Locking Down Weapons

A TECHNOLOGY that has been used for decades to secure nuclear weapons and even car radios could curb the threat of shoulder-fired missiles such as those used to shoot down Army helicopters in Iraq, according to weapons control experts. Known as a controllable enabler, the electronic lock allows only people who know a secret code to activate the missile. The device would be implanted at the microchip level in the guidance system of missiles such as the SA-7 model, which might have been used to bring down an Army Chinook helicopter over Falluja, Iraq, in November.

The enabler requires anyone firing a missile to enter a numeric code using a keypad on the launcher. Without the correct code, the missile "just never turns on," says Bob Sherman, a weapons control expert who formerly worked at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and is now with the State Department. And because the device is intertwined with the launcher's electronics, removing it could destroy the weapon.

Similar devices, known as permissive action links, have been used to secure U.S. nuclear weapons for decades, Sherman says. And an inexpensive version is used in car radios to prevent theft.

The Army long has resisted the enablers, Sherman says, saying they would be too costly to maintain. Sherman says he thought the military had changed its tune following the Sept. 11 attacks. However, officials at the Army's Picatinny Arsenal in northern New Jersey, where weapons-related research is conducted, say they're not considering the device. Weapons control experts fear that missiles are winding up in the hands of terrorists. Last year, suspected terrorists fired on an Israeli charter jet taking off from Mombasa, Kenya, and many believe U.S. troops and civilians are prime targets as well. The U.S. government is a major exporter of the missiles.

"U.S. weapons, including [shoulder-fired missiles], have ended up in terrorist hands before, and if the government insists upon continuing to export these weapons, all possible precautions should be taken to ensure that they can only be used by their intended recipients," says Matt Schroeder, an arms control researcher with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.

FOIA Frenzy

REQUESTS FOR GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS filed under the Freedom of Information Act have increased significantly in recent years, forcing federal employees to manage a flood of public demands for everything from inquiries about the hiring of airline passenger screeners to internal CIA memos about how the agency has handled alleged UFO sightings.

That crush of filings also has created a market for software companies that make programs to manage such requests and redact data. Employees used to do that by hand, with Xacto knives and black markers, says Wayne Jewell, a vice president at AINS Inc. of Rockville, Md. His company sells a program to do the work electronically.

The Justice Department, which compiles annual FOIA statistics, says requests reached 2.4 million in fiscal 2002, a 7 percent increase over the previous year. But Justice says agencies have made progress in reducing the considerable backlog of requests.

From the Files

• Most requests in fiscal 2002: Veterans Affairs Department (1.5 million).
• Fastest turnaround time: Transportation Department (median of 41 days).
• Slowest time: State Department (median of 546 days).
• Oldest pending request: Filed in 1987 by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter investigating the FBI.
• Time spent cataloging UFO sightings: CIA employees (15 to 37 hours per month in 1955).

General Deal-Maker

ADD LOBBYIST AND CONTRACT RAINMAKER to presidential candidate Wesley Clark's resume. As have many retired military officers, the retired general and former supreme commander of NATO has consulted or lobbied for technology firms trying to cash in on the homeland security business. Some have met with success and others with controversy. Clark resigned in November from the board of directors at Acxiom Corp., a consumer research company headquartered in Little Rock, Ark. He came to the board to help Acxiom win federal contracts.

It might have worked. Acxiom is involved in the Transportation Security Administration's effort to build an airline passenger screening system designed to weed out potential terrorists and other flight risks. It also was reportedly being eyed to participate in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's now-defunct Terrorism Information Awareness project. That initiative was predicated on sifting through massive amounts of consumer data from Acxiom for signs of nascent terrorist plots.

But Acxiom got into hot water after a Pentagon contractor purchased its consumer data and merged it with passenger information bought from discount airline JetBlue. The airline said the disclosure of personal data violated its privacy policy. Both companies are named in a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission by a Washington-area privacy watchdog. Acxiom wasn't the only technology contractor that paid for access to Clark's Rolodex. He also helped market military products for two companies, Time Domain of Alabama and WaveCrest Laboratories in Virginia.