Archive for the 'Covert Operations' Category
Senate Bill Rewrite Lets Feds Read Your E-mail, Cloud Docs, Facebook Information and More Without Warrants
November 20th, 2012Update: Dropped — It won’t just be the NSA that will get to have all the fun… Via: Cnet: A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans’ e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law. CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of […]
Broadwell and Kelley Visited White House
November 17th, 2012Via: AP: The two women at the center of the David Petraeus scandal — the biographer with whom he had an extramarital affair and the socialite who received worrisome emails that led investigators to uncover the illicit relationship — visited the White House on separate and apparently unrelated occasions. Neither woman met with President Barack […]
Ingress: Google’s Strange New Game
November 16th, 2012John Hanke is the head of Niantic Labs, the Google unit that created Ingress, a new global augmented reality game. Let’s quickly look at some of what Hanke was up to before he worked at Google. After graduation from the University of Texas at Austin, Hanke, “Worked in foreign affairs for the US Government in […]
Broadwell Had Substantial Classified Data on Computer
November 15th, 2012Hmm. Via: Reuters: A computer used by Paula Broadwell, the woman whose affair with CIA Director David Petraeus led to his resignation, contained substantial classified information that should have been stored under more secure conditions, law enforcement and national security officials said on Wednesday. The contents and amount of the classified material – and questions […]
Big Picture: Syria Conflict
November 12th, 2012Via: Boston Globe: In a conflict dragging on into its twentieth violent month, today was an especially deadly day in Syria, where rebels are fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad. A pair of car bombs exploded, one in Hama and one in Damascus, and both sides claimed wildly different casualty totals. Intense shelling of rebel […]
Mexico’s New President Set to Empower a ‘Devil’s Cartel’
November 11th, 2012Via: Narcosphere: Baruch Vega, a long-time CIA operative, has raised a red flag over the incoming president of Mexico’s decision to employ the former head of the Colombian National Police, Gen. Oscar Naranjo, as his security advisor in the war on drugs. “I do not think Naranjo will be running a war against drugs,” Vega […]
Mexican Hitman Claims Cartels Bought Guns from U.S. Border Patrol
November 11th, 2012Via: Wired: The testimony of a Mexican hitman turned US government witness has revealed some astonishing details of life inside Mexico’s criminal underworld. Most astonishing of all: claims that cartel assassins obtained guns from the US Border Patrol. According to Mexican magazine Revista Contralinea, the testimony comes from a protected government witness and former hitman, […]
CIA Director David Petraeus Resigns—Affair with High-Profile Journalist… But Wait, There’s More
November 10th, 2012You’ll love this. Via: National Post: David Petraeus resigned abruptly Friday as CIA director after an FBI investigation discovered his affair with biographer Paula Broadwell. Broadwell, who released All In: The Education of General David Petraeus earlier this year, is now under investigation for trying to access Petraeus’ email, which may have exposed classified documents, […]
How to Steal Data from Your Neighbor in the Cloud
November 9th, 2012It’s not easy, but the description of the attack is pretty interesting. Via: MIT Technology Review: The new attack undermines one of the basic assumptions underpinning cloud computing: that a customer’s data is kept completely separate from data belonging to any other customer. This separation is supposedly provided by virtualization technology—software that mimics an instance […]
HSBC Could Be Facing More than $1.5 Billion in Money Laundering Fines
November 5th, 2012Via: Reuters: A U.S. fine for anti-money laundering rule breaches could cost HSBC significantly more than $1.5 billion and is likely to lead to criminal charges, Europe’s biggest bank said on Monday. HSBC said the U.S. investigation had damaged the bank’s reputation and forced it to set aside a further $800 million to cover a […]
