Western Intel

How to Decode the True Meaning of What NSA Officials Say

"An equally insidious threat to the integrity of our national debate, however, comes not from officials’ outright lies but from the language they use to tell the truth. When it comes to discussing government surveillance, U.S. intelligence officials have been using a vocabulary of misdirection—a language that allows them to say one thing while meaning quite another. The assignment of unconventional meanings to conventional words allows officials to imply that the NSA’s activities are narrow and closely supervised, though neither of those things is true. What follows is a lexicon for decoding the true meaning of what NSA officials say." Continue reading →

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The NSA’s hiring – and they want a ‘civil liberties’ officer

"The ongoing Snowden revelations about the NSA's indiscriminate spying on private communications over the internet make the role particularly challenging. Anyone applying for the role would do well to familiarise themselves with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's handy guide to decoding NSA doublespeak. When senior NSA officials maintain that keeping track of phone conversations, for example, doesn't count as surveillance, then any privacy officer is going to have a difficult job. In fact, we can think of few more difficult jobs since the post of Staff Rabbi to the Spanish Inquisition." Continue reading →

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Investigation to record victims of US drone attacks in Pakistan

"The objective, said TBIJ deputy editor Rachel Oldroyd, is to take these deaths out of obscurity and make it easier to test statements about the nature and use of drones. US authorities have been reluctant to acknowledge any civilian deaths caused by the drone operations, which have been going on since 2006. The CIA has claimed a high rate of killings of militants, saying that strikes since May 2010 have killed more than 600 militants but no civilians. This claim is contested by experts, journalists and researchers on the ground." Continue reading →

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Fmr. NSA chief: ‘Morally arrogant’ Snowden will probably become alcoholic

"Gen. Michael Hayden, a former NSA and CIA chief, shared a lot of opinions during a discussion at a Washington church Sunday, beyond his thoughts on terrorists' love for Gmail and the U.S. government's approach to the Internet. Discussing the 'tension between security and liberty' at St. John's Episcopal Church near the White House, Hayden criticized the reporting of NSA surveillance programs, argued that society must make a choice between security and liberty, and took personal shots at NSA leaker Edward Snowden." Continue reading →

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First Syria rebels armed and trained by CIA ‘on way to battlefield’

"The first cell of Syrian rebels trained and armed by the CIA is making its way to the battlefield, President Barack Obama has reportedly told senators. During a meeting at the White House, the president assured Senator John McCain that after months of delay the US was meeting its commitment to back moderate elements of the opposition. Mr Obama said that a 50-man cell, believed to have been trained by US special forces in Jordan, was making its way across the border into Syria, according to the New York Times. The deployment of the rebel unit seems to be the first tangible measure of support since Mr Obama announced in June that the US would begin providing the opposition with small arms." Continue reading →

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Bruce Schneier: Surreptitiously Tampering with Computer Chips

"The paper talks about several uses for this type of sabotage, but the most interesting -- and devastating -- is to modify a chip's random number generator. This technique could, for example, reduce the amount of entropy in Intel's hardware random number generator from 128 bits to 32 bits. This could be done without triggering any of the built-in self-tests, without disabling any of the built-in self-tests, and without failing any randomness tests. I have no idea if the NSA convinced Intel to do this with the hardware random number generator it embedded into its CPU chips, but I do know that it could. Yes, this is a conspiracy theory. But I'm not willing to discount such things anymore." Continue reading →

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Glenn Greenwald: Inside the mind of NSA chief Gen Keith Alexander

"Now, on the website of DBI Architects, Inc. of Washington and Reston, Virginia, there are what purports to be photographs of the actual Star-Trek-like headquarters commissioned by Gen. Alexander that so impressed his Congressional overseers. It's a 10,740 square foot labyrinth in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The brochure touts how 'the prominently positioned chair provides the commanding officer an uninterrupted field of vision to a 22'-0' wide projection screen'. Its "primary function is to enable 24-hour worldwide visualization, planning, and execution of coordinated information operations for the US Army and other federal agencies.'" Continue reading →

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Gov. Standards Agency Suggests Dropping NSA-Influenced Algorithm

"Documents provided by Edward Snowden suggest that the NSA has heavily influenced the standard, which has been used around the world. In its statement Tuesday, NIST acknowledged that the NSA participates in creating cryptography standards 'because of its recognized expertise' and because NIST is required by law to consult with the spy agency. Various versions of Microsoft Windows, including those used in tablets and smartphones, contain implementations of the standard, though the NSA-influenced portion isn’t enabled by default." Continue reading →

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How the NSA Spies on Smartphones Including the BlackBerry

"For an agency like the NSA, the data storage units are a goldmine, combining in a single device almost all the information that would interest an intelligence agency: social contacts, details about the user's behavior and location, interests (through search terms, for example), photos and sometimes credit card numbers and passwords. According to the documents, it set up task forces for the leading smartphone manufacturers and operating systems. Specialized teams began intensively studying Apple's iPhone and its iOS operating system, as well as Google's Android mobile operating system. Another team worked on ways to attack BlackBerry." Continue reading →

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