Posts in the topic "Intelligence"
Tech Devolution
Posted 28 Feb 10
One aspect of the continuing, astonishing pace of technological development is how quickly sophisticated capabilities become available to everyday joes. The military-industrial complex is losing control of cutting-edge technology faster than ever. Just this week, three examples hit the news:
It is now cheap and easy to jam GPS navigation systems. One small device can knock out receivers for a radius of several kilometers. Even better: for a few thousand dollars extra, you can actually spoof locations! I expect this to start showing up in techno-thrillers and caper movies no later than next year.
Second, high-speed license plate scanning is now available to auto-repo companies. For the cost of the camera and a $600/mo. subscription fee, you can drive around (at up to 80 mph) checking parking lots, highways, etc for cars under a repossession order. That’s nice enough, at least for bottom-feeding collection agencies, but the larger question is: what happens to the collected data? This technology won’t stay in the, um, responsible hands of bounty hunters and repo men forever, and once large numbers of entities are using it, one could imagine all sorts of uses for vehicle tracking. Stalking, for example.
Finally, widespread commercial use of video surveillance, and effective conscription of cellphone call data, allowed authorities to rapidly discover a complete record of the Dubai assassination team. Even ten years ago this would have been impossible; now it’s everyday. (What’s most surprising is that the team, widely believed to be from Mossad, didn’t realize how easily they’d be found.)
Human ingenuity ensures a proliferation of unexpected uses for new inventions. It’s a brave surprising new world.
This post indexed as: Crime, Intelligence, Technology
You Can Hire the CIA!
Posted 01 Feb 10
Active CIA personnel are moonlighting - for very nice salaries – at private companies.
So far as we know, they’re not actually engaged in black-bag entry or covert assassination. (For a discussion of the latter — why not knock off your business rivals? — see this Overcoming Bias post. Interestingly, the most obvious reason,”because it’s wrong,” didn’t really enter the comment stream.) Rather, CIA experts in lie detecting are hiring out to hedge funds and the like, to evaluate the truthfulness of statements by competitors and partners.
Why anyone thinks the CIA would be good at this is a question for another day. And at a time when contractors nearly outnumber US soldiers in our two wars, concerns about line-blurring between public and private intelligence may seem quaint.
Still, it seems like a slippery slope. In Russia, a profit-seeking military has become thoroughly corrupt. That’s nothing to emulate.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military
The Panopticlick – You Are Being Tracked
Posted 28 Jan 10
Via Brian Krebs: it turns out that with all but the highest levels of browser security enabled, any website that wants to can uniquely identify your computer.
Cookies, history, visited sites, behavior — none of that matters. Simply assembling all the configuration information your browser shares is enough. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has assembled a demonstration here. Go ahead, try it!
Scary, huh? My own results depended on the browser. Using Opera, with Javascript and cookies disabled, isn’t bad. But of course that setup makes it difficult to actually read many websites, so my fallback is Firefox, with scripting enabled. And on that platform, my config is unique among all 140,000 sites the Panopticlick has tested so far.
The metaphor they’re using is “digital fingerprint,” but it’s more like a DNA sample.
They know who you are. And they’re watching.
Well, there’s always Tor. But that makes your online experience slow and crippled indeed. I use it anyway for certain research — you know, nuclear terrorism and so forth — but it’s not practical for day-to-day browsing.
Happy Data Privacy Day!
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Technology
CIA Enlists Private Tech to Spy on Interweb
Posted 15 Jan 10
The CIA just increased their investment in a private company whose mission is to eavesdrop on social-networking flow everywhere.
Visible Technologies, which trawls “media, video, images, blogs, Twitter, and any RSS feed in 12 languages” for corporate and government clients, just announced a $22m C round. The CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, is both an original investor and a current participant.
Should this bother you? The company’s position is that public statements are, well, public — no expectation of privacy exists. It’s no different than taking a photograph of someone on the street. Or secretly recording the behavior of people inside a supermarket. Or pointing a video camera at an political demonstration …
Legal, sure, until the collected information is used for political purposes. Like compiling dossiers on elderly peace activists: the police would never do that, would they? Oh, yeah, they would.
But that’s not the point of this post. More interesting to me are the quasi-public VC “firms” the government has set up. Besides In-Q-Tel, the Army has its own, OnPoint Technologies (not to be confused with NPR’s talk radio show), and the DOD has a larger initiative they call DeVenCi — Defense Venture Catalyst Initiative. The latter doesn’t invest directly, but facilitates “communications and mutual understanding between innovators and the DoD.” (The difference between funding, vs. guaranteeing large contract purchases in a way that supports the company, may matter less than results, which are likely to be similar.)
Set aside the politics for a moment. Even if the goals of these programs are worthwhile, we should ask, are they a good way to go about it? Remember: taxpayer dollars at work.
For one thing, the employees are well compensated. Furthermore, at In-Q-Tel a significant portion of their pay depends on the financial success of the investments — not the strategic objectives. Conflict-of-interest problems appear inevitable, as fiduciary responsibilities collide with national security concerns. Suppose Visible Technologies became an acquisition target for a Chinese internet company (which is not unheard of). Should In-Q-Tel partners oppose the sale, against their own (and the taxpayer’s) financial interest?
That’s not a hypothetical. Christopher Byron detailed stock shenanigans by In-Q-Tel a few years ago. In somewhat hyperbolic language,
This week there’s more to report on this fishy, six-year-old firm, which has been pouring a reported $35 million annually of taxpayer money into deals running the gamut from the shrewd to the idiotic. The one common feature of them all: if an investment proves profitable, much of the money flows into the pockets of In-Q-Tel’s own employees; if a deal proves a loser, the nation’s taxpayers get stuck with 100 percent of the loss.
