"A guy that's got a flat tire outside a nuclear facility in one location means nothing," said Thomas E. Bush III, the FBI's assistant director of the criminal justice information services division. "Run the guy and he's had a flat tire outside of five nuclear facilities and you have a clue."
In a paper called "Intelligence-Led Policing: The New Intelligence Architecture," law enforcement authorities working with the Justice Department said officers " 'on the beat' are an excellent resource for gathering information on all kinds of potential threats and vulnerabilities."
"Despite the many definitions of 'intelligence' that have been promulgated over the years, the simplest and clearest of these is 'information plus analysis equals intelligence,' " the paper said.
That's from an article in the Washington Post highlighting a computer networked intelligence sharing system for domestic law enforcement called "National Data Exchange, or N-DEx." Privacy advocates will no doubt issue their reactionary warnings of big brother, but data mining it itself is something every computer website, credit card and marketing companies do already.
"Law enforcement and federal security authorities said these developments, along with a new willingness by police to share information, hold out the promise of fulfilling post-Sept. 11, 2001, mandates to connect the dots and root out signs of threats before attacks can occur."
Oh, yeah. Remember that whole 9-11 thing? Remember so many outraged citizens wondering how this wasn't stopped. Connect the dots? Either we're serious about it or the next time we lose 3,000 people in a terror attack we'll have deserved to become such easy targets.
Labels: CIA, civil liberties, FBI, intelligence, surveillance, war on terror
[Washington Post] A Lebanese national who fraudulently gained U.S. citizenship through a sham marriage managed to obtain sensitive jobs at both the FBI and CIA, and at one point used her security clearance to access restricted files about the terrorist group Hezbollah, according to court documents filed yesterday.
U.S. officials say there is no evidence that Nada Nadim Prouty, 37, passed secrets to Hezbollah or to other groups the United States considers terrorist. But Prouty's ability to conceal her past from two of the nation's top anti-terrorism agencies raised new concerns about their vulnerability to infiltration.
"It is hard to imagine a greater threat than the situation where a foreign national uses fraud to attain citizenship and then, based on that fraud, insinuates herself into a sensitive position in the U.S. government," said U.S. Attorney Stephen J. Murphy in a statement announcing a plea agreement with Prouty.
...In 2000, she accessed restricted FBI computer files on Hezbollah, according to court documents, apparently to see whether family members had been linked to the Lebanon-based group. Prouty also improperly took home unspecified classified documents, according to her plea agreement. Justice officials said there is no indication that the classified records were shared with others. ... Prouty's case is also notable because of her ability to gain improper access to files in the Automated Case System, the FBI's antiquated computer network. The FBI has bungled repeated attempts to replace ACS and is unlikely to have a new system in place for several years.
According to the article Prouty "passed an FBI polygraph test with 'no deception noted.'" This isn't some sophisticated trained foreign spy, this is just an interpreter.
To say that this leaves one feeling disconcerted about the competencies of our intelligence services is an understatement. As others have often noted, how was John Walker Lindh able to infiltrate al Qaeda but the CIA or FBI cannot? The excuse back then was that it would take time to rebuild our intelligence services. Well, here it is six years after 9-11 and the intel community seems to have far more success in leaking classified documents to The New York Times than it does doing it's job. Bush may come and go but unfortunately it seems we're stuck with these bozos forever.
Labels: CIA, FBI, intelligence, war on terror
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program.
The changes may violate Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said on Thursday.
That's not all it violates... how about violating the trust the American public puts in the CIA and FBI to provide for the common defense and keep the baddies away instead of wasting time updating the world's first unreliable, amateur "encyclopedia"?
Just a few of many CIA screwups include: Not detecting North Korea's surprise attack in 1950. Underestimating Soviet strength and its invasions all through the Cold War. Being caught by surprise when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. India's nuclear proliferation. Pakistan's nuclear proliferation. Iran's nuclear proliferation. North Korea's nuclear proliferation. Indeed, the CIA can't win for losing - realized by UN inspectors after the Gulf War, first the CIA underestimated Saddam Hussein's WMD program in the 80s, and then they overestimated the same program prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003!
And that's not even all the detection failures regarding Islamic terrorism - 9/11, naturally, but then there's the USS Cole bombing and Khobar towers and Lebanon bombings of the US embassy and barracks in 1982 and 1983, and not foreseeing Hezbollah's kidnapping of its own people back then. In fact, by the 1990s the CIA didn't have one single human asset (spy) in Iraq. Not one.
Former CIA agent Robert Baer told reporters after 9-11 that the CIA "Beirut office has basically been closed since 1990-1991," and that "All the people in the counter-terrorism center (CIA CTC) and the FBI basically dismantled counter-terrorism over the 1990s." ...Who was president then... never mind.
I'm sure there are a slew of more unknown failures, and I'm sure there are a slew of unknown successes, but let's be honest that the CIA's reputation ain't exactly gold right now.
They'd be wise spending less time on Wikipedia and more time getting their crap together.
Labels: CIA, FBI, intelligence
