Thursday 6 September 2012

Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority (NSRA)

- Being formed to regulate safety from nuclear radiation.
-Regulator will not report to DAE but to parliament.
-It will be able to access any premises where radiation is present, used or proposed to be used and seize documents concerned.
-it will be the sole agency granting consent on nuclear transactions.
-For any violations, defautlers to face imprisonments, fines.
-The Authority will replace the existing atomic energy regulatory board (AERB).
POWERS
-to conduct investigations, inspect , search and seize documents and objects from the sources of such radiation.

ORGANISING STRUCTURE:
- A chair person (serving/ retired judge of Supreme court and high court)
- two full time members ( eminent scientists who have held position of secretary rank in the govt.)
-four part timers

There will be a " council of nuclear safety " to over see and review the policies on nuclear and radiation safety. it will be headed by PRIME MINISTER.

Mobile Radiation Detection System

The Government has proposed to equip 800 police stations covering 80 cities of India with radiation monitors including mobile radiation detection system that can be fitted to Plice Control Room (PCR) vans of the police. This will facilitate police to detect and get alerted in case such a van approaches any radioactive source or a radiologically contaminated area or detects any radio active sourec being transported. 

Google X

-It is a secret laboratory of Google Inc- described as 'Google X' - where scientists work on wild, out-there ideas.
-Most Google employees are not even aware the lab exists.
-This lab is for speculative R&D projects.

National Technical Research Organisation(NTRO)

-the  NTRO is an orphan in the ministerial system of administration — an intelligence agency that reports directly to the National Security Adviser, not to the Home Minister,
-It is a premier apex scientific organization under the National Security Advisor in the Prime Minister's Office, India.

 -Set up in 2004 with a mandate to bring state-of-the-art intelligence gathering and surveillance equipment to India, the NTRO was originally envisaged to be a ‘facilitator' rather than a producer, processor or consumer of intelligence.

-to deploy its capabilities as part of the operations that other agencies like the Intelligence Bureau and the Research and Analysis Wing were running.

-It also includes National Institute of Cryptology Research and Development (NICRD), which is first of its kind in Asia.

Echelon (signals intelligence)

ECHELON is a name used in global media and in popular culture to describe a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection andanalysis network operated on behalf of the five signatory states to the UK–USA Security Agreement (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, known as AUSCANNZUKUS or Five Eyes).It has also been described as the only software system which controls the download and dissemination of the intercept ofcommercial satellite trunk communications.

ECHELON was reportedly created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early 1960s, but since the end of the Cold War it is believed to search also for hunts of terrorist plots, drug dealers' plans, and political and diplomatic intelligence.
#The system has been reported in a number of public sources.
 #Its capabilities and political implications were investigated by a committee of the European Parliament during 2000 and 2001 with a report published in 2001, and by author James Bamford in his books on the National Security Agency of the United States.The report concludes that, on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks (which once carried most Internet traffic) and microwave links.
Bamford describes the system as the software controlling the collection and distribution of civilian telecommunications traffic conveyed using communication satellites, with the collection being undertaken by ground stations located in the footprint of the downlink leg.