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`Owning’ the weather? Part I

By Rahnuma Ahmed

“In 2025, US aerospace forces can “own the weather” by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications… weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary.”

– Col Tamzy J. House et. al., Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025

`Owning’ the weather? You must be thinking, What a preposterous idea!

Apparently not, for those who wrote the report from which I’ve quoted above (August 1996). It was a study commissioned by the chief of staff of the US Air Force to examine the “concepts, capabilities, and technologies the United States will require to remain the dominant air and space force in the future.” One which was reviewed by security and policy review authorities, and cleared for public release.

As I read the report, I cannot help but wonder at what is contained in those documents which have not been revealed to the public, ones that are classified. Neither can I help but marvel at the devotion and hard work that has gone into imagining, drawing-up and detailing such a scheme of mass murder. At the colossal criminality involved. An issue that the authors hurriedly traverse—”[weather-modification techniques] offers a dilemma,” it is a “controversial issue,” “some segments of society” are reluctant—lest they have any second thoughts, lest they develop any moral qualms over the matter.

Of course, as is only to be expected, all the necessary disclaimers are there. The views expressed are those of the authors. They do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Air Force. Or, the Department of Defense. Least of all, the US government. Representations of future scenarios are fictional. Any similarity to real people, to real events, why, to reality itself—is unintentional.

Weather modification, write the authors, has “tremendous military capabilities” (see table). Rainfall can be enhanced to flood the enemy’s lines of communication. To reduce the effectivity of precision guided missiles (PGM). Rainfall can be prevented too. To deny the enemy access to fresh water. To induce drought and wreck food cultivation. Fogs and clouds can be generated, or removed. Friendly forces merit generation, to enhance their ability to conceal themselves. While enemy forces shall suffer from fog/cloud removal, to deny concealment. To smoke ‘em out?

To develop an integrated weather-modification system, technological advancements are necessary in five areas: (1) advanced nonlinear modeling techniques (2) computational capability (3) information gathering and transmission (4) a global sensor array, and (5) weather intervention techniques. Some of these “intervention tools” already exist, we are told. Others may be developed. May be refined. For future use. To develop and refine technologies of mass murder….?

Current weather-modification technologies which will mature over the next 30 years, will—in all likelihood—become “a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications.” A policy that could be pursued at “various levels”: NATO. UN. Coalition. And, if the national security strategy in 2025 includes weather-modification, “its use in our national military strategy will naturally follow.” Its benefit? It’ll “deter and counter potential adversaries.” It’s “appropriate application… can provide battlespace dominance to a degree never before imagined.” The executive summary ends on this ominous note: “The technology is there, waiting for us to pull it all together;” in 2025 we can “Own the Weather.”

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The current military and civilian worldwide weather data network will evolve and expand to become a Global Weather Network (GWN). One which will be a super high-speed, expanded bandwidth, communication network by 2025. By then, weather-prediction models will prove to be “highly accurate in stringent measurement trials against empirical data.” And the “brains” of these models? “Advanced software and hardware capabilities which can rapidly ingest trillions of environmental data points, merge them into usable data bases, process the data through the weather prediction models, and disseminate the weather information over the GWN in near-real-time” (see Figure).

Although “extreme and controversial” examples of weather modification, such as, the creation of made-to-order weather, large-scale climate modification, creation and/or control (or “steering”) of severe storms, etc. were researched, “technical obstacles preventing their application appear insurmountable within 30 years.” And therefore, the authors write, these are only mentioned briefly.

Close observers are inclined to disagree. Weather warfare, they think, has already started.

“What are the underlying causes of extreme weather instability, which has ravaged every major region of the World in the course of the last few years?” writes professor Michel Chossudovsky, one of the keenest analysts.

