No longer is there a separation between Earthly technology, other worldly technology, science fiction stories of our past, hopes and aspirations of the future, our dimension and dimensions that were once inaccessible, dreams and nightmares… for it is now all the same!

By Gil Carlson

(C) Copyright 2016 Gil Carlson

Wicked Wolf Press Email: [email protected]

To discover the rest of the books in this Blue Planet Project Series: www.blue-planet-project.com/

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Air Hopper Robot Grasshopper…7 Aqua Sciences Water from Atmospheric Moisture…8 Avatar Program…9 Biometrics-At-A-Distance…9 Chembot Squishy SquishBot Robots…10 Cormorant Submarine/Sea Launched MPUAV…11 Cortical Modem…12 Cyborg Insect Comm System Planned by DARPA…13 Cyborg Insects with Nuclear-Powered Transponders…14 EATR - Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot…15 EXACTO Smart Bullet from DARPA…16 Excalibur Program…17 Force Application and Launch (FALCON)…17 Fast Lightweight Autonomy Drones…18 Fast Lightweight Autonomous (FLA) indoor drone…19 Gandalf Project…20 Gremlin Swarm Bots…21 Handheld Fusion Reactors…22 Harnessing Infrastructure for Building Reconnaissance (HIBR) project…24 HELLADS: Lightweight Laser Cannon…25 ICARUS Project…26 InfoChemistry and Self-Folding Origami…27 Iron Curtain Active Protection System…28 ISIS Integrated Is Structure…29 Katana Mono-Wing Rotorcraft Nano Air Vehicle…30 LANdroid WiFi Robots…31 Lava Missiles…32 Legged Squad Support System Monster BigDog Robot…32 LS3 Robot Pack Animal…34 Luke’s Binoculars - A Cognitive Technology Threat Warning…34 Materials with Controlled Microstructural Architecture (MCMA) program…35 M3 Soft Camo Robots…37 MAHEM Metal Jets…38 Micro Air Vehicles…39 Micro Imagers for Sensing On Nano Air Vehicles…40 Neural Engineering System Design NESD…41 Neural Implant to Treat Memory Loss…42 Neuromorphic Brain-Chip…42 One Shot XG Self-calculating gun scopes…45 Persistent Close Air Support (PCAS)…46 Pet-Proto Robot…47 Precision Urban Hopper Robot…47 Project Reymand…49 -2-

Radar Scope Can Sense Thru Walls…50 Remote Control of Brain Activity…51 RESURRECT High-Fidelity Computer Battlefield Simulations…52 RISE Robot: Six-Legged BIODYNOTICS…53 Self-Repairing Hunter-Killers…54 Shark Cyborgs On DARPA Remote Control…54 Shredder Challenge…56 Silent Talk 'Telepathy' For Soldiers…56 Smart Video Cams - DARPA's Mind's Eye…58 SMITE Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination…59 Soldier Scentric Imaging via Computational Cameras (SCENICC)…60 Springtail EFV-4B Personal Air Vehicle from Trek Aerospace…61 Stealthy, Persistent Perch and Stare UAVs…62 Submersible Aircraft - DARPA's Flying Sub…63 TASC - DARPA's Psychohistory…64 Toward Narrative Disruptors and Inductors…65 Upward Falling Payload…66 Vulture Five Year Flying Wing…67 Walrus and Griffith's War-Balloons…68 Warrior Web from DARPA…69 Warrior Web: Superman Underwear from DARPA…70

Acoustic Kitty…72 Area 51…73 CIA and Google at it Again…74 CIA hired private contractors…77 CIA Mind-Control Experiments…79 CIA Project to break security of Apple’s…80 Did Google fall into the hands of CIA and NSA?...81 Listening in on Lennon…83 MKULTRA…84 Operation Mockingbird…89 Operation Northwoods…90 Project 1794…90 Project Iceworm…92 Stargate Project…93

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Angry Birds…102 ANT Division of NSA…102 BLARNEY…106 Boundless Informant…106 Dishfire…108 EgotisticalGoat…110 FAIRVIEW…111 FASCIA…112 Gilgamesh…114 HappyFoot…115 NoseySmurf…116 Operation UFO…117 Optic Nerve…117 PRISM…119 Squeaky Dolphin…121 STORMBREW & OAKSTAR…122 TOR Users Attacked…122 XKeyscore…125

Europa Drill…128 OSIRIS-Rex…129 Super Ball Bot…130 Supersonic Bidirectional Flying Wing…131 Tiny Satellites…132 Traveling Without Fuel…133

Black Project Aircraft…134 GuardBot…141 Invisibility Cloak…142

NOTE: The material in this book has not been submitted to or approved by any U.S. intelligence agency. If anything is discovered that is considered by your agency to be classified, notify the publisher.

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DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) was established 1958 in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. DARPA reports directly to the Secretary of Defense; however, it operates independently of the rest of military research and development. They have an unlimited black budget and they aren’t accountable to anyone. While a lot of what they create does have benefits to the military and saves lives, we need to look a little deeper at some of these projects and think about what these projects could do to our privacy and even our survival when they end up in other government hands. Also, as you consider that some of these projects seem benign, we might just be seeing the tip of the iceberg and the very dark uses have been kept secret from our prying, inquisitive eyes! It’s interesting to note how many of these projects can be traced back to science fiction books of years ago. Are the folks at DARPA science fiction fans? Or is it possible that our science fiction of years ago was actually based on facts? Were these writers picking up or being fed ideas from aliens? Or was our government leaking their alien knowledge to the book and film writers as a form of disclosure? They say nothing is new, ideas just keep repeating themselves over the centuries. Advanced civilizations come and go. What we vainly claim to be great scientific achievements could be similar or inferior to what civilizations possessed many thousands of years ago! Also consider how many of these projects seem to have a relationship to alien technology. Are they back-engineered alien science? If you’ve read “The Day After Roswell” you will notice the similarities in the whole DARPA process. OK, that’s enough. I don’t want to get water-boarded, let’s get on with the projects…

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Important Note: Kinesis KL02 Micro Controller Chip

Since this powerful chip is so important to many of the military projects in use by DARPA and other branches of the government, I am bringing up this story again as many of us may have overlooked the value of this chip as it was overshadowed by the loss of the plane and so many lives: After Flight MH370 Vanished, it was claimed that Sir Jacob Rothschild was left as sole owner of the patent for the World’s Smallest Micro-Controller Electronic Warfare Chip, developed by Freescale Semiconductor: 70 Freescale Engineers (and 4 Patent Holders) Were on Flight MH370. When this story first broke it was originally reported that 70 engineers who worked for Freescale Semiconductor out of Austin Texas were flying on flight MH370 when it disappeared. Later it was altered to only 20 engineers from Freescale Semiconductors being on that plane. And some of the financial information I have seen shows that while Sir Jacob Rothschild, through Blackstone, was one of several major stockholders, he was not the sole owner. In a detailed report from Malaysia Chronicle dated April 8, 2014, said that Freescale launched what could be the world's smallest microcontroller in Feb 2013 called the Kinesis KL02. KL02 measures 1.9 mm by 2mm and contains RAM, ROM and a clock. Even with its minute size, KL02 might be the most potent next-generation war weaponry. Whether remotely controlled or automatically programmed, KLO2 can be utilized to employ drones smaller than flies. Such small-sized drones were allegedly being used to deliver lab-cloned viruses or toxic drugs instrumental for spreading plague, virus and disease; track spy satellites or large scale and hidden weaponries. KL02 could also be injected into devices like Google glass to render the device obsolete or have the device controlled from 'someone' aside from its owner. The chip is also significant in making plausible Pentagon's ultimate dream of the human-controlled robotic warrior. It can be injected into bionic prosthetics to control robotic nerves and limbs. 'Killing' the creators of this chip will prevent any leakage or selling of the technology to the Chinese and outside the Malaysian government. It is widely known that China is in its way of advancing its military-applications technology for warfare. The Malaysian government, on the other hand, is rumored to

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have acquired rights to a powerful chip which can alter barcode tags in retail goods and can be inserted into human body to by-pass identity verifications. The Rothschild family reportedly owns the Malaysian Central Bank which has significant investments in the Malaysian government and Malaysian Airlines.

Air Hopper Robot Grasshopper

This Air Hopper Robot is a prototype created at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The intent is to create a robot that is able to handle difficult, uneven terrain with some measure of robotic aplomb. The Air Hopper uses an air cylinder to achieve some height; it can apparently jump as much as 70 centimeters forward and 40 centimeters high. The Air Hopper is 129cm long, stands 52.2cm tall and weighs 32.4kg. DARPA is also working on a hopping robot - the Precision Urban Hopper. The only hopping robot that I can recall in science fiction is quite different in structure. I'm thinking of 1994 novel Heavy Weather; Bruce Sterling wrote about a device called a "dope mule robot."

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Aqua Sciences Water from Atmospheric Moisture

Aqua Sciences has developed a fully self- contained mobile freshwater generation system that can produce up to 1,200 gallons of fresh water per day by pulling it from atmospheric moisture. Aqua Sciences was under contract to the Pentagon to provide fresh water to US troops in Iraq. The company's secret technology was developed from original ideas from DARPA. (And possibly the aliens?) This program creates water from the atmosphere using low-energy systems, reducing the overall logistics burden for deployed forces and provides potable water within the reach of the warfighter any place, any time. Currently water is airlifted to troops using C-17 cargo planes, then trucked the rest of the way at a cost of $30 per gallon. Aqua Sciences can supply water for about thirty cents per gallon. They are being very secretive about the basic principles behind this device. But it works like rice used in saltshakers that acts as a magnet to extract water and keeps salt from clumping. The problem of finding potable water on our world is taken to extremes by Frank Herbert in his 1965 masterpiece Dune. In the novel, the planet Arrakis has no surface water at all; the natives use remarkable technology to gather moisture. One of the many devices used is the windtrap. Stilgar stopped at a yellow rock wall. He pressed an outcropping and the wall swung silently away from him, opening along an irregular crack. He led the way through past a dark honey- comb lattice that directed a cool wash of air across Paul when he passed it. "That air felt damp." A man behind them said "Plenty of air in the trap tonight." Using these simple devices, the natives were able to pull millions of decaliters of water from the planet's atmosphere.

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Avatar Program

How much of your tax money would you spend on a program to recreate Avatar, a movie in which a human is "uploaded" to a robot? Whenever a science-fictional desire exists, DARPA is ready to meet that. OK, the DARPA Avatar program is not quite like the movie: what they are working on is “interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi- autonomous bipedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.” Maybe the next step is a kind of cloned alien android, based partly on our own DNA?

Biometrics-At-A-Distance

Biometrics-at-a- distance is DARPA's way of picking you out in a crowd - you know, just in case they needed to - from a distance, without your knowledge. The idea is to use sensors to collect biometric identification systems like your identifiable heart beat from further way than is typical in your doctor's office. OBJECTIVE: The ability to collect, localize, and evaluate physiological signals (e.g., heart rate) at distances greater than 10 meters, non-line-of-sight, and through solid objects (walls, rock, concrete, etc.). DESCRIPTION: There is a need to remotely detect, collect, and evaluate physiological signals of interest. Applications and concepts-of-operations (CONOPs) that would benefit from this capability include, but are not limited to: building-clearing, warfighter health monitoring or battle damage assessment and triage, situational awareness and assessment. Existing micro-impulse radar (MIR) and ultra-wideband (UWB) technologies have the capability of detecting heartbeat and respiration at distances up to 8 meters but

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are limited in at greater distances and in challenging environments, such as penetration through thick or multiple walls, concrete, and RF-noisy environments. For example, in a building that has experienced a catastrophic event (fire, earthquake, etc.), the detection of survivors and assessment of their medical condition, in addition to their location to within 1-meter accuracy, would improve the likelihood of recovery of personnel and their survivability. Additionally, in a crowded environment it is highly challenging to uniquely identify persons based on collection of physiological signatures, such as electrocardiograms (ECGs). It is possible that high-frequency ECGs or other signals could improve the confidence level in unique identification. For this project, the use of “on body” sensors that transmit signals to remote locations, is not sufficient. Biometrics-at-a-distance will record human vital signs at distances greater than 10 meters, using non-line-of-sight and non-invasive or non-contact methods. And to uniquely identify 10 subjects with >95% confidence inside a building or similar structure. As well as using surrogate signals, detect, localize, and discriminate ten sources of surrogate physiological signals. Applications for this technology include use by disaster response search and rescue teams, fire and rescue, police and hostage rescue. Military applications include: building- clearing, warfighter health monitoring or battle damage assessment and triage, situational awareness and assessment. Science fiction fans have been ready for this development for several generations. In his Hugo award-winning 1967 novel Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny describes a robotic snake that can pick up EEG readings from up to a mile away. Looks like we will never be able to hide from the government!

Chembot Squishy SquishBot Robots

ChemBots are soft, flexible robots that are able to alter their shape to squeeze through small openings and then regain their full size. These are Chemical Robots (ChemBots): soft, flexible, mobile objects that can identify and maneuver

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through openings smaller than their static structural dimensions; reconstitute size, shape, and functionality after traversal; carry meaningful payloads; and perform tasks. ChemBots represent the convergence of soft materials chemistry and robotics to create a fundamentally new class of soft meso-scale robots that can perform the following key unit operations in sequence: 1. Travel a distance; 2. Traverse an arbitrary-shaped opening much smaller than the largest characteristic dimension of the ChemBot; 3. Reconstitute size, shape, and functionality after traversing the opening; 4. Travel a distance; 5. Perform a function using the embedded payload.

Cormorant Submarine/Sea Launched MPUAV

DARPA's Cormorant Submarine/Sea- Launched and Recovered Multi- Purpose Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (MPUAV) is a unique concept vehicle intended to extend the capabilities of both submarines and surface ships. The MPUAV concept involves the immersible vehicles housed and serviced in the launch tubes of cruise missile submarines. Released from the tubes, the MPUAVs would float at the surface until sent aloft by two Tomahawk solid rocket boosters. The turbofan engine MPUAVs would return to a designated recovery point, splash down and power down to wait for retrieval. Submarines would launch a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to snag the MPUAV and haul it back into a launch tube, where it could be docked and retracted. Fans of the UFO television series produced in Britain in 1969/1970 may recall the Skydiver, a sea-launched flying machine.

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Fans of the sixties series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea will of course recall the flying sub, which launched from a small bay on the underside of the submarine Seaview. It would power to the surface, and take off after building up a bit of speed. The Subjugator is a remote-controlled vehicle built by students for the 2004 International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition; it was modeled on the flying sub.

Cortical Modem

A direct neural interface is used to allow for the visual display of information without the use of glasses or goggles. The cortical modem project aims to build a low cost neural interface based display device. The short term goal of the project is the development of a device about the size of two stacked nickels with a cost of goods on the order of $10 which would enable a simple visual display via a direct interface to the visual cortex with the visual fidelity of something like an early LED digital clock. Now consider a more advanced version of the device capable of high fidelity visual display. First, this technology could be used to restore sensory function to individuals who simply can’t be treated with current approaches. Second, the device could replace all virtual reality and augmented reality displays. Now it gets a bit scary because the current approach is based in optogenetics, and it requires a genetic alteration of the DNA in your neurons.

Did DARPA get this idea from the Neuronic Receptor-Transmitter in Masson's Secret, a 1939 short story by Raymond Z. Gallun? ...inside his skull, where the frontal region of his brain was located, is a little cylinder, that neuronic receptor-transmitter. Its wires are carefully embedded in the proper nerve ends.

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Cyborg Insect Comm System Planned by DARPA

DARPA's HI-MEMS 'cyborg insects' are now being designed to communicate with each other by modulating their usual calls. Following close on the success of researchers in actually growing electronic control circuits in living insects, DARPA is now looking for additional functionality. Insects will be equipped with embedded MEMS transceivers that pick up modulated calling sounds from nearby insects. Once the information in a call is extracted by the transceiver, the information code is applied to an electromechanical device on board the insect that modulates the insect calls, thereby retransmitting the information to another insect, and so on. Science fiction and fantasy readers, alone among other human beings, are unfazed by this news. For example, we've seen (and read) about Gandalf talking with a moth in its own language, and then sending it as a message. I'm surprised DARPA hasn't requested this as a feature; why shouldn't soldiers be able to talk directly into this network? Fans of Dune of course recall the distrans, a technology that allows the user to imprint a message on the normal cry of a bat, which could then be interpreted by the person who receives the bat.

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The whole idea of embedding control circuits in a living insect was inspired by the 1990 sf novel Sparrowhawk by Thomas A. Easton. Finally, as far as I know, the earliest person to describe the idea of a controlled insect delivering a message was Philip K. Dick in his 1966 novel The Simulacra.

Cyborg Insects with Nuclear-Powered Transponders

DARPA's cyborg HI-MEMS insects are now equipped with a transponder that uses a radioactive fuel source. Electrical engineering associate professor Amit Lal and graduate student Steven Tin presented a prototype microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) transmitter—an RF- emitting device powered by a radioactive source with a half-life of 12 years, meaning that it could operate autonomously for decades. The researchers think the new RFID transmitter, which produces a 5-milliwatt, 10-microsecond-long, 100-megahertz radio-frequency pulse, could lead to the widespread use of radioisotope power sources. Steven Tin said that part of the goal of the radioisotope transmitter work is to power the insects that the group is developing for DARPA. The HI-MEMS program, which is approaching its fourth year, has already grown several kinds of insects—moths and beetles—with implanted control electronics. With such controls, they can be driven by a remote operator for “stealth applications” and disaster response. No longer do you have to worry about the Feds knocking on your door, now you just have to worry about them flittering unnoticed through a slightly cracked open window! Science fiction fans recall the blurbflies from Jeff Noon's excellent 2000 novel Nymphomation. Even earlier, the housefly monitors from Philip K. Dick's 1964 novel Lies, Inc. was loaded with all kinds of devices that needed tiny power supplies.

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EATR - Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot

The EATR is a special DARPA project to develop a robotic platform able to perform long missions while refueling itself by foraging. The system obtains its energy by foraging – engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable. Will it eat humans also? In order to succeed, EATR must be able to 1) identify suitable biomass sources of energy, 2) spatially locate and manipulate the sources of energy (cut to size as needed), and 3) convert the biomass to electrical energy. Don't mind that large robot in your front yard; it's a DARPA robot trying to feed itself having (1) identified grass as a suitable biomass for conversion. Hopefully, it will ignore your small children and pets, and will not try to cut them into pieces small enough to eat (2) and then subsequently convert them in to electricity. (A DARPA update later explained that EATR is a vegetarian. So need to worry) The robotic arm and end effector will be attached to the robotic mobility platform, either directly or affixed to a platform towed behind the HMMWV. It will have sufficient degrees-of-freedom, extend sufficiently from the platform, and have a sufficient payload to reach and lift appropriate materials in its vicinity. The end effector will consist of a multi-fingered (e.g., three-fingered or two-thumb, one-finger) hand with sufficient degrees-of-freedom to grasp and operate a cutting tool (e.g., a circular saw) to demonstrate an ability to prepare biomass for ingestion, and to grasp and manipulate biomass for ingestion. You may want to carry a baseball bat while out inspecting the back forty - use this to discourage EATR robots from trying to "manipulate" you or other things that you want to keep. -15-

Autonomous intelligence will be provided by the 4D/RCS system. The 4D/RCS (three dimensions of space, one dimension of time, Real-time Control System) architecture, has software modules created for the EATR. The 4D/RCS has been developed by the Intelligent Systems Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. They’ve been in the works for more than three decades with an investment exceeding $125 million. The NIST 4D/RCS has been demonstrated successfully in various autonomous intelligent vehicles, and a variation of the 4D/RCS serves as the Autonomous Navigation System (ANS) mandated for all robotic vehicles in the Army’s Future Combat System (an additional investment of $250 million). NIST is providing assistance in transferring the 4D/RCS technology for the EATR.

