03.17.10
Posted in Extremism, Predator State, War On Terror, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 9:17 am by George Smith
There are fewer more poisonous articles than those which lash nabbed terrorists together in search of a trend or a growing problem.
“Recent cases show challengeds of US terrorists,” reads the latest, from Associated Press.
Reporters Eileen Sullivan and Devlin Barrett lash together a collection of designated bad people in the news and consults a variety of experts to read the future. The future, in these stories, being always rotten and getting worse. No context in terms of what problems the US faces by comparison, or the amount of miscellaneous mayhem that goes down every month on US streets, is furnished.
It reads:
One was a drywall contractor and father, another a petite woman who cared for the elderly, another a U.S. military officer. The most alarming thing about a string of recently arrested terror suspects is that they are all Americans.
And there’s the crazy guy who shot and wounded guards to the entrance of the Pentagon and the man who wandered around as a construction worker nobody at nuclear plants in the US and then went off to crawl the dunes of Yemen for years. The crazy kid is left out because he was not a Muslim. Same for the poor man’s Ted Kaczinski who flew his airplane into an IRS building. And the deadliest bioterrorist in history, against which individuals like Jihad Jane seem silly — Bruce Ivins — is also not here.
Just not the right religion.
And of the terrorists selected for this story, only the US Army-minted Nidal Hasan proved truly capable — killing thirteen.
One might venture to say the number still seems quite small in a country as diverse and vast as the US, particularly when considering the poor state of mind imposed on nearly everyone by current economic conditions.
” ‘These cases, [one counterterrorism expert] said, ‘underscore the constantly evolving nature of the threat we face,’” reads the AP piece.
Another way to look at it, logically, is to see that it’s a rather bad argument for endless war and increasingly oppressive snooping, vigilance and intolerance. And that next to everyday problems like rising unemployment, broken government, and the failure of the United States to effectively educate and lead as befits a country of its history and size, these are only small annoyances which — by their exaggeration — point to a self-imposed increasingly bleak future.
A drift into terrorism is “a combination of psychology, sociology and people who, just for cultural reasons, gravitate” [to Islamic extremism] … We can’t assume we’ve got months and years,” Michael Chertoff opines.
Chertoff can always be counted on to reliably deliver the noxious disguised as wisdom. Just last month he was part of a program which CNN ran repeatedly over the course of one weekend, a feature presentation selling the idea that cyberattacks will deliver the new WMDs.
Chertoff’s observation on US terrorists implies one ought to take up the very bad idea that we need to quickly develop the right amount of observation and surveillance, marked up against a scientifically approved list of social character markers, so that these troublesome people can be ferreted out sooner — before too many of them show up and the streets run red with blood.
I know there are more of them out there,” says someone named Jack Tomarchio, another former Dept. of Homeland Security employee.
In these stories the most toxic quote always seems to be delivered by the ubiquitous Bruce Hoffman, a “terrorism expert at Georgetown University.”
“The spate of cases over the past two years shows the conventional wisdom about who is a terrorist is dangerously outdated,” the AP says Hoffman informs.
“There really is no profile of a terror suspect; the profile is broken … It’s women as well as men, it’s lifelong Muslims as well as converts, it’s college students as well as jailbirds.”
These words work to create the impression that terrorism is sort of like a hard to diagnose disease or a trace poisonous gas, floating through the air, capable of infecting or tainting anyone at anytime depending on a panoply of inner weaknesses. And that the only way to stop it is to go to the source and deliver a regular prescription of root terrorism-killing antibiotic or antidote — the burning and stamping out of Muslims who look at the US with anger from other countries.
It is the most meretricious thing, a prescription for endless war, more threats to blow out of proportion next to more urgent problems diminishing the quality of life and blighting futures nationwide. Except for those in the business of explaining and countering terrorism.
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03.15.10
Posted in Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 7:46 am by George Smith
“What and when MI5 knew about torture” is the headline of a story in the Guardian here.
The introduction reads:
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5 throughout most of the years of the so-called war on terror, insisted yesterday she had not known that Khalid Shiekh Mohammed was being waterboarded.
In a response to the appeal court’s judgment that MI5 officers had a “dubious record” on torture, she sought to blame the US and maintained that only after she retired in 2007 did she discover that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks had been waterboarded 160 times. “The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing,” she said. Critics, though, said it was stretching credulity to claim surprise.
However, British intelligence and anti-terrorism police regarded information extracted under torture as worthy of consideration, no matter the source or procedures used to extract it.
This pertained to the the infamous London ricin trial in which the government’s chief informant was an Algerian named Muhammad Meguerba.
When this writer was contacted by the UK defense for the accused Algerians in the “ricin case” in 2004 — a group that had been dubbed an infamous “UK poison cell” linking al Qaeda in Iraq with the west by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his infamous speech to the UN – most of the UK government’s case was said to rest on the information provided by Meguerba.
However, as time went on, Meguerba’s material could not be brought as evidence. And this was said to be because it had been made in a confession extracted under torture while in Algeria, a confession that was later recanted.
A London jury eventually concluded there had been no UK poison ring, just one loner with wild plans — Kamel Bourgass, a very bad man who had been convicted in a previous trial of murdering a Manchester police office during his capture.
