For an organization dedicated to not letting anything get by them, the Transportation Security Administration seriously dropped the ball this week when a full copy of its standard operating procedures for airport security leaked on the Web.
TSA officials said that the manual was posted online in a redacted form on a federal procurement Web site, but that the digital redactions were inadequate. They allowed computer users to recover blacked-out passages by copying and pasting them into a new document or an e-mail [Washington Post]. Among the information accidentally made public in the PDF: pictures of the passes that CIA officials and members of Congress use, as well as a list of the 12 countries whose passport holders are flagged for extra security checks. The document also revealed technical settings used by airport X-ray and explosive-detecting machines.
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Cocaine combined with capsaicin, an active ingredient in pepper spray, can be deadly, if research in mice is any indication.
In the early 1990s, anecdotes of people dying after being doused with pepper spray puzzled researchers, until autopsies revealed many were on cocaine at the time. To look for a link between the two substances, a research team injected cocaine, capsaicin or both at once into the abdomens of several groups of about 30 mice. Injections allowed them to control the dose of capsaicin the mice received, which wouldn’t have been possible if the mice were simply sprayed [New Scientist]. Equal doses of cocaine plus capsaicin killed about half the mice, compared to cocaine alone, which killed just a few. And a dose of cocaine high enough to kill half the mice on its own killed up to 90 percent when combined with capsaicin.
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Curvis Bickham spent eight months in prison for a triple-homicide because a police dog confused his scent with that of the killer. Now Bickham and others who spent months in jail after dogs linked their scents to evidence from crimes they did not commit are filing a lawsuit claiming Texas authorities falsely arrested and imprisoned them, their attorney said Tuesday [AP]. In a scent lineup, dogs sniff items found at a crime scene, and then sniff jars swabbed with the suspects’ scents and the scents of others not involved in the crime. When the dogs link crime scene and suspect, that evidence is often relied on heavily in court by the prosecution. Alaska, Florida, New York and Texas all use scent lineups to link suspects to crimes.
Dogs are used all the time to fight crime—from sniffing out bombs and drugs to locating dead bodies. However, scent lineups have critics barking. They say the lineups are poorly controlled, and argue that avoiding cross-contamination is basically impossible. The main target of the current lawsuit is Fort Bend County Deputy Keith Pikett—whose home-trained bloodhounds identified the suspects. A 2004 F.B.I. report warned that dog scent work “should not be used as primary evidence,” but only to corroborate other evidence. In several of the cases that were based on Deputy Pikett’s dogs, however, the scent lineups appear to have provided the primary evidence, even when contradictory evidence was readily available [The New York Times]. Deputy Pikett, by his own estimation, has conducted thousands of scent lineups.
The three men who filed the lawsuit against Deputy Pickett were all eventually set free after contradictory evidence proved their innocence. The Innocence Project of Texas, a legal defense organization … released a report last month that excoriated dog scent lineups as a “junk science injustice” [The New York Times]. Dog scent lineups bring to mind another high profile forensic science debate in Texas that many believe led to the execution of an innocent man. Now that the science behind dog scent lineups is coming under the same scrutiny, one can’t help but wonder if scent lineups might have led to a similar outcome.
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DISCOVER: Reasonable Doubt examines the fallibility of DNA evidence
Image: flickr / contadini
If you’ve caught an episode of COPS lately, then you’ve probably noticed that so-called less-lethal weapons have caught on with police departments across the country as a way to force unruly suspects into compliance. Tasers, which delivers an electrical current to the suspect via two dart-like electrodes, are often the weapon of choice. Now, the Pentagon wants to use beefed up Taser technology on the battlefield.
The puny little electrodes that the police weapons use just won’t do for the military. That’s why the U.S. Department of Defense has been developing a long-range electric shock device that fires from a 40-millimeter grenade launcher and can subdue an enemy from just under 200 feet away. The new Human Electro-Muscular Incapacitation (HEMI) projectile is being developed for the Pentagon by Taser International under a $2.5 million contract and should be ready for prototype testing some time after the new year [Popular Science]. HEMI’s range is three times longer than Taser International’s XREP shotgun-style projectile, which has generated controversy because of concerns that the projectile could be deadly in untrained hands.
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Here’s one direct and obvious effect of the economic stimulus package passed in February: The toxic sites where scientists ushered in the nuclear age are getting cleaned up. In Los Alamos, New Mexico, a dump that contains refuse of the Manhattan Project and that was sealed up decades ago is finally being explored, thanks to $212 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
But experts aren’t sure what they’ll find inside the dump. At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II [The New York Times]. It may also contain explosive chemicals that could have become more dangerous over the years of burial.
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The U.S. Justice Department has officially instructed federal prosecutors around the country to stop going after medical marijuana users who are complying with state laws. A total of 14 states now have some provisions for medical marijuana use.
