Sat Mar 23, 2024 11:33 pm by globalturboCyber Weapons are the New Arms for War
The military has for years been developing offensive capabilities, giving it the power not just to defend the U.S. but to assail its foes. Using so-called cyber-kinetic attacks, Alexander and his forces now have the capability to physically destroy an adversary’s equipment and infrastructure, and potentially even to kill. Alexander has concluded that such cyber weapons are as crucial to 21st-century warfare as nuclear arms were in the 20th. And he and his cyber warriors have already launched their first attack. The cyber-weapon that came to be known as Stuxnet was created and built by the NSA in partnership with the CIA and Israeli intelligence in the mid-2000s. The first known piece of malware designed to destroy physical equipment, Stuxnet was aimed at Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz. By surreptitiously taking control of an industrial control link known as a Scada (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system, the sophisticated worm was able to damage about a thousand centrifuges used to enrich nuclear material.
But Stuxnet is only the beginning. Alexander’s agency has recruited thousands of computer experts, hackers, and engineering PhDs to expand U.S. offensive capabilities in the digital realm. The Pentagon has requested $4.7 billion for “cyberspace operations,” even as the budget of the CIA and other intelligence agencies could fall by $4.4 billion. It is pouring millions into cyber defense contractors. And more attacks may be planned.
On a remote stretch of desert in central Utah, the National Security Agency has built a massive, 1 million-square-foot data warehouse. Costing more than $1.5 billion, the highly secret facility is designed to house upward of trillions of intercepted phone calls, e-mail messages, internet searches and other communications intercepted by the agency as part of its expansive eavesdropping operations. The NSA is also completing work on another data warehouse, this one in San Antonio, Texas.
“Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Support to Psychological Operations” is based upon “Special Operations Forces Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Operations” Field Manual No. 34-36 published on 30 September 1991 by Department of the Army Headquarters in Washington DC.
Missions
PSYOP missions are planned products and psychological actions in peace or war that are directed toward foreign enemy, friendly, and neutral audiences. The purpose is to influence attitudes and behaviors to achieve national political and military objectives.
PSYOP supports varied military, political, and diplomatic actions across the operational continuum. These missions can be strategic, operational, or tactical missions.
Strategic PSYOP missions are conducted at the national or theater level to advance broad, long-term psychological objectives in support of national psychological objectives.
Operational PSYOP missions are conducted to achieve mid-term objectives in support of theater campaigns and major operations.
Tactical PSYOP missions are conducted to achieve immediate or short-term objectives in support of tactical military operations.
Any of the above categories of PSYOP may support more than one level of the operational continuum. That is why distinctions between the categories of PSYOP are often blurred.
Special operation forces (SOF), whether operating unilaterally or in cooperation with conventional forces across the entire operational continuum, must always consider non-military factors and objectives.
PSYOP missions:
Play a critical and integral role in achieving or addressing these non-military objectives.
Aid in accomplishing tactical, operational, and strategic military objectives.
May be the only military force employed.
Must be integrated with all operations to prevent contradictory or conflicting messages.
Some Declassified In-Q-tel Projects
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
Recorded Future – Using what they call a “Temporal Analytics Engine,” Recorded Future (RF) provides forecasting and analysis tools to help analysts predict future events by scanning sources on the internet, and extracting, measuring, and visualizing the information to show networks and patterns in the past, present, and future. As of 2015 the engine was described as “Web Intelligence Engine Visible Technologies – social media monitoring.
Digital Reasoning – Since 2012, the firm has sold its Synthesys software to banks and hedge funds, including UBS and Point72 Asset Management. Financial institutions use Synthesys to scan internal e-mails within a given company in search of unfamiliar patterns between employees, in terms of word-specific content, frequency and interpersonal connections. The aim is to predict fraud before it occurs.
Palantir – Palantir Technologies, Inc. is a private American software and services company, specializing in data analysis. The company is known for two software projects in particular: Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community and United States Department of Defense, fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor.
CallMiner – Phone speech analytics software
MASINT – Remote tracking, surveillance, and extraction of brain-waves typifying thought-forms, emotional states, analytic mind states, and others
Mohomine mohoClassifier – Organizes mass data
3VR – 3VR Inc. develops software enabling organizations to mine data from video. 3VR works with leading banks, governments, law enforcement and retailers at the moment.
Adaptx – Creates digital pens that speed up field data collection.
