Obama to nominate wiretapping critic for critical DoJ post

January 7, 2009 Leave a comment

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Yesterday we wrote that Leon Panetta’s nomination to direct the CIA is part of a broader effort by US President Elect Barack Obama to reestablish governmental “oversight over the intelligence community, which […] was effectively terminated [after] 9/11”. Now rumors of yet another nomination come to support the view of a broader plan by Barack Obama “to depart from some of the most controversial legal policies of the Bush administration”. The President Elect is shortly expected to nominate David Kris, a former national security legal adviser in the Department of Justice, to lead the DoJ’s National Security Division. The Division was established in 2006 to oversee intelligence activities by US government agencies relating to counterespionage and counterterrorism. Read more of this post

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British authorities admit to hacking computers

January 7, 2009 Leave a comment

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The British Home Office has joined an EU-wide agreement that prompts European law enforcement agencies to resort to computer hacking (termed “remote searching” in the official document) in order to combat cyber crime. Commenting on the move, a spokesman for the UK Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) admitted that British law enforcement and intelligence agencies already conduct “a small number” of such operations every year. Specifically, the spokesman said that “remote searching”, which allows the authorities to covertly examine the contents and activity of targeted computers, was employed during “194 clandestine searches […] of people’s homes, offices and hotel bedrooms”. Read more of this post

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US Judge allows legal challenge of warrantless wiretapping

January 7, 2009 Leave a comment

Pete Seda, fmr head of Al-Haramain

Pete Seda, fmr head of Al-Haramain

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Ever since September 2004, when they were taken to court accused of terrorist links by the US government, the directors of Al-Haramain, a Saudi-based Islamic charity with offices in Oregon and Missouri, have suspected their telephones had been tapped under the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Their suspicions were confirmed last July, when US government prosecutors mistakenly gave the charity’s legal team a classified document showing that the FBI had indeed tapped the group’s office phones. The group’s legal team used the classified document as a basis to sue the Bush Administration, claiming that warrantless wiretapping violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). However, the presiding Judge, Chief US District Judge Vaughn Walker, ruled that the lawsuit rested on a classified document that Al-Haramain’s lawyers were not supposed to have access to in the first place. He therefore dismissed the case and ordered the Islamic charity’s legal team to return the document to the FBI. Read more of this post

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Analysis: Panetta’s CIA Nomination Part of Broader Obama Plan

January 6, 2009 Leave a comment

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
America’s largest newspapers describe US President Elect Barack Obama’s choice of Leon E. Panetta as CIA’s next Director as “a surpris[ing] and unusual choice” that has “stunned the national intelligence community“. These descriptions are not far from the truth. More importantly, however, the selection of the former Bill Clinton aide to head the nation’s most powerful intelligence agency reveals the continuing rift between the incoming Democratic Administration and many conservative hawks at the CIA. The latter openly warned the President Elect last month that he “may have difficulty finding a candidate who can be embraced by both veteran officials at the agency and the left flank of the Democratic Party”. Keep reading →

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Austin activist reveals himself to be FBI informant

January 6, 2009 Leave a comment

Brandon Darby

Brandon Darby

In the days just prior to last year’s Republican National Convention in St. Paul, two activists from Texas used a rented U-Haul trailer to transport dozens of homemade shields, helmets and batons to Minnesota’s capital. The two activists, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, presumably intended the homemade protection gear to be used in street demonstrations during the RNC. They were eventually intercepted by St. Paul police officers who appeared to know what the two men were hauling. The officers, who did not use a warrant, proceeded to smash the trailer’s lock and seize its contents. This incident appears to have failed to convince McKay and Crowder of the obvious existence of an informant in their ranks. Read more of this post

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Analysis: Pakistan’s former spy chief sees wider geopolitical games in region

