cryptogon.com

The couple, from Suwon in South Korea, would leave their three-month-old daughter home alone in their apartment while they spent up to 12 hours a day playing a Second-Life style3D fantasy game called Prius Online, The Sun newspaper reports.

Police said the couple had become totally immersed in the online game and neglected their real lives, giving their daughter just a bottle of milk per day.

Father Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and 25-year-old mother Choi Mi-sun called paramedics when they arrived home from a stint in a net cafe to find their daughter dead In September last year.

The couple first told police they had found their daughter dead when they woke in the morning, but suspicions were raised by the malnourished state the baby was found in.

“She appears to have starved to death because she was not fed for such a long period of time,” a spokesman for Korea’s national crime laboratory said after an autopsy was carried out.

The couple fled after the baby’s funeral, but police tracked them down and charged them with child abuse and neglect on Tuesday.

The parents told police they had not been to a net cafe in their five months on the run due to their “sense of guilt”.

Law enforcement officials told The Associated Press that both guns were once seized in criminal cases in Memphis. The officials described how the weapons made their separate ways from an evidence vault to gun dealers and to the shooters.

The use of guns that once were in police custody and were later involved in attacks on police officers highlights a little-known divide in gun policy in the United States: Many cities and states destroy guns gathered in criminal probes, but others sell or trade the weapons in order to get other guns or buy equipment such as bulletproof vests.

In fact, on the day of the Pentagon shooting, March 4, the Tennessee governor signed legislation revising state law on confiscated guns. Before, law enforcement agencies in the state had the option of destroying a gun. Under the new version, agencies can only destroy a gun if it’s inoperable or unsafe.

Kentucky has a similar law, but it’s not clear how many other states have laws specifically designed to promote the police sale or trade of confiscated weapons.

A nationwide review by The Associated Press in December found that over the previous two years, 24 states — mostly in the South and West, where gun-rights advocates are particularly strong — have passed 47 new laws loosening gun restrictions. Gun rights groups are making a greater effort to pass favorable legislation in state capitals.

John Timoney, who led the Philadelphia and Miami police departments and served as New York’s No. 2 police official, said he doesn’t believe police departments should be putting more guns into the market.

“I just think it’s unseemly for police departments to be selling guns that later turn up,” he said, recalling that he had once been offered the chance to sell guns to raise money for the police budget.

“Obviously, we always need the money but I just said, `No, we will take the loss and get rid of the guns’,” said the former police chief, who now works for Andrews International, a security consulting firm.

A spokeswoman for the Memphis police said gun swaps are a way to save taxpayer money.

One of the weapons in the Pentagon attack was seized by Memphis police in 2005 and later traded to a gun dealer; the gun used in the Jan. 4 courthouse shooting in Las Vegas as sold by a judge’s order and the proceeds given to the Memphis-area sheriff’s office. Neither weapon was sold by the Memphis law enforcement agencies directly to the men who later used them to shoot officers.

In both cases, the weapons first went to licensed gun dealers, but later came into the hands of men who were legally barred from possessing them: one a convicted felon; the other mentally ill.

The history of the two guns in the recent attacks was described by officials from multiple law enforcement agencies on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the investigations. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives provided reports on the gun traces to the investigating agencies, but is barred from publicly disclosing the results.

At the Pentagon, gunman John Patrick Bedell carried two 9 mm handguns, one of them a Ruger.

Law enforcement officials say Bedell, a man with a history of severe psychiatric problems, had been sent a letter by California authorities Jan. 10 telling him he was prohibited from buying a gun because of his mental history.

Nineteen days later, the officials say, Bedell bought the Ruger at a gun show in Las Vegas. Such a sale by a private individual does not require the kind of background check that would have stopped Bedell’s purchase.

Mike Campbell, an ATF spokesman in Washington, would not confirm the details. He would only say Bedell “appears to have purchased the gun from a private seller.”

The gun already had changed hands among gun dealers in Georgia and Pennsylvania by the time Bedell bought it. Officer Karen Rudolph, a Memphis police spokeswoman, said her department traded the weapon to a dealer in 2008 for a different gun that was better for police work.

The Ruger had sat in Memphis police storage for years at that point, after being confiscated from a convicted felon at a 2005 traffic stop.

