The Brennan Center for Justice will sponsor a panel discussion October 5 at the National Press Club in Washington DC on overclassification and “Curbing Needless Secrecy” to accompany the release of a new report on the subject. Participants include former Rep. Christopher Shays, former ISOO director J. William Leonard, former NRO director and chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board Martin C. Faga, and Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center.
One of our contributors passed this to me and asked me to comment in relation to the alarm that Winn Schwartau, Bill Caeli, Jim Anderson, and I sounded in 1994, in writing, to Marty Harris, then head of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).
Stuxnet, the cyberweapon that attacked and damaged an Iranian nuclear facility, has opened a Pandora's box of cyberwar, says the man who uncovered it. A Q&A about the potential threats.
EXTRACT:
CSM: How would you characterize the year since Stuxnet – the response by nations, industry and government?
LANGNER: Last year, after Stuxnet was identified as a weapon, we recommended to every asset owner in America – owners of power plants, chemical plants, refineries and others – to make it a top priority to protect their systems…. That wakeup call lasted only about a week. Thereafter, everybody fell back into coma. The most bizarre thing is that even the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Siemens [maker of the industrial control system targeted by Stuxnet] talked about Stuxnet being a wakeup call, but never got into the specifics of what needed to be done.
Published on Saturday, September 24, 2011 by Reuters
by Chikako Mogi
TOKYO – Japan found the first case of rice with radioactive materials far exceeding a government-set level for a preliminary test of pre-harvested crop, requiring thorough inspection of the rice to be harvested from the region, the farm ministry said late on Friday.
Even a rather non-observant person would have noticed by now that the Occupy Wall Street protest is being ignored by the mainstream media, or at least not taken seriously. Corporate-owned media knows its masters well.
Phi Beta Iota: The Wall Street Occupation, now going into its second week, with many additional demonstrations planned across the USA for 6 October 2011, is being ignored by the elite and their media sock-puppets. This is one reason most do not realize that the “Day of Rage” is about electoral reform and a non-violent repossession of the US and the US Government.
When the Central Intelligence Agency established a Center on Climate Change and National Security in 2009, it drew fierce opposition from congressional Republicans who disputed the need for an intelligence initiative on this topic. But now there is a different, and possibly better, reason to doubt the value of the Center: It has adopted an extreme view of classification policy which holds that everything the Center does is a national security secret.
Last week, the CIA categorically denied (pdf) a request under the Freedom of Information Act for a copy of any Center studies or reports concerning the impacts of global warming.
“We completed a thorough search for records responsive to your request and located material that we determined is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety…,” wrote CIA's Susan Viscuso to requester Jeffrey Richelson, an intelligence historian affiliated with the National Security Archive.
With some effort, one can imagine records related to climate change that would be properly classified. Such records might, for example, include information that was derived from classified collection methods or sources that could be compromised by their disclosure. Or perhaps such records might present analysis reflecting imminent threats to national security that would be exacerbated rather than corrected by publicizing them.
But that's not what CIA said. Rather, it said that all of the Center's work is classified and there is not even a single study, or a single passage in a single study, that could be released without damage to national security. That's a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago.
Despite intense focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East in the last decade, U.S. spy agencies are still lacking in language skills needed to talk to locals, translate intercepted intelligence and analyse data, according to top intelligence officials.
Telegraph, 20 September 2011
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks prompted a major push for foreign language skills to track militants and trends in parts of the world that were not a Cold War priority.
But intelligence agencies have had to face the reality that the languages they need cannot be taught quickly, the street slang U.S. operatives and analysts require is not easy, and security concerns make the clearance process lengthy.
As recently as 2008 and 2009, intelligence officials were still issuing new directives and programs in the hopes of ramping up language capability.
“Language will continue to be a challenge for us,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said at a congressional hearing last week.
“It's something we're working at, and will continue to do so, but we're probably not where we want to be,” he said.
Phi Beta Iota: Languages are not hard–what is hard is the “leadership” culture incapable of leading. US citizens by birth are never going to learn foreign languages as needed. There are just TWO solutions, both executable today, all it takes is integrity at the top, long missing:
1. Exempt case officers and others “on the street” from the idiotic security clearance requirements. Hire to qualifications and manage to risk. This includes restoration of the “principle agent” category as well as the third-country subject-matter expert category. They never see secrets, they just do what they do, very well.
2. Adopt the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) model of regional field stations in which multinational cadres of case officers and analysts are supported by US money and US technology. Again, they never see secrets and are firewalled during active ops.
