Perhaps it is time for the agencies to pool their resources and create a single entity that is responsible for all jurisdictions of the country and has the mandate to protect all critical infrastructures for all levels of government, private sector and its citizens. DHS and the FBI need to refocus on their other duties [...]
Filed in News Blurbs, Technology
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Also tagged BATF, CIA, Counterterrorism, Crime, Cyber Attacks, Cybersecurity, DARPA, DHS, DOD, FBI, FEMA, Hackers, Hacking, National Security, Networks, NSA, Pentagon, Robert Mueller, RSA Conference, STRATCOM, TSA
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We’ve all seen a television show or a movie about an undercover narcotics cop who become crooked. He loses the trust of his colleagues, then his family. Soon, the only contacts he has are with the world of drug dealers that he originally set out to destroy. Now picture this scenario of the criminal cop [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Afghanistan, CIA, Cocaine, Colombia, Corruption, Crime, DEA, Douglas Valentine, Drug Policy, Drug Trafficking, FBI, Heroin, Informers, Law, Narcs, Pakistan, Terrorism, The Phoenix Program, Vietnam War, War on Drugs
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It was an open secret that the National Security Agency was bolstering a Homeland Security program to detect and respond to cyber attacks on government systems, but a summary of that program declassified Tuesday provides more details of NSA’s role in a Homeland program known as Einstein.
The current version of the program is widely seen [...]
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
In essence, the classified memo cited by Cheney stated that the CIA torture of Abu Zubaydah led to the capture of suspected “dirty bomb’ plotter Jose Padilla in 2003. But as Isikoff reports, the newly-released docs point out that Padilla was arrested in 2002 — so torture couldn’t have secured his capture.
This also appears to [...]
Monday, February 22, 2010
Iran’s police chief on Saturday accused the Voice of America and the BBC of being the arms of U.S. and British intelligence agencies, and warned of severe repercussions for journalists and activists caught having contacts with them, state media reported.
Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, whose police forces have played a key role in the government crackdown [...]
Filed in Journalism, News Blurbs
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Also tagged BBC, CIA, Espionage, Freedom of Press, Iran, Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, Journalism, Media, MI6, Propaganda, Voice of America
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Thursday, February 18, 2010
Here are some previous international scandals involving Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies.
* 1954 – Egypt cracks Israeli Military Intelligence cell of Egyptian Jews who firebombed sites frequented by Westerners to embarrass Cairo and stop it nationalizing the Suez Canal. Two are hanged, one commits suicide and six others are jailed. Israeli Defense Minister Pinhas [...]
Thursday, February 18, 2010
The Mohamed case is the most prominent of a number of cases that have come to public attention. While the timeline of Mohamed’s torture places the implementation of the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” many months prior to their questionable legal justification in the August 1, 2002, Jay Bybee memo to the CIA, the [...]
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
For anyone who has a security clearance and doesn’t believe the U.S. faces a cyber-espionage crisis, Colonel Steven Shirley has 102 stories to share with you.
That’s the number of cases in which Shirley’s team of Pentagon researchers discovered cyberspies breaching the networks of government agencies, defense contractors and other organizations with ties to the U.S. [...]
Filed in News Blurbs, Technology
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Also tagged Contractors, Cyber Attacks, Cybersecurity, DOD, Espionage, Hackers, Hacking, Pentagon, Secrets, Spying, Think Tanks, Universities
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Monday, February 15, 2010
There are times when governments fight to keep documents secret to protect sensitive intelligence or other vital national security interests. And there are times when they are just trying to cover up incompetence, misbehavior or lawbreaking.
Last week, when a British court released secret intelligence material relating to the torture allegations of a former Guantánamo prisoner, [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Binyam Mohamed, CIA, Courts, Crime, Detainees, Dick Cheney, George W Bush, Guantanamo, Hillary Clinton, Law, MI5, Rendition, Torture, War Crimes
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Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship, but to the legalization of murder.
The director of U.S. national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee the government has the right to kill Americans abroad.
Here are 10 problems with this:
1. Acts that are crimes under [...]
But even if you’re someone who does want the President to have the power to order American citizens killed without a trial by decreeing that they are Terrorists (and it’s worth remembering that if you advocate that power, it’s going to be vested in all Presidents, not just the ones who are as Nice, Good, Kind-Hearted and [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Assassinations, Barack Obama, Constitution, Dennis Blair, Due Process, First Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment, Glenn Greenwald, GWOT, Terrorism, Unitary Executive, War Powers
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Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The world’s largest Internet search company and the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.
Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according [...]
“Nothing has stopped the dragnet,” said Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s legal director, whose case had grown to include all of the nation’s leading internet service providers.
The Bush administration and now the Obama administration have neither admitted nor denied the allegations. Instead, they have declared the issue a state secret — one that would undermine the [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged ATT, Big Brother, Congress, Courts, EFF, Law, Mark Klein, Privacy, Retroactive Immunity, Surveillance, Telecoms, TSP, Vaughn Walker, Wiretapping
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Previous CIA failures regarding the unanticipated decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq War demonstrate a $75 billion intelligence enterprise that can provide neither strategic nor tactical warning to policymakers and is reluctant to provide uncomfortable truth to power.
The serious problems that [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Accountability, Assassinations, Bureaucracy, CIA, Congress, Coup, Covert Ops, DHS, DIA, DNI, Intelligence Analysis, Leon Panetta, Militarization, NCS, NCTC, NIE, Oversight, Pentagon, Rendition, Secret Prisons, State Department, Torture, TSA
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Ensign asked Blair why it made sense to restrict interrogations of terrorism suspects to the techniques listed in the mostly-Geneva-Conventions-compliant Army Field Manual on Interrogations, as Obama insisted in one of the first executive orders of his presidency. Blair strongly strongly defended the decision. “We looked at that quite carefully,” Blair said. “We do not [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Army Field Manual on Interrogations, Dennis Blair, Detainees, DNI, Geneva Conventions, Human Rights, John Ensign, Law, Military Tribunals, Miranda Warning, National Security, Secret Prisons, Terrorism, Torture
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Listening To
