Boston Bomb Case Will be Solved Quickly

Or so I predicted on Washington, DC's WUSA-TV-9 today.

The intelligence technologies and policies developed in the past dozen years -- the same ones that give civil libertarians pause (and rightly, I should add) -- provide  the FBI and other investigative agencies vastly more power to solve the case than were available before the 9/11 attacks.  Watch it here.

How They Will Investigate the Boston Bombing

Former White House Counterterrorism Adviser Richard A. Clarke says U.S. security agencies have a wealth of investigative resources and techniques to employ against whomever carried out Monday's horrific bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

"While detectives and federal agents have started the laborious process of interviewing thousands of people in Boston, much of the work that is likely to be key to solving the Boston Bombing is technical and forensic," Clarke said on his FaceBook page.

Video from bystanders' cell phones, retail outlets and traffic cameras could provide quick clues to the perpetrators. The National Security Agency will also zero in on cell phone traffic around Boston and to such terrorist lairs and Pakistan and Yemen, he said. 

The resources that the government can bring to the case a dozen years after the 9/11 attacks are stupendous, said Clarke, a White House counterterrorism adviser to both Bushes and President Clinton.

"First, the FBI will stitch together hundreds of hours of video camera recordings from private and public surveillance and traffic cameras, as well as recordings made by private citizens attending the race. They will look for when the bombs might have been left behind and then examine the faces of everyone who was in the area around that time. They will try to put names to those faces, using facial recognition matching software, drawing on drivers license, passport, and visa databases."

After agents from Israel's Mossad carried out an assassination in Dubai, Clark said, "the police in the United Arab Emirates were able to recreate most of the the assassination operation by using snippets from dozens of surveillance cameras. For the FBI in Boston, a similar process has now begun."

Hot Shots: CIA Contractors Edition

The CIA and other intelligence agencies came under fire for hiring too many contractors, so what did they do? Hire more!

That and other nuggets have been dug up from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s biennial report by Steve Aftergood at Secrecy News, who otherwise found the report sadly lacking in details.

The report revealed that “a written report on each covert action that is being carried out under a presidential finding is provided to the congressional committees every quarter.”

It also said the DNI “abruptly cancelled a multi-year effort to establish a single consolidated data center for the entire Intelligence Community a year or so ago, in favor of a migration to cloud computing.”

But the contractor issue was far more entertaining, in an inside-the-beltway kind of way.

“Under criticism that the number of intelligence contractor personnel has grown too high, too fast, intelligence agencies have been cutting the number of contractors they employ or converting contractors to government employees,” Aftergood wrote. “But some of those agencies have continued to hire additional contractors at the same time, resulting in net growth in the size of the intelligence contractor workforce.”

The report also offers new descriptions of the SSCI’s 6,000-page study  on CIA rendition,  detention and interrogation activities, broken down into three volumes, Aftergood reported:

Hot Shots: NSA Society Edition

Oh, What Fun We Had at NSA

The NSA has released way-back issues of its “in-house technical journal,” Cryptolog: The Journal of Technical Health, from the years spanning 1974 -1997.  It “reads like an amateur computer club newsletter,” cracked Arik Hesseldahl of AllThingsD, complete with cartoons drawn in the margins.  Yet one does stumble upon the shiny object, such as an NSA employee’s account of her travels to Nice for the 1974 Seventh World Congress of Translators--which you gotta admit sounds like quite a gab fest.  Her descriptions of the gala include the riveting observation that “most of the men wore somber business suits but the women were dazzling in every kind of fancy attire and coiffure.”  We bet.

There’s no real intelligence here, but Cryptolog’s often droll accounts do shed light on life inside the black box over three decades. James Bamford, the trailblazing author of two best-selling books on the NSA, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, made extensive use of such unclassified newsletters to track down employees. 

--Sally Farrington, Jeff Stein

The Leak Dogs Are Gonna Bite Obama in the End

One of the salacious ironies of the John Kiriakou case is that the dogs the Obama administration has let loose on leakers are circling back, teeth bared, toward their owners.

“The Obama administration’s vigorous prosecution of leaks may yet cost it dearly,” Steve Coll writes in “The Spy Who Talked Too Much,” his autopsy on the former CIA man who revealed the agency’s torture practices and other secrets, in this week’s New Yorker.

“Recently, FBI agents have been interviewing administration officials about any role they might have had in providing classified information to David Sanger, of the [New York] Times, who last year disclosed the administration’s role in cyber attacks on Iran’s nuclear program,” Coll reported.

What’s sauce for the goose is even saucier for the gander. FBI agents on the case, who tilt against liberal windmills anyway, must be smacking their lips.

