Weldon, who is currently being investigated by the FBI over alleged corruption during his time in office, visited Libya in March to discuss a possible military deal, according to a letter describing the trip from Weldon to Defense Solutions CEO Timothy Ringgold. In May, Weldon, together with Ringgold and another company representative, traveled to Moscow to discuss working with Russia's weapons-export agency on arms sales to the Middle East.

Both trips were part of the company's effort to tap into the growing -- and often legally murky -- market for selling weapons from former Eastern Bloc countries to the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Ex-Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Penn., is helping broker deals between Russian weapons suppliers and the Iraqi and Libyan governments through his company, Defense Solutions.
Photo: H. Rumph Jr/AP

The Russians want to sell weapons to Iraq directly, but "must go slow on Iraq because of political reasons" and want to work with an "intermediary" like Defense Solutions, CEO Ringgold subsequently wrote to colleagues. "They have not spoken with any American company that can offer the quid pro quo that we can or that has the connections in Russia that we have," he boasted.

A few years ago, an American company proposing to sell weapons to Libya might have triggered a congressional hearing. So, too, would have a proposal to conduct arms deals with Russia, which the United States has accused of selling high-tech weapons to Syria and Iran.

However, U.S. government efforts to rapidly equip countries like Afghanistan and Iraq -- which have largely Soviet-origin weapons -- have created legal ambiguities and loopholes in export controls that didn't exist in years past and given rise to a new class of arms trade middlemen. So, even though both Libya and the Russian arms export agency are on official U.S. blacklists, government officials and analysts involved in weapons sales say the rules have become unclear as the push to equip allies in the global war on terror has blazed new but uncertain legal ground.

Eagerly stepping into that virgin territory is Defense Solutions, a Pennsylvania-based company that is carving out a small but lucrative niche in a new international arms bazaar. The firm boasts as its advisors a number of influential Washington insiders, such as retired General Barry McCaffrey, the former White House drug czar.

Helping the firm make key connections is Curt Weldon, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania at the center of an FBI investigation into alleged conflicts of interest during his time in office. Weldon, now a key executive at Defense Solutions, is working with the company to set up these weapons deals.

Defense Solutions has also proposed refurbishing Libya's BTR-60 armored personnel carriers, according to a sales proposal seen by Wired.com. Defense Solutions denies drafting a sales proposal to Libya.

It's an unusual, if not an entirely unexpected chapter for Weldon, whose time in office included frequent trips to Russia. As an influential member of the House Armed Services Committee, Weldon pushed for multibillion-dollar defense programs, like ballistic missile defense, and earned a reputation as a foreign policy gadfly, boasting of his contacts with officials in nations labeled by the administration as "rogue states" such as Libya and North Korea. Weldon's wild claims about a 9/11 cover-up and his sensationalist book warning of an Iranian terror plot, sometimes earned him official scorn and public ridicule, but it was accusations that he steered contracts to Eastern European businesses linked to his daughter's lobbying firm that drew the government's attention.

Weldon was voted out of office in 2006 just weeks after the FBI raided his daughter's home, and that of one of her associates.

Weldon did not respond to e-mails and phone requests to be interviewed or comment for this article. But in a 2006 interview, before the FBI probe was public, Weldon spoke enthusiastically about setting up a "front company" to work with the Russian arms agency, Rosoboronexport. Weldon hoped this company could sell weapons to the Middle East, and other regions, particularly to countries where the U.S. has strained relations. He claimed the director of Rosoboronexport approached him to work with "an American company that would act as a front for weapons these nations want to buy."

Weldon called the proposal an "unbelievable offer."

The administration, he acknowledged at the time, did not welcome the idea of an American company selling Russian weapons to potentially unfriendly countries. But two years later, Weldon, now a private citizen and chief strategic officer for Defense Solutions, appears to be working on precisely that sort of deal. And whether illegal or not, Defense Solutions' business represents a new phenomenon in the international arms trade business.

