New Spy Chief's "Total Information" Ties

"John Michael McConnell, the retired vice admiral slated to become America's new top spy, [has some] longtime associations [which] may cause him headaches during Senate confirmation hearings," Newsweek.com notes."One such tie is with another former Navy admiral, John Poindexter, the Iran-contra figure who started the controversial 'Total Information Awareness' program at the Pentagon in 2002."

The international consultancy that McConnell has worked at for a decade as a senior vice president, Booz Allen Hamilton, won contracts worth $63 million on the TIA "data-mining" program, which was later cancelled [kinda sorta -- ed.] after congressional Democrats raised questions about invasion of privacy... While his role in the TIA program is unlikely to derail McConnell's nomination, spokespeople for some leading Democratic senators such as Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Ron Wyden of Oregon say it will be examined carefully.

McConnell was a key figure in making Booz Allen, along with Science Applications International Corp., the prime contractor on the project, according to officials in the intelligence community and at Booz Allen who would discuss contracts for data mining only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "I think Poindexter probably respected Mike and probably entrusted the TIA program to him as a result," said a longtime associate of McConnell's who worked at NSA with him...

Intel experts agree that McConnell will need all the good will he can get from the intelligence and defense communities. "It's a good appointment for a bad office," says John Arquilla, who teaches intelligence at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "The directorate of national intelligence should not exist. It's very redundant." Insiders say Negroponte was frustrated by his lack of budgeting control over Pentagon intelligence, and the resistance of the CIA to his direction since his office was created in 2004 as part of the Bush administration's post-9/11 reforms.

And by the way, Rutty asks in the comments (I'm paraphrasing heavily here): What was McConnell's role in Echelon -- the NSA's massive information sweeper, which got some much attention during the Clinton years? (The project had been around for decades, remember.)

SIGINT's Clean Sweep? (Updated)

When Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA director, was nominated to head the Central Intelligence Agency, a few folks were worried. The CIA was supposed to be in charge of informant and spies -- human intelligence, or HUMINT. The NSA was a signals intelligence, or SIGINT, shop. Could the CIA really trust someone like Hayden, who specialized in technical snooping?

At the time, it seemed like a minor point. Hayden, after all, had a HUMINT background, too. And his resume wasn't really the issue; his authorizing of warantless wiretaps loomed much larger.

But the SIGINT/HUMINT divide is bound to come up again, now that Hayden's boss, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, is getting ready to skedaddle. Because Negroponte's likely replacement is Admiral Mike McConnell, another former NSA director. Another SIGINT guy.

Now, since 9/11, just about everyone in the intelligence field has talked about how crummy our network of flesh-and-blood informants is. Can a certified geek like McConnell fix that? Or is this one more acknowledgment of the triumph of technical intelligence -- and the decline of human snoops?

UPDATE 5:59 PM: Speaking of spying, let's hope the Daily News somehow got this story wrong. Because if George Bush really just granted the government, by executive fiat, the power to read our mail without a warrant, it violates every notion of privacy and due process under the law we've built up over the last 230 years in this country.

UPDATE 01/05/06 11:36 PM: "John D. Negroponte's exit from the nation's top spy post after just 19 months will temporarily stall reform efforts for the nation's 16 intelligence agencies and sow further instability," Siobhan Gorman reports in today's Baltimore Sun.

The departure leaves Negroponte's likely successor, retired Vice Adm. J. Michael McConnell, with little time to put the fledgling office on solid footing before the next White House turnover, tlawmakers and intelligence officials said.

The leadership change in the Director of National Intelligence office is compounded by the absence of a deputy to replace Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who left the job as second-in-command last spring to head the CIA.

Flood of Secret Docs Coming

Score one for the good guys. In a shockingly sane move, the Bush Administration -- widely considered to be the most secretive in recent history -- is going to let hundreds of millions of once-classified documents enter into the public sphere.

Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status without so much as the stroke of a pen, unless agencies have sought exemptions on the ground that the material remains secret...

And every year from now on, millions of additional documents will be automatically declassified as they reach the 25-year limit, reversing the traditional practice of releasing just what scholars request...

Gearing up to review aging records to meet the deadline, agencies have declassified more than one billion pages, shedding light on the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War and the network of Soviet agents in the American government.

Earlier this year, the Administration was scrambling to make secret again already declassified papers, like the CIA's 1948 plan to drop leaflets behind the Iron Curtain. Good for them for having the sense to switch course.

Data Diver Disses Terror-Mining

Jeff Jonas is one of the country's leading practitioners of the dark art of data analysis. Casino chiefs and government spooks alike have used his CIA-funded "Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness" software to scour databases for hidden connections.

So you'd think that Jonas would be all into the idea of using these data-mining systems to predict who the next terrorist attacker might be.

Think again. "Though data mining has many valuable uses, it is not well suited to the terrorist discovery problem," he writes in a new study, co-authored with the Cato Institute's Jim Harper. "This use of data mining would waste taxpayer dollars, needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties, and misdirect the valuable time and energy of the men and women in the national security community." Are you listening, NSA?

Jonas doesn't have a problem cobbling together information on suspects from various databases. It's using these databases to forecast a terrorist's behavior -- think market research, but for Al-Qaeda -- that Jonas hates. "The possible benefits of predictive data mining for finding planning or preparation for terrorism are minimal. The financial costs, wasted effort, and threats to privacy and civil liberties are potentially vast," he writes.

One of the fundamental underpinnings of predictive data mining in the commercial sector is the use of training patterns. Corporations that study consumer behavior have millions of patterns that they can draw upon to profile their typical or ideal consumer. Even when data mining is used to seek out instances of identity and credit card fraud, this relies on models constructed using many thousands of known examples of fraud per year.

Terrorism has no similar indicia. With a relatively small number of attempts every year and only one or two major terrorist incidents every few years—each one distinct in terms of planning and execution—there are no meaningful patterns that show what behavior indicates planning or preparation for terrorism. Unlike consumers’ shopping habits and financial fraud, terrorism does not occur with enough frequency to enable the creation of valid predictive models. Predictive data mining for the purpose of turning up terrorist planning using all available demographic and transactional data points will produce no better results than the highly sophisticated commercial data mining done today [with results in the low single-digits – ed.]. The one thing predictable about predictive data mining for terrorism is that it would be consistently wrong.

