Free Republic

Russia's swashbuckling military intelligence unit is full of assassins, arms dealers, and bandits. And what they pulled off in Ukraine was just the beginning.re are two ways an espionage agency can prove its worth to the government it serves. Either it can be truly useful (think: locating a most-wanted terrorist), or it can engender fear, dislike, and vilification from its rivals (think: being named a major threat in congressional testimony). But when a spy agency does both, its worth is beyond question. Since the Ukraine crisis began, the Kremlin has few doubts about the importance of the GRU, Russia's military...

I know that this topic is very controversial. Conservatives have always complained about radical feminism, and such radical feminists are over-represented among women with graduate degrees. Are women without college degrees better than women with graduate degrees, when it comes to fulfilling the job of wife and mother?

The Chicago Police Department, working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and FBI, has opened the Crime Gun Intelligence Center to crackdown on illegal guns from what they call “three-percenters.” A number of agencies including Chicago PD, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the ATF, and other regional partners, will operate the new joint task force from within the ATF’s Chicago Field Division. The target of this Crime Gun Intelligence Center: a group the ATF is referring to as “three-percenters.”

<p>The White House allowed the parents of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl to take part in a series of secure video conferences with State Department and intelligence officials and senior military commanders, according to a published report.</p>

Via Breitbart, this makes two separate accusations today — Ed already blogged the other — involving government attempts to suppress the truth about Bergdahl. Bad enough that they’d ask good soldiers to conspire in it, but withholding it from Congress takes this to another level.Pay attention at around a minute in, when he says he was taken by surprise by yesterday’s NYT story about the note Bergdahl reportedly left before leaving his post five years ago. (A note which may or may not have hinted at renouncing his citizenship.) Chambliss, who holds a plum intelligence post within Congress, read...

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...