News you may have missed #622
November 3, 2011 1 Comment
SVR seal
►►Russian spies in Germany focused on politics and military. A married couple arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia is believed to have been gathering information on political developments and military affairs, according to German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. The two have been identified as Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag. German prosecutors accuse them of spying for SVR, the successor to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate.
►►Israel releases spy who gave information to Iran. Israel has released Nahum Manbar, who was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 1997, after he was convicted of harming state security and selling information and supplies to create chemical weapons to Iran. Israel’s Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein approved the early release of Manbar on Monday, one and a half years before the end of his sentence. This was the third time Manbar had requested to be released early.
►►FBI releases Russian illegals’ photos and videos. Documents released Monday, including photos, videos and papers, offered new details about the FBI’s decade-long investigation into a ring of Russian sleeper agents who, US officials say, were trying to burrow their way into American society to learn secrets from people in power. The investigation was apparently code-named Operation GHOST STORIES because six of the 10 Russian agents had assumed the identities of dead people. If you are wondering what these spies are doing now, read this informative update from the Associated Press.
intelNews.org 
Analysis: CIA Open Source Center monitors Facebook, Twitter, blogs
November 8, 2011 by Joseph Fitsanakis 1 Comment
CIA HQ
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The Associated Press has been given unprecedented access to the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s Open Source Center, which is tasked with, among other things, monitoring social networking media. The Center, which was set up in response to the events of 9/11, employs several hundred multilingual analysts. Some are dispatched to US diplomatic missions abroad, but most work out of “an anonymous industrial park” in the US state of Virginia, which the Associated Press agreed not to disclose. The analysts, who are jokingly known in CIA OSINT (open-source intelligence) parlance as “ninja librarians”, engage in constant mining of publicly available information. The latter ranges from articles found in scholarly journals, to civilian television and radio station programs, as well as information available on the Internet. According to the Associated Press report, the Center began paying particular attention to social networking websites in 2009, when Facebook and Twitter emerged as primary organizing instruments in Iran’s so-called “Green Revolution”. The term describes the actions that Iranians opposed to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took to protest the disputed election results that kept him in power. Since that time, the CIA’s Open Source Center has acquired the ability to monitor up to five million tweets a day, and produces daily snapshots of global opinion assembled from tweets, Facebook updates and blog posts. Its executive briefings reportedly find their way to President Barack Obama’s Daily Brief on a regular basis. The Associated Press was given access to the Center’s main facility, and interviewed several of its senior staff members, including its Director, Doug Naquin. He told the news agency that the CIA Open Source Center had “predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime”, but had been unable to foresee the precise development of Internet-based social activism in the Arab world. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Analysis, CIA, CIA Open Source Center, Doug Naquin, Facebook, Internet, Iran, Jennifer Youngblood, open source intelligence, OSINT, President's Daily Brief, social networking, Twitter, United States