In years past arms brokers -- firms or individuals who serve as middlemen to facilitate weapons sales between countries -- were largely the stuff of spy thrillers. Unlike traditional American defense companies, like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, which typically sell weapons directly to NATO countries or other governments regarded as friendly to the United States, brokers are often small outfits run by people with sometimes questionable experience and reputations they will sell to anyone. One of the most infamous arms brokers, a Russian named Viktor Bout, is charged by the United States, United Nations, Interpol and others of funneling arms to terrorists and rebels around the world. He was recently arrested in Thailand. The United States is requesting his extradition on charges of supplying arms to a terrorist organization.

Two Marines lower the trim vane on the front of an Iraqi BMP-1 mechanized infantry combat vehicle that was captured during Operation Desert Storm. The American defense consulting firm Defense Solutions has proposed refurbishing Libya's aging fleet of BMP-1s. Defense Solutions denies drafting a sales proposal to Libya.

But ironically, Iraq has fueled a new market for these professional middlemen; the United States is funneling billions of dollars into modernizing Iraq's army so that the country's government can fend for itself after coalition troops withdraw. And Iraq's largely Soviet-equipped military is a natural market for Eastern European countries brimming with old or out-of-date equipment they would like to unload. The middlemen, in these cases, serve a key role by allowing the U.S. government to do business with an American company, which in turn buys equipment from Eastern Bloc countries in deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it financed with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

One of Defense Solutions' sales -- a deal to sell Hungarian-owed T-72 tanks to Iraq in 2005 -- was typical of these new foreign military sales. But on the more questionable side is the company's plans to work with Rosoboronexport, which is barred from doing business with the U.S. government, and Libya, which is still on the State Department's arms embargo list.

The Eastern European-Middle East arms-brokering business, while in some cases sanctioned by the U.S. government, has run into problems, including outright corruption and quality. Defense contractor Dale Stoffel, the president of Wye Oak Technology, and another American were gunned down in Iraq in December 2004 after Stoffel alleged that the Iraqi Ministry of Defense was involved in a kickback scheme. Like Defense Solutions, the company Stoffel worked for was refurbishing the Iraq's army Eastern Bloc equipment.

Another problem is quality. Weapons from the former Soviet Bloc, which the U.S. military euphemistically calls "nonstandard equipment," have been flagged as substandard, acknowledges Brigadier General Charles Luckey, who is in charge of security assistance at Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq. In an interview from Iraq, Brigadier General Luckey said: "One of the frustrating things about buying nonstandard [weapons], is that I'm the guy who has to deal with the fact that some broker I've never heard of allowed weapons to get to Iraq before they were inspected."

Defense Solutions is carving a new niche in the arms trade, selling Soviet-made weapons to Middle Eastern countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. Defense Solutions sold Hungarian-owed T-72 tanks to Iraq in 2005.

In one high-profile case, Iraqi officials alleged that a corrupt firm sold them $400 million in shoddy helicopters from Poland. More recently, a company led by a 21-year-old and a former masseur was offered a U.S. government contract worth nearly $300 million to sell ammunition to Afghanistan. The ammunition turned out to be outdated and of dubious origin and several people connected with the company have been indicted. A congressional investigation concluded that the company, which was on a State Department watch list, was able to take advantage of regulatory loopholes by using middlemen.

For those concerned about illicit arms trade, this new wave of weapons deals is rife with the potential for corruption and abuse, but for companies eager to pursue markets once regarded as dubious, it represents a lucrative business opportunity. The problem in these cases, according to those familiar with arms sales, is that it's no longer clear what's legal and what's not.

Rachel Stohl, an expert on international arms trade and a senior analyst at Center for Defense Information, says that in many ways, the rush to equip Iraq has led the United States to throw caution to the wind. She points to a report by the Government Accountability Office last year that found that some 190,000 weapons sold to Iraq have gone missing. "I think the reality is we won't know, until way after the fact, about all of these irregularities with the Iraq weapons provision program," she said. "We were providing them all these assault rifles that have gone missing. Why? They were not following the standard procedures that were in place."

But Iraq and Afghanistan aren't the only markets available to arms brokers like Defense Solutions. The gradual normalization of relations with Libya opens another door into a quasi-legal area of sales.

