News you may have missed #555

IARPA logo

IARPA logo

►►US spy agencies want to use photos to trace people. In announcement for its new Finder research program, IARPA, the US intelligence community’s research arm, says that it is looking for ways to “geolocate images” by extracting data and metadata from the images themselves and using this to make guesses about where they were taken.
►►Norway to reassess domestic intelligence gathering. Norway’s main domestic intelligence agency, the Police Security Service (PST), is facing questions over whether its focus on Islamic radicalism caused it to miss a rising threat from far-right extremists, such as Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people on July 22. But PST Director Janne Kristiansen says it would have been hard to stop Breivik even if more attention had been focused on far-right groups.
►►CIA pulls second station chief from Pakistan. For the second time in seven months, the CIA is replacing its station chief in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, citing “medical reasons” for the move. Last time this happened, Read more of this post

News you may have missed #507

  • Pakistani media reveal name of CIA station chief. Mark Carlton, the purported CIA station chief in Islamabad, was named by a Pakistani newspaper and a private television news network over the weekend, the second holder of that post in less than a year to have his cover blown by the media.
  • How an immigrant from Taiwan came to spy for China. Well-researched article on Tai Shen Kuo, a Taiwanese-born American citizen who is serving time in an Arizona prison for spying on the US for China.
  • Domestic surveillance grew in US in 2010. The level of domestic US intelligence surveillance activity in 2010 increased from the year before, according to a new Justice Department report to Congress. Moreover, the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved all 1,506 government requests to electronically monitor suspected “agents” of a foreign power or terrorists on US soil.
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