The Guardian piece continued:
Eliza Manningham-Buller spelt out her position in written evidence to the law lords in 2005: “In some cases, it may be apparent to the [security and intelligence] agencies that the intelligence has been obtained from individuals in detention … though even then the agencies will often not know the location of details of detention,” she said.
Though she added that detainees could “seek to mislead their questioners”, she said: “Experience proves that detainee reporting can be accurate and may enable lives to be saved.”
She referred in her statement to the “ricin trial” and the Algerian supergrass in the case, Muhammad Meguerba. “Questioning of Algerian liaison [security service] about their methods of questioning detainees would almost certainly have been rebuffed and at the same time would have damaged the relationship to the detriment of our ability to counter international terrorism,” Manningham-Buller said.
Lord Bingham, the senior law lord, said in the ruling that intelligence extracted by torture was not admissible in British courts: “I am not impressed by the argument based on the practical undesirability of upsetting foreign regimes which may resort to torture.”
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03.02.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 7:52 am by George Smith
When the US government closed the anthrax case recently, the committee to clear Bruce Ivins and all the conspiracy theorists again emerged from the closet. Because the case took so long and the bioterrorist was at the center of the US biodefense research community, careers and reputations were made and lost on it.
The Department of Justice and FBI released a 96-page executive summary of the case. It contains a good picture of the flask of anthrax death, the gold standard for bioterrorism. In recapping, the scientific work teased out the unique mixture of genetic fingerprint – morphological variance, it’s called – in the mailed anthrax, and matched it with the flask of spores in Ivins’s control.
Ivins was not the only person with access to the glass of horror. However, the bureau eventually cleared Steven Hatfill because he never had access to the area of Ft. Detrick where it was stored when he worked at the institution two years prior to the attacks.
As the FBI continued its investigation, closing in on Ivins’s lab, the scientist made a number of attempts to throw them off the case. At one time Ivins indicated in analysis that a freshly made culture plate of the mailed anthrax looked like that of a colleague’s when it actually looked like his own. In another, he furnished a purposely misleading sample to the FBI.
The rest of the piece by your host can be read at el Reg today here.
The story will never finish cleanly. There are too many who not only don’t trust the US government but who also cannot abide the fact that anthrax was made by one of their own.
Jason at Armchair Generalist dissected a NYT op-ed on the same issues yesterday here.
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02.24.10
Posted in Extremism, War On Terror at 10:14 am by George Smith
Like peroxide bombs, whenever the oafish failed al Qaeda man, Najibullah Zazi is in the news, hits at DD blog go up.
And he’s been in the news this week. Because he’s admitted guilt and is telling it all, and probably making some up, to authorities — perhaps so he doesn’t spend ALL of the rest of his life in some dungeon.
The government is naturally interested in tracking down confederates and finding out the precise nature of his doings in Pakistan.
“A man who admitted plotting to bomb the city’s subway system wanted to do so with the help of at least two other bombers during rush hour, when the most people could be killed, police said Tuesday,” according to news wires.
” ‘This was particularly disturbing,’ ” police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. “It was [Najibullah Zazi's] intention to be on trains during rush hour period and to kill New Yorkers. No question about it.”
Whether Zazi could have actually done so remains an open question as he has told authorities he flushed his explosive ingredients down the toilet when the noose began tightening upon him.
Zazi’s news history indicated he was fairly clueless, casting about on the Internet for methods on how to make explosive from beauty parlor supply store chemicals. DD would estimate that barring evidence showing the actual existence of it actually being in his hands, rather than just a collection of necessary materials, there was a better than even chance he was going to fail.
If so, he would still have been a really big nuisance, much like the underpants bomber.
But being a nuisance and the wrong religion today are the only ingredients needed to tip the US into frenzies of counterproductive action.
DD wrote about this extensively last year.
Excerpted:
One country stands alone in DD blog web statistics: Pakistan. The only thing net surfers from Pakistan land on at dickdestiny dot com are posts which reference peroxide bomb plots, jihadist recipes and documents for making poisons like cyanide or ricin, dirty bomb schemes, and other cases involving incarcerated members of al Qaeda.
The interest is invariant and monochromatic. Because it is this way, from the viewpoint of DD blog, Pakistan always look like it has a subset of young men interested in nothing but jihad and terrorism — a close fit with the real world. And because there are no other colorations in this interest, it can be observed for a trend.
It’s a bleak picture, considering the figures represent people only interested in terrorism and reading of it.
While the numbers are small, they are regular and constant.
They show DD that various things — the escalation of Predator drone bombings/assassinations in 2009, the expansion of the US embassy, more CIA operation in the country and greater treasure thrown at the Pakistani government — are not making Pakistan nicer or less filled with potential trouble. The level of animosity as shown by local interest has only increased, sometimes surprisingly so. If this is the US government’s ongoing strategy for Pakistan, there is polling proof here that it is not working. In fact, it is having the opposite effect: More really angry young Muslim men.
The only good news here is a point DD has made previously.
Since the beginning of the war on terror, the US mainstream media has created an artificial reality concerning it, one in which terrorists are assumed to be MacGyver-like characters, capable of making WMDs from just about anything — very easily.
All they need is to access the Internet, to download information which will make the manufacture of poisons and explosives only a little harder than adding tequila and crushed ice to margerita mix.