He continues, “Hurricanes and tropical storms have ravaged the Caribbean. Central Asia and the Middle East are afflicted by drought. West Africa is facing the biggest swarm of locusts in more than a decade. Four destructive hurricanes and a tropical rain storm Alex, Ivan, Frances, Charley and Jeanne have occurred in a sequence, within a short period of time. Unprecedented in hurricane history in the Caribbean, the island of Grenada was completely devastated: 37 people died and roughly two-thirds of the island’s 100,000 inhabitants have been left homeless; in Haiti, more than two thousand people have died and tens of thousands are homeless. The Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas and Florida have also been devastated. In the US, the damage in several Southern states including Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and the Carolinas is the highest in US history.”

While global warming is undoubtedly an important factor, writes Chossudovsky, it does not fully account for these extreme and unusual weather patterns.

In the 5 years since he wrote “The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: “Owning the Weather” for Military Use” (Global Research, September 2004), many more natural disasters have occurred: the Asian tsunami which hit 14 countries; Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand most severly, killing nearly 230,000 (December 2004). Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana, 1,836 people lost their lives (August 2005). Great Sichuan earthquake in China, 68,000 died (May 2008). The recent earthquake in Haiti, 200,000 estimated dead (January 2010).

Both the Americans and the Russians have developed capabilities, says Chossudovsky, to “manipulate the World’s climate.”

In a 1997 article of The Wall Street Journal (Nov 13), Chen May Yee wrote about a memorandum of understanding to be signed soon between a Russian and a Malaysian company to create a hurricane that would create torrential rains, one that would be directed close enough to clear the smoke without actually coming on land to create a devastation. In an earlier piece The Wall Street Journal had reported that a Russian company, Elate Intelligent Technologies Inc., advertising under the slogan `Weather Made to Order’—sold weather control equipment. Elate is capable of fine tuning weather patterns over a 200 square mile area, for as little as $200 per day. Hurricane Andrew, which had occurred a year earlier and had caused damage worth $30 billion could have been turned into “a wimpy little squall,” according to Igor Pirogoff, a director of Elate. Doesn’t this mean that hurricane Katrina too, could have been diverted?

As I research on the internet, I come across another news item: “Entering a thunderstorm 10 miles off West Palm Beach, a B-57 Canberra jet bomber chartered for one million dollars releases some 9,000 pounds of improved Dyn-O-Gel capable of 10-times stronger water absorption. Miami’s Channel 5’s weather radar shows the huge thunderhead losing moisture. Within seconds, the buildup vanished as one side of the cloud collapsed “like an avalanche”, according to a chase plane cameraman.” (Sun-Sentinel July 20/01).

As a weapon of war, the use of weather modification techniques was publicly described much earlier. On 20 March 1974, by the Pentagon. A 7 year cloud seeding effort in Vietnam and Cambodia, costing $21.6 million, had been initiated to increase rainfall in target areas, thereby “causing landslides and making unpaved roads muddy, hindering the movement of supplies.”  That US forces had suffered a drastic defeat in Vietnam, and forced to leave in 1975, is now part of history.

At present, other countries, probably China and North Korea, are feverishly working to catch up. Early snow covered Beijing last November. According to the Chinese state media, it was the result of Chinese metereologists’ efforts to “make rain by injecting special chemicals into clouds,” a technique that often gets results (Agence France-Presse, 1 November 2009).

According to Chossudovsky, weather-modification technology is being perfected in the US under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP), part of the (“Star Wars”) Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP is fully operational. That it has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes. That it is—from the military standpoint—a weapon of mass destruction…

(more, next week)

First Published in New Age on 1st February 2010

Tags: climate, control, Rahnuma Ahmed, science, technology, USA, War, weather

Insecure at last: the age of surveillance

by rahnuma ahmed

‘I am worried about this word, this notion — security. I see this word, hear this word, feel this word everywhere. Security check. Security watch. Security clearance. Why has all this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure?’

— Eve Ensler, ‘Insecure at Last: A Political Memoir.’

