The link is:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31511398/ns/us_news-military/
“The low-key launch of the new military unit reflects the Pentagon’s fear that the military might be seen as taking control over the nation’s computer networks.”
“Creation of the command, said Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn at a recent meeting of cyber experts, ‘will not represent the militarization of cyberspace.’”
And where is our lifeboat?
Here’s a story that should concern anyone wanting to believe that the military has a complete and accurate inventory of chemical and biological warfare materials.
“An inventory of deadly germs and toxins at an Army biodefense lab in Frederick found more than 9,200 vials of material that was unaccounted for in laboratory records, Fort Detrick officials said Wednesday. The 13 percent overage mainly reflects stocks left behind in freezers by researchers who retired or left Fort Detrick since the biological warfare defense program was established there in 1943, said Col. Mark Kortepeter, deputy commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.”
The rest of the story appears here:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=7863828
Given that “The material was in tiny, 1mm vials that could easily be overlooked,” and included serum from Korean hemorrhagic fever patients, the lack of adequate inventory controls to this point creates the impression that any number of these vials could be outside their lab. Of course, they assure us they have it all under control. Which will be cold comfort if we don’t have a lifeboat.
Today’s featured Invention Award winner really requires no justification–it’s an unmanned, armed tank faster than anything the US Army has. Behold, the Ripsaw.
Cue up the Ripsaw’s greatest hits on YouTube, and you can watch the unmanned tank tear across muddy fields at 60 mph, jump 50 feet, and crush birch trees. But right now, as its remote driver inches it back and forth for a photo shoot, it’s like watching Babe Ruth forced to bunt with the bases loaded. The Ripsaw, lurching and belching black puffs of smoke, somehow seems restless.
Like their creation, identical twins Geoff and Mike Howe, 34, don’t like to sit still for long. At age seven, they built a log cabin. Ten years later, they converted a school bus into a drivable, transforming stage for their heavy-metal band, Two Much Trouble. In 2000 they couldn’t agree on their next project: Geoff favored a jet-turbine-powered off-road truck; Mike, the world’s fastest tracked vehicle. “That weekend, Mike calls me down to his garage,” Geoff says. “He’s already got the suspension built for the Ripsaw. So we went with that.”
Every engineer they consulted said they couldn’t best the 42mph top speed of an M1A Abrams, the most powerful tank in the world. Other tanks are built to protect the people inside, with frames made of heavy armored-steel plates. Designed for rugged unmanned missions, the Ripsaw just needed to go fast, so the brothers started trimming weight. First they built a frame of welded steel tubes, like the ones used by Nascar, that provides 50 percent more strength at half the weight.
When you reinvent the tank, finding ready-made parts is no easy task, and a tread light enough to spin at 60 mph and strong enough to hold together at that speed didn’t exist. So the Howes hand-shaped steel cleats and redesigned the mechanism for connecting them in a track. (Because the patent for the mechanism, one of eight on Ripsaw components, is still pending, they will reveal only that they didn’t use the typical pin-and-bushing system of connecting treads.) The two-pound cleats weigh about 90 percent less than similarly scaled tank cleats. With the combined weight savings, the Ripsaw’s 650-horsepower V8 engine cranks out nine times as much horsepower per pound as an M1A Abrams.
While working their day jobs — Mike as a financial adviser, Geoff as a foreman at a utilities plant — the self-taught engineers hauled the Ripsaw prototype from their workshop in Maine to the 2005 Washington Auto Show, where they showed it to army officials interested in developing weaponized unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). That led to a demonstration for Maine Senator Susan Collins, who helped the Howes secure $1.25 million from the Department of Defense.The brothers founded Howe and Howe Technologies in 2006 and set to work upgrading various Ripsaw systems, including a differential drive train that automatically doles out the right amount of power to each track for turns. The following year they handed it over to the Army’s Armament Research Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), which paired it with a remote-control M240 machine gun and put the entire system through months of strenuous tests. “What really set it apart from other UGVs was its speed,” says Bhavanjot Singh, the ARDEC project manager overseeing the Ripsaw’s development. Other UGVs top out at around 20 mph, but the Ripsaw can keep up with a pack of Humvees.
