The Null Device
2007/9/20
Former Australian defense minister Kim Beazley has revealed that the Australian security services cracked US a defence code in the 1980s, to enable them to reprogram their US-built Hornet fighters to identify potentially hostile aircraft. The Hornets, you see, were shipped pre-programmed with the profiles of Warsaw Pact aircraft, of which there weren't many in the Asia/Pacific region, and thus would have been somewhat less than useful when faced with, say, Indonesian or New Zealand fighters. This setting was impossible to change without top secret codes, which the US promised to provide but somehow never came up with. Given that there's no consumer complaints commission that can order the return of jet fighters should they prove unfit for purpose, the Australians (which, presumably, means ASIO/ASIS/DSD) did the only thing they could: they spied on the Americans and stole the codes. What happened to whoever authorised the purchase of the aircraft without ensuring that they were fit for purpose is not known.
"In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves and we got another radar that could identify (enemy planes).
Mr Beazley said the Americans knew what the Australians were doing and were intrigued by the progress they made.I wonder whether the Australian department of defense has learned enough from this to demand the source code to the Joint Strike Fighter, as the British are doing. Or whether, indeed, Australia has the clout to make such requests.
Among recent proposals for keeping one step ahead of the terrorists is the use of formerly secret Russian mind-control and mind-reading technology, such as testing airline passengers' subconscious responses to scrambled images with terrorist-related themes:
SSRM Tek is presented to a subject as an innocent computer game that flashes subliminal images across the screen -- like pictures of Osama bin Laden or the World Trade Center. The "player" -- a traveler at an airport screening line, for example -- presses a button in response to the images, without consciously registering what he or she is looking at. The terrorist's response to the scrambled image involuntarily differs from the innocent person's, according to the theory.
Despite Smirnov's death, Rusalkina predicts an "arms race" in psychotronic weapons. Such weapons, she asserts, are far more dangerous than nuclear weapons. She pointed, for example, to a spate of Russian news reports about "zombies" -- innocent people whose memories had been allegedly wiped out by mind control weapons.Meanwhile, some are sceptical about whether or not one can actually deduce terrorist intent from such cues.
The problem, he said, is that there is no science he is aware of that can produce the specificity or sensitivity to pick out a terrorist, let alone influence behavior. "We're still working at the level of how rats learn that light predicts food," he explained. "That's the level of modern neuroscience."
(via Boing Boing) ¶ 0