Basis Technology – Synthesizes the foreign chatter and provides software for text analytics in over twenty languages. They work primarily in applied natural language processing, deriving meaning from the ways people actually use language.
Cloudera – Large-scale data storage. Cloudera Enterprises is one of the most cost-effective ways for companies to securely carry out large-scale data analysis and storage.
FireEye – FireEye is one of the most advanced cybersecurity firms and specializes in protecting against botnet attacks and also works to combat the malware that brings computers into the network.
The Ember Corporation – Ember Corporation focuses on developing networking systems that simplify wirelessly networking low-power products. They’re focused on smart energy, remote monitoring, and remote control uses of their tech.
Infinite Z – Virtual-holographic simulation a reality through an interactive 3D environment.
OpenSpan – Makes software that enables organizations to see exactly what employees are doing on their computer: what programs they’re using, what progress they’re making, etc.
Seventh Sense – Develops health monitoring products that interface with human skin
Sonitus Medical – Makes a hearing system that transmits sound imperceptibly through the mouth. The SoundBite hearing system plays off the principle of bone conduction to transmit audial messages. A nearly invisible in-the-mouth hearing and communication platform is non-invasive and connects directly to the inner ear, allowing the user to hear transmitted messages through their skull.
Spotter RF – Makes super-powerful radars in a handheld form that can track a person walking anywhere within a 148 acre space, and it’s handheld.
Visible Technologies – Extracts business solutions from social media chatter with software that allows users to extract business value from social communities, and also give customer insights for brands online.
Walleye – Makes handheld devices that can see into and through solid objects
DARPA Applications
Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time – particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.
The Pentagon is building a tool to identify social media propaganda campaigns that produces counter-spin through computer artificial intelligence.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/07/pentagon-seeks-to-manipulate-social-media-for-propaganda-purposes.html
Interactive Facial Recognition in Real Time –BBC facial recognition programs help predict the success or failure of television programming. In the past, the BBC has used its facial recognition technology, built by in-house startup CrowdEmotion, to track 4,500 faces as people watched show trailers to see what kinds of emotions the commercials produced. They’ve also looked at how hundreds of study participants react to programs like Top Gear and Sherlock. http://fortune.com/2016/02/13/bbc-ads-crowdemotion/
The company CrowdSight uses facial recognition software in real time. They advertise on their website: “Understand and Predict your Audience! Deliver Better Experiences by Knowing their Emotional Behavior and Engagement in Real-time. CrowdSight Software Development Kit (SDK) is a flexible and easy-to-integrate Crowd Face Analysis Software which allows you to gather real-time, anonymous information about your audience while they behave spontaneously in different life environments. Understand your audience emotional reactions and engagement towards your products, content and campaigns, and recognize important demographics such as age, gender and ethnicity, in real-time. CrowdSight works offline and on the most popular desktop and mobile platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android).”
http://sightcorp.com/crowdsight/
Visual Evoked Potential (VEP) – A VEP is an electrical potential recorded after a subject is presented with a type of visual stimuli. There are several types of VEPs. Steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEPs) use potentials generated by exciting the retina, using visual stimuli modulated at certain frequencies. SSVEP’s stimuli are often formed from alternating checkerboard patterns and at times simply use flashing images. SSVEP has proved to be successful within many BCI systems. This is due to several factors, the signal elicited is measurable in as large a population as the transient VEP and blink movement and electro-cardiographic artefacts do not affect the frequencies monitored.
Synthetic Telepathy and Silent Communication – In a $6.3 million Army initiative to invent devices for telepathic communication, Gerwin Schalk, underwritten in a $2.2 million grant, found that it is possible to use ECoG signals to discriminate the vowels and consonants embedded in spoken and in imagined words. The results shed light on the distinct mechanisms associated with production of vowels and consonants, and could provide the basis for brain-based communication using imagined speech. Research into synthetic telepathy using sub-vocalization is taking place at the University of California, Irvine under lead scientist Mike D’Zmura.
The first such communication took place in the 1960s using EEG to create Morse code using brain alpha waves. Using EEG to communicate imagined speech is less accurate than the invasive method of placing an electrode between the skull and the brain. On February 27, 2013 the group of Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University and IINN-ELS successfully connected the brains of two rats with electronic interfaces that allowed them to directly share information, in the first-ever direct brain-to-brain interface. On 3 September 2014, scientists reported that direct communication between human brains was possible over extended distances through Internet transmission of EEG signals.
