How’s this for a cool high-school science project?

Brenda Tan and Matt Cost, a pair of students at Trinity High School in Manhattan, recently performed DNA analysis of food items and other objects collected in their homes and surrounding environs.

They found a hellacious mix of mislabeled and possibly tainted food items and raised a ton of questions in the process.

Among their notable discoveries:
-  A pricey chunk of so-called sheep’s milk cheese turned out to have been derived from cow’s milk,
-  Fish labeled smelt turned out to be Japanese anchovy,
-  “Venison” dog treats were actually made from beef
-  Sturgeon caviar samples contained DNA from that widely-known delicacy, the Mississippi paddlefish.

The students dubbed their project “DNAHouse.” They analyzed their collections using the Barcode of Life Database which is normally used in species identification. They secured help from DNA barcoding experts at Rockefeller University and the American Museum of Natural History for their project.

A write-up of their work appears here.

“We do not know where or why the mislabeling occurred, but most cases appeared to involve substitution of a less expensive or less desirable item, suggesting the possibility of deliberate mislabeling for economic gain,” the authors wrote. “We also think mislabeling is a serious problem because certain individuals have allergies or dietary restrictions regarding certain foods.”

Trinity has a track record for producing these kinds of stories. Last year, 2 other Trinity students created a stir by reporting that one-quarter of the fish at local markets and restaurants was mislabeled.

Of note, Tan and Cost also sampled hair from several classmates. “We were happy to report,” they wrote, “that our classmates came back as 100% human.”

The Obama administration has announced a new policy that makes it harder for the government to claim “state secrets”—a phrase we thought had become George W. Bush’s middle name—in an effort to hide shady national security tactics like rendition and warrantless wiretapping from the public. 

The new policy requires the CIA, FBI, NSA and the US military to convince the attorney general and a team of lawyers at Justice that the release of information regarding such tactics presents a significant risk to “national defense or foreign relations,” according to the Washington Post.

The legislation raises the standard for “state secrets” to instances when the release of material “would be reasonably likely to cause significant harm to the national defense or the diplomatic relations of the United States.”

Under Bush, a claim of “state secrets” required approval of a mid-level official using a much lower standard of proof that disclosure would harm national security.

Bush asserted “state secrets” dozens of times, according to legal scholars.

“What we’re trying to do is . . . improve public confidence that this privilege is invoked very rarely and only when it’s well supported,” a senior department official confided to the Post. “We’re not following a ‘just trust us’ approach.”

Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a nonprofit that promotes government transparency welcomed the change. It is “enormously consistent with open-government recommendations” that he and other advocates have made for years.

Last February, in anticipation of the policy shift, Justice began reviewing about a dozen cases in which “state secrets” had been invoked.

Surprisingly, it reversed course in just one instance—a bizarre case in which a former DEA operative has accused the CIA and the State Department of wiretapping his home.

Last month, it was disclosed that the CIA once hired Blackwater USA, the private security contractor, to carry out an assassination program targeting suspected top members of al-Qaeda.

The ensuing debate about whether such activities ought to be outsourced has been on a low-boil ever since. 

The ruckus has been exacerbated by Blackwater’s thug-like reputation which it earned after its employees got into the habit of shaking down Iraqi civilians not to mention allegedly slaying 17 of them in Baghdad back in 2007.

The Justice Department indicted 5 Blackwater guards last year in connection with that incident.

Some lawmakers don’t like the idea of outsourcing intelligence operations from government employees.

Diane Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, recently told the Washington Post for example, that she has “believed for a long time that the intelligence community is over-reliant on contractors to carry out its work.”

That may be, but there is no legal prohibition against doing so.

“Actual intelligence analysis, actual intelligence collection are permissible activities for contractors under current OMB guidance,” former CIA director Michael Hayden told the Post.

“The CIA views contractors as essential to the accomplishment of its mission, bringing unique skills that the agency may need only for limited periods of time,” CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said in a statement.

In case you’re looking for them in the Yellow Pages by the way, Blackwater recently renamed itself Xe Services. Its founder, Erik Prince, financially backs Republican political candidates and causes.

After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Prince’s company secured several contracts to protect US personnel, including a $21 million no-bid contract to protect Paul Bremer, who headed the US led Coalition Provisional Authority at the time.

Next year, Blackwater won a $1 billion, 5-year State Department contract to guard US diplomats and dignitaries worldwide.

Government personnel using popular online file-sharing software have inadvertently caused sensitive government and personal data to be released.

The information includes lists of people with HIV, FBI photos of a Mafia hit man, the names of people in the federal witness protection program and the safe-house location for Laura Bush, according to testimony provided last week to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The leaks occur when people download so-called “peer-to-peer” software to share music or other files. Many of these software products expose the contents of their computers’ databases to remote users, the experts explained.

“The administration should initiate a national campaign to educate consumers about the dangers involved with file-sharing software,” Towns understated to the Washington Post.

