Announcement: Calling All Undergraduate Students of Intelligence
September 3, 2013
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The academic study of security and intelligence used to be seen as a strictly graduate-level preoccupation. Today, however, it is routinely encountered in undergraduate curricula and constitutes one of the fastest growing programs in political science. In response to the rising undergraduate interest in this field of study, the Security and Intelligence Studies program at King University in Bristol, Tennessee, launched The Security and Intelligence Studies Journal last spring. 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 SIS Journal was published in May of 2013 and is available on Amazon. It contains some of the finest undergraduate research on the theme: “security challenges in the 21st century”. For its second issue, the SIS Journal calls on interested authors to submit papers of up to 3,000 words in length on the theme: “Al-Qaeda – past, present, future”.
The theme’s elaboration, which can be found on the journal’s website, is as follows: “In less than a quarter of a century, al-Qaeda has grown 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. During the last decade, the demise of central al-Qaeda figures, including its founder and Emir, Osama bin Laden, have prompted 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. The Security and Intelligence Studies Journal calls on interested authors to explore various aspects of al-Qaeda’s past, present, or future, in an effort to shed scholarly light on one of the world’s most mysterious and elusive militant groups”.
The deadline for submissions of relevant scholarly papers of up to 3,000 words in length has been set for October 20, 2013. The SIS Journal editors encourage undergraduate students from around the world with a serious scholarly interest in security and intelligence to contact the journal by visiting its website or emailing the editors at kcsis@king.edu, to express their interest in submitting a paper. Collaborative works are welcome. We also kindly ask academics to forward this call for papers to their undergraduate students.



















US spy agencies probed job seekers with links to al-Qaeda
September 4, 2013 by Joseph Fitsanakis
One in five applicants for jobs in American intelligence agencies, who were rejected due to questionable backgrounds, were found to have connections with foreign intelligence or militant groups, including al-Qaeda. This is revealed in an internal document provided to The Washington Post by American defector Edward Snowden. Snowden, a former technical expert for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), is currently living in Russia, where he has been granted political asylum. Last week, he gave The Post a top-secret document containing the 2012 budget summary for the US National Intelligence Program. Among other things, the document reveals that individuals with links to what the United States Intelligence Community terms “hostile intelligence”, or foreign terrorist organizations, have sought to obtain intelligence-related jobs in the US. According to the paper, roughly one out of every five job seekers at the CIA, whose applications were rejected by the Agency due to suspicious backgrounds, had “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections”. Such connections allegedly included links with Lebanese Hezbollah, Islamic Hamas, as well as various al-Qaeda affiliates, all of which are on the US State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. The Post subsequently spoke to a CIA source who argued that the number of applicants found to have ties with militant groups was relatively small. The leaked document also mentions that the NSA has launched a major counterintelligence scheme aimed at uncovering “potentially suspicious or abnormal […] activity” among its employees. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with al-Qaeda, CIA, counterintelligence, Edward Snowden, Hamas, Hezbollah, News, NSA, United States