UK 2017: under surveillance

IT is a chilling, dystopian account of what Britain will look like 10 years from now: a world in which Fortress Britain uses fleets of tiny spy-planes to watch its citizens, of Minority Report-style pre-emptive justice, of an underclass trapped in sink-estate ghettos under constant state surveillance, of worker drones forced to take on the lifestyle and values of the mega-corporation they work for, and of the super-rich hiding out in gated communities constantly monitored by cameras and private security guards.

Source: Sunday Herald.

New World Economics: Simulations Controlling Reality in 2007

As of December 2006, the richest 2% of Earth humans owned more than half of the planet’s wealth. I suspect the numbers on that are a bit slippery, but the fact it’s anywhere close to that level of inequality is still disturbing. The feedback OODA loop of John Boyd has created a strange situation that humans have never faced before. When you can capture data on huge complex systems — like economies, crowds, nations, weather systems — and use that data to guide future decisions, that’s fairly normal government. What’s unprecedented is the speed of the feedback loop, when technocrats can accurately assess the results of their actions, in real time.

This is not particularly science fiction. I’ve disussed aspects of the surveillance state before, but I am far from an expert and the field is vast and mostly secretive. I would point you towarads recent articles at Global Research and Cryptogon for more knowledgeable takes on the surveillance enclosure. The peeks we do get are signifigant, such as the Sentient World Simulator that DARPA and Simulex have been working on, which is a fully-functional model of planet Earth, all it’s nations, and their people. The system is based off an earlier technology called Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS), which markets this super-computer power to the corporate world.

Source: Skilluminati Research.

Study: US preparing ‘massive’ military attack against Iran

The United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch without warning a massive assault on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, as well as government buildings and infrastructure, using long-range bombers and missiles, according to a new analysis.

Source: RAWStory.

Why Russia Is Flexing Its Muscles

Moscow’s latest saber-rattling — flying long-range bomber patrols toward the U.S. and Britain, launching planes from its sole aircraft carrier, redeploying the Russian fleet to the Mediterranean, engaging in war games with China and several central Asian nations — doesn’t mean the Cold War has returned. What it does signal is Russia’s willingness, emboldened by the oil wealth once again flowing to the government, to begin reasserting its historic role as a strategic counterweight to Washington. And if it can’t quite muster the heft to do that alone, Moscow is increasingly allying with other nations to challenge America’s global hegemony.

Source: Time.

DARPA Hearts HAARP; Tinfoil Hats Melt

Depending on who you talk to, HAARP  — the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program — is either an ionosphere-boiling superweapon, a giant mind control facility, a pork project par excellence, or some kind of defense against nukes in space.  But no matter what the project does, one thing is clear: DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D arm, absolutely loves it.

Source: Wired.

Pentagon to implant microchips in soldiers’ brains

The Department of Defense is planning to implant microchips in soldiers’ brains for monitoring their health information, and has already awarded a $1.6 million contract to the Center for Bioelectronics, Biosensors and Biochips (C3B) at Clemson University for the development of an implantable “biochip”.

Source: Press Esc.

Chinese nuclear sub shows up on Google Earth

Increasingly, tools readily available on the Internet enable independent specialists or even members of the general public to do intelligence work that used to be the monopoly of agencies like the CIA, KGB, or MI6. Playing the role of an armchair James Bond, Hans K. Kristensen, a nuclear weapons specialist at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in Washington, D.C., recently drew attention to images on Google Earth of Chinese sites. Kristensen believes that the pictures shed light on China’s deployment of its second-generation of nuclear weapons systems: one appears to be a new ballistic missile submarine [see above image]; others may capture the replacement of liquid-fueled rockets with solid-fuel rockets at sites in north-central China, within range of ICBM fields in southern Russia.

Source: IEEE Spectrum. An excellent example of how open source intelligence outsmart military intelligence.

See also: Nuclear terrorism: the new day after from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. From the article:

Finally, there is the question of whether the U.S. government would behave with rational restraint. This, of course, assumes that there is a government. A terrorist nuclear attack on Washington could easily kill the president, vice president, much of Congress and the Supreme Court. But in a July 12 Washington Post op-ed, Norman Ornstein revealed that the federal government has refused to make contingency plans for its own nuclear decapitation, which means that U.S. nuclear weapons could be in the hands of small, enraged launch control teams with no clear line of authority above them. Assuming that the federal government was still there, however, we can only imagine (using the reaction to the loss of a mere two buildings on 9/11 as a metric of comparison) the public rage at the loss of a city and the intense, perhaps irresistible, pressure on the president to make someone, somewhere pay for this atrocity.