And because the media and our government and private sector experts have propagated this meme on a regular basis, “Peroxide Bombs, Easy to Make!” and other texts like it have serendipitously floated to the top tier in search requests on the subject, making them virtual tools with which to gauge interest.
Fortunately for us, we live in world constrained by physical reality, not by what others wish it to be or think it is in the press. If we did not, reason stands to tell us bomb and poisoning plots would be commonplace in the west, not the recent historical pattern in which a handful of failed and aspirational plots are uncovered, marked by rare but globally well-known success.
Zazi, having allegedly been ‘trained’ Pakistan and motivated by the US war in Afghanistan, is a ringing example of the phenomenon described above.
“Trends in Terror Prep Net-surfing,” the story with Google metrics outlining the nature of it is here and also mirrored here at GlobalSecurity.
With lots of graphs and stuff.
Google Analytics statistics on hits for peroxide bomb and related searches from Colorado to this domain before and during the unraveling of the Zazi plot in the news last year. Aurora cluster driven by news that this was where Zazi was attempting his machinations.
The Story of Oafish Zazi – from the archives.
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02.17.10
Posted in War On Terror at 9:16 am by George Smith
The current United States can be defined as an immense accumulation of not terribly acute or attentive people obliged to operate a uniquely complex technology, which all else being equal, always wins. No wonder error and embarrassment lurk everywhere … Every employee a machine’s toad. — Paul Fussell, BAD, 1991
Today’s lead story on American airline security innovation was made for Paul Fussell. In 1991, he could not have forseen the War on Terror. But he could easily have predicted the many reactions to it in US life.
For one, the making of air travel more and more odious for the sake of an increased appearance of security.
“To the list of instructions you hear at airport checkpoints, add this: ‘Put your palms forward, please,’” reports CNN here.
“The Transportation Security Administration soon will begin randomly swabbing passengers’ hands at checkpoints and airport gates to test them for traces of explosives.”
“The point is to make sure that the air environment is a safe environment,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said to CNN. “We know that al Qaeda … terrorists continue to think of aviation as a way to attack the United States. One way we keep it safe is by new technology [and] random use of different types of technology.”
Then CNN (and one imagines every other news agency) trots out ’security experts’ to get their opinion.
Keep in mind, readers, that in the US it takes only a quick Google or shake of the digital Rolodex to find an expert who will tell you anything and everything are good ideas.
“Security experts consulted by CNN said swabbing hands is a good move … ” added CNN.
Privacy experts, of course, want to ensure TSA workers will not discriminate when swabbing. The testing must be truly random and senseless.
In the US, this means a ridiculous application.
Invariably — babies, quadriplegics, your grandmother, teenage girls, people in wheelchairs or with walkers or handcuffed to security men, the Chinese ping pong team — all will be tested.
You can furnish some other examples, DD is sure.
“The TSA has more than 7,000 explosive trace detection (ETD) machines and has purchased 400 additional units with $16 million in federal stimulus money,” reported CNN.
In 1991 for BAD, Fussell explained the US had become defined by realizing that stupidity is a national characteristic. As a result, everything henceforth and to this day must be delivered in either a thin skin of fraud or some other made-up bit of rubbish fashioned to make people think a thing is great.
In this manner, readers are delivered the implied idea that the stimulus money has been doing good in the making of going to the airport even more unpleasant.
“It’s a ‘very good idea,’ said [some] security expert [named] Tony Fainberg,” to CNN.
In early January I wrote about the underpants bomber, who has brought this on, at The Register.
Thus:
[The] dilemma is clear.
Human error being always guaranteed, on both sides, no amount of technology – whole body scanners, electric noses, bomb-sniffing machines and expanded computerized watch lists (particularly in the hands of the US, where laymen have been conditioned to view them as magic wands) – can wholly stop men with improvised chemistry experiments in their private places. Yet no public official, under risk of being fired, can speak of this obvious thing.
In fact, one might theorize there’s a practical limit achieved in which the complexity inherent in the accumulation of security systems and data and the limiting human capital required to operate and sift it erases any theoretical benefits and gains beyond a certain point. And that’s a place on the graph we are already past.
The complete article is here.
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02.09.10
Posted in War On Terror at 12:01 pm by George Smith
Bed-wetters and office clowns not sought.
The next story took over a year to develop and carry out. I was writing for a newspaper’s features section but didn’t tell anyone about it until the work was finished.
It remains a great read, one I’m still very proud of. And it’s relevant to our current national security problems over a decade after publication.
“Name five CIA experts on anything. I can’t do it,” said a former CIA analyst to the New York Times [on one Sunday] (”Langley, We Have a Problem,” Tim Weiner).
I write on substantive national security issues for the think-tank GlobalSecurity.Org and get quoted on them. While I’m not secret and classified, I did and do what CIA-men are supposed to do well but often don’t seem to.
On the old blog, this story steadily gained in readership over the past couple years.
And so I’ve elected to reprint it on the new blog, migrating it here for the eventual day I abandon Blogger.
Today, it’s one of the more frequently read pieces by people who apparently are searching for information on how to get hired by the CIA.
Good luck with it. I’ve no idea if the procedures described here are still in place. More’s the pity if even a few are.