Like Iraq, Libya has a substantial arsenal of Soviet-origin military weapons, offering a potential market for brokers working with Russia and other former Soviet states. But even when there's not an outright ban, sales to the Middle East are often fraught with controversy, particularly to countries like Libya, which was under international sanction for more than a decade. Even as sanctions against it have been lifted, European companies proposing to sell arms to Libya have faced steep criticism, particularly since the country is still ruled by dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who took power in a military coup in 1969.

While the United States lifted Libya's "state sponsor of terrorism" designation in 2006, other restrictions, such as on the sale of arms, remain in place. A State Department spokesperson confirmed that exports of "lethal munitions" to Libya, such as tanks or related equipment, are still banned, although sales of nonlethal equipment are now allowed on a case-by-case basis.

In late March, Weldon traveled to Libya for a weeklong trip at the invitation of the Gaddafi Foundation, a group run by the son of Libya's leader, and the chairman of Libya's foreign affairs committee, according to the report he sent to Defense Solutions (.pdf), a copy of which was obtained by Wired.com. The trip reports states: "Agreement reached for Weldon to quickly return to Libya for meetings with son [of Libyan leader Gaddafi] Morti regarding defense and security cooperation."

A document dated April 16, just two weeks after Weldon's trip, outlines Defense Solutions' proposal to Libya to refurbish the country's fleet of armored vehicles, including its T-72 tanks, BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, and BTR-60 armored personnel carriers. A copy of the sales proposal, also provided to Wired.com, is on Defense Solutions' letterhead, appears to bear the signature of company CEO Timothy Ringgold, and is addressed to Libya's defense procurement council. "Defense Solutions is committed to delivering a full end-to-end solution to its clients," the proposal states. "Besides refurbishing these vehicles, we are capable of providing a full logistics support package, including a two year supply of spare parts, maintenance and repair services, and operator, maintenance, and repair training."

In an interview with Wired.com, Ringgold admitted that he's interested in doing business in Libya and confirms receiving Weldon's trip report from Libya, but denies drafting or signing an arms-sale proposal. "I've never made such a document to Libya," Ringgold insisted, after being read the proposal, and told that his signature is on it.

In addition to the Libyan arms-deal document, Wired.com has also reviewed copies of e-mails from Ringgold discussing the Libyan deal.

While Ringgold denies proposing an arms sale to Libya, he is open about speaking with Rosoboronexport, which has been on a U.S. government sanctions list since 2006, after the Russian state agency allegedly violated the Iran and Syria Nonproliferation Act. An April e-mail provided to Wired.com describes Ringgold, Weldon and Stephan Minikes, a senior advisor to Defense Solutions and a former ambassador, meeting with Rosoboronexport. The conversations included a number of potential deals, including supplying Mi-17 helicopters to Afghanistan and spare parts for Iraq's infantry fighting vehicles. Ringgold wrote to colleagues following the visit, describing the meetings as a "spectacular success," saying the Russian agency "has the ability to undercut all cost proposals from brokers."

Ringgold confirmed those discussions and said that his company has sought to do business with Rosoboronexport. Asked whether Ringgold considers his dealings with Russia to be legal, he argued that U.S. companies could work with Rosoboronexport on a "case-by-case" basis. "The particular purpose of the meeting we had -- and I want to be crystal clear -- was in response to a U.S. government requirement," he said.

A number of officials at the State Department and in the Pentagon, when contacted for this article, could not say whether working with Rosoboronexport is legal or not. A Pentagon spokeswoman said she was familiar with the issue, but deferred the question to the State Department. When asked about Rosoboronexport's status on the blacklist, John Herzberg, a State Department spokesman replied: "What's on there is on there."

Asked whether, given the ban, there was any way a company could legally work with Rosoboronexport, as Ringgold suggested, Herzberg provided an equivocal answer. "At the stage of the process we're at, I'm unable to give you an answer," he said. "You can try elsewhere in government, and maybe they'll be braver than me."

