Archive for the 'Covert Operations' Category
Five Eyes Meeting in New Zealand
April 20th, 2017Via: New Zealand Herald: The highly secretive meeting being held in Queenstown this weekend is a gathering of intelligence and security agencies related to the Five Eyes spying network, the Herald understands. Among the people believed to be attending are Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Mike […]
Top Obama Adviser Used NSA Intercepts to Learn Names of Trump Associates
April 4th, 2017Via: Bloomberg: White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in […]
Super SEALs: Elite Units Pursue Brain-Stimulating Technologies
April 3rd, 2017Via: Military.com: At a conference near Washington, D.C., in February, the commander of all Navy special operations units made an unusual request to industry: Develop and demonstrate technologies that offer “cognitive enhancement” capabilities to boost his elite forces’ mental and physical performance. “We plan on using that in mission enhancement,” Rear Adm. Tim Szymanski said. […]
Cyborgs at Work: Employees Getting Implanted with Microchips
April 3rd, 2017Like many of you out there, I first heard about this technology in the 1990s. Decades later, a passive microchip implant seems like a practically innocuous fairy tale compared to the privacy hell that has metastasized all around us. In terms of technologies of political control, think of a chip implant as something like a […]
Apple Says Recent Wikileaks CIA Docs Detail Old, Fixed iPhone and Mac Exploits
March 23rd, 2017Great, I wonder what’s in the other 99% of the Vault 7 docs… Via: TechCrunch: We have preliminarily assessed the Wikileaks disclosures from this morning. Based on our initial analysis, the alleged iPhone vulnerability affected iPhone 3G only and was fixed in 2009 when iPhone 3GS was released. Additionally, our preliminary assessment shows the alleged […]
WikiLeaks Vault 7: CIA Firmware and Other Exploits on Apple iPhones and Mac Computers
March 23rd, 2017Via: WikiLeaks: Today, March 23rd 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 “Dark Matter”, which contains documentation for several CIA projects that infect Apple Mac Computer firmware (meaning the infection persists even if the operating system is re-installed) developed by the CIA’s Embedded Development Branch (EDB). These documents explain the techniques used by CIA to gain ‘persistence’ […]
A Simple Command Allows the CIA to Commandeer 318 Models of Cisco Switches
March 21st, 2017Via: Ars Technica: Cisco Systems said that more than 300 models of switches it sells contain a critical vulnerability that allows the CIA to use a simple command to remotely execute malicious code that takes full control of the devices. There currently is no fix. Cisco researchers said they discovered the vulnerability as they analyzed […]
How Police Departments Use Civil Forfeiture to Collect Billions
March 15th, 2017Whenever you hear about tips to the police from confidential informants or “concerned citizens,” etc. keep this in mind: U.S. Communications Intelligence Secretly Shared with Law Enforcement for Use Against Americans in Criminal Investigations. So, mass surveillance and civil forfeiture: Is there a link? “It is the height of naivete to think that once collected […]
NSA Routinely Monitors Americans’ Communications Without Warrants
March 15th, 2017Are They building electronic dossiers on as many of us as they can? I don’t know, but it sure looks that way. —Cryptogon, 2007: NSA, AT&T and the NarusInsight Intercept Suite In Open Thread: Trump Wiretap Claims, I wrote: Where is the uproar over the spook’s data center in Utah? Man, if you think that […]
FBI Undercover Stings Foil Terrorist Plots — That It Creates
March 12th, 2017Via: Kansas City Star: Announcements of foiled terrorist plots make for lurid reading. Schemes to carry out a Presidents Day jihadist attack on a train station in Kansas City. Bomb a Sept. 11 memorial event. Blow up a 1,000-pound bomb at Fort Riley. Detonate a weapon of mass destruction at a Wichita airport — the […]
