Intelligence Archives

As I reported last month folks in my corner of northeast New Mexico have worked themselves up into a lather over the fact that the special operations squadron at Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis, N.M .plans -- surprise -- to fly airplanes from that base, kept open in the 2005 BRAC round due to fierce lobbying by the state's congressional delegation.

Though the city council in my town, the original Las Vegas and the Taos city council passed resolutions against plans by the Air Force to conduct low level flights with V22s and MC-130s over northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, it looks like the Santa Fe city council will not join the mob, even though it too initially planned to oppose the flights.

The Albuquerque Journal reported on Friday that the Santa Fe city council will consider soon a new resolution which states:

""The governing body of the city of Santa Fe supports the best possible training opportunities for the armed forces of the United States," the new resolution said. "The governing body of the city of Santa Fe supports an environmental assessment that determines the potential environmental and socioeconomic consequences of the proposed LATN [Low Altitude Tactical Navigation ] training area in Northern New Mexico."

The Wall Street Journal had a good piece on this controversy today that included one truly loopy comment by a resident of a town just north of me.

This woman (and you can find her name in the Journal story) says she already is plagued by overflights by Air Force planes, including a recent one flying so low that she and her husband "we were looking into the eyeballs of a pilot bearing down on us."

Since I cannot see the eyeballs of an approaching driver on I-25 while traveling 75 miles an hour (82, if I'm truthful), the fact that this couple could see the eyes of a pilot in a much faster aircraft means they have such extraordinary visual acuity as to merit some serious scientific study.

At first glance there's no similarity between the oh-so-hip-microblogging service Twitter and the staid and secretive National Security Agency.

But when it comes to providing details on new data centers -- sensitive information for both outfits -- NSA and Twitter both seem to believe the best publicity is almost no publicity.

NSA let the Army Corps of Engineers put out the news of the contract for its new $1.2 billion data center in Salt Lake City, while Twitter has been positively mum on its Salt Lake City data center plans since a blog post in June by a Twitter engineer.

In an article that sounds eerily familiar to anyone who has tried to pry information out of NSA, the Salty Lake City Tribune reported Twitter "clamped a lid" on providing any more details about its data center plans.

In yet another take on the NSA PR playbook, the Twitter clampdown extended to its contractor, C7 data centers, which the Tribune said had been asked by Twitter not to disclose any information.

Maybe Twitter is trying to play up its secrecy so it can sublease some capacity from the NSA.

The Defense Intelligence Agency tried to get a head start on July 16 managing the reaction to the Washington Post "Top Secret America" series, which started running in the paper and on the Web on Monday.

In a For Official Use Only e-mail sent to all its contractors, the DIA warned them the series "is expected to show the relationships between the federal government and its contractors, describe the type of work the contractors perform, and may identify the locations of many government and contractor facilities." It also said any media inquiries should be directed to the DIA public affairs shop to forestall further disclosure of contract information.

I can't understand why this e-mail, sent to me by a DIA contactor and reproduced below, bears the FOUO stamp since it contains no sensitive information -- except maybe an insight into how freaked out the intelligence community is over the Post series.

Here's the full text of the DIA e-mail:

Subject: DIA SITE Teammates: Industry Notice: Washington Post Article - FOUO

The following memo was issued by KAREN BLUM, Head of the Contracting Activity, Defense Intelligence Agency

Notice to Industry Partners

Subject: Potential Disclosure of Contract Information

Early next week, the Washington Post is expected to publish articles and an interactive website that will likely contain a compendium of government agencies and contractors allegedly conducting Top Secret work. The website is expected to show the relationships between the federal government and its contractors, describe the type of work the contractors perform, and may identify the locations of many government and contractor facilities.

Should your management or public affairs offices be contacted by the media, any response must be consistent with your contract. If appropriate, you may also refer media inquiries to DIA' s Office for Public Affairs at (703) 695-0071 or e-mail DIA-PAO@dia.mil.

Since the DIA has more than 300 Top Secret contractors, as the Post reported, and probably thousands doing unclassified or secret work, did the agency really think this e-mail would not get leaked? That's not intelligent.

Bob Brewin will return to What's Brewin' July 20.

In Lie to Me, the yet-to-be-a-hit TV series on Fox, Dr. Cal Lightman (played by Tim Roth) uses his insight into the human condition to determine if a person is lying -- and then solving a crime based on uncovering the prevarication. Lightman typically peers into a subject's eyes, looking for twitching and shifting pupils. Now, a computer program can do that.

Scientists at the University of Utah have developed a software program that records an individual's eye movement while the subject reads and answers true-and-false questions on a written page. The program measures, among other things, pupil dilation; how long it takes to respond to a question; how long it takes to read, and maybe reread, a question; and, of course, errors. Tests show the program is better than polygraph tests at detecting lies.

From the press release announcing the program:

The researchers determined that lying requires more work than telling the truth, so they look for indications that the subject is working hard. For example, a person who is being dishonest may have dilated pupils and take longer to read and answer the questions. These reactions are often minute and require sophisticated measurement and statistical modeling to determine their significance.

