Russia warns of new arms race

By Adam Tanner

Munich, Germany, Feb.4— A senior Russian security official said Sunday that US plans to deploy an anti-missile system would undermine world stability and lead to a new arms race in outer space.

Speaking at a defense conference in Munich, Sergei Ivanov, secretary of Russia’s security council, offered talks on deep cuts in strategic nuclear arms if the new administration of US President George W. Bush abandons its plans.

“The destruction of the ABM Treaty will result in the annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability and create prerequisites for a new arms race, including one in outer space,” Ivanov said. Defense analysts say the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the United States and the then Soviet Union would be breached by the new US system if it were to come into force.

“Restraining the so-called rogue nations - to use the American terminology - may be carried out more effectively from the point of view of both expense and consequences by means of a common political effort,” Ivanov said.

“The situation in North Korea is the obvious example because the situation a year ago seemed much worse than today.”

He spoke a day after new Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, speaking at Munich, reiterated Washington’s intention to develop a missile shield despite objections from what Ivanov said was 88 countries, including its European allies.

US officials have cited the threat of missile attacks from nations such as North Korea as a reason to deploy a defensive shield.

Ivanov held out the possibility of substantial arms control cuts if Washington dropped its missile defense plans and preserved the ABM Treaty limiting Russia and the United States to a single defensive missile site each.

“If the ABM Treaty is maintained, Russia is ready for radical cuts with the United States of strategic offensive weapons to as low as 1,500 and even lower than this level,” Ivanov told the conference on international security.

“We are also ready for an immediate start to official talks with the United States on SALT 3.” The alternative was a dangerous arms race into space, Ivanov said, urging an international conference on preventing the militarization of outer space.

“The problem is very urgent.”

Since 1975, only Russia has maintained an ABM site, which it deploys around Moscow.

“This system is not destabilizing in any way because it is not a national system. It does not cover the national territory of Russia but less than one fifth of Russia’s territory,” Ivanov told reporters when asked why Russia still kept an ABM site.

“This is allowed by the 1972 ABM treaty.” American officials say the ABM treaty is an antiquated relic no longer essential in the post-Cold War world, an argument Russia rejects.

“The treaty created the possibility for predictability in the nuclear sphere and progress on the way toward nuclear disarmament not only for the USSR and the United States, but also the whole world,’’ Ivanov said.

The official also said Russia would continue talks with Europe on President Vladimir Putin’s alternative suggestion to build a pan-European theater missile system including Russia that could intercept missiles soon after they were fired.

“It’s a matter of further investigation, military cooperation including the exchange of data and technology. It is, by the way, very expensive,” Ivanov said. “We are going to follow through if our Western partners are willing.”

Source: Reuters

Super Bowl surveillance methods spur privacy concerns

By Peter Slevin

Tampa, Feb. 1— Super Bowl fans never knew it, but police video cameras focused on their faces, one by one, as they streamed through the turnstiles in Tampa on Sunday. Cables instantly carried the images to computers, which spent less than a second comparing them with thousands of digital portraits of known criminals and suspected terrorists.

“The courts have ruled that there is no expectation of privacy in a public setting,” said Tampa police spokesman Joe Durkin.

In a control booth deep inside the stadium, police watched and waited for a match. The extraordinary test of technology during the highest-profile US sporting event of the year yielded one hit, a ticket scalper who vanished into the crowd, reported an official at the company that installed the cameras.

But the decision to scan the unwitting crowd at the Super Bowl and countless visitors to the popular entertainment district of Ybor City for days before the big game inspired support and opposition yesterday over the nature of the technology and its intended uses.

Police spoke of a benign new law enforcement tactic no more intrusive than the use of a video camera at a convenience store. Civil libertarians challenged the involuntary videotaping of football fans and the growing use of physical trait digital databases by police agencies.

“This was just the latest tool,” said Tampa police spokesman Joe Durkin, who reported that the system made 19 matches during Super Bowl week. All had criminal histories but had committed no crimes of a “significant nature.” He said police made no arrests as a result of the surveillance cameras’ use.

“It’s identifying these people who have a propensity to whatever led them into being in the database, whether it’s a known pickpocket or a flimflam person,” Durkin said. “Had the system been able to identify a known terrorist and had Tampa police been able to stop him, this tool would have been invaluable.”

The American Civil Liberties Union opposes the involuntary capture of biometric details, such as face-recognition data, DNA and retina scans. The organization, in its list of “Privacy Principles,” considers the fingerprinting of convicted criminals a worthy exception.

“We are quickly moving to the point where law enforcement and the private sector will be able to identify us no matter where we go, no matter how anonymous we think we are,” said Barry Steinhardt, the ACLU’s associate director. “Not only is it going to rob us of our anonymity, but it’s going to be used as a tool of law enforcement to round up ‘the usual suspects’ and to hassle people on the streets.”

The practice is almost certainly legal, but it is in an emerging area of the law that has not been fully tested in court, said Harvard Law School professor Bill Stuntz.

