Privacy advocates said the Investigative Data Warehouse, launched in January 2004, raises concerns about how long the government stores such information and about the right of citizens to know what records are kept and correct information that is wrong.

The data warehouse is an effort to "connect the dots" that the FBI was accused of missing in the months before the 2001 attacks, bureau officials said. About a quarter of the information comes from the FBI's records and criminal case files. The rest -- including suspicious financial activity reports, no-fly lists, and lost and stolen passport data -- comes from the Treasury, State and Homeland Security departments and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

"That's where the real knowledge comes from . . . sharing information," said Gurvais Grigg, acting director of the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, who helped develop the system.

In a demonstration, Grigg sat at a computer and typed in the name "Mohammad Atta," one of the 19 hijackers in 2001. The system can handle variants of names and up to 29 variants on birth dates. He typed "flight training" in the query box and pulled up 250 articles relating to Atta.

The system, designed by Chiliad Inc. of Amherst, Mass., can be programmed to send alerts to agents on new information, Grigg said. Names, Social Security numbers and driver's license details can be linked and cross-matched across hundreds of millions of records.

No top secret information is in the system, officials said.

Grigg said that before 2002, it would take 32,222 hours to run 1,000 names and birth dates across 50 databases. Now agents can make such a search in 30 minutes or less, he said.

The 13,000 agents and analysts who use the system make an average 1 million queries a month, Grigg said. The system does not reach into the databases themselves but mines copies that are updated regularly, he said.

Irrelevant information can be purged or restricted, and incorrect information is corrected, he said. Willie T. Hulon, executive assistant director of the FBI's National Security Branch, said that generally information is not removed from the system unless there is "cause for removal."

Every data source is reviewed by security, legal and technology staff members, and a privacy impact statement is created, Grigg said. The FBI conducts in-house auditing so that each query can be tracked, he said.

David Sobel, senior counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the Federal Register has no record of the creation of such a system, a basic requirement of the Privacy Act. He also said the FBI's use of an internal privacy assessment undercuts the intent of the privacy law.

FBI officials said the database is in "full compliance" with the law.

Sobel said he learned under a Freedom of Information Act disclosure last week that the system includes 250 million airline passenger records, stored permanently.

"It appears to be the largest collection of personal data ever amassed by the federal government," he said. "When they develop the capability to cross-reference and data-mine all these previously separate sources of information, there are significant new privacy issues that need to be publicly debated."

Michael Morehart, chief of the FBI's Terrorist Financing Operations Section, has testified to Congress about some aspects of the system. He said that Treasury Department documents included in the database have helped counterterrorism investigations significantly.

The squadron's mission is to process, exploit and disseminate to commanders information gathered by AFSOC's MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicles and other airborne intelligence and surveillance sources, Hambleton said. The Predator is a medium-altitude, long-endurance, remotely piloted aircraft operated by the 3rd Special Operations Squadron at Creech Air Force Base, Nev.

Operators at Creech use remote controls to fly Predators anywhere in the world, around the clock. That capability, when fully realized, will create what Army Gen. Doug Brown, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, calls an "unblinking eye" for special operations forces.

But even an unblinking eye is worthless without a brain to process the information the eye sees, said Air Force Col. Timothy Leahy, AFSOF vice commander.

"That's where the 11th IS comes in," he said.

"We're going to extract intel value from data streams coming off (reconnaissance aircraft), figure out what the bad guys are doing and provide information to special ops commanders so they can make combat decisions," Hambleton said. "Basically, the 3rd SOS will provide the data, and we'll tailor it for the SOF customer forward."

Special operations forces require SOF-specific intelligence, Hambleton said. So the entire data gathering-analysis-combat commander chain is specialized and unique compared to the way other Air Force commands process and disseminate data, he said.

For instance, AFSOC is the only major command where the intelligence weapons system, called the distributed common ground system, works hand-in-hand with the air operations center. In AFSOC, both the DCGS and AOC report to the AFSOF commander, Col. Michael Callan.

"I'm very excited to see the 11th IS a reality," Callan said. "Many dedicated members of the AFSOF and AFSOC staffs have worked very hard to make this day happen.

"Having the 11th IS provide dedicated intelligence support to our warfighters will make us better able to find, fix and finish our adversaries," he said. "I welcome Colonel Hambleton and his squadron members to AFSOF".

In the war on terrorism, tracking down elusive enemies is akin to what Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael W. Wooley, AFSOC commander, calls "finding the proverbial needle not in a haystack, but hiding among other needles."

