News you may have missed #516
June 7, 2011 1 Comment
- UK government will continue to spy on Muslims says official. Britain’s Home Secretary, Theresa May, says she does not see “anything wrong with identifying people who are vulnerable to being taken down a certain route”.
- UK government outed IRA double agent. Senior Irish Provisional Army volunteer Denis Donaldson, who spied for the British government, was deliberately outed by the government to send a message to the IRA that he was expendable, and that it had another, more valuable informant within the IRA leadership ranks. The revelation is contained in a leaked US diplomatic document published by whistleblower website WikiLeaks. Donaldson was shot dead shortly after his role as an MI5 informant was revealed.
- Legendary CIA airline now in danger of crashing. There was a time, not so long ago, that CIA-linked contractor Evergreen International Aviation was doing quite well for itself. Today, the venerable intelligence-helpers have fallen on hard times. The other day, it had to unload its 200 million square foot maintenance facility in southern Arizona in order to help pay off its debts.
intelNews.org 
One in four US hackers is FBI informant, says report
June 8, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment
2600 magazine
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org
Experienced observers with strong links in the American computer hacker community estimate that around 25 percent of its members are working as informants for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other US government agencies. This according to an investigative report published in British quality broadsheet The Guardian, which claims that the large numbers of government operatives have spread unprecedented “paranoia and mistrust” inside the US computer hacker underground. According to the report, the authorities have made significant inroads, not by training their officers in hacking skills, but by employing the threat of lengthy prison sentences as a means of convincing captured hackers to turn into government informants. This technique is largely responsible for the creation of an “army of informants” operating “deep inside the hacking community” in the US. An example provided in the report is the infiltration of online forums used by the cybercriminal community as marketplaces for credit card, bank account, and other stolen identity information, which are often traded in bulk around the world. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with 2600, Anonymous (hacker group), Barrett Brown, computer hacking, cybercrime, Eric Corley, FBI, informants, John Young, Kevin Poulsen, News, United States