The news this morning that Yemeni security forces foiled an al-Qaeda plot to seize oil and gas export facilities and a provincial capital raises a timely question: Why does the terror network even care about the tiny, impoverished country and its puny oil infrastructure—especially when Saudi Arabia is right next door?
By devising an ingenious series of possibly undetectable airline bombs, a wiry Saudi named Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri has become the latest personification of the ever-changing al Qaeda threat. You can thank him and his tradecraft for much of the frenzy of counterterrorism activity in recent days. That includes pretty much every country shutting down its embassy in Sana’a, Yemen and evacuating government personnel, and dire warnings of a possibly large-scale imminent attack in North Africa or the Middle East—or possibly somewhere else.
Throughout history, the most successful criminals have been those clever and audacious enough to exploit a previously unknown vulnerability and steal loot in such a way that no one knew it was missing. When cybercriminals accomplish such a feat, their profits can be exponentially larger because they’re dealing in electronically transferred funds and not unwieldy bags of cash.
As the only person to ever head both the US National Security Agency and the US Central Intelligence Agency, ret’d Air Force General Michael V. Hayden has a lot of experience in seeing around corners. He’s now a global security consultant, helping companies and governments to protect themselves against cyber threats and other dangers. Last week, Hayden, also a director of Motorola Solutions and a distinguished visiting professor at the George Mason University School of Public Policy, said in a rare extended interview that Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies shared sensitive US information with the Beijing government. In a brief aside, he added that he’s undecided as to whether corporations should be allowed to go on the cyber-offensive, even in the absence of government intervention and protection.
Like father, like son in North Korea—at least when it comes to trying to provide a frosty stein of beer for the Party faithful. Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un’s recent effort to get Germany’s Paulaner brewery to build a Bavarian brew pub in the North Korean capital may seem a bit odd. A high percentage of people in his country are starving, and few enjoy anything in the way of creature comforts.
Say you’re minding your own business in outer space, and all of a sudden, one of your multibillion-dollar satellites gets blown up. Or the signals it sends to Earth go haywire and fly-by-wire planes start crashing. Or, worse, those signals start telling you a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile is heading your way.
There’s no longer doubt that the US government spies on foreign multinational corporations as well as governments, thanks to the disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor turned international fugitive Edward Snowden. The NSA vacuums up mountains of classified information from a rich array of sources. The CIA assists by launching digital “black bag” operations aimed at manually penetrating the computer systems of some of the world’s largest foreign multinationals.
Italy’s ambitious organized crime syndicates are still killing people and trafficking drugs and weapons, but their latest bet is eco-friendly businesses.
A new report on the state of risk-based cybersecurity management helps explain why IT employees and their corporate bosses don’t see eye to eye about hacking and other computer-based threats.
The biggest exporter of unmanned aerial vehicles, which are fast becoming essential to governments worldwide for both military and civilian uses, isn’t the United States, China or other major power. The big winner in this booming global market is Israel. And that creates a lot of geopolitical complications, for the obvious reasons.
This item has been corrected.
Olympic officials are downplaying this week’s call to arms by a top Chechen rebel, who released a videotape urging Islamist militants to disrupt the upcoming Winter Games in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Doku Umarov, leader of the Caucasus Emirate, told his broad coalition of Muslim fighters to “do their utmost to derail” the games, which he described as “satanic dances on the bones of our ancestors.” ”We are confident that the games will be safe and comfortable for all as guaranteed by the Russian state,” the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee said in a statement.
On July 1, while wrapping up his trip to Africa, US president Barack Obama announced that he wants to get serious about thwarting black market trafficking in elephant tusks, rhinoceros horns and body parts of other endangered species. The added bonus, if not the underlying motivation, is that the crackdown would undermine the many organized crime syndicates, insurgent groups and terrorists that are flourishing on the continent. Here’s why:
One of the reasons former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was able to get away with stealing top-secret documents about government surveillance programs is because Washington’s system of classifying national security information is badly broken. So many entire categories of data are classified—from how surveillance programs like PRISM work to the altitude at which US warplanes fly—that an astounding 4.9 million people are required to have “Top Secret” clearances just to do their jobs as government officials or, like Snowden, as private-sector contractors working on defense and intelligence matters. The system of vetting these people for clearances is dysfunctional, and national-security experts like former House intelligence committee chairwoman Jane Harman have said recently that the Snowden case is a good example of that.
European officials are even more shocked and outraged today than they were yesterday at the revelations in Der Spiegel that the US government has been spying on the EU’s offices in Washington and New York. “These are disturbing news if proven true. They demand full clarification,” the EU said in a terse statement today. French president François Hollande said that the revelations might threaten a big round of trade talks scheduled for next week in Washington. “We aren’t in the Cold War anymore,” said Steffen Seibert, chief spokesman for German chancellor Angela Merkel, at a news conference in Berlin.
When news broke that the US Central Intelligence Agency will soon begin funneling weapons to vetted Syrian rebels by way of Jordan, our next logical question was: How does one vet a Syrian rebel?
The first week on the job for Nicole Wong, dubbed by many as the US’s first chief privacy officer, has been fairly, well, private. The White House has named Wong, 44, a former top lawyer for Google and Twitter, as the new deputy US chief technology officer in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. But the appointment came with little fanfare or official communication about her role, even though Wong could have influence far and wide—not only on internet issues, but on foreign policy, trade and human rights. Here’s why.
The downgrading of an economy is a fairly well-known phenomenon. But there’s a lesser-known equivalent in the world of human rights, brought to you by the US State Department: the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. A touchstone for global human trafficking data, this year’s report, out today, did something uncharacteristically interesting: it demoted Russia and China, along with Uzbekistan, to “Tier Three” status, which puts them in the company of countries like North Korea, Iran and Zimbabwe.
G8 leaders agreed yesterday (June 18) to get their governments to stop paying ransoms to “terrorist kidnappers.” British prime minister David Cameron, who led the effort, called on private companies to do the same. A Cameron spokesman said the agreement was “very strong.”
Earlier this month, US prosecutors took down the global currency exchange Liberty Reserve and charged it with being the largest online money laundering operation in history, the “bank of choice for the criminal underworld.” More than a million customers used the Costa Rica-based company to wash more than $6 billion, according to an indictment. Besides drug traffickers, it alleged, Liberty Reserve’s illicit users included a wide array of gangsters and thugs, and criminal organizations engaged in credit card and investment fraud, identity theft, computer hacking, and child pornography.
Legislators and pundits have been baying for the blood of James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, over last week’s revelations of wide-ranging NSA surveillance. But the next person on their hit-list could be someone even Washington doesn’t know too well. Meet Rajesh [Raj] De, the general counsel for the US National Security Agency, and the lawyer with perhaps the biggest influence on the Obama administration’s approach to large-scale surveillance.
In disclosing classified details about some of the US government’s most secret surveillance programs, NSA leaker Edward Snowden said his greatest fear “regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.”
For anyone wondering how a disgruntled and relatively junior official like Edward Snowden could gain access to some of the US government’s most treasured secrets and leak them, the answer comes down to four words—the right security clearance.
In America there have been howls of outrage at news that the US National Security Agency may have been digitally eavesdropping on Americans—obliging James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, to reassure his compatriots that “only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted.” But on the rest of the planet the NSA rakes in millions of gigabytes of personal information with little, if any, opposition or controversy.