Back on the field, the tank has been readied for the photo. The program manager for Howe and Howe Technologies, Will McMaster, who is sitting at the Ripsaw’s controls around the corner and roughly a football field away, drives it straight over a three-foot-tall concrete wall. The brothers think that when the $760,000 Ripsaw is ready for mass production this summer, feats like this will give them a lead over other companies vying for a military UGV contract. “Every other UGV is small and uses [artificial intelligence] to avoid obstacles,” Mike says. “The Ripsaw doesn’t have to avoid obstacles; it drives over them.“
P.W. Singer
Just as the computer and ARPAnet evolved into the PC and Internet, robots are poised to integrate into everyday life in ways we can’t even imagine, thanks in large part to research funded by the U.S. military.
Many people are excited about the military’s newfound interest and funding of robotics, but few are considering its ramifications on war in general.
P.W. Singer, senior fellow and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, went behind the scenes of the robotics world to write “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.”
Singer took time from his book tour to talk with CNET about the start of a revolution tech insiders predicted, but so many others missed.
Q: Your book is purposely not the typical think tank book. It’s filled with just as many humorous anecdotes about people’s personal lives and pop culture as it is with statistics, technology, and history. You say you did this because robotic development has been greatly influenced by the human imagination?
Singer: Look, to write on robots in my field is a risky thing. Robots were seen as this thing of science fiction even though they’re not. So I decided to double down, you know? If I was going to risk it in one way, why not in another way? It’s my own insurgency on the boring, staid way people talk about this incredibly important thing, which is war. Most of the books on war and its dynamics–to be blunt–are, oddly enough, boring. And it means the public doesn’t actually have an understanding of the dynamics as they should.
It seems like we’re just at the beginning here. You quote Bill Gates comparing robots now to what computers were in the eighties.
Singer: Yes, the military is a primary buyer right now and it’s using them (robots) for a limited set of applications. And yes, in each area we prove they can be utilized you’ll see a massive expansion. That’s all correct, but then I think it’s even beyond what he was saying. No one sitting back with a computer in 1980 said, “Oh, yes, these things are going to have a ripple effect on our society and politics such that there’s going to be a political debate about privacy in an online world, and mothers in Peoria are going to be concerned about child predators on this thing called Facebook.” It’ll be the same way with the impact on war and in robotics; a ripple effect in areas we’re not even aware of yet.
Right now, rudimentary as they are, we have autonomous and remote-controlled robots while most of the people we’re fighting don’t. What’s that doing to our image?
Singer: The leading newspaper editor in Lebanon described–and he’s actually describing this as there is a drone above him at the time–that these things show you’re afraid, you’re not man enough to fight us face-to-face, it shows your cowardice, all we have to do to defeat you is just kill a few of your soldiers.
It’s playing like cowardice?
Singer: Yeah, it’s like every revolution. You know, when gunpowder is first used people think that’s cowardly. Then they figure it out and it has all sorts of other ripple effects.
What’s war going to look like once robot warriors become autonomous and ubiquitous for both sides?
Singer: I think if we’re looking at the realm of science fiction, less so “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” and more so the world of “Blade Runner” where it’s this mix between incredible technologies, but also the dirt and grime of poverty in the city. I guess this shows where I come down on these issues. The future of war is more and more machines, but it’s still also insurgencies, terrorism, you name it.
What seems most likely in this scenario–at least in the near term–is this continuation of teams of robots and humans working together, each doing what they’re good at…Maybe the human as the quarterback and the robots as the players with the humans calling out plays, making decisions, and the robots carrying them out. However, just like on a football field, things change. The wide receivers can alter the play, and that seems to be where we’re headed.
How will robot warfare change our international laws of war? If an autonomous robot mistakenly takes out 20 little girls playing soccer in the street and people are outraged, is the programmer going to get the blame? The manufacturer? The commander who sent in the robot fleet?
Singer: That’s the essence of the problem of trying to apply a set of laws that are so old they qualify for Medicare to these kind of 21st-century dilemmas that come with this 21st-century technology. It’s also the kind of question that you might have once only asked at Comic-Con and now it’s a very real live question at the Pentagon.