The trail of the gun used at the Las Vegas federal courthouse is older and harder to pin down. Johnny Lee Wicks, an elderly man enraged over cuts to his Social Security benefits, opened fire with the shotgun at the security entrance to the courthouse. He killed one officer, Stanley Cooper, and wounded another.

Wicks, like Bedell at the Pentagon, was killed by officers’ return fire.

Before that courthouse attack, what records exist suggest officers in Memphis confiscated that gun in 1998.

A judge in Memphis ordered the sale of the shotgun as part of a criminal case, and the proceeds of that sale went to the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, confirmed sheriff’s spokesman Steve Shular.

He said the gun dealer who bought it later sold the weapon to a dealer in Nevada. It is not clear how Wicks got the shotgun.

Rich Wyatt, a former police chief in Alma, Colo., who now operates a gun store — and who has bought weapons from police agencies — defended the practice of police selling guns.

John Patrick Bedell repeatedly tangled with police in recent months, while his relationship with his parents — whom he lived with in a gated community in Northern California — grew increasingly contentious.

“There’s a history of mental health problems with him that the family’s been dealing with for a number of years,” San Benito County, California, Sheriff Curtis Hill said Friday.

Bedell, 36, suffered from bipolar disorder, according to court records from a 2006 California arrest for a man by the same name. That man’s birth date matches the one authorities gave for the Pentagon shooter.

Bedell had been committed to mental institutions at least three or four times, according to Hill.

His ties to family had grown strained since late last year. Two months ago, Bedell’s parents filed a missing person report about him, although he returned and the report was canceled two weeks later, Hill said.

Bedell’s mother had also come across “some information — either from an e-mail received from a company, or an online posting on a bank account or something — where on the 10th of January he had made a $600 purchase at a shooting range in the Sacramento area in California,” Hill said. Bedell would not tell her what he bought, he said.

On Friday the FBI said they believe that Bedell drove to Washington, D.C., and parked his car in a garage near the Pentagon.

Bedell “was very well dressed in a suit” and showed “no distress in his appearance” as he approached a screening area to enter Pentagon grounds about 6:40 p.m. Thursday evening, Pentagon Police Chief Richard S. Keevill said.

“He walked very directly to the officers and engaged,” Keevill said. “He was very well armed. I will tell you that he had two 9 mm semiautomatic weapons and many magazines.”

On Friday, a picture emerged of Bedell as a troubled man with an intense interest in science.

On the social networking Web site LinkedIn, a profile page for a J. Patrick Bedell in the San Francisco Bay Area — where Bedell’s family lives — described him as an “MSEE student,” short for Master of Science in Electrical Engineering.

The page said he graduated from the University of California Santa Cruz with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1994.

The LinkedIn page said that Bedell attended San Jose State University from 1995 to 1996, but that he did not get a degree there.

In the missing person report filed in January, Bedell’s father said he worked in the San Jose area but that he did not know where.

Hill, the San Benito County sheriff, said the Bedell family filed the missing person report on January 4, a day after Bedell was stopped in Texas for speeding as he traveled west. The Texas Highway patrolman used Bedell’s cell phone to call Bedell’s family, Hill said.

“The highway patrolman wanted to know a little more information about him because when he stopped him for speeding, when he came up to the car, the interior of the vehicle was in ‘disarray,'” Hill said. The patrolman spoke with Bedell’s mother, then gave him a warning and sent him on his way, Hill said. The sheriff said the stop prompted the family to file the missing person report, Hill said.

In filing the report, Bedell’s father said John had been staying at an unknown address in San Jose after getting into a fight with his brother three weeks earlier.

It wasn’t Bedell’s first blowout with his brother. In July 2006, Bedell got into an altercation with Matthew Bedell and signed a citizen’s arrest to have him taken to jail and booked, Hill said.

A week after Bedell’s father filed the missing report in January, the parents called the police to say their son had shown up. Authorities went to the family’s home, where the parents said Bedell “appeared to be impaired, delusional, and agitated,” according to Hill.

“The agitation … was due to his mother asking him questions [such as], ‘Where have you been? What have you been doing?'” Hill said. She also asked him about the $600 purchase at the shooting range, he said.

“When she asked him to give her some details about what that purchase was, that’s when he became agitated and left the residence,” Hill said.

