Over 36 hours on August 29-30 2007, six AGM-129_ACM Air Launched Cruise Missiles each containing one W80_(nuclear_warhead) were removed from safeguarded weapons storage facilities at the Minot AFB in North Dakota, loaded aboard a B-52 bomber and flown 1500 miles to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. While removed from secure storage, these weapons passed through six separate links in the chain of custody without being discovered, without being visually inspected and were left unguarded and unsecured on the runways of both Minot and Barksdale for 15 hours and 12 hours respectively before the Ordnance Unloading Team at Barksdale discovered the error, established a security zone and activated a Nuclear Security Alert to further safeguard the warheads.

Attempting to conceal the incident as part of the DOD’s policy on neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons, Defense Secretary Robert Gates notified President Bush and ordered in internal Air Force Investigation of the incident, the first of it’s kind in the 40+ years of nuclear weapons handling. This lasted 6 days until the story of the incident was broken by the Military Times, quoting unnamed sources and picked up by the MSM. Soon after, the Air Force announced that the Minot Munitions Squadron commander was relieved of command and 25 airmen were disciplined. They also assured the public that the weapons never left the custody of Air force personnel and the public was never in danger. The results of that investigation saw the commanders of the 5^th Bomb wing and the 5^th Maintenance Group at Minot and the 2^nd Operations Group at Barksdale relieved of command, four senior NCOs of the 5^th Bomb Wing received “administrative action”, all personnel of the 5^th Bomb Wing were stripped of their nuclear certifications, 65 airmen lost their Personnel_Reliability_Program certifications and all tactical weapons ferry operations were suspended, citing:

“There has been an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards at Minot Air Force Base and at Barksdale Air Force Base.”

Additionally, the Inspector General offices of all USAF major commands with a nuclear mission were tasked to conduct “Limited Nuclear Surety Inspections” at every nuclear-capable unit under Defense_Threat_Reduction_Agency oversight. This prompted Gates to appoint retired USAF General Larry Welch to lead a special Defense Science Board to study the mishap in the context of the overall review of all nuclear weapons handling policies and procedures. That report was released in February of 2008 and is available for viewing here

Part I of this piece will look at the incident and DSB report from the perspective of a nuclear weapons handler, whether the reasons cited are credible and whether the actions taken to address it will have any effectiveness in improving nuclear weapons safeguards. Part II will look at some of the ancillary stories related to this incident and attempt to gauge their overall credibility and connection.

In 1987, the AGM-129 ACM (Advanced Cruise Missile) was deployed by the USAF as a stealthy weapons platform with both conventional and nuclear payload capabilities to counter improvements in the Soviet Air Defense regime. Although capable of carrying conventional warheads, their primary use was to carry W-80-1 Variable Yield thermonuclear warheads. Each W-80-1 has a programmable nuclear yield of between 5-150 Kilotons of TNT. Used primarily as a nuclear platform aboard B-52 bombers, the AGM-129 was deployed on wing pylons of 6 weapons each and an internal rotary launcher capable of carrying another 8 of the weapons. These weapons were subject to the START II treaty which required a limit of 400 warheads deployed on ACMs. In March, 2007, the USAF announced the retirement of the entire complement of AGM-129s due to high maintenance costs and reliability issues in order to meet START II goals of having fewer than 2,200 total deployed nuclear weapons by 2012. This was despite an ongoing Service Life Extension Program intended to keep them as a viable weapons system until 2030. The decommissioning procedures called for the removal of the W-80-1 warheads from the AGM-129s and replacement with dummy payloads. The dummy payload missiles were then ferried to Barksdale in complements of 12 missiles (2 pylons of 6) per trip for missile decommissioning. The W-80-1 warheads were to be flown to Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, NM aboard aircraft specially designed for payload survivability for further transfer to the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, TX and warhead dismantlement. By the first of August, 2007, more than 200 of these missiles were transferred and decommissioned at Barksdale.

