Ed Stoffel

A report released by the Joint Forces Command confirms Hussein supported a number of terrorists and terrorist activities inside and outside Iraq. The report failed to identify a "direct link" between Hussein and terrorists calling themselves "al Qaeda," but found that Hussein co-operated with them.

The Iraqi regime was involved in regional and international terrorist operations prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq. State sponsorship of terrorism became such a routine tool of state power that Iraq developed elaborate bureaucratic processes to monitor progress and accountability in the recruiting, training and resourcing of terrorists.

The report cited such examples as training for car bombs and suicide bombings in 1999 and 2000, both of which U.S. and Iraqi forces have struggled to contain since the rise of the insurgency in summer 2003.

 Pentagon Report Finds No Direct Saddam-al-Qaida Connection, VOA

 Also see: Saddam's Dangerous Friends: What a Pentagon review of 600,000 Iraqi documents tells us, Weekly Standard

While virtualization offers advantages over traditional software deployment, it also offers new security challenges. Processes that extend beyond the container's boundaries introduce risks that what happens in VM might not stay inside VM. Don Simard, the commercial solutions director at the U.S. National Security Agency, explained the problem to InfoWorld...

...NSA realized that this benefit of virtualization also introduced a new potential threat. After all, Simard said, "graphics cards and network cards today are really miniature computers that see everything in all the VMs." In other words, they could be used as spies across all the VMs, letting a single PC spy on multiple networks. Although he's not aware of any such spyware today, it's not a problem the NSA wants to experience or see happen in other intelligence agencies.

 Virtualization's secret security threats, InfoWorld

Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed software to aid in the prediction of terror behavior around the globe. The SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP) uses existing data to get ahead of possible future events...

SOMA has generated tens of thousands of rules about the likely behavior of each of around 30 terrorist groups, including major terrorist outfits such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Hezb-I-Islami. In addition to offering accurate behavioral models and forecasting algorithms, STOP can act as a virtual roundtable for terrorism experts to gather around and form a rich community that transcends artificial boundaries.

 STOP Terrorism Software Developed, Techtree