• Manning found guilty of violating the Espionage Act, acquitted of aiding the enemy

    A military judge earlier this afternoon (Tuesday) found Private Manning Pfc. Bradley Manning guilty of more than twenty counts of violating the Espionage Act. The judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, found Manning not guilty of aiding the enemy. Manning admitted to being to source of the massive leaks of U.S. government documents and videos, leaks which came to be called WikiLeaks. In all, Manning has leaked more than 700,000 documents. The sentencing phase will begin Wednesday. Violating several aspects of the Espionage Act could lead to punishment of up to 100 years in prison.

  • Deeply divided House rejects effort to curb NSA data collection program

    In an exceedingly close vote — 205-to-217 — a bitterly divided House of Representative on Wednesday rejected legislation proposed to block the National Security Agency (NSA) from continuing its metadata collection programs. The debate over the balance between security and privacy – and whether, indeed, the NSA surveillance programs threatened privacy — saw the formation of an unusual coalition of liberal Democrats and libertarian and tea party Republicans calling for curbing the NSA surveillance power.

  • Details of al Qaeda’s “next generation” bomb, aborted effort to take out its designer, emerge

    Al Qaeda engineers have been working on designing a sophisticated bomb powerful enough to bring down passenger planes but which is designed to avoid detection by explosives detection machines or trained dogs at airports. “All of our explosive detection equipment wasn’t calibrated to detect [this type of bomb]” TSA director John Pistole said. “And all of our 800 bomb-sniffing dogs had not been trained for that specific type.” A CIA informant inside a Yemeni cell of al Qaeda volunteered to place the bomb on a U.S.-bound plane, but instead delivered it to his CIA handlers in Saudi Arabia. A CIA effort to learn more about the bomb maker, Ibrahim Hassan Asiri, and take him out was aborted when someone leaked the story to AP. The news service refused pleas by the administration to postpone publication of the story until the end of the operation. The AP did agree to delay publication by a week to ten days to allow the CIA to extricate the agent and his family from Saudi Arabia to safety before publication. Asiri and his bomb-making assistants are still at large.

  • FAA warns Colorado town about drone hunting

    The town of Deer Trail, Colorado is considering the idea of allowing town residents to purchase hunting permits to shoot down drones operated by the government. The proposed permit would cost $25, and residents would be entitled to a $100 reward from the city for a successful attempt to shoot down a drone, if the drone’s “markings and configuration are consistent with those used on any similar craft known to be owned or operated by the United States federal government.”

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  • Angry lawmakers warn NSA to curb surveillance operations

    John Inglis, the deputy director of the National Security Agency (NSA), told angry lawmakers yesterday that his agency’s ability to analyze phone records and online behavior is greater than what the agency had previously revealed. Inglis told members of the House Judiciary Committee that NSA analysts can perform “a second or third hop query” through its collections of telephone data and Internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations. Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), the author of the 2001 Patriot Act, warned the intelligence officials testifying before the committee that unless they rein in the scope of their surveillance on Americans’ phone records, “There are not the votes in the House of Representatives” to renew the provision after its 2015 expiration. “You’re going to lose it entirely,” he said.

  • Automatic license plate readers used to collect, store data on millions of Americans

    Automatic license plate readers are the most widespread location tracking technology available to law enforcement. Mounted on patrol cars or stationary objects like bridges, they snap photos of every passing car, recording their plate numbers, times, and locations. At first the captured plate data was used just to check against lists of cars law enforcement hoped to locate for various reasons (to act on arrest warrants, find stolen cars, etc.). Increasingly, however, all of this data is being fed into massive databases that contain the location information of many millions of innocent Americans stretching back for months or even years.

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  • CIA copied, employed “Q”-developed 007 outlandish gadgets

    The real-life CIA copied and employed a few outlandish gadgets from James Bond movies. The CIA was successful copying Rosa Klebb’s infamous spring-loaded poison knife shoe from the film From Russia with Love, but was less successful trying to copy the homing beacon device used in Goldfinger to track the villain’s car. The CIA version had “too many bugs in it,” former CIA director Allen Dulles would later say, and stopped working when the enemy entered a crowded city.

