CIA

That Time The CIA and Pentagon Went To War

Brian K. Noe · March 31, 2016 ·

Against Each Other

William Rivers Pitt writes at Truthout about foolishness of “raw and ponderous weight” in Syria.

The Knights of Righteousness (yeah, that really is what they call themselves) have been armed and funded by — wait for it — the Central Intelligence Agency. Their opponents, the Syrian Democratic Forces, have been armed and funded by the Pentagon. Ergo, based upon the most recent battle in Marea, the Defense Department went to war with the CIA half a world away.

Read the full piece: The CIA and the Pentagon Are Shooting at Each Other | Truthout

Metadata Can Be Murder

Brian K. Noe · February 24, 2016 ·

From Ars Technica UK:

In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that “we kill people based on metadata.” Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent.

Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA’s SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan’s mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person’s likelihood of being a terrorist.

Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA’s methods as “ridiculously optimistic” and “completely bullshit.” A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET’s machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.

The Story of Matthew DeHart

Brian K. Noe · May 23, 2015 ·

Cory Doctorow details the story of Matthew DeHart, a veteran from a multi-generational military/intelligence family, whose Tor server ran him afoul of our government.

DeHart once discovered an unencrypted folder of damning documents on his server, which quickly disappeared and was replaced with an encrypted folder of the same size, with the same name. The unencrypted docs detailed an FBI investigation into some very dirty CIA tricks, possibly involving the still-unsolved slew of anthrax-laced letters sent to Congress in 2001. Not long after, DeHart was spooked by a visit from the FBI to one of his contacts, and he destroyed all potentially compromising storage associated with his server. That’s when things got weird.

Read the Story: Hacktivist sees too much, FBI lock him up on child-porn charges, produce no evidence – Boing Boing

A Debate on Torture

Brian K. Noe · March 30, 2014 ·

Democracy Now hosted a debate this past week between former CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo and human rights attorney Scott Horton.

The debate sheds light on the issue as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence feuds with the CIA over the declassification of its 6,000-page report on the agency’s secret detention and interrogation programs.

Read the transcript or watch the video here: A Debate on Torture: Legal Architect of CIA Secret Prisons, Rendition vs. Human Rights Attorney | Democracy Now!.

The CIA and the United States Senate

Brian K. Noe · March 13, 2014 ·

The folks from the ICFI have some good analysis this morning concerning the very public spat between Senator Feinstein and CIA Director Brennan.

Only the direst of circumstances could have compelled the California Democrat to make a public declaration that the CIA “may well have violated the separation-of-powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution,” and also “the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

We seem to be witnessing the complete breakdown of democratic rule.

For all the media publicity devoted to the political infighting between the White House and Congress, or the decisions of the Supreme Court, the real power in America is in the hands of an unaccountable, murderous apparatus of violence, provocation and spying that includes the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI and a dozen other such agencies.