Anyway, can you imagine DD ever working for the CIA? [Insert crazy horselaugh.]
(1992, Allentown) So you want to be a spy? And you’re sure the place to go is the CIA!
The CIA is interested in hearing from you. It interviews thousands of Americans for jobs as spies, intelligence analysts and technical specialists every year. But because of its classified mission, hiring methods are unusual and Kafka-esque, taking at least a year to complete and bound in smothering bureaucratic process, comic ineptitude and secrecy.
Although the number of people employed by the CIA is classified, it regularly recruits on college campuses and through the job listings in major metropolitan newspapers. A recent series of advertisements aimed at minorities in magazines like Ebony drew spectacular media attention, but the typical CIA ad is bland and unassuming, easily blending in with countless other corporate calls for highly-trained, college- educated Americans.
A year ago, one such ad ran in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Candidates were encouraged to send resumes for consideration to a post office box drop in Pittsburgh, one of the agency’s regional personnel clearinghouses. Candidates would be required to undergo a rigorous physical examination and polygraph test, the ad warned ominously.
I forwarded my resume to the CIA mail drop, listing my qualifications as a scientist and journalist with the reasoning that these talents would be useful in analysis.
Apparently, the CIA’s personnel staff agreed. They got back to me in about a month and in so doing, began a unique series of communications.
Candidates, you see, are not contacted directly by the CIA. Instead they are delivered mail that requests them to contact an agency worker by telephone within a certain time frame. The contacts are often anonymous. For example, prospects whose last names began with “S” were asked to phone “Bobbi – Program Officer” at the CIA’s Stafford Building in Tyson’s Corner Center, VA.
The initial interview with the CIA usually involves a type of cattle call. About a year ago, 30 of us met in a room at The Valley Forge Convention Center. There we underwent preliminary screening from a CIA team led by Pittsburgh-based representative. The team included workers from the agency’s directorates of intelligence, operations and science and technology, including one agency employee who looked over my resume, saw that I worked at a newspaper and added that he had come to the agency as a newsman, too.
It was the job of this spy and his colleagues to weed out potential crazies and issue to the remainder the agency’s personnel Holy Grail, the 30-page Personal History Statement (PHS).
The PHS is an inventory that scrutinizes all aspects of the job candidate’s professional and private life. It becomes the basic curriculum vitae used during hiring and the template for the CIA’s security team during its investigation of potential agents.
“Don’t leave anything blank,” warned one of the spies balefully at the convention center. “I didn’t think anyone would really sit down and go over the whole thing when I started, but believe me, they do.”
The PHS requires the spy-in-waiting to designate references in a number of categories, including family members, professional acquaintances and personal (not family) acquaintances who have lived in close proximity to the candidate for a year or two.
“This is so the agency can call up your neighbors and ask them if there’s loud music and blue smoke coming out of your front door on the weekends,” one of the CIA handlers cracked.
The candidate is asked to document any record of criminal activity including theft, traffic violations, sexual deviance and perversion, unlawful drug use or undue publicity surrounding a divorce or civil suit. There is a battery of medical inquiries probing the candidate’s injuries and hospital visits, mental stability, prescription and non-prescription drug use, gastro- intestinal health and nocturnal micturition frequency. (The last seemed aimed at uncovering whether the candidate had an enlarged prostate or was a chronic bedwetter.)
The candidate is warned that the veracity of his statement is liable to be tested by polygraph.
Accompanying submission of this dossier to the CIA are any collegiate transcripts and a long writing sample dealing with any topic of interest to intelligence workers. For example, writing about home grown pilot plants designed for the production of biological warfare agents in Third World countries is appropriate if you’re applying for a job as an analyst.
All candidates were warned not to inform anyone except close family members of their CIA screening. The CIA encouraged the use of a cover like “the government” or “Department of Defense” when notifying those who needed to be designated as references.
A few months after submission of the personal statement and transcripts, the candidate is likely to get a phone call from CIA security who identifies himself only as a member of “the Agency.”
His job is to verify and embellish some of the information included in the PHS, specifically those sections dealing with criminal activity and homosexuality.
In my case, the agent was particularly interested in a reference to recreational marijuana use in college.
“How many cigarettes would you say you smoked?” he asked. He was also interested in whether or not I had sex with men.
Satisfied, the agent continued by inquiring about drinking.
“The Agency’s position in these matters is one of abstention enforced by testing,” he said. [Sure, bro'. ] That concluded the interrogation.
“You have a nice day,” said the spy before hanging up.
Most of this preliminary screening is in response to much publicized problems the CIA has had in the past with the penetration by the criminal or mentally ill. James Jesus Angleton, the feared head of the CIA’s counterintelligence wing and one of the most powerful men in the agency during the height of The Cold War, left his office in disgrace, having acquired a reputation, documented by journalists Thomas Mangold and Seymour Hersh, as a paranoid alcoholic and pathological liar.
If the prospective employee’s personal statement and transcripts survive the initial evaluation, he or she is given a series of aptitude and psychological tests.
Those in eastern Pennsylvania were again contacted and issued a ticket/summons for the tests, which were administered one summer Saturday morning in the physics building at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
The testing at Penn, an all-day affair, included a series of vocabulary, simple math, reading comprehension and abstract thought multiple-choice quizzes, similar to a college aptitude test.
