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One of the U.S. Air Force’s secretive planes is pretending to be a vessel from the far, far future—the 23rd Century in fact. A U-2 spy plane took off from Northern California today broadcasting the aviation code NCC-1701A, which, as all Star Trek fans know, is the designation for the USS Enterprise.

Russia has detained a US citizen on suspicion of spying, according to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). American Paul Whelan was arrested December 28 in Moscow "while carrying out an act of espionage," the FSB said in a statement. "The investigation department of the Federal Security Service of Russia initiated a criminal case against a US citizen under article 276 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The investigation is underway," the statement continued. Article 276 is espionage. If found guilty, Whelan faces 10 to 20 years imprisonment, Russia's state-run news agency TASS reported. The Russia Ministry of...

Documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reveal more about a super-secretive partnership between federal agents and AT&T to run a massive telephone surveillance program. Hemisphere was first publicly disclosed in a New York Times article back in 2013 after a citizen activist in Seattle discovered the program through an open records request. Here’s how the EFF describes Hemisphere. Through the Hemisphere program, AT&T assists federal and local law enforcement in accessing and analyzing its massive database of call detail records (CDRs)—information on phone numbers dialed and received, as well as the time, date, and length of call and...

The Indian government has authorized 10 central agencies to intercept, monitor, and decrypt data on any computer, sending a shock wave through citizens and privacy watchdogs. Narendra Modi’s government late Thursday broadened the scope of Section 69 of the nation’s IT Act, 2000 to require a subscriber, service provider, or any person in charge of a computer to “extend all facilities and technical assistance to the agencies.” Failure to comply with the agencies could result in seven years of imprisonment and an unspecified fine. In a clarification posted today, the Ministry of Home Affairs said each case of interception, monitoring,...

President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday it was unclear to him why a Russian woman, Maria Butina, had been detained in the United States and accused of being a Russian agent because his intelligence chiefs had told him they knew nothing about her. “...she risks 15 years in jail. For what?” asked Putin. “...I asked all the heads of our intelligence services what is going on. Nobody knows anything about her.”

RUSH: Michael Cohen has begged a federal judge for mercy after his guilty plea. I should tell you, Paul Sperry, who writes for the New York Post and Real Clear Politics, took a look. He did a deep dive into Cohen’s plea that has been publicized by Mueller. We’ll link to it at RushLimbaugh.com. I’d have to read the whole thing to you, basically get in the weeds, but his conclusion is that this plea deal actually exonerates Trump, but that that’s not the way Mueller is gonna end up reporting this. Now, Rudy Giuliani is out joining the criticism...

FULL TITLE: Newsweek Publishes Propaganda From Actual SPY Attempting to Gain Support for Prosecution of Julian Assange Newsweek isn’t even being discreet about their embrace of outright Deep State propaganda anymore. On Saturday, the increasingly-irrelevant outlet published an article from actual intelligence agency spy Naveed Jamali, in which he attempts to gain support for the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “Like many current and former members of the intelligence community, I’ve been frustrated by the unwillingness of our government to act against Assange and Wikileaks,” Jamali admits in his ranting article. Caitlin Johnstone reports: “Jamali is currently a reserve...

The latest mystery mission of the U.S. Air Force's robotic X-37B space plane has now passed the 400-day mark . This mission — known as Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV-5) — was rocketed into Earth orbit on Sept. 7, 2017, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The uncrewed space plane is carrying out secretive duties during the X-37B program's fifth flight. [The X-37B Space Plane: 6 Surprising Facts] Flight duration Each X-37B/OTV mission has set a new flight-duration record for the program: OTV-1 began April 22, 2010, and concluded on...

Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign. Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the 2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee’s private law firm. That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to secretly pay research firm Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw intelligence alleging Trump...

The American appetite to import people from Communist China is almost as mysterious as its insistence on welcoming in millions of people from the same culture who gave us 9/11. China, not Russia, is our real global enemy (Russia, whom the Democrats used to love with the same fondness as a close family member from the Old Country), and yet we bring the Chinese and other hostiles here to "study" without a thought given to the real intentions of some of them. Latest case in point: A Chinese citizen living in Chicago was arrested Tuesday for allegedly spying, including...

