Hot off the press:

…after negotiations with AT&T, EFF has filed newly unredacted documents describing a secret, secure room in AT&T’s facilities that gave the National Security Agency (NSA) direct access to customers’ emails and other Internet communications

Secret, secure room makes me think of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, or maybe Alice’s Wonderland.

The timing might be coincidence a subpoena vote is about to be set for the US government’s wiretap records, according to the NYT:

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote Thursday on whether to authorize subpoenas to gain access to Justice Department documents related to the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program, including a series of secret legal opinions.

The vote comes a week after Democratic leaders on a House Judiciary subcommittee threatened to issue subpoenas for the same documents.

I wonder who Bush would be in Wonderland.

I thought for second that the date was a typo, but apparently the US military was pondering how to make a “love bomb” in 1994.

The most interesting thing about this story, however, is not how recent the absurd ideas were generated but the fact that they are so incredibly ethnocentric:

The plan for a so-called “love bomb” envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a “distasteful but completely non-lethal” blow to morale.

Scientists also reportedly considered a “sting me/attack me” chemical weapon to attract swarms of enraged wasps or angry rats towards enemy troops.

A substance to make the skin unbearably sensitive to sunlight was also pondered.

Another idea was to develop a chemical causing “severe and lasting halitosis”, so that enemy forces would be obvious even when they tried to blend in with civilians.

In a variation on that idea, researchers pondered a “Who? Me?” bomb, which would simulate flatulence in enemy ranks.

Indeed, a “Who? Me?” device had been under consideration since 1945, the government papers say.

However, researchers concluded that the premise for such a device was fatally flawed because “people in many areas of the world do not find faecal odour offensive, since they smell it on a regular basis”.

Uh huh. It is fun to debunk the plans one by one as they are mentioned and consider the source. In other words, the plans reveal the weaknesses of the US Army more than they give a sense of strength — the American military strategists are likely to be homophobic, dislike sunburn, worried about bad breath, afraid of wasps and rats, embarrassed by flatulence, etc..

None of the characteristics translate to a region that would be a target perhaps most ironically because the targets tend to be the sort of places that would have the fewest things in common with the attackers.

A giant glaring flaw in an otherwise excellent article (The Evolution of Security) by Daniel E. Geer is how he measures success. He might poke fun at trying to reduce the cost of management, but I think his expectations for a defined environment might be a bit unrealistic:

We reproduce our computing tissue asexually by cloning some gold master somewhere, even though a pond full of identical blue-green algae can be thought of as success only when evolution is very young.

A true gold master can be defined, measured and hopefully repeated. Repeating something that is not well defined or measured does not really mean it deserves the title of “gold”. People are all too willing to throw the term around, without a common criteria of what it means.

Maybe it’s a minor point, but it seems odd to me to compare the standard of evolution for products based in a heavily-skewed American consumer market to millions of years of life/death-based natural evolution.

I would say that the American industry is often dominated by who has the best story to sell and who will believe it, while success in the wild raises stakes to another level — true survival. Greer suggested some of this himself, earlier in his article:

We have risks, costs, and benefits from the all-alike alternative, and we have risks, costs, and benefits from the all-different alternative. Where’s the tradeoff? What is cost effective? Is this a new problem never before seen? Is there an answer? The answer is staring us in the face; the answer is in nature.

Unless of course you are a creationist, and then you might say that success is best defined and measured by someone, somewhere, who is elected or ordained to decide fate. The tradeoffs are not always as obvious as we might hope, and the systems are often too complex for us to emulate, which opens the door for people who prefer to give up and adopt a construct of faith.

Do you believe Vista is safe, or will you let nature decide?