Also included was the California Psychological Inventory, devised by Dr. Harrison Gough, psychologist. Our copy, which had a copyright date of 1956, asked for true/false responses to a number of statements, including:
“I have wound up in trouble because of my involvement in unseemly sexual activities.”
“In high school I was often sent to the principal’s office for ‘cutting up.’”
“I sweat in even the coolest weather.”
“I believe it is every citizen’s duty, as part of the community, to keep his sidewalk and lawn neat and clean.”
“I must admit, I think people are fools who don’t think the American way is the best there is.”
“I often think people are watching me.”
“I like tall women.”
“I must admit, I don’t mind being the ‘cut-up’ at the office party.”
One can only wonder what the two women who took the psychological inventory that Saturday answered to the question about liking tall women.
It seemed curious that the agency was using a test from 1956 — when presumably very few women applied for jobs in intelligence and when being a “cut-up” in high school was one of the worst things you could be accused of – to screen young professionals in 1991.
Two other tests included a work environment survey and a current world events test, both tailored for the CIA.
For example, the work environment survey asked whether the candidates would accept a job in a foreign culture or where conditions of extreme physical hazard (presumably a war zone), unpalatable food, no sanitation or debilitating disease prevail. It also focused on whether candidates would be willing to work anonymously and without recognition for long periods of time for people they find personally repugnant.
The hardest test was the current world events quiz. It presumed a comprehensive knowledge of world politics and personalities that might only be gained from religious study of The Washington Post or a background in international relations. Actually, I thought I did rather well on it.
After the testing, a couple more months passed.
Candidates were then informed by mail whether they had been bound over for interview at CIA headquarters in McLean, VA.
During this 9-month long period, no one from the agency had spoken to me for more than five minutes.
Finally, another letter arrived. It included an appointment date with “Agency Officials” interested in discussing possible employment.
The interview was set for the week after Thanksgiving in the Directorate of Intelligence’s Office of East Asian Analysis. “Ellie” was my contact. A room was reserved for the night before at The Days Inn in Vienna, VA.
It was a 15-minute drive to the CIA the next morning. The unmarked compound is not far from Langley High School. You can tell you are there by the barricades of concrete and obstacle-wire surrounding the wooded campus.
The entrance block-house guard was supposed to check my photo driver’s license, but he handed it back and waved me through without taking a look.
The Directorate of Intelligence is a modern looking edifice of cement and green glass. At the entrance were a score of smokers bearing the same furtive, hounded look seen at other corporations where smoking within the building has been banned.
Just inside was a marble hallway containing a likeness of William Casey.
Getting to the Office of East Asian Analysis entails a check-in at reception, where I presented my papers. After a few minutes, “Ellie,” a middle-aged woman showed up to escort me.
I was issued a green piece of paper and a pass card used to get through an electronic Pinkerton security turnstile. A security man gave my briefcase the once-over. Overhead was a sign stating that passage beyond the portal conferred agreement to a search of your person, your belongings and your car at any time.
The agency has been sensitive to accusations that it’s possible to walk out of the building with highly classified materials ever since 1978, when William Kampiles walked off CIA grounds with technical manuals for the super-secret National Reconnaissance Office’s KH-11 spy satellite. Kampiles, a junior clerk, was sentenced to 40 years in jail for selling the manual to the Soviets. During the same period, 16 other KH-11 manuals disappeared and were never traced.
While I was coming in, many were coming out. No bags were checked. Later, when I left, no one asked about my briefcase.
Upstairs in the Office of East Asian Analysis, National Geographic-like photos of China adorned the walls. Documents marked “SECRET” littered the desks.
Maddie, a personnel administrator, was holding court.
In her office, I asked her if the recession had affected hiring. It had, she said. “I don’t like the word ‘down-sizing’,” she said with a glassy smile. “We call it ‘right-sizing.’”
Maddie said she couldn’t say whether the agency’s “right- sizing” involves cuts in 60 percent of prospective hires, as had been recently reported in national newspapers. But then she changed her mind and commented, “That’s a little high.”
This has created problems for the agency, she said. Since attrition isn’t removing veterans at the expected rate, it’s been difficult to bring in new people she added. Complicating matters is the polygraph and security check. “Eighty to 90 percent of the people to which the agency makes an offer fail it.”
As for where I fit into things, interest was from the China Division: Industry & Technology branch of the office.
“The section head’s not here today,” said Maddie. “But Stan will speak with you.”
Stan turned out to be an airy, blond-haired analyst with a master’s degree in international relations from American University. (Today, Stan works at a company that specializes in business intelligence. When its partners aren’t out on the golf links they will — essentially — spy on your corporate competitors and provide research assessments or teach your firm how to do corporate counterintelligence.)
“What did you say your name was?” he asked as we walked down the hall to his boss’s empty office.
Stan didn’t have my resume, my PHS or any information on my scientific background, the reason I was being interviewed, so he didn’t ask any questions, preferring instead to talk about himself.
How many scientists are currently working in the office, I finally asked.
“None,” said Stan. “That’s why we’re trying to look at some.”
The agency, Stan said, made up for this lack by sending analysts to seminars on topics the various departments may have to deal with, such as ballistic missile technology. Stan said he was glad he had finally learned what an accelerometer was and how integral design is to ballistic missile development.
