I’ve been meaning to return to this Ellen Nakashima story on our cyberwar efforts. As you recall, it lays out the turf war between the CIA and DOD over clandestine cyberops, partly by telling the story a fight over whether or not to disrupt the jihadist online magazine “Inspire.” Last year, for instance, U.S. intelligence [...]

I’ve been reviewing the docket on Thomas Drake’s case to see whether it touches on the privacy concerns Drake had about NSA’s post-9/11 activities. It appears it doesn’t, even while there was an ongoing dispute about whether or not Drake will have access to the materials he submitted to the DOD Inspector General in support [...]

Thomas Drake, the NSA whistleblower, was on 60 Minutes this evening. I’ll have more to say about his appearance and case going forward, but I just wanted to highlight a critical detail revealed by 60 Minutes: the relative cost of Trailblazer–the SAIC implemented program Michael Hayden championed–and ThinThread–the program Drake and others claim was more [...]

Noah Shachtman points to NextGov’s unsuccessful attempt to define how much DOD plans to spend on cybersecurity next year. DOD or its components have offered three different versions: DOD’s mid-February report it would spend $2.3 billion Air Force’s mid-February report it, by itself, would spend $4.6 billion DOD’s March 23 revised report it would spend [...]

The Director of National Intelligence has floated a “shockingly bad” proposal on how much review GAO will be permitted within the intelligence community. According to Steven Aftergood, because the proposal defines the intelligence community broadly, it might result in the loss of GAO review in agencies like DOD and State. The Director of National Intelligence [...]

I’m reading through the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on what it did last Congress. Among a number of interesting details, the report describes really really bad accounting at the National Security Agency (NSA). The report describes how the Intelligence Authorization Bill of 2002 required that our big intelligence agencies produce auditable financial statements [...]

You’ve probably already read this story detailing how Hosni Mubarak used his 18 day delay in resigning to rob the Egyptian people. While the whole thing is worth a read, I wanted to point out how a senior Western intelligence official makes a point of revealing that we’ve been aware of conversations among Mubarak’s thieving [...]

In Colombia, apparently, you get arrested when you oversee illegal domestic wiretapping. Colombia’s Prosecutor General ordered the arrest of Jorge Noguera, a former director of Colombia’s state intelligence agency DAS, for the his alleged involvement in the illegal spying on government opponents. Noguera, who was director of the DAS between 2002 and 2006, is suspected [...]

Given the current surveillance state situation in America, the Keith case, formally known as United States v. United States District Court, is one of the most important cases from our recent past, and has profound implications on our present and future. The Keith case doesn’t have simple facts, but they are fascinating and instructive. So bear with me as we go though them – this is going to take awhile, and will be laid out over a series of four posts.

Tomorrow and Wednesday, the WaPo will continue its series on the Intelligence Industrial Complex. It will describe the contractors in the BWI/Fort Meade area that contribute to the NSA’s surveillance programs. According to the DNI’s Director of Communications, that story will describe the contractors in the vicinity, but not say explicitly that those contractors clustered [...]