The procedure instituted to accomplish this task at Minot is detailed on page 10 of the DSB’s report referred to above. It details that the Munitions Maintenance Squadron prepares a build-up sheet for each load to be ferried including pylon, missile and/or warhead serial numbers being moved prior to breakout. This sheet is sent to the breakout crew at the weapons storage facility who are tasked with verifying it against the existing inventory of weapons in storage and noting and reporting any discrepancies. Once completed, the breakout crew transfers the payloads to the Convoy Crew tasked with weapons transfer to the flight line. The Convoy Crew is tasked to verify the load and perform visual inspections upon receipt from the Breakout Crew, then transfer the weapons to the flight line, passing control onto the bomber Crew Chief and the loading Crew. Once they have visually verified and signed off on receipt of the weapons, they are loaded aboard the bomber, reverified by visual inspection and custody is turned over to the bomber crew. The bomber crew is tasked to do a visual inspection as part of their pre-flight checklist before the plane leaves the ground. This should require 4 visual inspections in Minot alone with further corresponding inspections taking place at the destination point until the weapons are finally secured in the weapons storage facility at Barksdale. Since the various payloads, nuclear, conventional and dummy, are visually identical at first glance and stored in the same facility, the payloads are supposed to be clearly identified with readily visible means to indicate payload types in addition to the individual visual inspections along the chain of custody. Additionally, all nuclear payloads are equipped with electronic and visual identifiers as well as anti-theft devices designed to trigger alarms if they leave the weapons storage facility without proper authorization and procedures.

On the day in question, the movement plan identified two pylons of nuclear-inert missiles to be transferred on 30 August, 2007 via tactical ferry. This plan was altered by the Minot Munitions Maintenance Squadron to include another pylon with missiles closer to the expiration dates of limited-life components instead of one of the pylons identified in the movement plan. As a result, the new pylon of weapons was not properly prepared for tactical ferry and the warheads contained in the missiles not removed prior to transfer. The Breakout Crew failed to visually verify the presence of nuclear warheads in the weapons being transferred and allowed the Convoy Crew to remove them without the proper security details being present. Subsequently, the Convoy, Loading and Aircrews all failed to properly perform their visual inspections with the consequent result of nuclear warheads being inadvertently loaded aboard the B-52 and transferred to Barksdale where they were unloaded and transferred to the Barksdale Convoy Crew who finally discovered their presence triggering the Nuclear Security Alert at Barksdale.

The Defense Science Board Report’s findings on the incident were listed as:

1. Over time, nuclear weapons movement procedures for bomber weapons have been compromised for expedient work processes. This evolution occurred without adequate review and approval above the Wing level.

2. There was confusion over applicability of nuclear weapons handling procedures for nuclear weapons systems that do not contain nuclear weapons.

3. The practice of storing nuclear munitions in the same facility with nuclear-test, nuclear-training and nuclear-inert devices led to confusion and unnecessary access to nuclear weapons.

4. The various levels of inspection activities failed to detect these changes in process which compromised established procedure. The Nuclear Operational Readiness Inspection process required only limited mission performance, sometimes generating as few as one aircraft being subjected to inspection.

The report further found that, due to the decrease in size of the nuclear force and stockpile of nuclear weapons in the inventory as well as it’s consolidation with chemical and biological weapons, the level of focus on the nuclear mission had been drastically reduced in the Air Force Bomber command, contributing to the conditions that created the Bent Spear incident. The report also found similar trends in the Air Force Missile command to a lesser degree when compared to the corresponding Naval nuclear weapons program.

As a former Naval Nuclear Weapons Handler, I was alarmed by the first reports of this incident and mystified at how it could have occurred. After reading the DSB’s review and subsequent Air Force corrective actions, I was equally alarmed at both the degradation of handling procedures within the Air Force and the fact that the 5^th Bomber Wing was still certified as nuclear-capable despite failing the subsequent Nuclear Surety Inspection on at least one occasion. Having experience undergoing one successful nuclear-certification inspection, the Navy’s Nuclear Weapons Acceptance Inspection as well as five annual Nuclear Technical Proficiency Inspections and two Technical Surprise Inspections, I was appalled by the Wing’s certification as well as the subsequent NSI failures by the 341^st Missile Wing at Malmstrom AFB, the 90^th Missile Wing at F. E. Warren AFB and the 377^th Air Base Wing at Kirtland AFB. The latter is especially disturbing since the 377^th is tasked with support of the transfer of the actual nuclear warheads to the Pantex plant for decommissioning. For the record, I have never heard of any nuclear-capable command in the US Navy either failing it’s inspections or being decertified as a result.

