September seemed to mark a serious escalation in global cyber warfare. Media reports detailed what appeared to be Chinese attacks against Pentagon networks and government computer systems in Germany, France and the United Kingdom -- putting Defense Department officials on the offensive.
China now has the capability to jam the Global Positioning System, widely used by both the military to, say, guide precision weapons and by civilians to, for example, provide timing for telecom networks, according to the annual Defense Department report on "Military Power of the People's Republic of China".
The U.S. Air Force is beefing up the service's ability to accurately track and monitor the position of other satellites in space and developing systems that can destroy those viewed as a threat.
Researchers have proposed a new surveillance system that would deputize ordinary citizens as mobile intelligence gatherers by providing them with chemical or radiation sensors that they could carry with them throughout their day. These distributed sensors would feed their data back into a centralized government system that would "connect the dots."
The U.S. military expects advances in nanotechnology to impact every major weapons system and is spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on various research programs, according to a senior military science adviser.
Permissive action links, a technology that has been used for decades in nuclear weapons and car radios, could curb the threat of shoulder-filed missiles according to weapons control experts.
U.S. agencies are scrambling to defend the food and agriculture industries from terrorist attack.
As the threat of biological terrorism has become more immediate and concern about new strains of pathogens has increased, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has responded by accelerating efforts to find new medicines that will reduce?and perhaps eliminate?the threat of anthrax and many other dangerous agents.
A real-time tracking system developed years ago for the Defense Department is emerging as a crucial component of an industry-driven cargo security network that aims to prevent terrorists from smuggling weapons of mass destruction into major ports.
In the debate over national cybersecurity strategy, most of the participants insist they don't want new regulations. Instead, they say, they want the marketplace to create cyberdefenses against hackers, viruses, and other Information Age threats. But regulations are coming anyway, some industry and government officials warn, in part because the high-tech sector is reluctant to take on new burdens during an economic slowdown.