In an interview from Iraq, General Luckey conceded it was a murky area, but said, "My understanding is they are currently on our no-go list."

The confusion over debarred parties has even led the U.S. government into its own legal tangles, according to Jim McAleese, a Washington attorney who specializes in government contracting and foreign military sales. Because the Russian government violated U.S. nonproliferation laws, even NASA had to go to Congress to ensure it could work with Russia on Soyuz flights to the international space station. "What I'm warning you about is, don't be surprised by the confusion," McAleese said. "There are a whole bunch of different statutes that were adopted piecemeal and were never intended to be reconciled."

But it's the very ambiguity of the law that troubles those who monitor export control. "It's highly unusual to do anything with the Russians, particularly Rosoboronexport," said Scott Jones, director of Export Control Programs at the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia.

Legal or not, reputable American companies simply don't want to work with banned entities, Jones said, for fear of risking their reputations and business. "Even if it's not an outright prohibition, most companies don't want to put themselves in a liability situation that has really bad PR … and they stay away from it," Jones said. "But if that's your business, pimping out arms from the U.S. or Russia, that's the way it works, and you push as much as possible."

Finding any U.S. defense company working with the Russian government at this point would be "remarkable," Jones added.

In the meantime, the future for Weldon is unclear. The FBI investigation continues and Weldon's former chief of staff recently pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge and is cooperating with the government, notes Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed a complaint against Weldon in 2004. Sloan speculated that Weldon may be charged with "honest service fraud" for misusing his office for personal gain. "It's an easier standard than bribery," she said. "I wouldn't be surprised [if he's charged] with bribery, but I think it will be honest services fraud."

Ringgold insists that he and Weldon are on the right side of the law. "Everything we do is in strict compliance with international and U.S. law and we operate only in the best interests of the U.S. government," he said. "I didn't serve 30 years in the United States Army to throw that away on a whim."

Asked if Weldon is still working for the company, Ringgold replied: "Absolutely, proudly so."

But two weeks ago a jury in the civil lawsuit against that employer, NDS Group, largely cleared the company -- and by extension Tarnovsky -- of piracy, finding NDS guilty of only a single incident of stealing satellite signals, for which Dish was awarded $1,500 in damages.

"I knew this was going to come," Tarnovsky says. "They didn't have any proof or evidence."

The trial was years in the making, yet raised more questions than it answered. It came down to testimony between admitted pirates on both sides who accused each other of lying. Now that it's over Tarnovsky, who was fired by NDS last year, is eager to tell his side of the story.

Dressed in loose jeans, flip-flops and a T-shirt, Tarnovsky, 37, spoke with Wired.com by phone and in an air-conditioned lab in Southern California where he's been running a consultancy since losing his job. Surrounded by boxes of smart cards and thousands of dollars worth of microscopes and computers used for researching chips, he talked excitedly at lightning speed about his strange journey, which began in a top-secret Pentagon communications center, and ended with him working both sides of a heated electronic war over pay TV.

His story sheds new light on the murky, morally ambiguous world of international satellite pirates and those who do battle with them.

The stakes are high: Earnings in the satellite-TV industry reach the billions. In the first quarter of this year alone, U.S. market leader DirecTV announced revenue of $4.6 billion from more than 17 million U.S. subscribers. Dish Network earned $2.8 billion from nearly 14 million subscribers. Although satellite piracy has greatly diminished from its peak seven to 10 years ago when the events detailed in the civil lawsuit took place, the two companies lost millions in potential revenue, and spent millions more to replace insecure smart cards used in their systems and track down dealers selling pirated smart cards.

Those smart cards are at the center of the controversy over NDS, a British-Israeli company and a majority-owned subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corp. The company makes access cards used by pay-TV systems, most prominently DirecTV -- itself a former Murdoch company. Nagrastar, a plaintiff in the case and NDS's chief competitor, makes access cards used by Dish Network and other runners-up in the market.