I went around trying to get the answer to this sort of question meeting with people not only in the military but also in the International Committee of the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch. We’re at a loss as to how to answer that question right now. The robotics companies are only thinking in terms of product liability…and international law is simply overwhelmed or basically ignorant of this technology. There’s a great scene in the book where two senior leaders within Human Rights Watch get in an argument in front of me of which laws might be most useful in such a situation.
Is this where they bring up Star Trek?
Singer: Yeah, one’s bringing up the Geneva Conventions and the other one’s pointing to the Star Trek Prime Directive.
You say in your book that except for a few refusenicks, most scientists are definitely not subscribing to Isaac Asimov’s laws. What then generally are the ethics of these roboticists?
Singer: The people who are building these systems are excited by the possibilities of the technology. But the field of robotics, it’s a very young field. It’s not like medicine that has an ethical code. It’s not done what the field of genetics has, where it’s begun to wrestle with the ethics of what they’re working on and the ripple effects it has on the society. That’s not happening in the robotics field, except in isolated instances.
What military robotic tech is likely to migrate over to local law enforcement or the consumer world?
Singer: I think we’re already starting to see some of the early stages of that…I think this is the other part that Gates was saying: we get to the point where we stop calling them computers. You know, I have a computer in my pocket right now. It’s a cell phone. I just don’t call it a computer. The new Lexus parallel-parks itself. Do we call it a robot car? No, but it’s kind of doing something robotic.
You know, I’m the guy coming out of the world of political science, so it opens up these fun debates. Take the question of ethics and robots. How about me? Is it my second amendment right to have a gun-armed robot? I mean, I’m not hiring my own gun robots, but Homeland Security is already flying drones, and police departments are already purchasing them.
Explain how robotic warfare is “open source” warfare.
Singer: It’s much like what’s happened in the software industry going open source, the idea that this technology is not something that requires a massive industrial structure to build. Much like open source software, not only can almost anyone access it, but also anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit, and in this case of very wicked entrepreneurial spirit, can improve upon it. All sorts of actors, not just high-end military, can access high-end military technologies…Hezbollah is not a state. However, Hezbollah flew four drones at Israel. Take this down to the individual level and I think one of the darkest quotes comes from the DARPA scientist who said, and I quote, “For $50,000 I could shut down Manhattan.” The potential of an al-Qaeda 2.0 is made far more lethal with these technologies, but also the next generation of a Timothy McVeigh or Unabomber is multiplying their capability with these technologies.
The U.S. military said in a statement this week that it plans to pull 12,000 troops out of Iraq by the fall. Do you think robots will have a hand in helping to get to that number?
Singer: Most definitely.
How?
Singer: The utilization of the Predator operations is allowing us to accomplish certain goals there without troops on the grounds.
Is this going to lead to more of what you call the cubicle warriors or the armchair warriors? They’re in the U.S. operating on this end, and then going to their kid’s PTA meeting at the end of the day?
Singer: Oh, most definitely. Look, the Air Force this year is putting out more unmanned pilots that manned pilots.
Explain how soldiers now come ready-trained because of our video games.
Singer: The military is very smartly free-riding off of the video game industry, off the designs in terms of the human interface, using the Xbox controllers, PlayStation controllers. The Microsofts and Sonys of the world have spent millions designing the system that fits perfectly in your hand. Why not use it? They’re also free-riding off this entire generation that’s come in already trained in the use of these systems.
There’s another aspect though, which is the mentality people bring to bear when using these systems. It really struck me when one of the people involved in Predator operations described what it was like to take out an enemy from afar, what it was like to kill. He said, “It’s like a video game.” That’s a very odd reference, but also a telling reference for this experience of killing and how it’s changing in our generation.
It’s making them more removed from the morality of it?
Singer: It’s the fundamental difference between the bomber pilots of WWII and even the bomber pilots of today. It’s disconnection from risk on both a physical and psychological plain.