Sentient World Simulation – The DoD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR. Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.
“SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP),” the paper reads, so that military leaders can “develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners.” SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/
Insight Program – DARPA awarded a $14 million contract to SAIC for the DARPA Insight program, which is intended to help U.S. intelligence experts detect threat networks, irregular warfare, and terrorist operations by combining intelligence information from imaging sensors, crowd-source and other social network or text-based sensors, as well as from other sources for further analysis. The program seeks to fill gaps in current U.S. intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems that center on the inability to exploit and cross-cue several different intelligence sources automatically.
The DARPA Insight program seeks to develop integrated human/machine reasoning into intelligence equipment to encompass operator knowledge and reasoning when dealing quickly with complex data from many different sensors. SAIC experts will concentrate on these areas in building the Insight next-generation ISR analysis system.
SAIC experts will build model-based behavioral correlation, modeling, prediction, and threat network analysis tools that combine intelligence information across many different sources automatically to improve the efficiencies of multi-intelligence sensors. The company also will develop a unified data-management and processing environment that integrates new intelligence sensors and software algorithms.
EM fields and Hidden symbols – DARPA is revealing programs, which have existed for years, to develop methods and techniques to incept thoughts and ideas into the mind. They reveal how once a mind has been programmed with the memory patterns, words and symbols can trigger the programing without the need of the original device.
Mind Control Project – The aim of this program is to remotely disrupt political dissent and extremism by employing “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation” (TMS) in tandem with sophisticated propaganda based on this technology. TMS stimulates the temporal lobe of the brain with electromagnetic fields. The program, conducted by The Center for Strategic Communication, is based at Arizona State University. This research aims to literally induce or disrupt the operation of narratives within the brain. In other words, this research aims to stop individuals from thinking certain thoughts and make others believe things they normally would not believe. This research has tremendous interrogation possibilities and could potentially be used to more successfully spread propaganda or stop political upheaval to an unsuspecting public. This research is being conducted by The Center for Strategic Communication at ASU and is entitled “Toward Narrative Disruptors and Inductors: Mapping the Narrative Comprehension Network and its Persuasive Effects”.
The military has for years been developing offensive capabilities, giving it the power not just to defend the U.S. but to assail its foes. Using so-called cyber-kinetic attacks, Alexander and his forces now have the capability to physically destroy an adversary’s equipment and infrastructure, and potentially even to kill. Alexander has concluded that such cyber weapons are as crucial to 21st-century warfare as nuclear arms were in the 20th. And he and his cyber warriors have already launched their first attack. The cyber-weapon that came to be known as Stuxnet was created and built by the NSA in partnership with the CIA and Israeli intelligence in the mid-2000s. The first known piece of malware designed to destroy physical equipment, Stuxnet was aimed at Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz. By surreptitiously taking control of an industrial control link known as a Scada (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system, the sophisticated worm was able to damage about a thousand centrifuges used to enrich nuclear material.
But Stuxnet is only the beginning. Alexander’s agency has recruited thousands of computer experts, hackers, and engineering PhDs to expand U.S. offensive capabilities in the digital realm. The Pentagon has requested $4.7 billion for “cyberspace operations,” even as the budget of the CIA and other intelligence agencies could fall by $4.4 billion. It is pouring millions into cyber defense contractors. And more attacks may be planned.
On a remote stretch of desert in central Utah, the National Security Agency has built a massive, 1 million-square-foot data warehouse. Costing more than $1.5 billion, the highly secret facility is designed to house upward of trillions of intercepted phone calls, e-mail messages, internet searches and other communications intercepted by the agency as part of its expansive eavesdropping operations. The NSA is also completing work on another data warehouse, this one in San Antonio, Texas.
“The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
A Description of Psyops from a Military Document“Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Support to Psychological Operations” is based upon “Special Operations Forces Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Operations” Field Manual No. 34-36 published on 30 September 1991 by Department of the Army Headquarters in Washington DC.
Missions
PSYOP missions are planned products and psychological actions in peace or war that are directed toward foreign enemy, friendly, and neutral audiences. The purpose is to influence attitudes and behaviors to achieve national political and military objectives.
PSYOP supports varied military, political, and diplomatic actions across the operational continuum. These missions can be strategic, operational, or tactical missions.
