Global articles on espionage, spying, bugs, and other interesting topics.

South Korean spy chief warns of more attacks by North

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — South Korea’s spy chief said Wednesday that there is a high chance that North Korea will attack again following a strike last month that has led to renewed tensions on the peninsula, the Yonhap news agency reported.

South Korean lawmaker Rhee Beum-Kwan quoted National Intelligence Service chief Won Sei-hoon as making the prediction, Yonhap reported.

“North Korea pushed for reckless actions as internal complaints grew over its hereditary power succession and economic situations worsened,” the lawmaker quoted Won as saying.

Meanwhile, South Korea and the United States wrapped up joint military exercises on the Yellow Sea, while South Korea carried on with plans for artillery firing drills next week amid simmering tensions with Pyongyang.

The live fire drills are a routine monthly exercise aimed at securing the safety of ships in the area, the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff told CNN. They are scheduled to begin Monday.

Officials said the planned firing drills are expected to take place in waters around the Korean peninsula, including those close to the Yellow Sea border, Yonhap reported.

But the Yellow Sea locations are not close to Yeonpyeong Island, where four South Koreans were killed by North Korean shelling on November 23, Yonhap reported officials as saying.

North Korea has said the South provoked the attack, which also left 18 people injured, because shells from a South Korean military drill landed in the North’s waters.

Meanwhile, South Korea and the United States are reportedly in talks about more joint naval exercises for this year or next year.

“We have been in consultations with the U.S. to carry out several rounds of joint military drills to deal with a limited provocation by the enemy,” said Col. Kim Young-cheol of the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Yonhap reported. “The timing and participating military assets have not been decided yet.”

North Korea warned Tuesday that the military drills by the United States and South Korea could lead to “all-out war any time.” The firmly worded message was published by North Korea’s state-run KCNA news service.

“If the U.S. and the South Korean war-like forces fire even a shell into the inviolable land and territorial waters of the DPRK, they will have to pay dearly for this,” the news service report said. The DPRK is the acronym for North Korea’s formal name: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The U.S. State Department announced Wednesday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet with ministers from South Korea and Japan next Monday to discuss the Korean crisis, among other issues.

That encounter comes amid calls from China for an emergency meeting of the six major powers involved in talks about the Korean peninsula. The six countries are China, Russia, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

South Korea has said it doesn’t think the time is right for a resumption of the six-party talks, but promised it would “bear in mind” the Chinese proposal.

In Washington, a State Department official said the United States is consulting with its allies but that resuming the six-party talks “cannot substitute for action by North Korea to comply with its obligations.”

The Japanese government said one of its envoys is in Beijing, China, for discussions on the situation.

As North Korea’s largest trading partner and strongest ally, China has been urged by the international community to confront the crisis.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday that China has “a duty and an obligation to press upon the North Koreans that their belligerent behavior has to come to an end.”

A top Chinese envoy met with South Korea’s president over the weekend, and a top North Korean official arrived in Beijing, China, on Tuesday, the first visit to China by a North Korean official since the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island.

CNN affiliate YTN reported that Choe Tae Bok, chairman of North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly, is on a five-day visit to China.

Amid the international attempts to avert warfare, the strident and saber-rattling rhetoric between the Koreas remained the region’s background noise.

This comes after South Korean President Lee Myung-bak warned this week that North Korea would face severe consequences if it launched another military attack across its southern border.

“If the North commits any additional provocations against the South, we will make sure that it pays a dear price without fail,” Lee said in a nationally televised address.

CNN’s Tim Schwarz contributed to this report.

New campaign to eavesdrop on E.T. launched

 In a vast cosmic experiment equivalent to hitting “redial,” astronomers in a dozen countries are aiming telescopes to listen in once again on some of the stars that were part of the world’s first search for alien life 50 years ago.

The coordinated signal-searching campaign began this month to mark the 50th anniversary of Project Ozma, a 1960 experiment that was christened the world’s first real attempt in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence or SETI.

Like Project Ozma, which got its name from a character in L. Frank Baum’s series of books about the Land of Oz, the new search is called Project Dorothy.

Project Ozma was conducted by astronomer Frank Drake of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. Drake is also famous for devising the Drake equation, which predicts the number of alien civilizations with whom we might be able to communicate.

The formula is based on factors including the rate of star formation in the galaxy and the percentage of stars thought to have planets. Making educated guesses for some of the equation’s terms, scientists have used it to predict we could find evidence of ET intelligence within the next 25 years.

“It is thrilling for me to witness the beginnings of Project Dorothy, the continuation of my search of 50 years ago,” Drake said in a SETI announcement. “To have so many talented people using so many telescopes in this new search, with the electronics and computer equipment of today, is a joyful thing to me. The equipment of today is far better than what we could have 50 years ago and will result in both very much better and very much more data than could be obtained then.”

The anniversary observations, which began Nov. 5, will continue throughout the month. Astronomers in Australia, Japan, Korea, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Argentina and the United States are taking the first shifts, searching for signs of an intelligent civilization from a few nearby stars.

Astronomer Shin-ya Narusawa of Nishi-Harima Astronomical Observatory in Japan, who launched Project Dorothy, said: “Two of the original stars from Project Ozma – Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani – are the nearest solar-type stars in the northern hemisphere.

Therefore, these two stars were the best SETI targets a half century ago. They remain the symbol of Project Ozma and are two of the target stars for Project Dorothy.”

The new search includes some particularly promising targets for extraterrestrial intelligence, including stars with known planets, which modern telescopes were only recently able to detect. The scientists are aiming for stellar systems where planets are thought to orbit at roughly the right distance from their suns to hold liquid water and thus, possibly, life.

“Project Dorothy vividly demonstrates just how far SETI has come in the past 50 years,” said the SETI Institute’s Douglas Vakoch, who is a member of Project Dorothy’s working group. “The lessons learned through Project Dorothy provide critical preparation for the day we finally detect a signal from another civilization.”

Though the searches undertaken by astronomers at the SETI Institute and elsewhere over the past 50 years have not found indications of little green men, experts say it’s too early to give up hope.

“Over the past 50 years our searches have not yet produced the discovery we all hope for,” Drake said. “This is understandable – in our vast and awesome universe it will take long, painstaking and comprehensive searches before we will have a good chance of success. This is the major lesson learned from previous searches. Project Dorothy is a major step in meeting the challenge created by this lesson.” (Space.com)