EXACTO Smart Bullet from DARPA

EXACTO (Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance) is a DARPA program to "revolutionize rifle accuracy and range by developing the first ever guided small-caliber bullet". The smart bullet is a five-inch fire-and-forget self-tracking bullet-missiles. DARPA seeks to improve sniper effectiveness and enhance troop safety by allowing greater shooter standoff range and reduction in target engagement timelines. The objective of the EXACTO program is to revolutionize rifle accuracy and range by developing the first ever guided small-caliber bullet. The EXACTO 50- caliber round and optical sighting technology will greatly extend the day and nighttime range over current state-of-the-art sniper systems. The system combines a maneuverable bullet and a real- time guidance system to track and deliver the projectile to the target, allowing the bullet to change path during flight to compensate for any unexpected factors that may drive it off course. This idea in a graphic form was in Michael Crichton's 1984 movie Runaway.

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Excalibur Program

The Defense Department constantly worries about the risks associated with combat, especially in urban situations where less-precise conventional weapons may cause unintended collateral damage. DARPA's Excalibur program is aimed at allaying these fears through light-weight laser weapon. Eventually, DARPA hopes the program will produce a 100-kilowatt laser that could be used in precision strikes against ground and air targets.

Force Application and Launch (FALCON)

The FALCON program is mainly focused on the X-41 CAV -- an alien- looking, cone-shaped "near-space" plane that can go 13,000 miles per hour (20 times the speed of sound). The Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle is designed to skim the top of the atmosphere just below space, and is a key element of the Pentagon’s Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS) capability — a program to build non-nuclear strategic weapons that can strike conventionally anywhere in the world in less than an hour. The $308 million Falcon HTV-2 is a suborbital near-space vehicle launched on a Minotaur rocket, a solid-fuel booster built from a decommissioned ballistic missile. On the very edge of the atmosphere, in a procedure called “clamshell payload fairing

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release,” the launch missile deploys the plane, which is then supposed to glide above the Earth at more than 13,000 miles per hour. The Pentagon is developing a generation of such hypersonic weapons as a way of being able to strike quickly at urgent threats — such as preparations by terrorists or rogue states to use nuclear weapons. Falcon, being developed jointly with the Air Force, is just one of a series of conventional long-range strike programs, including another DARPA project called Arclight, and the Air Force’s X-51, which successfully test-flew a hypersonic powered flight technology called scramjet — for “supersonic combustion ramjet.” The program calls for weapons that can “strike globally and rapidly with joint conventional forces against high-payoff targets” using “attacks in a matter of minutes or hours — as opposed to the days or weeks needed for planning and execution with existing forces.”

Fast Lightweight Autonomy Drones

"Birds of prey and flying insects exhibit the kinds of capabilities we want for small UAVs. Goshawks, for example, can fly very fast through a dense forest without smacking into a tree," according to an anonymous comment from a DARPA program manager. "The goal of the FLA program is to explore non-traditional perception and autonomy methods that would give small UAVs the capacity to perform in a similar way, including an ability to easily navigate tight spaces at high speed and quickly recognize if it had already been in a room before." Although it lacks the autonomous mode, it looks suspiciously similar to the speeder bike chase scene from Return of the Jedi:

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Fast Lightweight Autonomous (FLA) indoor drone

In place May 1, 2015. This project offers amazing spying possibilities thanks to the algorithms that enable these small air platforms to fly fast (e.g., at least 20 m/s) in cluttered environments (e.g., indoors) using on-board autonomy with small size, weight, and power components. Now you can possibly be spied on in your home, your office or any building you thought was secure! (Maybe even in the Whitehouse or the Kremlin!) They used to just bug your phone now they can send a bug after you through your window! They create platforms with the following characteristics: (1) a high-performance autopilot with bi-directional communication to custom closed- loop motor controllers, integrated low-level calibration software, and built-in sensor error detection and redundancy features; (2) an open interface that enables manual piloted control, autonomous control through an onboard computer or wireless communication module, vehicle configuration and tuning, and user customizable feedback of various sensor data from the autopilot; (3) modular design enabling rapid replacement of components after a crash; (4) modular design enabling the FLA performer teams to easily add their own processors, sensors, and other equipment to the platform; (5) employ electric propulsion using multiple rotors in order to hover;

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(6) produce 3,600 g of thrust in order to achieve high speeds; (7) exhibit a thrust to weight ratio above 3:1 with a 300 g battery in order to achieve high maneuvering agility; (8) measure under 28 in. from end to end with propeller guards in order to fit with at least 8 in. of margin through 36 in. windows.

This might remind you of the Scarab robot flying insect from Raymond Z. Gallun's 1936 classic The Scarab. The scarab easily avoided obstacles in complex indoor environments.

Gandalf Project

Gandalf is the codename for a defense department project to locate enemies precisely, and target them, by phone. It's not quite a Batman-type science- bending project, but DARPA's apparently hush hush "Gandalf" initiative looks to be fairly ambitious nonetheless -- at least as far as we can tell from the rather vague statements that have been made about it. In an announcement of sorts recently, DARPA reportedly said that the project's goal is to use "set of handheld devices" to track down a specific "signal emitter of interest" using radio frequency geolocation, and presumably some other measures they're not about to dish the details on. This could mean that a group of undercover operatives or special-forces troops would be able to be dispersed near a target and hone in on a particular cellphone, or other electronic device for that matter, and then proceed to track it with no one the wiser. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVE: The Gandalf program is an advanced technology and development and demonstration program that is seeking solutions to the functions of radio frequency (RF) geolocation and emitter identification using specific emitter identification (SEI) for specific signals of interest. The ultimate goal of the Gandalf program is to enable a set of handheld devices to be utilized to perform RF geolocation and SEI on RF signals of interest to the Gandalf program. The specific goals

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and performance objectives associated with RF geolocation and SEI for the Gandalf system are classified. The basic idea is that a group of agents or troops could carry a hand-held gadget that could pick out the phone of a specific person, and then target that person. Philip K. Dick had a unique understanding of the military mind, and he called this one in his wonderful 1965 novel The Zap Gun. He called this process of targeting a single individual needle-eyeification: "The final solution," Febbs said, "in my opinion, in n-e weapons." N-e: that signified the esoteric term, used in Wes-bloc's weapons circles such as the Board which he now belonged to, needle- eye. And needle-eyeification was the fundamental direction which weapons had been taking for a near half-century. It meant, simply, weapons with the most precise effect conceivable. In theory it was possible to imagine a weapon - as yet untranced of by Mr. Lars himself, still - that would slay one given individual at a given instant at a given intersection at one particular given city in Peep-East. Or in Wes-bloc, for that matter.

Gremlin Swarm Bots

Just imagine a pilot in an expensive fighter jet flying over contested airspace somewhere in the Pacific. A series of blips appears on the radar: drones staging a coordinated assault. But they’re far out to sea for attack drones — too far, it seems, to make it back to any safe landing spot. How did they get out here? Like a team of silver-suited circus performers, they encircle the jet in a precise and choreographed dance and begin a series of electromagnetic attacks, jamming the radar and the communications. The jet’s instruments begin to behave strangely. The pilot takes aim but there are too many of them. He’s been swarmed. As quickly as they

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appear, the drones are gone, vanished into the underbelly of a low-flying bomber that’s now climbing away. With his communications and targeting equipment fried, the pilot must return to base. He’s been effectively neutralized and the culprits are nowhere to be seen. In what some might regard as a swipe at certain high-priced fighter jets, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has a new program to develop distributed drones that can be recovered in the air via a C-130 transport plane, and then prepped for re-use 24 hours later. They’re calling them Gremlins. “An ability to send large numbers of small unmanned air systems (UAS) with coordinated, distributed capabilities could provide U.S. forces with improved operational flexibility at much lower cost than is possible with today’s expensive, all-in- one platforms—especially if those unmanned systems could be retrieved for reuse while airborne.”

Handheld Fusion Reactors

In 2009 DARPA was working on handheld fusion reactors! I wonder if they have them yet? Or if they are safe and how much of my tax money they are using up?

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The Chip-Scale High Energy Atomic Beams program will develop chip-scale high-energy atomic beam technology by developing high- efficiency radio frequency (RF) accelerators, either linear or circular, that can achieve energies of protons and other ions up to a few mega electron volts (MeV). Chip-scale integration offers precise, micro actuators and high electric field generation at modest power levels that will enable several order of magnitude decreases in the volume needed to accelerate the ions. Furthermore, DARPA thermal isolation techniques will enable high efficiency beam to power converters, perhaps making chipscale self-sustained fusion possible. Program Plans in 2009 were to: − Develop 0.5 MeV proton beams and collide onto microscale B-11 target with a fusion Q (energy ratio) > 20, possibly leading to self- sustained fusion. − Develop neutron-less fusion allowing safe deployment for handheld power sources. − Develop microscale isotope production by proton beam interaction with specific targets. − Explore purification of isotope systems. − Develop hand-held pico-second laser systems to introduce wakefield accelerators for x-ray and fusion sources. Damn, DARPA scares me!

Chipscale self-sustained fusion would be just the thing to power your pocket nucleo-bulb from Asimov's 1951 novel Foundation: He [Wienis] cast one look out of the window. The city was pitch-black... Only toward the fight, where the Argolid Temple stood was there illumination. He swore angrily, and dragged the king away. Wienis burst into his chambers, the five guardsmen at his heels. Lepold followed, wide- eyed, scared speechless. "Hardin," said Wienis, huskily, "you are playing with forces too great for you." The mayor ignored the speaker. In the pearly light of the pocket nucleo-bulb at his side, he remained quietly seated, a slightly ironic smile on his face.

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Harnessing Infrastructure for Building Reconnaissance (HIBR) project

This is just DARPA's way of saying that your days of hiding in your house or apartment building are just about over. DARPA has developed broad and diverse technologies necessary for external sensing deep inside buildings with the objective of providing a suite of sensing technologies for situational awareness both above and below-ground suitable across a broad range of building environments. The component technologies support all external ISR concepts of operations ranging from pre-mission planning through detailed assessment of targeted structures, and live updates during mission execution. We've all seen versions of this idea presented in films; typically, it shows dots representing people moving through a floor plan that had been entered into the computer beforehand. DARPA is now able to fully visualize the interior structure of a building without any architectural plan data. If that makes you want to retreat to your underground bunker in Montana, well, don't bother. DARPA is also working on GATE, or Gravity Anomaly for Tunnel Exposure, which can detect tunnels and underground bunkers. It's a sensor attached to low-flying aircraft that detects subtle changes in gravity and makes maps of the world underneath our own. (They just might plan on using them to find more of the underground caverns that are home to aliens, such as were discovered under Dulce Base!) In the 1996 movie Eraser, the sight on the gun was able to see right through the building, visualizing walls and major appliances, to pick up the heartbeat (actually, the whole heart!) of the target.

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HELLADS: Lightweight Laser Cannon

The High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) program is an ambitious DARPA project aimed at neutralizing surface-to- air missile threats that aircraft may encounter. Generally, surface-to-air missiles are faster than a target plane, making it difficult for an aircraft to evade fire. The HELLADS program attempts to use lasers to disable incoming missiles. DARPA is also planning on increasing the strength of the HELLADS laser in order to make it an offensive weapon capable of destroying enemy ground targets. It is light enough to fit on a fighter jet or drone aircraft, and yet powerful enough to fire a 150 kilowatt beam of energy. The Star Wars laser cannon may be closer than you think. High energy laser weapons already in development are powerful enough to bring down missiles (see MTHEL - Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser). However, their very large size has precluded placement on any but the largest planes. The main weight problem comes from the cooling systems needed. HELLADS makes use of a unique cooling technique. The high-energy laser uses a liquid that has the same angle of refraction as the mirrors inside the blaster. That way, the "ray gun" can fire away, even while it's being cooled. It has the low specific weight (5 kg/kW) and compact size need to be mounted in a smaller airborne vehicle. This kind of compact system is getting very close to what science fiction writers since H.G. Wells have envisioned when writing about the heat ray in War of the Worlds. More recently, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote about laser cannon in their 1974 novel Mote in God's Eye.

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ICARUS Project

One of the results of the VAPR program: a polymer that can be triggered to disintegrate. There's always a danger on the battlefield of one side's equipment falling into the hands of the other — at least, until DARPA's ICARUS project succeeds in making equipment that vanishes into thin air when no longer needed. Short for (believe it or not) Inbound Controlled Air-Releasable Unrecoverable Systems, ICARUS grew out of the military research agency's Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) program, which succeeded in making electronic components that can destroy themselves on a molecular level. "With the progress made in VAPR, it became plausible to imagine building larger, more robust structures using these materials for an even wider array of applications."

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InfoChemistry and Self-Folding Origami

The Programmable Matter program at DARPA is working on some fascinating technologies. The intent of the program is to have material that can form itself into a variety of three-dimensional objects on command. DARPA calls this idea InfoChemistry - building information directly into materials. One approach described as "self-folding origami" created by machines that use specialized sheets of material with built-in actuators and data. These machines use cutting-edge mathematical theorems to fold themselves into virtually any three- dimensional object. Sure sounds a lot like the alien technology and their ability create amazing materials. The Roswell crashed UFO that contained a super-strong memory metal that was as light as aluminum foil, indistructable and would spring back to its original shape. Did we learn how to create these materials from Roswell or maybe from aliens working with us at a later date? Today's generation of sf fans probably think of robots like the T-1000 series shape-shifting mimetic alloy "robots" from the Sarah Connor Chronicles.

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Iron Curtain Active Protection System

This is mounted to the roof and hood of a suitable vehicle. When activated by an approaching projectile, the Iron Curtain takes it out. (I could really use this, it would make me feel so secure as I’m speeding down the highway on my way to lunch at my favorite restaurant, which I will not name in the interest of security). DARPA in November 2009 awarded Mustang Technologies a contract to integrate Iron Curtain with its Crosshairs counter-shooter system for tests on an MRAP. Cued by the corner- mounted Crosshairs' radar, an optical sensor classifies the incoming threat and selects the aimpoint. When the RPG is just inches from the vehicle, the roof-mounted countermeasure fires straight down, deflagrating the warhead before it can detonate. Fans of Russian defense tech may recall the Arena Active Protection System (in Russian that's "активная система защиты" or "Арена"). It uses a Doppler radar to detect incoming

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warheads. Upon detection, a defensive rocket is fired that detonates near the inbound threat, destroying it before it hits the vehicle. :("lit. "Wind Coat ,מעיל רוח And fans of Israeli defense tech may recall the (in Hebrew "The system has been integrated onto Israeli Merkava main battle tanks in the Israeli Army. The design includes an F/G band fire-control radar with four flat-panel antennas mounted on the vehicle, with a 360-degree field of view. When a weapon is fired at the vehicle, the internal computer uses the signal from the incoming weapon and calculates an approach vector. Once the incoming weapon is fully classified, the computers calculate the optimal time and angle to fire the neutralizers. The response comes from two rotating launchers installed on the sides of the vehicle. The launchers fire the neutralizing agents, which are usually small metal pellets like shotgun shot. The system is designed to have a very small kill zone, so as not to endanger troops adjacent to the protected vehicle." A similar science-fictional system is in David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers" novels. The close-in defense system is triggered by hostile incoming "buzz-bombs" that target the tank you are in.

ISIS Integrated Is Structure

It is essentially an inflatable surveillance outpost. It hangs out in the upper atmosphere and has the ability to take high-res battlefield photos, even at night. And they will be able to get one up anywhere, any time -- it can be deployed within a matter of hours. Also, it's totally self-sustained, thanks to a solar energy and hydrogen fuel cell combo, and it doesn't require any kind of input from the ground. It can pretty much cruise around forever.

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And while that's fairly practical, another project called Combat Zones That See (CTS) is just as creepy as it sounds. Remember in The Dark Knight when Batman used Gotham's cellphones to try to track the Joker, and Morgan Freeman got really pissed off at him? Imagine something like that, only using every camera in an entire city instead of just cellphones. That's CTS. Basically, it uses municipal and other outdoor video and a computerized logic routine to track objects from camera to camera. CTS is intended to be able to primarily track vehicles in war zones, but that hasn't stopped privacy hounds on the Internet from pointing out that it could easily be used to track American citizens right here. Kind of makes you want to never leave the house.

Katana Mono-Wing Rotorcraft Nano Air Vehicle

The Katana Mono-Wing Rotorcraft is a coin-sized one-bladed helicopter. DARPA gave Lockheed a half-million dollars to continue development of this. Katana is intended for "indoor military missions." They claim that NAV platforms will be revolutionary in their ability to harness low Reynolds number physics, navigate in complex environments, and communicate over significant distances. The Reynolds number is the ratio between inertial forces and viscous forces arising where fluids such as air flow over solid surfaces such as aircraft wings. It is generally high for big, fast things like normal aircraft; but flying critters such as bats and insects - whose capabilities DARPA would like to achieve in their NAV - operate in low-Reynolds- number flight regimes. Lockheed has already done development work on a predecessor aircraft, based on the whirling maple seed ("samara"). This device was called "Samarai." -30-

LANdroid WiFi Robots

LANdroid WiFi robots are the latest items from DARPA. These are intelligent autonomous radio relay nodes that are able to establish mesh networks in urban settings. A LANdroid unit would consist of a robotic platform - small, inexpensive, smart, and mobile warfighters would carry lots of them (they are roughly palm-size) and then drop them as they go. Together, the units form a self- healing mesh network - multi-path, multi-hop and multiply connected. If a particular unit is taken out by the enemy (or possibly grabbed by some kid as a cool toy!), the network will route around the lost transmitter.

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Lava Missiles

Did you ever play the Modern Warfare games? And did you use the Javelin, that bazooka thing that lets you point at an enemy, then launch a smart missile that will chase him down no matter where he goes? Congratulations, you have used DARPA technology -- the Javelin was created in a partnership between DARPA and Texas Instruments.

Legged Squad Support System Monster BigDog Robot

A bigger BigDog robot is on order from Boston Dynamics. DARPA wants a new "robotic mule" to carry gear for soldiers in the field. The robot, called Legged Squad Support System, or LS3, will be able to navigate rough terrain, carrying 180 kilograms (~400 pounds) of load and enough fuel for missions covering 32 kilometers (~20 miles) and lasting 24 hours.

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Boston Dynamics says LS3 won't need a driver, because it will automatically follow a human leader using computer vision or travel to designated locations using sensors and GPS. Building the robot will take 30 months and cost US $32 million. The first LS3 prototype was expected to debut in 2012, so I would assume they are already out there in use somewhere. "If LS3 can offload 50 lbs [23 kg] from the back of each solider in a squad, it will reduce warfighter injuries and fatigue and increase the combat effectiveness of our troops," DARPA identifies these key program themes for LS3: Quadruped platform development: Design of a deployable walking platform with sufficient payload capacity, range, endurance, and low noise signature for dismounted squad support, while keeping weight and volume scaled to the squad level. Walking control: Develop control techniques that allow walking, trotting, and running/ bounding and capabilities to jump obstacles, cross ditches, recover from disturbances, and other discrete mobility features. User Interface (to include perception technologies): The ability for the vehicle to perceive and traverse its immediate terrain environment autonomously with simple methods of Marine/Soldier control. SF readers have been waiting for quadruped robotic helpers, thanks to Anthony Boucher's 1951 short story The Quest for Saint Aquin: He... took his first opportunity to inspect the robass in full light. He admired the fast-plodding, articulated legs, so necessary since roads had degenerated... the side wheels that could be lowered into action if surface conditions permitted; and above all the smooth black mound that housed the electronic brain - the brain that stored commands and data concerning ultimate objectives and made its own decisions on how to fulfill those commands in view of those data...

