Ex-CIA technician who leaked Verizon court order comes forward
June 10, 2013 25 Comments
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Last week, British newspaper The Guardian revealed a secret court order that enables the United States government to collect the telephone records of millions of customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest cellular phone service providers. On the morning of Sunday, June 9, the individual responsible for leaking the secret court order came forward on his own volition. He is Edward Snowden, a former technical assistant for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The 29-year-old computer expert, who has been working for the National Security Agency (NSA) for the last four years, told The Guardian that he decided to leak the injunction because he felt it posed “an existential threat to democracy”. He added that he was not motivated by money in disclosing the document. Were he after money, he said, he “could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich”. In a video published on The Guardian’s website, Snowden told the paper that his disillusionment with America’s “federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers” began even before 2007, when he was stationed under diplomatic cover at the CIA station in Geneva, Switzerland. He finally decided to act three weeks ago, he said, after careful consideration of the ramifications of his decision for his life and career.
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World’s first undergraduate intelligence journal publishes first issue
June 11, 2013 9 Comments
The study of security and intelligence used to be considered strictly a graduate-level preoccupation. Today, however, it is routinely encountered in undergraduate curricula and constitutes one of the fastest growing programs in the humanities. To satisfy the growing undergraduate interest in this field of study, King University in Bristol, Tennessee, launched The Security and Intelligence Studies Journal. It is the world’s first undergraduate scholarly journal focusing exclusively on themes of intelligence, security, counterterrorism, geopolitics and international relations. The first issue of the Journal is now out and available to purchase on Amazon for $9.00. It contains some of the finest undergraduate research on subjects ranging from the rise of Islamic militancy in West Africa, the Syrian Civil War, the Iranian nuclear program, to terrorism funding, and the rise of far-right militancy in the United States, among other issues. On the journal’s website, visitors can find subscription information, as well as the journal’s theme for issue 2, which is scheduled for publication in December 2013. Undergraduate students from all over the world are invited to submit 3,000-word papers on the subject: Al-Qaeda: past, present, future. The theme’s description is as follows: “In less than a quarter of a century, al-Qaeda grew from a small administrative unit in the Hindu Kush Mountains to a leading global agent of Sunni militancy. The history of this enigmatic organization is replete with unpredictable twists and turns that continue to mystify scholars and counterterrorism experts alike. In the past decade, the demise of central al-Qaeda figures, including its founder and Emir, Osama bin Laden, have led some to proclaim the organization extinct. Others point to the rise of al-Qaeda-inspired franchise groups in the Arabian Peninsula and parts of Africa, as well as lone-wolf terrorist acts around the world, in arguing that al-Qaeda’s ideology is far from obsolete. Read more of this post
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