Free Republic

Arthur Walker, one of four men convicted of selling secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, has died in federal prison. He was 79. The Federal Bureau of Prisons website confirmed that he died this month. A spokesman said he died over the holiday weekend, and Walker's family told Pete Earley, who wrote "Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring," that he died Friday of acute kidney failure. Walker was serving three life sentences plus 40 years for copying and conspiring to deliver secrets to the Soviet Union. He was sentenced in 1985.

Newser) – You might think that giving a green light to Edward Snowden and Aaron Alexis and allegedly fraudulently submitting 660,000 other background checks without actually completing them would prevent you from getting future government contracts. But you'd be wrong, because the Department of Homeland Security has awarded a $190 million contract to US Investigations Services, the Wall Street Journal reports. Why? Because USIS hasn't actually been suspended, and, as one immigration official explained, unless there is such a suspension in place, "by law and policy, we have to go with the lowest bidder." USIS isn't barred, the Office of...

Light bulbs can now send and receive data thanks to a California company that has added sensors into each power hub. Although these smart lights can monitor pollution or spot an unattended bag at an airport, their ability to track our every move raises privacy concerns. Bill Whitaker reports.

Microsoft's top lawyer says the fallout of the NSA spying scandal is "getting worse," and carries grim implications for US tech companies. In a speech at the GigaOm Structure conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith warned attendees that unless the US political establishment figures out how to rein in its spy agencies, there could be heavy repercussions for tech companies "What we've seen since last June is a double-digit decline in people's trust in American tech companies in key places like Brussels and Berlin and Brasilia. This has put trust at risk," Smith said. "The...

On 6 June 1944, President Franklin D Roosevelt solemnly declared, “You don’t just walk to Berlin”. He was speaking at a White House press conference, where he had just announced that Allied troops had landed in northern France. The gathering was a homely affair, with none of the bombast associated with similar events today. In fact, it was an occasion of masterly understatement. What he could have said was that the largest naval invasion in the history of the world was finally under way. ~snip~ The long-awaited amphibious invasion of France was not a secret, and it came as no...

National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has found the court of public opinion to be far more receptive than a court of law. He conducts the occasional interview with seemingly sympathetic journalists. NBC News aired one such interview with anchorman Brian Williams on Wednesday night. "Do you see yourself as a patriot?" Williams asked. "I do," answered Snowden, now 30. He was just trying to protect the country and the Constitution "from the encroachment of adversaries -- and those adversaries don't have to be foreign countries." Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, was having none of it. "In...

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has been sued by an advocacy group seeking the release of internal documents of a top intelligence adviser who was also working with a controversial Chinese technology company that has been identified as a potential espionage threat. The advocacy group Judicial Watch announced on Thursday that it had filed a lawsuit seeking the release of records pertaining to senior DNI adviser Theodore Moran, who was serving as an intelligence adviser while also working as a paid consultant to China’s Huawei Technologies, which has been identified by the House Intelligence Committee “as...

House lawmakers are seeking to stop Russian spy planes from partaking in exercises that may enable them to collect sensitive “intelligence that poses an unacceptable risk” to U.S. national security, according to a proposal in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Lawmakers have proposed to fully freeze funds that currently allow the United States to sign off on these Russian flights under the Open Skies Treaty, an agreement that permits aerial surveillance flights over 34 countries. The House proposal would also reduce funding and limit the amount of information the United States provides to Russia about American missile defense...

Russian surveillance planes already fly over America, thanks to a long-standing treaty. But a new, ultra-sophisticated spy plane has U.S. military and intelligence bosses spooked. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military and American intelligence agencies have quietly pushed the White House in recent weeks to deny a new Russian surveillance plane the right to fly over U.S. territory. This week, the White House finally began consideration of the decision whether to certify the new Russian aircraft under the so-called “Open Skies Treaty.” And now the question becomes: Will the spies and generals get their way?

Peter Matthiessen, a roving author and naturalist whose impassioned nonfiction explored the remote endangered wilds of the world and whose prize-winning fiction often placed his mysterious protagonists in the heart of them, died on Saturday at his home in Sagaponack, N.Y. He was 86... Mr. Matthiessen was one of the last survivors of a generation of American writers who came of age after World War II and who all seemed to know one another, socializing in New York and on Long Island’s East End as a kind of movable literary salon peopled by the likes of William Styron, James Jones,...

