Droids for the military ...

CNN) -- Some U.S. officials this year are expected to get smartphones capable of handling classified government documents over cellular networks, according to people involved in the project.

The phones will run a modified version of Google's Android software, which is being developed as part of an initiative that spans multiple federal agencies and government contractors, these people said.

The smartphones are first being deployed to U.S. soldiers, people familiar with the project said. Later, federal agencies are expected to get phones for sending and receiving government cables while away from their offices, sources said. Eventually, local governments and corporations could give workers phones with similar software.

The Army has been testing touchscreen devices at U.S. bases for nearly two years, said Michael McCarthy, a director for the Army's Brigade Modernization Command, in a phone interview. About 40 phones were sent to fighters overseas a year ago, and the Army plans to ship 50 more phones and 75 tablets to soldiers abroad in March, he said.

"We've had kind of an accelerated approval process," McCarthy said. "This is a hugely significant event."
Currently, the United States doesn't allow government workers or soldiers to use smartphones for sending classified messages because the devices have not met security certifications.

Officials have said they worry that hackers or rogue apps could tap into the commercial version of Android and spill state secrets to foreign governments or to the Web through a publisher such as WikiLeaks. As many as 5 million Android users may have had their phones compromised by a recent virus outbreak rooted in apps found on Google's market, said security software maker Symantec.

But with a secure smartphone, a soldier could see fellow infantry on a digital map, or an official could send an important dispatch from Washington's Metro subway without fear of security breaches.

Developers in the government program have completed a version that has been authorized for storing classified documents but not transmitting them over a cell network, said two people contributing to the initiative. Smartphones cleared for top-secret dispatches -- high-level classified information that would compromise national security if intercepted -- are expected to be ready in the next few months, they said.

Rather than building special handsets hardwired with secure components, the government plans to install its software on commercially available phones, the people familiar with the project said. This approach is far less expensive and allows the government to stay up to date with the latest phones on the market, they said.

Emphasis on security:

Government programmers are making security modifications to Android's kernel, which is the operating system's central component, the people involved said. The version will allow users to choose which data from Android and its applications can be sent over the Internet, they said.

"When you download an application on your phone, you don't really know what it does," Stavrou said. "We test the application in labs before the user consumes that application."

After testing more than 200,000 apps, the researchers discovered that many programs ask for access to far more personal information contained in the phone than they need and, more alarmingly, send some of that superfluous data to the app developers' servers, Stavrou said.

Even some well-intentioned features can compromise national security if left unchecked. For example, a weather app may automatically send a phone's GPS coordinates over the Internet to deliver a local forecast, or games may send the device's unique identifier along with a high score.

On government phones, officials will be prompted with detailed reports about what data may be sent, and they can decline or allow each transmission, the people involved said.

"People want to play 'Angry Birds,' and we do want our people to be able to download 'Angry Birds,' " Stavrou said. But he added, "If a clock application gets your GPS and transmits something over the network, that's not something that we would want to support."

Stavrou, along with seven others at George Mason and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, are developing the smartphone software. They are also consulting with several federal agencies, many within the Department of Defense, he said. He declined to name them.

"The government is actually working pretty hard in getting this technology to most agencies," Stavrou said. "Security is everybody's concern."

READ MORE AT CNN

Pantetta: Israel could attack Iran this spring ...

FOXNEWS:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is expressing new concerns about Iran's underground nuclear program, this time telling Washington Post columnist David Ignatius he's worried Israel may decide to attack it as early as this spring.

Traveling with the defense secretary in Brussels to cover his meeting with NATO defense ministers, Ignatius writes, "Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June.”

This is the first time we've heard such a specific timeframe. Fox News has previously reported concerns from former members of President Obama's national security team that a unilateral strike from Israel could occur sometime in 2012 and that Central Command has been planning for the possibility the U.S. could be drawn in.

One former government official who was involved in national security affairs agreed with Panetta's assessment on timing. "I think the likelihood of an attack is high, and the timing seems about right," the former official said, but added that Panetta "may have interrupted and delayed the timing by his disclosure."
Panetta and the administration have made clear in recent weeks that Iran would cross a "red line" by developing a bomb and that if that occurred, all options, including military action, would be on the table.