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LS3 Robot Pack Animal

This Legged Squad Support System (LS3) robot pack animal is being made for DARPA by from Boston Dynamics. It was commissioned by DARPA in 2010. The LS3, which weighs in at 800 pounds and can carry 400 pounds of gear over twenty miles of uneven terrain. The LS3 has a camera sensor system that provides the “eyes” it needs to make smart decisions about where it should go on a wild terrain. “Ears” for the LS3 are also in the works, so the robot can respond to simple commands. The vision for LS3 is to combine the capabilities of a pack mule with the intelligence of a trained animal.

Luke’s Binoculars Cognitive Technology Threat Warning

Star Wars Binoculars - Our friends at DARPA are at it again with a Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System. They've dubbed the device "Luke's Binoculars," after the device used by Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars movie. DARPA wants to do more than eyeball Banthas and Sand People. They intend to use an EEG scan of the soldier’s brain to help alert him to potential threats that he picks up -34-

subliminally. It turns out that there are fast neural signatures associated with target detection in natural imagery. Recent developments and discoveries in the disparate technology areas of flat-field, wide-angle optics, large pixel-count digital imagers, cognitive visual processing algorithms, neurally-based target detection signatures and ultra-low power analog-digital hybrid signal processing electronics have led DARPA to believe that focused technology development, system design, and system integration efforts may produce revolutionary capabilities for the warfighter. The DARPA CT2WS program is a soldier-portable digital imaging threat queuing systems capable of effective detection ranges of 1-10 km against dismounts and vehicles while simultaneously surveying a 120-degree or greater field of view (FOV).

Materials with Controlled Microstructural Architecture (MCMA) program

DARPA's Materials with Controlled Microstructural Architecture (MCMA) program is seeking ways to control and engineer materials at a fundamental level. If possible,

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DARPA would like to control the microstructure of materials right down to the micron level. Control at the microstructure level allows researchers to develop materials with greatly enhanced properties. For instance, DARPA was able to construct a material so light that it can rest atop a bubble. MCMA researchers are working toward the goal of developing a material that is as strong as steel, but as light as a plastic. To do so, they are exploring the full range of properties that can be manifested as functions of truss design and weight in a material’s microstructure. Wait a minute, isn’t this what they recovered at Roswell? DARPA has also developed lightweight materials that can absorb energy without failing, or breaking. Think about ultralight metallic microlattices — the nickel microtruss structure can achieve a 40% strain level without collapsing; in fact, it fully recovers its form. (Wow, that’s from Roswell!) DARPA is exploring how much strength and energy absorption can be combined in the same material without damaging it. The ultimate objective of the MCMA program is to be able to develop materials in the future with properties tailored to meet specific mission requirements. If DARPA is reading up on science fiction and is really trying to create science-fictional materials, DARPA program engineers just maybe already working on these science fiction materials: Fanmetal High tensile strength material; used in collapsible structures (from Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune). Glassite A strong, transparent material (from the 1930 novel Brigands of the Moon by Ray Cummings. Helio-Beryllium Unusual alloy combines a metal and a gas (from Robert H. Wilson's 1931 story Out Around Rigel) Steelonium Steel that did not rust or corrode (from Hugo Gernsback's 1911 novel Ralph 124c 41 +)

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M3 Soft Camo Robots

DARPA's Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program recently created low-cost silicone robots with microfluidic channels that allow for air and fluids to be pumped in to control movement, color and temperature. The robot moves at a speed of approximately 40 meters per hour; absent the colored fluid, it can move at approximately 67 meters per hour. They are working at smoothing the movements; as speed is less important than the robot's flexibility. Soft robots are useful in many circumstances because they are resilient and can maneuver through very constrained spaces. They tried using tethers to attach the control system and to pump pressurized gases and liquids into the robot. Tethered operation reduces the size and weight of such robots by leaving power sources and pumps off-board, but future prototypes could incorporate that equipment in a self- contained system. At a pumping rate of 2.25 mL per minute, color change in the robot required 30 seconds. Once filled, the color layers require no power to sustain the color. They appear to have been inspired by soft organisms, such as octopi and squid because of their ability to control their appearance, and that inspired them to explore dynamic coloration. Science fiction fans may recall the moldies from Rudy Rucker's 1997 novel Freeware which featured robots with remarkably flexible forms.

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MAHEM Metal Jets

The MAHEM (Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition) program is a new DARPA project, but to science fiction fans, it is an old, familiar idea. Arthur C. Clarke described the idea in his 1955 novel Earthlight. DARPA is initiating the MAHEM program to try to create compressed magnetic flux generator (CMFG)-driven magneto hydrodynamically formed metal jets and self- forging penetrators (SFP). Self-forging penetrators, as they are currently used, result from a conventional chemical explosion directed against a specially-shaped metal liner. When the device is set off, the blast causes the metal liner to achieve a new shape, suitable for penetrating deep into even moderately armored vehicles, and driven forward at a high velocity. The technology dates back to WWII. This kind of weapon can be highly effective (it was used against troops in Iraq). The drawbacks of this kind of weapon are that they are one-time-use weapons, and cannot efficiently form multiple SFPs from a single charge. This method of using a powerful electromagnet to accelerate a molten jet of metal could overcome the drawbacks mentioned above, and even achieve higher velocities and better targeting. DARPA expects it to provide the following capabilities: Provide the warfighter with a means to address stressing missions such as: lightweight active self-protection for vehicles (potential defeat mechanism for a kinetic energy round), counter armor (passive, reactive, and active), mine countermeasures, and anti- ship cruise missile final layer of defense. Science fiction readers have known about this idea for more than a half-century. In his excellent 1955 novel Earthlight, Arthur C. Clarke makes use of exactly this idea in a battle between a stationary facility on the Moon and several attacking space ships.

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Micro Air Vehicles

The Shrike, which basically looks exactly like a kid's RC copter and is built primarily for spying and reconnaissance. So, really, it is an RC copter, with an iPhone taped to it.

And if that sounds unimpressive, don't worry -- they're also developing the much smaller and much creepier NAV -- the Nano Air Vehicle. One day you might find one hanging around your neighbor's bird feeder. Yes, we're talking about a tiny robot hummingbird that can spy on terrorists (and maybe you). The whole thing is less than 6 inches tall and lighter than an ounce, and as demonstrated by the image above, it will fool absolutely everyone ever.

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Micro Imagers for Sensing On Nano Air Vehicles

Micro-Sensors for Imaging (MSI) is the name of the DARPA project that gives eyes to the new generation of nano air vehicles. With the impetus toward micro-air and ground vehicles for military applications, there is a compelling need for imaging micro- sensors compatible with these small platforms. Dramatic reduction in size and weight also significantly impacts the format of individual warfighter systems, opening the way to new sensor concepts especially in head-mounted applications. The Micro-Sensors for Imaging Program addresses technology to meet these needs, achieving a dramatic reduction in the size and weight of short wave infrared (SWIR) imaging sensors for both micro-air vehicle and head- mounted applications.

DARPA is working on a SWIR micro-air vehicle camera that weighs just ten grams - and that's inclusive of optics, detector and electronics.

Fans of sf writer Neal Stephenson already knew we would need these; take a look at his description of what was needed for the tiny flying aerostat monitors from his 1995 novel The Diamond Age.

Miss Pao continued, "The sky-eye dispatched a flight of eight smaller aerostats equipped with cine cameras." The kinky football was replaced by a picture of a tear-drop-shaped craft, about the size of an almond, trailing a whip antenna, with an orifice at its nose protected by an incongruously beautiful iris.

Raymond Z. Gallun also thought about this problem in his incomparable 1936 story The Scarab describing a tiny remote-controlled nano air vehicle: ...the Scarab buzzed into the great workroom as any intruding insect might, and sought the security of a shadowed corner. There it studied its surroundings, transmitting to its manipulator, far away now, all that it heard through its ear microphones and saw with its minute vision tubes.

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Neural Engineering System Design NESD

DARPA wants to build an implantable brain-to-computer interface. The idea here is that DARPA wants a chip smaller than a cubic centimeter — they characterize it as the volume of two nickels, back to back — that will provide “unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world.” Naturally, they’ve got an acronym for it: The Neural Engineering System Design, or NESD. They want to implant it in the human brain, and use it as an indwelling wideband interface for data transmission — and they’ve earmarked $60 million over four years for the purpose. Currently, the best neural interfaces we have are used for things like limb prosthetics, and they only use about a hundred channels at a time — and those channels get noisy, imprecise feeds because they’re many-to-one aggregators, collecting signals from hundreds or thousands of neurons per channel. Prior art in the field of brain-computer interfaces, while promising, is still young. The NESD project aims to create an indwelling brain-to-computer interface, capable of data transmission between the module and up to a million individual neurons at a time. “The interface would serve as a translator, converting between the electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain and the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology,” according to DARPA’s press release. Research like this represents an enormous leap forward, and it will have to be profoundly multidisciplinary. Straight out of the gate, NESD’s objective will require a good map of the connectome, and an intimate understanding of how neurons and their support cells do what they do. Implant engineering like this requires low-power electronics, materials science and mathematical modeling too. But imagine a HUD utility that could pick up sensory input from your brain, analyze it, and compare that information about your environment to a much larger database in real-time — like something you’d see on JARVIS’s resume. It’s even possible that by integrating magnetic brain stimulation, we could get remote I/O capabilities for the human mind.

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It boggles the mind to contemplate the security risks introduced by a wetware interface between a computer — any computer — and the human brain. Who’s going to get a chip put in their head made by the same governing bodies that gave us warrantless wiretapping and MK-ULTRA?

Neural Implant to Treat Memory Loss

DARPA has awarded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) up to $2.5 million to develop an implantable neural device with the ability to record and stimulate neurons within the brain to help restore memory. Memory is a process in which neurons in certain regions of the brain encode information, store it and retrieve it. Certain types of illnesses and injuries, including Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Alzheimer's disease and epilepsy, disrupt this process and cause memory loss. The goal of LLNL's work -- driven by LLNL's Neural Technology group and undertaken in collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Medtronic -- is to develop a device that uses real-time recording and closed-loop stimulation of neural tissues to bridge gaps in the injured brain and restore individuals' ability to form new memories and access previously formed ones. The research is funded by DARPA's Restoring Active Memory (RAM) program. Specifically, the Neural Technology group will seek to develop a neuromodulation system -- a sophisticated electronics system to modulate neurons -- that will investigate areas of the brain associated with memory to understand how new memories are formed. The device will be developed at LLNL's Center for Bioengineering.

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Currently, there is no effective treatment for memory loss resulting from conditions like TBI. LLNL will develop a miniature, wireless and chronically implantable neural device that will incorporate both single neuron and local field potential recordings into a closed- loop system to implant into TBI patients' brains. The device -- implanted into the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus -- will allow for stimulation and recording from 64 channels located on a pair of high-density electrode arrays. The entorhinal cortex and hippocampus are regions of the brain associated with memory. The arrays will connect to an implantable electronics package capable of wireless data and power telemetry. An external electronic system worn around the ear will store digital information associated with memory storage and retrieval and provide power telemetry to the implantable package using a custom RF-coil system.

Fans of science fiction are stimulated to remember the memory biochip from Lois McMaster Bujold's 1986 novel Shards of Honor, although it's not quite the same, obviously. DARPA makes it sound like a boon for those who have failing memories, but after all, this is DARPA, famous for military projects. Why do I feel that this is being designed for more sinister purposes, such as being able to download a person’s complete memory banks, making interrogation so much easier? Maybe even making water-boarding obsolete? And even removing someone’s memories completely? This would be useful for silencing those who disagree with their government. What would happen if they removed one’s memories and replaced them with someone else’s? Or how about replacing millions of citizen’s memories with a copies taken from a perfect example of a docile, obedient worker who never complained or challenged authority? Wouldn’t this be the dream of those who want to control the government and us? Why am I so skeptical? Is it because I have seen so many processes that were designed to help humans backfire and create so much pain and suffering? Maybe I shouldn’t be thinking like this, guess I just need to be water-boarded.

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Neuromorphic Brain-Chip

DARPA is working on neuromorphic chips that could make sense of video and sensor data from planes and drones right on board. A neuromorphic chip has been tested in a tiny drone aircraft that weighs less than 100 grams. In the experiment, the prototype chip, with 576 silicon neurons, took in data from the aircraft’s optical, ultrasound, and infrared sensors as it flew between three different rooms. The first time the drone was flown into each room, the unique pattern of incoming sensor data from the walls, furniture, and other objects caused a pattern of electrical activity in the neurons that the chip had never experienced before. That triggered it to report that it was in a new space, and also caused the ways its neurons connected to one another to change, in a crude mimic of learning in a real brain. Those changes meant that next time the craft entered the same room, it recognized it and signaled as such. The drone, custom built for the test by drone-maker company Aerovironment, is six inches square, 1.5 inches high, and weighs only 93 grams, including the battery. HRL’s chip made up just 18 grams of the craft’s weight, and used only 50 milliwatts of power.

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That wouldn’t be nearly enough for a conventional computer to run software that could learn to recognize rooms. IBM has been working with DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program since 2008 to develop computing systems that work less like conventional computers and more like the neurons inside your brain. The TrueNorth system, as it's been dubbed, employs modular chips that act like neurons. By stringing multiple chips together researchers can essentially build an artificial neural network. The version that IBM just debuted contains about 48 million connections -- roughly the same computing capacity as a rat's brain -- over an array of 48 chips. And we return to Science fiction… writer Peter Watts decided you could try giving a plane the brains of a pilot. Literally. In his 1999 novel Starfish, sf author Peter Watts describes what he calls "head cheese".

One Shot XG Self-calculating gun scopes

DARPA's One Shot XG program aims to improve the accuracy of military snipers through a small mountable calculation system that can be placed either on a weapon's barrel or on its spotting scope. The One Shot system is designed to calculate a number of variables — such as crosswind conditions, the maximum effective range of the weapon, and weapon alignment — using an internal Linux-based computer. The system would then indicate an ideal aim point for the marksman. The One Shot XG began testing in March 2013 and has continued in development.

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Persistent Close Air Support (PCAS)

A system that provides almost immediate close air support - The tactic of close air support — in which soldiers call in attack aircraft to gain advantage in the midst of a ground engagement with the enemy — has remained relatively unchanged since its emergence in World War I. In conventional close air support, pilots and ground forces focus on one target at a time through voice directions and a shared map. DARPA's Persistent Close Air Support (PCAS) program is aimed at radically redefining the concept. PCAS would change this by enabling ground agents to share real-time situational awareness and weapons data with aircraft crews. This would allow an aircrew to focus on multiple targets simultaneously. The PCAS is also designed to significantly reduce the time between calling in an airstrike and an aircraft's arrival on the battlefield.

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Pet-Proto Robot

The Pet-Proto, a predecessor to DARPA's Atlas robot, is confronted with obstacles similar to those robots might face in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). To maneuver over and around the obstacles, the robot exercises capabilities including autonomous decision-making, dismounted mobility and dexterity. The DARPA Robotics Challenge will test these and other capabilities in a series of tasks that will simulate conditions in a dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environment.

This robot derives from the PETMAN robot, who has been making real progress. PETMAN started out as a kind of consumption robots, as described by Frederik Pohl in his 1954 short story The Midas Plague.

Precision Urban Hopper Robot

The Precision Urban Hopper robot is a DARPA project intended to give wheeled robots an additional edge; the ability to jump up onto or over obstacles up to nine meters high. The device will have some sort of powered linear piston actuator that drives the mechanism. The Precision Urban Hopper is part of a broad effort to bolster the capabilities of troops and special

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forces engaged in urban combat, giving them new ways to operate unfettered in the urban canyon. This device appears to be part of the Urban Ops Hopper program from DARPA: The Urban Ops Hopper program develops semi-autonomous hybrid hopping/articulated wheeled robotic platforms that could adapt to the urban environment in real-time and provide the delivery of small payloads to any point of the urban jungle while remaining lightweight, small to minimize the burden on the soldier. In general, small robots or unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) are severely limited by obstacle negotiation capability. The hopping capability allows small UGVs to overcome obstacles many times their own size. Hopping mobility can be shown to be much more efficient than hovering for obstacles at heights less than or equal to a few meters. The hopping robot is truly multi- functional in that it can negotiate all aspects of the urban battlefield to deliver payloads to non-line-of-sight areas with precision. Abilities include:  "ability to make precise hops"  “'stick' accurate landings"  "hopping surface properties"

 "precision guided hopping"  "precision hop performance" This small GPS guided, unmanned ground vehicle can jump over and/or onto obstacles up to 9 meters high. The current design uses a combustion powered linear piston actuator that rotates about an actuated pivot to place the foot of the hopping mechanism on the ground at a 70-degree angle between the piston and the ground. The current vehicle’s ability to make precise hops through specified target locations such as windows and to “stick” accurate landings on small target locations without excessive bouncing is limited by the fixed hopping angle design, variations in hopping surface properties such as hardness, soil density, and ground undulations, and unpredicted and uncompensated vehicle tumbling both during flight and in the time between contacting the ground and coming to rest. A new vehicle design is envisioned that would allow for greater precision guided hopping and landing in varied terrain. If you're thinking that science fiction writers predicted this device - you're right. And took it to the ultimate state. In his 1994 novel Heavy Weather, Bruce Sterling wrote about a device called a "dope mule robot:" It was crossing the hills with vast, unerring, twenty-meter leaps. A squat metal sphere, painted in ragged patches of dun and olive drab. It had a single thick, pistoning metal leg.

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The bounding robot whipped that single metal leg around with dreadful unerring precision, like some nightmare one-legged pirate. It whacked its complex metal foot against the earth like a hustler's cue whacking a pool ball, and it bounded off instantly.

Project Reynard

In 2008, the NSA and DARPA collaborated for a covert data mining campaign called Project Reynard, which monitored millions of World of Warcraft users.

Project Reynard came at the first peak of MMO gaming and sought to track the online behavior of 10 million monthly subscribers to the World of Warcraft. This program wasn't revealed to the public until 2013, when Edward Snowden disclosed top secret documents related to governmental abuses of power.

DARPA scientists configured a Video Analysis and Content Extraction tool, as well as something called Knowledge Discovery and Dissemination, so that Reynard was "automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world."

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Radar Scope Can Sense Thru Walls

DARPA's handheld radar scope can provide troops with an ability that was formerly the province of science fictional superheroes alone - the ability to sense through up to 12 inches of concrete whether someone is in the next room. The Radar Scope was developed for use in Iraq. Weighing just 1.5 pounds, the device is about the size of a telephone handset with a cost of about $1,000. Waterproof and rugged, it runs on AA batteries. Held up to a wall, users will be able to sense movements as small as breathing up to fifty feet into the next room. "It may not change how four-man stacks go into a room (during clearing operations), But as they go into a building, it can help them prioritize what rooms they go into. It will give them an extra degree of knowledge so they know if someone is inside." The handheld Radar Scope is a remarkable invention, and should make the task of searching buildings at least a bit less dangerous. “You can run, but you can’t hide!” Science fiction writers have been working on this idea for generations. Golden age writer E.E. "Doc" Smith wrote about a spy ray in his 1934 novel Triplanetary. And then there is the sf life detector that Frank Herbert wrote about in 1958 in his story Cease Fire: The antennae of the Life Detector atop the OP swept back and forth in a rythmic halfcircle like so many frozen sticks brittle with rime ice... One operator - drugged to shivering wakefulness - stood watch in the OP. The space around him was barely six feet in diameter, crammed with equipment, gridded screens glowing a pale green with spots that indicated living flesh.