Intel specialists of the 11th IS will "be able to discern what that needle among needles is doing," Leahy said. "Once the operators of the 11th Intelligence Squadron find and fix the enemy, the world's best special operators, riding in the back of AFSOC aircraft, will go in and finish them."

Flushing Particles Using VLF Signals

System tests would employ extremely high-intensity, very low frequency (VLF) radio waves to "flush" particles from radiation belts and dump them into the upper atmosphere. The disruptions would result from the deluge of dumped charged particles temporarily changing the ionosphere from a "mirror" that bounces HF radio waves around the planet to a "sponge" that soaks them up, Rodger says.

The group's paper, "The atmospheric implications of radiation belt remediation," appears in the August edition of the international journal Annales Geophysicae. Otago University researchers collaborated with the British Antarctic Survey, the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory in Finland and the Finnish Meteorological Institute in its preparation.

Sleight of HAND

Unclassified US Department of Defense budget documents from earlier this year propose at least initially using the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP) near Gakona, Alaska, "to exploit emerging ionosphere and radio science technologies related to advanced defense applications." HAARP is jointly operated by the US Air Force and the US Navy. The project appears to be included under a program called "Sleight of HAND" (SOH).

"The effects of High Altitude Nuclear Detonations (HAND) are catastrophic to satellites," the budget report explains. "HAND-generated charged particles are trapped for very long periods of time, oscillating between the earth's north and south magnetic poles. This enhanced radiation environment would immediately degrade low-earth orbiting (LEO) spacecraft capability and result in their destruction in a short period of time."

The military budget documents refer to the SOH program as "a proof of concept demonstration" of technology and techniques to mitigate the HAND-enhanced trapped radiation, with the goal of accelerating "the rate of decay of trapped radiation from the LEO environment by a factor of 10 over the natural rate of decay."

Phase 1 of SOH would use a high-power ground-based source of VLF radiation - at least initially using the HAARP facility - "propagating through the ionosphere to deflect the trapped radiation deep into the atmosphere." If that proves valid and cost-effective, space-based demonstrations and tests apparently would follow.

Proposal Piques Interest of Amateur Radio Community

The New Zealand research paper caught the interest of at least one newspaper, the New Zealand Herald, and word of the plan soon was circulating within the worldwide Amateur Radio community. ARRL Propagation Report Editor Tad Cook, K7RA, investigated and filed a special propagation bulletin August 15.

"When I first heard of this on Monday morning, I thought it must be something from a fringe Web site peddling dark conspiracy theories," Cook commented, "but the newspaper reporting the news is real, and so is the team of scientists from New Zealand, the UK and Finland." Cook contacted Rodger to learn more.

"He proved very cooperative, accessible and helpful and told me RBR is a serious project, that 'money is starting to appear to investigate it in more detail,' and 'US scientists with military connections are treating it seriously'," Cook reports.

Sheer Energy

Cook says he shared with Rodger speculation by QST Contributing Editor Ward Silver, N0AX, to the effect that "the sheer energy needed to accomplish [RBR] would tend to rule it out from the start, and I don't know where they would erect the necessary antennas."

Responded Rodger: "This would be true, but they are hoping to rely on some of the non-linear processes in space plasmas, stealing the energy from the radiation belts to get the wave amplitudes high enough. We know this is possible - in theory - as it happens naturally already. We don't know how easy it will be to get it happening under our control."

Rodger says there are two plans to erect the necessary antenna. "One is to fly VLF antenna in space. This could be a power problem," he told Cook. "But for ground-based systems, you probably already know that most major naval powers have big VLF transmitters dotted over the globe."

Two US Navy VLF transmitters have power output capability in the megawatt range, Rodger remarked. "While these are designed to keep the signals mostly under the ionosphere, it shows the possibility for building big powerful antenna." No mention of HAARP appears in the group's research paper.

Ozone Layer Impact Minimal

The research group also calculated RBR's potential to affect the ozone layer but found that ozone depletion would be short-lived and similar to that resulting from natural processes such as large solar storms and volcanic eruptions.

Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.), in a tough reelection fight, drew parallels Monday between World War II and the current fight against "Islamic fascism," saying both required fighting a common foe in multiple countries. Santorum has been using the phrase for months.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld took it a step further in a speech to an American Legion convention in Salt Lake City, accusing critics of the administration's Iraq and antiterrorism policies of trying to appease "a new type of fascism."

White House aides and outside Republican strategists said the new description was an effort to more clearly identify the ideology that motivates many organized terrorist groups, representing a shift in emphasis from the general to the specific.

Depicting the struggle as one against Islamic fascists is "an appropriate definition of the war that we're in," GOP pollster Ed Goeas said. "I think it's effective in that it definitively defines the enemy in a way that we can't because they're not in uniforms."

