Tag: CIA

Congress to investigate UFOs – or is it the other way round?

5 Comments

As Congress prepares to hold the first public hearing on UFOs in half a century, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are feuding internally over how much to cooperate with demands to investigate and share what they know, according to current and former national security officials.

Pentagon officials are under increasing pressure to carry out Congress’ recent mandate to establish a permanent effort to coordinate research into reports of highly advanced aircraft of unknown origin intruding into protected airspace.

The law also requires regular classified and public reports to oversight committees on new incidents involving “unidentified aerial phenomena,” including previous information or investigations that are uncovered in government repositories or testimony…

“Without forcing peoples’ hand, it is going to be very difficult to uncover legacy ventures and programs that we know about based on oral interviews we dug up,” said a Defense Department official who is involved in the new effort but was not authorized to speak publicly. “There has to be a forcing mechanism.”

The official said there are people with knowledge of the phenomena who have yet to contribute to the oversight effort…“These people exist and they are protecting very interesting information,” the official said.

Over decades, experience tells me that even an official holding a tiny piece of information sought by Congress, the American public…will want a quid pro quo for speaking up. Even if they’ve not come forward because they believe their information useless. They can make it look like a hole card. Hidden value.

I’d be happy to get a science-based analysis of the history of UFO’s and learn whether or not public curiosity has value or not – or are we all chasing shadows?

Meta/Facebook bans cyber-mercenaries

1 Comment


Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has banned several “cyber-mercenary” groups thought to have been offering surveillance services aimed at activists, dissidents and journalists worldwide.

The social media giant said on Thursday it had begun warning about 50,000 people it believed may have come under scrutiny across more than 100 nations…

In a report, Meta called out seven private surveillance companies for hacking and other abuses, suspending roughly 1,500 mostly fake accounts across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

The Facebook parent said it deleted accounts tied to Cobwebs Technologies, Cognyte, Black Cube and Bluehawk CI – all of which were based or founded in Israel, a leading player in the cyber-surveillance business…India-based BellTroX, North Macedonian firm Cytrox and an unidentified entity in China also saw accounts linked to them removed from Meta platforms.

I’ve spent most of my adult life spied upon by one or another government agency. Most of them belonging to good old freedom-loving Uncle Sam. If you’ve ever been a civil rights activist, worked as hard as you could for peace and an end to wars designed for profit and power…any number of affronts to the powers-that-be in the GOUSA…you’re on “the list” budgeted by one or another agency in Washington, DC.

That’s not a solo act. Many nations have visible and hidden line items in their annual budget for spying on folks who speak up and speak out. It’s usually called something about national defense. Just understand. It’s a badge of honor whenever the few genuine history books are written.

Attaboy, Facebook!

“Our Father” knows best

14 Comments

[William] Barr’s path into the apparatus of the state is one on which he followed his father’s footsteps. Donald had worked at the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. While William was still a student at Columbia, where his father had also enjoyed a distinguished career as a teacher and administrator, he worked as a summer intern at the CIA and in 1973, took up his first full-time job there as an analyst.

That same year Donald Barr published an atrocious science fiction novel called Space Relations and dedicated it to his wife as a token of “thirty years’ love.” It is a probe launched from conservative, white, male America into the strange inner worlds of its own psyche in the Nixon years. As literature, it is excruciating. But it deals in a usefully unguarded way with themes that bear heavily on William Barr’s present position as Trump’s most formidable enabler: the legacy of slavery, Catholic sexual dogma, the proper response to revolt from below…

…Space Relations is really a thinly disguised plantation novel in which (Planet} Kossar serves as the Old South. Readers are being pointed in the direction of some allegory of American history…”

“The literary sins of the father—especially ones as grave as Space Relations—should not be visited on the son. There is, however, a very strong connection between Donald Barr’s hard-line Catholicism and William Barr’s present position as the main (perhaps the sole) intellectual buttress of Trump’s presidency. That connection lies in the idea of authority.”

