Eeyore's News and view

Gates may recommend new 'Cyber Command'
Pentagon hacked, fighter data stolen
April 21: Cyber spies that may have originated in China hacked into the Pentagon and stole several terabytes worth of data about the joint strike fighter program. The Pentagon says no sensitive material was taken. NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports.
updated 11:48 p.m. ET, Tues., April 21, 2009
While no final decisions have been made, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is expected to recommend the creation of a new military command to face the growing threat from cyber warfare, a senior U.S. official told NBC News on Tuesday.
According to the official, the program would not be on the level of a separate combatant command. Instead, the likely recommendation would be to create a "sub-unified command" that would focus entirely on combating cyber warfare but exist under the current Strategic Command.
A senior Pentagon official revealed that cyber attacks against military computer networks have "increased significantly ... more than doubled" in the past six months. The attacks were said to include "thousands of probes a day" against Web sites associated with the Defense Department.
One such cyber attack occurred two years ago against the military's most expensive weapons system, Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-35 Lightning II program — also known as the Joint Strike Fighter. Pentagon officials told The Associated Press that the hackers were able to steal data about some of the plane's systems through computer networks, although they insisted that the information was not classified and that the loss of the information did not present any potential threat to the aircraft.
One defense official said it is not clear who did it, or whether it was an attempt at corporate thievery or a hacker trying to harm the program. The Pentagon is expected to pay about $300 billion to buy nearly 2,500 of the F-35 jets for the Air Force, Navy and Marines.
Although the number of cyber attacks and simple "probes" has increased, none of the attacks has resulted in the loss of highly classified information, the officials said. The information is contained only in the U.S. military's internal computer networks, which are not accessible over the Internet and considered largely impenetrable by outside hackers.
The officials talked about the attacks and the Pentagon's response on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Gates is expected to make a final decision and recommendation on the Cyber Command following the release of a White House strategy on cyber defense. There have been increasingly frequent warnings that the nation's information networks are at risk and have been repeatedly probed by foreign governments, criminals or other groups.
In the wake of disclosures about the cyber attack, Lockheed Martin issued a carefully worded statement saying that "to our knowledge there has never been any classified information breach." The company added that its systems are continually attacked, and that measures have been put in place to detect and stop the hacking.
The statement did not specifically deny a breach into unclassified information or less sensitive areas of the F-35 program.
The cyber attacks were first reported Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal.
One official said that outside cyber scans of the fighter program are not new, and that they could well involve subcontractors and suppliers around the world. Those scans may not involve critical, classified systems, the officials said.
Lockheed is the lead contractor for the F-35. A number of other companies, including Northrop Grumman Corp. and BAE Systems, make parts and systems for the plane.
According to U.S. counterintelligence officials, this is not the first military jet program that has suffered cyber attacks.
During a speech in Texas earlier this month, Joel Brenner, head of the U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, said officials have seen counterfeit computer chips "make their way into U.S. military fighter aircraft."
Brenner added: "You don't sneak counterfeit chips into another nation's aircraft to steal data. When it's done intentionally, it's done to degrade systems, or to have the ability to do so at a time of one's choosing."
His comments were not related to the F-35, according to administration officials. But Brenner has also warned that careless, laid-off or disaffected employees can often be the root of corporate cyber leaks. Foreign governments or groups, he said, plan computer attacks that take advantage of sloppy workers or bad network management practices.
In a series of recent speeches, Brenner has repeatedly raised the alarm that foreign governments and other groups are accessing government systems and installing malicious software.
"The Chinese are relentless and don't seem to care about getting caught. And we have seen Chinese network operations inside certain of our electricity grids. Do I worry about those grids, and about air traffic control systems, water supply systems, and so on? You bet I do," Brenner told an audience at the University of Texas at Austin.
While some reports indicated the source of the F-35 hack was traced back to China, Pentagon officials told NBC News that there was no proof of that, and that the U.S. may not be able to prove the Chinese government was behind the cyber attack.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30319722/

China denies its cyber-spies hacked into the Pentagon's most expensive weapons programme
Computer spies have repeatedly breached the Pentagon's costliest weapons program, the $300billion (£206billion) Joint Strike Fighter project.
The intruders - who may have been Chinese - were able to copy and siphon data related to design and electronics systems on the F-35 Lightning II fighter plane.
That could make it easier to defend against the plane, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The spies could not access the most sensitive material, which is kept on computers that are not connected to the Internet, the paper added.
Attacks like these - or U.S. awareness of them - appear to have escalated in the past six months, said one former official.
'There's never been anything like it,' the official said.
'It's everything that keeps this country going.'
Citing people briefed on the matter, it said the intruders entered through vulnerabilities in the networks of two or three of the contractors involved in building the fighter jet.
The Journal said Pentagon officials declined to comment directly on the matter, but the paper said the Air Force had begun an investigation.
The identity of the attackers and the amount of damage to the project could not be established, the paper said.
