Press Room

February 18, 2012
One of Ireland’s best-known newsmagazines, The Journal, has published an interview with intelNews Senior Editor Joseph Fitsanakis, on the role of assassinations in contemporary international relations. The article, entitled “Secret Agents and Magnetic Bombs: The How and Why of Modern Assassinations“, by The Journal‘s Susan Ryan, is available here.

February 18, 2012
Ian Allen’s 2009 intelNews article on the writings of CIA case officer Edward Lee Howard, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1985, has been cited by American satirical  magazine Cracked, in an article entitled “The 6 Most Hilariously Inept Spies of All Time“.

February  8, 2012
IntelNews Senior Editor Joseph Fitsanakis has published a new research paper, co-authored with Micah-Sage Bolden, entitled “Social Networking as a Paradigm Shift in Tactical Intelligence Collection”. The paper argues that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a host of other social networking platforms are increasingly viewed by intelligence agencies as invaluable channels of information acquisition, and that recent case studies point to social networking as the new cutting edge in open-source tactical intelligence collection. The paper, published in MCIS’ Intelligence Studies Yearbook (pages 28-40) , is available as a .pdf here.

January 27, 2012
A 2009 intelNews analysis piece about the diamonds-for-arms scandal in Liberia is cited in an article on former Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, which appears in today’s issue El País, Spain’s widest-selling newspaper.

January 19, 2012
Joseph Fitsanakis is quoted in an article by the Canadian Press news agency about the arrest of Jeffrey Paul Delisle, a Royal Canadian Navy Sub-Lieutenant charged with spying for an unnamed foreign country, said to be Russia.

January 13, 2012
Dr Joseph Fitsanakis was interviewed on Friday by reporter Suzanne Hill, for ABC Radio National’s flagship evening news program ‘PM‘. In the interview, which was about the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, Fitsanakis pointed the finger at the Mossad, and explained why he didn’t believe the United States had anything to do with the killing. You can listen to the interview below, or by clicking here. The transcript of the interview is avaialable here.

.

January 11, 2012
The intelNews article titled “Israeli Mossad training Iranian exiles in Kurdistan” was picked up by Tikun Olam, maintained by veteran commentator Richard Silverstein, the Homeland Security Newswire, and TruthOut, among other outlets.

December 18, 2011
Joseph Fitsanakis has given a radio interview to Brian Johns, host of Building Power, on WEHC 90.7. The interview, which touches on Joseph’s academic work, as well as his concerns about American national security, was aired on December 18, 2011. You can listen to it here, or on YouTube, in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2.

December 13, 2011
Joseph Fitsanakis gave an interview on RT television about the Xe Services (formerly known as Blackwater), the private security group that recently rebranded itself to ‘Academi’. You can watch the interview below, or by clicking here.

.
October 2-9, 2011
All this week, intelNews was featured on the Freshly Pressed section of the WordPress.com homepage. Blogs featured on Freshly Pressed are handpicked by WordPress editors to represent the very best of the WordPress universe.  According to WordPress.com’s Joy Victory, inclusion in Freshly Pressed is WordPress’ “way of saying we like you. We really like you”. She also writes that “getting promoted to Freshly Pressed is a major traffic win because WordPress.com receives a high volume of page views”; she’s not kidding. Our blog traffic went literally through the roof.

September 30, 2011
Joseph Fitsanakis is quoted in an article on Chinese intelligence activities abroad, in the Chinese language newspaper The World Journal (世界日報電子報). The article can be found in Chinese here.

September 19, 2011
Joseph Fitsanakis is quoted in an extensive article on Chinese worldwide espionage by Alex Newman. The article, titled “China’s Growing Spy Threat”, is published in the latest issue of The Diplomat magazine, one of the foremost journals of the international diplomatic community.

August 1, 2011
From the moment of its creation, in 2008, intelNews has focused more on quality than on numbers. We are primarily interested in excellence of content, rather than astronomical visitor numbers. We have thus concentrated on reaching a specialized readership of intelligence and security professionals, as well as lay-readers with a sophisticated, multi-leveled interest in issues around intelligence and espionage. It has always been our conviction that, if quality is achieved, the numbers will inevitably follow. To prove the point, we are happy to announce that, on June 24, 2011, we marked 3,000,000 visitor hits since our inception, in November of 2008. We are grateful to everyone who has included this site to his or her daily Internet surfing routine, everyone who has consciously spread the word about our effort, as well as to those ‘established’ sites that have honored us by providing links to this blog. Most of the success of intelNews has been through word-of-mouth, rather than through any consistent promotional effort or advertising on our part. This, we believe, is the best guarantor of our continued success in the future.

