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2013-09-02T09:44:00.003+12:00

Petraeus called the Susan Rice Talking Points Useless

2013-09-02T00:00:00.000+12:00

IRS Scandal Strikes a Severe Blow to Big Government: Take a look at the 12-revisions of the Benghazi talking points, which resulted in such nonsense that CIA Director David Petraeus declared them “useless” the day before Susan Rice broadcast them on five different Sunday talk shows last September. Read more at http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2013/05/16/IRS-Scandal-Strikes-a-Severe-Blow-to-Big-Government.aspx#m8dFW73K8xYpuQLk.99

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Petraeus objected to Susan Rice's Benghazi talking points

2013-08-30T00:00:00.000+12:00

Petraeus email objected to Benghazi talking points - DC Breaking Local News Weather Sports FOX 5 WTTG: "Then CIA-Director David Petraeus objected to the final talking points that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice used five days after the deadly assault on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, because he wanted to see more detail publicly released, including a warning issued from the CIA about plans for a break-in at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, a newly released email shows."

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NSA cannot get its lies straight

2013-08-28T00:00:00.000+12:00

2,776 Privacy Breaches at the NSA in One Year | MIT Technology Review: "Two weeks after NSA chief cited tight auditing–and consequences for internal violations–new disclosures show such breaches are common."

NSA can't get its lies straight!

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Transporting a CIA A-12 Blackbird

2013-08-26T00:00:00.000+12:00

Transporting the CIA A-12 Blackbird: " . . . From the beginning of Project OXCART, it was known that the A-12s would be built in the SkunkWorks within the Lockheed Plant complex in Burbank, California and that the A-12s would have to be transported overland to Area 51 for flight testing, development and training of the Project Pilots. Long before the first A-12 airplane was ready for transport, the full scale model was built and had to be taken to the Area for installation on the radar range for studies of its radar cross section. The carriages that contained the model were smaller but all of these were oversize requiring a special travel permit. This trip to haul the full scale model was started in November 1959 and took three days to complete. The largest of these packages was 65' long and 32.6' wide. . . . " (read more at link above)

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CIA, Social Media

2013-08-23T00:00:00.000+12:00

Social Media Pose Riddle for CIA - WSJ.com: "The agency's social-media guidelines, described by the former official, allow even undercover officers to maintain Facebook accounts under their real names. "The rules had to catch up with the technology," the former official said. But there are limits. While officers can't post details of their work projects or travel, they may post personal notes on travel and photos, according to the ex-official. Officers were encouraged to use discretion to avoid compromising their agency status. Facebook friendships between undercover officers and people openly working for the CIA were discouraged, according to the former official. Among other things, such connections could be used to identify undercover agents, through link analysis. When the policy was issued, it led to a quandary for CIA officers, the ex-official said: Whether to defriend undercover officers. Doing so en masse could have had an unintended effect of alerting others to an undercover officer's status." (read more at link above)

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Barrett Brown, Another US Journalist On Trial

2013-08-21T00:00:00.000+12:00

The People v. Barrett Brown: Another US Journalist On Trial: "The People v. Barrett Brown: Another US Journalist On Trial - How a case of guilt by association reflects the problems with the nation's intelligence community." (read more at link above)

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London attackers known to British Security Services

2013-08-19T00:00:00.000+12:00

London attackers known to British security services | Reuters: "Witnesses said they shouted "Allahu akbar" - Arabic for God is greatest - while stabbing the victim and trying to behead him. A handgun was found at the scene."... (read more at link above)

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FBI Absolves Itself In Boston Bombing

2013-08-16T00:00:00.000+12:00

F.B.I. Said to Find It Could Not Have Averted Boston Attack: " . . . . After the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, which left 13 people dead, the criticism of the F.B.I. was far more pointed. The F.B.I. appointed one of its former directors, William H. Webster, to conduct a formal review into how the bureau handled its investigation of the gunman before and after the attack. That review, which found that the bureau had made mistakes in handling intelligence information, resulted in recommendations for changes that the F.B.I. could make to its information sharing and training. In the Boston case, the F.B.I. has no plans to appoint an investigator to examine its procedures. But inspectors general from four federal agencies, including the Justice Department, said they would be working together on their own investigation into how the government handled intelligence before the attack. The F.B.I. has been cooperating with the inspectors general by giving them investigative files and the opportunity to interview agents. . . ."