I asked Stan about the polygraph screening and nature of the psychological testing.
He laughed nervously but said, “Everybody has to go through it and it’s not any fun. But security believes very strongly in it and the agency works hard to get candidates through the lie-detector. We allow them to take it three times.”
At the end of the interview, Maddie asked me to take some “stuff” over to the Stafford Building for her when I went there to collect travel expenses. A moment later she thought better of it, but supplied me with directions anyway.
Outside the Stafford Building later in the day were more harried smokers. Inside I asked for gas money ($20) and mileage. A CIA worker insisted that this be compared against the price of the lowest airline ticket from Philadelphia. I argued that this was ridiculous, to no avail.
As predicted, a telephone call to a CIA airline-ticket specialist came up with a figure far in excess of the gas money. The agent then gave me a little more than $200 of the taxpayer’s money, a generous per diem, and mileage allowance. The hotel room had been paid in advance.
A call to Maddie’s office a few days later elicited the information that there were no job openings and no hiring plans.
When I asked why, in that case, the testing and interviewing, no one had an answer except to say “the agency has to plan for every contingency.”
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02.03.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 9:41 am by George Smith
Last week the Washington Post published an extraordinary number of articles on bioterrorism. Extraordinary not because of the information they delivered, but outstanding because they were very bad. And all written by reporter Joby Warrick, seemingly synchronized to lead up to the Graham-Talent special interest group’s critique of the Obama administration on preparedness.
Today, the Post’s Fred Hiatt continues the atrocity on the editorial page.
One of last week’s particularly bad pieces of reporting concerned ex-CIA man Rolf-Mowatt Larssen’s Harvard-issued ’study’ on al Qaeda and WMDs.
It was an example of astonishingly poor work and it was destroyed by DD here in a piece entitled The Busted Watch of US Threat Assessment.
Another copy was posted at GlobalSecurity.Org here.
The Mowatt-Larssen report — entitled Al Qaeda Weapons of Mass Destruction Threat: Hype or Reality? could not even get the simple facts concerning a policeman’s death right in the famous case of the alleged London ricin ring. And this was information published countless times in newspapers all over the United Kingdom.
That was hardly all that was wrong with the Mowatt-Larssen report. But readers can skip back to the original posts to get the details on this shabby piece of work.
One of the major problems with such poor analysis from high places is that it continues to drive opinion, more news stories and, eventually, policy. Once it is embedded in a place like the Washington Post it becomes very damaging. It actively impedes legitimate efforts to educate the public on issues and reality in the so-called war on terror. It serves only as another citation for those writing more things asserting that one needs to be very afraid.
And today, Hiatt’s opinion piece, the WaPo man cites Mowatt-Larssen right off the bat. Mowatt-Larssen, Hiatt implies, has shown we ought to still be alarmed.
“Three thousand people were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,” writes Hiatt. “More than 300,000 could be dead within one week after a modest attack with biological weapons.
“For most people, the thought of such an attack is an unthinkable horror. For al-Qaeda, it is a lingering dream and one that it is working diligently to achieve … Al-Qaeda is engaged in a ‘long-term, persistent and systematic approach to developing weapons to be used in mass casualty attacks,’ writes Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs …’
“Mr. Mowatt-Larssen is not the only one sounding an alarm.”
It is a textbook pathological case of argument from authority without any vetting of that authority.
And it was part of an argument Hiatt used to belt the Obama administration over the head, chiding it to act quickly to remedy the nation’s unpreparedness so that the people would be protected from deadly bioterrorism.
This is not a new song. Played literally thousands of times in the last few years it has worn out its ability to enlighten, if it ever had much of that precious quality in the first place. Now it exists only to hector and terrorize.
Jason Sigger at Armchair Generalist sees the problem clearly, too, and it’s not us or our inability to see the obvious.
He writes, in this case addressing some information concerning the Graham-Talent special interest group:
“Bad enough that Hiatt joins those who would continue overstating the actual threat of terrorists using nuclear or biological weapons to cause mass casualties. I thought newspapers were supposed to, you know, report facts. But pinning the G-T commission’s report on the Obama administration runs counter to what the commission said – that this was a report on the government’s efforts over a period of time, not within the last year …”
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07.13.09
Posted in War On Terror at 1:09 pm by George Smith
“From the point of view of an al Qaida military leader, Western intelligence agents are now ubiquitous in the lands of Islam, and their operations have been extraordinarily effective,” writes Steve Aftergood at his Secrecy Blog.
The post and accompanying al Qaeda document affords a view of the enemy not often seen in the US press — a view of a foe confused and afraid, badly hurt by the presence of American forces in their land.
It also shows ingenious use of simple printed circuits and the lowly nine volt battery.
Pictured within the al Qaeda document, they are small homing beacons, planted on al Qaeda men and in their abodes (or in the haunts of the innocent, if the intel and source on the ground is bad), for the purpose of Predator drone targeting. And it seems they have succeeded in their purpose often enough to merit significant effort to confiscate them and get warning out.
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06.29.09
Posted in Cyberterrorism, Extremism, War On Terror at 2:01 pm by George Smith
The daily dishwater on cyberwar, this time from the Times of London. “If you’re not worried, you have not been paying attention,” warns the writer.