Authorities arrived after he had left, and although they gave out information on him to law enforcement agencies, they were not able to find him, Hill said. The family told authorities that he had a “history of mental illness.”

On January 18, Bedell’s father told authorities his son had returned home and that the missing person report should be canceled, Hill said. According to the police report, Bedell was staying at an unknown address after stopping at home.

A couple weeks later, on February 1, Bedell was picked up by police in Reno, Nevada, and charged with marijuana possession. His court date was Tuesday, but Bedell failed to show up.

Court records from California show that investigators arrested a John Patrick Bedell in June 2006 on charges of cultivating marijuana and resisting arrest.

Bedell pleaded guilty. “I sincerely request the court not find the offense to reflect a propensity for violence on my part,” he said in a signed statement in the case. “I was experiencing an episode of mental illness (bipolar disorder) during the event in question.”

Court documents from the 2006 case also include a statement from Bedell’s psychiatrist confirming Bedell suffered from bipolar disorder and describing him as “relatively symptom-free when under medication.”

In an Internet posting, JPatrickBedell referred to being arrested in 2006 on marijuana charges.

“Given my belief that cannabis prohibition is the least defensible and most unjust aspect of the prohibitionist regime existing throughout the world today, I decided in March 2006 to cultivate cannabis in full view of the world,” the person said in a 2006 podcast.

Bedell appears to have been the same man who had railed against the government repeatedly on the Internet. Through podcasts and a Wikipedia page, a man identified online as JPatrickBedell cast the government as a criminal force destroying personal liberties.

“This seizure of the United States government by an international criminal conspiracy is a long-established reality,” the man said in a podcast in November 2006, which also was published as text online.

Such an organization, the man said, “would use its powers to convert military, intelligence, and law enforcement bureacracies (sic) into instruments for political control and the domination and subjection of society, while discrediting, destroying, and murdering honest individuals within those services that work to root out corruption and faithfully serve their fellow citizens.”

In a video posted on YouTube in October 2006, a man identified as jpbedell talked about his idea for “information currency,” which he said would “create a financial market for information.” The man in the video is the same man shown in a photograph of the shooter released Friday by the FBI. The man’s voice in the YouTube video also sounds similar to the voice in the podcasts.

A person using the screen name JPatrickBedell wrote about the same idea on a Wikipedia page that was taken down early Friday.

The San Benito County sheriff read a statement from the family on Friday, saying that they were “devastated” by Thursday’s news.

“To the outside world, this tragedy is the first and only thing they will know of Patrick; to us he was a beloved son, brother, grandson, nephew and cousin,” the family said, according to Hill. “We may never know why he made this terrible decision. One thing is certain, though, his actions were caused by an illness and not a defective character.”

They expressed hope for a quick recovery of the two wounded officers, and asked that the family’s privacy be respected.

“This is a well-respected longtime local family,” Hill told CNN on Friday. “They’re a middle — upper-middle class folks who are well known in the community. They’re a good solid family.”

Hill said that Bedell’s father is a financial advisor and that his mother works at the local branch of the California-based Gavilan College.

At a news conference Friday morning, Keevill, the Pentagon police chief, said Pentagon and Metro cameras of the area show the gunman in the time leading up to the shooting.

He showed “no real emotion in his face” as he approached the officers, Keevill said. He approached the officers Thursday evening and, when asked for identification, pulled a gun out of his pocket and began shooting, authorities said.

Officers Jeffrey Amos and Marvin Carraway returned fire with semiautomatic weapons, said Pentagon spokesman Terry Sutherland.

The two wounded officers had superficial injuries and were released from a hospital, officials said.

When officers located Bedell’s vehicle at a nearby parking garage, they found more ammunition inside, Keevill said.

Authorities do not know what the man’s motive may have been, he said.

Several versions of a 2004 scientific proposal to the Department of Defense, attributed to J. Patrick Bedell, exist in multiple locations on the Internet. A 28-page version of the proposal, “Aluminum Anodization for DNA Integrated Circuits,” lists Bedell as the sole employee for the project and estimates he would work 1,000 hours at $30 an hour for a total of $30,000.

A DARPA spokesperson would not confirm whether the proposal was received, saying the agency could legally comment only on proposals it funded.

Resentment of the U.S. government and suspicions over the 9/11 attacks have surfaced in writings by the Californian identified as the man fatally wounded in a hail of return fire.