I found the stated causes of the confusion that precipitated the incident somewhat disingenuous since my experience was also dealing with both nuclear and non-nuclear payloads in the weapons systems I was responsible for, including handling evolutions. I was further mystified at how nuclear warheads could be “inadvertently” transferred from a secure, alarmed storage facility, fail to set off any anti-theft or anti-transfer alarms and pass through a total of SIX separate transfers of custody involving over 50 total personnel before being discovered. While I found the recommendations of the DSB for a unified Air Force nuclear command structure encouraging, I am skeptical about the results unless the Air Force adopts a program more closely resembling the Naval program. So my closing questions are as follows:

1. Why were established nuclear handling procedures with regard to close personal inspection at Minot not followed by appropriate personnel?

2. Why were no alarms set off by the warhead transfer, despite having each nuclear warhead individually catalogued and alarmed electronically?

3. Why did FIVE separate teams fail to either visually inspect or verify the presence of nuclear payloads despite established procedures requiring such inspections, four of which occurred prior to the flight?

4. What plans and procedures are in place to prevent a reoccurrence and to ensure Air Force units tasked with the nuclear mission pass their inspections the first time, every time?

For better or worse, we have an extensive nuclear arsenal and will continue to have one for the foreseeable future. I have applauded and supported US efforts to safeguard both our own arsenal as well as assisting Russia and the other former Soviet states to safeguard and secure the remnants of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. I supported GHW Bush’s successful plan to transfer and safeguard the former Kazakh component of that arsenal to US custody for dismantling and securing of all it’s nuclear material. I have consistently opposed nuclear proliferation and support IAEA inspection and control of ALL nuclear weapons arsenals, including India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. As the only country to actually use nuclear weapons in combat, despite my agreement that their use ultimately saved more lives than it took, the Mark of Cain is upon us. That Mark can only be assuaged by a commitment to total nuclear disarmament by all nations with the US playing a leading role within the IAEA. I also offer my own personal opinion that the only group of people who have EARNED the RIGHT to authorize the First Use of nuclear weapons are the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
 

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In Part one of my piece, I attempted to explain the nature and scope of the US Warrantless Wiretap Program and the growing Surveillance Regime being built in this country. In Part 2, I will compare and contrast the growth and structure of the aforementioned Surveillance Regimes with other countries’ corresponding Systems of surveillance and control. I will also spotlight the International Surveillance Industry and its efforts to market its products by offering this technology to governmental power centers around the world.

Back in 1992, I was living in Vallejo, Ca, a working-class/Navy town in the northeastern San Francisco Bay Area. At that time, there was a local news story about a local drug dealer facing his third-strike conviction under California’s Three-Strikes law who had a brilliant idea. If I blow up the police evidence room and destroy my incriminating evidence, they can’t convict me. He knew the local police evidence storage wasn’t in the Police station, but at the local library of all places. He also knew that if he blew up just the library, sooner or later, the police would get around to him as a suspect. So he hired two other guys he knew who actually managed to find and steal enough explosives to construct three bombs. They planted the first bomb outside the local Solano County government office which detonated late at night doing little damage. The second bomb they planted against the outside wall of the evidence storage room at the library, but a local kid discovered it and the police were able to successfully defuse the bomb. So the two guys planted the third bomb next to the ATM at the local Wells Fargo branch, which also detonated with little damage, as another diversion. Unfortunately, for all concerned, the ATM camera had captured perfect pictures of the two men and police were able to solve the case in short order.

I offer the preceding story to illustrate a point. Had those 2 men just left town in 1992, taken a powder, gone to Buffalo, chances are they would have probably gotten away with it as the surveillance technology had not become so advanced, ingrained and integrated into society. Had those guys attempted the same crime today, their first bomb placement would have been recorded by surveillance cameras surrounding the government building, their facial features subjected to facial recognition software and their identities established from police and prison records, their fingerprints correlated to evidence from the explosives theft site, and their movements tracked from RFID chips embedded in their new “Real ID” driver’s licenses  thus apprehending them before they had a chance to place their second bomb.

I had my first personal experience in Biometric Access in 2000 at Level 3. I had been administratively transferred from the Outside Plant Department on the Central Coast of California to the LA Metro office as I had responsibilities for their fiber routes out to San Bernardino and up to Santa Barbara. Level 3 had installed fingerprint scanners at all access points into their equipment rooms and my prints had to be inputted into the system. I also saw the installations of workplace cameras throughout the facility, where the main long haul fibers terminated into my equipment and then branched off to two floors full of Cisco routers. Since Level 3 was marketing itself as “The Carriers’ Carrier” and selling off a lot of dark fiber to other firms, I took note.