A memo from Deputy Attorney General David Ogden said it was “unlikely to be an efficient use of limited federal resources” to prosecute “individuals with cancer or other serious illnesses who use marijuana as part of a recommended treatment regimen” [The Wall Street Journal]. The memo emphasized, however, that prosecutors should continue to target drug traffickers and distributors who use state laws as a cover for illegal activity.
Supporters of the policy change say it represents a new emphasis on violent crime and the sale of illicit drugs to children…. But some local police and Republican lawmakers criticized the change, saying it could exacerbate the flow of drug money to Mexican cartels, whose violence has spilled over the Southwestern border [Washington Post].
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Image: flickr / Neeta Lind
For many rape cases, the only leads investigators have to follow are the clues spelled out by a DNA sample. If after years the DNA isn’t matched to a suspect the case goes cold and the victim never has closure. A few years ago, when there was still a statute of limitations for rape in New York City, prosecutors devised a clever way to side-step the ticking clock—they decided to simply indict the DNA profile. Since then, New York City prosecutors have secured 117 indictments of DNA samples in rape cases, linked 18 of those profiles to specific people, and obtained 13 convictions, either through trials or negotiated pleas. Five cases are pending [The New York Times].
Called John Doe DNA indictments, the strategy is also used in a handful of other states to help solve sex crimes, and its success has prompted officials to expand DNA indictments to other types of crimes. In New York, authorities are now collecting more DNA evidence from the scenes of everyday crimes. They hope to use DNA to help solve unsolved crimes from the past that are subject to a statute of limitations, like burglary, robbery or serial car theft [The New York Times]. Opponents of John Doe DNA indictments say the passage of time, along with fading memories and disappearing witnesses, hinders the defendant’s ability to mount a defense, and that old DNA samples are subject to depredation and mishandling. However New York officials counter by saying it’s irresponsible to ignore genetic evidence, especially with modern molecular biology tools.
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DISCOVER: Reasonable Doubt—questions about the forensic infallibility of DNA emerge
Image: flickr / [puamelia]
Scientists in the United Kingdom are outraged over a new program that seeks to determine asylum seekers’ nationalities through DNA and the isotopes present in their hair and fingernails. “Horrifying,” “naïve,” and “flawed” are among the adjectives geneticists and isotope specialists have used to describe the “Human Provenance pilot project,” launched quietly in mid-September by the U.K. Border Agency [Science Insider]. The experts say the tests simply aren’t accurate enough to pinpoint a person’s country of origin.
The program will be tried out on asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa, and will seek to establish whether applicants from Kenya or Ethiopia are masquerading as refugees from war-torn Somalia. Yet scientists say the Border Agency’s goals confuse ancestry or ethnicity with nationality. David Balding, a population geneticist at Imperial College London, notes that “genes don’t respect national borders, as many legitimate citizens are migrants or direct descendants of migrants, and many national borders split ethnic groups” [Science Insider].
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Sleep deprivation. Stress positions. Waterboarding. These interrogation techniques used by the Bush administration in the war on terror were explained, at the time, as harsh but necessary tactics that forced captives to give up names, plots, and other information. But a new look at the neurobiological effects of prolonged stress on the brain suggests that torture damages the memory, and therefore often produces bad intelligence.
Irish neuroscientist Shane O’Mara reviewed the scientific literature about the effect of stress on memory and brain function after reading descriptions of the CIA’s Bush-era interrogation methods. The methods were detailed in previously classified legal memos released in April. O’Mara did not examine or interview any of those interrogated by the CIA [AP].
His findings: “These techniques cause severe, repeated and prolonged stress, which compromises brain tissue supporting memory and executive function” [Wired.com]. The study, to be published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, took note of the effect of the stress hormone cortisol on the brain, as well as the fear-related hormone noradrenaline’s impact on memory and the ability to distinguish true from false.
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In future military operations, aircraft and submarines may be able to stay in contact by firing up the laser comm. Researchers have devised a new way to communicate with submarines by using high-energy laser beams to create bubbles of steam in the water, which then pop in little explosions that generate a 220-decibel pulse of sound. By controlling the frequency of explosions, researchers could make a kind of underwater Morse code.
According to a press release from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, one of the peculiar effects of high-intensity laser beams is that they can actually focus themselves when passing through some materials, like water. As the laser focuses, it rips electrons off water molecules, which then become superheated and create a powerful “pop”. Because different colours of light travel at markedly different speeds underwater, the precise location where different colours focus together could be manipulated by the suitable design of a many-coloured input pulse [BBC News].