Without patterns to use, one fallback for terrorism data mining is the idea that any anomaly may provide the basis for investigation of terrorism planning. Given a “typical” American pattern of Internet use, phone calling, doctor visits, purchases, travel, reading, and so on, perhaps all outliers merit some level of investigation. This theory is offensive to traditional American freedom, because in the United States everyone can and should be an “outlier” in some sense. More concretely, though, using data mining in this way could be worse than searching at random; terrorists could defeat it by acting as normally as possible.

Treating “anomalous” behavior as suspicious may appear scientific, but, without patterns to look for, the design of a search algorithm based on anomaly is no more likely to turn up terrorists than twisting the end of a kaleidoscope is likely to draw an image of the Mona Lisa.

Civil libertarians and bloggers have talked 'til they're blue in the face about how lame this kind of terror-predicting is. But I don't think I've ever heard a giant of the field, like Jonas, come out against the practice -- at least not on-the-record. Let's hope this is one conversation that the feds are monitoring.

(Big ups: Daou)

UPDATE 11:49 AM: Shane Harris here. Die-hard proponents of pattern-based 'data mining' to catch terrorists will remain unconvinced by Jonas' and Harper's argument. While it's true that data mining in the commercial sector is based upon "training patterns," backers of systems such as Total Information Awareness will say, yes, and that's why data mining for terrorists has to start with hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of known or potential terrorist patterns to look for. A major part of TIA research was the creation of terrorist attack templates through red teaming exercises, in which experts were paid to come up with devious and clandestine plots that a terrorist might conceivably attempt. Their various machinations would, presumably, leave a set of digital footprints -- airline tickets purchased, money wired, hotels paid for, and so on -- and THAT data would be mined for clues.

What's also interesting about this paper is the combination of the authors. Jim Harper is a well-known and articulate activist, and has long since staked out central territory in the security vs. privacy debate. But Jonas has stayed out of politics. Indeed, those who've met him will know that he sticks out like a sore West coast thumb among Washington gear heads, being unafraid to use the word "dude" in formal conversation and happily acknowledging his ignorance of most Beltway insider baseball. But those who know Jonas and have heard him speak about electronic terrorist hunting know that, like his co-author Harper, he has a strong libertarian streak. Maybe Jonas wouldn't put it quite that way -- dude -- but it's there.

Google Monkeys Go Nuclear

Linzer has to be f’ing kidding right? RIGHT?

When the State Department recently asked the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement in a clandestine nuclear weapons program, the agency refused, citing a large workload and a desire to protect its sources and tradecraft.

Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer to find the names another way—by using Google. Those with the most hits under search terms such as “Iran and nuclear,” three officials said, became targets for international rebuke Friday when a sanctions resolution circulated at the United Nations.

[snip]

In the end, the CIA approved a handful of individuals, though none is believed connected to Project 1-11—Iran’s secret military effort to design a weapons system capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The names of Project 1-11 staff members have never been released by any government and doing so may have raised questions that the CIA was not willing or fully able to answer. But the agency had no qualms about approving names already publicly available on the Internet.

Talk about googlebombing someone.

This actually makes sense: You have what you think is the real list, but you only nail people for whom you can make a public case. But woe unto the poor schmoe who has to push a bunch of google search terms on skeptical foreign diplomats.

Come to think of it, the Project 111 name comes from the laptop of death (more) —so what’s the big secret?

This raises so many questions: Is unknown electro-folkie Johnny Burroughs, who records under the name Project 111, now on every no-fly list ever?

Update: I asked about the hyphen in Project 111. D-linz e-mailed me to say:

I decided to add it yesterday because that is how U.S. intelligence officials pronounce the project, with the 1 first and then the 11. Like the way you say nine-eleven for Sept. 11, rather than 9-1-1- for emergency help or one hundred and eleven. IC folks say “project one-eleven”

Later Update: Noah points out that I totally avoided the big revelation, that "none of the 12 Iranians that the State Department eventually singled out for potential bans on international travel and business dealings is believed by the CIA to be directly connected to Iran’s most suspicious nuclear activities.”

I guess that would mean the sanctions are kind of pointless, no?

-- Jeffrey Lewis, crossposted at Arms Control Wonk.com

Even later update: Noah here. At Defense Tech HQ, we're all big fans of open source intelligence -- information that's out there in the public sphere -- to nail potential bad guys. But only if it actually nails legitimately bad dudes, not just the random Joes who are unlucky enough to show up at the top of a Google search.

10 Doses of Spy Poison: $225

When it came out the other day that you could buy a speck of the spy-killing poison polonium-210 online, lots of folks said: big whoop. After all, it could take thousands of such samples to build up the amount of radioactivity that offed Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spook.

But it might just be time to start worrying again. As Bill Broad reports in today's New York Times:

An antistatic fan made by NRD, of Grand Island, N.Y., contains 31,500 microcuries of polonium 210 — or, in theory, more than 10 lethal doses. The unit often sells commercially for $225.00. Repeated calls to NRD were not returned, but the company in sales literature describes its products as unusually safe.

The company’s antistatic brushes contain less polonium, typically 500 microcuries of radiation. The three-inch brush often sells on the Web for $33.99. In theory, by spending $203.94, before tax and any handling charges, and then disassembling six brushes, someone with lab experience could accumulate a lethal dose.

In Tennessee, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory sells dozens of types of rare nuclear materials to American manufacturers. But Bill Cabage, a lab spokesman, said it sold no polonium 210 because Russia was able to do so much more inexpensively.

“That’s typical” of exotic radioisotopes, he said. “We can’t compete with their prices.”

Last week, Russia’s top nuclear official said it exports 8 grams of polonium 210 a month, or 96 grams a year, to the United States. That is 3.4 ounces, which seems like a trifle but in theory is enough for thousands of lethal doses.

Spy Poison Everywhere! (But Don't Sweat it)

Fears about spy-slaying polonium-210 are reaching fever pitch, with traces of the radioactive poison discovered at 12 different locations. But, as MSNBC's ace science reporter Alan Boyle informs us, the stuff is "actually not so rare to find it in everyday life."

In minute quantities, polonium-210 has been used over the years to spark up spark plugs and banish static cling. Polonium is one of the carcinogens in tobacco smoke, and you can buy a smidgen of it over the Internet at $69 a pop... Heck, there's even radioactive polonium in plain old dirt.

"It's present in all of us, in trace amounts - say, in nanocuries," said Keith Eckerman, a senior research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The amount is key. We might notice no ill results from billionths of a curie (which serves as a measure of radioactive intensity). In contrast, Litvinenko is thought to have been exposed to something around 5 millicuries (thousandths of a curie)...