John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., was identified as the shooter and authorities said he’d had previous run-ins with the law.

Investigators have found no immediate connection to terrorism, and the attack at the massive Defense Department headquarters appears to be a case of “a single individual who had issues,” Richard Keevill, chief of Pentagon police, said in an early morning press conference.

Keevill described Bedell as “very well educated” and well-dressed, saying Bedell was wearing a suit, armed with two 9 millimeter semiautomatic weapons and carried “many magazines” of ammunition. There was more ammunition in Bedell’s car, which authorities found in a local parking garage, Keevill said.

‘Hostile intent’
Bedell, 36, died Thursday night from head wounds received in a volley of fire with police. Keevill said the two injured officers and another officer who came to their assistance fired upon Bedell at the subway entrance into the Pentagon building in Arlington, Va.

“He came here from California,” Keevill said. “We were able to identify certain locations that he spent that last several weeks making his way from the West coast to the East coast.”

Noting that Bedell was wearing a suit, Keevill said: “There was no indication based on the way he was dressed that he had hostile intent.”

The exchange of fire lasted less than a minute but, numerous shots were fired, Keevill said, adding that he didn’t know how many because investigators were “still counting.” Bedell was not wearing body armor, he added.

The two officers injured have been released from the hospital. One suffered a thigh wound and the other was hit in the shoulder. Keevill said both were superficial injuries.

Keevill said he did not know the shooter’s motive.

“I have no idea what his intentions were,” said Keevill, who had late Thursday described the attack in this way:

“He just reached in his pocket, pulled out a gun and started shooting” at point-blank range. “He walked up very cool. He had no real emotion on his face.”

Beverly Fields, chief of staff of the D.C. medical examiner’s office, confirmed the man’s death and said his body arrived at her office shortly after midnight.

Signs emerged that Bedell harbored ill feelings toward the government and the armed forces, and had questioned the circumstances behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In an Internet posting, a user by the name JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the backyard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a cover up.

Keevill said Friday that authorities had not made “a final determination” that the shooter was the same Bedell.

The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”

That same posting railed against the government’s enforcement of marijuana laws and included links to the author’s 2006 court case in Orange County, Calif., for cultivating marijuana and resisting a police officer. Court records available online show the date of birth on the case mentioned by the user JPatrickBedell matches that of the John Patrick Bedell suspected in the shooting.

A man who identified himself as Bedell’s father told KNX Newsradio in Los Angeles that his son was a grad student at San Jose State University.

The assault at the very threshold of the Pentagon — the U.S. capital’s ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001 — came four months after a deadly attack on the Army’s Fort Hood, Texas, post allegedly by a U.S. Army psychiatrist with radical Islamic leanings.

Hatred of the government motivated a man in Texas last month to fly a small plane into a building housing Internal Revenue Service offices, killing an IRS employee and himself.

Whatever the motive of Thursday’s attack, the method resembled one in January in which a gunman walked up to the security entrance of a Las Vegas courthouse and opened fire with a shotgun, killing one officer and wounding another before being gunned down in a barrage of return fire.

President Barack Obama was getting FBI updates on the Pentagon shooting through his homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said.

The subway station is immediately adjacent to the Pentagon building, a five-sided northern Virginia colossus across the Potomac River from Washington. Since a redesign following the 2001 terrorist attack on the Pentagon, riders can no longer disembark directly into the building.

After the attack, all Pentagon entrances were secured, then all were reopened except one from the subway, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.

Transit officials said the station would remain closed at least part of the day Friday while the FBI continued its investigation.

Keevill said the gunman gave no clue to the officers at the checkpoint about what he was going to do.

“There was no distress,” he said. “When he reached into his pocket, they assumed he was going to get a pass and he came up with a gun.”

“He wasn’t pretending to be anyone. He was wearing a coat and walked up and just started shooting.”

Keevill added: “We have layers of security and it worked. He never got inside the building to hurt anyone.”

‘Normal guy’

Ronald Domingues, 74, who lives next door to Bedell’s parents in a gated golf course community in Hollister, said he doesn’t know the family well. But he said Bedell sometimes lived with his parents and struck him “like a normal young man.”

“He just seemed like a normal guy to me,” Domingues said. “I wouldn’t suspect he would be involved in anything like this.”

