You’ve heard of Blackwater, the private military company, that the Bush administration deployed in Iraq . Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious, since renamed firm, has tried to persuade President Trump to privatize the war in Afghanistan by hiring his new PMC to wage war on the Taliban. The same phenomenon can be seen...
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Trump’s Feud With the Intelligence Community Deepens
The dis-integration of the Trump administration continues. The long-integrated intelligence operations of the White House and the national security agencies are now out of sync. The normal governmental process by which the national security agencies present timely intelligence and policy options to a president who chooses among them is not functioning. “The system is broken,”...
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Who Is Spying on Citizen Lab, the Cybersecurity Watchdog?
Citizen Lab, based out of the Munk School at the University of Toronto, has for years played a leading role in exposing state-backed hackers operating in places as far afield as Tibet , Ethiopia and Syria . Lately, CItizen has drawn attention for its repeated exposés of an Israeli surveillance software vendor called the NSO Group, a firm whose wares have...
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Indictment Reveals How the Trump-Wikileaks Backchannel Worked
The indictment of Roger Stone, confidante of President Trump, has got Wikileaks worried. Julian Assange should be concerned too. The indictment, handed down by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and a Washington DC grand jury, makes Wikileaks look bad. In August 2016, the organization denied it had any “direct” connection to Stone, an answer that now...
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No Shutdown at the NSA’s Memory Bank
The gift shop at the National Cryptologic Museum in Annapolis Junction Maryland is open for business. Which is to say, life goes on, somewhat normally, at the National Security Agency, despite the partial government shutdown, now in its fifth week. The museum is located halfway between Washington DC and Baltimore in a sea of parking...