By
Josh Meyer
Veteran intel journalist Jeff Stein has an excellent and very comprehensive report about how dangerous it is to be a national security journalist these days, and it’s worth highlighting (and condensing with some of the best links).
Stein, who writes the SpyTalk blog and has written for The Washington Post and other media outlets, interviewed an impressive number of working journalists, media experts, lawyers and others for the Computing Now piece. He uses those interviews to show how the prosecutorial war being waged by the Bush and Obama administrations against reporters is actually worse than the general public knows.
When Stein joined The Post in 2010, the situation was already bad enough for an in-house lawyer to tell new hires to not write anything down that they didn’t want the government to see. “Not in your notes, and certainly not in emails,” he quotes the lawyer as saying. “Give your sources code names. Avoid talking about anything sensitive on the phone.” Continue reading →
By
Josh Meyer
By devising an ingenious series of possibly undetectable airline bombs, a wiry Saudi named Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri has become the latest personification of the ever-changing al Qaeda threat. You can thank him and his tradecraft for much of the frenzy of counterterrorism activity in recent days. That includes pretty much every country shutting down its embassy in Sana’a, Yemen and evacuating government personnel, and dire warnings of a possibly large-scale imminent attack in North Africa or the Middle East—or possibly somewhere else.
The global war on terrorism has never lacked a face of evil to embody the threat; Osama bin Laden, of course, as well as Ayman Zawahiri, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and others. But authorities are now pursuing Asiri with an especially high level of urgency and concern. The reason: not only is he a bomb-maker for the terror network’s most dangerous affiliate, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), he’s apparently a very capable and creative one who has trained other al Qaeda operatives. Continue reading →
By
Josh Meyer
I guess it’s good news that Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has rolled out new rules for protecting the news media from overly aggressive leak investigations and prosecutions, but forgive me for being a bit skeptical.
Holder only did so after igniting a firestorm of criticism (actually, several of them) for the way he and his boss, President Obama, went after journalists and the government officials who talked to them.
Most egregious was the secret effort to get a wide array of phone records from Associated Press reporters that the administration thought had revealed sources and methods and other classified information about counter-terrorism operations in Yemen and elsewhere. Also noteworthy: the administration’s attempts at criminalizing the behavior of Fox News’ James Rosen (a Medill alum) for working a source at the State Department for classified information about North Korea. Continue reading →
By
SB Anderson
Last week all but certainly will be looked back at as a watershed week in shifting support for the Surveillance State by not only U.S. citizens, but members of Congress.
For those who’ve been eyes-half-open mode because it’s Summer and watch to catch up, The New York Times today has a must-read on the politics and cross-party partnerships behind last week’s surprising oh-so-close vote in the House that would have killed funding for the National Security Administration’s telephone data collection, exposed by Edward Snowden.
Meantime, new research data shows the opinion shift among Americans. Almost half of those polled from July 17-21 said their “greater concern about government anti-terrorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties,” Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reported on Friday.
That was a 15-point jump since 2010, when the question was last asked. “This is the first time a plurality has expressed greater concern about civil liberties than security since the question was first asked in 2004.” Continue reading →
By
Josh Meyer
As the only person to ever head both the US National Security Agency and the US Central Intelligence Agency, retired Air Force General Michael V. Hayden has a lot of experience in seeing around corners. He’s now a global security consultant, helping companies and governments to protect themselves against cyber threats and other dangers.
Last week, Hayden, also a director of Motorola Solutions and a distinguished visiting professor at the George Mason University School of Public Policy, said in a rare extended interview that Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies shared sensitive US information with the Beijing government. In a brief aside, he added that he’s undecided as to whether corporations should be allowed to go on the cyber-offensive, even in the absence of government intervention and protection.
Quartz talked to Hayden about the threats private companies face and whether they’re well-positioned to address those threats for themselves, and for humanity. Continue reading →
By
Ellen Shearer
ASPEN, Colo. – The National Security Agency is implementing a series of procedural changes to guard against insider threats like that posed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, whose leaks of classified information have caused “significant damage” to U.S. security, the head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command told the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday.
Gen. Keith Alexander, who heads the two agencies, said he has “concrete proof that terrorists have taken action and made changes” based on the information Snowden has made public.
Alexander said he knows what information Snowden downloaded and took from NSA computers and responded “yes” when asked if it was a lot. Continue reading →
By
Josh Meyer
There’s no longer doubt that the US government spies on foreign multinational corporations as well as governments, thanks to the disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor turned international fugitive Edward Snowden. The NSA vacuums up mountains of classified information from a rich array of sources. The CIA assists by launching digital “black bag” operations aimed at manually penetrating the computer systems of some of the world’s largest foreign multinationals.
Washington isn’t alone, of course; dozens of other governments do the same, in collaboration with each other and individually. But one thing that US officials insist they won’t do is use the information gleaned from industrial espionage to help US corporations, like the Chinese do with their state-run defense, oil and other companies. Continue reading →
By
Tim McNulty
The cat-and-mouse Edward Snowden/National Security Agency (NSA) scandal has fueled the summertime news cycle with a high tech — though drawn-out — version of a police chase.
Reporters flocked to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport to search for the contractor who revealed secret NSA surveillance activities, and booked seats on flights to countries where Snowden might find refuge from the long arm of the United States government — only to discover he was a no-show.
Meanwhile, the diplomatic posturing of Latin American officials who feel the U.S. is bullying them into refusing asylum to Snowden added a side drama to media coverage of the actual crime — assuming that the courts will judge his actions a crime.
But the core issues have been more difficult to pursue.
Continue reading →
By
Josh Meyer
European officials are even more shocked and outraged today than they were yesterday at the revelations in Der Spiegel that the US government has been spying on the EU’s offices in Washington and New York. “These are disturbing news if proven true. They demand full clarification,” the EU said in a terse statement today. French president François Hollande said that the revelations might threaten a big round of trade talks scheduled for next week in Washington. “We aren’t in the Cold War anymore,” said Steffen Seibert, chief spokesman for German chancellor Angela Merkel, at a news conference in Berlin.
But while America’s European allies may be shocked, they can’t be surprised. Anyone familiar with the spy-versus-spy games in global diplomatic hubs knows that everyone has been spying on each other for decades. Continue reading →
By
Josh Meyer
When news broke that the US Central Intelligence Agency will soon begin funneling weapons to vetted Syrian rebels by way of Jordan, our next logical question was: How does one vet a Syrian rebel?
The CIA has been in the business of arming rebel groups for many decades, but often with very mixed results. Books will probably be written about what a bad idea it is for Washington and its allies to dole out weapons to a fractured, contentious and unaccountable group of Syrian fighters, especially after waiting for so long.
Although the US government isn’t saying how many rebels will be vetted, the program’s success could dramatically impact how the situation in Syria turns out. Three former CIA officials who have spent decades on the ground doing it say the upcoming campaign will be a crapshoot at best. Continue reading →