The Journal quoted former U.S. officials as saying the attacks seemed to have originated in China, although it noted it was difficult to determine the origin because of the ease of hiding identities online.
Today Chinese officials reacted angrily to the accusation.
'China has not changed its stance on hacking,' a Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying.
'China has always been against hacking and we have cracked down very hard on hacking. This is not a Chinese phenomenon. It happens everywhere in the world.'
A Pentagon report issued last month said that the Chinese military has made 'steady progress' in developing online-warfare techniques.
The Chinese Embassy said China 'opposes and forbids all forms of cyber crimes,' the Journal said.
The officials added there had also been breaches of the U.S. Air Force's air traffic control system in recent months.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1172326/China-denies-cyber-spies-hacked-Pentagons-expensive-weapons-programme.html

Interference Bloomberg Style
Posted by:Sebastian on Apr 20th, 2009
This New York Times piece shines quite a stunning flashlight at Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-gun operation:
He was arrested in 2005 and accused of using his wife and others as “straw buyers” to acquire more than two dozen sawed-off shotguns, semiautomatic pistols and rifles in Virginia, most of their serial numbers obliterated, and selling them for thousands of dollars in New York City. He faced up to five years in prison if convicted.
What follows is outrageous. Federal prosecutors wanted to throw the book at this guy. Bloomberg moved in and cut a deal, and got him off with probation, saying “his cooperation was ‘extraordinary’ and ‘really helpful to the city.’”
So you have a guy the feds managed to catch, who was unambiguously buying guns through a straw purchaser in Virginia, filing the numbers off the gun, and trafficking them illegally up to New York City, and selling them on the streets. And Bloomberg lets him off with a slap on the wrist? Why?
Mr. Winfield was no doubt helped by the timing of his case, which occurred as the city was looking for help in two lawsuits it filed in 2006 against more than two dozen gun dealers in Virginia and four other states.
Yep. Now we know why ATF was pissed at Bloomberg when it happened. They had an honest to God criminal gun trafficker, and Bloomberg got him off pretty much scott free so he could grandstand in public, crap all over ther rights of businessmen with no connection to his state, and all the while pandering to a fawning media who will congratulate him on doing so much to help rid New Yorkers of the scourge of “illegal guns.”
Well, it looks like the gig is up now. It’s never been about controlling crime. It’s about controlling people. Anyone who says that’s nonsense needs to look no further than Michael Bloomberg.
http://www.snowflakesinhell.com/2009/04/20/interference-bloomberg-style/

Robots are narrowing the gap with humans
WASHINGTON — Robots are gaining on us humans.
Thanks to exponential increases in computer power — which is roughly doubling every two years — robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people.
Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge.
Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer "brains'' now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims or explore craters on Mars.
At a "Robobusiness" conference in Boston last week, companies demonstrated a robot firefighter, gardener, receptionist, tour guide and security guard.
You name it, a high-tech wizard somewhere is trying to make a robot do it.
A Japanese housekeeping robot can move chairs, sweep the floor, load a tray of dirty dishes in a dishwasher and put dirty clothes in a washing machine.
Intel, the worldwide computer-chip maker, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., has developed a self-controlled mobile robot called Herb, the Home Exploring Robotic Butler. Herb can recognize faces and carry out generalized commands such as "please clean this mess," according to Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer.
In a talk last year titled "Crossing the Chasm Between Humans and Machines: the Next 40 Years,'' the widely respected Rattner lent some credibility to the often-ridiculed effort to make machines as smart as people.
"The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago," Rattner said. It's conceivable, he added, that "machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason in the not-so-distant future.''
Programming a robot to perform household chores without breaking dishes or bumping into walls is hard enough, but creating a truly intelligent machine still remains far beyond human ability.
Artificial intelligence researchers have struggled for half a century to imitate the staggering complexity of the brain, even in creatures as lowly as a cockroach or fruit fly. Although computers can process data at lightning speeds, the trillions of ever-changing connections between animal and human brain cells surpass the capacity of even the largest supercomputers
"One day we will create a human-level artificial intelligence,'' wrote Rodney Brooks, a robot designer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass. "But how and when we will get there — and what will happen after we do — are now the subjects of fierce debate.''
"We're in a slow retreat in the face of the steady advance of our mind's children,'' agreed Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. "Eventually, we're going to reach the point where everybody's going to say, 'Of course machines are smarter than we are.' ''
"The truly interesting question is what happens after if we have truly intelligent robots,'' Saffo said. "If we're very lucky, they'll treat us as pets. If not, they'll treat us as food.''
Some far-out futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and technology evangelist in Wellesley Hills, a Boston suburb, predict that robots will match human intelligence by 2029, only 20 years from now. Other experts think that Kurzweil is wildly over-optimistic.