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Remote Control of Brain Activity

Ultrasonic control of brain activity at Arizona State University has been supported by DARPA; a prototype device that does not require surgery has been created that allows for remote control of brain activity. (We should be really excited about this, soon our government will be able to control us by remote control, and it is our money that is paying for all this, how ironic!)

Recent advances in neurotechnology have shown that brain stimulation is capable of treating neurological diseases and brain injury, as well as serving platforms around which brain-computer interfaces can be built for various purposes. Several limitations however still pose significant challenges to implementing traditional brain stimulation methods for treating diseases and controlling information processing in brain circuits... Dr. William J. Tyler of the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University has engineered a novel technology which implements transcranial pulsed ultrasound to remotely and directly stimulate brain circuits without requiring surgery. Further, it has shown that this ultrasonic neuromodulation approach confers a spatial resolution approximately five times greater than TMS and can exert its effects upon subcortical brain circuits deep within the brain. How will this technology be used to provide an advantage for American Warfighters? Potential applications include behavioral reinforcement, anxiety and stress reduction, cognitive enhancement and long-term alertness and wakefulness. Fans of Vernor Vinge may recall "focusing", a brain-control technology from his 1999 novel A Deepness in the Sky: "Focusing ennobles. It is the key to Emergent success, and a much more subtle thing than you can imagine. It's not just that we've created a psychoactive microbe. This is one whose growth within the brain can be controlled with millimeter precision - and once in place, the ensemble can be guided in its actions with the same precision." "Don't you see? We can improve the attention-focusing aspects of consciousness: we can take humans and turn them into analytical engines."

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Fans of Philip K. Dick may recall the swibble, an artificially evolved remote-control metazoan- based mind control device from his 1955 short story Service Call: Patiently, the repairman explained elementary physics. "Swibble-culture is an organic phenotype evolved in a protein medium under controlled conditions. The directing neurological tissue that forms the basis of the swibble is alive, certainly, in the sense that it grows, thinks, feeds, excretes waste... "The swibble has direct access to human minds?" Anderson asked, fascinated. "Naturally. It's an artificially evolved telepathic metazoan. And with it, Wright solved the basic problem of modern times: the existence of diverse, warring ideological factions, the presence of disloyalty and dissent."

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RESURRECT High-Fidelity Computer Battlefield Simulations

REstoring SURvivability by REConstructing Trauma (RESURRECT) is a DARPA program to "create high-fidelity computer simulations of in-theatre events for tactical, operational and strategic review." In other words, a Kobiashi Maru-style simulation. -52-

(The Kobiashi Maru was a test given at Starfleet Academy. It was first presented in the 1982 movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It tested how potential officers would confront the "no win scenario.") According to the RESURRECT program notes that we’ve seen, this is how it works: Data collected from a variety of existing or novel sensors with anecdotal descriptions of events, medical records, autopsy findings and imagery, and other sources, created descriptive and predictive algorithms that were implemented in an existing simulation software package. They consider It to be innovative and revolutionary. DARPA just may have grabbed the idea for this from the wartime personality simulator described by Frank Herbert in his 1977 novel The Dosadi Experiment. It showed how military simulation might be done with a room full of military commanders and staff.

RISE Robot: Six-Legged BIODYNOTICS

Using the same principle as the BigDog Military Robot, these robots are able to climb practically anything they can get a grip on with claws or sticky pads. Each leg is powered by two electric motors; an onboard computer controls leg motion, services sensors and handles communication with handlers. RISE robots change posture depending on the curvature of the climbing surface; a fixed tail helps on steep ascents. RISE robots are about 0.25 meters long and weigh in at 2 kg. The maximum travel speed is about 0.3 m/sec. The RISE robots are chillingly similar to the sinister killing robots from the 1984 film Runaway, starring Tom Selleck and (bizarrely) Gene Simmons from the rock group KISS playing the maniacal bad guy. Michael Crichton wrote and directed this unjustly neglected movie.

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Self-Repairing Hunter-Killers

In the movie version, when the Terminator takes a few rounds - or is run over - or is set on fire - it calmly goes about making necessary repairs, or simply adjusts to get around the damage. DARPA is trying to develop what they call "Damage Tolerant Control Programs" to make sure that robots can continue and complete a mission in spite of taking heavy damage. Tests to date have seen small aerial robots lose large chunks of themselves to hostile fire, yet carry on with their mission. DARPA has now moved on to Phase III of their program. Phase III includes integration and flight demonstration of the technology. The objective of the flight demonstration is to show the utility of these technologies on an operationally representative [killer robot]. The US military has already tested a five-ton aerial remotely-operated robot, the MQ-9 Reaper, a medium-to-high altitude, long endurance unmanned aircraft system. The Air Force website describes it this way: "MQ-9's primary mission is as a persistent hunter- killer against emerging targets to achieve joint force commander objectives."

Shark Cyborgs On DARPA Remote control

DARPA has taken another page from science fiction writer William Gibson's book by creating a neural implant to enable engineers to remotely manipulate a shark's brain signals. This would allow them to control the animal's movements and possibly decode their perceptions. Given that sharks have senses that humans don't have (like the ability to sense electromagnetic fields), it could open up some interesting uses.

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The implant consists of a series of electrodes embedded in the shark's brain; different electrodes can be used to stimulate different areas of the brain. In addition, the DARPA researchers want to use their setup to detect and decipher the neural patterns that correspond to shark activities like sensing an ocean current, a particular scent in the water or an electrical field. This was first being worked on in 2006. They were developing a fish tag whose goal was to attain behavior control of host animals via neural implants. This shark tag for long-term open ocean field efforts investigating viability of animal behavior control and its utility for networked sensing and data acquisition. The tag is centered on a multi-channel neural ensemble reader, a processor to interpret the readings in real-time, and a multi-channel stimulator, intended for both micro and macro stimulation. Additional capabilities include an undersea navigation/tracking system, acoustic and RF communication capabilities, a sensitive multi-channel Electric field measurement sensor, and a range of environmental sensors, including ph, heading and motion sensors, temperature, pressure and chemical injection micro-pumps... Their results as of 2006 included neural ensemble recordings and stimulation of Mustelus Canis and Squyalus[sp] Acanthias. [Mustelus canis and and Squalus Acanthias are the smooth dogfish shark and the spiny dogfish shark, respectively. These animals have a long biomedical research history.] Now I may be way offbase here, but there seems to have been a higher number of shark sightings and shark attacks along the beaches off the Eastern U.S. coast recently. Could that be related to this program? Such as sharks be trained to attack humans, or just the aftereffects of intervening in their natural responses and they are fighting back?

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Shredder Challenge

DARPA's Shredder Challenge was set up to solve a problem faced by warfighters who find torn-up or shredded documents in war zones. Is it possible to reconstitute shredded documents? - Is it possible that they will also use it to paste together pages of my writings that I have shredded to keep them secret? Or reconstruct my financial information to find the banks where I have hidden all my money?

Silent Talk 'Telepathy' For Soldiers

Silent Talk is the name of a new DARPA project to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” And yes, that's in addition to the money spent to investigate wireless transmission of decoded thoughts.

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The intent of the program is to detect "pre-speech" - word-specific neural signals in the brain, analyze them and then send the content to team members. They intend to map EEG patterns to individual words - for one person. Then, determine if everyone has similar patterns. Finally, decode the pattern and broadcast the words to team mates in the field. The more I learn about DARPA's intentions regarding improving soldier capabilities, the more I think they're trying to create the Meks from Jack Vance's Hugo and Nebula award-winning 1967 novel The Last Castle. The Mek was a manlike creature... native... to a planet of Etamin. His tough rusty-brown hide glistened metallically as if oiled or waxed; the spines thrusting back from head and neck shone like gold, and indeed were coated with a conductive copper-chrome film... His maw, a vertical irregular cleft at the base of this 'face' was an obsolete organ by reason of the syrup sac which had been introduced under the skin of the shoulders... This was the Mek solitary, a creature intrinsically as effective as man - perhaps more by virtue of his superb brain which also functioned as a radio transceiver... The Meks are able to share the substance of their thoughts with each other by transmitting brain pattern signals using the conductive spines. DARPA is already working on the idea of the "syrup sac", creating transdermal patches to deliver essential nutrients. Readers may also be thinking of the Borg, whose members are retrofitted with a neuro- transceiver that links every drone into the collective.

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Smart Video Cams - DARPA's Mind's Eye

One of the desired military capabilities resulting from this new form of visual intelligence is a smart camera, with sufficient visual intelligence that it can report on activity in an area of observation. A camera with this kind of visual intelligence could be employed as a payload on a broad range of persistent stare surveillance platforms, from fixed surveillance systems, which would conceivably benefit from abundant computing power, to camera‐equipped perch‐and‐stare micro air vehicles, which would impose extreme limitations on payload size and available computing power. For the purpose of this research, employment of this capability on man‐ portable unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) is assumed. This provides a reasonable yet challenging set of development constraints, along with the potential to transition the technology to an objective ground force capability. I think that they might as well add the ability to fly around and gather visual information.

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SMITE Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination

This is a new DARPA program intended to dynamically forecast when deadly moles deep within government departments will likely strike. This is very interesting. I wonder if it can also detect potential whistleblowers or if this is really what they are referring to? The fundamental challenge is one of finding a poorly understood, subtle, or hidden signal (indicators of malicious behavior) buried in enormous amounts of noise (observational data of no immediate relevance) under the constraint that the measures of significance are themselves moving targets (based on dynamic context) that must be continually monitored and updated. The first step in meeting this challenge is to create a scalable, distributed infrastructure to securely collect, store, access, process, and correlate relevant data from heterogeneous sources over extended periods of time. The next step is to determine whether an individual or group of individuals is exhibiting anomalous behavior that is also malicious. However, this analysis is very heavily dependent on the context of the individual, groups of individuals and any data involved. Furthermore, context (e.g., location, time, roles and relations) is dynamic and so must be continually inferred, managed and applied automatically. Part of the challenge is detecting deceptive behavior. Deceptive behavior is characteristic of malicious intent which leads to the problem of assigning intent to observed behaviors. Looking for clues that suggest an insider attack 1) can be anticipated, 2) is underway or 3) has already taken place could potentially be easier than recognizing explicit attacks. On the other hand, in both the real and virtual world, it is very difficult to do anything without leaving some evidence behind. Attempts to conceal or remove evidence generally create new evidence that, if detected, could be a strong indication of the perpetrator’s intent. Security is often difficult because the defenses must be perfect, while the attacker needs to find only one flaw. An emphasis on forensics could reverse

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the burden by requiring the attacker and his tools to be perfect, while the defender needs only a few clues to recognize an intrusion is underway. Could a similar system be used on the public in general? Maybe a large group, neighborhood, city or even the whole country? And maybe even using all that info on us from NSA and running it through this SMITE system to tell which of us are suspicious? Damn, they are doing that already and they are on their way now to increase my meds!

Soldier Scentric Imaging via Computational Cameras (SCENICC)

This began in 2011 but is still at an early point in development. The program imagines a final system that comprised of optical sensors that are both soldier and drone-mounted, allowing a synthesis of information that greatly increases battlefield awareness. The program should ultimately provide soldiers with second-by-second information relating to their missions, using a completely hands-free system.

U.S. forces are often immersed in a highly complex, rapidly evolving, hostile environment containing a diverse collection of potential threats. Despite significant recent advances in both the platforms (e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles) and the sensor payloads (e.g., very high resolution cameras) employed within the wide array of modern Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, these conventional solutions do not currently provide the spatial, temporal or functional capabilities required by the individual warfighter. The vision of the Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras (SCENICC) program is to develop novel computational imaging capabilities and explore joint design of hardware and software to give warfighters access to systems that greatly enhance their awareness, security and survivability. The SCENICC program envisions a final system comprising both imaging and non-imaging optical sensors deployed both locally

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(e.g., soldier mounted) and in a distributed fashion (e.g., exploiting collections of soldiers and/or unmanned vehicles). Research began in 2011 in fields such as computational imaging theory, data collection/conditioning, data extraction/processing and human interface. Capability demonstrations are planned in the areas of Hands-Free Zoom, Computer Enhanced Vision and Full Sphere Awareness.

Springtail EFV-4B Personal Air Vehicle

The Springtail EFV-4B Personal Air Vehicle (PAV) is a fourth- generation vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) craft powered by a single engine. A single operator flies standing erect; a pair of ducts about one meter in diameter contain the fans that provide vertical thrust. Each fan has three blades which are counter-rotating, eliminating the torque that you are probably worrying about (normally associated with single rotor designs).

The Springtail EFV-4B is capable of a maximum speed of 113 miles per hour, with a hover ceiling of 11,400 feet. It can take off vertically, then fly horizontally, by shifting the angle of its rotors. DARPA awarded a $1 million grant in December 2000 to be used for further research and development. This machine allows a person to get three-dimensional in the battle space. (And in my opinion, might become an easy target flying around in the battle space without any protection.)

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Stealthy, Persistent Perch and Stare UAVs

This is a one-pound, 29- inch wingspan battery- powered Wasp unmanned system. The key technical features integrated into the micro- air vehicle include: (1) multifunctional materials that integrate the SP2S airframe structure with the power supply and transmit/receive antennas. (2) advanced aerodynamics and control systems, including auto-land and auto-home functions. (3) perch-and-grip technology. (4) microminiature pan/tilt/zoom EO cameras. (5) autonomous image capture. (6) data link communications relay capability with multiple digital channels that enables beyond-line-of-sight communications, with data/video encryption. As far as I know, the earliest mention of the idea of a miniature flying machine that can perch and stare is the Scarab Flying Insect Robot from the 1936 story by Raymond Z. Gallun. “The Scarab paused on its perch for a moment, as if to determine for itself whether it was perfectly fit for action. It was a tiny thing, scarcely more than an inch and a half in length...” “...the Scarab buzzed into the great workroom as any intruding insect might, and sought the security of a shadowed corner. There it studied its surroundings, transmitting to its manipulator, far away now, all that it heard through its ear microphones and saw with its minute vision tubes.”

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Submersible Aircraft - DARPA's Flying Sub

A submersible aircraft is the latest development from DARPA. And here what is expected from it: Flight: The minimal required airborne tactical radius of the sub-plane is 1000 nautical miles (nm). The minimum surface tactical radius is 100 nautical miles. The minimum subsurface tactical range is 12 nautical miles. Note that the ranges quoted are one-way ranges. The platform would need to be able to fly to a location, insert and extract personnel without refueling and this would require the total operational range to be 1000 nm airborne, 200 nm surface, 24 nm under water. Loiter: The platform should be capable of loitering in a sea-state 5 days, in theater between inserting and extracting personnel for up to 3 days (72 hours). The craft does not need to be submerged during loitering operations; it can operate at the surface. Payload: The platform should be capable of transporting 8 operators, as well as all of their equipment, with a total cargo weight of 2000 pounds. Depth: The operating depth of the platform will be constrained by balancing the need to reduce depth in order to minimize structural loads and snorkel complexity with the need to increase depth in order to minimize any potential signatures that could be generated by perturbing the free surface. The effect that the submerged platform will have on the free surface is exponentially proportional to the depth, therefore the platform should be able to operate at a relatively shallow depth and only have the snorkel affect the free surface. Speed: The speed of the platform in each mode of operation must allow the system to complete a tactical transit (1000 nm airborne,100 nm surface,12 nm sub-surface) trip in less than 8 hours. This 8-hour time must include any time required by the platform to reconfigure between modes of operation.

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TASC - DARPA's Psychohistory

Technologies for the Applications of Social Computing (TASC) is a DARPA project from 2009 to make use of the social computing phenomenon. They are developing a scientific approach to predicting the actions of large masses of people. Hmmmm, very interesting, then I assume they also have programs tailored to control these actions? What if there are large masses of people upset with billions in tax money being wasted by the government on some of these projects? They are developing new technologies to rapidly create theoretically-informed, data- driven models of complex human, social, cultural, and behavioral dynamics that are instantiated in near-real-time simulations ... technologies include the formalization and semantic representation of social science theories, the semantic integration of disparate types of social science data, techniques for analyzing these data, and efficient computational techniques for rapid data processing. DARPA is using all these technologies integrated into a flexible, modular social simulation system integrating sound social science theory with real world data, that facilitates a wide spectrum of military and intelligence applications, and that supports reliable, real-world decisions. Fans of Isaac Asimov may see in this effort an attempt to get at the basic principles of psychohistory from his 1951 novel Foundation.

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Toward Narrative Disruptors and Inductors: Mapping the Narrative Comprehension Network and its Persuasive Effects

Whistleblower Reveals Military Mind Control Project at Major University. What if the government could change people’s moral beliefs or stop political dissent through remote control of people’s brains? Sounds like science fiction, right? Well, a leaked document reveals that the US government, through DARPA research, is very close to accomplishing this. This was an anonymous whistleblower who worked on a secret ongoing mind-control project for DARPA. The aim of the program is to remotely disrupt political dissent and extremism by employing “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation” (TMS) in tandem with sophisticated propaganda based on this technology. TMS stimulates the temporal lobe of the brain with electromagnetic fields. The program, conducted by The Center for Strategic Communication, is based at Arizona State University. The DARPA funding for this project can be confirmed on the ASU website. The head of the project, Steve Corman, has worked extensively in the area of strategic communication as it applies to terrorism and “extremism” – or what could be called “the war of ideas.”

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Upward Falling Payload

DARPA’s Upward Falling Payloads program's concept centers on developing deployable, unmanned, distributed systems that lie on the deep-ocean floor in special containers for years at a time. These deep-sea nodes would then be woken up remotely when needed and recalled to the surface. In other words, they “fall upward.”

And yes, it's a DARPA program. One which was anticipated over seventy years ago by science fiction.

Cost and complexity limit the number of ships and weapon systems the Navy can support in forward operating areas. This concentration of force structure is magnified as areas of contested environments grow. A natural response is to develop lower-cost unmanned and distributed systems that can deliver effects and situation awareness at a distance. However, power and logistics to deliver these systems over vast ocean areas limit their utility. The Upward Falling Payload (UFP) program intends to overcome these barriers. UFP will realize a new approach to enable forward deployed unmanned distributed systems that can provide non-lethal effects or situation awareness over large maritime areas. However, the intended approach averts solutions to deploy technology from legacy platforms, or grow the complexity and reach of unmanned systems. Rather, the UFP approach centers on pre-deploying deep-ocean nodes years in advance in forward areas which can be commanded from standoff to launch to the surface. Nearly 50% of the world’s oceans are deeper than 4 km which provides a vast area for concealment and storage. As a consequence, the cost to retrieve UFP nodes is asymmetric with the likely cost to produce and distribute them on the seafloor. The concealment of the sea also provides opportunity to surprise maritime targets from below, while its vastness provides opportunity to simultaneously operate across great distances. Getting close to

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targets without warning, and instantiating distributed systems without delay, are key attributes of UFP capability. To succeed, the UFP program must be able to demonstrate a system that can: (a) Survive for years under extreme pressure, (b) Reliably be triggered from standoff commands, and (c) Rapidly rise through the water column and deploy a non-lethal payload. Section 1.2, and the limited distribution Metrics Addendum, quantify capability metrics. A multi-phase program is envisioned to design, develop, and demonstrate UFP nodes that overcome these hurdles. Murray Leinster wrote about a very similar device, an autonomous robotic underwater munition, in his 1942 short story The Wabbler: “The Wabbler lay in its place, with its ten foot tail coiled neatly above its lower end, and waited with a sort of deadly patience... It and all its brothers were pear-shaped, with absurdly huge and blunt-ended horns, and with small round holes where eyes might have been, and shielded vents where they might have had mouths...” “Splash! The Wabbler plunged into the water with a flare of luminescence and a thirty-foot spout of spume and spray rising where it struck... It dived swiftly for twenty feet... Then its falling checked. It swung about, and its writhing tail settled down below it... and “then slowly, it settled downward. Its ten-foot tail seemed to waver a little, as if groping.” “Then it made small sounds from inside itself. More bubbles came from the round place like a mouth. It settled one foot, two feet, three...”