July 22, 2011
Joseph Fitsanakis’ article on Israel’s use of Facebook to stop European pro-Palestine activists from reaching the Occupied Territories, was reposted on Wired magazine’s Beyond the Beyond blog, edited by Bruce Sterling, author of The Hacker Crackdown, among other classic books.

June 8, 2011
Ian Allen’s article on Osama bin Laden’s hideout, entitled “Porn Stash’ May be CIA PsyOp“, has been linked in an analysis on the subject by policy analyst Fouad Pervez, published in Foreign Policy in Focus.

May 8, 2011
Joseph Fitsanakis has been interviewed by Marie Szaniszlo, staff writer for The Boston Herald, and author of an article on the aftermath of the assassination of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. The article, entitled “Terror data key to fight, experts say”, is available here.blog.

April 19, 2011
Today we uploaded the 500th post in our News You May Have Missed series. We started the series almost two years ago, on June 15, 2009, with this post.

March 18, 2011
Russian newsmagazine переводчика has published a Russian-language translation of Joseph Fitsanakis’ intelNews article entitled “Russia may swap convicted spy for ‘merchant of death’ held in US”. The article concerns the rumored exchange between Washington and Moscow of Russian weapons dealer Viktor Bout, who is being held in a US prison, and Andrei Klychev, who was arrested last year in Russia for spying on behalf of the United States.

February 16, 2011
An article on AllGov.com by Noel Brinkerhoff, on an intelligence standoff between Argentina and the United States, includes a link to an intelNews article on the subject by Joseph Fitsanakis.

January 1, 2011
IntelNews celebrates two years of official operation! Although its history goes way back to 1988, we began the beta version of this particular phase of the project on November 16, 2008. We went officially online on January 1, 2009.

December 31, 2010
Dr. Joseph Fitsanakis has given an interview to Australian National Radio‘s Julian Morrow on the most notable espionage news of 2010. You can listen to the interview here or download it on mp3 here, or on YouTube, here.

November 16, 2010
IntelNews celebrates two years of operation! Although its history goes way back to 1988, we began the beta version of this particular phase of the project on November 16, 2008. We went officially online on January 1, 2009.

October 12, 2010
The intelNews Twitter page has amassed 250 followers, and is growing daily. Followers include investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and George Washington University’s National Security Archive, among others.

September 1, 2010
IntelNews has joined Before It’s News, by invitation from its editors. The BIN website provides hosting and distribution services to hundreds of news sources across a range of devices. The intelNews BIN news stream can be found here.

August 23, 2010
Dr. Joseph Fitsanakis has given an interview to Inter Press Service’s Lebanon correspondent Mona Alami for an article on the ongoing arrests of Israeli intelligence assets in Lebanon.

July 16, 2010
A report in French weekly newsmagazine L’Express, on the re-defection of nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri from the United States to Iran, has linked to an intelNews article by Joseph Fitsanakis on the CIA’s covert sabotage project against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

May 14, 2010
Ian Allen’s article on India’s blacklisting of China’s telephone hardware manufacturer Huawei Technologies, over espionage fears, has been republished in the May issue of the SA Intelligencer.

March 31, 2010
An article in British newspaper The Guardian, on Wikileaks‘ allegations of US government surveillance, quotes intelNews’ Dr. Joseph Fitsanakis. The article, written by Joseph Huff-Hannon, is available online here.

March 15, 2010
Today’s post, titled News you may have missed #309, marks 1,000 posts on this blog since November 16, 2008, when it became operational. This number corresponds to over two posts per day, and over three posts per weekday.

February 11, 2010
Joseph Fitsanakis’ article on the latest legal developments in the case of former Guantanámo detainee Binyam Mohamed, has been republished in the February issue of the SA Intelligencer.

January 6, 2010
Politico‘s foreign policy reporter, Laura Rozen, who has also written for Foreign Policy, The Nation, The American Prospect and Mother Jones magazines, has added intelNews to her list of favorite blogs, on her Politico website.

December 20, 2009
Joseph Fitsanakis’ article on the tense US-Pakistani intelligence relationship has made the “Best Web OpEds” list of OpEdNews.com, for Sunday, December 20, 2009.

