Were US Special Forces Involved in the Arrest of Faisal Shahzad?
by Jeremy Scahill
May 4, 2010
The team that was responsible for tracking down the Times Square Bomber was a group of secret Army intelligence planes. It was referenced in the press then removed from the story by CBS. Read about it in The Nation.
Via: The Nationby Jeremy Scahill
May 4, 2010
A US Special Operations Force source told me that the planes were likely RC-12s equipped with a Guardrail Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) system that, as the plane flies overland “sucks up” digital and electronic communications. “Think of them as manned drones. They’re drones, but they have men sitting in them piloting them and they can be networked together,” said the source. “You have many of them—four, five, six of them—and they all act as a node and they scrape up everything, anything that’s electronic and feed it back.” The source added: “It sucks up everything. We’ve got these things in Jalalabad [Afghanistan]. We routinely fly these things over Khandahar. When I say everything, I mean BlueTooth would be effected, even the wave length that PlayStation controllers are on. They suck up everything. That’s the point.”
Read: Times Square, Bombs and Big Crowds
Via: The NY Times Opinion Page
Focus on the ThreatClear thinking from one of the foremost security experts.
Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of several books on computer security, including “Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.”
No rules: Internet security a Hobbesian "state of nature"
Read entire article
From: ars technica
By Nate Anderson
February 1, 2010
Life in cyberspace can be nasty, brutish, and short. So says a new report (PDF) on international cybersecurity, which argues that the Internet is a Hobbesian “state of nature” where anything goes, where even government attacks maintain “plausible deniability,” and where 80 percent of industrial control software is hooked into an IP network.
It’s also a world where the US is both a model and a bully. When 600 senior IT security managers were asked which state actor was most likely to engage in cyberattacks, the top response was the US (36 percent), even among traditional US allies. On the other hand, US security practices were some of the world’s most admired.
Read entire article
In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ's New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush's
Commentary by Tim Jones @www.eff.org
Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration’s made two deeply troubling arguments.Read full article here
First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue “would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.” As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence….
