Terrorism

After a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.

This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

Thousands of special agents created at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are on missions 24 hours a day as they work to uncover threats to national security. These agents, which are actually intelligent software programs, scan the Internet, satellite images, hundreds of newspapers and electronic databases worldwide as they search for anything that even hints at a plot.

Computer scientists and engineers are raising questions about a government plan to create a multibillion-dollar computer system of "virtual borders" intended to identify would-be terrorists entering the United States.

On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security plans to announce the award of a contract to extend the reach of its program, called U.S.-Visit, to permit the Customs service to capture fingerprints and other profile information on hundreds of millions of people who enter or leave the United States each year.

The system, which investigators estimate could cost as much as $15 billion over 10 years, is intended to help officials determine who should be prohibited from entering the country, to identify visitors who have overstayed or violated the terms of their admission, and to help law enforcement agencies track those who should be detained.

Repeatedly invoking the threat of terrorism, the Senate on Wednesday unanimously approved a $5.6-billion, 10-year initiative to encourage private industry to develop vaccines and drugs that would protect Americans from biological, chemical or nuclear attacks.

If terrorists have access to anthrax, smallpox, botulism toxin, plague or Ebola virus, said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), "there is no question they will use it. And they will use it in a place where people gather to go about their daily lives."

The Senate vote came more than two years after anthrax-filled letters caused five fatalities, changed the way mail was inspected and delivered, and highlighted the nation's vulnerability to bioterrorist attacks.

President Bush, who on Wednesday praised passage of the bill as "another important step in winning the war on terror," proposed Project Bioshield in his 2003 State of the Union address. The House passed a bill, 421-2, last summer, but the legislation stalled in the Senate over the technical concerns of a handful of lawmakers.

Scale-free networks are everywhere. The can be seen in airline traffic routes, connections between actors in Hollywood, weblog links, sexual relationships, and terrorist networks. So what exactly is a scale-free network? A scale-free network is one that obeys a power law distribution in the number of connections between nodes on the network. Some few nodes exhibit extremely high connectivity (essentially scale-free) while the vast majority are relatively poorly connected. The reason that scale-free networks emerge, as opposed to evenly distributed random networks, is due to these factors:

* Rapid growth confers preference to early entrants. The longer a node has been in place the greater the number of links to it. First mover advantage is very important.
* In an environment of too much information people link to nodes that are easier to find. This preferential linking reinforces itself by making the easier to find nodes even more easy to find.
* The greater the capacity of the hub (bandwidth, work ethic, etc.) the faster its growth.

The Strength and Weaknesses of Scale-Free Networks
The proliferation of scale-free networks and our increasing dependence on them (particularly given their prevalence in energy, transportation, and communications systems) begs the question: how reliable are these networks?

Al's Hobby Shop in this leafy corner of suburban Chicago is always packed with mothers looking for Cub Scout badges, teenagers ogling imported slot cars and grown men playing with model trains.

But to federal law-enforcement officials, Al's is also a possible terrorist supply depot. And so, last October, a special agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was sent to Al's from Washington to buy $1,700 in model rocket motors.

"The guy told me that the government wanted to do some tests," recalls Tim Lehr, who sold the agent 40 motors containing almost 60 pounds of propellant. "He wouldn't say what the tests were for, but I could guess: The government wanted to ruin my hobby."

Since the passage of the initial post-9/11 antiterrorism laws in October 2001, hobby rocketry has been struggling to avoid regulation that enthusiasts say will destroy their sport, deter youngsters from pursuing an interest in science and waste the nation's limited law-enforcement resources. The Department of Justice says that federal agents need to keep an eye on who is buying model rockets because the toys are potentially dangerous and could be adapted by terrorists to attack airplanes and American soldiers.

If you have ever seen the cult '60s British television program The Prisoner, in which captured Cold War spies live on an island under constant surveillance, you can imagine what life may soon be like on Ayers Island, on the Penobscot River near the University of Maine.

In coming years, visitors to Ayers Island, the site of an abandoned paper and textile mill in Orono, Maine, will be spied upon by a comprehensive network of video cameras, motion detectors and sensors. Lurking behind all of those sensors will be an artificial intelligence system that will decide who can be trusted and who is deserving of greater scrutiny.