It may seem troubling to some that police can conduct such surveillance, but the practice is similar to the use of police cameras at busy intersections to capture speeding motorists, Stuntz said. In those cases, license plate numbers snapped by the cameras are traced to the cars’ owners, who are then mailed speeding tickets.

Casinos use face-recognition technology to identify card counters and other patrons considered undesirable, according to two providers of such systems. British police installed the American technology in the gritty East London borough of Newham in 1998 and have since reported a significant drop in crime.

In Newham, 300 cameras surveil the town center and such well-traveled locations as public transport exits. A town security official last year described the system, installed by New Jersey-based Visionics Corp., as less like Big Brother than “a friendly uncle and aunt watching over you.”

Yet two years ago, thousands of Americans objected on privacy grounds when they learned that their driver’s license photographs were being sold by states to a private company that wanted to create a national database for use by retailers to combat fraud. The states canceled the project.

The system used for the Super Bowl project, first reported yesterday by the St. Petersburg Times, was lent by companies seeking to market the technology to law enforcement agencies. Tampa police accepted the free use of the system as an experiment and worked with local and national police agencies to manage it during the week of the game, said Durkin.

Dave Watkins, managing director of Graphco Technologies Inc., said the event gave the company a chance to learn how the software would perform, which camera angles were most effective and how the lenses of the 20 video cameras should be focused in a public place.

As each person passed through the four main stadium gates, a camera captured dozens of images, which were fed into computers. The computers compared the portraits against a database assembled from law enforcement agency files by a Massachusetts company, Viisage Technology Inc., which markets the software. The digitized images were constructed using 128 facial characteristics — everything from the width of a nose to the angle of a cheekbone.

Each apparent match at the game was designed to be flashed side by side onto a computer screen at a stadium command post. A police officer determined whether the faces were those of the same person. The turnstile images were then discarded.

“We had several possibles. We had one confirmed,” said Watkins, whose company has no customers yet. “They did try to find the individual, but he had already left. He was a known ticket scalper.”

Durkin, the police spokesman, said the crowd surveillance is both legal and appropriate.

“The courts have ruled that there is no expectation of privacy in a public setting,” Durkin said. “I think the vast majority of the public, they welcome anything they can utilize to make their visit safer and do a preemptive strike on crime.”

Nor does the technology suggest Big Brother, proponents say.

“For the last 10 years, every time you went to a bank, a McDonald’s, a Dunkin’ Donuts, a gas station, your image is being picked up,” said Tom Colatosti, president of Viisage. “Not only is it being picked up but, worse, it’s being stored.”

Source: Washington Post

US expert says use of DU munitions is a “war crime”

By Kate Kelland

London, Jan. 30— The man who led the US army’s depleted uranium (DU) assessment team in the 1991 Gulf War said on Tuesday that the continued use of such weapons was a “war crime” which should be stopped immediately.

Speaking at a news conference at Britain’s Parliament, Dr. Doug Rokke, a major in the US army reserves, said he told his government as far back as 1991 of the health hazards of depleted uranium but his warnings had been consistently ignored.

Rokke, 51, worked in the Gulf from November 1990 to June 1991, leading the US Defense Department’s DU assessment team responsible for implementing a clean-up and advising on medical care for any US personnel who had been exposed to DU.

“What we learned during the Gulf War and what we learned during the research scared us,” Rokke said.

He said that his full recommendations, detailed in a November 1995 US army pamphlet entitled “handling procedures for equipment contaminated with depleted uranium or other radioactive commodities” had not been passed on to troops or civilians on the ground during NATO’s 1999 war against Yugoslavia over Kosovo.

An international storm broke over the use of DU munitions in January after Italy reported that six of its soldiers who served in the Balkans had died of leukemia.

But NATO chiefs have consistently denied that there is any proof that DU munitions carry any serious health risk and have rejected calls for a moratorium on their use.

Rokke said it was an “absolute lie” that troops and civilians who had been exposed to DU in the Gulf and in the Balkans had not suffered health problems. “We do have birth defects, we do have tumours,” he said.

Rokke himself was diagnosed with reactive airway disease due to uranium poi continued from page 1 soning.

He accused the NATO governments of covering up health warnings about DU, and said their insistence that the weapons would continue to be used raised serious “moral and ethical” as well as medical issues.

“When you deliberately and wilfully take radioactive waste... and throw it down in place in the world where children can pick it up and be exposed to it... that’s a crime against humanity and it is a war crime,” he said.

He also reacted angrily to comments by German Defence Minister Rudolf Scharping, who said on Saturday that fears about radiation from DU weapons were being whipped up by opponents of the Kosovo war.

“I’m going to make this loud and clear,” Rokke said. “The individuals who started the warnings on depleted uranium hazards... were the US army’s experts — myself and my team members who were tasked with cleaning up after the Gulf War.”

British member of parliament Alice Mahon, speaking at the same news conference, called on the British government to ban the use of DU munitions and fund a full and independent study into the risks.

Source: Reuters