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CIA operatives on the ground during Benghazi attack

2013-08-14T00:00:00.000+12:00

Exclusive: Dozens of CIA operatives on the ground during Benghazi attack – The Lead with Jake Tapper - CNN.com Blogs: "Dozens of CIA operatives on the ground during Benghazi attack"

But Susan Rice (now Obama's National Security Advisor a/k/a NSA) said it was all about a YouTube video--remember the Obama administration's "talking points"? (supposedly prepared by the CIA?)

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Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program

2013-08-12T00:00:00.000+12:00

Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program - NYTimes.com: "Each of the nine companies said it had no knowledge of a government program providing officials with access to its servers, and drew a bright line between giving the government wholesale access to its servers to collect user data and giving them specific data in response to individual court orders. Each said it did not provide the government with full, indiscriminate access to its servers."

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The Drone War: nothing fails like success?

2013-08-09T00:00:00.000+12:00

The Drone War: A Comprehensive Map of Lethal U.S. Attacks - Businessweek: "The attacks, which have decimated al-Qaeda-aligned groups, declined after 2010. Here, for the first time, is a comprehensive compilation of all known lethal U.S. drone attacks. . . ." (more, including graphics, at the link above)

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British intelligence accessing NSA PRISM surveillance data

2013-08-07T00:00:00.000+12:00

The "Protect America Act"??

British intelligence agency is reportedly accessing NSA’s PRISM surveillance data - The Next Web: "The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the UK is reportedly accessing information obtained by PRISM, the covert initiative created by the National Security Agency and FBI to monitor communications in the United States. The Guardian claims to have obtained documents which show that GCHQ has been able to leverage the system since June 2010. The evidence also suggests that the British intelligence agency created 197 reports using the data last year. GCHQ is also cited in the report, explaining that it takes its legal obligations “very seriously”. The $20 million program code-named PRISM was uncovered by two reports published by the Guardian and the Washington Post yesterday. Both claim that the National Security Agency has direct access to information held by a number of high-profile technology companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype.It has since been revealed that the initiative was born out of the Protect America Act, which was introduced in 2007. The Guardian says GCHQ’s involvement with PRISM is set out in a number of documents that were prepared for analysts working at the National Security Agency. . . ."

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War Games

2013-08-05T00:00:00.000+12:00

War Games: "The world's counterterrorism forces meet for a friendly shoot'em-up in the desert."

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Simple Google Search Unmasks Chinese Cyberspies

2013-08-02T00:00:00.000+12:00

How a Simple Google Search Unmasked a Chinese Cyber Espionage Network | MIT Technology Review: " . . . .“China-based espionage networks are actually very sloppy. We’ve seen this over and over again–sloppy careless steps that allowed us to see what they were doing. There is a huge outsourcing of the cyber criminal underworld, and it is not as sophisticated as one might assume, which may mean it’s not that closely directed by the government – at least not the ones that we see.” And it also said something about the level of hyperbole by security companies. “A lot of companies like to trumpet their unique investigative powers, but cracking one of the cyber espionage networks came down to a researcher in a university lab Googling something,” he added. . . ."

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Obama's Dirty Wars

2013-07-31T00:00:00.000+12:00

New documentary warns against Obama's 'Dirty Wars' - FRANCE 24: "A new documentary released Friday portrays US secret raids against terror suspects as a misguided assassination campaign that generates new enemies and tarnishes America's image. In "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield," journalist Jeremy Scahill condemns the "targeted killing" of purported Al-Qaeda linked militants in missile strikes and night raids by commandos as an ominous, permanent state of war that is "spinning out of control.""

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Glenn Greenwald: Let them investigate

2013-07-29T00:00:00.000+12:00

Glenn Greenwald: U.S. wants to destroy privacy worldwide - Katie Glueck - POLITICO.com: " . . . .“Let them go and investigate,” Greenwald said. He added, “There is this massive surveillance state that the United States government has built up that has extraordinary implications for how we live as human beings on the earth and as Americans in our country, and we have the right to know what it is that that government and that agency is doing. I intend to continue to shine light on that, and Dianne Feinstein can beat her chest all she wants and call for investigations, and none of that is going to stop and none of it is going to change.”"

