Science and Security
Balancing Protection and Privacy
 Every time someone sends an e-mail, buys an item with a credit card, or makes a phone call, the activities are recorded in vast corporate databases. Many of these databases are available to federal counterterrorism agencies, which use sophisticated computer programs to “mine” the data and try to identify patterns that indicate terrorist activities. Questions have been raised, however, about how effective these efforts really are, and whether the privacy of innocent individuals is being protected adequately in the process. To address these concerns, the National Research Council was asked to examine the technical effectiveness and privacy impacts of data mining and other surveillance techniques.
The resulting report, Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Program Assessment, says that all federal agencies with such counterterrorism programs should be required to systematically evaluate their effectiveness, lawfulness, and impacts on privacy. While the terrorist threat to the United States is real and serious, it does not justify government activities that violate the law.
The most serious threat today comes from international terrorist groups, who often use the Internet or other public communication channels to recruit, train, and plan operations. Some data-mining techniques can be effective, speeding and expanding the work of investigators who already have a lead, the report says. Agents can use them to quickly find out who has communicated with or transferred money to a known terror suspect. If there is a historical basis for concluding that a pattern of activity is linked to terrorism, then searching for similar patterns could aid investigations.
However, little is known about which patterns are linked to terrorism. As a result, programs that scan databases looking for any unusual patterns are apt to turn up far too many false leads to be useful, the report notes. No one should be arrested, searched, or have their rights denied simply because an automated data-mining program has identified them as suspicious.
Another counterterrorism technique called behavioral surveillance, which monitors people’s actions and physiological signs to try to determine if someone is about to commit an act of terrorism, is being researched and implemented by some federal agencies. There is no consensus on whether these techniques are ready for use, the report says. At most, they should be used to screen people for further investigation. The techniques raise serious privacy concerns, since those who are detained have to explain and justify their emotional states. Someone who appears nervous before boarding a plane, for example, may be a terrorist or may simply be afraid to fly.
The report offers a framework to help agencies that collect or mine data or conduct behavioral surveillance to evaluate the techniques to determine whether they are effective and lawful. In the aftermath of a disaster or terrorist incident, policymakers often come under intense political pressure to respond. However, a response should be based on more demanding criteria than “it’s better than nothing,” the report says.
In addition, policymakers should consider new restrictions to help prevent “mission creep,” which can occur when data collected is given to another agency to find tax evaders, for example, or people behind on their child-support payments. And innocent people who are harmed by privacy violations should have some form of redress, which at the very least should include an acknowledgement of the violation and action to reduce the likelihood that it will happen again.
The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation.
Nuclear Power, Not Nuclear Weapons
 More than two dozen nations — from Belarus to Vietnam to Egypt — are considering nuclear energy or have announced plans to build nuclear power plants. This potential expansion of nuclear power has a downside: Uranium enrichment facilities needed to make nuclear fuel for power reactors could also be used to produce a key ingredient for nuclear weapons. The same is true for reprocessing plants, which separate materials from spent nuclear fuel for recycling.
Enriched uranium can be purchased from two international consortia, the United States, and Russia. However, some countries may fear that relying on others for the fuel could make them vulnerable to a cutoff of supplies for political reasons. As more nations pursue nuclear power, the United States and Russia, along with other countries and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), should redouble efforts to develop a broad menu of approaches to increase the reliability of the supply of nuclear fuel, including assurances against political disruptions of supplies, thereby reducing nations’ incentives to build their own uranium-enrichment or reprocessing plants, says a report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences. The report, Internationalization of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: Goals, Strategies, and Challenges, is based in part upon discussions from an international workshop convened by the academies at the IAEA, involving 10 countries that might participate in such a system.
Over time, Russia, the United States, and other nations should work to create a global system featuring a small number of international centers to handle sensitive steps of the nuclear fuel cycle. To participate in such centers, countries should have to meet nuclear safeguards and nonproliferation criteria, the report says.
Countries that are part-owners of this global system for nuclear fuel services will likely feel more assured of a stable fuel supply. It would also let many more nations share in the profits of uranium enrichment. Under such a system, however, efforts will be needed to prevent the potential for sensitive technology or knowledge to leak and contribute to a nation’s efforts to build nuclear weapons.
If the suppliers of nuclear fuel would agree to take back spent fuel for disposal or reprocessing, it would provide another powerful incentive for nations not to build their own enrichment facilities, the report says. Doing so would allow nations to enjoy the benefits of nuclear energy without the environmental and security hazards of storing spent fuel. However, taking another nation’s nuclear waste is politically unpalatable for many countries. Russia is furthest along in offering these services to other nations. The U.S. and Russia should work on cooperative approaches to lease fuel to “newcomer” nations for the lifetime of their reactors.
The report also includes steps for evaluating proposed new fuel-cycle agreements, arrangements, and regulations. And nations should not delay implementation of nonproliferation arrangements for the fuel cycle that are feasible today while other options are being refined.