According to Kurzweil, robots will prove their cleverness by passing the so-called "Turing test.'' In the test, devised by British computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950, a human judge chats casually with a concealed human and a hidden machine. If the judge can't tell which responses come from the human and which from the machine, the machine is said to show human-level intelligence.
"We can expect computers to pass the Turing test, indicating intelligence indistinguishable from that of biological humans, by the end of the 2020s,'' Kurzweil wrote in his 2005 book, "The Singularity Is Near.''
To Kurzweil, the "singularity'' is when a machine equals or exceeds human intelligence. It won't come in "one great leap,'' he said, "but lots of little steps to get us from here to there.''
Kurzweil has made a movie, also titled "The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future,'' that's due in theaters this summer.
Intel's Rattner is more conservative. He said that it would take at least until 2050 to close the mental gap between people and machines. Others say that it will take centuries, if it ever happens.
Some eminent thinkers, such as Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive scientist, Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, and Mitch Kapor, a leading computer scientist in San Francisco, doubt that a robot can ever successfully impersonate a human being.
It's "extremely difficult even to imagine what it would mean for a computer to perform a successful impersonation,'' Kapor said. "While it is possible to imagine a machine obtaining a perfect score on the SAT or winning 'Jeopardy' — since these rely on retained facts and the ability to recall them — it seems far less possible that a machine can weave things together in new ways or . . . have true imagination in a way that matches everything people can do.''
Nevertheless, roboticists are working to make their mechanical creatures seem more human. The Japanese are particularly fascinated with "humanoid'' robots, with faces, movements and voices resembling their human masters.
A fetching female robot model from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology lab in Tsukuba, Japan, sashays down a runway, turns and bows when "she'' meets a real girl.
"People become emotionally attached'' to robots, Saffo said. Two-thirds of the people who own Roombas, the humble floor-sweeping robots, give them names, he said. One-third take their Roombas on vacation.
At a technology conference last October in San Jose, Calif., Cynthia Breazeal, an MIT robot developer, demonstrated her attempts to build robots that mimic human and social skills. She showed off "Leonardo,'' a rabbity creature that reacts appropriately when a person smiles or scowls.
"Robot sidekicks are coming,'' Breazeal said. "We already can see the first distant cousins of R2D2," the sociable little robot in the "Star Wars" movies.
Other MIT researchers have developed an autonomous wheelchair that understands and responds to commands to "go to my room'' or "take me to the cafeteria.''
So far, most robots are used primarily in factories, repeatedly performing single tasks. The Robotics Institute of America estimates that more than 186,000 industrial robots are being used in the United States, second only to Japan. It's estimated that more than a million robots are being used worldwide, with China and India rapidly expanding their investments in robotics.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/66530.html

'Quiet Sun' baffling astronomers
The Sun is the dimmest it has been for nearly a century.
There are no sunspots, very few solar flares - and our nearest star is the quietest it has been for a very long time.
The observations are baffling astronomers, who are due to study new pictures of the Sun, taken from space, at the UK National Astronomy Meeting.
The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity. At its peak, it has a tumultuous boiling atmosphere that spits out flares and planet-sized chunks of super-hot gas. This is followed by a calmer period.
Last year, it was expected that it would have been hotting up after a quiet spell. But instead it hit a 50-year year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity.
According to Prof Louise Hara of University College London, it is unclear why this is happening or when the Sun is likely to become more active again.
"There's no sign of us coming out of it yet," she told BBC News.
"At the moment, there are scientific papers coming out suggesting that we'll be going into a normal period of activity soon.
"Others are suggesting we'll be going into another minimum period - this is a big scientific debate at the moment."
In the mid-17th Century, a quiet spell - known as the Maunder Minimum - lasted 70 years, and led to a "mini ice-age".
This has resulted in some people suggesting that a similar cooling might offset the impact of climate change.
According to Prof Mike Lockwood of Southampton University, this view is too simplistic.
"I wish the Sun was coming to our aid but, unfortunately, the data shows that is not the case," he said.
Prof Lockwood was one of the first researchers to show that the Sun's activity has been gradually decreasing since 1985, yet overall global temperatures have continued to rise.
"If you look carefully at the observations, it's pretty clear that the underlying level of the Sun peaked at about 1985 and what we are seeing is a continuation of a downward trend (in solar activity) that's been going on for a couple of decades.
"If the Sun's dimming were to have a cooling effect, we'd have seen it by now."
'Middle ground'
Evidence from tree trunks and ice cores suggest that the Sun is calming down after an unusually high point in its activity.
Professor Lockwood believes that as well as the Sun's 11-year cycle, there is an underlying solar oscillation lasting hundreds of years.
He suggests that 1985 marked the "grand maximum" in this long-term cycle and the Maunder Minimum marked its low point.
"We are re-entering the middle ground after a period which has seen the Sun in its top 10% of activity," said Professor Lockwood.
"We would expect it to be more than a hundred years before we get down to the levels of the Maunder Minimum."