December 13, 2009
In a column on the sudden death in Vienna, Austria, of Saad Kheir, former director of Jordan’s General Intelligence Department, The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius has linked to Joseph Fitsanakis’ article on the same subject.

November 16, 2009
IntelNews celebrates one year online. Read the brief note by Ian Allen on the one-year anniversary of our effort.

November 05, 2009
Kaswar Klasra has cited intelNews in leading Pakistani newspaper The Nation, in an article entitled “Journalists as spies in FATA?”.

September 28, 2009
Dr. Joseph Fitsanakis’ work for intelNews and his academic teaching are featured in an article by Laura J. Mondul, published today in The Bristol Herald Courier.

September 24, 2009
Ian Allen’s article about the ongoing dismantlement in Lebanon of what is probably Israel’s largest spy ring in the Arab world, published on intelNews on September 23, has made Wired.com‘s list of Hottest Web Links.

August 24, 2009
Today intelNews marks its 500th post. We officially began our effort on January 1, 2009, which means we have posted on average around three posts per weekday.

July 1, 2009
Today intelNews marks six months of operation.During this period we have seen our visitor count grow to nearly 1000 hits per weekday. We appreciate the continuous support we receive from intelligence experts and lay readers alike.

June 30, 2009
We have succumbed to popular pressure. As of today, you can follow intelNews on . Incidentally, you can also share or bookmark intelNews articles, you can subscribe to read intelNews in one of the popular readers out there, you can get intelNews articles on your email, and you can even place our headlines on your website. So there.

May 21, 2009
Investigative journalist Joseph Huff-Hanon has quoted Joseph Fitsanakis in an in-depth report, published in AlterNet, about the ongoing wiretap scandal in Colombia, that has brought about a major purge in the country’s domestic intelligence agency, the DAS.

April 22, 2009
Information technology website Computer Weekly has linked Ian Allen’s report on alleged espionage against Greenpece by French Energy Giant Électricité de France (ÉDF), in a news story about the affair.

April 04, 2009
Ian Allen’s article “Does Norway engage in international espionage?”, has been cited in the Eurasian Secret Services Daily Review, of Axis Information and Analisys (AIA).

March 30, 2009
An intelNews report by Ian Allen, about suspected assassination operations by Russian intelligence agents in Turkey, has been referenced by Adrian Blomfield, foreign correspondent of British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, in an article about the recent assassination of former Chechen rebel commander Sulim Yamadayev in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

March 11, 2009
Ian Allen’s article about allegations of CIA covert activities in Bolivia, published on intelNews on March 11, has made Wired.com‘s list of Hottest Web Links.

March 10, 2009
Joseph Fitsanakis is quoted in an article by Wave magazine on international espionage in Brussels, Belgium, targeting the headquarters of the European Union.

February 12, 2009
An intelNews article by Joseph Fitsanakis, on the practice of extraordinary rendition under new CIA Director Leon Panetta, has been linked to by The Huffington Post, in a story about Mr. Panetta’s Senate confirmation.

February 12, 2009
An intelNews article by Ian Allen was referenced by Agencia EFE, the Spanish News Agency, and Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo, in a story about increasing espionage activity at the European Union headquarters in Brussels.

February 11, 2009
An intelNews article by Ian Allen was referenced by French newspaper Libération in a story about increasing espionage activity at the European Union headquarters in Brussels.

February 8, 2009
Ian Allen’s article on the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), has been republished (.pdf) on the documents library section of the Industrial Committee on Biometrics website of the US National Defense Industrial Association.

January 24, 2009
IntelNews is selected by WordPress as the 64th fastest-growing blog in the WordPress universe. We appreciate this opportunity to raise awareness in the blogosphere of all things intelligence.

January 24, 2009
Dr. Joseph Fitsanakis’ opinion piece “Is CIA Director Nominee a Hypocrite?” makes it to #39 of the WordPress Top Posts list for January 24, 2009.

January 1, 2009
IntelNews goes officially on the air. A mission statement is published, outlining the project’s aim of “filtering through the melodrama and sensationalism of the daily news to bring to the surface intelligence-related developments that rarely make news headlines”.

November 16, 2008
Intelligence experts Joseph Fitsanakis and Ian Allen unofficially launch intelNews as an online news and commentary blog specializing on intelligence and espionage-related news and developments from around the world. The website is located under its own domain (www.intelNews.org) using the WordPress interface.