Vulture Five Year Flying Wing

DARPA's Vulture is intended to fly for periods of up to five years unattended at 65,000 feet. The VULTURE Air Vehicle Program is designed to deliver and maintain an airborne payload on station for an uninterrupted period exceeding 5 years using a heavier- than-air platform system, not using

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either radioactive energy sources or employing any form of buoyant flight. It will enable the Military to deliver and maintain a 1000 lb, 5 kW airborne payload for an uninterrupted period exceeding 5 years with a 99+% on station probability. The Vulture will orbit over a small, well-defined area (like a battlefield) and provide continuous coverage of that area. Vulture is intended to operate in a manner similar to a satellite, except that it has the advantages of not being bound by orbital mechanics. The Vulture will provide a dramatic increase in sensor resolution and communications capability. Maybe this is similar to the Helios program. Helios is a single wing, solar-powered aircraft that has performed admirably above Hawaii in tests performed beginning in 2001.

Walrus and Griffith's War-Balloons

DARPA's Walrus program to develop and evaluate a very large airlift vehicle has been moving forward since 2009 when DARPA awarded contracts for the first phase of the program. Now don’t confuse these the "war-balloons" of late nineteenth century science fiction, these aren't dirigible airships. The Walrus aircraft are a heavier- than-air vehicle generating lift through a combination of aerodynamics, thrust vectoring and gas buoyancy generation and management. The two contractors receiving Walrus phase I awards were: Lockheed Martin Corp., Advanced Development Programs, Palmdale, Calif., which received $2,989,779 Aeros Aeronautical Systems Corp., Tarzana, Calif., which received $3,267,000 The goal of the Walrus program is to establish clear and credible solutions that provide confidence that earlier airship-era limitations will be overcome. Advanced breakthrough technologies were developed that support innovative lift and buoyancy concepts that do not rely on off-board ballast.

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The Walrus operational vehicle (OV) has the primary operational task of deploying composite loads of personnel and equipment (for example, the components of an Army Unit of Action) ready to fight within six hours after disembarking the aircraft. Walrus Operates without significant infrastructure and from unimproved landing sites, including rough ground having nominal five-foot-high obstacles. Carries a payload of more than 500 tons 12,000 nautical miles in less than seven days. Additionally, Walrus is capable of performing theater lift and supporting sea-basing and persistence missions to meet a range of multi-Service needs. The idea of using enormous dirigibles for heavy lifting in warfare is not a new idea. In his forgotten 1893 classic The Angel of the Revolution, George Griffith wrote about a coming World War fought with air-ships and war-balloons: ...The war-balloons were to be kept for purposes of transportation of heavy articles to Aeria, while the fleet of air-ships was to remain the sole effective fighting force in the world.

Warrior Web from DARPA

A Soldier carries a 61-pound load while walking in a prototype Warrior Web system during independent evaluation by the U.S. Army. (May 27, 2013)

The Warrior Web is a new DARPA project to create a kind of under-suit that significantly boosts endurance, carrying capacity and overall warfighter effectiveness. The Warrior Web program seeks to develop the technologies required to prevent and reduce musculoskeletal injuries caused by dynamic events typically found in the warfighter’s environment. The ultimate program goal is a lightweight, conformal under-suit that is transparent to the user (like a diver’s wetsuit). The suit seeks to employ a system (or web) of closed-loop controlled actuation, transmission, and functional structures that protect injury prone areas, focusing on the soft tissues that connect and interface with the skeletal system.

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In addition to direct injury mitigation, Warrior Web will have the capacity to augment positive work done by the muscles, to reduce the physical burden, by leveraging the web structure to impart joint torque at the ankle, knee, and hip joints. The suit seeks to reduce the metabolic cost of carrying a typical assault load, as well as compensate for the weight of the suit itself, while consuming no more than 100 Watts of electric power from the battery source. Does this remind you of comments that have been made over the years regarding the 1-piece jumpsuits worn by occupants of UFOs? Extremely tough while at the same time being very light and possibly designed to protect the wearer against the forces of space travel? Is this another example of our back-engineering of alien ingenuity? One of the earliest references to the idea of a metallic exoskeleton would probably meet DARPA's criteria. In his 1932 classic A Conquest of Two Worlds, Golden Age sf great Edmond Hamilton wrote about how scientists solved the problem of how to work in the heaviest gravity environment in the solar system: “The greatest difficulty, Crane saw, was Jupiter's gravitation... Earth's scientists solved the problem to some extent by devising rigid metallic clothing not unlike armor which would support the interior human structure against Jupiter's pull. Crane's men were also administered compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone to strengthen the skeleton structure...”

Warrior Web: Superman Underwear from DARPA

Warrior Web is yet another of DARPA's program workshops to explore particular ideas. In this case, DARPA is looking for a wearable suit that can help protect warfighters. Or in their words: “Technology related to the mitigation of musculoskeletal injuries on modern warfighters.” The vision of the Warrior Web program, grounded in human physiology and performance, is to develop and demonstrate the technologies required to create a compliant, warfighter-wearable, quasi-passive and adaptive suit system to both reduce injuries and retain optimal warrior performance.

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The Warrior Web program currently seeks the development and demonstration of technologies in five thrust areas: injury mitigation technologies; comprehensive analytical representations of biomechanical processes; quasi-passive regenerative actuation technologies; adaptive sensing and control technologies; and advancements in potential suit human-to-machine interfaces.

Science fiction fans may be thinking of the flexible armor suit from the 1966 novel Neutron Star by Larry Niven: Like a silicone plastic, the pressure suit was soft and malleable under gentle pressures, such as walking, but instantly became rigid all over when something struck it...

I'd also mention the powered suit with trauma maintenance from the 1974 novel The Forever War by Joe Haldeman: "The suit is set up to save as much of your body as possible. If you lose part of an arm or a leg, one of sixteen razor-sharp irises closes around your limb with the force of a hydraulic press, snipping it off neatly and sealing the suit before you can die of explosive decompression. Then "trauma maintenance" cauterizes the stump, replaces lost blood, and fills you full of happy juice and No-shock. So you will either die happy or, if your comrades go on to win the battle, eventually be carried back up to the ship's aid station."

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Created in 1947, the CIA had a single mission: provide top-notch intelligence estimates to policy makers. How many long-range bombers are the Soviets capable of building? CIA analysts provide an estimate, and the budget of the US Strategic Air Command goes up or down accordingly. That's it. Coups, covert ops, assassinations, and espionage weren't originally part of the plan.

Yet, within just a few years, government oversight of the CIA had dwindled to the point where members of Congress openly agreed that they didn't want to know what the CIA was doing, only that they keep doing it. Paranoia ran riot.

Acoustic Kitty

Most people wouldn’t think of the common house cat as being a potential master of espionage, but the CIA sure did. In the 1960s, American intelligence is said to have spent over $20 million on “Acoustic Kitty,” a top-secret project that used cats as recording devices. The project took a group of specially trained cats and surgically implanted microphones, antennae and batteries into their tails, and then set them loose near the Russian embassy. The idea was that an unassuming cat would be able to stride right up to groups of communist

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officials and listen in on their conversation, which it could then beam back to agents with its sophisticated radio equipment. The plan was eventually put into action, but the first cat sent into the field was supposedly run over by a taxi before it could make a recording, and operation ‘Acoustic Kitty” was abandoned shortly thereafter. (Could this actually have been a well-planned assassination by the KGB who were probably better at spying on us than we were on them and knew about our plans from the beginning?)

Area 51

Almost no other site has garnered as much attention from conspiracy theorists and UFO-enthusiasts as Area 51, a remote desert tract near Groom Lake in Nevada, roughly 83 miles (134 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas. The intense secrecy surrounding the base sparked peoples' imaginations, and Area 51 was commonly linked to paranormal activities, including pervasive theories that suggested Area 51 hid aliens and UFOs. In July 2013, declassified documents from the CIA acknowledged the existence of Area 51 for the first time, and confirmed that the top-secret site was used to test a variety of spy planes, including the well-known U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. While Area 51, which operates as a detachment of Edwards Air Force Base in neighboring California, has never been declared a covert base, the research and activities conducted there were some of the nation's most closely guarded secrets.

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CIA and Google at it Again: Investment Arms Work at Predicting Future Through Web Analysis

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.” The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event. “The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science. Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community. It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth. This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of

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Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra. America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports. “Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.” U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military- intelligence units. Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web. “We’re right there as it happens, we can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.” Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations. That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products. Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10

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million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash. Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago. Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues. In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many. But unease has been growing. Thirty-seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.) “Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.

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CIA hired contractors for secret assassination project

The CIA hired contractors from the controversial private security firm Blackwater to take part in a secret operation to track down and assassinate members of al-Qaida, it was reported.

The deal with the firm, Blackwater USA, was agreed to in 2004 but was only revealed to Congress much later and after it was discovered by the CIA's director, Leon Panetta. The Blackwater deal did not result in any assassinations, the report said, as it ran into legal, practical and diplomatic difficulties, and the program was closed down before Panetta took over. It is unclear whether the firm's employees, many of them former soldiers from US special forces, were meant to carry out the killings or simply help with training and surveillance. However, it is a damaging revelation, illustrating the extent to which the Bush administration's "war on terror" was outsourced – in this instance to a company surrounded by controversy for a string of incidents in Iraq in which Blackwater guards were found to have opened fire without justification. The Iraqi government consequently refused to renew the company's operating license. Earlier the North Carolina-based firm changed its name to Xe Services. According reports it still has classified contracts with the CIA. The report also draws attention to the Bush presidency's practice of loosening legal constraints on the CIA's counterterrorist operations and failing to inform Congress. Former vice-president Dick Cheney has defended both the measures taken and the administration's secrecy, arguing they were justified by the special circumstances of the "war on terror".

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The Abu Ghraib prison scandal brought to light the CIA's use of private companies to interrogate suspected terrorists, but Blackwater's involvement in a program of targeted killing raises even more serious questions of accountability. An internal CIA review of the program found that the CIA leadership under the Bush administration did not think it was necessary to tell Congress because the project was not far enough advanced. However, one unnamed official claimed: "It's wrong to think this counterterrorism program was confined to briefing slides or doodles on a cafeteria napkin … it went well beyond that." Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, refused to give details of the program but said: "Director Panetta thought this effort should be briefed to Congress, and he did so. He also knew it hadn't been successful, so he ended it." Some Democratic congressmen believe the outsourced assassination program may be one of many covert operations that have yet to be uncovered, and have called for further investigations of the secret side of America's "war on terror".

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CIA Mind-Control Experiments

At the height of the Cold War, the CIA conducted covert, illegal scientific research on human subjects. Known as Project MK-ULTRA, the program subjected humans to experiments with drugs such as LSD and barbiturates, hypnosis and (some reports indicate) radiological and biological agents. In 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all documents from Project MK-ULTRA destroyed. Nevertheless, late the following year, the New York Times reported on the illegal activities. In 1975, the Church Committee, headed by Senator Frank Church, and a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller investigated the project. They found that over more than two decades, the CIA spent nearly $20 million, enlisted the services of researchers at more than 30 universities and conducted experiments on subjects without their knowledge. Some of the research was performed in Canada. Some historians argue that the goal of the program was to create a mind-control system by which the CIA could program people to conduct assassinations. In 1953, Richard Condon dramatized the idea in the thriller The Manchurian Candidate, which was adapted into a film starring Frank Sinatra. Such ultimately wacky ideas were also dramatized in the recent George Clooney film The Men Who Stare at Goats.

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CIA Project to break security of Apple’s iPhones and iPads

RESEARCHERS WORKING with the Central Intelligence Agency have conducted a multi-year, sustained effort to break the security of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, according to top-secret documents. The security researchers presented their latest tactics and achievements at a secret annual gathering, called the “Jamboree,” where attendees discussed strategies for exploiting security flaws in household and commercial electronics. The conferences have spanned nearly a decade, with the first CIA-sponsored meeting taking place a year before the first iPhone was released. By targeting essential security keys used to encrypt data stored on Apple’s devices, the researchers have sought to thwart the company’s attempts to provide mobile security to hundreds of millions of Apple customers across the globe. Studying both “physical” and “non-invasive” techniques, U.S. government-sponsored research has been aimed at discovering ways to decrypt and ultimately penetrate Apple’s encrypted firmware. This could enable spies to plant malicious code on Apple devices and seek out potential vulnerabilities in other parts of the iPhone and iPad currently masked by encryption. The security researchers also claimed they had created a modified version of Apple’s proprietary software development tool, Xcode, which could sneak surveillance backdoors into any apps or programs created using the tool. Xcode, which is distributed by Apple to hundreds of thousands of developers, is used to create apps that are sold through Apple’s App Store. The modified version of Xcode, the researchers claimed, could enable spies to steal passwords and grab messages on infected devices. Researchers also claimed the modified Xcode could “force all iOS applications to send embedded data to a listening post.” It remains unclear how intelligence agencies would get developers to use the poisoned version of Xcode. Researchers also claimed they had successfully modified the OS X updater, a program used to deliver updates to laptop and desktop computers, to install a “keylogger.”

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Other presentations at the CIA conference have focused on the products of Apple’s competitors, including Microsoft’s BitLocker encryption system, which is used widely on laptop and desktop computers running premium editions of Windows. The revelations that the CIA has waged a secret campaign to defeat the security mechanisms built into Apple’s devices come as Apple and other tech giants are loudly resisting pressure from senior U.S. and U.K. government officials to weaken the security of their products. Law enforcement agencies want the companies to maintain the government’s ability to bypass security tools built into wireless devices. Perhaps more than any other corporate leader, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has taken a stand for privacy as a core value, while sharply criticizing the actions of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. “If U.S. products are OK to target, that’s news to me,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University’s Information Security Institute. “Tearing apart the products of U.S. manufacturers and potentially putting backdoors in software distributed by unknowing developers all seems to be going a bit beyond ‘targeting bad guys.’ It may be a means to an end, but it’s a hell of a means.”

Did Google fall into the hands of CIA and NSA?

Did these Government agencies fund, nurture and incubate Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information? Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’ The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the US and around

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the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to transform the US military into Skynet. Professor Bhavani Thuraisingham of University of Texas claimed that she managed the MDDS program on behalf of the US intelligence community, and that her and the CIA’s Dr. Rick Steinheiser met Google founder, Sergey Brin every three months or so for two years to be briefed on his progress developing Google and PageRank. By 1997, Thuraisingham reveals, shortly before Google became incorporated and while she was still overseeing the development of its search engine software at Stanford, her thoughts turned to the national security applications of the MDDS (Massive Digital Data Systems) program. In the acknowledgements to her book, Web Data Mining and Applications in Business Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism (2003), Thuraisingham writes that she and “Dr. Rick Steinheiser of the CIA, began discussions with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on applying data-mining for counter-terrorism,” an idea that resulted directly from the MDDS program which partly funded Google. “These discussions eventually developed into the current EELD (Evidence Extraction and Link Detection) program at DARPA.” So the very same senior CIA official and CIA-NSA contractor involved in providing the seed-funding for Google were simultaneously contemplating the role of data-mining for counter-terrorism purposes, and were developing ideas for tools actually advanced by DARPA.

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Listening in on Lennon

John Lennon sure was a feisty one. The ex-Beatle protested war, promoted peace and once wrote a song called "I Am the Walrus." No wonder the FBI put him on its watch list before the 1972 Republican National Convention (which the feds erroneously thought he might disrupt), terminated his visa and began deportation proceedings — at the suggestion of Senator Strom Thurmond. During the 1972 presidential election, the FBI monitored Lennon's television appearances and concerts and even followed the activities of Yoko Ono's daughter from a previous marriage. Lennon didn't do anything suspicious, so the FBI closed its investigation a month after Nixon's re-election. After Lennon's murder in 1980, historian Jon Weiner fought a 14-year legal battle to force the FBI to release its Lennon files under the Freedom of Information Act. In the end, he won. The findings are detailed in the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon.

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MKULTRA

When the extent of the U.S. government’s domestic spying program was revealed, many were surprised and outraged: how could a government which so prizes liberty of its citizens covertly collect data on its own people? Yet, sadly, this is not the first time Uncle Sam, without permission or notice, secretly gathered information on its people and wasn’t even close to the greatest atrocity. For that, there are numerous other examples such as when the government intentionally poisoned certain alcohol supplies they knew people would drink, killing over 10,000 American citizens and sickening many thousands others. (Despite this, the program continued for some time, though it was hotly debated in Congress when the death tolls started rolling in.) One other such “interesting” program, was from 1953 to 1964, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted dozens of experiments on the effects of biological and chemical agents on American citizens without their knowledge in Project MKUltra. These covert tests included subjecting the unwitting subjects to hallucinogenic drugs and other chemicals, among other things. It is difficult to find official documents about this program; however, in 1976 and 1977, the U.S. Senate conducted investigations and even held a joint committee hearing on Project MKUltra, then published much of what was discovered; you will not believe what they found out. MKULtra’s Purpose According to the hearing report, the project was intended to “develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials.” The motivation was also defensive, in that many were afraid during the Cold War that the Russians and Chinese had already developed weapons in this area. As the project’s proponents noted: The development of a comprehensive capability in this field of covert chemical and biological warfare gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemy’s theoretical potential,

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thus enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are. Officially authorized in 1953, by 1955, project creep had expanded the CIA’s authority under MKUltra to include the following: Discovery of the following materials and methods [including those]: which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol; which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness; which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so called “brain-washing;” which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use; [which will produce] shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use; and which will produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc. LSD experiments Senator Edward Kennedy dominated the hearing. In his opening remarks, he noted there was: an “extensive testing and experimentation” program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens “at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.” Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to “unwitting subjects in social situations.” For many of these drug tests, especially early on, there were “no medical personnel on hand either to administer the drugs or observe their effects.” Often, the randomly selected subjects had “become ill for hours or days, including hospitalization in at least one case.” Even more troubling, some of the tests proved lethal, but that did not stop the CIA from continuing their experimentation: The deaths of two Americans can be attributed to these programs; other participants in the testing programs may still suffer from the residual effects. The fact that they were continued for years after the danger of surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting individuals was known, demonstrate fundamental disregard for the value of human life.

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One of these lives belonged to Dr. Frank Olson, himself a researcher with the U.S. Army who studied “developing techniques for offensive use of biological weapons . . . [and] biological research for the CIA.” Along with a group of 9 other such scientists, he attended a conference in a cabin at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland in November 1953. Once there, ironically, CIA operatives spiked the researchers’ Cointreau with LSD. Only after the scientists had finished their drinks were they informed that they had been drugged. Most of the researchers handled the experience well and had no aftereffects, but not Dr. Olson. He never recovered from the ordeal and shortly after the experiment, began to show “symptoms of paranoia and schizophrenia.” Dr. Olson’s superior and the CIA who ran the experiment arranged for him to get treatment in New York City. While spending the night in a hotel room with the CIA officer, and after requesting a wake-up call for the next morning, Dr. Olson somehow managed to fall to his death. As the CIA officer (Lashbrook) reported: At approximately 2:30 a.m. Saturday, November 28, Lashbrook was awakened by a loud “crash of glass.” . . . . Olson “had crashed through the closed window blind and the closed window and he fell to his death from the window of our room on the 10th floor.” There is no indication that any investigation of foul play, particularly by the CIA officer (who was both responsible for the experiment and alone in the hotel room with Olson) was ever conducted. Universities, Prisons and Hospitals Conducted Experiments In the hearing, Senator Kennedy noted that many otherwise respectable institutions were fraudulently incorporated into MKUltra projects: What we are basically talking about is . . . the perversion and corruption of many of our outstanding research centers in this country, with CIA funds, where some of our top researchers were unwittingly involved in research sponsored by the Agency in which they had no knowledge of the background or the support for. According to the hearing report, “eighty-six universities or institutions were involved,” and “185 non-government researchers and assistants” worked on these projects. “Physicians, toxicologists, and other specialists in mental [and] narcotics” were lured into MKUltra through the provision of grants that were “made under ostensible research foundation auspices, thereby concealing the CIA’s interest from the specialist’s institution.”