Muslim groups have cried foul. Bush's use of the phrase "contributes to a rising level of hostility to Islam and the American Muslim community," complained Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Conservative commentators have long talked about "Islamo-fascism," and Bush's phrase was a slightly toned-down variation on that theme.

Dennis Ross, a Mideast adviser to both the first Bush and Clinton administrations and now director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said he would have chosen different words.

"The war on terror has always been a misnomer, because terrorism is an instrument, it's not an ideology," Ross said. "So I would always have preferred it to be called the 'war with radical Islam,' not with Islam but with 'radical Islam.' "

Why even mention the religion? "Because that's who they are," Ross said. "Fascism had a certain definition. Whether they meet this or not, one thing is clear: They're radical. They represent a completely radical and intolerant interpretation of Islam."

While fascism once referred to the rigid nationalistic one-party dictatorship first instituted in Italy, it has "been used very loosely in all kinds of ways for a long time," said Wayne Fields, a specialist in presidential rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis.

"Typically, the Bush administration finds its vocabulary someplace in the middle ground of popular culture," Fields said. "It seems to me that they're trying to find something that resonates, without any effort to really define what they mean."

Pollster Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, said the "fascist" label might evoke comparisons to World War II and remind Americans of the lack of personal freedoms in fundamentalist countries.

"Having called these people evildoers, fascism is just a new wrinkle," he said.

The tactic recalled President George H.W. Bush's 1990 likening of Iraq's Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler. "I caught hell on this comparison of Saddam to Hitler, with critics accusing me of personalizing the crisis, but I still feel it was an appropriate one," the elder Bush later wrote in a memoir.

Charles Black, a longtime GOP consultant with close ties to both the first Bush administration and the current White House, said branding Islamic extremists as fascists was apt.

"It helps dramatize what we're up against," Black said. "They are not just some ragtag terrorists. They are people with a plan to take over the world and eliminate everybody except them."

Stephen J. Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown University, suggested that White House strategists "probably had a focus group and they found the word fascist."

"Most people are against fascists of whatever form," Wayne said. "By definition, fascists are bad. If you're going to demonize, you might as well use the toughest words you can."

His speech in Salt Lake City, in which he also said administration critics suffered from "moral confusion," prompted angry reactions from Democrats hoping to win back control of Congress.

"It is a dangerous business to accuse those who disagree with you of moral and intellectual confusion," said Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. "Debate in our democracy is based upon respect, not vilification."

Said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.: "If Mr. Rumsfeld is so concerned with comparisons to World War II, he should explain why our troops have now been fighting in
Iraq longer than it took our forces to defeat the Nazis in Europe."

Responding Wednesday, Pentagon press secretary Eric Ruff said, "Facts are facts. As the secretary said in his speech, America and the free world face a gathering threat of challenges from a vicious enemy that is serious, lethal and relentless. There are important lessons from history that we ought to be mindful of as we talk about how we are going to meet the challenges extremist terror organizations present."

In his speech, Rumsfeld said it "was apparent that many have still not learned history's lessons." Aides later said he was not accusing the administration's critics of trying to appease the terrorists but was cautioning against a repeat of errors made in earlier eras.

Nevertheless, many Democrats in Congress viewed Rumsfeld's remarks as fighting words.

Sen. Jack Reed, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said Rumsfeld has been "substituting sloganing for strategy" and delivered a "calculated political argument" to make people believe that to support a war against terror requires support of the administration's policies.

"I think the analogy is very, very weak," Reed, D-R.I., said of Rumsfeld's comparison of Iraq to World War II.

It is time Rumsfeld "should be departing" the Pentagon, Reed added. Reed, Pelosi and other Democrats have been calling for the defense secretary's resignation for more than a year.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York called Rumsfeld's portrayal of Democrats a "strawman" and said Americans need answers on how to deal with a looming civil war in Iraq.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., shot back, saying Democrats were not committed to winning the war on terror. If they were, he asked, "Why does (Schumer's) party attack the president over and over again for using all the tools necessary to identify, track down and stop those who want to do us harm?" Democrats have objected to aspects of the president's terrorist surveillance program.

Also Wednesday, a New York Democratic House candidate, Navy veteran Eric Massa, accused Rumsfeld of lying about progress in Iraq.

Massa, who is challenging one-term Republican Rep. Randy Kuhl, said he was outraged by Rumsfeld's comments and faulted him for blaming the media for his own misstatements and missteps. He said the Bush administration has no effective plan to secure the country.

"This thing has disintegrated," Tim Walz, a Minnessota Democrat running for a House seat, said of Iraq.

