NSA director claims Bolton’s book would cause ‘irreparable damage’ to US secrets
June 19, 2020 3 Comments
The director of America’s largest spy agency claims in a signed affidavit that a forthcoming book by John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, would critically compromise intelligence secrets if published. Bolton served in that capacity from April 2018 until September 2019. His memoir of his time as President Trump’s national security advisor, titled The Room Where It Happened, is scheduled for publication on Tuesday.
But the White House has sued Bolton, claiming that he did not follow the requirements of his pre-publication screening process by government officials. President Trump’s legal team also claims that, if published, the book would damage critical areas of United States national security.
On Wednesday, the White House’s stance on the book was affirmed by the director of the National Security Agency, General Paul M. Nakasone. In a signed affidavit filed in US District Court in Washington, Gen. Nakasone said he had been asked by the legal adviser of the National Security Council to review “a limited portion” of the draft manuscript of Bolton’s book. He added that he had identified “classified information” in that portion of the manuscript, some of which was classified at the Top Secret/Sensitive and Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) level.
According to Gen. Nakasone’s affidavit, “compromise of this information could result in the permanent loss of a valuable SIGINT source and cause irreparable damage to the US SIGINT system”. SIGINT refers to the gathering of intelligence by intercepting communications signals in the form of information exchanged orally between people or mediated via electronic means.
Gen. Nakasone goes on to state that the unauthorized disclosure of the information contained in Bolton’s book could “reasonably […] be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage” to US national security. This includes causing “considerable difficulties in US and allied relations with specific nations”. The NSA director does not detail the precise damage that Bolton’s revelations could cause to US national security, stating only that the information would compromise an intelligence-collection “capability” that “significant manpower and monetary investments have been and continue to be made to enable and maintain”.
Alongside Gen. Nakasone’s affidavit, the Department of Justice submitted an emergency filing on Wednesday, seeking to block the publication of Bolton’s book on national security grounds. Another affidavit was filed on Wednesday by John Ratcliffe, President Trump’s newly appointed Director of National Intelligence.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 19 June 2020 | Permalink
Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered what is believed to be the first-ever case of hackers using LinkedIn to infect the computers of targeted users with viruses, according to a new report. The hackers appear to have been sponsored by government and to have targeted employees of carefully selected military contractors in central Europe, according to sources.
Complacency and substandard security by the United States Central Intelligence Agency were behind the Vault 7 leak of 2017, which ranks as the greatest data loss in the agency’s history, according to an internal report. The Vault 7 data loss was particularly shocking, given that the CIA should have taken precautions following numerous leaks of classified government information in years prior to 2017, according to the report.
Russian prosecutors have accused one of the country’s most respected hydroacoustics specialists, and globally recognized expert on the Arctic region, of spying for Chinese intelligence. This development highlights the competitive relationship between the two neighboring countries, who in recent years have tended to work together against what they perceive as a common threat coming from the United States.
Researchers at a university in Israel claim to have discovered a new low-tech eavesdropping technique, which relies on sound vibrations on the glass surface of light bulbs and requires equipment costing less than $1,000. The researchers claim that the technique, which they call “lamphone”, enables eavesdroppers to intercept, in real time, audible conversations from a room located hundreds of feet away, simply by recording the vibrations that sounds create on the glass surface of a common light bulb present in the room.
A court in Austria has found a retired Army colonel guilty of providing classified military information to Russia, following a closed-door trial. Interestingly, the alleged spy’s name has not been made public. Some Austrian media have been referring to him as “Martin M.”.
Moscow has reacted angrily to the Czech government’s decision to expel two Russian diplomats from the country, in response to allegations that the Kremlin plotted to assassinate three outspoken Czech politicians using a deadly poison. Russian officials pledged to respond in kind to Prague’s “indecent and unworthy deed”.
The United States Defense Intelligence Agency, a Pentagon organization tasked with collecting foreign military secrets, has rejected reports that it is spying on protestors inside the country. However, it confirmed that it has set up an “internal coordination group” to respond to “requests for information” by the Department of Defense. This development follows reports that some DIA employees communicated their concerns about being asked to spy domestically to the organization’s director last week.
The embassy of the United States in the United Arab Emirates declined free COVID-19 testing kits for its staff, because of concerns that the private labs offering the kits had ties to China, according to a new report. The testing kits were offered by a testing facility that was set up in March in Abu Dhabi, which is the capital of the oil-rich UAE —a close American ally in the Middle East.
