Dive into the archives.
- Conference: Open source in the IC
Registration is now open for this year’s DNI Open Source Conference happening 11-12 September.
The event staff asked us to let our readers know about the conference since many of you are probably interested in going. I know I would like to go but I will most likely be in Japan at that time (Chirol, you [...]
- Germany ‘NSA” Update
A few days ago, I alerted readers to another proposed security reform in Germany which would centralize Germany’s signals intelligence gathering. While I still have found little in the press in English or German, this longer Spiegel article outlines the concerns it has raised and the mood in Germany a bit more.
Germany Plans to Centralize [...]
- A German NSA
Not long after proposing a comprehensive reform of Germany’s security policy, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Germany is pushing for yet another security reform, combining Germany’s intelligence agencies under one roof. At the moment, German runs the following intelligence agencies:
- Federal Intelligence Service (BND or Bundesnachrichtendienst)
Military Security Service (MAD or Militärischer Abschirmdienst)
Federal Office for [...]
- Grain of Salt
Here’s the WSJ on the US intelligence report that Tehran has, for reasons yet to be explained, stopped atomic research for military purposes:
Before rolling out the peace banners, though, it’s worth looking at the agencies’ track record in getting these sorts of “estimates” right. As a matter of fact, U.S. intelligence services have so far [...]
- Ungoverned Megacities
The head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, has made an unusually public statement for a man and indeed an agency that usually remains invisible.
[...] Mumbai, Mexico City and Jakarta, saying they had become partially ungovernable. He noted the rise of private security firms to protect wealthier residents in sealed communities or to [...]
- More INT Blogging
Dr. George Friedman — founder of Stratfor, a private intelligence firm — has been taking his company “Web 2.0” over the past few months. Most recently the boss himself has joined the blogosphere. All of us at CA are/were subscribers of Stratfor. I recently began checking out their podcasts (sorry about the iTunes link Roy) [...]
- Be bias aware
One of the most basic skills of the intelligence analyst is overcoming one’s own mental obstacles. To develop a thoroughly reasoned, robust analysis all the niggling psychological debris that every human develops through education and life experience must be mitigated. Awareness is the first step and Lifehacker.org has an article every budding analyst [...]
- Analyst Advice
It takes real discipline to separate convenient metaphors from the necessary abstractions of analytical frameworks. It requires constant reminder that the map is not the territory, and that the familiar assumptions of our environments ”“ be they political, military, social/cultural, or economic ”“ may not serve us at all outside of our boundaries. And the [...]
- Skeletons
From the BBC:
The US Central Intelligence Agency is to declassify hundreds of documents detailing some of the agency’s worst illegal abuses from the 1950s to 1970s. The papers, to be released next week, will detail assassination plots, domestic spying and wiretapping, kidnapping and human experiments.
The documents — aka The Family Jewels — consist of a [...]
- Fighting the Five Poisons in Canada
China likely has hundreds of agents operating in Canada according to outspoken former Chinese diplomat to Australia, Chen Yonglin. Agents not only try to steal nuclear, government or high-tech secrets but also concentrate on developing vast networks of informants within the expat Chinese community to fight domestic dissent in China. The sources of dissent are [...]
