Hackers, Troops Rejoice: Pentagon Lifts Thumb Drive Ban: Via Danger Room.

Soldiers, you are now cleared to use your thumb drives again. U.S. Strategic Command has lifted its ban on the tiny drives, memory sticks, CDs, and other “removable flash media” on military networks.

The repeal, first reported by InsideDefense.com, may be good news for troops, who depend on the drives to move data in bandwidth-starved locations. But it may be good news for hackers, too. The original network security concerns which prompted the ban haven’t really been addressed, one Strategic Command cyber defense specialist tells Danger Room: “Not much changed. STRATCOM simply does not have the support to enforce such a ban indefinitely.”

STRATCOM prohibited the drives’ use back in November, 2008 after the Agent.btz virus began working its way through military networks. A variation of the “SillyFDC” worm, Agent.btz spreads by copying itself from thumb drive to computer and back again. Once on a PC, “it automatically downloads code from another location. And that code could be pretty much anything,” iDefense computer security expert Ryan Olson said at the time. [ Read more ... ]

Pentagon’s Black Budget Tops $56 Billion: Via Danger Room.

The Defense Department just released its king-sized, $708 billion budget for the next fiscal year. Much of the proposed spending is fairly detailed - noting exactly how many helicopters the Pentagon plans to buy, and how many troops it plans on playing. But about $56 billion goes simply to “classified programs,” or to projects known only by their code names, like “CHALK EAGLE” and “LINK PLUMERIA.” That’s the Pentagon’s black budget.

Cobbling together this round figure for the military’s hush-hush projects is easier than it seems. The Pentagon’s separate ledgers for operations, research, and procurement all contain line items for “classified programs.” Add those to the non-sensical, all-caps programs, and you’ve got yourself a nice round estimate for the Pentagon’s secretive efforts. [ Read more ... ]

Pentagon Searches for ‘Digital DNA’ to Identify Hackers: Via Danger Room.

One of the trickiest problems in cyber security is trying to figure who’s really behind an attack. Darpa, the Pentagon agency that created the Internet, is trying to fix that, with a new effort to develop the “cyber equivalent of fingerprints or DNA” that can identify even the best-cloaked hackers.

The recent malware hit on Google and other U.S. tech firms showed once again just how hard it is to pin a network strike on a particular person or group. Engineers are pretty sure the attack came from China, and it sure was sophisticated enough to come from a state military like China’s. But it’s hard to say conclusively that the People’s Liberation Army launched the strike.

It’s the kind of problem Darpa will try to solve with its “Cyber Genome” project. [ Read more ... ]

Pentagon Report Calls for Office of ‘Strategic Deception’: Via Danger Room.

The Defense Department needs to get better at lying and fooling people about its intentions. That’s the conclusion from an influential Pentagon panel, the Defense Science Board (DSB), which recommends that the military and intelligence communities join in a new agency devoted to “strategic surprise/deception.”

Tricking battlefield opponents has been a part of war since guys started beating each other with bones and sticks. But these days, such moves are harder to pull off, the DSB notes in a January report (.pdf) first unearthed by InsideDefense.com. “In an era of ubiquitous information access, anonymous leaks and public demands for transparency, deception operations are extraordinarily difficult. Nevertheless, successful strategic deception has in the past provided the United States with significant advantages that translated into operational and tactical success. Successful deception also minimizes U.S. vulnerabilities, while simultaneously setting conditions to surprise adversaries.”

The U.S. can’t wait until it’s at war with a particular country or group before engaging in this strategic trickery, however. “Deception cannot succeed in wartime without developing theory and doctrine in peacetime,” according to the DSB. [ Read more ... ]

Paging James Cameron: Pentagon Wants 3-D Surveillance: Via Danger Room.

Think Avatar, for military spies. Pentagon far-out research arm Darpa wants to turn surveillance into a 3D experience for troops. They’ve launched the Fine Detail Optical Surveillance (FDOS) Program, and are requesting proposals for prototypes of optical imaging systems that would use “advanced high-resolution 3D imaging technology.” Darpa wants two kinds of surveillance systems: portable units for active battle, and drone-ready systems for unmanned planes.

The agency wants proposals that start from scratch, using a fundamentally new model for obtaining video footage. The 3D surveillance should be able to monitor moving targets with high resolution, from different ranges, and without the need for users to do much legwork, like scanning or refocusing on a target. Darpa anticipates that 3D surveillance would boost field of vision and depth of vision “by over 100X” compared to existing systems. [ Read more ... ]

The creepy mindset behind Cass Sunstein's creepy proposal: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

(updated below - Update II)

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama's closest confidants.  Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs."  In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and psuedo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites -- as well as other activist groups -- which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  The paper's abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.  [ Read more ... ]

Navy Wants Troops Wearing Brain-Scanners Into War: Via Danger Room.