The former president of Argentina, Mauricio Macri, has been indicted as part of a widening investigation into a domestic spying program, which allegedly targeted opposition politicians, journalists and other public figures. The alleged espionage took place between 2015 and 2019, when Macri occupied the country’s highest office.
India has expelled two officials at the High Commission of Pakistan in New Delhi, after they were allegedly caught with fake Indian identity papers while trying to acquire classified documents. But the Pakistani government has rejected the allegations and subsequent expulsions as “a part of persistent anti-Pakistan propaganda” from India, and said the two officials were tortured while under detention by Indian authorities.
As the Islamic State continues to transfer its activities online due to the coronavirus pandemic, the group has published the first issue of a new cybersecurity magazine, aimed at helping its members evade surveillance. The Islamic State, known previously as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, has always been active online. But the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted it to 
The United States has alleged that the Russian military flew over a dozen unmarked aircraft to Libya, in an attempt to provide air support for Russian mercenaries who are fighting in Tripoli. If true, this development marks a major escalation of Russia’s military intervention in the Libyan civil war.
A Saudi government official, who served as a senior advisor to the oil kingdom’s former Crown Prince, has accused the Saudi monarchy of abducting his children in order to force him to end his self-exile in Canada. With a doctorate in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Saad al-Jabri was until 2015 a rare example of a highly educated government administrator among Saudi Arabia’s ruling elite. Dr. al-Jabri rose in the ranks of the Saudi aristocracy in the 1990s under the tutelage of his patron, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef (pictured). Prince bin Nayef is the grandson of Saudi Arabia’s founding monarch, King Abdulaziz, and until 2015 was destined to succeed King Abdullah and occupy the kingdom’s throne. Eventually, bin Nayef appointed Dr. al-Jabri as Minister of State and made him his most senior and trusted adviser on matters of security and intelligence.
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Analysis: A look at the CIA’s half-century-old ‘disease intelligence’ program
June 22, 2020 Leave a comment
The article was published in the declassified edition of Studies in Intelligence, the CIA’s in-house research publication. Written by Warren F. Carey and Myles Maxfield, the article appeared [.pdf] in the spring 1972 issue of the journal, and is titled “Intelligence Implications of Disease”. It discusses the 1966 outbreak of meningitis in China’s Guangdong Province, which prompted the CIA to begin tracking diseases in a systematic way. The outbreak first appeared in the city that is today known as Guangzhou, and within weeks it had resulted in a military takeover of the Chinese healthcare system. The latter collapsed in places, and prompted the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence (known today as the Directorate of Science and Technology) to begin collecting data in order to assess the political fallout of the disease.
The article states that the CIA cryptonym for the disease was Project IMPACT. Its scope was limited, but it expanded 1968, when the world health community began to issue alerts about the so-called Hong Kong flu. Known officially as Hong Kong/A2/68, the virus spread around the world in a few months, and is believed to have killed between 1 and 4 million people, including around 100,000 Americans. At that time, according to the article in Studies in Intelligence, the CIA’s Project IMPACT “went global”, and was combined with BLACKFLAG, an ongoing effort by the Agency to “computerize disease information and derive trends, cycles and predictions” on a global scale.
Project BLACKFLAG tracked the spread of the disease in the Soviet Union and in North Vietnam, and issued regular analyses of the political ramification of the epidemic. That was not easy, say the authors, given the fact that most nations of the communist bloc tried to conceal information about it. The CIA was also able to issue warnings to its teams of operatives abroad, instructing them to shield themselves from the flu as it spread around East Asia and, eventually, the world.
According the authors, the CIA’s early disease intelligence projects were able to demonstrate that data aggregation was critical in helping monitor and forecast outbreaks. It also showed that these such forecasts could have “an initiating and vital role” in political, military and economic intelligence. Today, says Ferran, the CIA’s disease intelligence program has the same twofold mission it had when it was first conceived: first, to collect intelligence about the actual extent of the spread of diseases abroad —which may differ from the official information provided by foreign governments; and second, to try to forecast the consequences of these trends for American interests in the regions impacted by an ongoing epidemic or pandemic.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 22 June 2020 | Permalink
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with CIA, disease intelligence, history, Myles Maxfield, News, Project BLACKFLAG, Project IMPACT, Studies in Intelligence, Warren F. Carey