Expert testimony was provided by Robert Boback, the chief executive of Tiversa, a company that scans Internet-based music- and file-sharing networks for sensitive data. Boback told the committee that foreign governments are exploiting peer-to-peer software to spy on the US government.

“Other countries know how to access this information and they are accessing this information,” he warned.

The list of HIV infected people also included their Social Security numbers, according to Boback. 

“This is unbelievably sensitive medical data,” Deborah Peel told the Post. The founder of Patient Privacy Rights added, “It has people’s names on it from mental-health treatment programs, drug studies. These files have everything needed for identity theft, the most prominent and frightening consumer issue with electronic systems.”

Another expert witness, Lime Group chairman Mark Gorton said his company’s P2P software renders such piracy extremely difficult, but there are hundreds of P2P software providers out there.

“Most creators of P2P applications are not based in the United States, and may not even be corporations,” Gorton said.

The National Security Agency has been intercepting email messages and phone calls of American citizens in violation of the already broad legal limits imposed by Congress last year, according to government intelligence officials.

These officials indicate there has been significant and systemic, although possibly inadvertent “overcollection” of domestic communications involving people living in the US.

Last week the Justice Department acknowledged to the New York Times that, as part of a routine review of NSA operations, it “detected issues that raised concerns.”

Justice Department officials then “took comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance” with the law and court orders, according to the statement.

The violations apparently began last July when Congress modified the law regarding government wiretapping powers on terrorism and spying suspects. The new spying framework apparently created implementation challenges and errors resulted.

The original law represented a triumph for the Bush administration, 3 years after his warrantless wiretapping program was outed in 2005.

After much wrangling in Congress, the original law permitted the NSA to collect, without court-approved warrants, gobs of international phone and email traffic as it passed across US telecom gateways, so long as the targets  were “reasonably believed” to be outside the US.

The modification was designed to assure the law wasn’t extended to US citizens but either something got lost in translation or NSA staffers ran into operational glitches making it difficult to distinguish domestic from international communications, or both.

The result was that the agency was targeting US citizens and domestic communications without warrants.

No one seems to know the scope of the problem, or if they do, no one’s talking.

It is not clear whether the NSA actively listened to conversations or read email from Americans, or whether it simply obtained access to them.

Senators John Rockefeller (D-WVa) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) have introduced new legislation designed to supersize current US defense systems against cyberattacks.

The proposal would empower the Feds to establish and enforce security standards governing the private sector for the first time.

In the US, private networks control key infrastructure such as electricity, water and sewage, and nuclear power, not to mention most financial and traffic control systems.

The new bill reached the docket just days after national security officials announced that Russian and Chinese cyberspies had hacked their way into the nations’ energy grid and inserted applets that could be activated remotely resulting in massive blackouts, gridlock and who knows what else.

The legislation suggests appointing a cybersecurity czar that would report directly to the president. This person would be empowered to disable computer networks, including those in the private sector, in the event of a cyberattack.

The Senators’ bill was drafted with input from the Big O’s people, although he has not officially endorsed it yet. It is based on recommendations made in a report drafted last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

It’s not clear how industry groups will respond. Jim Dempsey, a VP for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, which advocates for civil liberties groups and the private sector, told the Washington Post that such standards have long been a “third rail of cybersecurity policy.”

Federal regulations, he added, might actually stifle innovative approaches to cybersecurity by requiring companies to adopt a singular approach.

Recently, Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence told reporters he expected there will be privacy concerns regarding the new proposal. Any program has to be designed to assure citizens it is “not being used to gather private information,” he told reporters.

Russian and Chinese cyberspies have accessed the US electrical grid and inserted software that, if activated, can disrupt the system and cause massive blackouts according to national security officials.

The intruders have not attempted to bring down the grid, but one official told the Wall Street Journal that “if we go to war with them, they will try.”

Nearly all the violations were detected by US intelligence agencies, not the companies responsible for the infrastructure.

The intelligence officials also raised concerns that cybercriminals could carry out similar crimes against nuclear power plants, financial networks and water and sewage systems, since they all rely on the Internet for communication and control.

In 2000 for example, a whacked-out Australian hacker commanded a water-treatment facility to release 200,000 gallons of raw sewage into rivers, parks, and property owned by a Hyatt hotel.

And Tom Donahue, a senior CIA official said that last year, a coordinated cyberattack shut down power equipment in several countries outside the US. The attackers subsequently tried to extort money, according to Donahue.

“Our own infrastructures are as vulnerable as (our) foreign counterparts,” warned Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair.

Nevertheless, these officials see no immediate danger.

China, for example, can’t afford to disrupt our economy since American consumers are major purchasers of its products.

The Big O has tasked a committee to review US cybersecurity programs. The report is due next week.

“Russia has nothing to do with cyberattacks on US infrastructure or on infrastructure in any other country,” Yevgeniy Khorishko, a Russian Embassy spokesman admonished the Journal.