He added that the current slight dimming of the Sun is not going to reverse the rise in global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
"What we are seeing is consistent with a global temperature rise, not that the Sun is coming to our aid."
Data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows global average temperatures have risen by about 0.7C since the beginning of the 20th Century.
And the IPCC projects that the world will continue to warm, with temperatures expected to rise between 1.8C and 4C by the end of the century.
No-one knows how the centuries-long waxing and waning of the Sun works. However, astronomers now have space telescopes studying the Sun in detail.
According to Prof Richard Harrison of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire, this current quiet period gives astronomers a unique opportunity.
"This is very exciting because as astronomers we've never seen anything like this before in our lifetimes," he said.
"We have spacecraft up there to study the Sun in phenomenal detail. With these telescopes we can study this minimum of activity in a way that we could not have done so in the past."

Eeyore's News and view

Clinton: NKorea plan to fire missile 'provocative'
MEXICO CITY (AP) - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday warned North Korea that firing a missile for any purpose would be a "provocative act" that would have consequences.
North Korea is loading a rocket on a launch pad in anticipation of the launch of a communications satellite between April 4 and 8, U.S. counterproliferation and intelligence officials said. North Korea announced its intention to launch the satellite in February, but regional powers worry the claim is a cover for the launch of a long-range missile capable of reaching Alaska.
Clinton told reporters during a visit to Mexico City that the U.S. believes the North Korean plan to fire a missile for any purpose would violate a U.N. Security Council resolution barring the country from ballistic activity. She linked a missile launch to the future of talks between the U.S., North Korea and four other nations aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
"We have made it very clear that the North Koreans pursue this pathway at a cost and with consequences to the six-party talks, which we would like to see revived," Clinton said.
"We intend to raise this violation of the Security Council resolution, if it goes forward, in the U.N.," she said. "This provocative action in violation of the U.N. mandate will not go unnoticed and there will be consequences."
National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair said earlier this month that all indications suggest North Korea will in fact launch a satellite. However, North Korea faked a satellite launch in 1998 to cloak a missile development test.
In 2006, North Korea launched a Taepodong-2 that blew up less than a minute into flight.
Both the satellite launch rocket and long-range missile use similar technology, and arms control experts fear even a satellite launch would be a test toward eventually launching a long-range missile.
South Korea, the U.S. and Japan have urged North Korea to refrain from launching a satellite or missile, calling it a violation of the Security Council resolution. North Korea insists it has the right to develop its space program and on Tuesday warned the U.S., Japan and its allies not to interfere with the launch.
In Seoul, the Defense Ministry and the National Intelligence Service said Thursday that they cannot confirm whether the North has loaded the rocket on the launch pad.
South Korea's chief nuclear envoy, Wi Sung-lac, said Wednesday after returning from talks with his Beijing counterparts that a launch would trigger a response.
"If North Korea launches rocket, certain countermeasures are unavoidable," he said. He refused to elaborate, saying the measures, including any sanctions, would be discussed among U.N. Security Council member nations.
It probably won't be clear if the latest launch is a satellite or a missile test until footage can be analyzed after the event; the trajectory of a missile is markedly different from that of a satellite.
Analysts have been watching for signs of a satellite or missile on the launch pad in Musudan-ni, the northeast coastal launch site. Satellite imagery from March 16 showed progress toward mounting a rocket, with a crane hovering over the launch pad, said Christian LeMiere, an editor at Jane's Intelligence Review in London.
LeMiere said that once the rocket is mounted, scientists would need at least a week to fuel and carry out tests before any launch. Images from earlier this month did not indicate the rocket or missile had been mounted, he said.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090326/D975G4M80.html

This was one of the very first things i blogged about, it was the stupid, unecessary deaths in Iraq from electrocion. Here it is in the news again
AP IMPACT: More bad wiring imperils troops in Iraq March 26, 2009 - 8:29am
Iraq war veteran, and former California Army National Guardsman Sgt. Ron Vance, is seen at his in Fresno, Calif., home Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2009. The electric shock that ripped through Vance's body while showering at a U.S. base in Taji, Iraq, in August 2004 knocked him unconscious. Vance said he didn't feel the military took the incident seriously: "It wasn't a priority on their list. It was like, he's fine. He's alive. He's OK." (AP Photo/Gary Kazanjian) By KIMBERLY HEFLING
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The military is racing to inspect more than 90,000 U.S.-run facilities across Iraq to reduce a deadly threat troops face far off the battlefield: electrocution or shock while showering or using appliances.
About one-third of the inspections so far have turned up major electrical problems, according to interviews and an internal military document obtained by The Associated Press. Half of the problems they found have since been fixed but about 65,000 facilities still need to be inspected, which could take the rest of this year. Senior Pentagon officials were on Capitol Hill this week for briefings on the findings.