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For some of the 12 hospitals that participated in Project MKUltra, tests were conducted on terminal cancer patients – presumably because the experiments were anticipated to have long-lasting detrimental, if not lethal, effects. Sadly, to get the hospitals (and perhaps the patients) to agree to these experiments, the CIA often paid the institution. For example, Subproject 23, authorized in August 1955, worked as follows: The project engineer . . . authorized the contractor to pay the hospital’s expenses of certain persons suffering from incurable cancer for the privilege of studying the effects of these chemicals during their terminal illnesses. Likewise, many of the experiments conducted at the three prisons were done secretly: “We also know now that some unwitting testing took place on criminal sexual psychopaths.” Not all testing was done unwittingly, although that did not make it any more ethical. For example, in a prison experiment conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health Addiction Research Center at the Lexington Rehabilitation Center (a prison for convicted drug addicts), prisoners who volunteered to participate in a hallucinogenic drug experiment were promised (and received) doses of “the drug of their addiction.” Miscellaneous Other Experiments An unknown number of other experiments in “such areas as effects of electro-shock, harassment techniques for offensive use and gas propelled sprays and aerosols” to be used as “assassination delivery systems” were also being conducted. In addition, MKUltra scientists were authorized to research “additional avenues to the control of human behavior” including “radiation and paramilitary devices and materials.” Heinous Covert Experiments: By the Numbers Project MKUltra consisted of 149 subprojects “many of which appear to have some connection with research into behavioral modification, drug acquisition and testing or administering drugs surreptitiously,” including as follows:  6 subprojects involving tests on unwitting subjects were conducted.  8 subprojects involving hypnosis, including 2 that also used drugs were performed.  7 subprojects included the use of drugs or chemicals.  4 subprojects used “magician’s art . . . e.g., surreptitious delivery of drug-related materials.”

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 9 subprojects studied sleep research (read: deprivation) and psychotherapy’s influence on behavior.  6 subprojects studied the effects on human tissue of “exotic pathogens and the capability to incorporate them in effective delivery systems.” The CIA Lost or Destroyed All Records of Project MKUltra Sadly, but not surprisingly, almost no records remain of the 10 years of covert activity. As Senator Kennedy noted: Perhaps most disturbing of all was the fact that the extent of experimentation on human subjects was unknown. The records of all these activities were destroyed in 1973, at the instruction of then CIA Director Richard Helms. Notably, however, some records were overlooked during the CIA’s destruction because new records were found in 1977, as noted by Senator Kennedy: We believed that the record, incomplete as it was, was as complete as it was going to be. Then one individual, through a Freedom of Information request, accomplished what two U.S. Senate committees could not. He spurred the agency into finding additional records. The records reveal a far more extensive series of experiments than had previously been thought. Nonetheless, these records still leave an incomplete record of the program. No Accountability Two lawsuits arising out of MKUltra activities made it to the Supreme Court, but both protected the government over citizen’s rights: In 1985, the Court held in CIA vs. Simms that the names of the institutions and researchers who participated in Project MKUltra were exempt from revelation under the Freedom of Information Act due to the CIA’s need to protect its “intelligence sources.” In 1987, in United States v. Stanley, the Court held that a serviceman who had volunteered for a chemical weapons experiment, but who was actually tested with LSD, was barred from bringing a claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

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Operation Mockingbird

Operation Mockingbird was a bit of a two-pronged approach to dealing with the media: on the one hand, journalists were routinely employed by the CIA to develop intelligence and gather information, or to report on certain events in a way that portrayed the US favorably. On the other, there were actual plants within the media—paid off with bribes or even directly employed by the CIA—to feed propaganda to the American public. Mostly, this program was meant to convince the public of how incredibly scary Communism was, and to make sure that public opinion favored taking out the Red Menace at any expense. Even scarier was the fact that having major newspaper publishers and the heads of TV stations bought and paid for meant that significant overseas events could be excluded from coverage in the media—events like the aforementioned coup in Guatemala, which didn’t see the light of the day in the American press at the time. Congressional hearings in 1976 (the “Church Committee”) revealed that the CIA had been bribing journalists and editors for years. Following the Church hearings, newly minted CIA director and future President George H.W. Bush announced: “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full- time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.” Yet he added that the CIA would continue to welcome unpaid, voluntary support of said journalists.

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Operation Northwoods

In the early 1960s, when the Cold War was in full swing and fear of communism was rampant, a plan dubbed Operation Northwoods was proposed within the American CIA. In short, it called for the government to perform a series of violent terrorist actions in U.S. cities including bombings, hijackings, phony riots, and sabotage, all of which could then be blamed on Cuba. This would drum up support for a war against the communists and lead to an eventual military operation to remove Fidel Castro from power. The plan was drafted and signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presented to President John F. Kennedy, who personally rejected it, and it was subsequently abandoned. For years after, Operation Northwoods existed as a rumor, but it was finally revealed to be true when top-secret documents describing the plan were made public in 1997 as part of a release of government papers relating to the Kennedy assassination.

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Project 1794

In late 2012, the U.S. Air Force declassified a trove of documents, including records of a secret program to build a flying saucer-type aircraft designed to shoot down Soviet bombers. The ambitious program, called Project 1794, was initiated in the 1950s, and a team of engineers was tasked with building a disc-shape vehicle capable of traveling at supersonic speeds at high altitudes. The declassified documents reveal plans for the plane to reach a top speed of Mach 4 (four times the speed of sound), and reach an altitude of 100,000 feet (30,480 meters). The project's estimated cost was more than $3 million, which in today's dollars would be more than $26 million. Project 1794 was canceled in December 1961 after tests suggested the flying saucer design was aerodynamically unstable and would likely be uncontrollable at high speeds (let alone supersonic speeds).

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Project Iceworm

In the 1960s, the U.S. Army embarked on a secret mission to build a series of mobile nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. The objective was to house medium- range missiles close enough to strike targets within the Soviet Union.

The program was codenamed Project Iceworm, but to test its feasibility, the Army launched a cover research project called "Camp Century" in 1960. Under this guise, engineers built a network of underground buildings and tunnels, including living quarters, a kitchen, a recreation hall, infirmary, laboratories, supply rooms, a communications center and a nuclear power plant. The base, which was kept secret from the Danish government, operated for seven years. The program was canceled in 1966 after shifting ice created unstable conditions. Today, the crushed remains of Project Iceworm are buried beneath Arctic snow.

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Stargate Project: Psychic Warriors and the CIA

Metaphysical and psychic phenomena have long existed on the fringes of conventional science and academia. ESP, Clairvoyance, Telekinesis and Astral traveling have all been relegated to the back seat of mainstream, accepted belief systems in spite of an extensive mention of these practices down the ages, across myriad cultures. It has always been challenging for practitioners of the science to be validated by the prevailing status quo. That however changed in 1995 when the CIA declassified a top secret program that had been training individuals in the esoteric science of 'Remote Viewing' in which, it was claimed, people were able to envision ongoing activities in distant places and future events. Although reminiscent of a Sci-Fi yarn, Remote Viewing was tested and deployed under rigorous scientific conditions to obtain data about foreign espionage activities, counter terrorism efforts, secret military bases abroad and hidden missiles. It recognized the inherent psychic potential in humans and attempted to harness these special faculties or 'powers' for the purposes of intelligence gathering, often of a vital nature. The initial testing was done at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) where extensive investigations were carried out into the human mind's capacity to transcend all bounds of time and space. SRI's research was supported by the CIA and other government agencies for over two decades. Russell Targ, Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann were the original founders of this once-secret program. Their task was to learn to understand psychic abilities, and to use these abilities to gather information about the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They found from years of experience that people can quickly learn to do remote viewing, and can frequently incorporate this direct knowing of the world — both present and future — into their lives.

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They were the original 'Psi Spies' named after the title of Jim Marrs' exhaustive study of the phenomenon. The project produced some remarkable results. Among them were detailed renderings of secret Soviet bases, the whereabouts of Red Brigade terrorism hostages in Italy, location of victims in the Israeli hostage crisis, locations of Scud missiles during the first Gulf War and even the impending attack on the Twin Towers in NY! (done by a private contractor and ignored until after the event). The program eventually came to be called 'Operation Stargate'. The initial media that surrounded the declassification in 1995 uncovered some surprising details. On ABC's Nightline, one of the operatives, Joe McMoneagle was put to the test by none other than Ted Koppel. He was able to prove the authenticity of the system with flying colors. Remote viewers can often contact, experience and describe a hidden object, or a remote natural or architectural site, based on the presence of a cooperative person at the distant location, or when given geographical coordinates, or some other target demarcation — which they call an 'address'. Shape, form and color are described much more reliably than the target's name, function, or other analytical information. In addition to vivid visual imagery, viewers sometimes describe associated feelings, sounds, smells and even electrical or magnetic fields. Blueprint accuracy has occasionally been achieved in these double-blind experiments, and reliability in a series can be as high as 80 per cent.

Case Studies In 1984 Targ organized a pair of successful 10,000-mile remote viewing experiments between Moscow and San Francisco with famed Russian healer Djuna Davitashvili. Djuna's task was to describe where a colleague would be hiding in San Francisco. She had to focus her attention ten thousand miles to the west and two hours into the future to correctly describe his location. These experiments were performed under the auspices and control of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Djuna hit the mark on all counts and the experiment was declared a resounding success. Ten years earlier, in 1974, Russell Targ and his colleague Hal Puthoff carried out a demonstration of psychic abilities for the CIA. Pat Price, a retired police commissioner, described the inside and outside of a secret Soviet weapons laboratory in the far reaches of Siberia — given only the geographical coordinates of latitude and longitude for a reference. (That is, with no on-site cooperation.) This trial was such a stunning success that they were forced to undergo a formal Congressional investigation to determine if there had been a breach in National Security. Of course, none was ever found, and the government supported them for another fifteen years.

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Data from these formal and controlled SRI investigations were highly statistically significant (thousands of times greater than chance expectation), and have been published in the world's most prestigious journals, such as Nature, The Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and The Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences. The twenty years of remote viewing research conducted for the CIA is outlined in Miracles of Mind: Exploring Non-local Consciousness and Spiritual Healing', co-authored by Targ and Katra. Recent research in areas as different as distant healing and quantum physics are in agreement with the oldest spiritual teachings of the sages of India, who taught that "separation is an illusion." The powers we are discovering now are described by Rishis as 'Siddhis', or fruits of deep penance and arcane Yogic techniques, verbally transmitted, only known to inner circles. The military and institutional exploitation of this timeless phenomenon is alarming. It is being harnessed by world governments in a game of cosmic brinkmanship, none of whom can possibly know the complete ramifications of unleashing such latently devastating forces without comprehending the holistic nature of the universe and interconnectedness of all life. What is remarkable however, is the fact that the cat is out of the bag finally with regard to parapsychology, metaphysics and the occult. The so-called 'mainstream' has not only recognized the stunning potential of psychic energy but has gone so far as to harness it for territorial one-upmanship. The human race only needs to realize the vast reserves of raw power that it has at its disposal to effect profound and genuine transformation of the human condition on a global scale.

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What You Need to Know About the NSA’s Surveillance Programs

What information does the NSA collect and how?

We don’t know all of the different types of information the NSA collects, but several secret collection programs have been revealed: A record of most calls made in the U.S., including the telephone number of the phones making and receiving the call, and how long the call lasted. This information is known as “metadata” and doesn’t include a recording of the actual call (but see below). This program was revealed through a leaked secret court order instructing Verizon to turn over all such information on a daily basis. Other phone companies, including AT&T and Sprint, also reportedly give their records to the NSA on a continual basis. Altogether, this is several billion calls per day.

Email, Facebook posts and instant messages for an unknown number of people, via PRISM, which involves the cooperation of at least nine different technology companies. Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others have denied that the NSA has “direct access” to their servers, saying they only release user information in response to a court order. Facebook has revealed that, in the last six months of 2012, they handed over the private data of between 18,000 and 19,000 users to law enforcement of all types -- including local police and federal agencies, such as the FBI, Federal Marshals and the NSA.

Massive amounts of raw Internet traffic The NSA intercepts huge amounts of raw data, and stores billions of communication records per day in its databases. Using the NSA’s XKEYSCORE software, analysts can see “nearly everything a user does on the Internet” including emails, social media posts, web sites you visit, addresses typed into Google Maps, files sent, and more. Currently the NSA is only authorized to intercept Internet communications with at least one end outside the U.S., though the domestic collection program used to be broader. But because there is no fully reliable automatic way to separate domestic from international communications, this program also -96-

captures some amount of U.S. citizens’ purely domestic Internet activity, such as emails, social media posts, instant messages, the sites you visit and online purchases you make.

The contents of an unknown number of phone calls There have been several reports that the NSA records the audio contents of some phone calls and a leaked document confirms this. This reportedly happens “on a much smaller scale” than the programs above, after analysts select specific people as “targets.” Calls to or from U.S. phone numbers can be recorded, as long as the other end is outside the U.S. or one of the callers is involved in "international terrorism". There does not seem to be any public information about the collection of text messages, which would be much more practical to collect in bulk because of their smaller size. The NSA has been prohibited from recording domestic communications since the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act but at least two of these programs -- phone records collection and Internet cable taps -- involve huge volumes of Americans’ data.

Does the NSA record everything about everyone, all the time?

The NSA records as much information as it can, subject to technical limitations (there’s a lot of data) and legal constraints. This currently includes the metadata for nearly all telephone calls made in the U.S. (but not their content) and massive amounts of Internet traffic with at least one end outside the U.S. It’s not clear exactly how many cables have been tapped, though we know of at least one inside the U.S., a secret report about the program by the NSA’s Inspector General mentions multiple cables, and the volume of intercepted information is so large that it was processed at 150 sites around the world as of 2008. We also know that Britain’s GCHQ, which shares some intelligence with the NSA, had tapped over 200 cables as of 2012, belonging to seven different telecommunications companies. Until 2011 the NSA also operated a domestic Internet metadata program which collected mass records of who emailed who even if both parties were inside the U.S. Because it is not always possible to separate domestic from foreign communications by automatic means, the NSA still captures some amount of purely domestic information, and it is allowed to do so by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The collected information covers “nearly everything a user does on the Internet,” according to a presentation on the XKEYSCORE system. The slides specifically mention emails, Facebook chats, websites visited, Google Maps searches, transmitted files, photographs, and documents of different kinds. It’s also possible to search for people based on where they are connecting from, the language they use, or their use of privacy technologies such as VPNs and encryption, according to the slides. This is a massive amount of data. The full contents of intercepted Internet traffic can only be stored for up to a few days, depending on the collection site, while the associated “metadata” (who communicated with whom online) is stored up to 30 days. Telephone metadata is smaller and is stored for five years. NSA analysts can move specific data to more permanent databases when they become relevant to an investigation. The NSA also collects narrower and more detailed information on specific people, such as the actual audio of phone calls and the entire content of email accounts. NSA analysts

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can submit a request to obtain these types of more detailed information about specific people. Watching a specific person like this is called “targeting” by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law which authorizes this type of individual surveillance. The NSA is allowed to record the conversations of non-Americans without a specific warrant for each person monitored, if at least one end of the conversation is outside of the U.S. It is also allowed to record the communications of Americans if they are outside the U.S. and the NSA first gets a warrant for each case. It’s not known exactly how many people the NSA is currently targeting, but according to a leaked report the NSA intercepted content from 37,664 telephone numbers and email addresses from October 2001 to January 2007. Of these, 8% were domestic: 2,612 U.S. phone numbers and 406 U.S. email addresses. How the NSA actually gets the data depends on the type of information requested. If the analyst wants someone's private emails or social media posts, the NSA must request that specific data from companies such as Google and Facebook. Some technology companies (we don't know which ones) have FBI monitoring equipment installed "on the premises" and the NSA gets the information via the FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit. The NSA also has the capability to monitor calls made over the Internet (such as Skype calls) and instant messaging chats as they happen. For information that is already flowing through Internet cables that the NSA is monitoring, or the audio of phone calls, a targeting request instructs automatic systems to watch for the communications of a specific person and save them. It’s important to note that the NSA probably has information about you even if you aren’t on this target list. If you have previously communicated with someone who has been targeted, then the NSA already has the content of any emails, instant messages, phone calls, etc. you exchanged with the targeted person. Also, your data is likely in bulk records such as phone metadata and Internet traffic recordings. This is what makes these programs “mass surveillance,” as opposed to traditional wiretaps, which are authorized by individual, specific court orders.

What does phone call metadata information reveal, if it doesn’t include the content of the calls?

Even without the content of all your conversations and text messages, so-called “metadata” can reveal a tremendous amount about you. If they have your metadata, the NSA would have a record of your entire address book, or at least every person you’ve called in the last several years. They can guess who you are close to by how often you call someone, and when. By correlating the information from multiple people, they can do sophisticated “network analysis” of communities of many different kinds, personal or professional -- or criminal. Phone company call records reveal where you were at the time that a call was made, because they include the identifier of the radio tower that transmitted the call to you. The government has repeatedly denied that it collects this information, but former NSA employee Thomas Drake said they do.

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Even without location data, records of who communicated with whom can be used to discover the structure of groups planning terrorism. Starting from a known "target" (see above), analysts typically reconstruct the social network "two or three hops" out, examining all friends-of-friends, or even friends-of-friends-of-friends, in the search for new targets. This means potentially thousands or millions of people might be examined when investigating a single target. Metadata is a sensitive topic because there is great potential for abuse. While no one has claimed the NSA is doing this, it would be possible to use metadata to algorithmically identify, with some accuracy, members of other types of groups like the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street, gun owners, undocumented immigrants, etc. An expert in network analysis could start with all of the calls made from the time and place of a protest, and trace the networks of associations out from there. Phone metadata is also not “anonymous” in any real sense. The NSA already maintains a database of the phone numbers of all Americans for use in determining whether someone is a “U.S. person” (see below), and there are several commercial number-to- name services in any case. Phone records become even more powerful when they are correlated with other types of data, such as social media posts, local police records and credit card purchase information, a process known as intelligence fusion.

Does the NSA need an individualized warrant to listen to my calls or look at my emails?

