Soon after legendary spymaster and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton’s intelligence career supposedly ended with his forced retirement in December 1974 due to the exposure of CIA wrongdoing, he returned to the Agency, where counterintelligence operations reportedly remained under his purview until late 1975.

Documents obtained by obtained by MIT national security researcher Ryan Shapiro and shared exclusively with MuckRock show that the Agency soon signed a Top Secret contract with Angleton after his much publicized firing. The documents also show that both Angleton and CIA Director Colby gave misleading testimony to the Church Committee about this. A previously classified internal CIA History also raises doubts about the nature of Angleton’s contract work by contradicting CIA’s public statements. Part one of this article explores his rehiring and the lies directly surrounding it, while later parts will reexamines CIA’s “war in heaven” including the possibly libelous “Monster Plot” report and the circumstances surrounding Angleton’s fall from grace.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/oct/19/angleton-return/

Privacy rights group Privacy International says it has obtained evidence for the first time that UK spy agencies are collecting social media information on potentially millions of people.

It has also obtained letters it says show the intelligence agencies’ oversight body had not been informed that UK intelligence agencies had shared bulk databases of personal data with foreign governments, law enforcement and industry — raising concerns about effective oversight of the mass surveillance programs.

The documents have come out as a result of an ongoing legal challenge Privacy International has brought against UK intelligence agencies’ use of bulk personal data collection as an investigatory power. (The group also has various other active legal challenges, including to state hacking).

It says now that the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO) oversight body “sought immediate inspection when secret practices came to light” as a result of its litigation.

The use by UK spooks of so-called bulk personal datasets (BPDs) — aka massive databases of personal information — was only publicly revealed in March 2015, via an Intelligence and Security Committee report, which also raised various concerns about their use.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/17/uk-spies-using-social-media-data-for-mass-surveillance/

The US Senate Judiciary Committee has unveiled its answer to a controversial spying program run by the NSA and used by the FBI to fish for crime leads.

Unsurprisingly, the proposed legislation [PDF] reauthorizes Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) – which allows American snoops to scour communications for information on specific foreign targets.

It also addresses the biggest criticisms of the FISA spying: that it was being used to build a vast database on US citizens, despite the law specifically prohibiting it; was being abused to do a mass sweep of communications, rather than the intended targeting of individuals; and that there was no effective oversight, transparency or accountability built into the program.

But in case you were in any doubt that the new law does not shut down the expansive – and in some cases laughable – interpretations put on FISA by the security services, you need only review the proposed legislation's title: the USA Liberty Act. Nothing so patriotic sounding can be free from unpleasant compromises.

And so it is in this case. While the draft law, as it stands, requires the FBI to have "a legitimate national security purpose" before searching the database and to obtain a court order "based on probable cause" to look at the content of seized communications, it still gives the domestic law enforcement agencies the right to look at data seized on US citizens by the NSA. And agents only need supervisory authority to search for US citizens' metadata.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/05/usa_liberty_act/

US officials are denying accusations raised in an incredible BuzzFeed News report published Friday, in which a senior US Treasury official accused the intelligence arm of the Treasury Department of illegally spying on US citizens. A Senate source now tells Gizmodo that department officials may be called to brief the Senate Intelligence Committee over the matter.

The Treasury official, who spoke to BuzzFeed News on the condition of anonymity, implicated Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OIA) in “domestic spying.” The report, which cited multiple government officials, stated that the OIA had “repeatedly and systematically” violated domestic surveillance laws by rifling through the private records of US citizens without legal authority.

Accusations that the OIA has been illegally collecting and storing data on US citizens—as well as providing the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies with “illegal backdoor access” to US citizens’ financial records—has already prompted a response from lawmakers charged with overseeing the intelligence community.

https://gizmodo.com/senate-intelligence-officials-plan-to-question-treasury-1819233352

The intelligence division at the Treasury Department has repeatedly and systematically violated domestic surveillance laws by snooping on the private financial records of US citizens and companies, according to government sources.

