Public Intelligence

Several sets of presentation slides for talks given by Ira A. “Gus” Hunt, the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer, on the topic of “big data” and cloud computing. A recent presentation given by Hunt at the GigaOM Structure:Data conference last week garnered significant attention for his discussion of the CIA’s desire to “collect everything and hang on to it forever.” Hunt’s presentation was similar to several he has given before, many of which share the same slides, including one which states: “It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information.”

A number of hacked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor have shed light on a global suspicious activity surveillance system called TrapWire, that is reportedly in use in locations around the world from the London Stock Exchange to the White House. The emails, which were released yesterday by WikiLeaks, provide information on the extent and operations of a system designed to correlate suspicious activity reports and other evidence that may indicate surveillance connected with a potential terrorist attack.

The following photos depict various pieces of art held in the CIA Museum at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.  The museum’s collection, interestingly, seems to hold only one abstract art piece by artist Gene Davis who was known for paintings featuring striking sets of colorful vertical lines.  Captions are provided by the CIA.
 

A formerly classified document from 1952 on the CIA’s Project BLUEBIRD, an offshoot of Project MKULTRA.

A report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence detailing an investigation into the CIA’s MKULTRA program, dated August 3, 1977

A CIA Inspector General report written in 1963 following an investigation into the Agency’s MKULTRA program.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is building a computer system capable of automatically analyzing the massive quantities of data gathered across the entire intelligence community and extracting information on specific entities and their relationships to one another. The system which is called Catalyst is part of a larger effort by ODNI to create software and computer systems capable of knowledge management, entity extraction and semantic integration, enabling greater analysis and understanding of complex, multi-source intelligence throughout the government.

Israel’s intelligence services agree with American intelligence assessments that there is not enough proof to determine whether Iran is building a nuclear bomb, according to a report published Sunday in the New York Times. The newspaper said that senior American officials believe there is little disagreement between the Mossad and U.S. intelligence agencies over Iran’s nuclear program, despite the fact that Israeli political leaders have been pushing for quick action to block Iran from becoming what they describe as an existential threat.

A transcript of a private meeting held in 1968 in the New York Pratt House of the Council on Foreign Relations. The meeting was attended by a number of prominent members of the early U.S. intelligence community, including Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles. The transcript was reportedly discovered by Vietnam War protesters who occupied a building in 1971 housing Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. One of the attendees of the secret meeting, William Harris, served as an associate to the Center for International Affairs and this transcript was found in his personal files. The transcript was published in full in the 1974 book “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence” by Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John D. Marks, a former officer of the United States Department of State. The meeting transcript is described in the book as the “most complete description of the CIA’s covert-action strategy and tactics ever made available to the outside world.”

The following interactive map was compiled from information reported by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism. It displays the names and locations of airfields/bases inside of Pakistan that have been or are currently being used by U.S. forces.  Some of the bases are used for logistical support, while others such as Shamsi airfield, were previously used [...]

In certain parts of the US government, when an operation has unintended negative second or third-order consequences, they are called “blowback.” The radical Islamic movements in the Pashtun areas today were always present, but putting them on steroids in the 1980′s was pretty short-sighted by any reasonable accounting — a classic case of “blowback.” During the Soviet-Afghan war, the Pakistanis had their own agenda. The Pakistani Army’s intelligence branch, called the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, became extremely powerful by cooperating with the United States and the government of Saudi Arabia to channel roughly $7.2 billion dollars worth of covert foreign military aid to their preferred Mujahideen clients. To control the Mujahideen, the ISI formed seven resistance groups, each with a notional political party associated with it. These became known as “the Peshawar Seven.” CIA oversight of the covert money was weak, and much of it went into ISI’s pockets.

A majority of 28 mostly European countries have failed to comply with freedom of information requests about their involvement in secret CIA flights carrying suspected terrorists, two human rights groups said Monday. London-based Reprieve and Madrid-based Access Info Europe accused European nations of covering up their complicity in the so-called “extraordinary rendition” program by failing to release flight-traffic data that could show the paths of the planes. The groups said only seven of 28 countries had supplied the requested information. Five countries said they no longer had the data, three refused to release it and 13 had not replied more than 10 weeks after the requests were made.

American citizens are not immune from being treated like an enemy if they take up arms against the United States, the CIA general counsel said on Thursday. CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston was responding to a question at an American Bar Association national security conference about the killing of Americans overseas without presenting evidence of wrongdoing. A CIA drone strike killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric linked to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, earlier this year.

Senior Iranian parliamentary officials announced that the country has arrested 12 agents of the American Central Intelligence Agency. Member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Parviz Sorouri said that the agents had been operating in coordination with Israel’s Mossad and other regional agencies, and targeted the country’s military and its nuclear program. “The US and Zionist regime’s espionage apparatuses were trying to damage Iran both from inside and outside with a heavy blow, using regional intelligence services,” Sorouri told the Islamic republic news agency on Wednesday.