That's a minute amount - a speck of polonium that active would weigh less than a millionth of a gram, according to the Health Physics Society's information sheet on polonium. But getting that much polonium together would probably require going to the source, which usually involves a nuclear reactor. This is why investigators are thinking the hit on Litvinenko was a high-level spy-vs.-spy job.

The amounts used in industrial applications - yes, including those $69 polonium samples, which are typically used to calibrate radiation detection devices - are far more minute: a speck of a speck of a speck.

UFO Nut Sells Spy Poison Online (Updated)

"The radioactive material that killed a former Russian spy in Britain can be bought on the Internet for $69," Information Week is reporting.

Polonium-210, which experts say is many times more deadly than cyanide, can be bought legally through United Nuclear Scientific Supplies, a mail-order company that sells through the Web, based in Sandia Park, N.M. Chemcial companies sell the Polonium-210 legally for industrial use, such as removing static electricity from machinery. United Nuclear claims that it's "currently the only legal Alpha source available without a license."

The type of Polonium-210 sold emits alpha radiation, which can't penetrate the skin, but is deadly if swallowed, depending on the amount ingested. The Polonium available on United Nuclear's site can be purchased without a license because the level of radioactivity, 0.1 microcurie, does not pose a danger, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.

"At that level, it's exempt from licenses," NRC spokesman David McIntyre said. "At any exempt quantity, it's not considered a health hazard."

Such small amounts of Polonium could be used to calibrate devices used to detect radiation, McIntyre said. If used for that purpose, the material would remain in its sealed container, and never actually handled.

United Nuclear is run by Bob Lazar, who, some 20 years ago, claimed to have worked on alien spaceships on a secret military base in Nevada... [That'd be Area 51 --ed.]

In April, United Nuclear was ordered by the Department of Justice to stop selling chemicals that it claimed could be used to make explosives, the Albuquerque Journal reported. At the time, Lazar said he was fighting the legal challenge.

On the site, United Nuclear says it will not sell anything illegal, including explosives or the materials to make explosives. "Because our products can be potentially hazardous in the wrong hands, we will occasionally terminate and refund orders, if we feel you are a juvenile posing as an adult, inexperienced with the materials ordered, or using our products to make any sort of explosive device," the company says.

Wired ran a story about Lazar and other science salesmen a few months back. Somehow, the Area 51 stuff never made it into the piece.

(Big ups: RC)

UPDATE 11:50 AM: Be sure to check out Arms Control Wonk's take on the polonium poison mystery.

UPDATE 1:55 PM: "Authorities grounded three British Airways jetliners in London and Moscow on Wednesday and drew up plans to contact thousands of airplane passengers as they broadened their investigation into the radiation poisoning death of a former Russian spy," the AP says. "Two planes at London's Heathrow Airport tested positive for traces of radiation, a third plane has been taken out of service in Moscow awaiting examination."

Russian Intel's Assassination Trail

Dissident ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko is wasting away in a hospital bed, allegedly poisoned (or maybe not) by his former colleagues. As the L.A. Times notes, he's only the latest in a series of assassination attempts Russian intelligence have supposedly tried to pull off, in recent years.

Two Russian intelligence agents were convicted in Qatar in 2004 for the car-bomb slaying of Chechen separatist leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. They were returned to Russia and later freed.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko still has a badly scarred face and painful nerve damage from near-fatal dioxin poisoning during a presidential campaign in which he advocated freeing Ukraine from Russia's sphere of influence.

A Saudi-born financier of the Chechen resistance, Omar ibn Khattab, died in 2002 after opening a poisoned letter. Russia's Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, was blamed in the killing.

And Anna Politkovskaya, whose slaying Litvinenko was reportedly investigating when he fell ill, became sick after drinking what she claimed was poisoned tea while traveling to Beslan during the 2004 siege of a school by Ingush and Chechen militants.

Air Force Wants Terminator Tongues

In Terminator 2, the evil, morphing T1000 imitates the voices of John Connor's foster parents, in order to lure the snot-nosed future leader of humanity back home... and kill him. Luckily, Ahnold the good Terminator does some fancy mimickry of his own -- aping John's early-teen whine, and tricking the robotic trickster right back.

The Air Force is hoping to pull off the same stunt, one day. The flyboys are looking for a few good researchers "to develop and test voice transformation algorithms" so airmen can "disguise their true identity or... make their voice sound like another individual."

Computer scientists have gotten better and better at syntheisizng speech that sounds almost human. But "while voice transformation [has] been around for a while, the ability to transform a person’s voice to a target voice is not yet solved," the Air Force observes. So the program will start by playing with the "speaking rate, stress, and intonation" to "provide broad parameters for modeling a person’s voice. A finer grain analysis of a person’s voice may also be performed by de-convolving an audio signal into its glottal pulse and vocal tract information."

If that all works as planned, the idea is to move on to "experiments with human listeners... to assess the validity and potential use of voice transformation techniques." And if that goes well, too, then it's on to "employ[ing] voice transformation software... for use in a deception campaign against hostile forces."

There could also be commercial uses, the Air Force notes. In a case of art-imitating-life-imitating-art, the military research might be used "in the gaming industry and animated films for creating and modify voices, for voice dubbing of foreign films, and for creating/reducing a person’s accent."

Maybe the work will be done by the time Ahnold suits up for Terminator 5.

UPDATE 5:10 PM: Defense Tech pal Xeni Jardin just test-drove the latest translator tech.

New Rules for Secret-Makers

Folks in the intelligence field have been complaining for years that the way the government classifies information is beyond screwy. A seemingly unending array of officials have the power to render documents secret. And the decisions they make tend to be as much a matter of personal whim as of national security.

Luckily -- finally -- the Army's intel shop is stepping up to do something about it, Secrecy News reveals. It has released a "standardized methodology for making original classification decisions," along with a tutorial for would-be secret-makers.

"Many of the criteria for classification are obvious, such as if the information's loss would reveal military plans or open senior leadership to a terrorist attack," the Washington Post notes. "But others are much more ambiguous." And surprising.

The memo notes that even when a document within the Army system is deemed unclassified, that "does not mean that it is automatically releaseable to the public." A category called "Controlled Unclassified Information" allows information to be protected from public view. This category includes the label "For Official Use Only," which can involve things such as "internal rules and practices of the agency," trade secrets, intra-agency memos that "are part of the decision-making process" and records that invade a person's privacy.

The memo also says a compilation of individually unclassified items can be considered classified "if the compiled information reveals an additional association or relationship" that otherwise would not be apparent...