The work assigned to Task Force SAFE, which oversees the inspections and repairs, is aimed at preventing deaths like that of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, 24, of Pittsburgh. He died in January 2008, one of at least three soldiers killed while showering since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Scores more soldiers suffered shocks between September 2006 and July 2008, according to a database maintained by KBR Inc., the Houston-based contractor that oversees maintenance at most U.S. facilities in Iraq.
"We got a ton of buildings we know probably aren't safe and we just don't have them done yet," said Jim Childs, an electrician the task force hired to help with the inspections. "It's Russian roulette. I cringe every time I hear of a shock."
Ron Vance, who served as a sergeant in the California Army National Guard, remembers being knocked out cold in a shower building in 2004 in Taji, Iraq. He said he screamed and fell while showering, suffering burns on his back and shoulders. Another soldier who tried to pry him from the shower head also was injured. Vance, 57, of Fresno, Calif., said he's still too traumatized to shower without his wife nearby.
Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., called Task Force SAFE's findings troubling. He said the task force is doing good work but said problems should have been fixed much earlier.
"Just imagine getting the news that they've done 25,000 facilities, but your son or daughter is in the 65,000 they haven't done," Casey told the AP.
Last year, 94 troops stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan or other Central Command countries sought medical treatment for electric shock, according to Defense Department health data. KBR's database lists 231 electric shock incidents in the more than 89,000 facilities the company runs in Iraq, according to military records.
KBR is the target of a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Maseth's family. They claim the company knew there were electrical problems in the building where he died, but didn't fix them. His mother testified last year on Capitol Hill.
Army investigators have since reclassified Maseth's death as negligent homicide caused by KBR and two of its supervisors. An Army investigator said KBR failed to ensure work was done by qualified electricians and plumbers. The case is under legal review.
"KBR is not responsible for the electrocution deaths widely reported, including that of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth," Heather Browne, a KBR spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
KBR and another contractor, Arkel International, are the targets of a second lawsuit, filed by the family of another soldier electrocuted in Iraq, Staff Sgt. Christopher Lee Everett, 23, of Huntsville, Texas. Everett, a member of the Texas Army National Guard, was killed in September 2005 when the power washer he was using to clean a vehicle short-circuited.
Task Force SAFE inspectors found many of the facilities that fall under KBR's contract have electrical problems, according to an internal military document obtained by The Associated Press. Of the 20,340 maintained by KBR and inspected so far, 6,935 failed the government inspection, the document said. When about 2,000 of the buildings with faulty work were re-inspected, the facilities passed, the document said.
The Defense Contract Management Agency has accepted KBR's plans to correct the problems, according to the document the AP obtained. It said the agency will closely oversee KBR's work.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., questioned why KBR has been allowed to continue to perform electrical work in Iraq. He said the military should take a more careful look at the electrical work in Afghanistan, too, where KBR also has a large contract for electrical work.
"If they found widespread problems, the obvious question is why has there not been action to remove the contract and bring in another contractor?" Dorgan said.
Browne, the company spokeswoman, said KBR has cooperated with the government, performing technical inspection and providing requested information.
Task Force SAFE (the acronym stands for Safety Action for Fire and Electricity) said it is making progress. The Army is tracking reports of just over two fires each day in Iraq, mostly blamed on electrical faults. But that's down from nearly five fires a day, Brig. Gen. Kurt Stein said in an e-mail to the AP. Stein said the number of electrical shocks has also been reduced.
"Although we are still seeing some electrical shocks, they tend to be minor and are often preventable," Stein said.
In addition to the repairs, Stein said the military has purchased more reliable surge protectors to replace ones that had been bought in Iraq.
"Our hearts go out to the families of those who died or were injured from electrical shock or fire," Stein said. "We take our job to inspect, identify, repair and prevent electrical and fire incidents very seriously."
Vance, the guardsman who was shocked in the shower, said the military didn't take his injuries seriously. He's since retired on partial disability from the Veterans Affairs Department for a "cognitive disorder" related to the incident, but he has sought additional compensation for what he describes as ongoing knee and shoulder problems for falling in the shower.
"I really don't think they cared. I didn't die," Vance said. "It wasn't a priority on their list. It was like, he's fine. He's alive. He's OK."
http://wtop.com/?nid=116&sid=1633395

I guess i'm just stupid, but every time government gets a hold of something they mess it up. Too many examples and to little time. One of the best is the famed "chicken ranch" in Nevada. This profitable whore house they took for taxes and then they tried to run it themselves. They failed it was not because of the fact they were not familiar with how they are run or the people involved (they are all whores on Capitol hill) they just foul up everything they touch. And now they want control over just about everything.
Geithner to Propose Vast Expansion Of U.S. Oversight of Financial System
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner plans to propose today a sweeping expansion of federal authority over the financial system, breaking from an era in which the government stood back from financial markets and allowed participants to decide how much risk to take in the pursuit of profit.