When my grandfather went to war in the Pacific, he went to a place where there was such danger he might not ever come home again. You compare that to the drone pilot experience. Not only what it’s like to kill, but the whole experience of going to war is getting up, getting into their Toyota Corolla, going in to work, killing enemy combatants from afar, getting in their car, and driving home. So 20 minutes after being at war, they’re back at home and talking to their kid about their homework at the dinner table. So this whole meaning of the term “going to war” that’s held true for 5,000 years is changing.
What do you think is the most dangerous military robot out there now?
Singer: It all hinges on the definition of the term dangerous. The system that’s been most incredibly lethal in terms of consequences on the battlefield so far if you ask military commanders is the Predator. They describe it as the most useful system, manned or unmanned, in our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Eleven out of the twenty al-Qaeda leaders we’ve gotten, we’ve gotten via a drone strike. Now, dangerous can have other meanings. The work on evolutionary software scares the shit out of me.
You’re saying we’re gonna get to a HAL situation?
Singer: Maybe it’s just cause I’ve grown up on a diet of all that sci-fi, but the evolutionary software stuff does spook me out a little bit. Oh, and robots that can replicate themselves. We’re not there yet, but that’s another like “whoa!”
People have finally got the attention of companies and governments to look ahead to 2020, 2040, 2050 in terms of the environment and green technology. But as you said in your book, that’s not happening with robotics issues. Why do you think that is?
Singer: When it comes to the issue of war, we’re exceptionally uncomfortable looking forward, mainly because so many people have gotten it so wrong. People in policymaker positions, policy adviser positions, and the people making the decisions are woefully ignorant in what’s happening in technology not only five years from now, not only now, but where we were five years ago. You have people describing robotics as “mere science fiction” when we’re talking about having already 12,000 (robots) on the ground, 7,000 in the air. During this book tour, I was in this meeting with a very senior Pentagon adviser, top of the field, very big name. He said, “Yeah this technology stuff is so amazing. I bet one day we’ll have this technology where like one day the Internet will be able to look like a video game, and it will be three-dimensional, I’ll bet.”
(laughing) And meanwhile, your wife’s at Linden Labs.
Singer: (laughing) Yeah, it’s Second Life. And that’s not anything new.
At least five years old, yeah.
Singer: And you don’t have to be a technology person to be aware of it. I mean, it’s been covered by CNN. It appeared on “The Office” and “CSI.” You just have to be aware of pop culture to know. And so it was this thing that he was describing as it might happen one day, and it happened five years ago. Then the people that do work on the technology and are aware of it, they tend to either be: head-in-the-sand in terms of “I’m just working on my thing, I don’t care about the effects of it”; or “I’m optimistic. Oh these systems are great. They’re only gonna work out for the best.” They forget that this is a real world. They’re kind of like the atomic scientists.
Obviously the hope is that robots will do all the dirty work of warfare. But warfare is inherently messy, unpredictable, and often worse than expectations. How would a roboticized war be any different in that respect?
Singer: In no way. That’s the fundamental argument of the book. While we may have Moore’s Law in place, we still haven’t gotten rid of Murphy’s Law. So we have a technology that is giving us incredible capabilities that we couldn’t even have imagined a few years ago, let alone had in place. But the fog of war is not being lifted as Rumsfeld once claimed absurdly.
You may be getting new technological capabilities, but you are also creating new human dilemmas. And it’s those dilemmas that are really the revolutionary aspect of this. What are the laws that surround this and how do you insure accountability in this setting? At what point do we have to become concerned about our weapons becoming a threat to ourselves? This future of war is again a mix of more and more machines being used to fight, but the wars themselves are still about our human realities. They’re still driven by our human failings, and the ripple effects are still because of our human politics, our human laws. And it’s the cross between the two that we have to understand.
Jetfuel powerpack, armour… shoulder turret?
Posted in Science, 27th February 2009 12:18 GMT
Free whitepaper – Data center projects: standardized process
US weaponry globocorp Lockheed is pleased to announce the unveiling of its newly-acquired powered exoskeleton intended to confer superhuman strength and endurance upon US soldiers.