A retired Marine with nearly two decades of aviation experience has stepped forward with a compelling theory about a mysterious plane that was spotted flying over Texas last month. On March 10, photographers Steve Douglass and Dean Muskett took pictures of three puzzling aircraft flying over Amarillo, and posted them online in hopes of identifying the planes. Retired-Marine James Vineyard has submitted one of the more interesting explanations, telling the Houston Chronicle he believes they are SR-72 Blackbirds - a spy plane that can cross the U.S. in less than an hour, unmanned.

Joint Subcommittee Hearing: Iran’s Support for Terrorism Worldwide Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa 2172 House Rayburn Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Mar 4, 2014 10:00am

TECHNOLOGY 7887 kHz, Your Home for Classic Cuban Espionage Radio The shortwave radio signals that the alleged Russian spies were using are still surprisingly effective. By Brett Sokol Posted Tuesday, July 6, 2010, at 1:53 PM ET The FBI documents that accompanied last week's arrest of 10 alleged Russian spies are alternately creepy—who knew the Tribeca Barnes & Noble was a hotbed of espionage?—and comical—turns out even foreign spies wanted to cash in on suburban New Jersey's real estate boom. With a nod to Boris and Natasha, the accused are also said to have used short-wave radio, a 1920s-era technology...

The National Security Agency (NSA) will send its recommendations for where to store telephone metadata records to President Obama later this week, the outgoing NSA director said Friday in a speech defending his agency’s surveillance tactics. General Keith Alexander, who is retiring as NSA director next month, did not say where he thinks the data should be held. President Obama recommended on January 17th that the government stop holding Americans’ phone call records, but pushing the data out to either telephone companies or to a third party are both seen as having significant drawbacks. “The good news is we have...

In June 1981, the Soviet Union began building a huge, nuclear-powered reconnaissance ship specifically designed to sail thousands of miles to the U.S. missile test site at the remote Kwajalein Atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There, the vessel would sit for months, hoovering up electronic data in order to determine what America’s most secretive weapons could do. But the spy ship Ural, completed in May 1983, sailed only once—from the Baltic shipyard where she was built to her home port of Vladivostok—and never went anywhere near Kwajalein. Hobbled by faulty hardware, cursed with bad luck and starved...

Yesterday “TheBlaze” published an interview with Romanian Lt. Gen Ion Pacepa, a discussion which arose around the publishing of his work, “Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism.” Pacepa is a defector to the United States, but not just any run-of-the-mill defector. He is the highest-ranking Soviet intelligence officer to ever defect. He crossed over back in 1978 and was given political asylum by then President Jimmy Carter. He has made a practice since that time to write in defense of freedom while living his life under threat of assassination, hiding out...

He [Snowden] states that his “breaking point” was “seeing Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress” denying the existence of a domestic spying programs while under questioning in March of last year. Mr. Snowden goes on to state that, “The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public.” Read more: http://benswann.com/media-blacks-out-new-snowden-interview-the-government-doesnt-want-you-to-see/#ixzz2sSdnMVhn Follow us: @BenSwann_ on Twitter

A court in Jerusalem has sentenced an Israeli man to four-and-a-half years in prison for offering to spy for Iran. Yitzhak Bergel, 46, pleaded guilty to charges of contacting a foreign agent, intent to commit treason and attempting to aid an enemy of Israel. But the court ruling noted that "no damage had been done to the state". Bergel belongs to the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect which is vehemently opposed to the State of Israel's existence. Its members believe a Jewish state can only be established by the Messiah.

During the 1980s with no end of the Cold War in sight, the CIA became alarmed at the number of Soviet spies working for the U.S. who were being arrested and executed. The U.S. network of informants within the USSR was rapidly being dismantled, severely damaging American intelligence gathering capabilities. It became apparent that the CIA had a mole who was compromising their efforts. Based on the book Circle of Treason by former CIA agent Sandy Grimes, the ABC series The Assets dramatizes the events and investigation leading to the arrest of traitor Aldrich Ames. The show is a grim...

MKs demand Pollard's release after revelations that US conducted surveillance on former PMs Barak, Olmert. A chorus of politician from across the political spectrum called for the release of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard on Sunday, after leaked NSA documents revealed the US has been tracking the e-mails of former Israeli leaders. Documents leaked by fomer National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the United States was spying on the e-mails of former prime minister Ehud Olmert and former defense minister Ehud Barak between the years 2008-2009. Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein (Likud Beytenu) assailed Washington for “hypocrisy,” saying that...