Posts Tagged ‘Intelligence’

 

A Court at the Crossroads

As Democrats and Republicans debate legislation that would alter 30-year-old limits on intrusive electronic and physical searches by the government, the secretive 11-member court that oversees surveillance of foreign-intelligence targets in the United States finds itself in the middle of a very public power struggle.Regardless of where law and policy makers fall on the question, […]

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The Liberator

Mike Wertheimer may be the most dangerous man in U.S. intelligence. You would probably never guess it, judging from his lengthy and opaque title — assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic transformation and technology. A perfect testament to the well-worn bureaucratic tradition of offering little insight by tossing around a lot of words. […]

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Intelligence Innovation Lags

America’s declining influence over scientific and technological innovation has had “an enormous impact” on U.S. intelligence agencies, and “makes it more likely that our adversaries can employ the very same — or perhaps even more advanced” — science and technology than that available to the United States. That’s the assessment from the Intelligence Science Board, […]

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The Spy Gap

Intelligence agencies must decode a human capital crisis. When Tom Waters decided to become a spy, the first thing on his mind wasn’t how much he’d get paid. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Waters, then a 36-year-old business consultant living in Tampa, Fla., packed his bags for a business trip to Montreal. His […]

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Signals and Noise

People like to say that the world changed on 9/11. That it became a more confusing place. But for two men, as buildings and bodies burned, the world became much clearer.On the morning of September 11, 2001, John Poindexter, a 65-year-old retired rear admiral and President Reagan’s onetime national security adviser, was driving to his […]

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More than Meets the Ear

The National Security Agency’s warantless surveillance program is broader than officials have described. The Bush administration has assiduously avoided any talk about the actual workings of its program to intercept the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are suspected of having links to terrorists abroad. Officials’ unwavering script goes like […]

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TIA Lives On

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.Research under the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness program — which developed technologies […]

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Intelligence Designs

In the spring of 2000, a year and a half before the 9/11 attacks, Erik Kleinsmith made a decision that history may judge as a colossal mistake.Then a 35-year-old Army major assigned to a little-known intelligence organization at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, Kleinsmith had compiled an enormous cache of information — most of it electronically […]

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The Private Spy Among Us

To help the government track suspected terrorists and spies who may be visiting or residing in this country, the FBI and the Defense Department for the past three years have been paying a Georgia-based company for access to its vast databases that contain billions of personal records about nearly every person — citizens and noncitizens […]

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The Worm that Turned

The federal government’s fight against one cyber villain changed its response to online attacks. Wednesday, June 20, 20016:30 a.m.FBI Headquarters,Washington After 23 years as a CIA analyst, having briefed the president and his team on every conceivable threat to national security, Bob Gerber was scared. More scared than he’d been in a long time.Holed up […]

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