Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Dashiell Bennett

The CIA Didn't Trust Snowden, Even Back in 2009

Dashiell Bennett, The Wire — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 12:13:28 -0400

Edward Snowden had a negative report placed in his CIA personnel file more than four years ago, but that red flag wasn't enough to keep him out of the NSA's highly classified computer network. According to a report in Friday's The New York Times, while working as a CIA technician back in 2009, Snowden was sent home from an overseas posting due to the suspicions of supervisor — who suspected him of trying to gain unauthorized access to classified files. Yet, that didn't stop Snowden from retaining his security clearance when he switched jobs and moved to the NSA.

At the beginning of 2013, Snowden was hired by Booz Allen Hamilton, a government contractor who put him to work for the National Security Agency. Had Booz Allen or the NSA seen Snowden's CIA file before hiring him, it almost certainly would have affected his employment, but his tarnished record appears to have "slipped through the cracks."

In 2006, Snowden was hired as computer technician by the CIA and sent to Geneva, Switzerland, with a State Department cover story. In interviews this summer, Snowden claimed his work in Geneva made him "disillusioned" with the government and its clandestine operations. By 2009, a supervisor noticed that Snowden's attitude and work habits had changed. He placed a "derogatory report" in Snowden's file, which included the suspicion that he had tried to access files without authorization. After the note was filed, Snowden was sent home.

Read the full story on Atlantic Wire.

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Navy Yard Responders Say Rescue Was Hampered by Bad Radios

Dashiell Bennett, The Wire — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 10:32:51 -0400

In the aftermath of this week's Navy Yard shooting, questions continue to be raised not just about shooter and his actions, but about the seemingly limited effectiveness of the first response. Several firefighters and police officers say that they had trouble communicating during the chaotic moments of the shooting, because their radios were not functioning properly inside Building 197.

Federal firefighters and Navy police officers say they were given radios that initially worked properly, but as they went deeper into the building in pursuit of the gunman, they could no longer communicate with each other or to anyone outside the building. The radios were reportedly not powerful enough to reach transmitters outside the building. Others say they could hear the communications on their own radios, but could not respond in kind, forcing them to use their cellphones to talk to people on the outside.

Radios belonging to the D.C fire department appeared to work much better, but they could not communicate with rescuers belong to other units, so federal officers had to turn to cellphones or runners to enable communications. Even if the Navy radios had been working, they would not have been compatible with those used by the officers of the Metropolitan Police Department.

Even worse, some of the Navy employees say this was a known issue well before the shooting, but little was done to correct it.

Read the full story at TheAtlanticWire.com.

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NSA Searches Some Americans' Emails for Any Mention of Foreign Suspects

Dashiell Bennett, The Wire — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 10:04:31 -0400

The National Security Agency says it doesn't target American citizens when searching through its vast quantities of data looking for threats, but that doesn't mean it won't look through your email. The New York Times has the latest revelation in the never-ending flood of leaks about how NSA conducts its business, and the newest one suggests that thousands and thousands of emails, including those sent and received by American citizens, are being combed over by intelligence agents without a warrant.

The description of the program is a little confusing, but (we think) it works like this: Say NSA the wants to find out information about a particular individual or "target." Since NSA is already authorized to intercept any electronic communication that crosses U.S. borders, their servers are already soaking up this data on an ongoing basis. (And that probably doesn't even include the "massive amounts" of data that countries like Germany give to the NSA everyday.)

To find out more about the target, NSA copies a large selection of the data and runs a keyword search for something very specific, like a name or an email address or a phone number. In "a small number of seconds," the program then take any communication that matches that search and sets it aside for actual humans to look at later. The rest is deleted.

Mastermind of 9/11 Attacks Designed a Vacuum Cleaner From His CIA Prison

Dashiell Bennett, The Wire — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 12:54:46 -0400

The man long-considered the most responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has been in prison a long time—so long that he appears to have had time to reinvent common household appliances. A new report from the Associated Press claims that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was captured by the CIA in 2003, was allowed to spend free time working on designs for a new vacuum cleaner.

CIA officials says Mohammed was allowed to indulge his hobby — he actually has a degree in mechanical engineering from a North Carolina university — both as a reward for good behavior and to keep him sane. They were concerned that his long imprisonment might do so much psychological damage that he would no longer be useful as source for information. (Other detainees have experienced severe mental breakdowns as result of their torture and long confinement.)

The terrorist leader had already been tortured numerous times while being held in secret "black site" prisons in Eastern Europe, and his value as a prisoner had been mostly exhausted. But agents also knew he wasn't going to be released anytime soon and he might helpful again in the future, if he stayed healthy.

The project was one of many designed to keep prisoners like Mohammed lucid and cooperative. According to the same CIA sources, he would often hold "office hours" with CIA officers, where he would lecture them about Islam and his history of jihad. He also liked to read books, including the Harry Potter series.

