Free Republic

Forget being smarter than a fifth-grader. Most Americans think they’re smarter than everyone else in the country. Fifty-five percent of Americans think that they are smarter than the average American, according to a new survey by YouGov, a research organization that uses online polling. In other words, as YouGov cleverly points out, the average American thinks that he or she is smarter than the average American. A humble 34 percent of citizens say they are about as smart as everyone else, while a dispirited 4 percent say they are less intelligent than most people. Men (24 percent) are more likely...

One Nigerian official's wish for Boko Haram: "Find them, kill them." ....... "I love this about America," he said with a tone of, if not love, then certainly reverence. "Find them, kill them. Don't wait for judicial manipulation." As the parents of the kidnapped schoolgirls become more desperate, and their protests in Abuja grow larger, he may be repeating those four words to himself like a mantra.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is clamping down on a technique that government officials have long used to join in public discussions of well-known but technically still-secret information: citing news reports based on unauthorized disclosures. A new pre-publication review policy for the Office of Director of National Intelligence says the agency’s current and former employees and contractors may not cite news reports based on leaks in their speeches, opinion articles, books, term papers or other unofficial writings. Such officials “must not use sourcing that comes from known leaks, or unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information,” it says. “The use of such...

New research has undermined the popular belief that Neanderthals were less intelligent than Homo sapiens, and challenges the widely-held view they were forced into extinction by modern humans. Many experts have suggested humans’ advanced culture and hunting ability caused Neanderthals to disappear from Europe over 30,000 years ago. …

The top two officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency said Wednesday that they will retire from those positions in the coming months, part of a leadership shake-up at an agency that is under pressure to trim budgets and shift focus after more than a decade of war, current and former U.S. officials said. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn is expected to end his tenure as DIA director this summer, about a year before he was scheduled to depart, according to officials who said Flynn faced pressure from Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and others in recent months....

PARIS -- A Cold War is purely an intelligence war. If you go on a Ukrainian geopolitical bender in front of a former KGB chief like Russian President Vladimir Putin without having a firm grasp of the opposition's mind-set, you risk launching yourself into a wall like some kind of drunken frat bro on a Slip 'n Slide. Here are a few handy tips for understanding the Russian intelligence modus operandi and how it differs from America's. HUMINT vs. OSINT: Russia has higher standards and capacity for espionage and intelligence operations than the West, placing a greater value on reliable...

​It’s been two-and-a-half years since the United States government unveiled an insider threat program to keep classified networks and sensitive intelligence secure, but the officials in charge would literally rather storm away than speak about it. From the floor of Congress last Thursday, US Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) acknowledged that the interagency Insider Threat Task Force established in 2012 “for deterring, detecting and mitigating” future potential risks “was intended to train federal employees to watch out for insider threats among their colleagues.” But media reports in the years and months since, as the senator put it, have suggested “that this...

In another of the phone calls, the SBU video cited a Moscow phone number for one of the callers, identified only as "Alexander" in the video. Ukrainska Pravda reported that the number belonged to a pro-Kremlin publicist Alexander Borodai, and cited unidentified sources as saying that the man had been entrusted with the "Crimea question" and now is handling the "Donetsk question" in eastern Ukraine. In February, Borodai published a YouTube video, titled: "How to Divide Ukraine." The SBU said in a statement that Russia had begun "large-scale military aggression" in eastern Ukraine by deploying "subversive groups" of servicemen from...

The intrigue is growing over the Federal Security Service's involvement in Ukraine. On April 11, Ukraine's Deputy Prosecutor General said there was no evidence implicating the FSB in events on Maidan Square. At the same time, it is officially confirmed that FSB generals visited Kiev on Feb. 20 to 21. Recall that the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry sent a note to Moscow on April 4 demanding to know why FSB Colonel General Sergei Beseda visited Kiev on Feb. 20 and 21, and that the very next day Interfax cited a source in Russian intelligence confirming that visit. The answer as to...

In a recent paper, Lubinski and his colleagues caught up with one cohort of 320 people now in their late 30s. At 12, their SAT math or verbal scores had placed them among the top one-100th of 1 percent. Today, many are CEOs, professors at top research universities, transplant surgeons, and successful novelists. That outcome sounds like exactly what you’d imagine should happen: Top young people grow into high-achieving adults. In the education world, the study has provided important new evidence that it really is possible to identify the kids who are likely to become exceptional achievers in the future,...