Strategic PSYOP missions are conducted at the national or theater level to advance broad, long-term psychological objectives in support of national psychological objectives.
Operational PSYOP missions are conducted to achieve mid-term objectives in support of theater campaigns and major operations.
Tactical PSYOP missions are conducted to achieve immediate or short-term objectives in support of tactical military operations.
Any of the above categories of PSYOP may support more than one level of the operational continuum. That is why distinctions between the categories of PSYOP are often blurred.
Special operation forces (SOF), whether operating unilaterally or in cooperation with conventional forces across the entire operational continuum, must always consider non-military factors and objectives.
PSYOP missions:
Play a critical and integral role in achieving or addressing these non-military objectives.
Aid in accomplishing tactical, operational, and strategic military objectives.
May be the only military force employed.
Must be integrated with all operations to prevent contradictory or conflicting messages.
Some Declassified In-Q-tel Projects
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
Edward Bernays, Propaganda
Recorded Future – Using what they call a “Temporal Analytics Engine,” Recorded Future (RF) provides forecasting and analysis tools to help analysts predict future events by scanning sources on the internet, and extracting, measuring, and visualizing the information to show networks and patterns in the past, present, and future. As of 2015 the engine was described as “Web Intelligence Engine Visible Technologies – social media monitoring.Digital Reasoning – Since 2012, the firm has sold its Synthesys software to banks and hedge funds, including UBS and Point72 Asset Management. Financial institutions use Synthesys to scan internal e-mails within a given company in search of unfamiliar patterns between employees, in terms of word-specific content, frequency and interpersonal connections. The aim is to predict fraud before it occurs.
Palantir – Palantir Technologies, Inc. is a private American software and services company, specializing in data analysis. The company is known for two software projects in particular: Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community and United States Department of Defense, fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor.
CallMiner – Phone speech analytics software
MASINT – Remote tracking, surveillance, and extraction of brain-waves typifying thought-forms, emotional states, analytic mind states, and others
Mohomine mohoClassifier – Organizes mass data
3VR – 3VR Inc. develops software enabling organizations to mine data from video. 3VR works with leading banks, governments, law enforcement and retailers at the moment.
Adaptx – Creates digital pens that speed up field data collection.
Basis Technology – Synthesizes the foreign chatter and provides software for text analytics in over twenty languages. They work primarily in applied natural language processing, deriving meaning from the ways people actually use language.
Cloudera – Large-scale data storage. Cloudera Enterprises is one of the most cost-effective ways for companies to securely carry out large-scale data analysis and storage.
FireEye – FireEye is one of the most advanced cybersecurity firms and specializes in protecting against botnet attacks and also works to combat the malware that brings computers into the network.
The Ember Corporation – Ember Corporation focuses on developing networking systems that simplify wirelessly networking low-power products. They’re focused on smart energy, remote monitoring, and remote control uses of their tech.
Infinite Z – Virtual-holographic simulation a reality through an interactive 3D environment.
OpenSpan – Makes software that enables organizations to see exactly what employees are doing on their computer: what programs they’re using, what progress they’re making, etc.
Seventh Sense – Develops health monitoring products that interface with human skin
Sonitus Medical – Makes a hearing system that transmits sound imperceptibly through the mouth. The SoundBite hearing system plays off the principle of bone conduction to transmit audial messages. A nearly invisible in-the-mouth hearing and communication platform is non-invasive and connects directly to the inner ear, allowing the user to hear transmitted messages through their skull.
Spotter RF – Makes super-powerful radars in a handheld form that can track a person walking anywhere within a 148 acre space, and it’s handheld.
Visible Technologies – Extracts business solutions from social media chatter with software that allows users to extract business value from social communities, and also give customer insights for brands online.
Walleye – Makes handheld devices that can see into and through solid objects
DARPA Applications
Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time – particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.