The Pentagon’s been pushing for better ways to diagnose, treat and prevent wartime brain injuries. Last year, they requested proposals for pharmacological methods to stave off PTSD. New genetic tests and brain scans, meant to identify war-fighters who are “vulnerable” to stress reactions, are ongoing. Now, the Navy’s looking to speed up the diagnosis of brain trauma, with a portable, weather-proof, multipurpose brain scanner.

The Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery is requesting proposals for a brain-scanning system that can assess a myriad of neuro-cognitive abilities, including reaction times, problem solving and memory recall. [ Read more ... ]

Wikileaks Says It Has Half-a-Million 9/11 Pager Messages: Via Threat Level.

The document-leaking site Wikileaks says it’s preparing to release 500,000 intercepted wireless pager messages from a 24-hour period encompassing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Site operators say they plan to start rolling out the texts beginning at 3:00 a.m. New York time, paced to display as they were broadcast at the corresponding time on September 11, 2001. American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower at 8:46 a.m., and United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower 17 minutes later.

“Text pagers are mostly carried by persons operating in an official capacity,” reads the description on the site. “Messages in the archive range from Pentagon and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults to their operators as the World Trade Center collapsed.”

A sample of the alphanumeric pages appeared on the site Tuesday night. [ Read more ... ]

FBI’s Data-Mining System Sifts Airline, Hotel, Car-Rental Records: Via Threat Level.

A fast-growing FBI data-mining system billed as a tool for hunting terrorists is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store, declassified documents obtained by Wired.com show.

Headquartered in Crystal City, Virginia, just outside Washington, the FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) maintains a hodgepodge of data sets packed with more than 1.5 billion government and private-sector records about citizens and foreigners, the documents show, bringing the government closer than ever to implementing the “Total Information Awareness” system first dreamed up by the Pentagon in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Such a system, if successful, would correlate data from scores of different sources to automatically identify terrorists and other threats before they could strike. The FBI is seeking to quadruple the known staff of the program.

But the proposal has long been criticized by privacy groups as ineffective and invasive. Critics say the new documents show that the government is proceeding with the plan in private, and without sufficient oversight. [ Read more ... ]

Intelligence Analyst Charged With Hacking Top Secret, Anti-Terror Program: Via Threat Level.

An analyst at a Defense Department spy satellite agency faces federal hacking charges after allegedly poking around in a top-secret system used in a classified terrorism investigation involving the FBI and the U.S. Army.

Brian Keith Montgomery worked on a covert program for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — the spy agency in charge of satellite and aerial image collection. On April 9, he was carrying out his duties when he saw a message that “provided significant detail about a classified operation” that was unrelated to his job, according to an affidavit filed by a Pentagon investigator.

The operation is not detailed in the affidavit (.pdf), but there is a reference to the 902nd Military Intelligence Battalion, an Army counterintelligence unit based at Fort Meade in Maryland, with a presence at more than 50 other locations inside and outside the United States. The 902nd faced controversy in 2005, when NBC News published documents showing the the unit had been spying on American anti-war protesters. Under the guise of fighting terrorism, the group had filed intelligence reports on legal demonstrations, including a weekly protest at an Atlanta recruiting station, and a protest at the University of California at Santa Cruz. [ Read more ... ]

Group Plans Lawsuit To Unveil the CIA’s ‘Pentagon Papers’: Via Wired: Threat Level.

The CIA and other agencies are sitting on a trove of documentary evidence of actual and suspected wrongdoing under the Bush administration, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation plans to file a lawsuit Wednesday to force the intelligence community to come clean, the group says.

At issue are the misconduct reports the spy agencies are required to file with the Intelligence Oversight Board, a board of private citizens with security clearances who oversee the spy agencies and report to the president. The board is tasked with evaluating the self-reported malfeasances of intelligence agencies, looking at the agencies’ responses, and forwarding on the worst to the attorney general when it believes criminal prosecution is called for. [ Read more ... ]

Pentagon Shutting Down Domestic Spying Database:

The Pentagon will power down a controversial domestic spying database known as TALON on September 17, following intense criticisms of the program to track threats against military base following revelations that the database included reports on peaceful anti-war groups. The scandal-plagued Counterintelligence Field Activity office will shut the database on September 17, the Pentagon announced Tuesday. Future threat reports will be funneled to an FBI database known as Guardian. [ Read more ... ]

Iraqi Biometric Database Could Become Extermination List, Pentagon Says: Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are being enrolled in a U.S military-run biometric database, seeded with Saddam Hussein's own spy files.' The Army created the database to'help the occupation forces tell good guys from bad guys, but the program's manager Lieutenant Colonel John Velliquette'admitted to DANGER ROOM's Noah Shachtman that the Iraqi biometric database could become a 'hit list if it gets in the wrong hands.' [ Read more ... ]

The Pentagon Wants a 'TiVo' to Watch You:

An anonymous reader writes "Danger Room, a Wired blog, today cites a study of future electronic snooping technologies from Reuters, written by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board. More than anything, it seems these outside advisers want a surveillance system that would put Big Brother to shame, and they're looking at the commercial sector to provide it. [ Read more ... ]