The Obama administration's plan, described by several sources, would extend federal regulation for the first time to all trading in financial derivatives and to companies including large hedge funds and major insurers such as American International Group. The administration also will seek to impose uniform standards on all large financial firms, including banks, an unprecedented step that would place significant limits on the scope and risk of their activities.
Most of these initiatives would require legislation.
Geithner plans to make the case for the regulatory reform agenda in testimony before Congress this morning, and he is expected to introduce proposals to regulate the largest financial firms. In coming months, the administration plans to detail its strategy in three other areas: protecting consumers, eliminating flaws in existing regulations and enhancing international coordination.
The testimony will not call for any existing federal agencies to be eliminated or combined, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The plan focuses on setting standards first, leaving for later any reshaping of the government's administrative structure.
The nation's financial regulations are largely an accumulation of responses to financial crises. Federal bank regulation was a product of the Civil War. The Federal Reserve was created early in the 20th century to mitigate a long series of monetary crises. The Great Depression delivered deposit insurance and a federally sponsored mortgage market. In the midst of a modern economic upheaval, the Obama administration is pitching the most significant regulatory expansion since that time.
An administration official said the goal is to set new rules of the road to restore faith in the financial system. In essence, the plan is a rebuke of raw capitalism and a reassertion that regulation is critical to the healthy function of financial markets and the steady flow of money to borrowers.
The government also plans to push companies to pay employees based on their long-term performance, curtailing big paydays for short-term victories. Long-simmering anger about Wall Street pay practices erupted last week when the Obama administration disclosed that AIG had paid $165 million in bonuses to employees of its most troubled division, despite losing so much money that the government stepped in with more than $170 billion in emergency aid.
The administration's signature proposal is to vest a single federal agency with the power to police risk across the entire financial system. The agency would regulate the largest financial firms, including hedge funds and insurers not currently subject to federal regulation. It also would monitor financial markets for emergent dangers.
Geithner plans to call for legislation that would define which financial firms are sufficiently large and important to be subjected to this increased regulation. Those firms would be required to hold relatively more capital in their reserves against losses than smaller firms, to demonstrate that they have access to adequate funding to support their operations, and to maintain constantly updated assessments of their exposure to financial risk.
The designated agency would not replace existing regulators but would be granted the power to compel firms to comply with its directives. Geithner's testimony will not identify which agency should hold those powers, but sources familiar with the matter said that the Federal Reserve, widely viewed as the most obvious choice, is the administration's favored candidate.
Geithner and other officials have said in recent weeks that such powers could have kept in check the excesses of AIG and other large financial companies.
"The framework will significantly raise the prudential requirements, once we get through the crisis, that our largest and most interconnected financial firms must meet in order to ensure they do not pose risks to the system," Geithner said yesterday in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Geithner to Propose Vast Expansion Of U.S. Oversight of Financial System
Proposals to Rein in Financial Firms
Hand in glove with this expanded oversight, the administration also is seeking the authority to seize these large firms if they totter toward failure.
Under current law, the government can seize only banks.
The administration yesterday detailed its proposed process, under which the Federal Reserve Board, along with any agency overseeing the troubled company, would recommend the need for a takeover. The Treasury secretary, in consultation with the president, then would authorize the action. The firm would be placed under the control of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The government also would have the power to take intermediate steps to stabilize a firm, such as taking an ownership stake or providing loans.
"Destabilizing dangers can come from financial institutions besides banks, but our current regulatory system provides few ways to deal with these risks," Geithner said yesterday. "Our plan will give the government the tools to limit the risk-taking at firms that could set off cascading damage."
The administration compared the proposed process with the existing system under which banking regulators can take over failed banks and place them under FDIC control.
One important difference is that the decision to seize a bank is made by agencies that have considerable autonomy and are intentionally shielded from the political process. Some legislators have raised concerns about providing such powers to the Treasury secretary, a member of the president's Cabinet.
The cost of bank failures is carried by the industry, which pays assessments to the FDIC. The Treasury said it has not yet determined how to pay for takeovers under the proposed system. Possibilities include dunning taxpayers or collecting fees from all institutions the government considers possible candidates for seizure.
FDIC chairman Sheila C. Bair issued a statement that expressed support for an expansion of her agency's responsibilities.
"Due to the FDIC's extensive experience with resolving failed institutions and the cyclical nature of resolution work, it would make sense on many levels for the FDIC to be given this authority working in close cooperation with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors," Bair said.
The administration also wants to expand oversight of a broad category of unregulated investment firms including hedge funds, private-equity funds and venture capital funds, by requiring larger companies to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Firms also would have to provide financial information to help determine whether they are large enough to warrant additional regulation.
Hedge funds were designed to offer high-risk investment strategies to wealthy investors, but their role quickly grew from one on the fringe of the system to a place near the center. Some government officials have sought increased regulation of the industry since the 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management threatened the stability of the financial system.
Geithner also plans to call for the SEC to impose tougher standards on money-market mutual funds, investment accounts that appeal to investors by aping the features of checking accounts while offering higher interest rates. He will not make specific suggestions.