It’s complicated, but not in all cases. Leaked court orders set out the "minimization" procedures that govern what the NSA can do with the domestic information it has intercepted. The NSA is allowed to store this domestic information because of the technical difficulties in separating foreign from domestic communications when large amounts of data are being captured. Another document shows that individual intelligence analysts make the decision to look at previously collected bulk information. They must document their request, but only need approval from their "shift coordinator." If the analyst later discovers that they are looking at the communications of a U.S. person, they must destroy the data. However, if the intercepted information is “reasonably believed to contain evidence of a crime” then the NSA is allowed to turn it over to federal law enforcement. Unless there are other (still secret) restrictions on how the NSA can use this data this means the police might end up with your private communications without ever having to get approval from a judge, effectively circumventing the whole notion of probable cause. This is significant because thousands or millions of people might fall into the extended social network of a single known target, but it is not always possible to determine whether someone is a U.S. person before looking at their data. For example, it’s not usually possible to tell just from someone’s email address, which is why the NSA maintains a database of known U.S. email addresses and phone numbers. Internal documents state that analysts need only “51% confidence” that someone is a non-U.S. person before looking at their data, and if the NSA does not have “specific information” about someone, that person is “presumed to be a non-United States person.” Also, the NSA is allowed to provide any of its recorded information to the FBI, if the FBI specifically asks for it.

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Is all of this legal?

Yes, assuming the NSA adheres to the restrictions set out in recently leaked court orders. By definition, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decides what it is legal for the NSA to do. But this level of domestic surveillance wasn’t always legal, and the NSA's domestic surveillance program has been found to violate legal standards on more than one occasion. The NSA was gradually granted the authority to collect domestic information on a massive scale through a series of legislative changes and court decisions over the decade following September 11, 2001. See this timeline of loosening laws. The Director of National Intelligence says that authority for PRISM programs comes from section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Verizon metadata collection order cites section 215 of the Patriot Act. The author of the Patriot Act disagrees that the act justifies the Verizon metadata collection program.

The NSA's broad data collection programs were originally authorized by President Bush on October 4, 2001. The program operated that way for several years, but in March 2004 a Justice Department review declared the bulk Internet metadata program was illegal. President Bush signed an order re-authorizing it anyway. In response, several top Justice Department officials threatened to resign, including acting Attorney General James Comey and FBI director Robert Mueller. Bush backed down, and the Internet metadata program was suspended for several months. By 2007, all aspects of the program were re-authorized by court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In 2009, the Justice Department acknowledged that the NSA had collected emails and phone calls of Americans in a way that exceeded legal limitations. In October 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment at least once. The Justice Department has said that this ruling must remain secret, but we know it concerned some aspect of the "minimization" rules the govern what the NSA can do with domestic communications. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recently decided that this ruling can be released, but Justice Department has not yet done so. Civil liberties groups including the EFF and the ACLU dispute the constitutionality of these programs and have filed lawsuits to challenge them.

How long can the NSA keep information on Americans?

The NSA can generally keep intercepted domestic communications for up to five years. It can keep them indefinitely under certain circumstances, such as when the communication contains evidence of a crime or when it’s “foreign intelligence information,” a broad legal term that includes anything relevant to “the conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States.”

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The NSA can also keep encrypted communications indefinitely. That includes any information sent to or from a secure web site, that is, a site with a URL starting with "https".

Does the NSA do anything to protect Americans’ privacy?

Yes. First, the NSA is only allowed to intercept communications if at least one end of the conversation is outside of the U.S. -- though it doesn't have to distinguish domestic from foreign communication until the "earliest practicable point" which allows the NSA to record bulk information from Internet cables and sort it out later. When the NSA discovers that previously intercepted information belongs to an American, it must usually destroy that information. Because this determination cannot always be made by computer, this sometimes happens only after a human analyst has already looked at it. The NSA also must apply certain safeguards. For example, the NSA must withhold the names of U.S. persons who are not relevant to ongoing investigations when they distribute information -- unless that person’s communications contain evidence of a crime or are relevant to a range of national security and foreign intelligence concerns. Also, analysts must document why they believe someone is outside of the U.S. when they ask for addition information to be collected on that person. An unknown number of these cases are audited internally. If the NSA makes a mistake and discovers that it has targeted someone inside the U.S., it has five days to submit a report to the Department of Justice and other authorities.

What if I’m not an American?

All bets are off. There do not appear to be any legal restrictions on what the NSA can do with the communications of non-U.S. persons. Since a substantial fraction of the world’s Internet data passes through the United States, or its allies, the U.S. has the ability to observe and record the communications of much of the world’s population. The European Union has already complained to the U.S. Attorney General. The U.S. is hardly the only country doing mass surveillance, though its program is very large. GCHQ, which is the British counterpart to the NSA, has a similar surveillance program and shares data with the NSA. Many countries now have some sort of mass Internet surveillance now in place. Although passive surveillance is often hard to detect, more aggressive governments use intercepted information to intimidate or control their citizens, including Syria, Iran, Egypt, Bahrain and China. Much of the required equipment is sold to these governments by American companies.

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Angry Birds

Nowhere is safe from the prying eyes of government agencies, it seems, not even much- loved mobile game Angry Birds. As soon as a player opened up the game and began their bird-slinging adventures, algorithms within the game’s code relayed their age, sex and other information to intelligence agents. This is according to documents leaked from GCHQ, which revealed how it and the NSA had been working on ways to tap into mobiles and collect data through apps. Not just Angry Birds fell foul of the surveillance program: Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were also targeted. “It effectively means that anyone using a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system,” a secret 2008 report by the British agency said.

ANT Division of NSA

Catalog of Exploits for Nearly Every Major Software/Hardware/Firmware. After years of speculation that electronics can be accessed by intelligence agencies through a back door, an internal NSA catalog reveals that such methods already exist for numerous end-user devices. When it comes to modern firewalls for corporate computer networks, the world’s second largest network equipment manufacturer doesn’t skimp on praising its own work. According to Juniper Networks’ online PR copy, the company’s products are “ideal” for protecting large companies and computing centers from unwanted access from outside. They claim the performance of the company’s special computers is “unmatched” and their firewalls are the “best-in-class.” Despite these assurances, though, there is one attacker none of these products can fend off — the United States’ National Security Agency. Specialists at the intelligence organization succeeded years ago in penetrating the company’s digital firewalls. A document viewed by SPIEGEL resembling a product -102-

catalog reveals that an NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry — including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell and Apple’s iPhone. These NSA agents, who specialize in secret back doors, are able to keep an eye on all levels of our digital lives — from computing centers to individual computers, from laptops to mobile phones. For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox. And no matter what walls companies erect, the NSA’s specialists seem already to have gotten past them. This, at least, is the impression gained from flipping through the 50-page document. The list reads like a mail-order catalog, one from which other NSA employees can order technologies from the ANT division for tapping their targets’ data. The catalog even lists the prices for these electronic break-in tools, with costs ranging from free to $250,000. In the case of Juniper, the name of this particular digital lock pick is “FEEDTROUGH.” This malware burrows into Juniper firewalls and makes it possible to smuggle other NSA programs into mainframe computers. Thanks to FEEDTROUGH, these implants can, by design, even survive “across reboots and software upgrades.” In this way, US government spies can secure themselves a permanent presence in computer networks. The catalog states that FEEDTROUGH “has been deployed on many target platforms.” The specialists at ANT, which presumably stands for Advanced or Access Network Technology, could be described as master carpenters for the NSA’s department for Tailored Access Operations (TAO). In cases where TAO’s usual hacking and data- skimming methods don’t suffice, ANT workers step in with their special tools, penetrating networking equipment, monitoring mobile phones and computers and diverting or even modifying data. Such “implants,” as they are referred to in NSA parlance, have played a considerable role in the intelligence agency’s ability to establish a global covert network that operates alongside the Internet. Some of the equipment available is quite inexpensive. A rigged monitor cable that allows “TAO personnel to see what is displayed on the targeted monitor,” for example, is available for just $30. But an “active GSM base station” — a tool that makes it possible to mimic a mobile phone tower and thus monitor cell phones — costs a full $40,000. Computer bugging devices disguised as normal USB plugs, capable of sending and receiving data via radio undetected, are available in packs of 50 for over $1 million. The ANT division doesn’t just manufacture surveillance hardware. It also develops software for special tasks. The ANT developers have a clear preference for planting their malicious code in so-called BIOS, software located on a computer’s motherboard that is the first thing to load when a computer is turned on.

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This has a number of valuable advantages: an infected PC or server appears to be functioning normally, so the infection remains invisible to virus protection and other security programs. And even if the hard drive of an infected computer has been completely erased and a new operating system is installed, the ANT malware can continue to function and ensures that new spyware can once again be loaded onto what is presumed to be a clean computer. The ANT developers call this “Persistence” and believe this approach has provided them with the possibility of permanent access. Another program attacks the firmware in hard drives manufactured by Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung, all of which, with the exception of latter, are American companies. Here, too, it appears the US intelligence agency is compromising the technology and products of American companies. Other ANT programs target Internet routers meant for professional use or hardware firewalls intended to protect company networks from online attacks. Many digital attack weapons are “remotely installable” — in other words, over the Internet. Others require a direct attack on an end-user device — an “interdiction,” as it is known in NSA jargon — in order to install malware or bugging equipment. There is no information in the documents seen by SPIEGEL to suggest that the companies whose products are mentioned in the catalog provided any support to the NSA or even had any knowledge of the intelligence solutions. “Cisco does not work with any government to modify our equipment, nor to implement any so-called security ‘back doors’ in our products,” the company said in a statement. Contacted by SPIEGEL reporters, officials at Western Digital, Juniper Networks and Huawei also said they had no knowledge of any such modifications. Meanwhile, Dell officials said the company “respects and complies with the laws of all countries in which it operates.” Many of the items in the software solutions catalog date from 2008, and some of the target server systems that are listed are no longer on the market today. At the same time, it’s not as if the hackers within the ANT division have been sleeping on the job. They have continued to develop their arsenal. Some pages in the 2008 catalog, for example, list new systems for which no tools yet exist. However, the authors promise they are already hard at work developing new tools and that they will be “pursued for a future release”.

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BLARNEY

BLARNEY is, in short, the international version of the PRISM program. It is one of the many component programs that fall under the umbrella of FAIRVIEW. Through BLARNEY, the NSA forms partnerships with foreign telecommunication companies to gain access to their customer data. Very little has been published about BLARNEY’s exact operations, but it appears to focus specifically on metadata. BLARNEY gathers up ‘metadata’—technical information about communications traffic and network devices—as it streams past choke points along the backbone of the Internet. Metadata focuses not on the contents of communications but on where and when they were sent. The exact details of how the data is collected are unclear, but it appears that the information is provided to the NSA by both foreign intelligence agencies and commercial partnerships with companies. For example, NSA partnerships with both German and British intelligence agencies. In the latter case, this partnership has afforded the agency access to information moving over the networks of major telecom companies, like BT and Vodafone. It is unclear, however, whether these partnerships are directly associated with BLARNEY.

Boundless Informant

Boundless Informant, besides having an unenviably unsubtle name for NSA officials to have to explain in front of Congress, is perhaps the most damning evidence so far that the NSA is conducting mass surveillance inside the United States.

Boundless Informant helps the NSA analyze and visualize the, well, boundless amounts of metadata information it collects around the world. (Metadata, or “data about data”, is all the information about a piece of data besides the actual content of the data. For example, metadata about telephone calls includes the phone numbers of the caller and recipient, as well as the location and duration of the call, but not the words in the call itself.) The top surveilled countries in 2013 were Iran, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and India

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The map above shows that in March 2013 alone, the NSA collected over 73 billion metadata records worldwide. Despite the NSA’s assurance that it does not intentionally collect data on Americans, nearly 3 billion pieces of metadata were collected from the United States alone.

If you want to see what your own metadata looks like, engineers at the MIT media lab developed a program called Immersion that analyzes your email metadata to create a cluster chart of your social connections.

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Dishfire

Like FASCIA, Dishfire targets cell phones. More specifically, it collects nearly 200 million text messages daily around the world, using them to view financial transactions, monitor border crossings, and meetings between unsavory characters.

According to our sources, each day the NSA stores:

• More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)

• Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts

• More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.

• Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users

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Using Dishfire, the NSA can extract names, geo-coordinates, missed calls, SIM card changes, roaming information, travel, financial transactions, and passwords from a user’s cell phone. The NSA has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more — including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity.

The NSA has stated that they remove all text messages involving U.S. citizens from their databases, and that “privacy protections for U.S. persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of SMS data in Dishfire.” Based on this week’s Washington Post report that nearly half of NSA surveillance files involve Americans, it’s hard to take their word for it. Based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, NSA has developed a “Google-like” search engine called ICREACH, which has the capacity to gather personal information. This search engine can access over 850 million personal records, including private e- mails, chats, and some phone locations. The NSA is sharing the data collected through its ICREACH program with nearly two dozen US government agencies. The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents specifically identify the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) as “core participants. According to a December 2007 NSA secret document, “The ICREACH team delivered the first-ever wholesale sharing of communications metadata within the U.S. Intelligence Community.” The Intercept reported that one key issue raised by the ICREACH program is whether domestic law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI or the DEA, have used ICREACH to trigger secret investigations of US citizens through a controversial process known as “parallel construction.” As Gallagher explained, parallel construction involves information gathered covertly by law enforcement agents, who subsequently create a new evidence trail that excludes the original, covert one. “This hides the true origin of the investigation from defense lawyers and, on occasion, prosecutors and judges—which means the legality of the evidence that triggered the investigation cannot be challenged in court.”

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EgotisticalGoat

EgotisticalGoat and its sister program, EgotisticalGiraffe, were designed to help facilitate attacks on people using the anonymous network Tor. Techniques included targeting web browsers like Firefox and giving the NSA full control over a target’s computer – keystrokes, online activity and files. The Tor network is relied upon by journalists, activists and campaigners around the world to maintain the secrecy of their communications and avoid reprisals from their respective governments. The network, oddly enough, is provided with 60 per cent of its funding by the US government. Agents operating EgotisticalGoat admitted the Tor network was too large for them to completely crack. In one top-secret presentation named “Tor Stinks” it stated "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time ... with manual analysis we can de-anonymize only a very small fraction of Tor users.” With more information to come from Snowden, who claims his leaks to date are just the tip of the iceberg, do we have more cause for concern over our data than ever before? Are all of these operations a gross misconduct or a necessary evil?

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FAIRVIEW

In the words of Thomas Drake, a former NSA senior executive who blew the whistle on the agency’s reckless spending and invasive surveillance in 2006, FAIRVIEW is the NSA’s project to “own the Internet.” FAIRVIEW is what Drake called an “umbrella program.” It incorporates many different operations, such as BLARNEY, OAKSTAR, and STORMBREW that intercept massive amounts of international Internet traffic by various means. Drake described FAIRVIEW as focused on collecting messages and phone calls at “the main Internet backbone links/junctions of the undersea trunk/cable fiber optic systems.” Details on FAIRVIEW’s operations are scant, but it appears that the program works (at least in part) as follows: The NSA partners with U.S. telecommunications companies that then make agreements with international companies for their Internet data. There are likely many different means through which the NSA intercepts these companies’ information. Based on conversations with Drake, the FAIRVIEW program also appears to encompass direct link-ups with offshore submarine cables. It is likely that the former operation falls under the purview of the BLARNEY program.

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FASCIA

FASCIA is the NSA’s real-life Marauder’s Map. In December 2013, Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani of The Washington Post reported that FASCIA was collecting nearly 5 billion pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of cellphones worldwide every day.

For your cell phone to work, your service provider needs to know its approximate location. Your phone transmits this information to the nearest cell towers, which the network can then use to triangulate your location. According to leaked NSA documents, FASCIA works by storing this location data when it is passed along the cables that connect different mobile networks. An NSA analyst sitting at a desk in Maryland can then search through this stored data to track the location of a specific phone user.

Perhaps the most interesting (and scariest) functionality of FASCIA is its “Co-Traveler Analytics.” By comparing a known target’s cell phone location with the location of other cell phones during an hour-long time window, the NSA can isolate groups of cell phones traveling together to find associates of the known target.

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This graphic explains the FASCIA program:

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Gilgamesh

Unfortunately, this operation has nothing to do with the fifth king of Uruk Mesopotamia. According both to documents released by Snowden and the testimony of a former drone operator, the NSA used telecommunications devices as targets for drone strikes. Rather than confirming with operatives on the ground, said the whistleblower, the NSA would identify a target based on the geolocation of their phone and order an assassination. The drone operator was adamant the technology was aiding the War on Terror but that civilians were “absolutely” being killed enmasse by the strikes. Terrorists cottoned on to the NSA’s idea, though, and began to mix up their SIM cards to avoid being tracked. Commanders would switch them with footsoldiers and footsoldiers with civilians. The NSA often located targets based on their activity levels and not on the content of the calls, resulting in, according to the former pilot “death by unreliable data.”

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HappyFoot

HappyFoot was the codename for an operation designed to track internet users’ movements by piggybacking onto their cookies and location data. When a consumer visits a site cookies are enabled on their computer, allowing the site's company to tailor advertisements to them, something government snoops were keen to exploit. Slides released by Snowden and published by the Washington Post revealed the NSA had been latching onto these cookies in order to identify possible targets for further hacking operations. Using a unique cookie from Google called PREF, intelligence agents could pick out one person from a sea of internet data in order to focus on them specifically. The NSA slides indicated that Google complied with this action entirely after being compelled to by the US government.

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NoseySmurf

Also known by the names “TrackerSmurf” and “DreamySmurf”, the NoseySmurf project tied into the Angry Birds scheme by tapping into mobile phones to scrape data from users. The NSA spent over $1 billion (£580 million) in its search to find more efficient tracking and piggybacking methods for infiltrating targeted devices. In one top- secret presentation, the agency describes a victim uploading an image to Facebook from their phone as a “Golden Nugget!!” From the simple act of someone uploading a picture to a social media site, later slides say, agents could glean a victim’s contacts, location, gender, age, income, ethnicity, education level and even number of children.

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Operation UFO

Operation UFO is an [alleged] NSA operation in support of Project PLUTO, of which little information is made available. The few mentions are made by a respected whistleblower named William Moore, whom some say was setup to be assasinated. Its mission is to form intelligence teams to be the first on scene of any UFO crash site in order to secure the technology and prevent it from falling into foreign hands. Several teams exist around the world. The United States is specifically concerned that ET technology does not fall into Soviet hands. The mission is to be accomplished regardless of the country of occurrence. Extraterrestrial craft recoveries occur in foreign countries as well as the U.S. In 1967 It has been confirmed that at least one alien craft was retrieved from the Russians either voluntarily or through one of the aforementioned programs. The disk is similar in appearance to another craft that was already in the possession of the U.S. military.

Optic Nerve

Think TSA full-body scanners are intrusive? The UK’s surveillance agency GCHQ collaborated with the NSA to create Optic Nerve, a program that automatically stores webcam images of users chatting on Yahoo Messenger. During one six-month period in 2008, Optic Nerve collected images from 1.8 million Yahoo accounts. It inserts each image, even those without a known target, into NSA

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databases, which can then be searched by analysts using XKeyscore. Again, all this happens without a court warrant.

Surprising to no one besides the NSA, an estimated 3.4%-10.8% of the images taken were sexually explicit:

Yahoo denied any knowledge of Optic Nerve, calling it “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy,” and promised to start to encrypt all Yahoo services by April 2014. As of today, Yahoo Messenger remains unencrypted.

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PRISM

(Planning Tool for Resource, Integration, Synchronization, and Management)

Perhaps the most infamous (though not the most comprehensive) of the NSA’s programs, PRISM is geared towards collecting the Internet data stored by nine major Silicon Valley technology companies: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, PalTalk, Skype, YouTube, Apple, and AOL. According to a slide leaked by Snowden to the Guardian and the Washington Post in early June, PRISM collects the following information from customers of the nine aforementioned tech companies: “emails”; “chat--video, voice”; “photos”; “stored data”; “VoIP”; “file transfers”; “video conferencing”; “notifications of target activity--logins, etc”; “online social networking details”; and “special requests.”