According to allegations in the lawsuit, in the late '90s NDS extracted and cracked the proprietary code used in Nagrastar's cards, a fact that NDS doesn't contest. What happened next, though, is hotly disputed. Nagrastar says Tarnovsky used the code to create a device for reprogramming Nagrastar cards into pirate cards, and gave the cards to pirates eager to steal Dish Network's programming. Tarnovsky was also accused of posting to the internet a detailed road map for hacking Nagrastar's cards.

Nagrastar says NDS had an obvious motive for these antics: Their own chip, the so-called P1 or "F Card," had already been thoroughly cracked by pirates, and the company wanted to level the playing field with its competitors.

NDS denied the allegations at trial. The company declined to comment for this article or to confirm details of Tarnovsky's employment other than to say it was pleased that the verdict "ended in a resounding affirmation of NDS and its business ethics and proper conduct."

Tarnovsky began his pirating career in the '90s while serving in the U.S. Army. He had a top-secret SCI security clearance working on cryptographic computers in Belgium for NATO headquarters, and spent a year at Ft. Detrick in Maryland providing support to the National Security Agency for satellite transmissions to Europe.

In 1996, he was stationed in Germany when his colonel sold him a used satellite-TV system, along with two pirated access cards, neither of which worked. Tarnovsky began posting on online pirate forums, and developed contacts in the community, ultimately learning how to fix the cards to access English-language programs from Sky in the United Kingdom.

After leaving the Army and returning to the States, he got a call from Ron Ereiser, a Canadian pirate who'd heard about him through the grapevine. Pirates had found a back door in the P1 card and were vigorously exploiting it to get DirecTV content. But the cards kept failing. In a game of pirate pingpong, DirecTV periodically deployed electronic countermeasures, or ECMs, in the satellite stream that killed the cards in their set-top boxes. Ereiser needed someone to fix the cards.

There was serious black-market money on the line. In Canada, where pirating of U.S. satellite services wasn't considered illegal until 2002, syndicates of dealers did enough business that they could afford to chip in about $50,000 to hire a programmer to reverse engineer the latest cards. Pirate cards would sell for about $200 each, with the profit split between the investors and engineers. Tarnovsky claims Canadian pirate dealers could make $400,000 in a weekend; when Reginald Scullion, a notorious pirate in Canada, was raided in 1998, authorities seized $5.5 million from his bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes, though not all of it was from piracy.

Ereiser, who now works as a consultant to Nagrastar, concedes that the money from piracy was good, but insists that nobody became an overnight millionaire. "It was lucrative," he said in a telephone interview. "But to suggest that millions were being made in a month is an absolute crock."

DirecTV's countermeasures were a nagging drag on this lucrative trade. Every time an ECM was deployed, Ereiser and other dealers would be harangued by customers demanding to have the cards fixed and their TV programs restored.

Tarnovsky, who was known online as "Big Gun," says Ereiser offered him $20,000 to fix cards that were killed by ECMs, and he agreed. Each time NDS created a countermeasure, Tarnovsky would analyze the code and find a way to circumvent the countermeasure. He did it while working full-time as a software engineer for a semiconductor company in Massachusetts.

"I'd be at work and I'd check the IRC (channel) to see if they'd launched their Thursday countermeasure yet," he says. "It was like a chess game for me. I couldn't wait for them to do a countermeasure because I would counter it in minutes."

Tarnovsky suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which he says helped with the detailed work.

"I think so fast," he says.

It wasn't long before NDS came courting. Tarnovsky had a contact at the company to whom he'd begun passing information about holes in its software, even supplying patches to fix them. NDS offered him a job earning $65,000 a year. By the time the company fired him last year, he was earning about $245,000 in salary and bonuses and had another $100,000 in stock options, he says.

The company set him up in a lab in Southern California equipped with a computer, some DirecTV set-top boxes, sample DirecTV cards and NDS source code. There was no fancy equipment at first, but his relationship with NDS and the lab grew over the decade he worked with them. Tarnovsky says the job was a dream come true. While living in Europe he'd once seen a news report showing an engineer at a French satellite company writing countermeasures, sitting in a lab with smart cards piled around him on his desk.

"I always thought it would be so cool to be that guy," Tarnovsky says. "Finally I got the chance."