The Chinese government “resolutely oppose[s] any crime, including hacking, that destroys the Internet or computer networks” echoed Chinese Embassy spokesperson Wang Baodong.

During his campaign to “change Washington,” the Big O frequently accused Bush of wantonly ignoring public disclosure rules and flaunting the state-secrets privilege at will.

Now it appears The Coronated One is doing a bit of that himself.

Obama’s Justice Team is seeking to dismiss a US District court case filed by an Oregon charity accused of funding terrorism on grounds that it threatens state secrets and national security.

It has even intimated it might abscond with classified documents currently in the court’s custody to prevent the charity’s lawyers from perusing them.

The Bush Justice Team regularly invoked “state secrets” to prevent civil liberties groups from accessing sensitive documents regarding offshore prisons for terrorism suspects, warrantless wiretapping of US citizens and other questionable behavior.

The charity, al-Haramain wants damages from the FBI and National Security Agency, alleging the Feds’ illegal eavesdropping of its board members and lawyers violated its freedom of speech and due process rights.

The charity is no longer in business. It claims its purpose was philanthropic and that the Feds have no evidence to support assertions against it.

“There has to be other ways to protect secret information without having to block accountability,” Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at UC Irvine told the Washington Post.

Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller responded that it “has already moved on a number of fronts to ensure Americans have access to information about their government’s actions. With respect to state secrets, the attorney general has ordered a review of pending cases to ensure the privilege is only invoked when absolutely necessary.”

“At this point,” said Jon Eisenberg, the al-Haramain attorney, “I don’t feel like I need to do anything. The outrage speaks for itself.”

Shirwa Ahmed, a Somali-born college student mysteriously disappeared from his Minneapolis home 15 months ago. Ten months later, he blew himself up along with 4 other suicide bombers in Somalia, in a coordinated attack orchestrated by al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda splinter group.

That prompted several Somali American families from Minneapolis to come forward.

 What they said was that Ahmed was only the first of many in the Somali community there to leave town unexpectedly.

Eight left in one day last August. Seven more bolted on Election Day.

The men tended to be good students. They attended the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center mosque. Before leaving, they became less social and took their religious studies more seriously, according to the families.

In investigating the disappearance of his cousin, Ahmad Hassan found paperwork for a flight to Somalia. A travel agency told him an adult claiming to be a parent paid for the ticket.

“We believe a minority group is recruiting these kids, brainwashing them and financing and arranging the travel,” Hassan told the Washington Post. “Those who are recruiting kids here can harm us here.”

The FBI is on the case. Investigations are active in Boston, Columbus and Seattle.

CIA Director Leon Panetta said the Somali connection “raises concerns about the potential for terrorist activity” and “constitutes a potential threat to the security of this country.”

The men’s American passports would enable them to reenter the country with alacrity.

Al-Shabaab “presents U.S. authorities with the most serious evidence to date of a ‘homegrown’ terrorist recruitment problem in the American heartland,” Georgetown professor Bruce Hoffman told the Post. 

Mahir Sherif, a lawyer for the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center said it “does not engage in political activities, has not and will not recruit for any political cause and never will be in support of terrorist philosophy or acts.”

Shortly after Russia’s brazen denial-of-service attack knocked Kyrgyzstan off the grid for a week, the impoverished nation’s president announced he was closing Manas Air Base, the US’ last remaining facility in Central Asia.

The Bear’s cyber-bullying had the Big O bumming since he planned to use the base as a staging ground for troops on their way to Afghanistan.

Still, that was small potatoes compared to the coordinated cyber-attacks on the Pentagon and other US agencies in 2007, which among other things infiltrated Robert Gates’ email.

The hack demonstrated for the once and future Defense Secretary that his country isn’t nearly as prepared to defend itself in a cyber war as it is to do so in a conventional military war.

Obama got the memo too. He just charged Melissa Hathaway to lead a 60-day review of America’s cyber security prowess, or lack thereof.

The more our government, financial systems and power grid rely on the Internet, the more exposed we become. Michael McConnell, who was National Intelligence Director under Bush Jr., told the Wall Street Journal that cyber security was “the soft underbelly of this country.”

Last year, Bush created the Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative, a top-secret $6 billion program directed at shielding dot-gov and dot-mil Web sites with nuts and bolts security procedures ironically dubbed “Einstein.”

Cyber aggressors would likely cruise past such defenses without breaking a sweat, if they haven’t already.

The US government repels amateurish cyber attacks daily. Many are after weapon designs or classified communication.

Most appear to originate in China, though it’s not possible to know, the Internet being what it is.

There were 13,000 information security attacks in 2007 alone, according to the Wall Street Journal, and that’s not counting the ones we don’t know about.

 So far as the US public knows, no one’s launched a sophisticated, coordinated, sustained cyber-attack against the US since 2007.

Even if this has happened and we’ve defended ourselves fairly well, no one knows what will happen next time. (more…)