News you may have missed #644 (Pakistan edition)
December 7, 2011 Leave a comment

AfPak border
►►US built its own secret Pakistani spy service. Deep within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), America’s most reliable ally has been the spy service’s division known as the T Wing. It was created largely from scratch in 2006 and 2007, after the Americans mostly gave up trying to work with the ISI’s uncooperative leadership. US officials say their hope was that the T Wing might help to offset the pernicious influence of the ISI’s S Wing, the division in charge of managing the Pakistani government’s relationship with Islamic extremist groups such as the Kashmiri separatist Lashkar-e-Taiba and Afghanistan’s Taliban.
►►Pakistan ‘permanently’ shuts down resupply routes to Afghanistan. NATO recently literally shot itself in the foot, imperiling the resupply of International Assistance Forces (ISAF) in Afghanistan, by shooting up two Pakistani border posts in a “hot pursuit’ raid. Given that roughly 100 fuel tanker trucks along with 200 other trucks loaded with NATO supplies cross into Afghanistan each day from Pakistan, Pakistan’s closure of the border has ominous long-term consequences for the logistical resupply of ISAF forces, even as Pentagon officials downplay the issue and scramble for alternative resupply routes.
►►Analysis: The fiction of Pakistan as a US ally. Sixty percent of the supplies used by US forces in Afghanistan transit Pakistan. The logistical requirements of the American army in the Afghan theater are staggering. Leaving aside food, ammunition and a million other necessities, the US military in Afghanistan consumes 300,000 barrels of oil a day. Every drop of that oil has to be trucked in country. NATO so far keeps stressing that there is no immediate threat to continued operations, but that will be true for only so long. Wars consume mountains of supplies, and without fuel, food and bullets soldiers will not fight for long.




















Analysis: The strange world of cyberspy vendor conferences
December 27, 2011 by Joseph Fitsanakis 5 Comments
It is common knowledge among intelligence observers that espionage activity around the world is on the increase, having in some cases surpassed Cold-War levels. The main facilitator of this phenomenon is technological, namely the ease of access to classified information afforded by relatively safe cyberespionage techniques. In our 21st-century, therefore, the spy v. spy game takes place largely online. Ironically, however, many of the government agencies engaged in offensive cyberintelligence operations against each other buy the required software and hardware from the same vendors. The latter are private companies, headquartered in Milan, London, Johannesburg, Montreal, and other cities around the world, which periodically participate in industry trade shows. These gatherings are eerie, secretive meetings, frequented by international spies representing various governments, and are strictly closed to outsiders. Vernon Silver, of Bloomberg, which has done an admirable job lately tracking the operations of these secretive vendors, has penned a fascinating exposé of one such bizarre trade show, called ISS World. Known informally as ‘Wiretappers Ball’, ISS (short for Intelligence Support Systems) World convenes several times a year in various cities around the world. One recent show, which took place in Malaysia, hosted nearly 1,000 attendees from 56 countries, writes Silver: “unlike trade shows, this one had no social events [and] no corporate-sponsored cocktail parties”. Instead, merchants of communications interception technologies offered demonstrations to agents of various governments, of what is called “offensive IT intelligence”. These demonstrations, conducted by appointment only in darkened conference rooms, center on technologies that can hack cell phones, break into email accounts, unscramble encrypted Skype calls, and surreptitiously access targeted web cams. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Analysis, communications interception, cyberespionage, ISS World, telecommunications hardware