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CIA officers in Iraq have been largely hunkered down in their heavily fortified Baghdad compound since U.S. troops left the country in 2011, current and former officials say, allowing a once-rich network of intelligence sources to wither. That's a big reason, they say, the U.S. was caught flat-footed by the recent offensive by a Sunni-backed al-Qaida-inspired group that has seized a large swath of Iraq. "This is a glaring example of the erosion of our street craft and our tradecraft and our capability to operate in a hard place," said John Maguire, who helped run CIA operations in Iraq in...

Is it time for you to delete your Facebook account permanently? This guy thinks so, and his arguments may just convince you. You should take a moment to hear what he has to say and then decide for yourself.

A couple of months ago, we posted one of our early Google Search/Now rumors, and it was something of a long range rumor compared to others. While things like parking reminders, proper timer management, and bill pay reminders have already seen their public release, the ability to set contact-based reminders ("remind me when I'm with this person"), hasn't come forward yet. But it will likely appear very soon with a new feature in Android called Nearby, which will allow new interactions between you and nearby people, places, and things.

David Cenciotti, The AviationistMay 26, 2014, 12:59 PM On May 4, the U.S. Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk remotely piloted system arrived at Misawa Air Base, Japan, where it is scheduled to operate from May to October 2014. The huge Northrop Grumman UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) was deployed to Japan to support ISR (Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance) missions in the Pacific theater. Its operations are carried out by a team of 40 personnel belonging to the 69th Reconnaissance Group, Detachment 1. The UAS is a temporary replacement for the ISR missions launched from Guam. Those missions are particularly affected by...

Fugitive Edward Snowden on Friday challenged the NSA’s insistence that it has no evidence he tried to raise concerns about the agency’s surveillance activity before he began leaking government documents to reporters, calling the response a “clearly tailored and incomplete leak ... for a political advantage.” “The NSA's new discovery of written contact between me and its lawyers -- after more than a year of denying any such contact existed - raises serious concerns,” Snowden said in an email Friday to NBC News. “It reveals as false the NSA's claim to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post in December of...

Ten years before Edward Snowden revealed his bombshell that the United States government was electronically spying on people on a massive scale there was Bay Area-resident Mark Klein. Nannett Miranda reports. Ten years before Edward Snowden revealed his bombshell that the United States government was electronically spying on people on a massive scale there was Bay Area resident Mark Klein. As a San Francisco-based AT&T technician in 2003, he installed a splitter that sent a copy of communications data to a secret room set up by the NSA in his South of Market office building. "I knew right away that...

Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters who chronicled the document dump by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden via the U.K. press, now said he’s set to publish his most dramatic piece yet: The names of those in the United States targeted by the NSA. “One of the big questions when is comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’ Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that...

This is why I hate Obamacare. I knew this was coming. This is why I railed against using the IRS to enforce Obamacare. I knew insinuating the IRS into your health care was just the beginning. I knew going to electronic health records was going to send this country down the rabbit hole. And here it is. The federal government is piecing together a sweeping national “biosurveillance” system that will give bureaucrats near real-time access to Americans’ private medical information in the name of national security, according to Twila Brase, a public health nurse and co-founder of the Citizens Council...

A tech industry group that has Facebook and Google as participants has rejected the latest draft of a U.S. legislation that aims to put curbs on surveillance by the National Security Agency.The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday said it supported swift passage of the USA Freedom Act by the U.S. House of Representatives, and urged the Senate to follow suit."Overall, the bill's significant reforms would provide the public greater confidence in our programs and the checks and balances in the system," the White House said in a statement.But the tech companies, which also include Yahoo, AOL, Apple,...

China has dismissed all US accusations of industrial cyber-espionage against five of its military officials and published proof that Washington is actually stealing data from China. Beijing also summoned the US ambassador for an explanation. Beijing reacted to Washington’s recent round of industrial espionage accusations by publishing its latest data on US cyber-attacks against China. China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center of China (NCNERTTCC) reported that during just two months, from March 19 to May 18, the US directly controlled 1.18 million host computers in China using 2,077 Trojan horse networks or botnet servers. According to...

In the dystopian future of George Orwell's "1984," the government uses an endless state of war to justify food rationing by the Ministry of Plenty, rewriting history by the Ministry of Truth, and brutal interrogation by the Ministry of Love. Recently, President Obama's Privacy Working Group -- a response to the public outcry over the mass collection of telephone data -- concluded that the government needed to collect and review more private data. It's tempting to think, "you couldn't make this up." But, of course, Orwell imagined it in detail. The working group's report contains several mundane policy recommendations to...

Israeli officials denounced on Tuesday evening a report in Newsweek which said that American intelligence officials have linked the U.S. visa crisis to Israeli espionage. The report cited these American officials as saying in closed conversations that "Israel crosses the line for espionage in the United States." In response, Israeli officials told Kol Yisrael radio’s diplomatic affairs correspondent Chico Menashe that the report “smelled of anti-Semitism.” "The allegations of espionage in the U.S. are false. Israel is not spying there. The report in Newsweek smells of anti-Semitism, we are portrayed as an enemy country,” one official told Kol Yisrael. Another...

New restrictions on police use of cell phone tracking technology has won backing from the Minnesota Senate. Senators voted Tuesday to require a special tracking warrant when a device is used to find a person's location by their cell phone or other electronic devices. The bill says law enforcement must show probable cause of a crime. People being tracked must eventually be notified that their information was collected.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Onondaga County has 5.2 million records showing where drivers have been over the past year. But if you'd like to know what the county has on your travels, you're out of luck. Police cars throughout the county are outfitted with special cameras -- license plate readers -- that take hundreds of pictures of license plates a minute. Those records, showing the plate and where it was photographed, are warehoused in the county's database and held for a year. Onondaga County denied a Freedom of Information Law request from me for all records they had on my license...

Everyone seems to forget that the FBI is the NSA's primary partner in the latter's domestic spying operations and that, in fact, the NSA's job would be impossible without them. Whenever you see a company deny giving any data to the NSA remember: It's because it's not the NSA asking (or demanding) the information of them, it's the FBI.

A few weeks back, I read a Washington Post story "Inside the admissions process at George Washington University" and noted this interesting tidbit towards the end: GW also asks students to list a role model and two words to describe themselves. As for herself, Freitag said, she would list “Martha Stewart/Tina Fey” and “sassy/classy.” This year, she’s seeing a lot of Edward Snowden citations. I had thought about writing it up, but decided it was a pretty small thing, really. It's not secret that, as a group, younger people have a much more favorable impression of Snowden than older people....

Federal systems remained vulnerable to hackers even after researchers identified the bug. Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security, but it didn't alert anyone in the government. Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered "Heartbleed"—a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL—some time in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services—such as email, search, and YouTube—before the companies publicized the bug on April 7. The researchers also notified a handful of other companies about the bug before going...

The Surveillance State goes big in an article from Gizmodo, which describes early testing of a "God's-eye" system that collates information from multiple sources on the ground, giving the authorities what inventor Ross McNutt describes as "a live version of Google Earth, only with TiVo capabilities." What McNutt's system does grows more amazing, and perhaps more chilling, as you read more about how it works: It's sort of similar to what your average satellite can do—except, in this case, you can rewind the video, zoom in, and follow specific people and cars as they move around the grid. It's not...

WASHINGTON — Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday. But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to...

link only: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-11/nsa-said-to-have-used-heartbleed-bug-exposing-consumers.html