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In an announcement certain to fuel conspiracy theories and science fiction stories alike, Israeli scientists revealed that they can fabricate blood and saliva samples that don’t contain DNA from the person who donated the samples, but rather hold the genetic code of an unrelated person. Theoretically, such samples could end up being used as false DNA evidence. Says lead researcher Dan Frumkin: “You can just engineer a crime scene…. Any biology undergraduate could perform this” [The New York Times]. While it might be easier for a shadowy crime scene-fixer to plant a stray hair or cigarette butt than to cook up a misleading batch of blood or saliva, researchers say that they can imagine scenarios in which blood or saliva would be more convincing.
Frumkin and his colleagues at the private company Nucleix used two different methods to create the false samples. In the first, the researchers take a tiny DNA sample from an individual’s hair or spit, and use a process called DNA amplification to increase the sample size. The researchers then took blood from another individual and put it through a centrifuge to remove the DNA-carrying white blood cells, leaving behind the red blood cells, which don’t carry DNA. They then added the applified DNA to the blood sample, et voila! When this engineered blood sample was sent to a leading forensic lab, the analysis detected the DNA of only the original individual, and saw nothing amiss.
But, don’t worry, like a hacker taking down servers to sell cyber security services, Nucleix has a fix: a system that can detect the difference between natural and manufactured DNA. It looks for a lack of methylation; an addition of methyl groups to DNA occurs naturally in genetic code, but it isn’t found in Nucleix’s manipulated DNA [Scientific American].
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In the hopes of combating rising suicide and mental illness rates, the U.S. Army is implementing a mental stress training course for all 1.1 million members of the National Guard, reservists, and active-duty soldiers.
The training, the first of its kind in the military, is meant to improve performance in combat and head off the mental health problems, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide, that plague about one-fifth of troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq [The New York Times]. The program will be taught by Army sergeants in classes that generally last about an hour-and-a-half, and will begin in October at two bases before spreading to all service members. The training will also be available for family members and civilian employees.
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A 28-year-old hacker has been charged in what federal prosecutors are calling the largest case of identity theft ever seen. The man, Albert Gonzalez, worked with two unnamed Russian conspirators to run wild through the computer networks of a handful of prominent corporations, including 7-Eleven, the supermarket chain Hannaford Brothers, and the payment processor Heartland Payment Center. The size of the heist—130 million credit and debit card numbers, according to prosecutors—have many people wondering: How exactly is such a massive theft carried out?
The Justice Department’s indictment (pdf) describes how Gonzales (a.k.a. “segvec” and “soupnazi,” among other aliases) and his co-conspirators pulled it off. They began the job by scanning lists of Fortune 500 companies for likely targets, and then visited retail outlets to scope out the payment systems used at checkout counters and to look for vulnerabilities. Then they would write specific codes to corrupt their data systems and launch a virus from computers in the United States and Europe to pull hundreds and thousands of credit card numbers, and sort through them using a “sniffer,” which is basically a data analysis system that decodes big chunks of information [The Atlantic].
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The cyber-attack that temporarily disabled Twitter and compromised Facebook and LiveJournal was politically motivated and was directed at a pro-Georgian blogger called Cyxymu, says a representative from Facebook.
The attack, which paralyzed Twitter for two hours and “degraded” service on Facebook, was one known as a distributed denial of service attack. This technique uses a network of tens of thousands of compromised computers, known as a “botnet”, to flood a website’s servers with page view requests, leaving legitimate traffic unable to get through. This huge amount of connection requests can quickly overwhelm a server and, in some cases, cause an entire website to crash [Telegraph]. It seems Twitter, a relatively new service with a U.S.-based infrastructure, couldn’t handle the surge in traffic, while Facebook and Google, which have many key services located internationally, were better-prepared for it.
It has not been confirmed who perpetrated the attack, but the blogger says he believes it could have been an attempt by the Russian government to squelch his criticism of over Russia’s conduct in the war over the disputed South Ossetia region, which began a year ago today. “Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I’m certain the order came from the Russian government” [Guardian], the blogger said. Such a widespread attack, some believe, would only be possible if the coordinator of the attack had access to significant resources.
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A French hacker broke into the email accounts of Twitter executives and employees, and now the cyber snoop is leaking business and personal info about company leaders to TechCrunch, an American blog, and Korben, a French blog. The hacker reportedly guessed passwords and gained access to several Gmail accounts, as well as accounts with Google Docs, PayPal, and other services.
TechCrunch received a compressed zip file of 310 confidential documents, including a complete Twitter employee list and salary information; food preferences of Twitter employees; confidential contracts with companies such as Nokia, Samsung, Dell, AOL, Microsoft, and others; a contact list of notable Web and entertainment personalities; meeting reports; [and] applicant resumes [PC World]. Now it’s up to the site to decide what information to publish. Thus far, TechCrunch has decided not to release anything that is personally embarrassing. Still, under the philosophy “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising,” the site will release documents it considers relevant to the company. These include notes from executive meetings, the original pitch for a Twitter TV show, and certain company financial information.
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