For example, the memo states that information would be "confidential" if its loss "could threaten the international position of the U.S.," an outcome it further defines as damaging "U.S. credibility with a foreign government."

Information would be "secret" if its disclosure "would weaken the international position of the U.S.," which is defined as causing a "negative impact to the international position of the U.S. and its ability to negotiate with foreign governments." Information would be considered "top secret" if disclosure would "significantly weaken" the U.S. position, meaning it would result in the "inability of the U.S. to successfully negotiate with a foreign government for a significant period of time."

Another element in the Army memorandum is the suggestion that if a document contains information meeting two different categories of "confidential," it could be classified as "secret." And if it has two different "secret" pieces of information, it could be classified as "top secret."

To me, the rules still seem too restrictive. But clearer rules, whatever they are, seem like a big first step towards getting ourselves out of the murky, tangled mess we're in today.

What A Wiki Really Means for the Intelligence Community

Yesterday brought news that the U.S. intelligence community has a secret wiki, modelled along the lines of the collaboratively created Wikipedia, that it hopes will revolutionize how intelligence is shared among the nation's spooks and analysts.

A "top secret" Intellipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction April 17. Less restrictive versions exist for "secret" and "sensitive but unclassified" material.

The system is also available to the Transportation Security Administration and national laboratories.

Intellipedia is currently being used to assemble a major intelligence report, known as a national intelligence estimate, on Nigeria as well as the State Department's annual country reports on terrorism, officials said.

Full story.

I held off writing about it, because I really wanted to think about what the news meant.

Tellingly Wikipedia really had the scoop, since the first entry for Intellipedia showed up on September 27, about a full month before what I think was the first press mention in a U.S. News and World Report story on October 23rd (current Wikipedia entry).

But what's really interesting about wikis isn't just that people can add to and edit it. It's that wikis start with totally blank pages, and more importantly, totally unwritten processes.

That lesson was made clear to me this summer when I wrote a story about the future of wikis for Wired News and talked with Yoz Grahame, who worked a Wikipedia-like project in England known as H2G2 and who currently works as a developer advocate for a DIY application site called Ning.

Grahame told me:

Although it seems that with wikis that people are just editing text, there's something more important going on, which is the editing of structure. And quite often in the discussion parts, like the talk pages of Wikipedia and the forums going on around these thing, that's where you see process evolving.

Instead of communities changing the logic of the underlying system, they are dynamically reconfiguring their own underlying process logic.

That's how Wikipedia evolved. How do we manage this huge amount of incoming data? They evolved a process. The great thing about wikis is that a wiki is such a blank and restructurable slate, it means we are able to evolve with them.

So the question here isn't whether Intellipedia will make the National Intelligence Estimate more accurate, it's whether wikis will fundamentally alter the bureaucratic rules and processes of the intelligence community.

Would a new process emerge such that there will never be a replay of the CIA's dismissal of the Energy Department's strong dissent over the conclusion that intercepted aluminum tubes were intended for an Iraqi nuclear program?

It's hard to say if wikis can change a culture that much.

But for those interested, my wiki story this summer was turned over to readers prior to publication, so they could edit and add to it. And they did -- and the results were surprising and the process fascinating.

May the intelligence community have as much luck with wikis as I did.

Update: Lots of other have things smart things to say about the project, like Michael Hampton and Dan Farber. Thanks also to JQP and others who pointed me to the story yesterday.

- Ryan Singel

NSA Targets 'Lost' Fans

The CIA aren't the only spooks with wacky recruiting stunts. The signals intelligence snoops over at the National Security Agency are trying out tricks of their own, to reel in potential employees. The latest, according to Defense Tech pal Siobhan Gorman: a first-ever series of TV ads, airing on episodes of "Lost" and "CSI."

"It was the demographic we were looking for," said NSA spokesman Donny Weber, who said the commercial was aimed at college students and professionals in the [Baltimore-Washington] region's high-tech corridor...

The ad prompted a surge in interest among would-be recruits, with nearly 4,000 visiting the NSA's Web site after seeing the commercial, John Taflan, the agency's director of human resources, said in a written statement...

As techno music blares and a radiant blue globe spins in the background, rapid-fire scenes flash on the screen, from a helicopter to a ship to a person with a red-and-white-checked scarf obscuring his face, presumably representing a terrorist...

"Our adversaries do their best to keep their plans a secret. At the National Security Agency, we uncover those secrets, and keep our own secrets safe," the narrator says... "That's why NSA employs only the most intelligent people in the country." She asks viewers to "explore career options at NSA" by visiting the NSA's Web site.

The commercial was designed to appeal to a highly educated crowd that might not have considered the NSA as a career opportunity before, Weber said. He said he did not have information on how much the ad buy cost or who produced it...

The placement of the NSA commercial surprised some intelligence professionals. Describing Lost as a television variation on "Dungeons and Dragons," CIA veteran Ron Marks said its viewers are exactly the ones the NSA should be recruiting.

"What a wonderful way of reaching an audience that's interested in problem-solving and thinking differently," he said, noting that U.S. intelligence agencies have done little to reach out to the growing number of computer gamers and other teenage technophiles.

UPDATE 11:34 AM: While this might be Ft. Meade's first attempt to attract the pubescent D&D set, the Agency has been going after role-players' grammar school siblings for years.

Spyboys Go Web 2.0

Last week, the New York Times and some civil libertarians got all grossed out by a government plan to monitor the foreign press for its opinions of America. "It is just creepy and Orwellian," Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said.

So no one tell Lucy about this system keeping tabs on overseas TV channels, 24/7, for the military, ok? She's liable to get real upset.

BBN Technologies' Broadcast Monitoring program pumps a TV channel -- Al-Jazeera, say -- through a set of servers, which do a quick-and-dirty transcription of the audio into Arabic text. Then, that text is ported into English.

The initial results are something short of Berlitz. "Did not professional background political motive for fighting veil as might be introduction," was the interpretation for one recent Al-Jazeera news snippet. But it's good enough for keyword searches, or to give human translators the heads-up when there's something relevant happening.

A quick search for "Saddam trial," at yesterday's Association of the United States Army convention, produced 43 hits from the last week of Al-Jazeera coverage. (The system keeps 90 days' worth of TV on its hard drive.) Click on any of those hits, and you instantly get the Arabic text, the English text, and the video segment. It's like TiVo for spies -- with a transcription service built in.

A military psyops task force in Iraq is already using the system, according to BBN's Martha Lillie. So is U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, and the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. The Army's 5th Special Forces Group, currently stationed at Iraq's Balad Air Base, is next in line.