Ice breakers were trying to free the ferry Amorella and two cargo ships stuck at the edge of an archipelago northeast of Stockholm, while rescue helicopters and military hovercraft were on standby to evacuate passengers if needed. Gale-force winds were hampering the effort, the Swedish Maritime Administration said.

“As soon as they break the ice, it freezes over again,” sea rescue spokesman Peter Lindquist said. He said no one was hurt and there were no immediate plans to evacuate the ships.

The Maritime Administration said the Amorella had 753 passengers and 190 crew on board. The 10-deck ship belongs to Viking Line, which operates Baltic Sea cruises between Sweden and Finland.

The other ships stuck in the area were the roll-on-roll-off ferry Sea Wind with 32 people and the Regal Star, a cargo ship with 56 people on board. Three other ferries that got stuck in the ice were able to break free earlier Thursday.

One of those ships, the Finnfellow, collided lightly with the Amorella when the ice pressed the two ships together, but there was no major damage to either ship, Lindquist said. “Just some paint that was scratched off,” he said.

Official government cyber defenders are now required to have the skills of a hacker according to a mandatory certification approved this week by the Department of Defense.

The DoD now requires its computer network defenders (CNDs) pass Certified Ethical Hacker certification program from the International Council of E-Commerce Consultants (EC-Council) to fulfill baseline skills.

The Certified Ethical Hacker qualification tests someone’s knowledge in the mindset, tools, and techniques of a hacker.

CNDs — who are part of the DoD’s information assurance workforce — protect, monitor, analyze, detect, and respond to unauthorized activity within DoD information systems and computer networks.

Assistant Secretary of Defense John Grimes officially instated the Certified Ethical Hacker requirement in late February under DoD Directive 8570, which provides guidance for how DoD information workers should be trained and managed.

The move is significant because it solidifies the practice of ethical hacking — also known as penetration testing — in mainstream IT practices, said Jay Bavisi, co/founder and president of EC-Council. The council is a vendor-neutral organization that certifies IT professionals in security-related skills.

“Now hacking is no longer a bad word in mainstream IT community,” he said, adding that ethical hacking is not exactly what people think of when they hear that word anyway.

“What we are doing is not hacking — we are seeking permission from the owners of the network to beat the hackers at their own game,” Bavisi said. In fact, the tag line for the EC-Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker educational program is: “To beat a hacker, you must think like one.”

IBM coined the term “ethical hacking” in the 1960s to define a way for IT security researchers to emulate the work of hackers so they can better defend networks, Bavisi said.

Ironically, though ethical hacking was first adopted in covert practices by the U.S. military, in the last decade or so it has become a common practice among Fortune 500 companies to employ ethical hackers to defend networks, he added.

The practice seems to have come full circle with the DoD directive, which Bavisi said the department took three years to approve.

Speaking at a security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney pitched the Web usage fee as one way to subsidize efforts to combat emerging cyber threats — a costly venture, he said, but one that had vast community benefits.

“You could say it’s a public safety issue and do it with general taxation,” Charney noted.

Ultimately, Charney was only offering one suggestion during the RSA security conference; not a precise policy prescription.

Secure Flight, the newest weapon in the U.S. war on terrorism, gives the United States unprecedented power over who can board planes that fly over U.S. airspace.

Secure Flight applies to flights to, from or over the United States, from Canada to another country. Flights between two Canadian cities, that travel over U.S. airspace, are excluded, but about 80 per cent of Canadian flights to the Caribbean and other southern points and to Europe fly over the U.S.

The program, which is set to take effect globally in December 2010, was created as part of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, adopted by U.S. Congress in 2004.

Parliament never adopted or even discussed the Secure Flight program — even though Secure Flight transfers the authority of screening passengers, and their personal information, from domestic airlines to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

When asked about the program, Transport Canada, the federal department in charge of Canadian airlines, deferred to Public Safety Canada.

After refusing to comment on Secure Flight or the federal government’s position on the U.S. program, David Charbonneau, a Public Safety Canada spokesman, said “Canada works in partnership with the United States, as well as with other allies on aviation safety and security.

“Canada’s approach will continue to balance the privacy rights of travellers with the need to keep the public safe from terrorist and other threats to the air transportation system.”