  • Navy drone lands on ship without human assistance

    A U.S. Navyexperimental drone has executed several landings on the USS George H.W. Bush, marking an advance in robotic aviation. The drone calculated, without human assistance, how fast to approach the ship, when to put its wheels down, and when to hit the brakes.

  • CBP drones may be armed with non-lethal weapons

    Customs and Border Protection (CBP) currently has eight Predator drones used on the northern and southern borders, and two more drones watching the Caribbean. The drones are equipped with high-tech cameras. Critics say drones are not an efficient way to monitor the border, and that they lead to few arrests and seizures. Other critics are worry about something else: a recent CBP report show that the agency is considering arming these drones with “expendables or non-lethal weapons designed to immobilize [targets of interest].”

  • NSA revelations raise doubts about passage of cybersecurity legislation

    U.S. officials say the revelations about the National Security Agency’s(NSA) domestic surveillance programs could make it harder for lawmakers to pass a cybersecurity bill. Critics of the House cybersecurity bill, known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which was passed earlier this year (it is still being debated in the Senate), argued the bill could lead to private information falling into the hands of the NSA.

  • Documents show NSA conducted surveillance of EU member states, embassies (updated)

    European politicians issued indignant warnings Sunday to the United States that U.S.-European relations may suffer as a result of revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) spied on European governments and their embassies in Washington, and on European Union (EU) offices. The revelations were contained in documents, dated 2010, which Edward Snowden took from Booz Allen. Observers note that the revelations are not exactly news, since it has always been assumed that the United States spies on the activities of foreign diplomats – even those representing allies — in the United States. It has also been assumed that the United States was conducting surveillance of major countries and international institutions. Moreover, at least seven European Union member states – the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy — have formal agreements with the United States to provide communications metadata to the NSA. “There’s a certain schadenfreude here [in Europe] that we’re important enough to be spied on,” a senior European official said. “This was bound to come out one day. And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of our member states were not doing the same to the Americans.”

  • Documents show NSA conducted surveillance of EU member states, embassies

    European politicians issued indignant warnings Sunday to the United States that U.S.-European relations may suffer as a result of revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) spied on European governments and their embassies in Washington, and on European Union (EU) offices. The revelations were contained in documents, dated 2010, which Edward Snowden took from Booz Allen. Observers note that the revelations are not exactly news, since it has always been assumed that the United States spies on the activities of foreign diplomats – even those representing allies — in the United States. It has also been assumed that the United States was conducting surveillance of major countries and international institutions. Moreover, at least seven European Union member states – the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy — have formal agreements with the United States to provide communications metadata to the NSA. “There’s a certain schadenfreude here [in Europe] that we’re important enough to be spied on,” a senior European official said. “This was bound to come out one day. And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of our member states were not doing the same to the Americans.”

  • U.K. increases intelligence agencies’ budget to counter terror threat

    George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, will today announce the government’s spending plans for FY 2015-16. The U.K. agencies responsible for fighting terrorism — MI6, MI5, and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — will see a significant increase in their combined £1.9 billion budget, an indication of the David Cameron government’s concern about the growing terrorism threat the United Kingdom.

  • Background check of Snowden may have been faulty

    The Inspector General of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) told lawmakers that a 2011 security reinvestigation of Edward Snowden’s background, conducted by a government contractor, may have been faulty. Later in 2011, OPM began investigating the contractor — USIS — for contract fraud. That investigation is still ongoing. The IG told the lawmakers that eighteen background investigators and record searchers — eleven federal employees and seven contractors — have so far been convicted for falsifying background investigation reports. Their abuses included interviews that never occurred, answers to questions that were never asked, and record checks that were never conducted, the IG said.

  • States move to draft their own drone laws

    Advances in drone technology and drop in prices have led media and other organizations, and even private citizens, to purchase drones to do their own investigations. Several states have now drafted their own drone laws.