But Israel is less patient. It appears Israeli officials' red line would be crossed when Iran has the material to build a bomb. In other words, it appears they believe that by this spring Iran will have stockpiled enough highly enriched uranium to produce a nuclear warhead.

By that point, it will be too late for Israel to act alone. Unlike the United States, Israel does not have the capacity to strike Iran's hardened enrichment facilities 200 feet underground. That, along with Iran's arsenal of missiles that can reach Israel, add to Panetta's concerns that Israel is preparing to strike as early as this spring.

There are essentially two obvious methods for striking the underground facility that could be used. The first involves the Pentagon’s newly developed Massive Ordnance Penetrator, known simply as the MOP. The largest of its kind, it's a 30,000 pound bunker-busting bomb designed to hit underground targets. Yet in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Panetta acknowledged the MOP has some shortcomings and needs further development to reach areas as deeply buried as Iran's nuclear facilities.

Since the MOP is the largest conventional weapon in the U.S. arsenal, the second option could involve using smaller-scale nuclear weapons. It's not likely a card the Obama administration would play, one that would make him the first president since Harry Truman to drop a nuclear bomb.

Another clue about Israel's intent was the sudden cancellation of long-planned joint U.S.-Israeli military exercises that would have culminated in live-fire drills this May. The Israelis apologized for postponing the exercises, and a Pentagon spokesmen said at the time of the cancellation the Israelis explained they needed to postpone in order to "assume optimum participation," suggesting their forces could be needed elsewhere.




Read HERE

Skyquakes rattle Northwest

Mystery fireballs & noises from the sky? Natural? Black Projects? Armageddon? Hoaxes Viral Marketing??

Brad McGavock was on duty this morning when we called the Tulsa National Weather Service office about the possible meteor ripping through the sky.

"Around 8 p.m. there was reported to be a sonic boom that was heard over the DFW area."

McGavock says there was a report that a highway patrolman inadvertantly caught a glimpse of the sighting.

"His dash cam on his car actually recorded the meteor as it went through the sky."
He says the FAA confirmed that the object indeed was a meteor.

Some people said the object had a long tail and that it appeared to fall apart. Others said they heard or felt an explosion as it passed.

Police, fire and weather officials all reported receiving a high volume of calls.
Information from the American Meteor Society said that the object was a bolide.

A bolide is a fireball or very bright meteor.

It explodes often with visible fragmentation and sometimes a sonic boom, according to AMS.

Case closed right?


But wait there's more? Strange noises from the sky are coming in from around the globe - with explanations ranging from meteors to "Auroral noise " to Gabriel's horn calling down the Apocalypse.


Here are a few related videos:

From Canada:




From my hometown of Amarillo:



From New York:



Maybe this explains it?


Damn Interesting:

If you happen to be reasonably close to one of the Earth’s magnetic poles, the next time there’s a particularly intense aurora, go outside. Get as far as you can from sources of noise – traffic, barking dogs, TVs – and listen. Listen carefully.

If conditions are right, you may hear some unusual noises. Earwitnesses have said the sound is like radio static, a small animal rustling through dry grass and leaves, or the crinkling of a cellophane wrapper. Inuit folklore says it’s the sound of the spirits of the dead, either playing a game or trying to communicate with the living.

It’s the sound of the aurora itself. And the cause is currently unknown. Understanding the phenomenon is made more difficult by the fact that though there are many anecdotal reports, the sound has yet to be recorded.

Aurora displays are caused by the solar wind interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere. Because these interactions happen at altitudes of at least sixty kilometers, the sounds heard cannot be made by the aurora directly. Even if the air up there were dense enough to support sound waves, they would disperse and fade long before they reached the ground.

The sounds aren’t common, and there doesn’t seem to be any consistency in their occurrences. What’s more, one observer of an aurora may hear the sounds distinctly, while another observer of the same display– even at the same location– may not.

The inconsistency makes it difficult to determine the underlying cause of the sounds. As with any faint phenomenon that is difficult to observe and study, theories abound. One hypothesis claims it’s all in the observer’s head. Modern media has made us used to hearing sound along with visual display, so we sometimes believe we are hearing things even when there is no actual sound. But this doesn’t account for those Inuit legends that predate the technological era, nor does it account for observations made by blindfolded or indoor observers.