Geithner to Propose Vast Expansion Of U.S. Oversight of Financial System
Proposals to Rein in Financial Firms
SEC chairman Mary Schapiro plans to testify today that the SEC supports both proposals.
The administration's broad determination to regulate the totality of the financial markets also includes a plan to regulate the vast trade in derivatives, complex financial instruments that take their value from the performance of some other asset. Derivatives have become a basic tool of the financial markets, but trading in many variants is not regulated. Credit-default swaps, a major category of unregulated derivatives, played a major role in the collapse of AIG.
Geithner plans to call for the entire industry to be placed under strict regulation, including supervision of dealers in derivatives, mandatory use of central clearinghouses to process trades and uniform trading rules to ensure an orderly marketplace.
The Fed already is moving to improve the plumbing of the financial system, including of the derivatives trade. The administration wants to expand and formalize these efforts.
Senior government officials view these highly technical arrangements as critical to the restoration of a healthy financial system.
Staff writer Zachary A. Goldfarb contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/25/AR2009032502311.html?hpid=topnews

Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.
A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.
It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.
Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.
The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. "We're moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster," says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.
It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see "When hell comes to Earth"). If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.
The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.
Worse than Katrina
The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.
There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.
Though a solar outburst could conceivably be more powerful, "we haven't found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event", says James Green, head of NASA's planetary division and an expert on the events of 1859. "From a scientific perspective, that would be the one that we'd want to survive." However, the prognosis from the NAS analysis is that, thanks to our technological prowess, many of us may not.
There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimising power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.
The second problem is the grid's interdependence with the systems that support our lives: water and sewage treatment, supermarket delivery infrastructures, power station controls, financial markets and many others all rely on electricity. Put the two together, and it is clear that a repeat of the Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. "It's just the opposite of how we usually think of natural disasters," says John Kappenman, a power industry analyst with the Metatech Corporation of Goleta, California, and an advisor to the NAS committee that produced the report. "Usually the less developed regions of the world are most vulnerable, not the highly sophisticated technological regions."
According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people (see map). From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.
First to go - immediately for some people - is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.
There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly - delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.
Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites - but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.
72 hours of healthcare remaining
The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. "From the surveys I've done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more," says Kappenman. "A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two."
Within a month, then, the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.
Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month.
30 days of coal left
Nuclear power stations wouldn't fare much better. They are programmed to shut down in the event of serious grid problems and are not allowed to restart until the power grid is up and running.
With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration systems, people could begin to die within days. There is immediate danger for those who rely on medication. Lose power to New Jersey, for instance, and you have lost a major centre of production of pharmaceuticals for the entire US. Perishable medications such as insulin will soon be in short supply. "In the US alone there are a million people with diabetes," Kappenman says. "Shut down production, distribution and storage and you put all those lives at risk in very short order."
Help is not coming any time soon, either. If it is dark from the eastern seaboard to Chicago, some affected areas are hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away from anyone who might help. And those willing to help are likely to be ill-equipped to deal with the sheer scale of the disaster. "If a Carrington event happened now, it would be like a hurricane Katrina, but 10 times worse," says Paul Kintner, a plasma physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
In reality, it would be much worse than that. Hurricane Katrina's societal and economic impact has been measured at $81 billion to $125 billion. According to the NAS report, the impact of what it terms a "severe geomagnetic storm scenario" could be as high as $2 trillion. And that's just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back.
4-10 years to recover
"I don't think the NAS report is scaremongering," says Mike Hapgood, who chairs the European Space Agency's space weather team. Green agrees. "Scientists are conservative by nature and this group is really thoughtful," he says. "This is a fair and balanced report."
Such nightmare scenarios are not restricted to North America. High latitude nations such as Sweden and Norway have been aware for a while that, while regular views of the aurora are pretty, they are also reminders of an ever-present threat to their electricity grids. However, the trend towards installing extremely high voltage grids means that lower latitude countries are also at risk. For example, China is on the way to implementing a 1000-kilovolt electrical grid, twice the voltage of the US grid. This would be a superb conduit for space weather-induced disaster because the grid's efficiency to act as an antenna rises as the voltage between the grid and the ground increases. "China is going to discover at some point that they have a problem," Kappenman says.
Neither is Europe sufficiently prepared. Responsibility for dealing with space weather issues is "very fragmented" in Europe, says Hapgood.
Europe's electricity grids, on the other hand, are highly interconnected and extremely vulnerable to cascading failures. In 2006, the routine switch-off of a small part of Germany's grid - to let a ship pass safely under high-voltage cables - caused a cascade power failure across western Europe. In France alone, five million people were left without electricity for two hours. "These systems are so complicated we don't fully understand the effects of twiddling at one place," Hapgood says. "Most of the time it's alright, but occasionally it will get you."