All of these groups are using the systems (which go for anywhere from $110,000 to $190,000 per channel) for pretty much the same thing: track what the foreign press is saying about the U.S. It's part of a larger effort in the government to stop relying quite so much on snitches and mega-expensive spy satellites -- and start paying more attention to so-called "open source intelligence." Stuff out in the public sphere, in other words. "Perhaps our best source of information is the television," Rear Adm. Ronald Henderson, deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff, recently noted.

And while that may give some people the willies, it sure sounds like a good idea to me. We know jihadists are using everything from Hotmail to YouTube to Al-Jazeera to spread their messages, and do their business. Why not track them out in the open? Think of it as the Web 2.0 approach to spying: Let the bad guys supply the intel for us; we'll just make the connections.

CIA's Wacky, Online 'Personality Quiz'

These are tough times for the Central Intelligence Agency. It's not just the blown calls on Iraq. Or the bruising turf battles with the White House. There's the series of internal purges. And, of course, the constant threat of another terrorist attack. No wonder the Agency is having trouble hiring good people.

But still, can things have grown so dire at Langley that the CIA has to resort to gimmicks like this wink-wink-trying-to-be-ironic-and-cool-but-instead-looking-even-more-dorky recruiting website

The "CIA personality quiz" is supposed to show how the Agency needs all types to function. So the exam offers up a series of questions, about your favorite leisure activities, the "kind of transportation you prefer," and what super power you'd like to have. And then the site tells you what kind of valuable asset to the CIA you'd be.

If the super power you want is flight, for example, and your dream is to climb Mt. Everest, according to the Agency, you're a "Daring Thrill Seeker." If you prefer shopping on Rodeo Drive and sunbathing on a yacht, that means you're a "Innovative Pioneer." If you'd like to have ESP and a designer wardrobe, that qualifies you as an "Impressive Mastermind." Naturally.

Somehow, this is all meant to dispel myths about what it's like to work for the Agency. Take Myth #1, for instance: "You’ll Never See Your Family and Friends Again." Au contraire, the site says. "The work we do may be secret, but that doesn’t mean your life will be. Because the variety of CIA careers is similar to that of any major corporation. So… your friends and family will still be part of your life."

Nor will your work be all that dangerous. "Car chases through the alleyways of a foreign city are common on TV, but they’re not what a CIA career is about. And, they don’t compare with the reality of being part of worldwide intelligence operations supporting a global mission."

And that grueling background check? Don't sweat it. "Because of our national security role, CIA applicants must meet specific qualifications — but, don’t worry. Getting caught smoking in high school isn’t enough to disqualify you. Your intellect, skills, experience and desire to serve the nation are most important to us."

Unless you're setting up Agency websites, I guess.

Today's Required Reading...

...Is Jane Mayer's funny, fascinating portrait of "Junior," the rascally skirt-chaser and gambler who is "arguably the United States’ most valuable informant on Al Qaeda." Here's a snip, from this week's New Yorker:

According to Fadl, he met bin Laden in Afghanistan, where he had gone in his early twenties to fight against the Soviet Union. He testified that he was one of the first people to join Al Qaeda, in 1989; soon afterward, he moved back to Sudan, where he helped bin Laden acquire properties and front companies. At a time when most Americans knew little about Al Qaeda, Fadl provided the jury with a lengthy tutorial, describing the organization’s cellular structure and its training camps, where recruits learned how to handle weapons and were taught a militant view of Islam. He characterized bin Laden as a man determined to attack the United States—even with nuclear weapons if he could. In the early nineties, he testified, bin Laden issued a secret fatwa at a meeting in Sudan: “It say, ‘We cannot let the American army stay in the Gulf area and take our oil, take our money, and we have to do something to take them out. We have to fight them.’ ” (Fadl also admitted to a life style that was less than pious. Under questioning, he confessed that, prior to joining Al Qaeda, he had nearly been arrested for smoking marijuana with a friend, on a trip to Saudi Arabia; the friend had gone to jail for two years, he said, adding, “I escaped to Sudan.”)

I Spy Hezbollah

Jeff Stein's CQ story is packed tight with fascinating tidbits about what the West's intelligence services know about Hezbollah -- and why they're not saying more. So make sure to read the whole thing. Here's a snippet.

Iran’s role as quartermaster to Hezbollah missileers in Lebanon is beyond dispute...

"Lots of photographs exist" of the Iranian supply operations, Reynolds says... "The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] are well aware of the location of rockets..."

"The transfers are also detectable by U.N. peacekeepers," Reynolds added, who are headquartered "near the airport, and [by] foreign military attaches in Damascus. These weapons are then followed into Lebanon by human and technical means..."

"The Israelis are very hesitant to reveal photographic electro-optical evidence from Mt. Hermon," Reynolds says, "because it would reveal to the Syrians some Israeli [surveillance] capabilities and the Syrians would then use that knowledge to counter them."

Washington, Reynolds says, resists "revealing them for the same reason" — so as not to disclose the quality of its technical collection capabilities, which include satellites and ground-station intercepts of Iranian and Syrian electronic communications.

But pretty good pictures of the Hezbollah positions are available to anybody with a laptop, via Google Earth.

Reynolds even e-mailed me a couple of photos of the Lebanon-Israel-Syria border region that he had downloaded from Google arth and marked up around the Hezbollah sites.

Pentagon's "Best Source of Intel": TV

"Though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has repeatedly bashed the media’s continuous coverage of insurgent bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan," Inside Defense notes, "it turns out the Pentagon’s command center relies very heavily on such press reports to gather real-time intelligence."

The National Military Command Center, a windowless underground facility located beneath the Pentagon, must constantly provide information about current events to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the defense secretary and ultimately the president.

The center has many military means of gathering intelligence, including classified computer networks and space-based systems, but standard television news reports are often the best way to stay abreast of events in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Rear Adm. Ronald Henderson, deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff.

“Perhaps our best source of information is the television,” Henderson said June 19 during a panel discussion in Washington sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

“And in fact, if you were to come into the command center, you would see six big, giant TV screens,” he said. “Now I spend a lot of time watching TV because -- if you think about it -- it’s the best intelligence network in the world.”

It's become almost a cliche that 80 percent or more of intelligence work comes from "open source" materials, like press reports. So it's always been kind of a mystery to me why the administration and Pentagon chiefs constantly go after the media, when reporters are actually helping these guys do their jobs. It's like beating up on Raytheon for making missiles, or Motorola for building radios.