January 5, 2009 Leave a comment

Hamid Gul

Hamid Gul

Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, the controversial former Director General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has expressed the view that Pakistan’s nuclear disarmament is the ultimate aim of the US-Indian alliance. Speaking to reporters in Islamabad, Gul said India’s insistence on charging the ISI with complicity in the 2008 Mumbai attack is “part of a greater conspiracy to discredit the body for being an extension of the Pakistan Army” and eventually questioning the latter’s role as guardian of the country’s nuclear arsenal. “Once the Army and the ISI are demolished [the US and India] will reach out to our nuclear capability saying it is not is safe hands”, said the retired Lieutenant General. In discussing the increasing military and political collaboration between the US and India, Gul noted that “the Americans and Israel [are] hell-bent that India should be given pre-eminence in the region”, acting as the dominant regional power. He described such a scenario as essentially positioning India to the role of overseer of “60 per cent of the world’s trade [which] passes through the Indian Ocean”, including transport routes of “Gulf oil, bound for China and Japan, [which] will be under the shadow of India’s sole nuclear power”. Read more of this post

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Indian Home Minister points to sophistication of Mumbai attacks

January 5, 2009 Leave a comment

Prior to an official visit to the US, later this week, India’s Home Minister said yesterday that the sophisticated planning and professional execution of the 2008 Mumbai attacks points to involvement of “state actors” in the operation. Speaking to India’s NDTV news network, Palaniappan Chidambaram, who is the Indian government’s  Union Minister of Home Affairs, said he presumes those behind the attack “are state actors or state-assisted actors unless the contrary is proved”. The Home Minister justified his rationale based on the meticulous execution of the coordinated militant assault of last November, which killed nearly 180 people in India’s largest city. “Somebody who is familiar with intelligence and who is familiar with commando operations has directed this operation”, said Chidambaram. “It was too enormous a crime and required very elaborate planning, communication networks, financial backing. It was a very, very sophisticated operation”. The Home Minister will be delivering a “detailed dossier” to US Homeland Security officials later this week, which reportedly includes “electronic evidence […] and intercepts” as well as reports from interrogations. [IA]

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Costa Rican political police rocked by high-level corruption scandal

January 5, 2009 1 Comment

DIS scandal

DIS scandal

For years, Costa Rica’s unions and opposition activists have accused the country’s political police, the Dirección de Inteligencia y Seguridad (DIS), of illegally spying on lawful political activity. Yet their allegations never made it into the US State Department’s annual human rights reports on Costa Rica. The Department’s latest report claims that the country’s “civilian authorities generally maintained effective control of the security forces”. Last November, however, government investigators uncovered an enormous money-laundering cartel operating inside DIS, whose head was no other than the organization’s Deputy Director, Roberto Guillén. Guillén, who was forced to step down on November 25, employed DIS computers to access private information of unsuspecting citizens, and used the data to launder nearly half a million dollars in illegal transfers to himself and others. Read more of this post

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CIA conducting ‘unprecedented’ operations in Britain

January 4, 2009 Leave a comment

British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph has published an article (reprinted in Australia’s The Age) discussing what it describes as CIA’s “unprecedented intelligence-gathering operation in Britain”. The paper cites “security sources in Washington and London” in revealing that the US spy agency is “recruiting and handling a record number of informers within the British Pakistani community”. Security circles in Washington have been known to express concerns about militant tendencies in that community, which is nearly one-million-strong. Bruce Reidel, a 26-year CIA veteran and al-Qaeda expert, who now advises US President Elect Barack Obama’s transition team, says that Britain’s Muslim community (whose members can travel to the US without visas) is “regarded by the American intelligence community as perhaps the single-biggest threat environment.” Read more of this post

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Hamas copies Israel’s random phone call tactic

January 3, 2009 Leave a comment

Hamas message

Hamas message

IntelNews has been reporting in recent days that Israeli intelligence are placing random calls to cell phones of Gaza residents prompting them to evacuate Hamas-affiliated targets. We also reported that this technique, which Israel also employed in Lebanon and Syria during the last couple of years, seems to have resulted in a backlash for the Israeli Defense Forces, as Gaza residents receiving these random calls often rush to the roofs of potential target buildings in efforts to prevent the attacks. It now appears that Hamas, the Palestinian group in charge of the Gaza strip, is employing a similar tactic to warn Israeli cell phone subscribers that Qassam rockets will fall “on all cities” and that “shelters [will] not protect” them. Read more of this post

