The American skies may soon be full of drones after it was disclosed that domestic law enforcement agencies, from the FBI to local police, have been granted permission to deploy the unmanned aircraft.
Documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws show that more than 50 non-military organisations have asked to fly drone aircraft, many of which can carry cameras and surveillance equipment for spying, within the US.
The NSA, the intelligence arm of the United States responsible for eavesdropping and code breaking, weathered criticism and high-profile legal challenges in 2005 for its warrantless wiretapping program, and now we have a decent idea of the sophisticated and controversial methods the NSA employs to penetrate global telecommunications networks. Still in the shadows, however, is a secretive joint program with the Central Intelligence Agency codenamed F6, but better known as the Special Collection Service.
The men and women of the Special Collection Service are responsible for placing super-high-tech bugs in unbelievably hard-to-reach places.
The Indian Navy is all set to commission its first Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) squadron on the East Coast at Uchipuli near here soon.
It is considered a significant step towards strengthening maritime surveillance and reconnaissance in Palk Strait, Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay off the Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh coast. The commissioning of the UAV squadron near Rameswaram assumes significance not only due to its close proximity to Sri Lanka but also due to the strategic importance of the region.
The US has launched a new classified radar imaging satellite that can see at night and through bad weather, allowing American intelligenceagencies to spy on countries of interest.
An unmanned rocket blasted off from the California coast carrying a clandestine new spy satellite called NROL-25 for the US military, media reports said.
The United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a mission to orbit the classified satellite for the US National Reconnaissance Office. The liftoff came after several delays due to bad weather and a technical glitch, Space.com reported.
Spies could now snoop on you through your TV, dispensing with the necessity of planting bugs in your room, according to CIA director David Petraeus.
The CIA says it will be able to ‘read’ these devices via the internet – and perhaps even via radio waves from outside the home, Petraeus added.
Everything from remote controls to clock radios can now be controlled via apps – and chip company ARM recently unveiled low-powered, cheaper chips which will be used in everything from fridges and ovens to doorbells, according to the Daily Mail.
“A good number” of unmanned U.S. military and intelligence drones are operating in the skies over Syria, monitoring the Syrian military’s attacks against opposition forces and innocent civilians alike, U.S. defense officials tell NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski.
The officials said this surveillance is not in preparation for U.S. military intervention. Rather, the Obama administration hopes to use the overhead visual evidence and intercepts of Syrian government and military communications in an effort to “make the case for a widespread international response,” the officials told Miklaszewski.
China’s intelligence operations are the “core arena” for achieving the superpower status which the Communist elite in Beijing so passionately desires. Central to its spy activities is the island of Cuba which is strategically located for the interception of U.S. military and civilian satellite communications. China’s spy services also cooperates closely with Havana’s own world-class intelligence services.
Inexplicably, the U.S. mass media are ignoring both the existence of the spy base as well as the Cuban-Chinese alliance which is responsible for it.
America’s classified X-37B spaceplane is probably spying on China, according to a report in Spaceflight magazine.
The unpiloted vehicle was launched into orbit by the US Air Force in March last year and has yet to return to Earth.
The Pentagon has steadfastly refused to discuss its mission but amateur space trackers have noted how its path around the globe is nearly identical to China’s spacelab, Tiangong-1.
There is wide speculation that the X-37B is eavesdropping on the laboratory.
“It sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake” could be the theme song for a new spy satellite being developed by DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s latest proof-of-concept project is called the Membrane Optical Imager for Real-Time Exploitation (MOIRE), and would provide real-time images and video of any place on Earth at any time — a capability that, so far, only exists in the realm of movies and science fiction. The details of this huge eye-in-the-sky look like something right out of science fiction, as well, and it would be interesting to determine if it could have applications for astronomy as well.
China launched two satellites Wednesday as part of a decade-long rapid expansion of earth-monitoring capabilities that also buttress the country’s growing military prowess.
Yaogan-12, the primary cargo of the launch, is the twelfth model in a series of “remote sensing” satellites that many analysts believe are tasked with gathering military intelligence. China, which has never acknowledged a defense-related launch, claims that the satellite will be used for “scientific experiments, land survey, crop yield assessment, and disaster monitoring.”
As the Police once sang [6], “Every breath you take and every move you make…I’ll be watching you,” and that seems to sum up the Italian Hacking Team services and what it pimps atIntelligence Support Systems (ISS) conferences [7]. While there are many vendors at such conferences offered worldwide and allegedly for “lawful interception, criminal investigation and intelligence gathering,” some stand out as ethically and legally questionable. We know cyber cops need ways to go after the evil cybercriminal elements hiding in cyberspace, but it’s the “mass surveillance” and “without a warrant” that sets our privacy hackles on edge as that seems to assume anyone may be a bad guy needing monitored.
It’s high time Canada had a proper foreign spy agency, especially if the feds are serious about positioning Canada as a country that punches above its weight on the international stage.