In public Sunday, President Obama was at a summit unsuccessfully leaning on Russia and China to back diplomatic efforts to curb Iran’s nuke program. In private Sunday, there was more evidence of an efficient and brutal covert operation that continues to degrade Iran’s military capabilities. Iranian officials revealed that one of the 17 men killed in a huge explosion at a munitions depot was a key Revolutionary Guard commander who headed Iran’s missile program. And the IRNA state news agency reported that scientists had discovered a new computer virus in their systems, a more sophisticated version of the Stuxnet worm deployed last year to foul up Iran’s centrifuges.

Central Intelligence Agency Classification Management and Collaboration Group (CMCG) Classification Process Quick Reference Guide (QRG) from 2008.

The shadowy al-Qaeda group has reportedly criticized Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for spreading “conspiracy theories” about 9/11 attacks, casting doubt on the alleged role of the terrorist group in the incidents. An article published in the latest issue of al-Qaeda’s English-language magazine Inspire criticized President Ahmadinejad’s UN remarks over the September 11 attacks as “ridiculous,” Western media report. During his address to the UN General Assembly on September 22, President Ahmadinejad said the US government was involved in the 9/11 attacks or allowed them to happen to find an excuse to wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The article insisted that President Ahmadinejad’s remarks that the 9/11 attacks were actually carried by the US “stands in the face of all logic and evidence.” This comes as reports released by al-Qaeda are usually believed to be produced by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Federal Minister for Interior A Rehman Malik on Sunday said that CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) of the United States not Pakistan created the Haqqani network and trained its members.Talking to media-persons at a ceremony held to laud the Islamabad police over the recovery of a huge cache of weapons, the Interior Minister said that the Haqqani network was present in Afghanistan and those claimimg otherwise should give the evidence of its presence in Pakistan.“We will fight the terrorists as our forces are capable of handling them and countering any challenge,” the minister said and added that it was evident from combating militants in Swat and other troubled areas that the law enforcement agencies were making sincere efforts to root out the menace of terrorism.

Documents concerning CIA rendition of terrorism suspects, with the help of the UK, recovered from the offices of Libyan intelligence and published by Human Rights Watch.

A cache of papers found at the intelligence headquarters dating from the time it was run by Moussa Koussa, who later became foreign minister and defected in March, showed Libya was handed Islamist opposition members as part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme. MI6 also provided extensive information to the Libyan authorities of opponents living in Britain. The British intelligence services seem to have been more circumspect than their American colleagues, however. Often the files, which were found by Human Rights Watch and shown to The Sunday Telegraph, suggest they restricted themselves to confirming information already known to the Libyans.

With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks only a month away, former CIA Director George Tenet and two former top aides are fighting back hard against allegations that they engaged in a massive cover-up in 2000 and 2001 to hide intelligence from the White House and the FBI that might have prevented the attacks. The source of the explosive, unproved allegations is a man who once considered Tenet a close friend: former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who makes the charges against Tenet and the CIA in an interview for a radio documentary timed to the 10th anniversary next month. Portions of the Clarke interview were made available to The Daily Beast by the producers of the documentary. In the interview for the documentary, Clarke offers an incendiary theory that, if true, would rewrite the history of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were on U.S. soil – terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers on 9/11.

The former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center raised concerns Wednesday about an impending “code war” in which hackers will tamper not just with the Internet but with technology that runs real-world infrastructure. Somewhat fittingly, Cofer Black’s keynote talk at the Black Hat hacker conference at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas was interrupted by a literal alarm: flashing lights, sirens and the whole bit. “Attention, please. Attention, please,” a robotic woman’s voice said repeatedly as Black smiled, apparently confused. “We are currently investigating the alarm signal you are hearing. Please remain calm.” After a pause and some laughs from the audience, Black kept going.

As the Pakistani public grows increasingly outraged at the United States’ drone attacks in the northwest region of the country, a recent study by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism is contradicting U.S. officials’ insistence that “not a single civilian life” has been claimed in the covert war. Led by British investigative journalist Chris Woods and Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, the study found that at least 45 civilians, including six children, have been killed in 10 drone strikes since August 2010 alone, while another 15 attacks between then and June 2011 likely killed many more. According to the study, civilians die in one out of every five Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-operated drone attacks in the tribal region, located on the border with Afghanistan, a statistic that the Bureau says can no longer be denied by the U.S. government.

Mysterious guesthouses have been established in Abottabad’s famous residential area. It has been revealed that Blackwater officials are living there. Important persons regularly visit these guesthouses, and there are fears that the peace and stability in Abottabad may be affected. According to the details received, there are many guesthouses in Abottabad where immoral activities take place at night and meetings in the name of NGOs are arranged during the day. As soon as the night falls, suspicious persons start coming to these guesthouses.

The Pentagon has developed a list of cyber-weapons and -tools, including viruses that can sabotage an adversary’s critical networks, to streamline how the United States engages in computer warfare. The classified list of capabilities has been in use for several months and has been approved by other agencies, including the CIA, said military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive program. The list forms part of the Pentagon’s set of approved weapons or “fires” that can be employed against an enemy. “So whether it’s a tank, an M-16 or a computer virus, it’s going to follow the same rules so that we can understand how to employ it, when you can use it, when you can’t, what you can and can’t use,” a senior military official said.