Tarnovsky had two roles at NDS -- to find holes in its software and work undercover with pirates to discover what they were doing against NDS technology.

To conceal his relationship with NDS from pirates, few people at the company knew his identity. He used the name "Michael George" and for the first four years was paid through other companies, including, for about five months, HarperCollins, the Murdoch-owned book publisher.

"It was very hush-hush, because we didn't know who could be an inside informant," he says.

Part of his job was developing ECMs for NDS. He'd examine pirate NDS cards to determine how they worked, then send instructions to engineers in Israel to create a kill for them.

"I didn’t actually load the gun and pull the trigger but I got to make the bullet," Tarnovsky says.

Among the countermeasures he says he created was one known among pirates as the "Black Sunday" kill -- an elaborate scheme that destroyed tens of thousands of pirate DirecTV cards a week before Super Bowl Sunday in 2001.

Instead of being delivered all at once like other measures, the Black Sunday attack code was sent to pirate cards in about five dozen parts over the course of two months, like a tank transported piece by piece to a battlefield to be assembled in the field. "They never expected us to do this," Tarnovsky says.

The kill didn't last long before pirates found a way to jump-start the cards. But it holds an enduring position in pirate lore; for the first time, they could see a cunning mind at work on the other side.

While Tarnovsky was killing cards, however, he was also helping pirates fix them.

Days before Tarnovsky began working for NDS, the company began phasing in its latest-generation smart card, the P2, which was thought to be virtually uncrackable. But word reached the company that two Bulgarian hackers working for Ereiser had cracked the P2. On NDS's instructions, Tarnovsky met with Ereiser undercover in Calgary to get the code. When he got there, Ereiser offered him $20,000 to work for him fighting whatever countermeasures NDS and DirecTV cooked up to thwart their P2 hack.

NDS considered it a great opportunity for Tarnovsky to maintain his pirate identity, but DirecTV insisted on some controls. Under "Operation Johnny Walker," as they dubbed it, Tarnovsky gave Ereiser a program to create pirate NDS cards, but encrypted it so no one could copy it. The program worked only with a dongle attached to Ereiser's computer and created a limited number of cards that could be killed at any time.

But, according to Nagrastar, Tarnovsky wasn't just helping NDS fight piracy by working undercover and creating ECMs, he was also committing piracy against NDS's competitors to weaken their place in the market.

After NDS engineers in Israel hacked the Nagrastar code in the late '90s, Nagrastar says Tarnovsky created a "stinger" program that turned Nagrastar cards into pirate cards. He allegedly gave the program to a Canadian named Al Menard in 1999 who sold reprogrammed Nagrastar cards for $350 each. Then in December 2000, someone anonymously posted code and detailed instructions for hacking Nagrastar's card to two websites, one of them run by Menard, exposing Dish Network to even more piracy. It was estimated in court testimony that between 100,000 and 165,000 pirated Nagrastar cards were released to the market in the wake of this posting.

Nagrastar says Menard began sending Tarnovsky cash from the sale of the pirate cards. At the end of August 2000, authorities acting on an anonymous tip seized two boxes destined for a mail drop Tarnovsky rented in Texas. Inside, they found a CD and DVD player with $20,000 and $20,100 concealed inside.

The boxes were sent from a phony address for "Regency Audio" in Vancouver to C.T. Electronics at Tarnovsky's address. A customs form for a third package that wasn't seized indicated that it was sent from Menard to Tarnovsky and also contained electronic goods.

Tarnovsky was in Israel at the time, and says he didn't know anything about the packages until he was notified that they'd been seized. He thinks they were sent by someone in Nagrastar's camp who was trying to frame him. He says Nagrastar's accusations about the "stinger" program were baseless, and that he never gave Menard any software.

On Feb. 9, 2001, U.S. Customs agents appeared at his doorstep. On advice of a lawyer, he declined to let them search his house without a warrant. Tarnovsky was never arrested or charged with any crime, but suspicions against him were mounting. NDS gave Tarnovsky a polygraph test, but asked only two, self-interested questions that never touched on the Nagrastar accusations: Had Tarnovsky sold any modified NDS smart cards, or company secrets, since he'd been working for the company? Tarnovsky answered no, and passed the test.