And security expert Christian Leuprecht said Canada could have one of the best foreign intelligence services in the world, given its very diverse population and the good relations the government has with Canada’s ethnic communities.
Speaking to Today’s Zaman, high-level officials from the Turkish Defense Ministry said: “For years, Israel has obtained images of our territory. For the first time, we will have a satellite for intelligence. Reciprocity is essential in international relations. If they observe Turkish soil, Turkey has the same right, too.”
Turkey’s defense and procurement authorities completed the deal with Telespazio for the construction and launch of the country’s first military satellite, Göktürk, in 2009. The 250-million-euro contract was signed on July 16, 2009 at a ceremony attended by representatives of Telespazio and top Turkish officials, including Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül and Undersecretariat for the Defense Industry (SSM) head Murad Bayar.
It also reflects a stocktaking of the intelligence agencies as Putin prepares to return to power. He draws his support from the spooks, but he also wants efficiency and obedience. The GRU often duplicated the work of the SVR and instead he wants it to concentrate on what it is best at: true military espionage, work in Central Asia and the Caucasus and, one may suspect, occasional assassinations of enemies abroad.
Putin was once a spook; he believes in them and draws many of his closest allies from their ranks. But he also knows that left to their own devices they will tend to be distracted by futile turf wars. They also get too big for their own boots and from time to time need reminding who’s boss. In this respect, the GRU is simply the sacrificial victim of the hour. The FSB and SVR, though, are expected to learn the lesson.
The Canadian Forces’ National Counter-Intelligence Unit assembled at least eight reports on the activities of native organizations between January, 2010, and July, 2011, according to records released under access to information law.
When told of the documents, one aboriginal leader said the thought of the military keeping tabs on natives was “chilling.”
This city now has five surveillance cameras watching traffic downtown, but next year’s Republican National Convention could bring hundreds more on the street and in the sky.
Among other things, officials are interested in:
• 164 cameras able to read a number 3 inches high at 300 meters in the day and identify people and vehicles at 100 meters in the dark. Many of these would be mounted on light poles.
• Two “unmanned aerial vehicles” that could hover for 20 minutes, fly in 20-knot winds and carry cameras with zoom lenses or thermal imaging capabilities.
When Iran’s president accused the U.S. at the United Nations General Assembly last year of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks, American diplomats were not caught flat-footed by the tirade.
Even before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad finished his incendiary rant, U.S. diplomats marched out of the cavernous U.N. hall in protest and were ready with a written statement condemning his comments.
It was as if the U.S. knew exactly what Ahmadinejad intended to say.
A blindfolded man stands on explosives, trembling as he confesses to spying for the CIA in Pakistan. Armed men in black balaclavas slowly back away. Then he is blown up.
One of his executioners —members of an elite militant hit squad — zooms a camera in on his severed head and body parts for a video later distributed in street markets as a warning.
Al Qaida, the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani network — blamed for the September 13 attack on the US embassy in Kabul — picked the most ruthless fighters from their ranks in 2009 to form the Khurasan unit, for a special mission.
Haiti has not had a military since it was disbanded in 1995 under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide after years of coups and human rights abuses. Some Haitians have said in recent months they welcome the creation of a new army, a reflection of patriotism but also of the expectation that it would create jobs in an impoverished country.
Human rights groups have expressed uneasiness with the idea of restoring a military that was notorious for abuses.
The New York Police Department put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Associated Press.
The documents describe in extraordinary detail a secret program intended to catalog life inside Muslim neighborhoods as people immigrated, got jobs, became citizens and started businesses. The documents undercut the NYPD’s claim that its officers only follow leads when investigating terrorism.
Following revelations by Bloomberg Markets Magazine that a spun-off intelligence unit of German electronics giant Siemens, Trovicor, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Perusa Partners Fund 1 LP, a shadowy investment firm headquartered in Guernsey, had sold surveillance gear to Bahrain deployed against the pro-democracy movement, it has since emerged that Microsoft established an IT training program for Ministry of Justice and Interior officials in Tunisia.
A secret State Department cable published by the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks, 06TUNIS2424, “Microsoft Inks Agreement with GOT,” 22 September 2006, noted that “during the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in South Africa July 11-12, the GOT and the Microsoft Corporation signed a partnership agreement that provides for Microsoft investment in training, research, and development, but also commits the GOT to using licensed Microsoft software.”
The export of high-tech products, included software suites employed for spying on political dissidents, are said to be closely regulated under U.S. law to prevent abuse by repressive governments.
Reports suggesting South Africa’s intelligence agencies are in fresh turmoil are likely to be discussed by Parliament’s joint standing committee on intelligence (JSCI) when it convenes on Wednesday.
The committee is supposed to act as a watchdog over the country’s intelligence services. Its chairman, ANC MP Cecil Burgess, confirmed on Sunday that the matter would be raised.
An official silence reigned on Sunday on allegations suggesting a major stand-off between State Security Minister Siyabonga Cwele and the country’s three top intelligence bosses.