The Pentagon is building a tool to identify social media propaganda campaigns that produces counter-spin through computer artificial intelligence.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/07/pentagon-seeks-to-manipulate-social-media-for-propaganda-purposes.html
Interactive Facial Recognition in Real Time –BBC facial recognition programs help predict the success or failure of television programming. In the past, the BBC has used its facial recognition technology, built by in-house startup CrowdEmotion, to track 4,500 faces as people watched show trailers to see what kinds of emotions the commercials produced. They’ve also looked at how hundreds of study participants react to programs like Top Gear and Sherlock. http://fortune.com/2016/02/13/bbc-ads-crowdemotion/
The company CrowdSight uses facial recognition software in real time. They advertise on their website: “Understand and Predict your Audience! Deliver Better Experiences by Knowing their Emotional Behavior and Engagement in Real-time. CrowdSight Software Development Kit (SDK) is a flexible and easy-to-integrate Crowd Face Analysis Software which allows you to gather real-time, anonymous information about your audience while they behave spontaneously in different life environments. Understand your audience emotional reactions and engagement towards your products, content and campaigns, and recognize important demographics such as age, gender and ethnicity, in real-time. CrowdSight works offline and on the most popular desktop and mobile platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android).”
http://sightcorp.com/crowdsight/
Visual Evoked Potential (VEP) – A VEP is an electrical potential recorded after a subject is presented with a type of visual stimuli. There are several types of VEPs. Steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEPs) use potentials generated by exciting the retina, using visual stimuli modulated at certain frequencies. SSVEP’s stimuli are often formed from alternating checkerboard patterns and at times simply use flashing images. SSVEP has proved to be successful within many BCI systems. This is due to several factors, the signal elicited is measurable in as large a population as the transient VEP and blink movement and electro-cardiographic artefacts do not affect the frequencies monitored.
Synthetic Telepathy and Silent Communication – In a $6.3 million Army initiative to invent devices for telepathic communication, Gerwin Schalk, underwritten in a $2.2 million grant, found that it is possible to use ECoG signals to discriminate the vowels and consonants embedded in spoken and in imagined words. The results shed light on the distinct mechanisms associated with production of vowels and consonants, and could provide the basis for brain-based communication using imagined speech. Research into synthetic telepathy using sub-vocalization is taking place at the University of California, Irvine under lead scientist Mike D’Zmura.
The first such communication took place in the 1960s using EEG to create Morse code using brain alpha waves. Using EEG to communicate imagined speech is less accurate than the invasive method of placing an electrode between the skull and the brain. On February 27, 2013 the group of Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University and IINN-ELS successfully connected the brains of two rats with electronic interfaces that allowed them to directly share information, in the first-ever direct brain-to-brain interface. On 3 September 2014, scientists reported that direct communication between human brains was possible over extended distances through Internet transmission of EEG signals.
Sentient World Simulation – The DoD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR. Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.
“SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP),” the paper reads, so that military leaders can “develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners.” SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/
Insight Program – DARPA awarded a $14 million contract to SAIC for the DARPA Insight program, which is intended to help U.S. intelligence experts detect threat networks, irregular warfare, and terrorist operations by combining intelligence information from imaging sensors, crowd-source and other social network or text-based sensors, as well as from other sources for further analysis. The program seeks to fill gaps in current U.S. intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems that center on the inability to exploit and cross-cue several different intelligence sources automatically.
The DARPA Insight program seeks to develop integrated human/machine reasoning into intelligence equipment to encompass operator knowledge and reasoning when dealing quickly with complex data from many different sensors. SAIC experts will concentrate on these areas in building the Insight next-generation ISR analysis system.
SAIC experts will build model-based behavioral correlation, modeling, prediction, and threat network analysis tools that combine intelligence information across many different sources automatically to improve the efficiencies of multi-intelligence sensors. The company also will develop a unified data-management and processing environment that integrates new intelligence sensors and software algorithms.
EM fields and Hidden symbols – DARPA is revealing programs, which have existed for years, to develop methods and techniques to incept thoughts and ideas into the mind. They reveal how once a mind has been programmed with the memory patterns, words and symbols can trigger the programing without the need of the original device.
Mind Control Project – The aim of this program is to remotely disrupt political dissent and extremism by employing “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation” (TMS) in tandem with sophisticated propaganda based on this technology. TMS stimulates the temporal lobe of the brain with electromagnetic fields. The program, conducted by The Center for Strategic Communication, is based at Arizona State University. This research aims to literally induce or disrupt the operation of narratives within the brain. In other words, this research aims to stop individuals from thinking certain thoughts and make others believe things they normally would not believe. This research has tremendous interrogation possibilities and could potentially be used to more successfully spread propaganda or stop political upheaval to an unsuspecting public. This research is being conducted by The Center for Strategic Communication at ASU and is entitled “Toward Narrative Disruptors and Inductors: Mapping the Narrative Comprehension Network and its Persuasive Effects”.