Of course, venture capitalists see the immense business potential of the program, especially in the intelligence and Defense agencies - which have loads of money to spend on fighting bad guys, which means finding out who's lying.

"The eye-tracking method for detecting lies has great potential," [Credibility Assessment Technologies President and venture capitalist Donald] Sanders says. "It's a matter of national security that our government agencies have the best and most advanced methods for detecting truth from fiction, and we believe we are addressing that need by licensing the extraordinary research done at the University of Utah."

Hat tip: Discovery News

Update on the leak of military documents to the website WikiLeaks: The Pentagon charged U.S. Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, from Potomac, Md., with "eight violations of the U.S. Criminal Code for allegedly illegally transferring classified data, according to a charge sheet released by the military," CNN reported.

Wired's Threat Level blog first reported that Bradley had allegedly leaking military documents and video to WikiLeaks.com, which anonymously posts military information in the name of disclosure. One of the more notorious leaks was a 2007 video filmed by the Army of a helicopter mistakenly attacking and killing civilians in Iraq, including a Reuter's photographer.

Wired.com conducted an interview in April with a soldier who came onto the scene after the helicopter attack and provides useful analysis and perceptions of what happened.

Bob Brewin is on vacation and will return to writing What's Brewin' later this month.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity wants some help from smart folks who can develop new kinds of optical, biological or brain-based computers.

IARPA also would like some novel ideas on how to secure the transmission of information using optical, electromagnetic, digital packet, chemical or biological signals.

Although this is a dry research proposal published on FedBizOps, it has the ring of a script for a science fiction movie in which the spooks harness brains and bodies to the 'Net in some sort of cyborg fantasy.

Since California Governor (and sometime actor) Arnold Schwarzenegger will soon be out of a job, maybe he'd like the lead.

Congress -- an outfit which consists of 535 folks in search of a sound bite and 24,000 staffers who support that goal -- wants access to the Defense Department's classified network, or also known as the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet).

Giving thousands access to the network could result in leaks that make the Gulf oil spill look like a drip. But it could happen due to language buried on page 372 of the 637-page report on the fiscal 2011 Defense authorization bill approved by the House Armed Services Committee.

The language would require the Defense Secretary to provide SIPERNet access to each congressional committee through a secure link on CAPNet, the fiber-optic network that serves the House and Senate.

The link, the bill says, would support "appropriate" classified communications between the Hill and the Pentagon. But I'm more than a bit concerned it will lead to decidedly inappropriate leaks of classified and sensitive information.

I can understand a need (maybe) for SIPRNet access by the Defense or Intelligence committees, but why (oh why) would the Standards of Official Conduct or Small Business committees need a connection to Defense's secret network, used to run wars, among other things.

Two years ago, I observed that the second level ramp at Washington's Dulles International Airport seems to serve as a parking lot for the privileged, despite signs about every 50 feet warning "No Parking, No Stopping, No Standing."

The situation has not changed, as I learned on April 25 while waiting for the Washington Flyer shuttle bus to the West Falls Church metro stop. I counted at least 16 Masters Of The Universe sitting blissfully behind the wheels of their Beamers, Lexi and other high-end iron for more than 15 minutes without one law enforcement official telling them to move on.

Evidently the folks who run the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority do not view this unofficial parking lot for the high rollers at Dulles as a security issue. But how do we know that a Beamer driver is not an employee of a contractor working for the Homeland Security Department and is not a bad actor who wants to do in homeland security, starting with Dulles Airport?

Given the possibilities, I hope I'll never find out the answer to that question.

Senators on the Armed Services Committee quizzed Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, on Thursday about his nomination as commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. The lawmakers candidly admitted they were computer challenged.

But not Alexander, who not only has degrees in physics and systems technology, but he told the panel that he also is the owner of a new iPad tablet computer, confirming his status as a true geek.

I imagine he uses the iPad at home and not at work because I have yet to see that the iPad has been certified for use on any military network.

Shh, the National Security Agency has developed a software tool that detects thumb drives or other flash media connected to a network, and any federal agency can get a copy free -- no box tops or coupons required.

The NSA provided a brief tantalizing description of its USBDetect 3.0 Computer Network Defense Tool in the unclassified part of its fiscal 2011 budget request.

The software, the NSA said, provides "network administrators and system security officials with an automated capability to detect the introduction of USB storage devices into their networks. This tool closes potential security vulnerabilities; a definite success story in the pursuit of the [Defense Department] and NSA protect information technology system strategic goals."

I figured the NSA might like to tell a digit-stained wretch more about this success story, but alas, the agency declined to unburden itself. An image therapist up at Fort Meade, Md., told me what I found in the budget documents about the detection tool is all the info NSA cares to share with me -- or the rest of the world.

USBDetect evidently has been around for almost two years and has been successfully used by the Homeland Security Department to sniff out flash media gizmos, according to a report on the use of thumb drives and similar gadgets on DHS networks.

The Defense Information Systems Agency makes a brief mention of the USB detection software on its information assurance Web page but buries the details behind a firewall.

I have a hunch that a bunch of other agencies use the detection software, and so before you stick a thumb drive into your government computer to copy a 100 slide PowerPoint brief, beware that Software Big Brother may be watching.