The engineers, drawn largely from the nearby University of Maine, will use the network to test the reliability of new sensors. They will also attempt to demonstrate that AI, combined with ubiquitous sensors, may be able to provide civil authorities with comprehensive, real-time intelligence about the whereabouts of individuals and cars, and the status of buildings and other structures within a particular geographical area.

Ayers Island will be open to the public, who are expected to visit the island for its nature trails, amphitheater, sculpture garden and museum, all part of a planned renovation project for the island. A contemporary arts festival on Ayers Island is scheduled for this summer. Many cameras and motion detectors will be in place by that time, according to the company that owns the island, Ayers Island LLC.

Physicists have discovered a new signature characteristic of radiation that could be used to detect the gamma ray emissions of smuggled illegal nuclear materials, even if they are concealed among large bundles of shipping containers.

The problem of detecting smuggled nuclear weapons or devices presents an enormous challenge for security officials. More than 6 million containers enter U.S. ports annually. West Coast facilities alone process about 11,000 a day, or an average of eight every minute. A single container can hold up to 57,000 pounds.

Officials have been attempting to figure out how to inspect containers for smuggled nuclear materials without disrupting the flow of the nation's commerce.

The physicists, from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., think they have come up with the solution.

"We have identified a new radiation signature, unique to fissionable material, that exploits high-energy, fission-product, beta-delayed, gamma ray emissions," said lead researcher Thomas Gosnell. "Fortunately, this signature is robust in that it is very distinct compared to normal background radiation, where there are no comparable high-energy gamma rays."

Ray Kurzweil has proposed a nanobiotechnology research program to replace the cell nucleus and ribosome machinery with a nanocomputer and nanobot to prevent diseases and aging and another program to create defensive technologies against rogue designer viruses.

Kurzweil presented the ideas in a keynote at the recent "Breakthrough Technologies for the World's Biggest Problems" conference on April 28, sponsored by the Arlington Institute.

International acts of terror in 2003 were the fewest in more than 30 years, according to the U.S. State Department's annual terrorism report released Thursday.

The Patterns of Global Terrorism report said 190 acts of international terrorism occurred in 2003 -- a slight drop from 198 attacks the previous year and the lowest total since 1969.

The figure marked a 45 percent decrease in attacks since 2001, but it did not include most of the attacks in Iraq, because attacks against combatants did not fit the U.S. definition of international terrorism.

The Pentagon's New Map
By Thomas P. M. Barnett
Copyright 2004

Network-centric warfare demands robust systems that can respond automatically and dynamically to both accidental and deliberate faults. Adaptation of fault-tolerant computing techniques has made computing and information systems intrusion-tolerant and much more survivable during cyber attacks, but even with these advancements, a system will inevitably exhaust all resources in the face of a sustained attack by a determined cyber adversary. Computing systems and information systems also have a tendency to become more fragile and susceptible to accidental faults and errors over time if manually applied maintenance or refresh routines are not administered regularly. The Self-Regenerative Systems (SRS) program seeks to address these deficiencies by creating a new generation of security and survivability technologies. These "fourth-generation" technologies will bring attributes of human cognition to bear on the problem of reconstituting systems that suffer the accumulated effects of imperfect software, human error, and accidental hardware faults, or the effects of a successful cyber attack. The overarching goals of the SRS program are to implement systems that always provide critical functionality and show a positive trend in reliability, actually exceeding initial operating capability and approaching a theoretical optimal performance level over long time intervals. Desired capabilities include self-optimization, self-diagnosis, and self-healing; it will be important for systems to support self-awareness and reflection in order to achieve these capabilities.

The comb, that simple device millions of people pass through their hair every day, could become the latest tool in the battle against terrorism.

That’s because a group of University of Rhode Island researchers has found that chemicals used to make bombs remain in the hair of explosives handlers long after repeated washings.

The lead researcher, Professor of Chemistry Jimmie Oxley, one of the co-directors of URI's Forensic Science Partnership, has also found that when the research team members attached ordinary gauze to combs, they had effective collection devices.

To cope with the possibility that terrorists might someday detonate a nuclear bomb on American soil, the federal government is reviving a scientific art that was lost after the cold war: fallout analysis.

The goal, officials and weapons experts both inside and outside the government say, is to figure out quickly who exploded such a bomb and where the nuclear material came from. That would clarify the options for striking back. Officials also hope that if terrorists know a bomb can be traced, they will be less likely to try to use one.