Does a free press mean that embarrassing, even dangerous, details about American operations will occasionally get disclosed? Yup. Does it mean that media reports will sometimes be more negative and sensational than the military would like? Of course. But if what you get in return is the "best intelligence network in the world," isn't that a price worth paying?

UPDATE 10:37 AM: One Pentagon agency that's been particularly aggro in its dealing with the press has been the Joint IED Defeat Organization. The groups, which started in 2003 as a "12-person office to develop quick strategies for combating homemade bombs in Iraq -- has quietly expanded into a $3 billion-per-year arm of the Pentagon, with more than 300 employees and thousands of contract workers," the Boston Globe notes. And like most fast-growing start-ups, the JIEDDO is having trouble figuring out what its focus should be.

General John Abizaid , the head of US military forces in the Middle East, recently complained to members of the IED group that its emphasis on multimillion-dollar contracts to develop high-tech sensing equipment has been ineffective at curbing attacks by homemade bombs, according to a person who was present.

Abizaid said the office... should focus more on nontechnical solutions, such as figuring out where the explosives are coming from and who is planting them, the official said.

A recent report commissioned by the Pentagon, written by a team of counter-insurgency specialists and provided to Abizaid, was blunt: "The response to the IED has been primarily to increase force protection by emphasizing technical solutions which have proven insufficient," said the internal report, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe...

Interviews with current and former members of the task force -- all of whom requested anonymity because they are not authorized by the Pentagon to speak to the media -- revealed widespread frustration that money and other resources were going into long-term deals with major defense contractors.

"This is a perfect example of a Cold War mind-set," said one former official who held a senior post in the office and has since left government...

Some members of the House and Senate share the concern that by focusing on longer-term projects, the task force is squandering its mission to provide quick, on-the-ground solutions to homemade bombs, whether through technology or intelligence.

(Big ups: RC)

Ex-NSA Chief Blasts Taps, Calls for CIA Breakup

Former NSA director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman lashed out at the Bush administration Monday night over its continued use of warrantless domestic wiretaps – and called for the CIA to be broken up in two. It's one of the first times a former high-ranking intelligence official has criticized the program in public, analysts say.

"This activity is not authorized," Inman said, as part of a panel discussion on eavesdropping, sponsored by the New York Public Library. The Bush administration "need[s] to get away from the idea that they can continue doing it."

Since the NSA eavesdropping program was unveiled in December, Inman – like other senior members of the intelligence community – has been measured in the public statements he's made about the agency he headed under President Jimmy Carter. He maintained that his former analysts "only act in accordance with law." When asked whether the president had the legal authority to order the wiretaps, Inman replied, "someone else would have to give you the good answer."

But sitting in a brightly-lit, basement auditorium at the Library, next to James Risen, the New York Times reporter who broke the surveillance story, Inman's tone changed. He called on the President to "walk into the modern world" and change the law governing the wiretaps – or abandon the program altogether.

"The program has drawn a lot of criticism, but thus far former military and intelligence officials have not spoken up. To have Admiral Inman – the former head of the NSA -- come forward with this critique is significant," said Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, who sat on the panel with Inman and Risen. "Because of the secrecy surrounding this type of activity, much of the criticism has come from outsiders who don't have a firm grasp of the mechanics and the utility of electronic intelligence. Inman knows whereof he speaks."

My Wired News article has details.

UPDATE 5:02 PM: While Inman was generally supportive of General Michael Hayden, George Bush's pick for CIA director, and Inman's NSA successor -- despite the fact that the Hayden was the guy running the questionable domestic surveillance project. Even his critics, Inman said, have given Hayden "high marks" for refocusing the agency on terrorism.

Most of 'em, anyway. NSA whistleblower Russ Tice, to put it mildly, hates Hayden's guts. Echoing TPM Muckraker allegations that "between 1999 and 2005, the NSA bungled two key technology programs and... has been burning through billions -- billions -- of dollars," Tice tells Defense Tech:

Through his mismanagement, many critical SIGINT missions were not funded and the intelligence needed and depended on was not collected. Perhaps 911 could have been avoided if NSA had those assets in place and did not waste all that money...

He lied about the NSA being involved in domestic spying and continues to lie about the enormous scope of those programs. He stated NSAer know about the Forth Amendment to the Constitution and in the same breath proved that he did not have a clue about it hinging on "probable cause" not reasonableness. He forgot to mention that he also violated the FISA Act and NSA's own policy on domestic Spying (USSID-18).

To be frank, he is a self promoter, an ass-kisser, an accomplished liar, an oath breaker, an extremely poor manager, a sadist, a criminal, and a proven domestic enemy of the Constitution of the United States. Oh, and a piss-poor all-source intelligence officer to boot. He should have remained an air opps officer restricted to the flight ready-room.

To sum Hayden up in a few words, he is dishonorable and without integrity.

In would appear that the president will not tolerate a lap-dog like Porter Goss that barks now and again. Hayden will lift his leg and squat all over the constitutional carpet, but while in the lap of the man who sits the newly erected thrown, Hayden will wag his tail and only open his mouth to lick his master's face.

Lord help us!

UPDATE 6:35 PM: Inman also emphasized something Defense Tech has been saying since the start of this scandal: that your average spook finds the idea of spying on Americans downright revolting.

One of Inman's "proudest moments" as NSA director was when senior employees told him not to pursue a legally fishy operation, he noted. "It's deeply ingrained in you that you operate within the law."

UPDATE 6:40 PM: In addition, Inman put to bed the notion that the NSA's domestic eavesdropping program only examined the links between terror suspects -- not the contents of the conversations themselves. Is this all about who-called-who? "No, it isn't," he answered, on his way out the door (he had to leave quick, because of a bout of food poisoning). For voice communications, which are tough to search, that might be the case, he added. But with e-mail? No way.

Hello, Hayden

It's official: General Mike Hayden has been nominated to head the CIA. Republican lawmakers are already spooked by the choice -- and not just because of his domestic wiretap project, or his shaky grip on the 4th amendment says. But one military intelligence specialist tells Defense Tech that he likes Mike:

If we leave aside the obvious political arguments over the NSA program which are sure to come up at any confirmation hearings, Hayden is a great pick. One of the big talking points on both sides of the aisle is how CIA needs to be fixed... Hayden did the same thing at NSA, dragging it kicking and screaming into the 21st century. He overcame a lot of bureaucratic inertia to accomplish that. I would say he is the best candidate to do just the same at CIA. Additionally, being a in the military might afford him a little extra protection from some of the political sniping that comes with a regular political appointee. Time will tell, but if we are serious as a nation about our security and having competent intelligence services to help provide that security, I don't think we could fins anyone better for this job at this time. If certain Senators want to play politics and kill this nomination (if it comes) to make some partisan points, what we will inevitably end up with running the CIA is a milquetoast, non-threatening figurehead who is acceptable to everyone, and such a person will have no leverage to produce any reforms in the Agency. That result would be the intelligence equivalent of FEMA/Michael Brown. That should be unacceptable to us all.