Tailor-made, to suit your needs

Surveillance often works innocuously. Consider this: billboards equipped with small cameras that gather details about passers-by — gender, a rough estimation of age, and how long she or he looks at the billboard. The cameras, it is said, use software to establish that the person is a billboard-viewer, it then analyses her or his facial features like cheekbone height, distance between nose and chin, to judge the person’s gender and age. Race is not used as a parameter. Not yet, but the companies say that they can, that they will. These details are transmitted to a central database. The purpose is to ‘tailor’ a digital display of the viewer, ‘to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman,’ and another to ‘a teenage Asian boy.’ To sell products more efficiently. More rationally. It does not intrude on privacy, so the argument goes, since actual images of billboard viewers are not stored.

These billboards are similar to websites such as Amazon, described as the largest (virtual) bookstore in the world, tailor-made to assist the customer, her needs and interests. I visit the website to look up books on feminist theory, I am shown bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, along with, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, also written by her, one that is, so I am told, ‘Frequently Bought Together.’ Simultaneously, five other products are displayed, that Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought. Down below are menus which, at a click, will display my Recent History, books recently purchased, or viewed by me.

The Surveillance Society

Surveillance, as a growing number of Western writers, journalists, artists, academics and human rights activists keep reminding us, is no longer ‘the future’. In the words of Henry Potter, London editor of Vanity Fair, ‘we are already at the gates of the surveillance society.’ According to a group of academics, writers of A Report on the Surveillance Society (September 2006), it exists ‘not merely from dawn to dusk,’ but for twentyfour hours a day, seven days a week. It is systemic, expressed not only through supermarket check-out clerks who want to see loyalty cards, or the coded access card that allows one to enter the office, or CCTV (closed-circuit TV) cameras, which in Britain, are ‘everywhere.’ A CCTV consulting firm puts the number deployed at more than 4 million, nearly as many as the rest of the world combined, minus the United States. The report’s authors write, ‘these systems represent a basic, complex infrastructure which assumes that gathering and processing personal data is vital to contemporary living.’ Surveillance is, in their words, a ‘part of the fabric of daily life.’

They write, it would be a mistake to think of surveillance as ‘something sinister, smacking of dictators and totalitarianism,’ or as ‘a covert conspiracy.’ Instead, it is the outcome of modern organisational practices, business, government and the military. It is better viewed as the progress towards efficient administration, as a benefit for the development of Western capitalism and the modern nation-state. Four hundred years ago, rational methods began to be applied to organisational practices, to ensure that the new organisations ran smoothly. It made informal social controls on business and governing, and people’s ordinary social ties ‘irrelevant.’ The growth of new computer systems after World War II reduced labour intensity, it increased the reliability and the volume of work that could be accomplished. Subsequent growth of the new communications system, now known together as ‘information technology’ (IT), is related to modern desires for efficiency, speed, control and coordination, and is global.

Capitalism’s push to cut down on costs and to increase profits has accelerated and reinforced surveillance. This, accompanied by the 20th century’s growth of military and police departments, and the development of new technologies, has improved techniques of intelligence-gathering, identification and tracking. Surveillance thus, has become part of being modern.

It is undoubtedly two-sided. It has its benefits: it helps deter traffic violations, tracks down criminals, medical surveillance programmes provide necessary information to public health authorities etc. But, the authors warn us, there are things that are ‘seriously wrong’ with a surveillance society. Large scale technological infrastructures suffer from problems, equally large in scale, especially computer systems where a mistaken, or an imprudent keystroke can cause havoc. For instance, twenty million ordinary peoples’ online search queries from AOL were released for ‘research’ purposes in August 2006. The names of identifiers were not tagged, but connecting search records with names took only a couple of minutes. Corruptions and skewed visions of power, not that of tyrants, but of leaders justifying extraordinary tactics in exceptional cicumstances, such as the endless ‘war on terror,’ can be disastrous. Many Muslim Americans have been branded as unfit for travel, or subject to racial profiling. Surveillance systems are wrong on three other counts: they are `meant to discriminate between one group and another’, as recent trends show, distinctions of class, race, gender, geography and citizenship are being exacerbated and institutionalised. Second, it undermines trust, something necessary to social relationships, breeding suspicion in its place. When parents start to use webcams and GPS systems to check on teenage childrens’ activities, or spouses check each others’ suspected infidelities, it speaks of a ‘slow social suicide.’ And third, surveillance systems associated with high technology and anti-terrorism distract us from pursuing ‘alternatives,’ from paying attention to larger and more urgent questions.