“[Cyberwar] would be like being teleported back to the 1970s,” it is said. “Even a minor conflict could slow the global Internet to a crawl. So cyber-war is a bit like nuclear war, in that even a minor outbreak threatens everyone’s life and welfare.”
Is your life threatened when you cannot log on to Twitter? Well, OK, that’s a trick question. We already know that the upper class swells on CNN and in newspaper features sections wouldn’t be able to go on with life.
OK, ok, but you’d quickly starve during an all out cyberwar. That’s for sure. The local supermarket with all the fancy signs wouldn’t sell you food and it certainly wouldn’t give you a dollar off on all those things when you punch in your telephone number. And I bet your cable digital TV and phone wouldn’t work either, just like in that movie where Bruce Willis as John McClane battles the annoying cyberterrorist who used to work for the Pentagon.
That was a good movie. The annoying cyberterrorist had a really hot chick who could kickbox as his henchwoman.
Anyway, cyberwar will be so bad you’ll have to find your own corner market, one not connected to the Internet, for your fortified wines.
So, what to do when the nuclear apocalypsecyberwar begins?
Cyber-carpet-bombing is the correct response, DD reported this weekend.
“[One expert] recounts what one of the staff told him about how NATO would react to a [new] cyber-strike,” reports the Times. “Overwhelming response: a single, gigantic counterstrike that cripples the target and warns anyone else off launching a future cyber-war. He isn’t sure what it would look like, but the show of force he envisages is so severe that the only thing he can compare it to is a nuclear attack.”
Just for amusement, DD has hit the Wayback Machine and retrieved similar quotes from 2001, when another excitable fellow — an alleged cyberwar expert by the name of
James Adams – was often in the news about total cyberwar.
“Y2K will illustrate what an attack could do… Anybody who says after January 1, 2000 that this [threat of cyber attack] is all just made up I think is an idiot.” From the University of Southern California’s Networker magazine, winter 98-99.
Pentagon hackers employed in Eligible Receiver “did more than the massed might of Saddam Hussein’s armies, than the Nazis in the Second World War.” — from Techweek, 1999.
“”One need only look at today’s headlines to recognize industry’s need for iDefense … iDefense draws upon an unparalleled understanding of the critical infrastructure and a keen awareness of the growing threats and vulnerabilities confronting industry to provide its clients a timely and truly unique service.” — from the PR Newswire, June 1999.
“Which brings us to the final rung on the escalatory ladder: the virtual equivalent of nuclear deployment. I offer as illustration Eligible Receiver.” From a speech, “The Future of War,” delivered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, June 2000.
“Consider the recent LoveLetter virus … The effect? The equivalent of a modest
war … No terrorist organization in history has ever achieved such damage with a single attack. Few small wars cost so much … The LoveLetter attack was indeed the first real taste of terrible things to come.” Also from “The Future of War.”
“Estimates of the cost of [the LoveLetter virus] to the United States range from $4 billion to $15 billion — or the equivalent, in conventional war terms, of the carpet-bombing of a small American city.” From Foreign Affairs magazine, May-June 2001.
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06.26.09
Posted in Cyberterrorism, War On Terror at 4:53 pm by George Smith
Today, a collection of items again having to do with the tradition of blaming China and its mighty but hard-to-see cyberwarriors.
For example, when you want to build a cyber-attack force, blame the Chinese for starting a cyber-arms race, hacking into US utility companies, cyber-spying and installing backdoors and hidden boobytrap software switches in everything.
Since it’s a practice that has been carried out so well and for so long, the Chinese media has finally started to wise up to it.
So, this year, for the first time, DD has begun to field questions from Chinese journalists, who are returning the favors long administered by their counterparts in the western English-speaking newsmedia. That is, instead of wanting to talk about how China is menacing US cyber-interests, they want to know about the US menacing the rest of the world’s cyber-interests.
From a Q&A — in e-mail — this week:
Chinese journalist: Will US wage cyber warfare against its enemies?
DD: I doubt there will be any significant happenings of this nature. Too much potential for an exposure resulting in great embarrassment and bad publicity if caught doing such a thing. It wouldn’t look good if the US military was caught installing a worldwide zombie botnet now, would it?
Chinese journalist: US cyber security may provoke the new world arms race on the new military frontier, do you think so?
DD: The rhetoric on the subject may inspire something like this. However, it will be offset by the limited nature of what such things can accomplish in the real world.
Chinese journalist: What do you think of the cyberattacks worldwide?
DD: It’s another day, just like many, for IT staffs.
Chinese journalist: Will the American aggressive approach to cyber-security pose a threat to privacy and civil liberties?
DD: There is already some concern about this. As to privacy, there have been agencies and parties in the US which have been involved in pushing back on encroachments and violations of privacy in cyberspace for many years. They’ve had some mixed successes and some big failures, so it’s an ongoing battle.
Next up, a partial transcript from the Ian Masters show,
a couple weeks ago. DD has edited it down to the most interesting points, and the common worked-to-death scripts re China and cyberwar.
Ian Masters, Pacifica radio host: There’s [now] an expectation hacker soldiers will be hired. The New York Times has a piece on Sunday on the frontpage, a rather skeptical piece, suggesting that this indeed may be another raid on the treasury by the military industrial complex.