And so it goes…

Dr Anthony Fauci on the New Rules of Living

7 Comments

…If [people], if they’re worried about the immune system and the relationship to COVID-19, and namely what’s going on right now, I would just click on the CDC website, cdc.gov, and then from there, you go to coronavirus.gov. And they could tell you all about the things that are relevant. Like why some people, like the elderly, and certain people who have underlying conditions that weaken their immune system, why they not only get infected the way everybody does, but they really have a poor outcome because their body is not able to fight off the virus very well. If you look at what’s going on in our own country and globally, generally, the people who really, really get into trouble are people who have underlying conditions…

…How confident are you that face masks, cloth masks like a bandanna, are enough when I go out to the grocery store?

It is certainly better than not having it on. Is it 100% protective against a droplet that someone might sneeze or cough, or even some aerosol? Of course not. However, in reality, if you can stay six feet from someone, at all times, the virus very, very unlikely would travel that far to you. But in the real world that we live in, when you go to a pharmacy or you go to a grocery store, the chances of you always being six feet from someone are just unlikely, which is the reason why the recommendation of, although it isn’t perfect, wear something that is a cloth…

Google and Apple are saying they’re going to develop technology to trace this via mobile phone. Do you think that’s a good idea?

…One of the sticky, sticky issues about that is that there is a lot of pushback in this country to get someone or some organization — to have by GPS somebody know where you were and when you were there. Even though from a purely public health standpoint, that makes sense. You know, you could look at somebody’s cell phone, and say, “You were next to these 25 people over the last 24 hours.” Boy, I gotta tell you the civil liberties-type pushback on that would be considerable. Even though from a pure public health standpoint, it absolutely makes sense.

There are many more questions, well-asked and answered, in the article. Definitely a worthwhile read.

Just to address the last question I included in this post…the Apple/Google contact tracking software won’t tell you or anyone else who those 25 people were you stood next to. The anonymizing process tells you that you were near a certain number of folks who exhibit symptoms, probably where. More detailed information would only be passed along to public health agencies IF those individuals opt in to allow that.

I understand the questions about civil liberties many folks will have. Once I became an activist against racism and bigotry, the whole range of progressive issues guaranteed I would be subject to scrutiny from the Big Brother factions in our government. I would have given this greater consideration…and still have chosen public health and safety as the greater good. But, I haven’t had to worry about that since about 1960. :-]

Pentagon says they’re worried about consumer DNA testing

Leave a comment


Lisa Ferdinando/DOD

The Pentagon is advising troops that there are security risks, to include mass surveillance and potential tracking, associated with using consumer DNA kits. The products have become popular in recent years with people looking to discover potential medical issues or uncover information about ancestry and even find unknown relatives…

“These DTC [direct-to-consumer] genetic tests are largely unregulated and could expose personal and genetic information, and potentially create unintended security consequences and increased risk to the joint force and mission,” the memo reads.

“Moreover, there is increased concern in the scientific community that outside parties are exploiting the use of genetic data for questionable purposes, including mass surveillance and the ability to track individuals without their authorization or awareness,” the memo states.

Humbug! Yes, we all should be concerned about privacy and access to personal information. Automatic call for anyone spending any time on the Web. Anyone applaud the Pentagon for worrying about citizens becoming security risks from DNA testing? Drivel!

As much as geeks drive concern over privacy and corporate use of that info – it should take a century or two for non-government snoops to catch up to the files in possession of the FBI, NSA and the rest of the vegetable soup tracking ordinary citizens under the umbrella of security. Cripes, last time I was involved with challenges to federal snoops, the active file went back to my first sit-in over sixty years ago.

Watch for the morning news

2 Comments

The NY TIMES and the Washington POST will be turning up two more whistleblowers. One is from the intelligence community and reportedly has even more and better evidence about corrupt phone calls to Ukraine. Another is from the IRS and has info about Trump and Giuliani getting report(s) on Trumpo’s sleazy taxes stashed in limbo.

Our fake president tries as well as he can to shut down a free press. But, good, bad, or indifferent, he has not succeeded and isn’t likely to.

CIA yanked top spy from Russia — feared Trump would expose him

1 Comment


мой питомец

❝ In a previously undisclosed secret mission in 2017, the United States successfully extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government, multiple Trump administration officials with direct knowledge told CNN.

❝ A person directly involved in the discussions said that the removal of the Russian was driven, in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.

Whether or not the Fake President is a willing stooge for Putin – or simply incompetent – is moot. He’s already proven himself untrustworthy by any executive security standards.

