by Shelley Dubois

The Air Force’s geek squad wants the technology to monitor government employees’ deviant online behavior. And they want you to build it.

Today, the Air Force issued a call for proposals from small businesses, with this objective: “Define, develop, and demonstrate innovative approaches for determining ‘good’ (approved) versus ‘bad’ (disallowed/subversive) activities, including insiders and/or malware.”

But taboo activity could span everything from leaking top secret information to spamming contacts with a chain letter to visiting any site that government officials deem dubious. Previously, they’ve said some interesting things about social networking, which may or may not influence what they’d do with new tools.

Now, those tools are a ways away. Current methods to detect insider breaches of cyber security “only address the most blatant violations of policy or the grossest deviations from accepted behavior,” according to the Air Force request. The cyber security system works mostly by rejecting certain predefined digital signatures at the borders of the network. But, as the Air Force request pointed out, people with inside access are more familiar with the security system and best know how to thwart it.

Not everyone who jeopardizes security does it intentionally. The Air Force also wants the algorithm to flag unwitting security breaches like opening an infected site during research.

Get cracking if you want to help root out the deviants. The technology needs to be ready to test nine months from now, and you’ll be compensated up to $100,000 for your troubles.

by Sebastian Smith, AFP

A top US domestic security chief announced Wednesday a strategy to make ordinary citizens the first line of defense against an increasingly multi-faceted terrorist threat.

“For too long, we’ve treated the public as a liability to be protected rather than an asset in our nation’s collective security,” Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a speech in New York.

“This approach, unfortunately, has allowed confusion, anxiety and fear to linger.”

Napolitano, who also announced an extra 78 million dollars in anti-terrorism funding for 15 mass transit systems nationwide, said modern communications had increased the sophistication of threats since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“The tools for creating violence and chaos are as easy to find as the tools to buy music online or restocking inventory,” she said. “If 9/11 happened in a web 1.0 world, terrorists are certainly in a web 2.0 world now.”

Napolitano urged a “much broader society response” in which the public helps curb a growing phenomenon of so-called home-grown terrorism.

Referring to a spate of arrests around the country of US citizens and residents charged with jihad-type militancy, Napolitano said that ordinary people were often the best eyes and ears.

“You are the ones who know when something is not right in your communities,” she said in her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Indeed if you look at the last couple of weeks, arrests have been made in places like Minneapolis and North Carolina,” she said.

“So I think better education, about the breadth of the threat and how it can be carried out, is important.”

In the latest case, seven people were arrested Monday, including an American-born Muslim convert and his two sons living in a quiet North Carolina suburb.

Napolitano even called on children to join an effort previously shouldered by police and other security services.

“There’s actually an important role we can play in educating even our very young about watching for, and knowing what to do, if you’re in an airport and you see a package left with no one around,” she said.

However, she stressed she was not advocating “a culture of spying on one another.”

She insisted that President Barack Obama’s administration was committed to repairing the erosion of civil liberties that took place under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

“We have to be careful,” she said. “That’s a balance to be struck.”

An example, she said, was the need to respect mosques and other Islamic institutions.

“We have to be very careful about profiling a religious institution just as we have to be careful about profiling individuals,” she said. “We have to be very, very careful about interfering with the free exercise of religion.”

Even as US troops become increasingly focused on fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, more attention is being paid to violent plots hatched within US borders — often led by US citizens or residents.

The Washington Post on Wednesday described the chief suspect in the North Carolina arrests, Daniel Boyd, as the son of a US marine who had a “typical American childhood” in the suburbs of the US capital, Washington.

This week, a New York court unsealed a confession made in January by a Long Island man, Bryant Vinas, who says he joined Al-Qaeda to attack US forces in Afghanistan and had plotted to attack a New York commuter train.

In May, five Miami men were found guilty of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, which just this month was renamed the Willis Tower.

Also in May, four New York men — three of them US citizens — were arrested on charges of trying to blow up synagogues and destroy a US military plane.