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.

(Image via Daria Filimonova/Shutterstock.com)

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What Did Tech Companies Know About the NSA and When Did they Know It?

Dashiell Bennett, The Wire — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:41:31 -0400

The technology giants that were implicated in the NSA/data mining bombshell have so vigorously denied any acknowledgment of the program that The Washington Post has had to quietly pull back its claim that the major firms were complicit in the snooping. In the original version of the Post story that went up on Thursday, the paper claimed that nine companies mentioned by name in the report "participate knowingly" in the widespread collection of data from their servers.

Reporters Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras did write that "several" of the companies they reached out to before publication had denied knowledge of the program, but that did not cause them leave out that assertion at publication. Once the story broke, however, the companies went on the defensive, issuing very public denials that they were in on the plan. The denials were so stout that the paper seems to have walked back that small, but important aspect of the story. It appears the phrase "participate knowingly" has been removed from the piece and an explanatory paragraph added in that subtly acknowledges it may have been the result of a misunderstanding. There are no notes or indications on the Post website that the story had been altered.

Given the fact that NSA acknowledges the PRISM program exists (and defends it as vital and useful) and the fact that tech companies claim so strongly to know nothing about it, it seems there's going to be some debate over the next few days about how exactly the program worked. There is also sure to be lots of fingerpointing and accusations that tech companies are either lying or foolish. (Everyone already thinks that about the government.) While the Director of National Intelligence has promised more information about how it was supposed to work, the squabble over logistics and responsibility is likely to overshadow the larger debate about whether this should be happening at all.

This Stem-Cell Cloning Breakthrough Is Going to Revive the Same Old Debate

Dashiell Bennett, The Wire — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:22:25 -0400

Researchers in Oregon claim to have solved the tricky problem of cloning human stem cells, but you're more likely to see a duplicate of a years-old ethics debate than you are a duplicate human.

The breakthrough is one that's been long sought after by biologists: creating perfectly matched human tissues through the process of cell cloning. In the past, researchers have had success with cloning animals through a technique known as somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), where the nucleus of an unfertilized egg is replaced with the DNA of a donor cell. (That's how Dolly the sheep was born.) The egg can then be turned into an embryo, with DNA that matches the original donor exactly. Later, stem cells from that developing embryo could be harvested and, in theory, be cultured to become almost any type of human cell there is. That would open a huge array of new medical treatments, from curing diabetes to fixing spinal cord injuries to providing rejection-proof organ transplants.

In the last decade or so, doctors had mostly turned away from SCNT as a means of producing "patient-specific" embryonic stem cells. They did so for a variety of reasons, but the biggest was that it didn't really work on humans. Researchers in South Korea claimed to have done just that in 2004, but their finding turned out to be a fake. Other attempts created imperfect results or were too expensive or inefficient. As a result, scientists have focused on other methods of attempting to create patient-specific stem cells. The focus now is on "reprogramming" adult cells so they become stem cells again, which has had limited success. (The new cells are called pluripotent cells, or iPS cells.) As one surprised researcher put it, "the most surprising thing [about this paper] is that somebody is still doing human [SCNT] in the era of iPS cells."

Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Dashiell Bennett

The CIA Didn't Trust Snowden, Even Back in 2009

Navy Yard Responders Say Rescue Was Hampered by Bad Radios

NSA Searches Some Americans' Emails for Any Mention of Foreign Suspects

Mastermind of 9/11 Attacks Designed a Vacuum Cleaner From His CIA Prison

What Did Tech Companies Know About the NSA and When Did they Know It?

This Stem-Cell Cloning Breakthrough Is Going to Revive the Same Old Debate

An Air Force Unit Controlling Our Nuclear Weapons Is Filled with 'Rot'

We're One Step Closer to On-Demand Organ Transplants

Half of All U.S. Rivers Are Too Polluted for Our Health

New 'Cosmic Blueprint' Lets Us Look at the Earliest Days of the Universe

Is the CIA Getting Out of the Drone Business?

South Korean Websites Taken Down In Possible Cyberattack From North Korea

Obama Says Iran Is a Year Away from a Nuke

North Korea Shuts Off Its Emergency Hotline to Seoul

North Korea Is Now Threatening a Preemptive Nuclear Attack

Pro-Assad Hackers Take Over AFP's Twitter with Syrian Propaganda Photos

Inspectors Find Major Iran Nuclear Move Ahead of Talks

North Korea's Nuclear Negotiating Game Has It All Backwards

Nuclear Negotiations with Iran Fail... Again

Why North Korea's Nuclear Program Can't Be Stopped

Iran airs spy footage it (allegedly) took from a captured U.S. drone

The drone secrets inside John Brennan

Iran sent a monkey into space

Latest flu numbers paint the picture of an epidemic

FAA orders review of all Boeing 787 Dreamliners