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Taliban Information Minister arrested in Peshawar

January 3, 2009 1 Comment

Ustad Yasar, who heads the Taliban information division in Afghanistan, has been arrested in Peshawar, Pakistani intelligence officials announced today. Yasar was previously arrested in 2005, again in Pakistan, by Pakistani security forces and was handed over to the Afghan authorities in the same year. In 2007, however, he was released in exchange for Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo, who had been abducted by the Taliban earlier that year. Other high-level Taliban operatives released along with Yasar include Mansoon Ahmad, Abdul and Hamdullah Ghaffar, and Mullah Abdul Latif Hakimi, the spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan. All of them remain at large. An unnamed Pakistani security official has said that, at the time of his recent arrest, Yasar was acting under orders from Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, who had sent him to the Pakistani borderlands “to mediate in a dispute between Taliban factions” there. It will be interesting to see if the Pakistanis give US interrogators access to Yasar, and if they extradite him to Afghanistan. [IA]

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Analysis: Former USAF Secretary discusses hidden history of nukes

January 3, 2009 1 Comment

It is not necessary to agree with Thomas C. Reed’s worldview in order to appreciate his deep knowledge of the history of nuclear politics. His argument, for instance, that “the world is safer for having all the permanent UN Security Council members possess nuclear weapons” may be seen as absurdly myopic -especially in light of numerous instances in which the US and the USSR came close to annihilating the entire world during the Cold War. Nevertheless, the former nuclear weapons designer and US Air Force Secretary always has interesting insights to share on the dark history of nuclear proliferation. For instance, in a recent interview with US News & World Report, Reed discussed how Klaus Fuchs, the nuclear scientist who was jailed in 1950 for having spied for the Soviets, also shared his immense nuclear knowledge with the Chinese, following his release from prison. He also outlined the Chinese contribution to nuclear proliferation in the Third World, which he attributes to a 1982 decision by the Chinese leadership, under the Chairmanship of Deng Xiaoping, to “proliferate nuclear technology to communists and Muslims” around the world. Read more of this post

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Gaza civilians ignoring IDF cell phone warnings

January 2, 2009 Leave a comment

Nizar Rayan

Nizar Rayan

IntelNews has reported in recent days that Israeli intelligence are employing cell phones to warn Gazan civilians that they may killed if located nearby Hamas-affiliated targets. Specifically, an undisclosed number of Gaza residents have been receiving “unusual phone calls” with an automated request in Arabic “that they and their families leave their homes as soon as possible for their own safety”. It now appears this technique has resulted in a backlash for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), as Gaza residents receiving such calls often rush to the roofs of potential target buildings in efforts to prevent the attacks. An article in The Australian reports that “in some cases, [Gaza] residents have gone up to the roof to show themselves to circling aircraft and succeeded in preventing the attack”. Read more of this post

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Finish security police declassify early Cold War archive

January 2, 2009 Leave a comment

Suojelupoliisi, Finland’s security police (otherwise known as SUPO), declassified today segments of its Cold War counterintelligence archives. The declassified archives include the entirety of its 1949 document collection, as well as archive indexes for the decade 1949-1959. It is the first time that SUPO has made internal documents available to the public. The 1949 archive is important because it marks the beginning of SUPO’s intense monitoring of Soviet intelligence operations in Finland, and of activities of the Communist Party of Finland, forerunner of today’s Communist Party of Finland (Unity). Read more of this post

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Analysis: Report discusses foreign espionage targets inside US

January 2, 2009 Leave a comment

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued a new strategy report broadly addressing foreign espionage activity in the US. The report, which has been circulated within the National Association of Chiefs of Police, claims that America is “targeted from nearly every corner of the globe”. Citing data from 2003, it states that “dozens of countries” had “hundreds of known or suspected intelligence officers [entering or traveling] within the United States”. Accordingly, FBI counterintelligence investigations spanned the entire country and involved “all 56 [of the Bureau’s] field offices”. More importantly, the FBI strategy report stresses that foreign intelligence activity within the nation is today “far more complex than it has ever been historically” due to its increasingly asymmetrical character. Read more of this post

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