Tallinn government surveillance cameras reveal black bag operation

December 16, 2008 by 1 Comment

A surveillance camera monitoring the City Government building in Estonian capital Tallinn has recorded nighttime images of what appears to be a black bag operation by either Kaitsepolitseiamet (KPol), the country’s  Security Police, or by Russian intelligence. Black bag operations refer to covert, surreptitious entries into structures in the course of human intelligence missions. Responding to allegations by Tallinn mayor, Edgar Savisaar, the country’s public prosecutor disclosed that KPol officers had surreptitiously entered the building to “remove secret microphones” from the office of Ivo Parbus, an adviser to the city’s deputy mayor, who has been arrested in connection with a bribing scandal. However, Tallinn’s mayor says that he does not believe the break-in to have been authorized by KPol, and that “he has information that one [of the] person[s seen] entering the building is a former spy of the Russian army”. Read more of this post

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Analysis: Who is giving Obama advice on national security?

December 16, 2008 by Leave a comment

On Monday, US President-Elect Barack Obama chaired the first official meeting of the national security team he assembled earlier this month. But according to an article published today in The International Herald Tribune, an extended list of national security advisers to the President-Elect includes several conservatives, such as Brent Scowcroft, George Shultz and even Richard Armitage (!), whom he has contacted seeking counsel. Why does Barack Obama continue to court such Reaganite and neoconservative figures? Is he simply contacting them as a standard procedural duty, wishing perhaps to ensure some kind of managerial continuum between the current and incoming administrations? But if this is the case, then why do his senior advisers insist on releasing these names to the press in connection with the very first official meeting of Obama’s national security team? Read Article →

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Russian government amends treason and spying definitions

December 16, 2008 by Leave a comment

Last week Russia’s State Duma passed a law abolishing the use of juries in terrorism trials, and replacing them with three-judge panels. This week the government has submitted yet another bill significantly revising legal definitions of spying and treason. Current Russian law defines spying and treason as “hostile” actions threatening “the foreign security of the Russian Federation”. The new bill, if enacted, will revise the definition to “[actions] against the security of the Russian Federation, including its constitutional order, sovereignty, territorial and state integrity”. Read more of this post

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US federal appeals court upholds National Security Letters

December 16, 2008 by Leave a comment

National Security Letters (NSLs) are types of warrantless subpoenas issued by US government agencies. They are typically used to force organizations or companies to surrender information pertaining to individuals or groups. In the late 1970s, NSLs were used in rare instances by the FBI during investigations. The 2001 USA PATRIOT Act marked an unparalleled expansion of the power of NSLs, allowing their use against American citizens even in cases when they are not targets of criminal investigations. The USA PATRIOT Act also ratified a gag order provision preventing NSL recipients from disclosing the letter’s existence. The CIA, FBI and the US Department of Defense are all known to have issued several NSLs in recent years. Read more of this post

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Estonian sleeper agent may have been double spy, say Germans

December 15, 2008 by Leave a comment

Herman Simm

Herman Simm

Last month, Estonian counterintelligence agents arrested Herman Simm, a high-level official at the Estonian defense ministry, on charges that he spied on behalf of Russian intelligence for nearly 30 years. At the time, Western counterintelligence officials said Simm, who was in charge of handling all of Estonia’s “classified and top secret material on NATO”, was at the center of “the most serious case of espionage against NATO since the end of the Cold War”. But the complexity of this espionage affair has now increased, with German weekly magazine Der Spiegel reporting that Simm was also a paid informant of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service. Read more of this post

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Analysis: Former CIA clandestine officer paints bleak picture of Agency

December 15, 2008 by Leave a comment

In a brutally honest exposé, a 25-year veteran of the CIA has publicly described the Agency as an organization mired in failure, mediocrity and incompetence. Art Brown, who headed the Asia division of the CIA’s Clandestine Service from 2003 to 2005, has called the Agency’s seven-year, multi-billion operation to find Osama bin Laden a “failure” that “no amount of ‘rendition’ of bin Laden lieutenants can mask”. Writing in The New York Times, the CIA veteran has revealed that Syria’s alleged construction of a nuclear reactor in the country’s eastern desert came “as a surprise” to the Agency. Read more of this post

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Whistleblower who disclosed NSA domestic spying program comes forth

December 15, 2008 by Leave a comment

Exactly three years ago, New York Times journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed NSA’s domestic warrantless spying program, which was secretly authorized by the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11. Nearly a dozen undisclosed insiders helped the two journalists unravel the NSA scheme. But the initial tip came from what Lichtblau describes in his book, Bush’s Law, as a “walk-in” source with intimate knowledge of the US intelligence community’s practices. That “walk-in” source has now come forth. His name is Thomas M. Tamm, a former US Justice Department official who held a Sensitive Compartmented Security clearance (“a level above Top Secret”) issued by the US government. Read more of this post

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Police spying revelation rocks New Zealand