Over the past year, at least a dozen employees in another branch of the Treasury Department, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, have warned officials and Congress that US citizens’ and residents’ banking and financial data has been illegally searched and stored. And the breach, some sources said, extended to other intelligence agencies, such as the National Security Agency, whose officers used the Treasury’s intelligence division as an illegal back door to gain access to American citizens’ financial records. The NSA said that any allegations that it “is operating outside of its authorities and knowingly violating U.S. persons’ privacy and civil liberties is categorically false.”

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/us-intelligence-unit-accused-of-illegally-spying-on?

THE GROWING PROPENSITY of government hackers to reuse code and computers from rival nations is undermining the integrity of hacking investigations and calling into question how online attacks are attributed, according to researchers from Kaspersky Lab.

In a paper set for release today at the Virus Bulletin digital security conference in Madrid, the researchers highlight cases in which they’ve seen hackers acting on behalf of nation-states stealing tools and hijacking infrastructure previously used by hackers of other nation-states. Investigators need to watch out for signs of this or risk tracing attacks to the wrong perpetrators, the researchers said.

Threat researchers have built an industry on identifying and profiling hacking groups in order to understand their methods, anticipate future moves, and develop methods for battling them. They often attribute attacks by “clustering” malicious files, IP addresses, and servers that get reused across hacking operations, knowing that threat actors use the same code and infrastructure repeatedly to save time and effort. So when researchers see the same encryption algorithms and digital certificates reused in various attacks, for example, they tend to assume the attacks were perpetrated by the same group. But that’s not necessarily the case.

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/04/masquerading-hackers-are-forcing-a-rethink-of-how-attacks-are-traced/

US intelligence agencies have violated federal surveillance laws hundreds of times over the past decade, a painstaking analysis of declassified reviews, opinions, and documents has shown.

New research by the Open Tech Institute has found over 200 violations by the NSA and the FBI since the introduction of a controversial surveillance provision designed to collect foreign intelligence. Violations include over-collecting data, violating attorney-client privilege, and conducting unlawful surveillance of Americans, who are generally protected from spying under the constitution.

The research is the first comprehensive, compiled list of violations of the provision, known as section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is designed to collect data on foreign persons overseas, but also incidentally collects a large amount of data on Americans. The statute is the legal basis for the PRISM program and the tapping of global undersea fiber optic cables.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/us-violated-spy-laws-hundreds-of-times-in-the-past-decade/

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has offered to provide evidence that the Russian collusion narrative is false in exchange for a pardon from President Trump.

The president, apparently, has not yet gotten the message. On Saturday, President Trump told reporters that he has "never heard" of Assange's offer to make a deal.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) told The Daily Caller that Trump is being blocked from knowing about the potential deal with Assange. “I think the president’s answer indicates that there is a wall around him that is being created by people who do not want to expose this fraud that there was collusion between our intelligence community and the leaders of the Democratic Party,” Rohrabacher said.

https://pjmedia.com/video/julian-assange-says-will-provide-evidence-russia-narrative-false-exchange-pardon/

Intelligence Director Dan Coats Monday urged Congress to tread carefully as it considers imposing limitations on surveillance authorities enjoyed by the nation’s spy agencies for nearly a decade.

“This is clearly a major issue for the intelligence community,” Coats told a group of journalists at his office complex in suburban Virginia. “It’s one of our top priorities.”

The administration of President Donald Trump has called on Congress to renew and make permanent some powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expire at the end of this year. Those powers permit collection of electronic communications of foreigners who are deemed potential threats to U.S. national security, a list of targets that this year topped 106,000.

A scattering of legislators from both parties have called for limitations on surveillance power, voicing concerns from libertarian and civil liberties perspectives that U.S. citizens are getting swept up in the data collection.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article175334586.html

A change requested by the Trump administration will allow the NSA to keep information it acquired illegally.

This spring, the government announced a change to the way the National Security Agency collects information targeting foreigners, using the telecom backbone in what it calls "upstream" collection. Whereas for 10 years, the agency had sucked up communications mentioning a target's selector—say, collecting all emails sent to someone in this country that include Osama bin Laden's phone number in the body of the email—in April it stopped doing so domestically (though it will still do tons of it in collection overseas).

