The first week on the job for Nicole Wong, dubbed by many as the US’s first chief privacy officer, has been fairly, well, private. The White House has named Wong, 44, a former top lawyer for Google and Twitter, as the new … Continue reading
Federal efforts to block cyberterrorism need more teeth and should focus more on going after threats instead of concentrating on protecting vulnerabilities, according to several top cyber experts speaking at a recent panel sponsored by the American Bar Association.
The cybersecurity panel on June 21 was part of the ABA Homeland Security Law Instutute conference. The speakers were high-level current and former government cyber experts. Here are some of their comments. Continue reading
WASHINGTON – A recent column published on CNN.com raises the possibility of a major privacy infringement buried in the many pages of the Senate bipartisan immigration reform bill: Requirements that digitized passport or driver’s license photos be on file with Citizenship and Immigration Services for anyone wanting to work, including U.S. citizens, and be matched against a government-issued photo ID card, using a government-mandated facial recognition device.
Immigrant workers would likely have to get biometric worker identification cards.
In America there have been howls of outrage at news that the US National Security Agency may have been digitally eavesdropping on Americans—obliging James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, to reassure his compatriots that “only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted.” But on the rest of the planet the NSA rakes in millions of gigabytes of personal information with little, if any, opposition or controversy.
Edward Snowden, who was identified today as the leaker of NSA documents to The Guardian and Washington Post, confirmed the broad outlines of the spy agency’s overseas activities. He told the Guardian the NSA’s global invasion of privacy was what drove him to risk the comfortable life he’d built for himself. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building,” he said.
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The mystery surrounding how much domestic spying the US government has been conducting on its own citizens will only intensify in the coming days, as a growing number of the nine major internet companies linked to an alleged top-secret data-mining program deny they had anything to do with it.
The stories in the Guardian and Washington Post contend that the National Security Agency and FBI were jacking directly into the central servers of the companies and scooping up all sorts of personal data in a hunt for terrorist activity. Publicly, these agencies insist that they only do that overseas, to foreigners, while the tech firms concerned insist they aren’t involved and have never heard of such a scheme.
That may or may not be true, and finding out the gritty details is sure to become the next parlor game in Washington. One thing is for sure, though. If PRISM is what the two newspapers say it is, it is the biggest domestic spying program that the United States has ever conducted, and by orders of magnitude.
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With nine months to go before the 2014 Winter Olympics, the biennial sport of Olympics-bashing has begun in earnest. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is being criticized for cost overruns and the other usual problems. And as always, the host country, this time Russia, is taking heat for cronyism, corruption, environmental concerns and construction delays.
But this time there is another, bigger set of worries. At several recent gatherings around the world, experts have wrung their hands publicly about how the XXII Winter Games pose the biggest security threat of any games in memory.
The Olympics, which will run from February 7th to the 23rd, are going to be held right in the middle of one of the world’s hottest conflict zones, the North Caucasus. Sochi, the host city, is a lovely resort town on Russia’s Black Sea coast. But the region around it is a cauldron of ethnic hatred and anti-Russian separatist movements. And then there is all of the organized crime, Islamist militancy and terrorism. Continue reading
On Wednesday, 24 hours or so before President Obama’s major speech today on national security issues, some of the top security reporters in Washington began their predictable barrage of mini-scoops on what he was going to say.
The administration was going to rein in drone attacks on U.S. citizens and hold them up to the rule of law. It was going to transfer drone strikes from the CIA to the military. It was going to shift away from a military war footing to something more in keeping with the rule of law. Oh, and the administration acknowledged killing four Americans in drone strikes over the years.
Those are just the kind of leaks of classified information that this administration has become known for hunt down; more investigations and prosecutions, in fact, than all other administrations combined, according to the experts. But here’s the difference: these leaks were all but assuredly sanctioned by the White House and most likely by the President and his inner circle. Continue reading
Today’s brouhaha around Ryan Fogle, a junior US diplomat in Moscow whom Russian authorities detained and accused of spying, may have seemed to some like a joke, or else suspiciously like a bad frame-up.
Fogle was paraded in front of cameras at Russia’s state security service, the FSB, along with his alleged tools of tradecraft—which included two wigs, a wad of cash, a compass, and a “Dear Friend” letter intended for a potential Russian recruit—before being declared persona non grata and told to leave the country.
To say this doesn’t add up would be an understatement. The real story probably won’t be known for days, if not years. But here are five common misconceptions about the world of espionage that the Fogle case shows. Continue reading
The good news out of today’s annual US Defense Department report on China is that the People’s Liberation Army is partnering up on joint military exercises with the US as never before, including on some humanitarian missions.
The bad news is that despite this veneer of collegiality, China continues to engage in a massive, and often successful, effort to steal US military technology and know-how through sophisticated espionage and cyber-intrusion efforts, according to the DoD.
Some top targets: engines for aircraft and tanks, solid-state electronics and micro-processors, guidance and control systems, and “enabling technologies such as cutting-edge precision machine tools, advanced diagnostic and forensic equipment, and computer-assisted design, manufacturing and engineering.” Continue reading
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, the head of Mexico’s notorious Sinaloa Federation, has been a busy man in recent years. Known for leading one of the country’s bloodiest and most successful narco-trafficking groups, Guzman has quietly become the face of another growing phenomenon that extends beyond Mexico’s borders. It’s called deviant globalization.
That’s according to a study just out in the academic journal published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the US military academy.
The CTC Sentinel report, by Samuel Logan of the Southern Pulse investigative intelligence firm, traces the expansion of Guzman’s empire as he searched for better narco-products, more secure supply chains and bigger profits. Continue reading
Medill/GlobalPost investigation sheds new light on $3.2 billion U.S. mine clearance and victim assistance effort.
Medill/USA TODAY investigation of U.S. international food aid programs finds significant, entrenched problems
Read about the project.
→ Continue to the story.EVANSTON, Ill. — The Robert R. McCormick Foundation has renewed a $1 million grant to fund the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative at Northwestern University over the next two years.
The NSJ program provides journalists-in-training and working journalists with the knowledge and skills necessary to report accurately, completely and with context on events and issues related to defense, security and civil liberties. The initiative began in January, 2009 with an initial three-year, $1.3 million McCormick Foundation grant. The grant was also renewed for $1 million over two years in 2011.