Another theory also claims it’s all in your head, but for a different reason. Electrophonic hearing is the direct stimulation of the auditory nerves by external electromagnetic fields. There are reports of people hearing “clicks” and “pops” coincident with lightning flashes, and well ahead of any thunder, that can only be explained this way.


The theory is unable to explain why only the sense of hearing is affected – though there are rare reports of people noting odd smells accompanying an aurora display.

The Earth did experience a solar storm last week: Here's an excerpt from a report on this storm:

A wave of charged particles from an intense solar storm is pummeling the Earth right now. NASA scientists say.

The storm began when a powerful solar flare erupted on the sun(Jan. 23), blasting a stream of charged particles toward Earth. This electromagnetic burst, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), hit Earth at about 9:31 a.m. EST (1430 GMT), according to scientists at the Space Weather Center at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"It's a minor to moderate storm," Yihua Zheng, a lead researcher at the Space Weather Center, told SPACE.com. "Probably in the next 10 hours or so, people at high latitudes can see auroras. This could maybe cause communication errors at the polar caps, but the magnetic activities are probably not too strong."
The northern lights displays will be especially visible for people in northern latitudes where it is currently night.

"For parts of Europe already, and further points to the east, we should expect to see strong magnetic storm conditions," Harlan Spence, an astrophysicist at the University of New Hampshire, director of its Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, told SPACE.com. "There's a very good chance tonight that we'll be seeing some very strong auroral displays. Typically auroras occur at relatively high latitudes, but for events like this, you could get auroras down at mid to low latitudes."

When a coronal mass ejection hits Earth, it can trigger potentially harmful geomagnetic storms as the charged particles and the fields within it interact with the planet's magnetic field lines. This can amp up normal displays of Earth's auroras (also known as the northern and southern lights), but a strong CME aimed directly at Earth can also cause disruptions to satellites in orbit, as well as power grids and communications infrastructures on the ground.

The recent solar flare set off an extremely fast-moving CME, Zheng said, and the associated radiation storm was the strongest since 2005. But the ejected cloud of plasma and charged particles was not directly aimed at Earth, and is hitting the planet at an angle instead. This glancing blow will likely lessen any impacts on Earth, she added.

But wait - maybe it's a sign of the coming 2012 Apocalypse or the magnetic poles flipping? Here's an interesting video:



Then there are those who suggest we are all the victims of a viral advertisng campaign as suggested HERE.



Or how about emitted from flying triangles? Spoiler alert: bad audio dub to follow:




It's getting weird out there folks!
Stay tuned!


-Steve Douglass

This just in - a smoking gun? Could the sky sounds all be a fake?
THE LINK IS HERE!




This just in ...


Don't fear the Reaper: (start at 2:45 mark)

Every drone is better with BACN!

The U.S. Air Force has awarded Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) a $47.2 million contract for the purchase and integration of two more Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN) payloads on two existing Block 20 Global Hawk aircraft.

BACN is a high-altitude, airborne communications and information gateway system that maintains operational communications support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The persistent connectivity that BACN provides improves situational awareness and enables better coordination between forward-edge warfighters and commanders. BACN bridges and extends voice communications and battlespace awareness information from numerous sources using a suite of computers and radio systems.

After the BACN payloads have been integrated on the Block 20 Global Hawks, the aircraft will be designated as USAF EQ-4B unmanned systems, providing long endurance and high persistence gateway capabilities.

“The addition of two more BACN systems on Global Hawks will decisively enhance the required 24/7 gateway capability,” said Claude Hashem, vice president of the network communications systems business at Northrop Grumman’s Information Systems sector. “The EQ-4B unmanned systems will continue to provide long endurance and unsurpassed communications persistence to our warfighters.”

Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for the development, fielding and maintenance of the BACN system and the RQ-4 Global Hawk aircraft. The company was awarded the first BACN contract in April 2005 by the Air Force Electronic Systems Center, Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass. The Global Hawk program is managed by the Air Force Aerospace Systems Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

“This latest award continues the BACN program tradition of delivering new capability on compressed timelines that meets the operational needs,” said Steve Zell, Northrop Grumman BACN program director.
Northrop Grumman’s work on the BACN program is managed and performed in San Diego with Global Hawk integration performed in Palmdale, Calif.