Authorities on Tuesday arrested Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese citizen who was living in Chicago, accusing him of spying on the U.S. for China. Ji was allegedly trying to recruit a variety of Chinese nationals living in the U.S., according to a press release from the Department of Justice (DOJ). Some of Ji's alleged potential recruits were engineers and scientists, while others were U.S. defense contractors. Ji has been charged with one count of acting as an agent of a foreign government knowingly on U.S. soil. Ji allegedly did so at the direction of a high-ranking intelligence official within the Ministry...

WASHINGTON — Over the years, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has come to view herself as a China hand. And now, amid mounting tensions between China and Taiwan, the California Democrat is increasingly asserting herself behind the scenes as a would-be peacemaker. In the process, Feinstein is playing on a rare set of personal relationships that she has nurtured with the three men now at the center of the standoff: the presidents of China, Taiwan and the United States. To each, Feinstein has been dispensing strong and unequivocal advice. "I sometimes say that in my last life maybe I was Chinese," Feinstein...

Vice President Mike Pence had a message for former President Barack Obama at the Values Voter Summit Saturday: the American economy is booming because the Trump administration is rolling back Obama administration policies. “It’s been two years of promises made and promises kept, and we’re just getting started,” Pence told the conference audience in Washington, DC. He cited more than four million jobs created since President Donald Trump took office, record low black and Hispanic unemployment, wages rising at the fastest pace in a decade, and the highest middle class income in recorded history. Pence said this did not just...

“To be brave, you have to know so you can act.” They were South African author Sisonke Msimang’s words but could well have been the theme for this past weekend’s Antidote, a festival of ideas which focused on solutions that saw Chelsea Manning, Ronan Farrow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maureen Dowd, Msimang and more speaking out on the Sydney Opera House stages. The event was almost overshadowed by the home affairs department’s decision to issue a notice of intention to deny Manning an entry visa on character grounds last week. But her talk went ahead regardless: Manning video-called in from Los Angeles...

An indictment was returned today charging Ahmadreza Mohammadi-Doostdar, 38, a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen, and Majid Ghorbani, 59, an Iranian citizen and resident of California, with allegedly acting on behalf of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran by conducting covert surveillance of Israeli and Jewish facilities in the United States, and collecting identifying information about American citizens and U.S. nationals who are members of the group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). The charges were announced by Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers, U.S. Attorney Jessie K. Liu for the District of Columbia, and Acting Executive Assistant Director Michael McGarrity...

Paul Manafort stands trial in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's dock for a tax evasion case that the Department of Justice in 2005 decided there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute for no other reason than he later worked for Donald Trump. Perhaps now he wishes he had been the office manager for California senator Dianne Feinstein (D), who hired a Chinese spy to be her driver and office manager, for there seems to be a double standard here when it comes to working with agents for a foreign power. There is no evidence or even a suggestion that Feinstein was colluding...

The Russian woman who was indicted on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of Moscow reportedly socialized with an associate of then-candidate Donald Trump's during the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign. Citing documents and testimony that was provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee and later described to the newspaper, The Washington Post reported Friday that Maria Butina had many interactions with former Trump campaign aide, J.D. Gordon, over email. Gordon served as the Trump campaign's director of national security for six months until departing in August 2016 for a role on Trump's transition team. The Post reported...

About once a year the Society of Old Prosecutors meets in a private libation spot the name of which I am honor bound not to disclose. We met to discuss the week’s events and, as long as I don’t name the participants, I was given permission to share some of the talk. (Given the mad-dog operations of the Special Counsel some feared that to publicly state their views they’d be subject to midnight FBI raids with their nightgown-garbed wives rousted from bed and felt up by armed agents, or all their assets seized and their private correspondence unrelated to anything handed...

Desperate Trump-haters, searching for something – anything! – to show that the Trump administration is in bed with Vladimir Putin seized on the news a week ago that a young Russian named Maria Butina had been indicted for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), or, in the words of the DOJ, for "conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation within the United States without prior notification to the Attorney General." Here at last was a face – and a red-headed female one, to boot – to attach to the charges of treason being thrown around by the likes...

WASHINGTON — The White House has rebuffed concerns among American intelligence and law enforcement officials and ordered that more lawmakers be given access to classified information about an informant the F.B.I. used in 2016 to investigate possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to two American officials with knowledge of the decision. Both the director of national intelligence and the director of the F.B.I. tried to keep the classified documents tightly restricted, fearing that a broader dissemination of operational reports and other sensitive material could lead to more leaks of detailed information about the role of the confidential...