DD (aka George Smith): Well, that’s been a constant. I mean, it’s not exclusive to the Obama administration. Cyberwarfare and cybersecurity have been used by the US government over the past fifteen years to, as you say, rattle the tin cup for a variety of reasons. I mean, it’s kind of like, what many people don’t realize is that the extremist views are in charge, OK? [Laughs] There really isn’t a voice of moderation. And there really never has been in the area.
IM: So, in other words, the sky’s always falling.
GS: That’s right.
IM: And the Russians are coming.
GS: Or the Chinese. The Chinese were coming ten years ago. And they’re coming again.
IM: And the terrorists are coming.
IM: In terms of cyberwarfare al Qaeda is not a player?
GS: No, they’re not a player.
IM: They do low-tech video releases. So who is the target of this new initiative by President Obama, is it Russia and China?
GS: Those are the common two. Ten years ago there were a large number of stories circulated insisting China, the dragon, was about to show its claws and fire, and it had developed a cyberwarfare capability, and in the most extreme cases could attack the United States’ oil refineries and cause explosions, war from remote, things like that. And with Barack Obama, on Friday, he includes in his speech a statement that cities in foreign countries have been blacked out by cyberattack, and that’s simply an urban legend. There’s nothing to back that up at all yet it finds its way into his cyber policy review report.
Now, why is that? [Laughs]
If you look at the footnotes of the report real carefully, this comes out of an old press release from a computer security company.
IM: So ginning up business?
GS: Well, specifically, this occured about a year ago. It was to gin up business for protection of remote control access systems. What better way to do it than to say the CIA had told [your expert business] that cities which cannot be named, in countries that cannot be named, had power companies attacked which cannot be named, causing blackouts in cities, the number of which cannot be named.
IM: Really?
GS: Yeah, well that’s it …
IM: Where is the beef then, as they once said in a political campaign? We’ve got a lot of sizzle — but there’s no steak here?
GS: Well, the real beef is that there isn’t any doubting that there are problems with cybersecurity. We’re now built on a system that’s fundamentally insecure … and when you choose to use the Internet … to build your networks upon [it], then you’re choosing to work with an insecure system and the daily problems that come with that are part of the overhead of doing business and conducting life like that. And that’s a complete separate set of issues which everyone must deal with on a daily basis.
Ah, have you had an experience with removing malware, viruses or spyware from your computer?
IM: Well now, at the risk of advertising for Apple, I have a Mac.
GS: [Laughs] Well, good for you!
IM: So everyone is attuned to these things and paying the price.
GS: And everyone has to deal with it daily and take measures or suffer the consequences … Bad actors on the Internet are not known for restraint, OK? If there was an ability to turn the United States off like a switch, it would have been done already, I think. They wouldn’t show the qualms of, perhaps, a foreign country whose leaders would say: “Maybe we shouldn’t do this.”
Someone would just say: “No, we’re going to do it because I want to be famous and show the world how powerful I am.” Which is one of common motivations, among many, in people who do these kinds of things on the Internet, who are constantly knocking on your firewall door …
CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, Jamie McIntyre, was puzzled: “This term cyber warfare sounds kind of, you know — amorphous, kind of hard to get your hands around it…” (See here for the next excerpt’s original publication.)
Fifteen minutes later, Gordon Chang, author of an unintentionally hilariously entitled book called The Coming Collapse of China vaguely informed the news network, “Well, they say that two [instances] of those were really the Chinese caused blackouts in the United States, one in 2003 and the other…”
For Chang, “they” were a couple of chatterers from the press, more specifically, an article in the National Journal, a publication nobody but Congressional staffers and producers and editors of news organizations in Washington, DC, reads.
“We’ve always knows that our civilian networks, which are not protected as well as the defense ones, can be taken down, but we never really had a demonstration that it could, indeed, actually happen until a couple of years ago,” continued Chang.
The news story demonstrated one common feature of all stories on cyberwar. You can say anything you wish and not suffer a beatdown. The most remarkable, even ludicrous, things can be claimed. Once on paper, it’s fair to discuss such things as if they had the reality of a piece of granite.
Since the Chinese had been causing blackouts, Chang reasoned the US government ought to show some backbone and give them a talking to …
To spend too much time arguing details [over this] is to be drawn into the deranged world of the American way of threat description … What would the United States do [then] in retaliation? Start carpet-bombing? Carpet-bombing, in this case, means having a force of cybermen and their own vast military botnet to launch DDOS attacks.
In “Carpet-bombing in Cyberspace,” an article from the Armed Forces Journal, Col. Charles W. Williamson III writes “America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack.”
There is a carpet-bombing gap in cyberspace, it is said. “We are in [a new arms race] and we are losing,” asserts Williamson. China has the greatest capability for cyber carpet-bombing because “analysts think China has the world’s largest denial-of-service capability.”
The US can offset this by investing in its own military botnet, sort of like not allowing the Russkis to take the lead in mineshaft digging in Dr. Strangelove.
In slightly different form,
at SITREP.
Update: The daily dose of
cyberwar exaggeration. Cyberwar will throw everyone back to the Seventies. Except you won’t get to be young again.
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