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

The parent company of The Intercept—First Look Media—has announced that it will provide support for the legal defense of Reality Leigh Winner, the NSA contractor who stands accused of leaking a top-secret document to The Intercept. She faces up to 10 years in prison, if convicted. Winner, who remains in jail, was charged for allegedly leaking a top-secret document showing how Russian military intelligence attempted to hack into several states’ voting infrastructure. The Intercept’s handling of the story faced widespread scrutiny. The Department of Justice claimed in an affidavit and search warrant that it caught the leaker in part by actions taken by The Intercept. We speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept.

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/7/13/whistleblowers_shouldnt_be_prosecuted_like_spies

A former CIA officer sold top secret and other classified documents to Chinese intelligence officials, according to charges filed Thursday in Alexandria federal court.

Kevin Patrick Mallory, 60, of Leesburg, Va., was arrested Thursday and appeared briefly in front of Judge Theresa Buchanan on counts of delivering defense information to aid a foreign government and making false statements. He asked to be represented by a public defender.

Mallory had a top secret security clearance until he left the government in 2012, prosecutors say, having worked at various government agencies and defense contractors.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/ex-dod-employee-accused-of-selling-top-secret-governments-to-china/2017/06/22/3ec3a706-576f-11e7-a204-ad706461fa4f_story.html?utm_term=.86a38e3ab6e0

The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.

Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.

But there was no disagreement about the damage. From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources. According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies-espionage.html

Prosecuting Assange under the Espionage Act for publishing leaked information — which Attorney General Jeff Sessions calls “a priority” — is dangerous. It could turn out to be a major move toward what President Trump has long been threatening to do: punish the independent media in America.

“When governments are trying to restrict press rights of any kind, the inclination is not to go after the most popular kid in the room — it’s to go after the least popular,” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told me.

What WikiLeaks has consistently done, Timm said, “is publish information that is true and that the government considers secret. That’s the same thing that the New York Times or The Washington Post does all the time.” (Sessions’s threatened prosecution reportedly would not focus on the Russian hacks of Democratic officials’ emails, which during the campaign prompted Trump to proclaim: “I love WikiLeaks!”)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-government-wants-julian-assange-in-jail-thats-bad-for-the-rest-of-us/2017/05/05/c8e153dc-3197-11e7-8674-437ddb6e813e_story.html?utm_term=.7eb95f4b71bb

For more than a decade, U.S. officials have refused to say what secrets China might have gleaned from the plane. Two years after the incident, journalists saw a redacted U.S. military report, which revealed that although crew members had jettisoned documents out an emergency hatch as they flew over the sea and had managed to destroy some signals-collection equipment before the plane fell into the hands of the Chinese, it was “highly probable” China had still obtained classified information from the plane. Attempts by journalists and academics to learn more over the years have been unsuccessful.

But now, a comprehensive Navy-NSA report completed three months after the collision, and included among documents obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, finally reveals extensive details about the incident, the actions crew members took to destroy equipment and data, and the secrets that were exposed to China — which turned out to be substantial though not catastrophic.

The unredacted Navy report, supplemented by a 2001 Congressional Research Service summary of the incident, as well as The Intercept’s interviews with two crew members on board during the collision, presents the most detailed picture yet of the P-3 incident, a critical moment in U.S.-China military relations.

https://theintercept.com/2017/04/10/snowden-documents-reveal-scope-of-secrets-exposed-to-china-in-2001-spy-plane-incident/