A sophisticated piece of spyware has been quietly infecting hundreds of government computers across Europe and the United States in one of the most complex cyber espionage programs uncovered to date. Several security researchers and Western intelligence officers say they believe the malware, widely known as Turla, is the work of the Russian government and linked to the same software used to launch a massive breach on the U.S. military uncovered in 2008. Those assessments were based on analysis of tactics employed by hackers, along with technical indicators and the victims they targeted.

They are already cursed with the rather unflattering label of ‘vertically challenged’. Now experts say short people may also be intellectually challenged too - or at least in comparison to their taller counterparts. A new study has found a link between IQ and height, suggesting that those who are shorter are on average more likely to be less intelligent. Academics identified genes that influence both height and IQ, and said there was a ‘significant genetic correlation’ between the two factors.

Dispatches How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations A page from a GCHQ top secret document prepared by its secretive JTRIG unit "One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents. Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously...

For the second time in a week, the nation´s top intelligence chiefs Tuesday issued a scathing assessment of the global threats facing the United States, warning that Syria is becoming a base from which extremist, Al Qaeda-linked groups could attack the U.S. “We are concerned about the use of Syrian territory by the Al Qaeda organization to recruit individuals and develop the capability to be able not just to carry out attacks inside of Syria, but also to use Syria as a launching pad,” said CIA Director John Brennan at a hearing before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

It was sad last week to wake up to news of the passing of former New York Democratic congressman Otis G. Pike. During the fierce debates of 1975, known as the “Year of Intelligence” (because the controversies of the day led to the first significant investigations of the actions of U.S. intelligence agencies) Representative Pike held to a steady course in the face of a concerted effort by the Ford administration -- and the CIA, NSA, and FBI of the day -- to head off any public inquiry. Sound familiar? Like the current controversy, ignited by leaks from NSA contract...

Sen. Patrick Leahy says the American people are at risk of being controlled by their government due to the expansive surveillance powers of the National Security Agency. Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” the Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee told host Chris Wallace that the nation’s lawmakers must act to return control of the government to the people.

So Benghazi finally claims another victim. The knife sticking out of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s back was stuck there slowly by fellow pantsuiter, Sen. Diane Fienstein, (D-Kalf.) who chairs the Senate Intelligence committee for the gentleman’s club also known as the United States Senate. That knife means that Hillary is probably dead. At least as a presidential candidate. Oh, yes, the New York Times won’t give it up quite yet. But for Hillary, it’s o-v-e-r. The Senate report on Benghazi released by Feinstein’s office is largely a compendium of what you, I and everyone outside of the...

The president’s hand-picked intelligence review panel has submitted a list of recommendations that would politicize the leadership and the routine operations of the nation’s leading military intelligence agency. The 46 recommendations urge the federal government to treat foreign enemies as courtroom-protected citizens, and to would require the soldiers working at the National Security Agency to negotiate day-to-day decisions with an array of private-sector lawyers. President Barack Obama met Wednesday with his five appointees on the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, whose report was released late Wednesday afternoon. Obama is expected to announce his preferred policies next month, but...

Obama's National Intelligence Director, James Clapper, blatantly lied to Congress last Spring when in response to a question stated the NSA does not "not wittingly" collect information on Americans in bulk. The lie was revealed thanks to American hero and true patriot, Edward Snowden. Proven a liar, Clapper now freely admits he gave the "least untruthful" answer he could without revealing classified information. The Hill reports Patriot Act author says "Obama’s intel czar should be prosecuted" Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the original author of the Patriot Act, says Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be prosecuted for lying to...

Psychologists have shown humans are poor judges of their own abilities, from sense of humour to grammar. Those worst at it are the worst judges of all. You're pretty smart right? Clever, and funny too. Of course you are, just like me. But wouldn't it be terrible if we were mistaken? Psychologists have shown that we are more likely to be blind to our own failings than perhaps we realise. This could explain why some incompetent people are so annoying, and also inject a healthy dose of humility into our own sense of self-regard.