News you may have missed #579 (CIA edition)
August 30, 2011 Leave a comment
Robert Grenier
►►Interview with ex-CIA Islamabad station chief. Robert Grenier, who was the CIA’s Islamabad station chief from 1999 to 2001, tells Pakistan’s Express Tribune newspaper that the US unmanned drone program, which began as “a very surgically employed tool against international terrorists”, has now “become much more of a conventional weapon against militants”. He also rejects allegations that Pakistani government officials were aware of osama bin Laden’s whereabouts, saying that “no one has apparently found any compelling evidence”.
►►Who will guide Petraeus in his new CIA job? Siobhan Gorman, of The Wall Street Journal, opines that, when US General David Petraeus takes the helm at the Central Intelligence Agency next month, it will fall to the Agency’s deputy director Michael J. Morell, a little-known 31-year CIA veteran, to guide the new director.
►►CIA drone kills al-Qaeda deputy. An anonymous US official has told The New York Times that a CIA drone killed al-Qaeda’s second-ranking operative in Pakistan’s northwest province of Waziristan. Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who in the past year had taken over as al-Qaeda’s top operational planner, was killed on August 22, according to the official. Al-Qaeda is still officially led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is also believed to be in Pakistan.
intelNews.org 
Computer virus found on CIA’s Predator drone remote-control system
October 10, 2011 by Joseph Fitsanakis 2 Comments
Predator drone
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The remote control cockpits of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s Predator drones have been infected by a potentially disastrous computer virus, which surreptitiously records every keystroke made by the pilots. Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, which aired the exclusive report, said that the virus was discovered by the US Pentagon’s network security specialists less than two weeks ago. It also said that the virus has successfully resisted “multiple efforts” to remove it from the computers that guide the remote-controlled missions of the Agency’s unmanned drones. The blog cited a Pentagon computer specialist, who claims that he and his network security team “keep wiping it off and it keeps coming back”. The specialist also said that it is unclear at the present stage whether the computer virus is malicious or benign, in terms of its security implications. It also remains unknown whether the virus was introduced to the system intentionally or by accident, and how far it has spread into the system. It has been confirmed that the primary task of the virus is keylogging —recording all keystrokes made by users. But nobody at the Pentagon seems to know what happens to the keylogged data —that is, whether it remains within the Predator drone computer system, or whether it is clandestinely transmitted to individuals located outside the US military’s chain of command. The Wired report notes that there have been no reports of incidents relating to compromised information as a result of the keylogging virus. Read more of this post
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