He continued to work for NDS for six years. But then last year, Nagrastar confronted NDS with a sheriff's report showing that fingerprints lifted from the seized electronics equipment sent to Tarnovsky's Texas mail drop belonged to an associate of Menard, raising suspicions again that Tarnovsky might have sold pirate Nagrastar cards without NDS's knowledge. NDS fired him.

Tarnovsky says his termination proves he and NDS weren't conspiring against Nagrastar. Had they been, NDS would have done anything to keep him happy, and quiet. He says the fact that Nagrastar lost the case shows he wasn't pirating on his own either.

"I've never sold a single Nagra card, ever," he says.

Although he was angry at NDS for abandoning him, he told Wired.com before the trial ended that he hoped to work for the company again.

"I want to make sure that NDS wins this lawsuit because that will clear my name," he said at the time.

When it was suggested that someone might view this as motivation for him to lie on NDS's behalf, he disagreed.

"That's crazy. I could go to jail," he said. "I would never perjure myself for some company."

Since NDS fired him he's been consulting for two semiconductor companies and a manufacturer of dongle tokens, but he misses his life in electronic warfare. If NDS doesn't want him, he says he'd be happy to work for Nagrastar -- jumping sides once again.

"I could design a whole entire chip for them like I did for NDS," he says. "NDS thinks today that their technology is superior to everybody else's and it probably is, because they're 17 years ahead of Nagra technologically. But Nagra could catch up overnight if they used my services.

"I'm a very valuable asset as far as smart-card technology goes," he adds. "I know everything about (NDS) as far as their intellectual property models go."

He offered his services to the company last year, while the lawsuit was pending. Nagrastar declined.

Those so-called Afghan National Auxiliary Police (ANAP), all formerly in the service of local warlords, had received two months of training by Dutch and American soldiers and were now the first line of defense against the Taliban.

Arming tribesmen was a risky idea. True, this sort of tribal initiative had been effective in Iraq. But NATO commanders feared that Afghan loyalties to their warlords ran too deep. NATO was “arming people who were not necessarily in line with the [Afghan] government,” U.S. Brig. Gen. Robert Cone told Wired.com.

So, last month, NATO fired the auxiliary cops and scrapped the tribal strategy, leaving gaping holes in Afghanistan's defenses. The fix? Marines, of course, armed with fingerprint pads, iris scanners and electronic databases.

With these biometric tools, the Marines are planning to recruit new cops who have no ties to tribal warlords. “We know there are some shadow police and some militia-type police,” Lt. Col. Ray Hall, the Marine commander, said. “Once we go through the vetting process, we'll have everybody screened … so that problem should go away.”

That means scanning every new recruit's unique iris “eye prints,” logging their thumb prints and feeding it all into a growing, but still very spotty, national database linked to criminal and intelligence records. If a cop has any known warlord ties, he's disqualified from serving.

CIA teams used FBI biometrics while hunting for known Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan in 2001, and since then, the military has gathered data on almost every Afghan it comes in regular contact with.

There's one more problem. Not all the military databases can talk to one another. “We haven't standardized,” said Larry Schneider, a Northrop Grumman VP who last year was working on collapsing many biometrics systems into just one.

Until everyone is looking at the same data, seditious Afghan cops will probably keep falling through the cracks.