Tracey Schmitt, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said the Democratic candidates' strategy is to criticize Republican efforts to win the war on terror, while elected Democrats are "committed to a strategy that will weaken our ability to defend America and make us less safe at home and abroad."

"There has not been a prosecution for contempt over anybody publishing outside this jurisdiction (Britain), but logically there is no reason why there should not be," said Caroline Kean, partner at UK media law firm Wiggin.

While restricting what British media can report has been effective in the past, the Internet has made it far harder to stop information published by foreign outlets, which may breach Britain's laws, from being seen by UK readers.

The New York Times article cited unnamed investigators providing information not given publicly by British police.

It detailed the content of martyrdom videos and bomb-making equipment found by police and said an attempt to blow up the airliners was not as imminent as authorities had suggested.

The same article appeared on the paper's Web site, http://www.nytimes.com, but readers in Britain who clicked on the headline received the notice "This Article Is Unavailable." "On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain. This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial," the notice said. PUBLISHED IN BRITAIN However British newspapers the Times and the Daily Mail also published details from the New York Times article this week. A government source said no injunctions had been taken out against the British papers, but action could not be ruled out if details were in any future publications, closer to a trial date. "We're keeping it under careful, constant review," he said. Because British courts may impose heavy fines and jail editors, foreign newspapers sometimes hold potentially sensitive stories out of their British print editions. Media lawyer Mark Stephens of Finer, Stephens, Innocent said he could not see anything wrong with the blocked New York Times article and the decision by British papers to print similar details showed the contempt of court law may be the problem. "It's probably unhelpful to have an area of law which is so uncertain where one set of lawyers is saying censor everything while another says there's nothing wrong with it," he said. "Even by blocking you don't have the desired effect. You actually create an enhanced interest as the blocking becomes a story in itself, which fans the flames of curiosity," he said. This was the first time the New York Times had targeted a readership and blocked it from seeing a story on the Web, as far as a spokeswoman and a lawyer from the paper could recall. "The British take this very seriously and tend to attack publications for contempt even if the arguments that we would have made sounded fairly reasonable," George Freeman, a lawyer with the New York Times Freeman said it was no guarantee that someone in Britain could not find the story. "But our position is that we did what we could to prevent publication in Britain. If someone carries in on a jet plane a New York Times from New York, that's not our doing and we can't prevent that," Freeman said.

Of course, today's situation is very different from the one described in the novel. Whereas the totalitarian government in 1984 installed cameras everywhere with the intention of monitoring the people in order to secure its rule, the current placement of surveillance cameras is a part of the country's security measures. Ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the international community has been obsessed with security.

Britain, as a country that has suffered terrorist attacks of its own, has all the reasons to be cautious. It is only reasonable for the government to take all measures to secure its country and people from any possible acts of terror and crimes in general. Placing cameras is a part of such security measures. In fact, the surveillance cameras played an important role in identifying and capturing those responsible for last year's London Liverpool Station explosion.

It is true that without the government's active involvement in public security people would feel less. More policemen and cameras liberates the public from the burden of constantly worrying about safety.

Yet, it is still difficult to shake off the uncomfortable feeling of being watched and the lack of privacy. It is saddening that today's world has reached a point where people can no longer feel safe without cameras everywhere to protect them from possible future crimes. Although different in many aspects, today's society more and more resembles that of 1984.

A three-person contamination team arrived from Vancouver to test what investigators describe as an organic and glue-like orange crystalline powder.

Two employees who came in contact with the substance were quarantined and decontaminated before they were allowed to go home.

RCMP in Whitehorse are taking the matter seriously and are continuing their investigation.

According to Mr Savelyev, a weapons and explosives expert, special forces fired rocket-propelled grenades without warning as a prelude to an armed assault, ignoring the fact that negotiations were apparently still going on.

He says the explosions turned the school into a war zone when the Chechen gunmen retaliated, causing a fire which killed many of the hostages trapped beneath its burning roof.

Mr Savalyev's 700-page report, Beslan: the Hostages' Truth, contradicts the official account, which is that the school was not deliberately stormed and that it was the hostage-takers, not special forces, who detonated the two explosive devices that triggered the gunfight.

The Chechen rebel who apparently masterminded the siege - Shamil Basayev - was killed last month in an explosion that the Kremlin claims was the result of a special operation.

The search for his personal archive and an estimated $7m (£3.7m) in cash has apparently led the authorities to abduct his last wife, whose identity and existence was a mystery until very recently.

Elina Ersenoyeva, 26, was snatched by masked gunmen on 17 August and has not been heard from since.