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The program operates through a secretive judiciary body called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court, which was created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, provides the agency with warrants for the private information of both foreigners and American citizens in matters of “national security.” The court has been criticized for its readiness to approve the seizure of such information. Since 1978, thousands of applications have been filed in the court. In all that time only 10 have ever been denied.

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Squeaky Dolphin

There’s a prize for anyone who can understand the reasoning behind this codename. Squeaky Dolphin was an initiative thought up by the UK’s GCHQ. It involved tapping into the cables carrying the world’s web traffic in order to monitor what people are up to on social media.

Documents leaked to NBC news by Snowden revealed how British spies showed off their new invention to their US counterparts. GCHQ demonstrated how it could monitor YouTube in real time and collect addresses from the billions of videos watched every day. Analysts demonstrated how, through a central information hub, they could determine which videos were popular in which cities and at what times, as well as what each demographic preferred to click on. The UK spooks did mention to their allies that this program was for general trends only and not for spying on individuals, but there are as yet unconfirmed rumors GCHQ used the tech to target Twitter users with propaganda.

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STORMBREW & OAKSTAR

Like BLARNEY, the STORMBREW and OAKSTAR programs appears to fall under the umbrella of FAIRVIEW. Little is known about them other than that they are listed under the line “Collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows passed.”

TOR Online Browse Users Subject to Attack

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The online anonymity network Tor is a high-priority target for the National Security Agency. But first, let me explain, Tor is not just a browser that regular folks might ordinarily use to prevent being spied on while on the web. This is the browser of choice for users going to the Dark Web. While I believe in freedom, I also agree that the Dark Web and what goes on there, is a place that needs some policing and most folks who journey there are looking to get involved in something illegal and harmful to others. The work of attacking Tor is done by the NSA's application vulnerabilities branch, which is part of the systems intelligence directorate, or SID. The majority of NSA employees work in SID, which is tasked with collecting data from communications systems around the world. According to a top-secret NSA presentation provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, one successful technique the NSA has developed involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. The trick identified Tor users on the Internet and then executes an attack against their Firefox web browser. The NSA refers to these capabilities as CNE, or computer network exploitation. The first step of this process is finding Tor users. To accomplish this, the NSA relies on its vast capability to monitor large parts of the internet. This is done via the agency's partnership with US telecoms firms under programs codenamed:  Stormbrew  Fairview  Oakstar  Blarney The NSA creates "fingerprints" that detect http requests from the Tor network to particular servers. These fingerprints are loaded into NSA database systems like XKeyscore, a bespoke collection and analysis tool which NSA boasts allows its analysts to see "almost everything" a target does on the internet. Using powerful data analysis tools with codenames such as Turbulence, Turmoil and Tumult, the NSA automatically sifts through the enormous amount of internet traffic that it sees, looking for Tor connections.

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The very feature that makes Tor a powerful anonymity service, and the fact that all Tor users look alike on the internet, makes it easy to differentiate Tor users from other web users. On the other hand, the anonymity provided by Tor makes it impossible for the NSA to know who the user is, or whether or not the user is in the US. After identifying an individual Tor user on the internet, the NSA uses its network of secret internet servers to redirect those users to another set of secret internet servers, with the codename FoxAcid, to infect the user's computer. FoxAcid is an NSA system designed to act as a matchmaker between potential targets and attacks developed by the NSA, giving the agency opportunity to launch prepared attacks against their systems. Once the computer is successfully attacked, it secretly calls back to a FoxAcid server, which then performs additional attacks on the target computer to ensure that it remains compromised long-term, and continues to provide eavesdropping information back to the NSA.

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XKeyscore

Speaking from Hong Kong to journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden made his most famous statement about the extent of NSA mass-surveillance programs: “I, sitting at my desk, had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.”

Journalists had already known about NSA efforts to collect internet and phone data for nearly a decade. By 2007, the NSA was adding one to two billion internet records to its databases daily. In 2010, The Washington Post reported that “every day, collection systems at the [NSA] intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications.” What we didn’t know was whose communications were being stored, and what ability NSA analysts had to access them.

When Snowden revealed the stunning power he had as a contractor for the NSA, he was referring to the NSA’s XKeyscore program — a program previously unknown to the public — which gives analysts the ability to easily search through the staggering amount of internet data collected and stored by the NSA every day.

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Using XKeyscore, an NSA analyst can simply type in an email address or IP address of a “target” and access their emails, search history, visited websites, and even Facebook chats. The program’s leaked slides boast that XKeyscore’s ability to analyze HTTP data allows it to see “nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet.”

Want to know who searched for Pakistani President Musharraf on the BBC’s website?

How about “everyone in Sweden that visits a particular web forum”?

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“The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they’ve collected over the last several years. And what these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things. It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future.”

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These NASA Projects may seem rather tame compared to those of other Government agencies, take a closer look beyond the hype, you never know what will be revealed to your inquisitive mind!

Europa Drill

As a premier destination in the search for aliens, the saltwater ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa has astronomers salivating uncontrollably. Yet it’s stubbornly protected by a 30- kilometer-thick (20 mi) shell of ice. Probing these depths is an unprecedented task even

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on Earth, so imagine the mathematical gymnastics necessary to achieve this half a billion miles from home. However, such a project might be closer to fruition than you might think. President Obama has already allocated $15 million of NASA’s annual allowance for Europa exploration, and this historic mission could begin as soon as 2022. NASA has already developed radical new drilling technology, custom-built to punch through Europan ice crust—a nuclear-powered ice cannon. Testing is underway on Alaska’s Matanuska Glacier, where the VALKYRIE is being prepped for its eventual use elsewhere in the solar system. Conventional drilling tools could never puncture such a mighty ice crust, and maintaining a giant drill bit is a logistical nightmare. So VALKYRIE uses a nuclear core to produce scorching jets of water to cut through the ice.

OSIRIS-REx

NASA’s New Frontiers program is a triumvirate of planned missions focused on our own solar system. The Juno mission will provide new insights on Jupiter. New Horizons will give us our first real images of Pluto. The OSIRIS-REx might be the most ambitious, as it aims to bring an asteroid sample to Earth. A primitive, nearby asteroid called Bennu is the target, and samples returned could offer hints about the formation of the solar system. This ancient chunk is a leftover from the debris field that coalesced billions of years ago to form the planets and the Sun. It floated around untouched for over four billion years. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx—slated for launch in 2016—will poke into Bennu with an extractor rod. That’s quite a feat, considering that the asteroid’s diameter is only about the length of four football fields, and it zips through the solar system like a cosmic bullet. Bennu has a high chance of striking Earth in the 22nd century, so this mission might just be important for gathering data on the makeup of the asteroid—just in case, perhaps, we need to blow it to smithereens.

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Super Ball Bot

“Tensegrity” might sound like an ’80s prog- rock band, but it actually stands for “tensional integrity.” Using this concept, NASA has developed a flexible, physically durable, segmented ball dubbed the Super Ball Bot. The ball’s configuration allows efficient mobility and great shock-absorbing qualities because it transfers force evenly throughout the structure, much like the human body. It’s so durable that NASA plans to drop these balls directly onto Saturn’s moon Titan without a parachute. Its unmatched squishiness acts as a damper, replacing the need for landing gear. It looks like a jumbled mess of tent poles. However, this flimsy contraption is actually quite stable and could serve as transport on Titan—picture an army of rolling metallic tumbleweeds. NASA will use this as a shell to augment the rovers and landers of the future. The tensegrity cocoon will cushion vehicles. The ball will get around more easily than anything with wheels, rolling over sand, rocks, and other unfriendly terrain.

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Supersonic Bidirectional Flying Wing

The impressively named Supersonic Bidirectional Flying Wing is a ridiculously suave aircraft that looks like it would cut you for looking at it wrong. It’s the creation of Gacheng Za, a professor at the University of Miami. And its piqued NASA’s interest because Za’s concept allows the craft to excel at an unprecedented range of altitudes and speeds. For aircraft in general, the initial phase of flight requires a large surface area to produce lift. That’s why airplanes have large wings. But once the craft is comfortably up in the air, the increased surface area produces extra drag and therefore deceleration. This dichotomy of aerodynamic efficiency is never fully satisfied, but NASA hopes to skirt the issue with the bidirectional design, awarding $100,000 to further realize this crazy concept. This giant wing is truly versatile. It uses a broad physique to easily get airborne. Then to attain supersonic velocity, it shoots to higher altitudes and rotates 90 degrees, producing the sleekest profile possible to slice through air.

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Tiny Satellites

NASA’s newest generation of satellites depart radically from current models. The clunky machines we’re used to are being replaced by increasingly smaller devices, some of which could comfortably fit in your hands. One of these new nanosatellites is the CubeSat. As its name implies, it’s simply a small cube, 10 centimeters (4 in) long and weighing a measly 1.3 kilograms (3 lb). These satellites are highly customizable and easy to transport, which is why NASA is currently allowing students and schools to submit their own designs. The chosen sats will then be launched into space. They’re so small that they can easily be carried as payloads on previously scheduled missions. But they get even smaller. A series of stamp-sized satellites was launched into space in 2011 onboard the shuttle Endeavour to be affixed to the ISS. These are completely inconspicuous and barely larger than your thumbnail. And if testing goes well, NASA plans to launch these tiny stamps en masse. Once in space, the lightweight chips would drift about like specks of dust, replacing today’s much more expensive and labor- intensive satellite production.

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Traveling Without Fuel

Newly developed space engines examined by NASA can create thrust without propelling fuel in the opposite direction. To a layperson, this engine seems to blatantly violate Newton’s laws of motion and the momentum conservation principle, yet it appears to work. The Cannae Drive uses its distinctive cone in conjunction with microwave radiation to propel itself across space. Instead of using fuel to boost itself along, its convex nose directs microwave-produced pressure away from itself, producing a tiny push. A similar engine, called the EmDrive, has been produced in Britain. So, far the energy generated is on the order of micronewtons, about as powerful as a butterfly sneezing. But it implies that NASA may eventually develop a whole new breed of engine—one that will eliminate fuel costs and make deep-space voyages an exponentially more viable option.

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Black Project Aircraft

There is nothing more fascinating in the aviation world than the “black projects” – aircraft programs that are so secret that even those with the highest security clearance have no idea they exist. But occasionally the veil of secrecy is accidentally lifted, offering a fleeting glimpse into this shadowy world. Often these are mistaken for some off-world craft and chances are they may have back-engineered from a recovered UFO, or even stranger for some folks to fathom, built with the help of aliens!

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TR-3A Black Manta. Little is known of the TR-3A Black Manta, which is rumored to have been active during the 1980s/1990s. It’s an alleged stealth aircraft that exists in the shadow world of rumor and probable misinformation; its reported status – black project; its existence – vehemently denied. The TR-3A is claimed to be a subsonic stealth spyplane manufactured by Northrop Grumman (famed for their “flying wing” designs). Some say it was used in the Gulf War to provide laser designation for F-117 stealth fighters dropping laser-guided bombs. Another hypothesis holds that the vehicle identified as the “TR-3″ was merely a prototype for the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. Another theory comes via two designs from Teledyne Ryan, a firm specializing in unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, patented in 1977 – one for an unmanned, one for a manned aircraft. Whether the TR-3A is linked to these designs is not known, but intriguingly “TR” also stands for Teledyne Ryan – probably meaningless since “TR” traditionally stands for tactical reconnaissance. The fact that Teledyne Ryan was purchased by Northrop Grumman in 1999 adds fuel to the fire of conspiracy theory. But could it also mean the facts are staring us right in the face? Teledyne Ryan’s designs strongly resemble the UFOs photographed in Belgium in 1989/1990, which were chased by the Belgian Air Force and seen by hundreds of people.

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(Don’t ask me where I got these original TR-3A drawings from!)

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The ether is buzzing with information about the alleged TR-3B, from scientific write-ups about its fantastical capabilities to seemingly real photo and video footage. In the dark world of flying triangles, the TR-3B would seem to be king. Yet despite hundreds of sightings at least confirming the existence of a large triangular aircraft that can fly slow with little noise, this black project – thought to be codenamed “Astra” – could be one of the most classified of all time. It’s tough to know what to make of the here say since, to the uninitiated, reports of the TR-3B’s capabilities fall in that hazy hinterland between science fiction and – perhaps – reality. Here’s what is reported: The TR-3B is a nuclear powered tactical reconnaissance aircraft built with technology available by the mid-1980s. It’s said to have been developed under the Aurora Program, again muddying the waters since Aurora is thought to be the codename for another top secret spy plane. While some maintain the TR-3B was made possible by reverse engineering alien technology, many think its functions are the product of human beings – albeit very clever ones! At least three of the billion dollar plus TR-3Bs were thought to be flying by 1994. Its outer coating is thought to be reactive to electrical stimulation, changing color and reflectiveness to make the TR-3B look like a small craft or several aircraft at various locations. This theory at least sounds plausible and would explain why myriad radar operators have witnessed planes on their screens vanish while others appear out of nowhere, (Sounds like alien technology to me) then race off at speeds and forces of gravity that would crush any human pilot. It would be much easier for an advanced aircraft to trick the radar than perform structurally impossible maneuvers. Here’s where things get really interesting: The TR-3B is allegedly powered by a circular, plasma filled accelerator ring called a “magnetic field disrupter” (MFD) that surrounds a rotatable crew compartment. This MFD supposedly generates a magnetic vortex field that disrupts the effects of gravity and reduces the mass of everything within the accelerator by 89% – making the craft extremely light and maneuverable. But for the more skeptical among us, a less exotic theory suggests the TR-3B Astra is nothing more than a highly advanced “air balloon”, explaining the slow speeds and lack of noise.

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Flying Doritos Twice in a little over a month, photos of unknown triangular aircraft have been revealed to America. The aircraft shown below, shot by photographer Jeff Templin of Wichita, also happens to match the trio of flying wings photographed flying over Amarillo Texas recently. This new photo, along with other developments, may offer up new clues as to the origins of these mysterious machines. There have been suggestions that this could this be one of the upcoming B2 evolutions. There are 2 new stealth bombers being planned and prototypes of the first one (the "2018" bomber) have already been constructed by Lockheed or Boeing. There are also rumors of somewhat smaller, unmanned prototypes of a drone with a high altitude bomber type payload bay.

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The Bird of Prey shown above, cost $67 million and is the product of Boeing’s advanced research and development division, the Phantom Works. This is an example of a classic ‘black’ program aircraft which has been built and flight tested for a number of years – and no one outside the program knew about it is said to have demonstrated a range of stealth and production technologies. It is a single seat, single engine design and with a reported maximum altitude of 6100 metres (20,000 feet). Its top speed is a relatively sedate 480 km/h (300 mph).

It is possible that the design of the AX-17 shown above is being maintained and in use in a highly secret black project. -140-

GuardBot

The Marines Are Building Robotic War Balls! The future of amphibious assault looks kind of like an explosive inner tube. It’s really a drone. Establishing a beachhead on enemy-held turf is historically one of the most dangerous jobs in warfare. But the robotic age may make it slightly less so. A research team from Stamford, Conn. has developed an amphibious drone that they are currently testing with the Marines. The GuardBot is a robot ball that swims over water at about 4 miles per hour and then rolls along the beach, at as much as a 30- degree incline and 20 miles per hour. It uses a nine-axis stabilization, “pendulum motion” propulsion system, which moves the bot forward by shifting the center of gravity back and forth and a variety of steering algorithms. It took creator Peter Muhlrad some seven years to develop, but now that it’s complete Muhlrad says it can be rapidly produced in various sizes. Company documents suggest it can be scaled down to units as small as 10 cm and as large as nine feet. The company is planning to develop a prototype that’s 6 feet in diameter. Muhlrad’s company, GuardBot Inc. has a cooperative research development agreement, or CRADA, with the Navy. A CRADAis a legal framework that allows private companies or researchers to use government facilities, research and resources to build things that are mutually beneficial to both parties. The information that the researcher discovers is protected for up to five years. Under many CRADAs the researcher does not receive money from the government but has the right to commercialize what he or she produces. The government retains a use license. Here’s the team presenting it at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia, in 2012. Watch it navigate the volleyball pit. In January 2014, they tested it at the Naval Amphibious Base in Little Creek, Va., where the GuardBot successfully deployed from and returned to a naval craft.

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They are working on new software that incorporates geographic information system data, or GIS, to allow for far greater autonomy. Just pick a spot on the map and the ball will get there. The system was designed primarily for surveillance and object inspection. It’s capable of 360 degree turns so it’s somewhat more maneuverable than other ground robots. It was able to detect explosive chemicals from about 2 inches away. And it could carry explosives rather than detection or camera equipment.

Invisibility Cloak

New technology makes troops invisible… Some scientists seem to take their cues from science fiction or fantasy novels. Physicists in Texas have developed a method to make objects "invisible" within a limited range of light waves. It's not Harry Potter's invisibility cloak just yet, but scientists say it has a lot of potential. The desire to become invisible dates back to the ancient Greeks, if not further. In mythological literature, gods and goddesses donned a headdress to disappear from sight. Like Potter's cloak, the "cap of invisibility" was imbued with magical powers. A fixture in magic, the invisibility cloak has now advanced to science. Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin have developed a thin material called a 'mantle cloak.' If an object is wrapped in it, it 'disappears,' but the effect only applies to a limited range of light waves -- specifically microwaves.

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The future is not here just yet In their experiment, the physicists covered a cylinder about a foot long and an inch or so in diameter with the material. Microwave detectors could no longer plainly 'see' it, although it was still visible to the human eye. But the same principle could be transferred to the range of perceptible light, researchers say. Doing so would then make objects invisible to the human eye. The effect only covers a very small band of electromagnetic waves at one time, and in the visible range of light, it would only work on objects much thinner than a single strand of hair. Useful in nanotechnology Scientists find this development exciting because it could prove useful in nanotechnology by letting light bypass microscopic objects that would otherwise block it. The discovery could advance the fields of specialty optics and biotechnology, according to the physicists. This is not the first time scientists have made an object 'invisible,' but previous methods have involved hulking devices and more cumbersome methods. The new cloak is made of a sheer, handy material that can be applied to many surfaces, even irregular ones, according to the report. Light and invisibility We see things because light reflects off of them and hits our eyes. Or, in this case, microwaves bounce off of them and hit a detection device. Light has properties that can be manipulated, which is how objects can be rendered invisible. It can be reflected away, for example. Illusionists such as David Copperfield can use mirrors to make an object disappear. Light also refracts -- or breaks -- when it passes through a prism or raindrops, resulting in the palette of colors we see in a rainbow. It also bends ever so slightly due to gravity, when it passes by a planet. Previous attempts at achieving invisibility have involved bending or reflecting light around the object that is meant to vanish. The mantle cloak takes a new approach. Light is a wave that can be disturbed. That's what the mantle cloak does.

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The cloak's material It is made by combining copper tape with polycarbonate, a material commonly used in DVD's and CDs. The resulting cloak has a miniscule pattern -- like a finely checkered shirt -- that neutralizes the waves bouncing off of it. For it to work, the material's pattern has to be roughly the size of the wavelength of light to be canceled out. That gives it a tightly limited range of waves it will work on. It has no effect on a vast array of electromagnetic waves, which come in a myriad of sizes. The light waves we can see make up only a thin sliver of them. Although the scientists say the principle behind the cloak could currently only be used to hide objects from the human eye that are so tiny it can't see them anyhow, they say it could "pave the way" to the development of advanced "camouflaging and invisibility." Microwaves, which the mantle cloak currently does neutralize, are used in radar detectors. And I’m sure the aliens flying around in their UFOs have had this technology for a long time. It’s possible that that here are so many more of them in our skies (and even our backyard!) that we just can’t see because they don’t want us too!

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http://www.blue-planet-145- -project.com/