The U.S. has put thousands of untranslated documents, captured from the former Iraqi government, online in an experiment to see if volunteer researchers can find evidence of weapons of mass destruction or ties to al-Qaeda that the official intelligence agencies could not.
Arguing that satellites are consuming too much of the intelligence budget, the House Intelligence Committee is proposing a major shift of financing away from costly space-based spying to bolster the ranks of agents and analysts.
Arms control advocates contend that research planned for a new Department of Homeland Security laboratory at Fort Detrick would violate the international ban on biological weapons and could touch off a global biological arms race.
A worldwide distributed computing network that harnessed the downtime on 2.4 million computers in more than 190 countries, the Vatican and Antarctica, has trimmed years from the research effort by winnowing 35 million potential smallpox drug molecules down to a few thousand with promise. Now scientists can test those molecules in the lab at the Army's biodefense research center at Fort Detrick in Frederick
A flood of new funding for bioterrorism research promises to increase rapidly the number of labs and people with access to such lethal pathogens. Some scientists say that without new limits and tougher regulations, the law of unintended consequences could come into play. The biodefense research boom could lead to diversions of organisms or expertise for new terrorist attacks, making Americans less safe rather than safer.
The U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground confirmed last night that it has produced dry anthrax powder in recent years but said the anthrax has been "well-protected" and is all accounted for.
For nearly a decade, U.S. Army scientists at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah have made small quantities of weapons-grade anthrax that is virtually identical to the powdery spores used in the mail attacks that have killed five people, government sources say.