I'll be curious to hear what guys like Bobby Ray Inman, Patrick Keefe, and James Risen say tonight during their New York Public Library talk. If there are any truly juicy tidbits, I'll let you know.

Meanwhile, check it constantly with Laura Rozen and TPM Muckraker, who are all over the CIA transition story.

UPDATE 12:14 PM: I've been away for a few days (more on that in a bit), so I didn't get a chance to comment on the downright hilarious spin whizzing around Porter Goss' departure from the CIA. I didn't work in Washington all that long. But I was there long enough to know that top-level guys like him do not get fired suddenly over long-standing turf battles or routine staff shake-ups. Frankly, the poker-and-hooker theory makes a whole lot more sense.

Air Force One Scare; Real Security Sacrificed

Stephen I. Schwartz is the former executive director and publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the editor and co-author of Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940. This his first post for Defense Tech. I'm looking forward to more.

The headline sure seemed scary: "Web site exposes Air Force One defenses." And the copy down below was just as breathless, discussing a nameless online document which gave "specific information about the anti-missile defenses" on the two specially-converted 747-200B series planes serving as Air Force One (Air Force designation VC-25A). "Detailed interior maps" showed, among other things, the "location of Secret Service agents" and, more alarmingly, "the location where a terrorist armed with a high-caliber sniper rifle could detonate the tanks that supply oxygen to Air Force one’s medical facility." You could almost forgive the Drudge Report for posting the San Francisco Chronicle story instantly.

But the Chron failed to mention the most important – and most glaringly obvious -- aspect of the document: It's part of a safety manual, written so firefighters and emergency responders can quickly rescue Air Force One's pilots and passengers if there's an accident or mishap. The document was cleared for international public release ages ago.

The article says that "the Air Force reacted with alarm last week after The Chronicle told the Secret Service" about the document, while the Secret Service had no comment. Writer Paul J. Caffera quotes a public affairs officer from the 89th Airlift Wing at Andrews Air Force Base saying "it is not a good thing" to have such information in the public domain. For good measure he throws in comments from a national security analyst Daniel Gouré (whose quote actually gives away the "secret" of the anti-missile defense system deployed on the aircraft) and former congressman and White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, who says, "If I were still chief of staff, I would order the damned site (to) pull it down."

Of course, protecting Air Force One should be given the absolute highest priority. Every measure should be taken to ensure the safety of everyone aboard. But would yanking this document really help? Or could it hurt?

The document Caffera found is part of the Air Force’s Technical Order 00-105E-9 - Aerospace Emergency Rescue and Mishap Response Information (Emergency Services) Revision 11. It resided, until recently, on the web site of the Air Logistics Center at Warner Robins Air Force Base. The purpose is pretty straight-ahead: "Recent technological advances in aviation have caused concern for the modern firefighter." So the document gives "aircraft hazards, cabin configurations, airframe materials, and any other information that would be helpful in fighting fires."

As a February 2006 briefing from the Air Force Civil Engineer Support Agency explains, the document is "used by foreign governments or international organizations and is cleared to share this information with the general global public…distribution is unlimited." The Technical Order existed solely on paper from 1970 to mid-1996, when the Secretary of the Air Force directed that henceforth all technical orders be distributed electronically (for a savings of $270,000 a year). The first CD-ROMs were distributed in January 1999 and the web site at Warner Robins was set up 10 months later. A month after that, the web site became the only place to access the documents, which are routinely updated to reflect changes in aircraft or new regulations.

But back to the document Caffera found. It's hardly a secret that Air Force One has defenses against surface-to-air missiles. The page that so troubled Caffera indicates that the plane employs infrared countermeasures, with radiating units positioned on the tail and next to or on all four engine pylons. Why does the document provide that level of detail? Because emergency responders could be injured if they walk within a certain radius of one of the IR units while it is operating.

Nor is it remarkable that Secret Service agents would sit in areas on the plane that are close to the President’s suite, as well as between reporters, who are known to sit in the back of the plane, and everyone else. Exactly how this information endangers anyone is unclear. But it would help emergency responders in figuring out where to look for people in the event of an accident. (Interestingly, conjectural drawings of the layout of Air Force One like this one are pretty close to the real deal.)

As for hitting the medical oxygen tanks to destroy the plane, you'd have to be really, really lucky to do that while the plane is moving at any significant speed. And if it's standing still and you are after the President and armed with a high-caliber sniper rifle, why wouldn’t you target him directly? Besides, if you wanted to make the plane explode, it would be much easier to aim for the fuel tanks in the wings (which when fully-loaded hold 53,611 gallons). Terrorists don’t need a diagram to figure that out. But a rescuer would want this information so that the oxygen valves could be turned off to mitigate the risk of a fire or explosion.

Interestingly, what Caffera either missed or ignored is that the Technical Order includes detailed information on most of the fixed-wing and rotary aircraft operated by the military, by NATO, and by civilian agencies like the Forest Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Other U.S. military aircraft found in the document include the Global Hawk, SR-71, COBRA BALL and RIVET JOINT (both using modified versions of the C-135), the B-2 bomber, the F-117A fighter, the E-6B (inheritor of the Cold War-era "Looking Glass" and TACAMO missions), the National Airborne Operations Center (codename "Nightwatch"), to be used by the President or his successor in the event of a nuclear war, and even the Airborne Laser and the International Space Station.

Caffera's story was quickly posted on the Drudge Report and subsequently picked up and picked apart in all sorts of places. A more tempered response from John Noonan at the Officers' Club, who's in the Air Force.

Predictably, many folks criticized the Chronicle for publishing the article and, in their view, jeopardizing security. There was even speculation that the drawings were decoys designed to mislead terrorists. Few, however, have actually looked closely at the document, even as they point out the relative ease with which they located it. And no one has explained its true purpose or the fact that it has been freely available online for over seven years.