The study was funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, with additional support from the Russian Academy of Sciences and assistance from IAEA in arranging the international workshop.
Conventional Prompt Global Strike
 The United States has an arsenal of conventional weapons systems, including tactical aircraft and cruise missiles, and heavy bombers. Sometimes, however, the U.S. military needs to act more quickly than these non-nuclear weapons systems would allow — for example, to strike a gathering of terrorist leaders or a shipment of weapons of mass destruction during a brief period of vulnerability. In 2007, the U.S. Department of Defense requested $127 million from Congress to develop conventional prompt global strike (CPGS) capability, defined as the ability to strike a target within meters anywhere in the world with a non-nuclear weapon, and within one hour of the decision to launch the attack. The budget request was earmarked for the Conventional Trident Modification (CTM) program, in which two Trident II missiles on each of the U.S. Navy’s 12 deployed nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines would be converted from being nuclear-armed to conventionally armed, to provide a CPGS capability. Congress rejected the request because of concerns about “nuclear ambiguity” — the possibility that the launch of a converted Trident might be mistaken for the launch of nuclear-armed missile. In addition, policymakers questioned whether other proposed CPGS systems might better address some of the military, political, and technical issues surrounding the CTM program.
A report by the National Research Council that examined these issues finds that credible scenarios exist in which the U.S. could gain meaningful political and strategic advantages by being able to strike important targets quickly with conventional weapons when currently deployed military forces could not act as rapidly. U.S. Conventional Prompt Global Strike: Issues for 2008 and Beyond recommends that in the near term Congress should fund CTM research, development, testing, and evaluation at a level sufficient to achieve early deployment if tests confirm system effectiveness, and at the same time it should develop doctrines and policies for the use of CPGS systems. Failure to proceed could significantly delay progress on other proposed CPGS systems.
While concerns about nuclear ambiguity are valid, the benefits of possessing a limited CPGS capability outweigh the risks, the report finds. The risk is very low that another nation would launch a nuclear retaliatory attack on the United States because it misinterpreted a conventional strike as nuclear. A foreign nation would be extremely unlikely to believe that the United States was starting a nuclear war with no more than a handful of long-range missiles, and would have every incentive, in its own interest, to determine definitely the character of the attack before responding. The risk could be reduced even further through sound policies and procedures about the use of proposed CPGS systems.
The report includes evaluations of other proposed CPGS systems and makes specific recommendations for how DOD should proceed in the next two to three years and beyond. In addition, the report recommends that the United States should work with allies, Russia, and other nations to mitigate concerns about U.S. abilities to strike promptly with conventional weapons.
The study was funded by the U.S. Department of the Navy.
Sound Assessment of the Nuclear Stockpile
The United States has not conducted an underground nuclear test since 1992, when a voluntary moratorium on testing was enacted. In the absence of testing, three national laboratories — Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories — are charged with annually assessing the nation’s aging stockpile of nuclear weapons to ensure that they are still reliable and secure. The three labs use a wide range of processes, technologies, and expertise to evaluate the weapons, including a sophisticated framework called quantification of margins and uncertainties (QMU). However, concerns have been raised about the methodology and implementation of QMU, as well as whether the assessment tool can be used to certify that a proposed new generation of nuclear warhead — called the reliable replacement warhead — will work without the need for nuclear testing. In light of these issues, Congress asked the National Research Council to evaluate the laboratories’ use of QMU.
Its report, Evaluation of Quantification of Margins and Uncertainties Methodology for Assessing and Certifying the Reliability of the Nuclear Stockpile, says that QMU is a sound and valuable framework for helping maintain the nation’s nuclear weapons capability. The laboratories should expand their use of QMU while continuing to develop, improve, and increase the application of the methodology. A more mature QMU could also help certify the reliable replacement warhead, provided its design is close to existing warheads.
To quantify confidence in weapons reliability, the QMU framework incorporates data and analysis from many experimental and computational sources such as data from non-nuclear, above-ground experiments and past nuclear weapons tests. QMU is valuable in many ways, says the report, especially for allocating important resources and for organizing the many computer simulation and coding tools used to assess the stockpile. QMU should be applied to all aspects of assessment that are deemed critical for warhead performance.
Because effective use of QMU relies on expert judgment, the laboratories should make sure to maintain quality staff, the report says. In addition, the methodology used to identify and announce uncertainties should be developed further. While there are differences in how the methodology is implemented at the laboratories, these differences can enhance QMU development, the report says. Differences in definitions among the labs, the absence of documentation, and the lack of consistency within each lab, however, are causes for concern.
If the design of a new warhead is sufficiently similar or “close” to existing, already tested designs, then a more developed QMU methodology could be used to certify them, along with other tools. The laboratories that are designing the weapons should provide detailed justification for use of archival tests to support any proposed new design and investigate ways to help quantify “closeness,” the report says.
The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
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