Blogger: Dan Blum

There are two groups actively working to create a common event standard that allows event logs and audit records to be shared and understood across many products, and the good news is that they’re talking to each other:

• Common Event Expression (CEE) language, by Mitre 
• X/Open Distributed Audit Standard (XDAS), by Open Group 

The business benefits of creating a common event standard would be considerable:

• Reduced log management and security information event management (SIEM) system integration costs 
  • Reduced volume of event data and simplification of SIEM architecture 
  • Reduced need for (and increased effectiveness of) normalization 
• Reduced cost of integrating new solutions with security management infrastructures and frameworks 
• Lower cost of integrating event management and audit into cross-enterprise applications (such as federated identity management)
• Faster and simpler data exchange between organizations, vendors and incident response services supporting real time response to threats and attacks 
• Better forensics for a common defense 

Late last year, our Burton Group Security and Risk Management Strategies (SRMS) group decided to push the question of event standards with vendors, trade press, and standards groups. But we felt that we needed evidence of end user enterprise interest and involvement to start doing so. Happily, as we began researching the space, we found that Mitre’s CEE was being driven by the EU, NATO and DoD as well as log management and platform vendors. Burton Group held a conference call discussing common event standards and SIEM with members of the International Information Integrity Institute (I-4), and key stakeholders showed up. The Open Group reports that enterprises as well as vendors are getting involved with XDAS. Clearly, enterprises seem ready to focus on this topic.

Of course, there are challenges ahead. Not only is there no complete common event standard out in the field today, there are many partial standards or solutions, including Syslog; the IETF’s Intrusion Detection Message Exchange Format (IDMEF) and Incident Object Description and Exchange Format (IODEF); the Java Specification Request (JSR) 47 Logging API, WS-Management subscribe/publish APIs and so on. Any comprehensive standard released in the future should work with existing technologies like these as much as possible. Also, there are a number of complexities, including mapping event semantics between different systems, synchronizing time while managing clock drift, and maintaining dynamic event handling policies.

Fortunately, the Mitre and Open Group efforts are gaining traction. Mitre has put up a CEE web site and one can ask to subscribe to the CEE mailing list. Mitre has described its scope as covering standard event taxonomy/terminology, log syntax, log transport and recommendations on what types of events and data elements systems should log. Mitre’s specifications are in the draft stage, and publication for comment is “expected 2008” according to the website. That’s pretty indefinite. But we are told that while not complete, these draft documents will reflect a considerable amount for work that has already been done and can be built upon. It is positive that a CEE community representative says Mitre plans to begin by seeking comments on the underlying goals and requirements for event standards. But to establish a broadly accepted industry standard anytime soon, Mitre and the government/defense community it servers will have to accelerate overly lengthy document review cycles and possibly streamline handling procedures designed for classified information rather than open standards deliberation.

As my colleague Bob Blakley wrote in “An Auditing Standard: Has this rough beast's hour come round at last?” last July, Open Group revived prior work on a specification called “X/Open Distributed Audit Standard” (XDAS).  XDAS addresses the concerns necessary to build a robust distributed security auditing system in a mature and complete way, but its 1990s era C and UNIX interfaces need to be updated. Novell, whose Bandit Project incorporates XDAS, has contributed source code to a new open-source project called OpenXDAS (http://openxdas.sourceforge.net/) which makes an XDAS implementation widely available.

As these two standards efforts proceed, we hear mixed signals. There have been some indications of contention; for example, CEE representatives purport to have a strong emphasis on “simplicity,” while some observers have expressed concern that XDAS may be “too complex.” Of course, the other side of the argument could be that CEE will over-simplify issues, but it’s hard to have that discussion when specifications for CEE aren’t publicly available yet.

Fortunately, olive branches have been extended as well. During the Open Group meetings in January, 2008 Burton Group observed the XDAS and CEE leadership discuss ways they could coordinate and avoid overlaps. For example, CEE and XDAS could make sure that XDAS APIs become a CEE-compatible logging transport and, if both organizations produce data dictionaries for events, they could be perhaps formulated to use a common taxonomy and to avoid schema conflicts and overlaps. We’re also hoping that vendors such as Arcsight, Oracle and CA – who have been proactive about proposing specifications or encouraging the industry to create a common event standard – will be become part of the convergence on a common solution.

In the coming weeks and months, Burton Group will keep watching the event standards space and post more information on how matters develop. Please let us know by commenting on this blog if there are other standards efforts we should be watching, compatibility concerns to address, or other issues and questions you’re concerned about. We hope to continue being a voice for convergence and standardization that helps put the industry on the road to a common event standard by 2009.