Not long after the announcement, the government released documents explaining why it had dropped this kind of collection, which it calls "about" collection. Those documents amounted to a confession that the NSA failed to follow rules the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court put in place in 2011 to ensure upstream collection complied with the Fourth Amendment.

There was a stink, at the time, accusing the Obama Administration of using Section 702 of FISA—which only permits the government to target foreigners—of using it to spy on Americans for five years. Those accusations were, technically, true (the NSA attributed such spying to technical failures, not legal ones). But the truth is far more troubling. In fact, from 2004 to 2016, the NSA was always engaging in collection the FISC would go on to deem unauthorized. For 12 years, under both the Bush and Obama Administrations, the NSA was collecting information that, if retained, would break the law.

But under the current presiding judge, overseeing the plans of the Trump Administration, NSA will be allowed to keep such data, a change from her three predecessors.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vb7eg9/the-nsas-12-year-struggle-to-follow-the-law

Intelligence agencies that are run by Technocrats are data hoarders who are compelled to collect everything that is collectible, illegal or not. We have stated many times that American intelligence agencies have long-since gone rogue, becoming unresponsive to courts and legislators alike. They must be stopped, at all costs. This is not about intelligence to keep Americans safe, but rather about building a surveillance network that will eventually lead to Scientific Dictatorship. Listen to the video in this article! ⁃ TN Editor

The NSA gets its authority to spy on U.S. Citizens from Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The law will expire this year after it hits its five-year sunset. Lawmakers will soon be deliberating over whether to renew Section 702 for another five or maybe even make it permanent.

https://www.technocracy.news/index.php/2017/09/13/reason-its-time-to-rein-in-warrantless-domestic-spying-before-its-too-late/

https://www.end702.com/

What a lot of people don't know, is that a range of classified documents from the NSA have not been attributed to Edward Snowden, which means that there was at least one other leaker inside the NSA.

Initially, this leaker was called the "second source", and although he was responsible for significant leaks, they got little attention in the US. More media coverage gained the release, since 2016, of NSA hacking tools by the mysterious "Shadow Brokers".

Now, a close look at documents published by the German magazine Der Spiegel in December 2013 provided new indications that the second source could be identical with the Shadow Brokers.

http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2017/09/are-shadow-brokers-identical-with.html

The Senate Intelligence Committee has approved a bill classifying WikiLeaks as a “hostile, non-state intelligence service.” Phillip Giraldi, former CIA officer and counter-terrorism specialist, explains how this is “like going to war” and that he “would not rule out assassinations.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsHD6ykE5iE

This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy's new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.

In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance, agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a "fourth branch" of the federal government -- with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year.

Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history's largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation's 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined "black budget" of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget.

By sweeping the skies and probing the worldwide web's undersea cables, the National Security Agency (NSA) could surgically penetrate the confidential communications of just about any leader on the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up billions of ordinary messages. For its classified missions, the CIA had access to the Pentagon's Special Operations Command, with 69,000 elite troops (Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile arsenal. In addition to this formidable paramilitary capacity, the CIA operated 30 Predator and Reaper drones responsible for more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.

While Americans practiced a collective form of duck and cover as the Department of Homeland Security's colored alerts pulsed nervously from yellow to red, few paused to ask the hard question: Was all this security really directed solely at enemies beyond our borders? After half a century of domestic security abuses -- from the "red scare" of the 1920s through the FBI's illegal harassment of antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s -- could we really be confident that there wasn't a hidden cost to all these secret measures right here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this security wasn't really so benign when it came to us.

From my own personal experience over the past half-century, and my family's history over three generations, I've found out in the most personal way possible that there's a real cost to entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion of secret agencies. Let me share just a few of my own "war" stories to explain how I've been forced to keep learning and relearning this uncomfortable lesson the hard way.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41724-exploring-the-shadows-of-the-us-security-state-how-i-learned-not-to-love-big-brother

RELEASE: CIA 'Express Lane' system for stealing the biometric databases of its 'partner' agencies around the world. https://t.co/8FefOS2Ljl pic.twitter.com/LPwlAd0Tgr— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 24, 2017

Today, August 24th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes secret documents from the ExpressLane project of the CIA. These documents show one of the cyber operations the CIA conducts against liaison services -- which includes among many others the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The OTS (Office of Technical Services), a branch within the CIA, has a biometric collection system that is provided to liaison services around the world -- with the expectation for sharing of the biometric takes collected on the systems. But this 'voluntary sharing' obviously does not work or is considered insufficient by the CIA, because ExpressLane is a covert information collection tool that is used by the CIA to secretly exfiltrate data collections from such systems provided to liaison services.