The good news is that, given enough warning, the utility companies can take precautions, such as adjusting voltages and loads, and restricting transfers of energy so that sudden spikes in current don't cause cascade failures. There is still more bad news, however. Our early warning system is becoming more unreliable by the day.
By far the most important indicator of incoming space weather is NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE). The probe, launched in 1997, has a solar orbit that keeps it directly between the sun and Earth. Its uninterrupted view of the sun means it gives us continuous reports on the direction and velocity of the solar wind and other streams of charged particles that flow past its sensors. ACE can provide between 15 and 45 minutes' warning of any incoming geomagnetic storms. The power companies need about 15 minutes to prepare their systems for a critical event, so that would seem passable.
15 minutes' warning
However, observations of the sun and magnetometer readings during the Carrington event shows that the coronal mass ejection was travelling so fast it took less than 15 minutes to get from where ACE is positioned to Earth. "It arrived faster than we can do anything," Hapgood says.
There is another problem. ACE is 11 years old, and operating well beyond its planned lifespan. The onboard detectors are not as sensitive as they used to be, and there is no telling when they will finally give up the ghost. Furthermore, its sensors become saturated in the event of a really powerful solar flare. "It was built to look at average conditions rather than extremes," Baker says.
He was part of a space weather commission that three years ago warned about the problems of relying on ACE. "It's been on my mind for a long time," he says. "To not have a spare, or a strategy to replace it if and when it should fail, is rather foolish."
There is no replacement for ACE due any time soon. Other solar observation satellites, such as the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) can provide some warning, but with less detailed information and - crucially - much later. "It's quite hard to assess what the impact of losing ACE will be," Hapgood says. "We will largely lose the early warning capability."
The world will, most probably, yawn at the prospect of a devastating solar storm until it happens. Kintner says his students show a "deep indifference" when he lectures on the impact of space weather. But if policy-makers show a similar indifference in the face of the latest NAS report, it could cost tens of millions of lives, Kappenman reckons. "It could conceivably be the worst natural disaster possible," he says.
The report outlines the worst case scenario for the US. The "perfect storm" is most likely on a spring or autumn night in a year of heightened solar activity - something like 2012. Around the equinoxes, the orientation of the Earth's field to the sun makes us particularly vulnerable to a plasma strike.
What's more, at these times of year, electricity demand is relatively low because no one needs too much heating or air conditioning. With only a handful of the US grid's power stations running, the system relies on computer algorithms shunting large amounts of power around the grid and this leaves the network highly vulnerable to sudden spikes.
If ACE has failed by then, or a plasma ball flies at us too fast for any warning from ACE to reach us, the consequences could be staggering. "A really large storm could be a planetary disaster," Kappenman says.
So what should be done? No one knows yet - the report is meant to spark that conversation. Baker is worried, though, that the odds are stacked against that conversation really getting started. As the NAS report notes, it is terribly difficult to inspire people to prepare for a potential crisis that has never happened before and may not happen for decades to come. "It takes a lot of effort to educate policy-makers, and that is especially true with these low-frequency events," he says.
We should learn the lessons of hurricane Katrina, though, and realise that "unlikely" doesn't mean "won't happen". Especially when the stakes are so high. The fact is, it could come in the next three or four years - and with devastating effects. "The Carrington event happened during a mediocre, ho-hum solar cycle," Kintner says. "It came out of nowhere, so we just don't know when something like that is going to happen again."
Bibliography
Severe Space Weather Events - Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts (National Academies Press)
When hell comes to Earth
Severe space weather events often coincide with the appearance of sunspots, which are indicators of particularly intense magnetic fields at the sun's surface.
The chaotic motion of charged particles in the upper atmosphere of the sun creates magnetic fields that writhe, twist and turn, and occasionally snap and reconfigure themselves in what is known as a "reconnection". These reconnection events are violent, and can fling out billions of tonness of plasma in a "coronal mass ejection" (CME).
If flung towards the Earth, the plasma ball will accelerate as it travels through space and its intense magnetic field will soon interact with the planet's magnetic field, the magnetosphere. Depending on the relative orientation of the two fields, several things can happen. If the fields are oriented in the same direction, they slip round one another. In the worst case scenario, though, when the field of a particularly energetic CME opposes the Earth's field, things get much more dramatic. "The Earth can't cope with the plasma," says James Green, head of NASA's planetary division. "The CME just opens up the magnetosphere like a can-opener, and matter squirts in."
The sun's activity waxes and wanes every 11 years or so, with the appearance of sunspots following the same cycle. This period isn't consistent, however. Sometimes the interval between sunspot maxima is as short as nine years, other times as long as 14 years. At the moment the sun appears calm. "We're in the equivalent of an idyllic summer's day. The sun is quiet and benign, the quietest it has been for 100 years," says Mike Hapgood, who chairs the European Space Agency's space weather team, "but it could turn the other way." The next solar maximum is expected in 2012.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.300-space-storm-alert-90-seconds-from-catastrophe.html?full=true