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Snowden Fallout

2013-07-27T00:00:00.000+12:00

Inside the ‘Q Group,’ the Directorate Hunting Down Edward Snowden - The Daily Beast: "Hayden (Mike Hayden, a former director of the NSA and a former director of the CIA) dismissed the criticism that terrorists already knew the NSA was collecting vast amounts of telephone metadata before Snowden's leak.

“Let me get this right: I got a religious fanatic in the cave in the Hindu Kush, yet this is a front-page, above-the-fold story and he already knew this?” he asked rhetorically. “That does not make sense. It will teach guys to be far more cautious in the future.""

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Cryptography is key weapon in the fight against "empire states"

2013-07-25T06:57:00.002+12:00

How cryptography is a key weapon in the fight against empire states | Julian Assange |guardian.co.uk: " . . . But the new great game is not the war for oil pipelines. It is the war for information pipelines: the control over fibre-optic cable paths that spread undersea and overland. The new global treasure is control over the giant data flows that connect whole continents and civlisations, linking the communications of billions of people and organisations. It is no secret that, on the internet and on the phone, all roads to and from Latin America lead through the United States. Internet infrastructure directs 99% of the traffic to and from South America over fibre-optic lines that physically traverse US borders. The US government has shown no scruples about breaking its own law to tap into these lines and spy on its own citizens. There are no such laws against spying on foreign citizens. Every day, hundreds of millions of messages from the entire Latin American continent are devoured by US spy agencies, and stored forever in warehouses the size of small cities. The geographical facts about the infrastructure of the internet therefore have consequences for the independence and sovereignty of Latin America. . . ." (read more at link above)

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Résumé Shows Snowden Honed Hacking Skills

2013-07-12T00:00:00.000+12:00

Résumé Shows Snowden Honed Hacking Skills - NYTimes.com: "Whatever his role, Mr. Snowden’s ability to comb through the networks as a lone wolf — and walk out the door with the documents on thumb drives — shows how the agency’s internal security system has fallen short, former officials say."

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Obama Running Secret Wars Out of White House: Jeffrey Sachs Video

2013-07-11T00:00:00.001+12:00

Obama Running Secret Wars Out of White House: Sachs: Video - Bloomberg: "June 11 (Bloomberg) -- In "This Matters Now," Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute director at Columbia University, discusses the dangers of the surveillance of phone calls and internet activity by the NSA and what it means to citizens' privacy. He speaks on Bloomberg Television's "Bloomberg Surveillance.""

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US Seized Confidential Mail Records Of European Parliament

2013-07-10T00:00:00.000+12:00

The United States Seized Confidential Mail Records Of European Parliament - Falkvinge on Infopolicy - Falkvinge on Infopolicy: "The United States is breaking into and digging through mail between the European Parliament and people who have been commissioned to produce its political reports. This is completely unacceptable."

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Why the Benghazi controversy is "absolutely not" over

2013-07-09T00:00:00.000+12:00

Republicans want to talk to Col. George Bristol about Benghazi - CBS News: "While much scrutiny has been paid to the talking points used to brief the public on the attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, CBS News National Security correspondent Bob Orr and senior national security analyst Juan Zarate discuss which questions remain unanswered about the government's response to the attack."

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NSA: The Questions No One Asks

2013-06-29T00:00:00.000+12:00

Edward Snowden Q and A: NSA whistleblower answers your questions | World news | guardian.co.uk: "Since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to achieve that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it."

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Odyssey social network resilient to random attacks

2013-06-27T00:00:00.000+12:00

The Remarkable Properties of Mythological Social Networks | MIT Technology Review: " . . . Miranda and co think of each character in the Odyssey as a node in the network. They say a link exists between two characters when they meet in the story, when they speak directly to each other, cite one another to a third character or when it is otherwise clear that they know each other. In analysing the Odyssey, they identified 342 unique characters and over 1700 relations between them. Having constructed the social network, Miranda and co then examined its structure. “Odyssey’s social network is small world, highly clustered, slightly hierarchical and resilient to random attacks,” they say. . . ."

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