Archive for the 'Covert Operations' Category
U.S. Can’t Account for 40% of Firearms Sent to Afghan Security Forces
July 28th, 2014Via: Washington Times: A government oversight agency says the Pentagon has lost track of more than 40 percent of the $626 million in firearms it has provided to Afghanistan’s security forces, prompting officials to contemplate a “carrot and stick” approach to arming the fledgling military. A Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report scheduled to […]
Government Surveillance and Internet Search Behavior
July 27th, 2014Via: SSRN: This paper uses data from Google Trends on search terms from before and after the surveillance revelations of June 2013 to analyze whether Google users’ search behavior shifted as a result of an exogenous shock in information about how closely their internet searches were being monitored by the U.S. government. We use data […]
European Court Says CIA Ran Secret Jail in a Polish Forest
July 24th, 2014Via: New York Times: The CIA ran a secret jail on Polish soil, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on Thursday, piling pressure on Poland, one of Washington’s closest allies, to break its long silence about the global programme for detaining al Qaeda suspects. The court said it had been established that the CIA […]
Germany: Typewriter Manufacturers See Boom in Sales
July 24th, 2014Via: The Local: German typewriter manufacturers are enjoying a boom in sales following the NSA spying scandal. A German defence manufacturer switched to typewriters last year, while last week a leading politician called for the government to use the old technology. The head of the parliamentary inquiry into spying by the US National Security Service […]
Legislation Proposed in Australia that Would Jail Journalists for Reporting on Material Released by Goverment Whistleblowers
July 16th, 2014Via: Guardian: Australian journalists could face prosecution and jail for reporting Snowden-style revelations about certain spy operations, in an “outrageous” expansion of the government’s national security powers, leading criminal lawyers have warned. A bill presented to parliament on Wednesday by the attorney general, George Brandis, would expand the powers of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation […]
Israel Can’t Win This or Any Future Conflicts by Bombing Gaza
July 15th, 2014In other news: Hamas Was Founded by Mossad. Via: Los Angeles Times: The heavy bombardment of Gaza only deepens the Israelis’ problem rather than solving it. Over the last 47 years, Israel has systematically created one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world in the Gaza Strip. The more targets Israel destroys, the more […]
Britain: “Secret Service Infiltrated Paedophile Group to ‘Blackmail Establishment'”
July 15th, 2014Via: Express: BRITISH security services infiltrated and funded the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange in a covert operation to identify and possibly blackmail establishment figures, a Home Office whistleblower alleges. The former civil servant has told detectives investigating the activities of paedophiles in national politics that the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch was orchestrating the child-sex lobbying […]
German NSA Committee May Turn to Typewriters
July 15th, 2014Via: Ars Technica: Patrick Sensburg, chairman of the German parliament’s National Security Agency investigative committee, now says he’s considering expanding the use of manual typewriters to carry out his group’s work. In an appearance (German language) Monday morning on German public television, Sensburg said that the committee is taking its operational security very seriously. “In […]
GCHQ Has Developed Covert Tools to Seed the Internet with False Information
July 15th, 2014The headline is a huge understatement. Go through the document for a laundry list of stuff they’re up to. Via: First Look: The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web […]
From 2004: “Army Test in 1950 May Have Changed Microbial Ecology”
July 14th, 2014Via: San Francisco Chronicle: Serratia is a bacterium that some doctors and residents of the Bay Area have been familiar with for many years. In 1950, government officials believed that serratia did not cause disease. That belief was later used as a justification for a secret post-World War II Army experiment that became a notorious […]