Needless to say, corporate promo vid of the Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC™) is available:
The exoskeleton is based on a design from Berkeley Bionics of California, but Lockheed say they have brought significant pimpage to the basic HULC. The enhanced version is now on show at the Association of the United States’ Army Winter Symposium in Florida.
“With our enhancements to the HULC system, Soldiers will be able to carry loads up to 200 pounds with minimal effort,” according to Lockheed’s Rich Russell.
From the vid, the HULC certainly seems a step forward on Raytheon’s rival XOS mechwarrior suit, which at last report still trails an inconvenient power cable to the nearest wall socket.
Not so the HULC; four pounds of lithium polymer batteries will run the exoskeleton for an hour walking at 3mph, according to Lockheed. Speed marching at up to 7mph reduces this somewhat; a battery-draining “burst” at 10mph is the maximum speed.
The user can hump 200lb with relative ease while marching in a HULC, however, well in excess of even the heaviest combat loads normally carried by modern infantry. There’d be scope to carry a few spare batteries. Even if the machine runs out of juice, Lockheed claims that its reinforcement and shock absorption still helps with load carrying rather than hindering.
There are various optional extras, too. The HULC can be fitted with armour plating, heating or cooling systems, sensors and “other custom attachments”. We particularly liked that last one: our personal request would be a powered gun or missile mount of some kind above the shoulder, linked to a helmet or monocle laser sight.
One does note that remote-controlled gun mounts weighing as little as 55lb are available, able to handle various kinds of normally tripod- or bipod-mounted heavy weapons.
You’d need more power, but that’s on offer. According to the Lockheed spec sheet (pdf) there’s an extended-endurance HULC fitted with a “silent” generator running on JP8 jet fuel. A tankful will run this suit for three days, marching eight hours per day — though presumably at the cost of some payload.
Doubtless other power options could be developed: Lockheed says the HULC needs 250 watts on average.
It’s important to note that the HULC is basically a legs and body system only: there’s no enhancement to the user’s arms, though an over-shoulder frame can be fitted allowing a wearer to hoist heavy objects such as artilery shells with the aid of a lifting strop.
The HULC may not be quite ready for prime time yet. But the military exoskeleton as a concept does seem to be getting to the stage of usefulness, at least in niche situations for specific jobs.
The BigDog petrol packmule, an alternative strategy for helping footsoldiers carry their increasingly heavy loads, may now have a serious rival. ®
NewScientist — March 10, 2009, by A. C. Grayling
IN THIS age of super-rapid technological advance, we do well to obey the Boy Scout injunction: “Be prepared”. That requires nimbleness of mind, given that the ever accelerating power of computers is being applied across such a wide range of applications, making it hard to keep track of everything that is happening. The danger is that we only wake up to the need for forethought when in the midst of a storm created by innovations that have already overtaken us.
We are on the brink, and perhaps to some degree already over the edge, in one hugely important area: robotics. Robot sentries patrol the borders of South Korea and Israel. Remote-controlled aircraft mount missile attacks on enemy positions. Other military robots are already in service, and not just for defusing bombs or detecting landmines: a coming generation of autonomous combat robots capable of deep penetration into enemy territory raises questions about whether they will be able to discriminate between soldiers and innocent civilians. Police forces are looking to acquire miniature Taser-firing robot helicopters. In South Korea and Japan the development of robots for feeding and bathing the elderly and children is already advanced. Even in a robot-backward country like the UK, some vacuum cleaners sense their autonomous way around furniture. A driverless car has already negotiated its way through Los Angeles traffic.
In the next decades, completely autonomous robots might be involved in many military, policing, transport and even caring roles. What if they malfunction? What if a programming glitch makes them kill, electrocute, demolish, drown and explode, or fail at the crucial moment? Whose insurance will pay for damage to furniture, other traffic or the baby, when things go wrong? The software company, the manufacturer, the owner?
Most thinking about the implications of robotics tends to take sci-fi forms: robots enslave humankind, or beautifully sculpted humanoid machines have sex with their owners and then post-coitally tidy the room and make coffee. But the real concern lies in the areas to which the money already flows: the military and the police.