ExpressLane is installed and run with the cover of upgrading the biometric software by OTS agents that visit the liaison sites. Liaison officers overseeing this procedure will remain unsuspicious, as the data exfiltration disguises behind a Windows installation splash screen.

The core components of the OTS system are based on products from Cross Match, a US company specializing in biometric software for law enforcement and the Intelligence Community. The company hit the headlines in 2011 when it was reported that the US military used a Cross Match product to identify Osama bin Laden during the assassination operation in Pakistan.

https://wikileaks.org/vault7/#ExpressLane

An alleged British secret agent in the IRA who is accused of being linked to at least 20 murders while working for military intelligence could be charged with perjury for denying in court he was a spy, a senior UK police officer has told the Guardian.

Stakeknife, whose real name is believed to be Freddie Scappaticci, was the IRA’s chief spy catcher and received £80,000 each year as one of Britain’s most important agents within the terror group. It is alleged that his army and police handlers turned a blind eye to murders in order to promote their agent inside the IRA’s ranks.

Police are now investigating the person known as Stakeknife as part of Operation Kenova, a £35m investigation into his alleged role as an agent working for military intelligence within the IRA’s internal security department also known in Irish republican circles as “the nutting squad”.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/21/stakeknife-could-face-perjury-charges-says-senior-police-officer

Intelligence from Australia's Pine Gap base is being used on US battlefields, leaked documents from the US National Security Agency have revealed for the first time.

The documents reveal that the base outside Alice Springs, officially titled Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, provides detailed geolocation intelligence to the US military that can be used to locate targets, including for special forces and drone strikes.

The use of lethal unmanned drones by the US military has been blamed for hundreds of civilian deaths across countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan Syria, Yemen and Somalia.

The documents, which Background Briefing is publishing for the first time, come from the massive archive of classified documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

One document, titled "NSA Intelligence Relationship with Australia" is marked "top secret", and demonstrates that the role of Pine Gap, referred to by its NSA codeword RAINFALL, has become more military-focused over time.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-20/leaked-documents-reveal-pine-gaps-crucial-role-in-us-drone-war/8815472

A SHORT DRIVE south of Alice Springs, the second largest population center in Australia’s Northern Territory, there is a high-security compound, code-named “RAINFALL.” The remote base, in the heart of the country’s barren outback, is one of the most important covert surveillance sites in the eastern hemisphere.

Hundreds of Australian and American employees come and go every day from Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, as the base is formally known. The official “cover story,” as outlined in a secret U.S. intelligence document, is to “support the national security of both the U.S. and Australia. The [facility] contributes to verifying arms control and disarmament agreements and monitoring military developments.” But, at best, that is an economical version of the truth. Pine Gap has a far broader mission — and more powerful capabilities — than the Australian or American governments have ever publicly acknowledged.

An investigation, published Saturday by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in collaboration with The Intercept, punctures the wall of secrecy surrounding Pine Gap, revealing for the first time a wide range of details about its function. The base is an important ground station from which U.S. spy satellites are controlled and communications are monitored across several continents, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept from the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

https://theintercept.com/2017/08/19/nsa-spy-hub-cia-pine-gap-australia/

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has announced that the FBI has formed a new team focused on investigating potential leaks to the press. During a press conference on Friday, Sessions said that leak investigations have tripled since President Donald Trump took office. Civil liberties groups criticized Sessions's remarks. Ben Wizner of the ACLU said, "A crackdown on leaks is a crackdown on the free press and on democracy as a whole." We speak with John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who exposed the Bush-era torture program and became the only official jailed in connection with it.

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/8/formerly_jailed_cia_whistleblower_john_kiriakou