Both The Sunday Independent and City Press reported that ministry spokesman Brian Dube had confirmed on Friday that Gibson Njenje, the head of the State Security Agency (SSA) – previously known as the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) – had resigned “with immediate effect”.
Mall of America officials say their security unit stops and questions on average up to 1,200 people each year. The interviews at the mall are part of a counterterrorism initiative that acts as the private eyes and ears of law enforcement authorities but has often ensnared innocent people, according to an investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting and NPR.
In many cases, the written reports were filed without the knowledge of those interviewed by security. Several people named in the reports learned from journalists that their birth dates, race, names of employers and other personal information were compiled along with surveillance images.
One Iranian man, now 62, began passing out during questioning.An Army veteran sobbed in his car after he was questioned for nearly two hours about video he had taken inside the mall.
Much of the questioning at the mall has been done in public while shoppers mill around, records show. Two people, a shopper and a mall employee, also described being taken to a basement area for questioning. Officials at the mall would not address individual cases.
For a military that loves to create shiny hardware from scratch, dipping into the used-plane market is a rarity, done only under the most urgent conditions. Remotely piloted drones have been the intelligence stars of the wars, but the Pentagon cannot build them quickly enough to meet the demand.
So the Air Force bought eight used King Airs and equipped them with video cameras and eavesdropping gear as part of a broader effort to supplement the drones with manned aircraft. The Army has also retooled similar planes to track insurgents who plant bombs.
In turning to the King Airs, the Pentagon has appropriated an aircraft that is commonly associated with business executives flying to meetings and wealthy vacationers to weekend ski outings. King Airs have also drawn celebrity pilots like the late actor and comedian Danny Kaye.
Following successful field tests at White Sands Missile Range, the Army placed orders a new force-protection system that combines several technologies into one platform.
Nicknamed Kraken after the mythological sea-creature with untold tentacles, The Combat Outpost Surveillance and Force Protection System (COSFPS) integrates radar, unmanned sensors, surveillance cameras, remote-controlled weapons, and gunshot detection into an interface controlled by a couple of soldiers with a laptop.
The latest report offers the balanced assessment that China will need several decades to develop the capacity to project and sustain large high-intensity military operations far from Chinese territory, but it still expects the Chinese armed forces to acquire considerable regionally focused capabilities by 2020. It also estimates that China spent more than $160 billion for its military in 2010, well above China’s official figure, which sounds about right since the Chinese government excludes several categories from the official defence budget.
True to form, on Friday, China’s Defence Ministry, in the first official Chinese response to the report, accused the United States of exaggerating China’s military power. In its faxed comments to Reuters, the Ministry said that: ‘It is very normal for the Chinese military to develop and upgrade some weapons and armaments.’ Chinese officials have repeatedly denounced the annual reporting process as inherently divisive and hypocritical in light of the enormous US defence budget, which is several times greater than even the highest estimate of Chinese military spending.
Ali Soufan is a long-time FBI agent and interrogator who was at the center of the U.S. government’s counter-terrorism activities from 1997 through 2005, and became an outspoken critic of the government’s torture program. He has written a book exposing the abuses of the CIA’s interrogation program as well as pervasive ineptitude and corruption in the War on Terror. He is, however, encountering a significant problem: the CIA is barring the publication of vast amounts of information in his book including, as Scott Shane details in The New York Times today, many facts that are not remotely secret and others that have been publicly available for years, including ones featured in the 9/11 Report and even in Soufan’s own public Congressional testimony.
Shane notes that the government’s censorship effort “amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath…
The department has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as “rakers,” into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims.
Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit.
A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency’s payroll, was the architect of the NYPD’s intelligence programs.
Her operation, carried out from 2007 to 2009, was not only illegal but, according to Colombia’s attorney general’s office, designed to find incriminating evidence on judges and debilitate their investigation of the president’s congressional allies. The ensuing scandal has led to criminal investigations against Uribe’s top advisers and ensnared the former president himself, who served from 2002 to 2010.
A close U.S. ally in the war against drug trafficking, Uribe’s conduct is now under investigation by a special congressional commission. He denies giving orders to infiltrate the court.
As intelligence and defense departments enter a new era with reduced spending, special operations forces provide some stability to the security of the U.S. Special ops forces are a key component of the war in Afghanistan and have a high rate of military success, so even in an economic recession, people remain the greatest asset to the military.
These forces operate a network of secret prisons across the world and engage in: counter-terrorist activities; assassinations; long-range reconnaissance; intelligence analysis; foreign troop training; and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.
Dominicans are reeling from news that the government of Dominica through the National Joint Intelligence Committee (NJIC) has been discretely spying on the activities and actions of several Dominicans over the last few months.
The NJIC is a secret outfit allegedly set up by the authorities, and comprising of security officers of the Dominica Police Force. It is said to be headquartered at the sixth floor of the Financial Services Building in Roseau.
News of the spying came after Senior Counsel Anthony Astaphan inadvertently released a report he received from the NIJC concerning the meetings held by opposition groups at the beginning of the year.