I had been following Britain’s efforts to beef up its internal security systems using lessons learned from dealing with the IRA. I was also familiar with China’s telecommunications architecture and it’s conversion to a DWDM fiber optic-based system, ending any effective NSA electronic eavesdropping on the Chinese government’s communications. So, after Klein’s revelations, I started seeing stories like This in trade magazines. I had been familiar with the growth of the security industry after the Atlanta Olympic Bombing and 9/11.

Then, last year, Naomi Klein’s article on China appeared in Rolling Stone in advance of the Beijing Olympics. Her analysis of the convergence of governmental and corporate power in the surveillance and control of China’s minorities and populations was very insightful. I began seeing similarities between the Communications Security infrastructures. The methods the Chinese government used in their news reports of the Tibetan unrest prior to the Olympics as well as the recent Uigher uprisings controlled information flow out of those areas to images favorable to the government. The rapidly growing surveillance camera networks integration into first local and then regional network control centers allowed Chinese authorities to track and identify strikers and demonstrators while utilizing images of violent demonstrators juxtaposed with police showing restraint. The facts that most of this technology was supplied by Western Corporations and the true scope of the international security business was staggering.

I watched the methods of security control for both the Denver and St. Paul conventions in 2008 with the police’s use of biometric and DNA information gathering and pre-event detentions of political activists at St. Paul and Denver as National Special Security Event and started to see the convergence of architecture and methodology of these geographically diverse systems with the drumbeat of system integration as the war cry.

Despite all this doom and gloom of what appears to be shaping up as a global security regime, there are datum of hope that crop up here and there. The Chinese government’s efforts to channel civic discontent into existing governmental institutions and it’s immediate reactions to the devastating quakes there stand in stark contrast to FEMA’s woeful performance in the wake of Katrina. The use of alternate web hosting to facilitate the demonstrations in Iran after last year’s election was another possible bright spot. They show that mass action is still possible and can be effective using the Internet and Telecomm systems as political organizing tools. But it also spotlights the need for greater dialogue and cooperation among dissident populations across the globe to counterbalance corporate influence on government to ensure some semblance of control by the governed. At the same time, these same efforts show a strategy to channel popular discontent and unrest into approved channels without effecting any real change to the overall state structure. It also shows how little difference there is in the main goals of all these surveillance regimes. Witness the Latest Frontier of data mining being used by

Iran, Britain and the US. The last article linked also illustrates how Police and Security entities have used their systems to identify and arrest dissidents and perceived enemies of the regime..

In conclusion, the Global Authoritarian Capitalist Security State I see being established will be a two-class system. If you’re one with a skill or with capital to offer to it, you’ll be thoroughly vetted before being allowed into your job, or school. You’re movements will be tracked to and from work, on the job and at any recreational activity. You’re banking and spending habits will be scrutinized along with every other form of electronic communications activity. Your associations and friends will be catalogued and, as long as you represent no threat to authority, you will live in a new, worldwide Pax Corporatica with the freedom to indulge in any form of material consumption. If you’re poor or marginalized, you will live outside that world with the full panoply of state and corporate power utilized against you to keep you from becoming an organized threat to the Pax Corporatica.

Forty-seven years ago, Marshall MacLuhan wrote in “The Guttenberg Galaxy”, addressing what he termed “The Global Village”:

“Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western World a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.”

Are we conforming to that vision, something darker or a hybrid of the two? What Village do YOU want to live in?

Be Seeing You. 

This piece will attempt to analyze the US Government’s Warrantless Wiretap Program utilizing open source information including A.T.&T. Whistleblower Mark Klein’s EFF affidavit, podcasts by James Bamford and Russell Tice available on this site, and comparisons with similar surveillance networks currently in use in Great Britain and China. The rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the past thirty years has been touted as a mechanism of information freedom and open societies, a global clearinghouse for political and personal empowerment and a panacea against the forces of repression and censorship. What I will attempt to show in this piece is how those lofty goals remain largely unrealized and how governments, under the guise of “security” are, in fact, using the Internet as a new, overarching and suffocating surveillance state to monitor, compile and track the personal and private lives of virtually everyone who uses modern telecommunications in any form. I will attempt to demonstrate that, because of the erection of this surveillance regime, privacy of communications is essentially dead. I will also attempt to show how information gathered under this program can be used to populate private corporation databases and affect the general populace through credit reports, employment opportunities and the convergence of private and government databases.

