An independent commission has concluded that terrorists will most likely carry out an attack with biological, nuclear or other unconventional weapons somewhere in the world in the next five years unless the United States and its allies act urgently to prevent that.

The Defense Science Board released a sobering report that called for the incoming Obama administration to focus on a small but complex set of defense issues, with protection of the country against weapons of mass destruction as the top priority of the new secretary of defense.

Four of the five main online forums that al-Qaeda's media wing uses to distribute statements by Osama bin Laden and other extremists have been disabled since mid-September, monitors of the Web sites say. At the same time, in an apparently unrelated flare-up of online sectarian hostility, Shiite and Sunni hackers have targeted Web sites associated with the other sect, including that of a Saudi-owned television network and of Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric.

Images from high-resolution military spacecraft, combined with powerful change detection software at ground processing facilities, is enabling the space-based identification and tracking of specific Taliban and al Qaeda individuals in the isolated villages and rugged terrain of Afghanistan.

Seven years after al-Qaida took down New York's World Trade Center towers and struck the Pentagon itself, the United States does not have a coherent strategy to deter another attack, according to senior U.S. officials and analysts outside government.

The Defense Intelligence Agency is worried that terrorists will be able to launch crude missile attacks (similar to China's test last year) against U.S. satellites by 2020. However, the article offers a few good reasons to doubt the intelligence communities track record on assessing military space threats.

Dark Web, a giant, searchable database at the University of Arizona's Artificial Intelligence Lab, is an attempt to uncover, cross-reference, catalogue and analyze all online terrorist-generated content on the at least 7000 to 8000 terrorist sites.

The Bush administration is planning to give domestic law enforcement agencies increased access to powerful spy satellite technology. But some lawmakers and civil liberties groups say that the program may invade the privacy of Americans.

A team of computational scientists have created a new technology they are calling the "Dark Web" which aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web.

The Bush administration has approved a plan to expand domestic access to some of the most powerful tools of 21st-century spycraft, giving law enforcement officials and others the ability to view data obtained from satellite and aircraft sensors that can see through cloud cover and even penetrate buildings and underground bunkers.