Solving the Mystery of the White Box That Fell From the Sky

Leave a comment

❝ Fifty-five years ago, in the woods outside Moncton, New Brunswick, around 160 miles east of the Maine border, David McPherson Sr. found a very large white box adorned with some very large lenses. It was attached to a parachute, so McPherson thought it might be an American spy camera, possibly launched by the Central Intelligence Agency. The fact that Canadian military tried to take the box from him — before McPherson and his family voluntarily relinquished it in exchange for answers that never came — only added to his suspicions.

McPherson died 18 months ago, never having gotten to the bottom of the mystery. But this week his son, David McPherson Jr., said that his father had been right all along. Declassified CIA documents reveal that the white box was part of a CIA program to send cameras into the sky with balloons to spy on the Soviets. The McPhersons’ box likely hit some wind and went astray…

❝ The CBC helped the McPhersons crack the mystery after running a story Monday about the “thing in the woods.” A rush of tips soon came in, leading the family to some declassified documents on the CIA website, in addition to the Military Communications and Electronics Museum in Kingston, Ontario, both of which had photos of apparatuses that looked like the one they had found. Documents also reveal that the box was likely part of Project Genetrix, a program started under President Dwight D. Eisenhower that used balloons to conduct surveillance over Russia and China, according to the CBC.

❝ It’s unclear where the box is now — maybe in a government warehouse somewhere — but the McPhersons still have some two-dozen photos from its discovery. They also now have closure.

Of course it would have been beyond stupid to think this thing was a weather balloon. Anymore than the replacement – shot down over the Society Union, the U2 spy plane – was doing weather research. The sad bit is that our government simply never feels there is an appropriate time to tell the truth to taxpayers picking up the tab.

Wonder what’s on the shelf labeled ROSWELL?

Six agencies, federal cops, investigate Russia paying for pro-Trump hackers

6 Comments


“Oh, Look. This one has Donald’s name engraved on it.”

❝ The FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election, including whether money from the Kremlin covertly aided President-elect Donald Trump…

The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence…

❝ Investigators are examining how money may have moved from the Kremlin to covertly help Trump win, the two sources said. One of the allegations involves whether a system for routinely paying thousands of Russian-American pensioners may have been used to pay some email hackers in the United States or to supply money to intermediaries who would then pay the hackers…two sources said.

The informal, inter-agency working group began to explore possible Russian interference last spring, long before the FBI received information from a former British spy hired to develop politically damaging and unverified research about Trump…

❝ Trump’s presidential transition team did not respond to a request for comment about the inquiry.

❝ FBI Director Comey refused at a recent Senate hearing to comment on whether the bureau was investigating Russia’s hacking campaign for possible criminal prosecutions. Spokespeople for the FBI, the Justice Department and the national intelligence director declined to comment…

❝ The BBC reported that the FBI had obtained a warrant on Oct. 15 from the highly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing investigators access to bank records and other documents about potential payments and money transfers related to Russia…

RTFA for the whole context. Importantly, this started before the Chris Steele dossier surfaced with the FBI. That the FBI was able to get a FISA warrant indicates they were able to establish probable cause the target was a foreign power – and the surveillance was likely to produce foreign intelligence.

How Russian cyberwar hackers invaded the U.S.

7 Comments


A filing cabinet broken into in 1972 as part of the Watergate burglary sits beside a computer server that Russian hackers breached during the 2016 presidential campaign

❝ When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.

His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the Dukes,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government…

❝ Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C. who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real F.B.I. agent and not an impostor…

❝ It was the cryptic first sign of a cyberespionage and information-warfare campaign devised to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, the first such attempt by a foreign power in American history. What started as an information-gathering operation, intelligence officials believe, ultimately morphed into an effort to harm one candidate, Hillary Clinton, and tip the election to her opponent, Donald J. Trump.

❝ Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the D.N.C. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin…instead of Republican President Richard Nixon.

RTFA. Journalism from the NY TIMES mostly unadulterated by editorial requirements. Well done tale of the level of cyber-ignorance common to much of our government, a significant chunk of the global corporate world.

A worthwhile read for you and me – long before the movie comes out. And it will.