December 15, 2008 by Leave a comment

IntelNews has paid particular attention to domestic intelligence operations conducted against law-abiding protest activity in the so-called “war on terrorism”. The US is hardly the only Western country where intensification of government spying on protest activity has been noted in recent years. During the past few days, political life in New Zealand has been stirred by revelations that the country’s police force has for years used “paid informants to infiltrate protest groups”, including “groups such as Greenpeace, animal rights and climate change campaigners and Iraq war protesters”. Read more of this post

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Analysis: Obama urged to get to bottom of NSA warrantless wiretap scheme

December 15, 2008 by Leave a comment

Patrick Keefe, Century Foundation fellow and author of Chatter: Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, has published an editorial in The New York Times urging US Congress and President-Elect Barack Obama to engage in a “thorough course correction on domestic surveillance”. Keefe describes the post-9/11 enhancement of the domestic wiretapping powers of the National Security Agency (NSA) as a direct violation of “one of the signature prohibitions of the post-Watergate era”, which allowed the US government to turn “its formidable eavesdropping apparatus on its own citizens”. Read more of this post

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Moldovan politicians to undergo intelligence clearing before elections

December 15, 2008 by 1 Comment

A new bill requiring all Moldovan politicians to be cleared by the country’s intelligence services before running for office, has been approved in a first round of voting by the country’s communist-dominated parliament. The bill was proposed earlier this year by the governing Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova, led by Vladimir Voronin. Read more of this post

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Two US spies killed in Mumbai attack, Indian government sources claim

December 13, 2008 by Leave a comment

Yesterday, intelNews discussed the apparent zeal with which the US State Department is monitoring the Indian and Pakistani responses to the recent militant attack on Mumbai. Visiting New Delhi on Friday, US Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte, made sure to remind the Indian government that “there were United States casualties as well. So we are also victims of these attacks”. Today The Express adds another possible explanation for the State Department’s “unprecedented” interest in the attacks. The Indian newspaper cites “reliable sources in [the Indian] government” in asserting that “two senior espionage officials from the US were among the eight Americans killed in the […] attacks”. The newspaper alleges that the news of the two officials’ deaths, who were reportedly shot at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel on the night of November 27, “rankled the White House”. It is not clear from the report whether the two agents were staying at the hotel, were attending a meeting there, or rushed there from elsewhere in Mumbai in response to the attacks. [JF]

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British assisted abduction of Iranian police officers, says senior official

December 13, 2008 by Leave a comment

Last July, Jundullah, a separatist Sunni Islamic organization operating in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province, abducted and subsequently murdered 16 Iranian police officers stationed in Saravan, Iran. Now Iran’s First Deputy Judiciary Chief, Ebrahim Raisi Ghraib, has said the Islamic Republic has “obtained information” that British forces helped Jundullah fighters abduct the police officers by providing them with “critical intelligence” during the operation. Read more of this post

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Senate Committee report blames Bush Administration for detainee torture

December 13, 2008 by Leave a comment

In 2004, after the eruption of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, the US Department of Defense dismissed the torture practices as the work “of a few bad apples”. Now a report by a bipartisan Senate committee concludes that the abuses conducted by CIA and US military guards and interrogators were direct results of the Bush Administration’s detention policies and “should not be dismissed as the work of bad guards or interrogators”. The report, detailing a two-year study by the US Senate Armed Services Committee, has yet to be made public and much of it will remain classified. This being the case, it is not expected to have any impact on the Bush administration, which “continues to delay and in some cases bar members of Congress from gaining access to key legal documents and memos about the detainee program”. [IA]

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Analysis: Should US cybersecurity be managed by the White House?

December 13, 2008 by Leave a comment

Ars Technica has published a well-written analysis of the recent report on US cybersecurity by the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency. It examines the question of whether it would be wise for US cybersecurity to be managed by the White House. It concludes that “[w]hile big-picture proposals for reorganizing US cybersecurity efforts tend to grab headlines, it’s likely to be easier to establish consensus around some […] more specific proposals […] such as merging ‘national security’ and ‘homeland security’ advisory functions that bear on network security”, and that “it may make more sense” at this point in time “to focus on these less sexy reforms first”. The article is available here. [IA]

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Candidates currently considered by Obama for top intelligence posts

December 13, 2008 by Leave a comment

According to the Associated Press, some of the top candidates considered by US President-Elect Barack Obama’s transition team for Director of the CIA are: John Gannon (CIA’s Deputy Director of Intelligence during the Clinton Administration); Jami Miscik (CIA’s former chief analyst); Steve Kappes (current Deputy Director at the CIA); Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA, leader of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence); and John McLaughlin (former interim CIA chief). For the post of Director of National Intelligence, the top considerations are: Denny Blair (retired US Navy Admiral and former commander of the US Pacific Command); Don Kerr (currently Deputy Director of National Intelligence); Jami Miscik (see above); and former Rep. Tim Roemer (D-IN). IntelNews has previously reported on the possibility that Barack Obama may in fact retain the current CIA leadership “for a while”. [JF]

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