Now, evidence is emerging that In-Q-Tel’s brand of “Heads I win, tails you lose” deal-making may go even further than that. A source familiar with In-Q-Tel’s inner workings claims that once an equity deal with a company is worked out, In-Q-Tel officials routinely begin talking the company up on Capitol Hill to help the new partner land lucrative government contracts. A Newsweek story in March of last year suggested much the same thing, reporting that In-Q-Tel helped one of its investment partners — a Nevada-based software firm called Systems Research and Development — obtain government business.
As usual, the fundamental problem is oversight. If the public, or even just a few competent senators and members of congress, were allowed to keep an eye on what In-Q-Tel and its brethren are up to, Byron would have to find other subjects.
By the way, I should mention that my novel Exit Strategy dealt with a government-intelligence VC operation gone rogue. But that was fiction.
This post indexed as: Crime, Finance, Intelligence, Military, Technology
TMI: Tradecraft
Posted 06 Jan 10
One reason I enjoyed reading thrillers and spy novels, when I was younger, is the tradecraft you could learn. Detailed instructions for evading a tail, planting a bug in an embassy, exchanging coded microdots in dead drops — it’s all there, in between the gunfire and betrayals by venal politicians. A fascinating window into the secret world, unavailable anywhere else …
until now. This once-mysterious arcana is now laid out in dozens of neat, lesson-planned how-to books, aimed at all ages. The gift shop at the International Spy Museum includes (among many, many more) the following titles:
Handbook of Practical Spying
The Real Spy’s Guide To Becoming a Spy
Ultimate Spy
Other tricks and techniques are detailed in books like The Worst-Case Scenario Survival series. Wannabe MacGyvers have Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things (or, for that matter, The Unofficial MacGyver How-To Handbook).
From an author’s standpoint, it’s sort of like forensics. In the old days, half the fun of a police procedural was, well, the procedure: how to take a fingerprint, run a DNA scan, or spray a hotel room with Luminol. Thanks to CSI: Everywhere and a cultural fascination with this stuff, readers now know far more about it than I ever will. Even autopsies — for a mystery to be publishable, apparently a pathologist has to saw open a braincase by Chapter 3.
I can’t possibly keep up, but now that the information is out there, maybe it doesn’t matter so much. I guess there’s always character, plot, setting and voice to fall back on.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Technology, Writing
Armageddon
Posted 10 Nov 09
Someone’s blockbuster plot is assembling itself in Pakistan. Officials are openly talking about the possibility of a coup, or of radicals within the military taking over the country’s nuclear arsenal.
As usual Seymour Hersh has elicited some striking off-the-record comments. From a “Special Forces advisor”:
We are playing into Al Qaeda’s deep game here. If we blow it, Al Qaeda could come in and scoop up a nuke or two … The Pakistan military knows that if there’s any kind of instability there will be a traffic jam to seize their nukes.
That’s a nice image for the elevator pitch.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military, Writing
DEA, Abroad Again
Posted 10 Nov 09
Twenty years ago, the Drug Enforcement Agency began sending paramilitary teams abroad, to conduct “counter-drug” operations at the source. These efforts, begun during the Reagan administration and known as Operation Snowcap, ended in 1994, after a plane crash in Peru killed five DEA agents.
It turns out the DEA teams were revived and have been back in action for more than five years, in Afghanistan. Known as FAST — “Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Teams” — the agents seem to be involved in rather more than giving advice. Interestingly, although the DEA is part of the Justice Department, the FAST teams are largely funded and supported by the Pentagon.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military
Who’s Who in the IC
Posted 10 Nov 09
I read a British thriller recently that included an American covert-operations team — the usual black-bag stuff, infiltration, assassination, like that. The author must have had a tight deadline, because he made these operatives employees of the National Security Agency.
I guess to a foreign audience that sounded good enough, but of course the NSA doesn’t do any of that. They hire cryptographers and network analysts, not ex-SOF paramilitaries.
But it’s easy to get confused. The US has a vast, sprawling, and almost incomprehensible range of organizations involved in intelligence. Broadly speaking they may be divided into military and “civilian” agencies. The former includes, for example, the DOD’s Special Forces Command, and each service arm’s own intelligence units. The latter houses the CIA, the NSA, and innumerable others. The civilian side alone has a budget in the current fiscal year of nearly $50 billion; the military side is still kept secret. (You can “see” the Military Intelligence Program’s budget, every last line of which is redacted, here.)
The point is that if your plot requires spies and secret agents, there are many, many more choices than Langley. Is the villain smuggling a nuclear bomb in on a container ship? Coast Guard Intelligence could save the day. Is the warhead going the other way — stolen from a US decommissioning operation, for example? The Air Force Office of Special Investigations might be involved. Need someone to run down al-Qaeda’s hawala donors? Your hero could come from Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Financial Analysis. And so forth.
Of course, for many authors (and readers) such background wonkery is unnecessary — give your protagonist some Krav Maga training, stubble and an authority problem, and you’re done. For me, though, it’s a little like firearms. Sure, I could just hand out “pistols” and “rifles” and “MAC-10s” to my characters and let it go. (“MAC-10s” is a joke, you know that, right? A topic for another post …) But readers like more detail than that, so I do the research. It doesn’t take too much time.
Finally, the point of this entire post: the best survey of American spy agencies I know of is Jeffrey Richelson’s The US Intelligence Community. Sure, it’s incomplete; necessarily so, since chairs move around in the bureaucracy faster than Richelson’s 3-4 year revision cycle can keep up with. And plenty of material is available online, if you can sort through the reliability questions. But for an all-in-one reference, this book cannot be beat.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military