Who Is Lisa Monaco?

Lisa Monaco is a smart cookie, no doubt about that. And a true-blue Democrat.

The Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School grad, who turns 44 in February, has climbed so steadily through the government’s national security ranks that her new job as homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to President Obama seems almost preordained. Rumors are flying that she may even replace Bob Mueller at the FBI before too long.

Yet it’s almost certain that few people outside of Washington’s insular national security world will ever have heard of her.

That’s because, unlike her predecessor John Brennan, she’s been an oiler in the machinery room of counterterrorism, not a boss man from one of the alphabet agencies -- CIA, FBI, NSA and the like.

But she has had friends in high places, starting with Joe Biden, who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Monaco worked there as research coordinator from 1992 to 1994, according to the questionnaire she filled out during her confirmation process 20 years later to be assistant attorney general for national security.

Kiriakou Plea Provokes Bitter Name-Calling Among Lawyers

Is John Kiriakou a leaker or a patriotic whistleblower?  Some rare, public name-calling among lawyers close to the case has broken out over the question.

Some of the ex-CIA man’s most fervent supporters claim the government is persecuting a patriot who helped expose CIA water boarding and the other “enhanced interrogation techniques” many people equate with torture.

The Justice Department begs to differ, of course. It argues the case is simple: Kiriakou “repeatedly” disclosed classified information and the names of covert CIA employees to journalists.

So far, it has been winning. Kiriakou’s lawyers last week lost a key pre-trial ruling when the judge in the case said the feds would not have to prove that Kiriakou meant harm to the United States by exposing the interrogation program to public scrutiny.  

That set-back, apparently, led his lawyers to seek a plea deal with the feds, which one source said might amount to two-and-a-half years in prison. A hearing is scheduled for 11 tomorrow morning in federal court in Alexandria, Va.

[Update: Kiriakou and the Justice Department finalized the deal in court on Tuesday, the former CIA man pleading guilty to one count of illegally disclosing the identity of a covert agent. He's expected to spend 30 months in prison.] 

Even as a plea deal was only rumored, Kiriakou’s most staunch defenders were denouncing his lawyers, which include famed Washington defense attorney Plato Cacheris, for taking it.

U.K. 'Spy-in-a-Bag' Mystery Piques U.S. Interest

If spy agency operative Gareth Williams brought his bondage and bike-racing hobbies to the Washington area during his many visits to NSA headquarters at Ft. Meade, he practiced them with a discretion worthy of his profession. 

The British media has been in a frenzy for almost two years over Williams, a codes-and-cyphers whiz, since his lithe body was discovered zipped up in a carryall bag in the bathtub of an MI6 safe house in London, in August 2010.

Today the NewYork Times presented the bizarre and fascinating case, an intoxicating mix of spy work and sexual picadillos, to an American audience in a front page piece, generating a big buzz in national security circles.

Will a Woman Helm U.S. Intelligence Next Year?

Women have run Britain's domestic counterterrorism agency, and a woman may soon run France's foreign espionage service. Three American women with similar credentials could possibly emerge from the shadows in an Obama, Clinton or McCain administration.

CQ Politics (05/30/2008)

Mike Chertoff Takes See-No-Evil Stance on NSA Wiretaps

As more allegations of questionable wiretapping emerged last week, the former federal judge faced an unprecedented interrogation on the Homeland Security Department’s relationship with the NSA.

CQ Homeland Security (03/07/2008)

State Secrets Abuses Come to a Boil

The government's practice of fending off suits by former intelligence agents and civil rights groups by invoking the 'state secrets privilege' is coming under heavy fire.

CQ Politics(02/01/2008)

Wiretapping's Collateral Damage

The strange spy tale of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright and the administration's push for open-ended electronic surveillance powers combine to create cause for worry — but not just for the reasons many people think.
See story

CQ Politics(01/25/2008)

Homeland Intelligence Chief Allen to Be Grilled on What NSA Gave Him

When the National Security Agency assigned Bill Semenick to be its liaison to the Homeland Security Department three years ago, he found he didn’t have a parking space, a desk or a secure computer link back to his Ft. Meade, Md., headquarters.
See Story

CQ Homeland Security (5/19/2006)

To Spy Veteran, Ma Bell's Alleged Role in NSA Wiretapping Has Familiar Ring

Marty Kaiser is nearly cackling on the telephone as another e-mail arrives.

“Oh, you’ve gotta see this one,” he says.

He reads a few lines and laughs — it’s another missive from old friends and associates who are chiding him about the latest fallout from the NSA domestic spying case.
See Story

CQ Homeland Security (4/14/2006)