A confused controversy arose in early 2008 over the deployment in Iraq of three SWORDS armed robotic vehicles carrying M249 machine guns. The manufacturer of these vehicles said the robots were never used in combat and that they were involved in no “uncommanded or unexpected movements”. Rumours nevertheless abounded about the reason why funding for the SWORDS programme abruptly stopped. This case prompts one to prick up one’s ears.
Media stories about Predator drones mounting missile attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan are now commonplace, and there are at least another dozen military robot projects in development. What are the rules governing their deployment? How reliable are they? One sees their advantages: they keep friendly troops out of harm’s way, and can often fight more effectively than human combatants. But what are the limits, especially when these machines become autonomous?
The civil liberties implications of robot devices capable of surveillance involving listening and photographing, conducting searches, entering premises through chimneys or pipes, and overpowering suspects are obvious. Such devices are already on the way. Even more frighteningly obvious is the threat posed by military or police-type robots in the hands of criminals and terrorists.
There needs to be a considered debate about the rules and requirements governing all forms of robot devices, not a panic reaction when matters have gone too far. That is how bad law is made — and on this issue time is running out.
A. C. Grayling is a philosopher at Birkbeck, University of London
Posted in defense, education, ethics, events, military, policy, space | 1 Comment on The Disclosure Project May 9th 2001 National Press Club Conference and DEAFENING SILENCE: Media Response to the May 9th Event and its Implications Regarding the Truth of Disclosure by Jonathan Kolber
DEAFENING SILENCE: Media Response to the May 9th Event
and its Implications Regarding the Truth of Disclosure
by Jonathan Kolber
http://www.disclosureproject.org/May9response.htm
My intent is to establish that the media’s curiously limited coverage of the May 9, 2001 National Press Club briefing is highly significant.
At that event, nearly two dozen witnesses stepped forward and offered their testimony as to personal knowledge of ET’s and ET-related technologies. These witnesses claimed top secret clearances and military and civilian accomplishments of the highest order. Some brandished uncensored secret documents. The world’s major media were in attendance, yet few reported what they saw, most neglecting to even make skeptical mention.
How can this be? Major legal trials are decided based on weaker testimony than was provided that day. Prison sentences are meted out on less. The initial Watergate evidence was less, and the implications of this make Watergate insignificant by comparison. Yet the silence is deafening.
Three Possibilities:
If true, the witness testimony literally ushers in the basis for a whole new world of peace and prosperity for all. Validating the truth of Disclosure is probably the most pressing question of our times. The implications for the human future are so overwhelming that virtually everything else becomes secondary. However, the mass media have not performed validation. No investigative stories seeking to prove or disprove the witness testimony have appeared.
This cannot be due to lack of material; in the remainder of this article I will perform validation based upon material handed to the world’s media on May 9th.
In my view, only three possibilities exist: the witnesses were all lying, they were all delusional, or they were documenting the greatest cover-up in history. The reason is that if any one witness were neither lying nor delusional, then the truth of Disclosure is established. Let’s examine each possibility in turn.
If the witnesses were lying, a reasonable observer would ask, “where is the payoff?” What is the possible benefit to a liar pleading for the chance to testify before Congress under oath? The most likely payoff would be a trip to jail. These witnesses have not openly requested any financial compensation, speaking engagements or the like, and the Disclosure Project’s operation cannot support a payoff to dozens of persons. A cursory evaluation of its “products” coupled with a visit to its Charlottesville offices will establish this. Further, the parent organization, CSETI, is an IRS 501C3 nonprofit organization, and its lack of financial resources is a matter of public record. So the notion that the witnesses were doing so for material benefit is unsupported by facts at hand.
To my knowledge, large numbers of persons do not collude to lie without some compelling expected benefit. Other than money, the only such reason I can conceive in this case would be ideology. I wonder what radical extremist “ideology” could plausibly unite such a diverse group of senior corporate and military witnesses, nearly all of whom have previously displayed consistent loyalty to the United States in word and deed? I find none, and I therefore dismiss lying as implausible.