Fear internalised

Caroline Osella, a contributor to the ASA (Association of Social Anthropologists) blog discussion on recruiting anthropologists in the ‘war on terror’ (through the Human Terrain System programme), wrote of a personal experience that illustrates the ‘state of paranoid anxiety’ that grips people. As the mother of an 11 year-old, she had gone to a school meeting for parents to discuss a planned residential adventure school trip. She was astounded, she writes, to see parents not asking questions about activities planned, or practicalities like food, or other stuff to take along. Instead, questions revolved exclusively around security. School authorities were asked: ‘will an adult stay awake all night to monitor that kids are safe and not wandering?,’ ‘can the kids escape to the outside?,’ ‘can strangers get in?’ And she writes, incredible as it may sound, one father finally asked, ‘what guarantee can the school provide that paedophiles will not be able to break the perimeter fence and get into the site, where the kids will be sleeping unchaperoned in tents?’

It was surreal, Osella writes, to sit and listen to ‘reasoned and careful discussions’ of a totally fantastic scenario. It would be great, she says, to embrace some insecurity and uncertainty, and to accept the absence of ‘total control’ over our lives.

How does surveillance get naturalised? Mark Andrejevic, author of Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, believes that reality TV has played a part in transforming American attitudes toward surveillance. Producers of early reality programs such as MTV’s The Real World (1992) had a hard time finding people willing to have their lives taped nearly 24 hours a day for several months. Now, thousands of young people form audition lines in college towns, ‘more people applying to The Real World each year than to Harvard.’ New generations, Andrejevic says, are growing up viewing television shows that let anyone see the lives of others recorded voluntarily. There are other reality shows too, like COPS, where police chases of criminals is filmed. Increasingly, he says, the results of surveillance are seen as `entertainment,’ as being within the realm of the public’s right to know.

The mass collection of DNA data, and ‘policy’ laundering

The introduction of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 in the UK has led to anyone being arrested on ‘suspicion’ of committing the slightest offence. After arrest, the police remove a DNA sample, which stays on the police database, even though the person may not be charged. Increasing by 40,000 samples per month, the database has surpassed more than 3 million DNA samples, a fifth of which belong to people of African-Caribbean origin. Who owns these DNA samples? ‘Once a database like this is established, the authority concerned tends to regard the information as being in its ownership, to be exchanged without reference to the subjects,’ writes Potter. The British government admitted that it had passed more than 500 DNA samples (I wonder whose, Arabs? Muslims?) to foreign agencies. But when asked to which countries, ‘no one seemed to know.’ The chairman of the Nuffield Bioethics Committee, Sir Bob Hepple anxiously commented, ‘We didn’t have any legislation to establish the DNA database and it has not been debated in parliament.’

Western governments, it seems are devising new strategies to circumvent traditional ideals of civic liberty, based on notions of freedom and privacy (mind you, not in its colonies). Dr Gus Hosein, senior fellow with Privacy International says, ‘illiberal policies’ are pushed through international treaty organisations. The British government brought into effect communications surveillance policies through the European Union, and ID cards through the United Nations. ‘The government returns home to Parliament, holding their hands up saying ‘We are obliged to act because of international obligations’ and gets what they want with little debate.’ It is a strategy that has led to the coinage of new words: ‘policy laundering.’

Having originated in the West, these surveillance systems are gradually extending outside it, to control, regulate and limit the lives of people in non-Western countries.

First published in The New Age on 15th September 2008

Tags: control, DNA testing, modernisation, Profiling, Rahnuma Ahmed, surveillance, technology