Dimitri Soudas, a spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, referred all questions on the Secure Flight program back to the office of Transport Minister John Baird, who oversees Transport Canada.

The European Parliament, on the other hand, has consistently voiced objections to the Secure Flight plan.

Canadian airlines already check their flight manifests against the U.S. no-fly list, which is compiled by the FBI and distributed to airlines around the world. It contains the names of about 16,000 people the U.S. government says are suspected of terrorism. The names and why they are on the list are not disclosed for reasons of “national security.”

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration says Secure Flight will reduce the number of false positives — people with the same name as someone on the no-fly list — who now are stopped at airports.

Under Secure Flight, the TSA, a branch of Homeland Security, will have access to all U.S. government databases.

As part of Secure Flight, Canadian airlines will transfer personal information of travellers to Homeland Security, preferably 72 hours before takeoff. Then, the TSA will use Infoglide, a package of 50 “identity resolution” algorithms and such complex mathematical formulas as search engines to extract and aggregate information from several sources, to check passenger identities.

“If necessary, the TSA analyst will check other classified and unclassified governmental terrorist, law enforcement, and intelligence databases — including databases maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defence, National Counter Terrorism Centre, and Federal Bureau of Investigation,” notes Secure Flight Final Rule, the U.S. government document that defines the program.

The General Accounting Office, an U.S. institution similar to Canada’s auditor general, is concerned this sweeping check could cause new problems.

“More individuals could be misidentified, law enforcement would be put in the position of detaining more individuals until their identities could be resolved, and administrative costs could increase, without knowing what measurable increase in security is achieved,” the GAO said in a January presentation to the U.S. House of Representatives committee on Homeland Security.

Andrea McCauley, a Homeland Security spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., said the TSA is confident there will be fewer false positive results, branding innocent travellers as potential terrorists, than under the current no-fly list system.

“We have designed this program to ask for the minimum amount of personal information necessary,” she said.

If the search of U.S. databases, which will also contain data collected in Canada such as police records, turns up “no match” between and passenger and the watchlist, Homeland Security will inform the airline it can issue a boarding pass.

Personal information will be purged from the system after seven days, McCauley said.

“If you are a potential match, it would be retained for seven years,” she said, explaining that “a potential match is someone who has been determined not to be an exact match but has the potential to match some of the data elements.”

The new program, code-named Hone, is designed to give intelligence and law enforcement agencies a leg up on criminals who are now operating anonymously on the Internet.

In many ways, the cyber world is ideal for subversive and terrorist activities, said Antonio Nucci, chief technology officer with Narus. “For bad people, it’s an easy place to hide,” Nucci said. “They can get lost and very easily hide behind a massive ocean of legal digital transactions.”

It’s trivial to set up a Gmail or Facebook account under a fake name. The question for law enforcement then becomes, how does it connect different pieces of information to the same person? “It’s very hard to connect these two pieces of information,” Nucci said. “We’re really asking [law enforcement] to become almost like magicians.”

Narus is best known as the creator of NarusInsight, an network monitoring device that can analyze traffic on IP networks. AT&T allegedly used a Narus system to wiretap customer data on behalf of the U.S. National Security Agency as part of a U.S. domestic terrorist surveillance program.

Hone works in tandem with NarusInsight. By Nucci’s own admission, however, it can do some pretty “scary” things.

The software’s user creates a target profile, and Hone then proceeds to link what Nucci calls “islands of information.” Hone can analyze VOIP conversations, biometrically identify someone’s voice or photograph and then associate it with different phone numbers.

“I can have a sample of your voice in English, and you can start speaking Mandarin tomorrow. It doesn’t matter; I’m going to catch you.”

It uses artificial intelligence to analyze e-mails and can link mails to different accounts, doing what Nucci calls topical analysis. “It’s going to go through a set of documents and automatically it’s going to organize them in topics — I’m not talking about keywords as is done today, I’m talking about topics,” he said.

That can’t be done with today’s technology, he said. “If you search for fertilizers on Google… it’s going to come back with 6.5 million pages. Enjoy,” he said. “If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer… it’s not even searchable.”

Hone will sift through millions of profiles searching for people with similar attributes — blogger profiles that share the same e-mail address, for example. It can look for statistically likely matches, by studying things like the gender, nationality, age, location, home and work addresses of people.