Further, the witnesses claimed impressive credentials. Among them were a Brigadier General, an Admiral, men who previously had their finger on the nuclear launch trigger, air traffic controllers, Vice Presidents of major American corporations—persons who either routinely have had our lives in their hands or made decisions affecting everyone. To my knowledge, in the half-year since May 9th, not a single claimed credential has been challenged in a public forum. Were they lying en masse, such an exposure would be a nice feather in the cap of some reporter. However, it hasn’t happened.
If all the witnesses were delusional, then a reasonable observer would presume that such “mass psychosis” did not suddenly manifest. That is, a number of witnesses would have shown psychotic tendencies in the past, in some cases probably including hospitalization. To my knowledge, this has not been alleged.
If they were documenting the greatest cover-up in history, and especially as briefing books that enumerated details of specific cases were handed out on May 9th to the dozens of reporters present, coverage should have dominated the media ever since, with a national outcry for hearings. This did not happen either.
Implications:
What do the above facts and inferences imply about the state of affairs in the media and the credibility of the witness testimony? In my view, they imply a lot.
If the witnesses were neither lying nor delusional, then the deafening media silence following May 9th implies an intentional process of failure to explore and reveal the truth. Said less politely, it implies censorship. (If I am right, this is itself an explosive statement, worthy of significant media attention—which it will not receive.) The only stories comparable in significance to May 9th would be World War III, a plague decimating millions, or the like. Yet between May 9th and September 11th, the news media was saturated with stories that are comparatively trivial.
Briefing documents were provided to reporters present. These books provided much of due diligence necessary for those reporters to explore the truth. However, neither Watergate-type coverage nor exposure of witness fraud has followed.
One of the witnesses reported how he became aware of 43 persons on the payrolls of major media organs while in fact working for the US government. Their job was to intercept ET-related stories and squelch, spin or ridicule. If we accept his testimony as factual, it provides a plausible explanation for the deafening silence following May 9th.
There is a bright spot in this situation. Some of the media did provide coverage, if only for a few days. This suggests that those who control media reporting do not have a monolithic power; they can be circumvented. The event did run on the internet and was seen by 250,000 viewers, despite “sophisticated electronic jamming” during the first hour (words attributed to the broadcast provider, not the Disclosure Project). Indeed, it continues to be fully documented at the Project’s web site.
Conclusions:
Since an expose of witness deceit or mass psychosis would itself have been a good, career-building story for some reporter, but no such story has appeared, I conclude that these witnesses are who they claim to be.
If these witnesses are who they claim to be, then they presented testimony they believe truthful. Yet no factual detail of any of that testimony has since been disputed in the media. Half a year is enough time to do the research. I believe the testimony is true as presented.
If the data is true as presented and the media are essentially ignoring what is indisputably the greatest story of our era, then the media are not performing the job they claim to do. Either they are being suppressed/censored, or they do not believe the public would find this subject interesting.
The tabloids continuously run stories on ET-related subjects, and polls show high public interest in the subject, so lack of interest value cannot be the explanation. I conclude that there is active suppression. This is corroborated by the witness claim of 43 intelligence operatives on major media payrolls.
Despite active suppression, enough coverage of the May 9th event happened in major publications and broadcast media to prove that the suppression can be thwarted. An event of significant enough impact and orchestration can break through the censorship. Millions of persons previously unaware of or dubious about ET-related technologies and their significance for ending our dependence on Arab oil have since become aware.
We live in a controlled society, one in which the control is secretive yet masquerades as openness. Yet, as proven May 9th, this control can be overcome by the concerted efforts of determined groups of persons. We must seek such opportunities again.
How About You?
I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road at the recommendation of my cousin Marie-Eve. The setting is a post-apocalyptic world and the main protagonists — a father and son — basically spend all their time looking for food and shelter, and try to avoid being robbed or killed by other starving survivors.
It very much makes me not want to live in such a world. Everybody would probably agree. Yet few people actually do much to reduce the chances of of such a scenario happening. In fact, it’s worse than that; few people even seriously entertain the possibility that such a scenario could happen.
People don’t think about such things because they are unpleasant and they don’t feel they can do anything about them, but if more people actually did think about them, we could do something. We might never be completely safe, but we could significantly improve our odds over the status quo.
