CQ Politics | Film Exposes the Seduction of Secrecy
This vivid and disturbing exposure of the human dimension of the conflict between the government’s duty to keep secrets and the peoples’ right to know deserves a national audience.
One of its more interesting insights is how sexy secrets are.
“Secrecy is something like forbidden fruit,” former NSA official [...]

From MaineSecurity.com:
The counter-terrorism community is becoming increasingly concerned with “home-grown extremists inspired by militant Islamic ideology” that is operationally controlled by al-Qaeda. This ideology is being spread rapidly throughout the world and here in the United States via the Internet. Read an interesting commentary on this topic entitled “Virtual Jihad”, Forbes.com, May 19, 2008. Read [...]

SpyTalk: Israel Might Have Many More Spies Here, Officials Say
The elderly man arrested last week on charges of spying for Israel years ago was probably still working for the Jewish state’s espionage service in tandem with another, as yet unidentified spy, former U.S. intelligence officials say. The case serves as a reminder that the U.S.-Israeli [...]

WIRED’s Michael Peck details how the nation’s intelligence agencies are leaving classrooms behind as they embrace technology to train new spy recruits in virtually simulated environments.  With names like Rapid Onset, Vital Passage and Sudden Thrust, Peck blogs that the games are “actually a surprisingly clever and occasionally surreal blend of education, humor and intellectual [...]

ShaneHarris.net: Surveillance Standoff
No one should believe that real-time government surveillance of the communications network is an idea born of the 9/11 attacks or that it results solely from the Bush administration’s aggrandizing of executive power. The legal arguments that the government has asserted to support increased surveillance of digital space were first put forth in [...]

The FBI wants to Google you. Online, offline, underline. And they’d prefer to do it without your knowledge, thank you very much.

They are asking us to trust them.

They have a surprisingly short memory of the history of their institution.

Justice Department Declassifies Memo on Military Interrogations - Homeland Security Digital Library Weblog
Yesterday, the Justice Department declassified and publicly released a 2003 legal memorandum prepared in response to a request from the Pentagon to “examine the legal standards governing military interrogations of alien unlawful combatants held outside the United States,” including both international and [...]

The inside drama behind the warrantless wiretapping story. - By Eric Lichtblau - Slate Magazine
… The Times’ decision to publish the [warrantless wiretapping] story—a decision that was once so controversial—has been largely overshadowed by all the other political and legal clamor surrounding President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program: the dozens of civil lawsuits; the ongoing [...]

The U.S. House of Representatives continues its gamesmanship with national security. For a body that has been trying to prove its bona fides to protect the American people, it’s an odd strategy. With echoes of Groundhog Day, House Leadership chose to pass legislation that has no chance whatsoever winning the support of the Senate (and therefore no chance whatsoever of becoming law) and retired for another vacation.Meanwhile, the ability of the Intelligence Community to do its job remains hampered. And the message to the private sector? Next time your government asks for your support, run away as fast as you can.

“We can see groups emerging in cyber spaces and virtual communities that would be wholly virtual. They would organise and radicalise in virtual worlds and attack using cyber methods without becoming a real world presence in any real way.”

While skeptics of enhanced intelligence-gathering tools attack as “fear mongers” anybody who suggests that the FISA reform legislation needs to be passed quickly in the name of national security, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton makes clear that politicizing the war on terror can and will be a bipartisan effort when it suits the political temper. Check out her latest ad.

Having passed something, members of Congress will go back home and tell their constituents that they did the right thing and addressed the critical security needs of our country. They simply won’t mention the complicated telecom issue, and act as if they took bold action. They’ll feel no sense of urgency to return the matter — which means that the private sector companies, whom the government has begged to join the homeland security effort, will be open targets for lawsuits … and good luck getting such cooperation from the private sector ever again.

It is Hezbollah’s illicit enterprises in America that have drawn the attention of our security and intelligence agencies. A Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) investigation into a pseudo-ephedrine smuggling scam in the American Midwest led investigators to Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon, and other Middle Eastern countries including bank accounts tied to Hezbollah and Hamas. 11 DEA chief Asa Hutchinson confirmed: “a significant portion of some of the sales are sent to the Middle East to benefit terrorist organizations.”

As seen in the Washington Post’s Government Inc. blog, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance is hosting a summit where technology companies can present their ideas and innovations to a panel of representatives from the federal government Science & Technology organizations.

Columnist Bob Novak offers some interesting observations about the connection between the Democrats’ decision to let the FISA reform expire rather than offering a house vote, suggesting that the power of the trial lawyers within the Democratic Party was too powerful to overcome:
The recess by House Democrats amounts to a judgment that losing the generous [...]

The availability of cheap, disposable cell phones, the growth of the internet, and the emergence of a rapid and complex global telecommunications infrastructure that can route phone calls anywhere in the world has allowed a level of anonymity that terrorists have quickly learned to exploit to mask their plans and operations. This is the context in which the debate on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) must be conducted.

In the Washington Post today, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnnell makes a plea for the House of Representatives to take action and pass FISA reform to bring the nation’s intelligence gathering capabilities into the 21st Century. (The House broke for its President’s Day Recess yesterday without taking action, allowing the FISA reform reauthorization to expire.)

The Majority Leader of the House Democrats summed up the rather mystifying position of his colleagues today when he stated on the House floor that they have no sense of urgency over the FISA wiretapping debate. One senses that Hoyer didn’t fully appreciate the irony of such a statement, considering how Congress has dithered on FISA reauthorization to the point where it is set to expire in a couple of days.

Yesterday, the Senate did the right thing by passing the Protect America Act and preventing our nation’s private sector national security partners from being left unprotected from frivolous lawsuits, today. It is now up to the House to recognize that without these partners our intelligence and national security communities will ultimately grind to a halt. The private sector brings to bear the innovation, skilled labor and hard work of millions of people every day in the name of our nation’s security.

While it may have escaped the notice of some members of Congress and maybe even some members of the media, there only remains two legislative days before the Protect America Act (FISA legislation) expires. This politically charged but vital legislation provides the authorization and warrant process intelligence officials must follow when tracking terrorist activities that lead into U.S. borders. Sources on the Hill express to me doubt that any legislation will emerge from the Intelligence Committees of the House and Senate before the bill expires.