on the success of this effort. The FBI director rarely appears at congressional hearings or news conferences without his chief information officer close by these days. An Afghan immigrant, the 43-year-old Mr. Azmi fled his native country in the early 1980s after the Soviet invasion. After a brief stint as a car mechanic in the U.S., he enlisted in the Marines in 1984 and spent seven years mainly overseas. A facility for languages -- he speaks five -- helped him win an assignment in the Marines working with radio communications and emerging computer technologies. When he returned to the U.S., he joined the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a project manager developing software and hardware solutions for patent examiners. He attended college and graduate school at night, obtaining a bachelor's degree in information systems from American University and a master's degree in the same field from George Washington University, both in Washington, D.C. Afterward, he got a job at the Justice Department in which he helped upgrade technology for U.S. attorneys across the country. That is where he was working when terrorists attacked Sept. 11, 2001. On Sept. 12, armed with two vans of equipment, Mr. Azmi and a team of engineers traveled from Washington to New York, donned gas masks, and broke into the U.S. Attorney's office near the World Trade Center to secure information and get systems up and running. Within 48 hours, the network was back online. Then he says he got a call from a friend from his military days, who asked, "Do you want to watch the news or make the news?" Mr. Azmi headed back to Afghanistan, where he spent two months crawling through the mountains with a special-operations unit searching for Osama Bin Laden. He won't say whether he did this in a civilian capacity. Mr. Azmi eventually returned to the Justice Department. In November 2003, Mr. Mueller plucked him to join the FBI, promoting him in May 2004 to be chief information officer. At the time, the Virtual Case File system was delayed but there was still hope it could work. Early this year, however, a field test in the FBI's New Orleans office determined the setup wouldn't satisfy the agency's needs. Mr. Azmi was ordered to start over from scratch. Its replacement, dubbed Sentinel, is supposed to be bigger than just a case-management system, incorporating search-engine tools for investigation and efficiency improvements to decrease the FBI's reliance on paper. The bureau currently uses more than 1,000 paper forms to do everything from asking permission to take a trip to wiring an informant with a body recorder. The road map for the project, housed in a two-inch-thick binder that Mr. Azmi frequently pats, is based on input from hundreds of managers and rank-and-file employees at the bureau about their needs and processes. Before, Mr. Azmi says, "we didn't have a blueprint. We all decided to build a house, but no one knew what the foundation was going to look like." The project won't be completed until 2009 and is likely to cost hundreds of millions dollars more. No official estimate of the price will be provided, FBI officials say, until after the contract is awarded in November. At its core, though, Sentinel will be successful only if it threads the needle of sharing and securing information for only those who need to see it. Making the task more difficult is the size and disparity of the FBI's technology needs. For example, the bureau has four separate computer networks -- Top Secret, Secret, Classified and Sensitive but Unclassified. The Secret database alone is subdivided into thousands of compartments that house information on grand juries, among other things. By comparison, "we had one network at the National Security Agency that we did everything on," says Jack Israel, a 25-year NSA veteran and now the FBI's chief technology officer who works for Mr. Azmi. The NSA network was "secret," thus viewed only by those with security clearances at that level. But a single report filed by an FBI agent could include information that falls into all four categories, meaning walls must be erected around data so its existence is known only by those with authorization. Instead of doing what's known as a "flash cutover," or taking down the old system completely and turning on the new, as was previously planned, Mr. Azmi has opted for a gradual approach. It is already under way. So far, all of the information stored in the old, rudimentary system has been copied -- four billion records, or three terabytes of data -- into a provisional system known as the Independent Data Warehouse. While it doesn't put to rest the security issues raised in the Aragoncillo case, the database, used by some 8,000 employees, allows information to be accessed and manipulated through an easier Internet-style connection. An internal search engine is being tested by the FBI's counterterrorism and counterintelligence units that will allow users to pictorially chart how various people and groups connect to each other. It is all part of Mr. Azmi's plan to make the FBI more like his favorite crime drama, "24" on Fox Television. Though the show is based on the CIA, its lead character, agent Jack Bauer, "always has the right information available at the right time. ... That's the goal for the FBI." -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list Clips(a)philodox.com http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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