Danger From Two Directions: Ourselves and Nature.
Human technology is becoming more powerful all the time. We already face grave danger from nuclear weapons, and soon molecular manufacturing technologies and artificial general intelligence could pose new existential threats. We are also faced with slower, but serious, threats on the environmental side: Global warming, ocean acidification, deforestation/desertification, ecosystem collapse, etc.
Continue reading “I Don’t Want To Live in a Post-Apocalyptic World” | >
Announcing $35M in new funding last Friday Twitter was one of the few bright spots in a collapsing economy. The micro-blogging service has been attracting increasing attention within the mainstream, as the political classes adopt the service – most notably, congressman Pete Hokestra (R-Mich.) who produced a stream of tweets detailing his location as he traveled from Andrew’s Air Force base to Baghdad and back. Besides the disbelieving head shaking this particular series of political tweets attracted, it does highlight the amorphous nature of Twitter — it isn’t clear what it really is.
Certainly, the revenue model remains unclear, as does its true utility or even what the unintended consequences of using the service may be. In a National Security sense Twitter emerged as a powerful networked communications platform during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when a stream of tweets marked #Mumbai (# being the global tagging system Twitter employs) gave a seemingly real-time commentary on events as they unfolded in Mumbai. Similarly, Twitter has been used to communicate the message and activity surrounding the riots in Greece using the #Griot tag. These are examples of the network effect working with a rapid communications platform and developing a powerful narrative from many different observation points. The style is anarchic but increasingly compelling.
Therefore, one argument regarding the long-term use of Twitter, in the National Security space at least, is that Twitter in conjunction with other tools, continues the trend of making ordinary citizens active producers of potentially actionable intelligence. This equally applies to Microsoft Photosynth and the meshing of user created digital platforms is a future trend, which doesn’t seem too far away. One of Twitter’s more recent high profile moments was the picture of the USAirways plane in the Hudson taken by an ordinary citizen who happened to be on a ferry, which went to the scene. This picture quickly and succinctly explained the situation to any emergency service in the area. This same principal can clearly be globally extended in terms of data and geographic reach. In fact it is the increasing penetration of mobile devices, which would seem to offer a bright future for the Twitter platform.
An area, which the Twitter platform excels in are the tools that can be used to manipulate the information within Twitter. This is where the open feel of the service suggests it somehow has more potential than the well designed social networking platforms such as Facebook. Information is messy and Twitter fits around this principle.
In order to examine Twitter we established a Twitter feed at www.twitter/In_Terrain. The idea behind this was to use the RSS feed Twitter tool TwitterFeed to push content of interest to a Twitter account and then examine ways in which this could be consumed. The results so far have been impressive. Twitterrific available for Apple products displays the security information feed in a very useful way. Tweetr for windows does a similar thing for Microsoft based systems and of course TwitterBerry enables access from a Blackberry. If users join Twitter they can chose to ‘follow’ the In_Terrain feed and receive the same information and potentially reply to specific tweets they find interesting – thus creating the ‘conversation’ Twitter, desires. Similarly, if other security and intelligence focused twitter feeds become apparent the In_Terrain twitter feed can ‘follow’ those conversations – thus beginning the network effect.
Clearly, this is still experimental and there are other avenues to explore with regard to GPS Twitter applications. The aim with the In_Terrain Twitter account is to generate tweets from mainstream information sources as well as the ‘lower frequencies’. Starting a National Security focused tweet seems like an interesting idea right now – so I welcome Blog readers to ‘join the conversation’ – and please make suggestions for improvements or content additions. Maybe it will even become useful.
The year 2008 saw the hype fall away from virtual worlds but in contrast social networks are going from strength to strength and are being increasingly used as protest vehicles around the world. While the utility of Facebook and Twitter (using the #griot descriptor to report on the riots in Greece) have been widely reported upon some of the more interesting and interactive information can still be found in Second Life, which bodes well for the future of virtual worlds. Full report and links relating to this phenomena over at the MetaSecurity blog. Whether it be web-forums, Facebook or Second Life, virtual communities will continue to be an increasingly important part of the National Security picture in 2009.