Originally posted on the Lifeboat blog.

Current nuclear threat worse than during Cold War

WASHINGTON, July 19 (RIA Novosti) - The risks of an accidental nuclear war have increased since the Cold War as Russia’s early warning capability has deteriorated, a former U.S. defense official said.William J. Perry, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-Director of the Preventive Defense Project at Stanford University, said in a congressional testimony Wednesday that “the danger of nuclear war occurring by accident” still existed.”Both American and Russian missiles remain in a launch-on-warning mode,” Perry, who served as U.S. defense secretary in 1994-97, said. “And the inherent danger of this status is aggravated by the fact that the Russian warning system has deteriorated since the ending of the Cold War.”Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has heavily depended on its radars located abroad, particularly the Daryal facility in Azerbaijan and two Dnepr stations in Ukraine, near Sebastopol and Mukachevo.

Some reports said the outdated radar facilities that Moscow is renting on the territories of former Soviet republics were in poor condition, and that “holes” had appeared in Russia’s early-warning missile threat coverage.

In the same testimony, Perry blasted the Bush administration for concentrating its efforts on building defenses to protect the U.S. from a potential ballistic missile threat, while downplaying the danger of nuclear terrorism.

“The centerpiece of our government’s strategy for dealing with a nuclear attack is the National Missile Defense system now being installed in Alaska,” he said.

“But the greatest danger today is that a terror group will detonate a nuclear bomb in one of our cities,” the expert said.

“Terrorists would not use a ballistic missile to deliver their bomb, they would use a truck or a freighter,” Perry said, adding that a missile shield alone would not reduce the nuclear threat to the country.

Colonel General Valter Kraskovsky, a former commander of the Soviet Union ballistic missile defense, dismissed Perry’s statement as an element of the information war the U.S. is waging against Russia.

“We should have expected such statements. The U.S. will continue pressing this issue because its main goal is to present Russia as a country owning powerful retaliatory weapons which it is incapable of controlling. They will be striving to disarm us on any possible pretext - for instance that we cannot oversee everything, that we can make a mess of things, or accidentally deliver strikes, and so on,” Kraskovsky said.

He said the Russian warning system properly monitored near-space, but that the situation could change if intergovernmental agreements on Russia using the two radar stations in Ukraine were revoked.

“If the stations stop operating in the interests of our country, the Russian air defense system will have problems,” Kraskovsky said.

Via RIA Novosti. Also ”Cheney pushes Bush to act on Iran” via the Guardian. 

iRobot Receives $14 Million Order for PacBots

iRobot Corp. (NASDAQ:IRBT) received a US Navy order worth $14 million, part of an Indefinite-Delivery/Indefinite-Quantity (IDIQ) contract to supply of PackBot man transportable robotic systems to the US forces. The recent order brings the total value of orders received from the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) to $66 million. The total worth of the IDIQ contract could reach up to $264 million. Delivery has started in March 2007 and will continue through the end of 2007. The U.S. military’s MTRS program has requirements for up to 1,200 robots through 2012. To date, iRobot has delivered more than 800 PackBot robots to a broad range of military and civilian customers worldwide.

PackBot uses a unique propulsion system developing a road speed of up to 14 km/h. The system is characterized by distinctive “flippers” which offer continuous 360 degrees rotation and negotiation of rough terrain and obstacles such as stairs, rocks, logs, rubble and debris. The platform can climb grades up to 60% and survive submersion in water up to two meter deep. It is built to survive drop from two meter height, on a concrete surface, or being thrown through a window or tumbling downstairs.

Via Defense Update.

Satellite Pit Stop

According to DARPA’s website “the goal of the Orbital Express Space Operations Architecture program is to validate the technical feasibility of robotic, autonomous onorbit refueling and reconfiguration of satellites to support a broad range of future U.S. national security and commercial space programs. Refueling satellites will enable frequent maneuver to improve coverage, change arrival times to counter denial and deception and improve survivability, as well as extend satellite lifetime. Electronics upgrades on-orbit can provide regular performance improvements and dramatically reduce the time to deploy new technology on-orbit.”

Via Defence Tech.