Let me begin by defining some terms to help the reader understand the overall scope of Warrantless Wiretaps. These terms will give the reader an idea of the masses of data being monitored:

The basic building block circuit for our purposes is called a DS-3. Each DS-3 contains 28 T-1s, each containing 24 voice channels. So 1 DS-3 equals 24 times 28 or 672 voice channels. These DS-3s are multiplexed to the Optical Channel level and have a numerical value of 1. Therefore, an Optical Channel or OC-3 circuit contains 3 DS-3s capacity or 2016 voice channels. An OC-12 circuit contains 12 DS-3s or 8064 voice channels; an OC-48 circuit contains 48 DS-3s or 32,556 voice channels. These circuits are multiplexed to an OC-192 DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplex) level for long distance transport. What the last term means is anywhere from 24 to 36 OC-192 (192 DS-3s) modulated on a single fiber for long distance transport. So a single optic fiber can carry almost 5,000,000 individual phone channels at once. Most single mode fiber cables contain between 50 and 100 individual fibers providing a transmit and receive path for 25-50 OC-192 DWDM circuits. I am personally certified on equipment up to and including the OC-192 DWDM level.

Now we turn to Mark Klein’s EFF affidavit in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit, Hepting v A.T.&T. :

In it, Klein describes his tasks as an A.T.&T. data communications technician in general terms as well as a project he was tasked to perform at the A.T.&T. Central Office located in 611 Folsom St., San Francisco. He describes how he was charged with the installation, test and turn-up of optical hybrid splitters to tap off optical signals from an array of A.T.&T. and other OCC (Other Common Carrier) circuits for transport and analysis within secret rooms installed  in Central Offices in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and Seattle, among others, for the National Security Agency. Inside these rooms, the traffic was routed through a Semantic Traffic Analyzer provided by Narus, an Israeli-owned company affiliated with Israel’s counterpart agency to the NSA, as documented by James Bamford in his podcast interview available on this site. It was also routed to the main NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, MD where it was stored for further data mining as part of the WWP. The splitter circuit diagrams are included on page 24 of the affidavit with the circuit cutover diagram visible on page 15. Of particular interest to me is the engineering document on page 17 of his affidavit, listing the Other Common Carriers leasing A.T.&T. facilities whose circuits and customers were also being monitored. It reads like a Who’s Who of major telecommunications IXCs (Inter-Exchange Carriers) including Qwest, Level3, Cable & Wireless, Global Crossing and a host of others. It also lists the size of each circuit routed to the NSA by it’s OC-x number as detailed above. Since Klein’s declaration only spotlights the West Coast central offices affected by this nationwide program, it is fair to assume it was also being carried out in corresponding offices on the East Coast as well.

The official justification offered by both the Bush and Obama administrations is that these circuits were only used for overseas traffic and, therefore, within the NSA’s lawful mandate to monitor overseas communications. The fallacy of that argument is that all the offices mentioned, while having some overseas circuits originating from them, primarily contained domestic telecommunications traffic. If the NSA wished to stay within its official mandate, this program could have been accomplished with far less cost by placing the NSA rooms with their equipment at overseas cable terminal offices such as the Transpacific Cable Terminal at Los Osos, near Morro Bay, CA.

Both Bamford and Tice, in their podcast interviews, speak of the two massive new NSA data storage facilities being built in Utah and Texas. Those locations are where all this information will be stored once they come online. Now consider the outsourcing of intelligence work to private contractors and security firms like CACI, Choicepoint and others who specialize in data mining from public sources as well and you begin to see the scope and impact of this program on ordinary citizens. Consider, also, Bamford and Tice’s revelations of a parallel National Telecommunications Traffic Control Center being constructed at Fort Meade identical to A.T.&T.‘s National Traffic Control Center in Bedminster, NJ. The eventual merging and sharing of this information between government and corporate entities is almost inevitable. Remember, as Benito Mussolini defined it:

“Fascism is the convergence of governmental and corporate power.”

So the questions I have are this.

1. Why is such an overarching, intrusive, draconian wiretap program necessary?

2. What mechanisms are there in place to prevent government-sourced private information from being shared with corporate entities?

3. Is the NSA positioning itself to take control of all telecommunications in the event of a national emergency? 

4. What national emergency might provide a trigger mechanism for the assumption of such control?