Having read all this, you’ll probably want to peruse the documents yourself, as many thousands of people, including yours truly, have already done. Well you can’t, because just as predictably they’ve been yanked off the web (though you can find cached text-only versions via Google). And not only the current version is gone, but previous ones as well.

Did the folks at Warner Robins notice the fuss and undertake some damage control? No, a reporter from London’s The Guardian newspaper telephoned Robins about the story and found a spokesman who indicated he was unaware of "the problem." But not for long. A few hours later, the documents were gone.

Caffera has another explanation in a follow-up article in today’s Chronicle that breathlessly begins:

Air Force and Pentagon officials scrambled Monday to remove highly sensitive security details about the two Air Force One jetliners after The Chronicle reported that the information had been posted on a public Web site.

This time, Caffera correctly describes the purpose of the Technical Order. Nevertheless, according to Air Force spokeswoman Lt. Col. Catherine Reardon, "We are dealing with literally hundreds of thousands of Web pages, and Web pages are reviewed on a regular basis, but every once in a while something falls through the cracks…. We can't even justify how (the technical order) got out there. It should have been password-protected. We regret it happened. We removed it, and we will look more closely in the future."

An Air Force source familiar with the history and purpose of the documents who asked not to be identified laughed when told of the above quote, reiterated that the Technical Order is and always has been unclassified, and said it is unclear how the document can be distributed now, adding that firefighters in particular won’t like any changes that make their jobs more difficult or dangerous.

"’The order came down this afternoon [Monday] to remove this particular technical order from the public Web site,’ said John Birdsong, chief of media relations at Warner Robins Air Logistics Center, the air base in Georgia that had originally posted the order on its publicly accessible Web site. According to Birdsong, the directive to remove the document came from a number of officials, including Dan McGarvey, the chief of information security for the Air Force at the Pentagon."

Muddying things still further are comments from Jean Schaefer, deputy chief of public affairs for the Secretary of the Air Force. "We have very clear policies of what should be on the Web," she said. "We need to emphasize the policy to the field. It appears that this document shouldn't have been on the Web, and we have pulled the document in question. Our policy is clear in that documents that could make our operations vulnerable or threaten the safety of our people should not be available on the Web."

And now, apparently, neither should documents that help ensure the safety of our pilots, aircrews, firefighters and emergency responders.

-- Stephen I. Schwartz

UPDATE 3:17 PM: Cryptome has the document here.

(Big ups: Russ)

English to Arabic, Hands-Free

Four-and-a-half years after 9/11, only a teeny-tiny percentage of our troops speak Arabic. And despite advertised plans for increased language training, that's not going to change any time soon. In the meantime, the military is turning to technological fixes -- translator gadgets that let soldiers convey simple commands.

The best known of these is probably the PDA-like Phraselator. Make a couple of stylus taps, or say a few words in English, and out comes an Arabic phrase. "It gets really funny looks from the Iraqis, but they think it's cool," one company commander tells me.

But the Phraselator can be a bit of a pain, too. Because you have to hold the thing in your hands in order for it to work. And that makes it a lot harder to hold an M-16 at the same time.

So Integrated Wave Technologies has come up with a translator that doesn't require any a hand to work. Talk English into a headset, and a ammo clip-sized speaker broadcasts out the Arabic equivalent. Check out this video for an example. You'll see, the translators aren't for carrying on conversation; they only interpret a few words at a time. But they seem to work well, when you're yelling at someone to get on the ground while your gun is pointed at his head. About 600 of the things are now in theater, according to the company.

The next step, of course, is to make the translators two-way, so Iraqis can talk back to the soldiers. Integrated Wave Technologies has a Darpa contract to do just that -- one of several translation projects the Pentagon's way-out researh arm is funding.

Decades-Old Docs Reclassified

Phew. I was worried there, for a second, that some evil-doer might learn our country's most sensitive secrets. Like the CIA's 1948 plan to drop leaflets behind the Iron Curtain. Or an English translation of a newspaper article on China's nukes -- from Belgrade, 1962.

Luckily, we won't have to worry about those breaches in security any more. Thanks to some intrepid intelligence agency bureaucrats, the New York Times reports, 55,000 "historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians... have been remov[ed] from public access."

The [program] began in 1999... But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid [who has put his version of the whole affair online, and posted some of the reclassified papers] was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.

Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.

"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."

"It is important to understand that there is no rigorous, consensual definition of what constitutes classified information," Steven Aftergood notes in today's Secrecy News. "Instead, in a practical sense, classified information is whatever the executive branch says it is."

In 1997, the Central Intelligence Agency declassified the total intelligence budget for that year ($26.6 billion). But intelligence budget figures from three, four and five decades earlier remain classified. Why? Because the CIA says so!

One might argue that it should be the other way around -- budget figures from the remote past should be declassified while more recent figures should perhaps be classified. But such logic is foreign to CIA classification policy, and to the classification system as a whole.

"90 percent" of what's currently classified is being wrongly kept from the public, Rep. Chris Shays, chairman the national security panel of the House Committee on Government Reform, once told me. "I've read supposedly classified documents where page after page after page didn't tell me anything I didn't already know."

Now, some might argue that it's still better to err on the side of keeping things clandestine -- that the risk of releasing one important secret is so great, it outweighs any potential benefit of making the information free.

Those people would not include some of the country's top current and former spies, however. They argue that, by keeping a gazillion documents under wraps, spooks and cops and soldiers are prevented from sharing information. And that's not a good thing, when you're trying to track down terrorists.

"Our secrecy system is all about protecting secrecy officers, and has nothing to do with protecting secrets. It's a self-licking ice-cream cone," said Rich Haver, Donald Rumsfeld's former special assistant for intelligence. "We're compartmentalizing the shit out of things. It's causing a total meltdown of our intelligence processes."

UPDATE 4:08 PM: Shays is going to hold a hearing on this next month. "Secrets are kept to protect the national security," he said in news release, "not to prevent embarrassment or protect Cold War bureaucrats from history's judgment. When many knowledgeable voices, including the 9/11 Commission, have called for greater openness and information sharing, our policies on creation and handling of sensitive information are moving in exactly the opposite direction. That threatens national security."

UPDATE 4:15 PM: 1442 days ago, when the bioweapons-watchers Sunshine Project filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the National Academies of Science about some supposedly "non-lethal" weapons research, the group figured it would get a speedy response. After all, there's a law that "when NAS does a study for the government, documents that are deposited in the Public Access Records File are public." The Sunshine Project is still waiting. It's one of the group's "Top 10 Freedom of Information Failures,"