Another component can trace the location of someone using a mobile device such as a laptop or phone.

Bit by bit, it pieces together the subject’s different identities on the Internet.

Narus is still testing the waters with Hone. Working with a consortium of universities, the company has used Hone to sift through massive amounts of public information. “We started to collect data three years ago and we’ve gone through several programs,” Nucci said. “We have something like 75 million users in our system.” With the permission of users, Nucci’s team also analyzed data on about 50,000 private profiles.

Nucci will discuss Hone at the RSA Conference in San Francisco Friday.

The company is now talking to potential customers such as defense contractors and government agencies to see if there’s enough interest to turn Hone into a product. “If the market is as big as we guess it’s going to be, then we will start rolling this into products,” Nucci said.

But new documents reveal Canada’s National Microbiology Lab isn’t immune to leaks, spills and failures in restricted areas where lethal organisms are housed.

Health Canada documents obtained through an access-to-information request reveal close to 250 internal incidents — ranging from equipment failures to potential chemical exposures — were reported in the lab between 2005 and 2009.

The incidents range in severity and include benign finger cuts, potential exposures to chemicals and viruses such as avian influenza, and equipment failures in Level 3 and 4 containment labs.

One 2006 incident resulted in a person exposed to a “negligible” amount of a Level 4 pathogen. Problems with the air system in a Level 4 lab surfaced twice in 2008, and in the first six months of last year there were eight equipment failures in the same Level 3 containment lab.

Level 4 has the highest level of safety and security.

While the incidents are reviewed by a federally appointed community-liaison committee, they are only made public at the committee’s discretion.

New Democrat MP Pat Martin said he was “surprised and disappointed” to hear of the large number of internal incidents reported in the lab during a short period of time. Martin said he wants to see the community liaison committee convene a special public meeting to review the incidents and determine whether the facility is operating in a safe manner.

“I’m quite taken aback that there’s been that number of incidents when we’ve been assured a state-of-the-art facility has state-of-the-art protocols,” Martin said.

The city witnessed fierce fighting in 2004 as US forces carried out a major offensive against insurgents.

Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe.

The US military says it is not aware of any official reports showing an increase in birth defects in the area.

BBC world affairs editor John Simpson visited a new, US-funded hospital in Fallujah where paediatrician Samira al-Ani told him that she was seeing as many as two or three cases a day, mainly cardiac defects.

Our correspondent also saw children in the city who were suffering from paralysis or brain damage – and a photograph of one baby who was born with three heads.

He adds that he heard many times that officials in Fallujah had warned women that they should not have children.

Doctors and parents believe the problem is the highly sophisticated weapons the US troops used in Fallujah six years ago.

British-based Iraqi researcher Malik Hamdan told the BBC’s World Today programme that doctors in Fallujah were witnessing a “massive unprecedented number” of heart defects, and an increase in the number of nervous system defects.

She said that one doctor in the city had compared data about birth defects from before 2003 – when she saw about one case every two months – with the situation now, when, she saw cases every day.

Ms Hamdan said that based on data from January this year, the rate of congenital heart defects was 95 per 1,000 births – 13 times the rate found in Europe.

“I’ve seen footage of babies born with an eye in the middle of the forehead, the nose on the forehead,” she added.

A spokesman for the US military, Michael Kilpatrick, said it always took public health concerns “very seriously”.

“No studies to date have indicated environmental issues resulting in specific health issues,” he said.

Provisional figures from the forecaster show the UK winter ? which in forecasting terms lasts from the start of December until the end of February ? has been the harshest, in temperature terms, since 1978-79.

The news may come as little surprise to those affected by snow in December and January, when falls of up to 2ft saw councils’ grit supplies run low, travel chaos and the return of the Guardian’s snow day live blog.

According to the Met Office the mean temperature in the UK was 1.51C this winter, compared to a long-term average winter temperature ? calculated from data collected between 1971 and 2000 ? of 3.7C. The mean temperature in 1978-79 was 1.17C.

The data shows that Scotland suffered the most this winter, with the provisional mean temperature 0.24C ? only slightly higher than 1978-79, when the figure was 0.16C.

England, Northern Ireland and Wales were warmer, although temperatures of 2.12C, 2.05C and 2.09C respectively could only be considered mild by comparison with the Scottish figure.