Blogs of War

Officials announce first Afghanistan surge units
About 16,000 Marines and Soldiers have been notified they will deploy to Afghanistan as part of President Barack Obama’s new strategy.

Data-Sifting For Timely Intelligence Still an Elusive Goal
Although there was evidence to suggest that the Japanese navy was up to something in December 1941, that information was scanty and came too late. Today’s intelligence agencies have another problem altogether — more information than they can deal with, and computers aren’t helping as much as one might expect for reasons that will be familiar to Slashdot readers: computers can crunch numbers faster and more accurately than humans but they’re still easily baffled by language as it is commonly used in the real world.

Coordinated Bombings in Baghdad Kill at Least 121
A series of devastating car bombings rocked Baghdad on Tuesday, killing at least 121 people and wounding hundreds more, according to preliminary accounts by witnesses, the police and hospital officials.

Chicago Terrorism Suspect Charged by U.S. Over Mumbai Attacks
U.S. prosecutors charged a Chicago man with helping plan last year’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai by carrying out surveillance of potential targets in India’s financial hub.

Pakistan spy agency office attacked in Multan
A gun and bomb attack on an office of Pakistan’s main intelligence agency in the central city of Multan has killed at least 12 people, police say.

Does Terrorism Work?
Is terrorism an effective tool for achieving political goals? Yes, up to a point, according a new paper.

Spy chief to face ‘taxi driver’ claim over Iraq weapons
Spy chief Sir John Scarlett is being questioned about intelligence on Iraq after claims a taxi driver was the source for the most infamous claim.

GD makes appointment for C4 Systems unit
U.S. company General Dynamics announced the appointment of a former Homeland Security Department senior executive official to its C4 Systems unit.

Cuban spies to get reduced prison sentences
The appeals judges ruled the initial sentences were too harsh for Ramon Labanino and Fernando Gonzalez, both 46. A Miami judge is scheduled to impose new sentences Tuesday on both men.

Cambodian Court Jails Thai as ‘Spy’
Siwarak Chutipong, an employee of Cambodia Air Traffic Services, was arrested by Cambodian police nearly a month ago, on charges of stealing information on the flight schedule and passing it to Thai diplomats in Phnom Penh.

Google chief: Only miscreants worry about net privacy
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt tells CNBC, sparking howls of incredulity from the likes of Gawker.

Real ID, Pass ID Napolitano’s statements
On December 2nd Secretary Napolitano of Homeland Security appeared before the Senate committee. As he had promised in his radio broadcast Senator Tom Udall (D, NM) raised the issue of extensions for states to meet the requirements of the Real ID Act.

MIT wins $40,000 prize in nationwide balloon-hunt contest
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced that the MIT team was the first group in the contest to report the latitude and longitude coordinates of all 10 balloons, which were scattered across the United States.

How Authoritarian States Survive the Internet
By adapting established methods of control, authoritarian and semi-authoritarian states have been able to counter the political impact of the internet within their borders, experts say, with serious implications for digital democracy movements around the world.

How the Taliban Take a Village (Lind/Sexton)
A current method used by Taliban in Afghanistan to gain control of an area deemed of strategic interest to the Taliban leadership operating from safe havens in Pakistan or within Afghanistan is to identify and target villages to subvert.

Worth Watching: Cheeky_Geeky

USASOC turns 20
Twenty years ago last week, the Army activated U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg with then-Lt. Gen. Gary E. Luck as the first commander.

U.S. sees homegrown Muslim extremism as rising threat
This may have been the most dangerous year since 9/11, anti-terrorism experts say.

Reducing India-Pak tension important for America’s strategic interests: US NSA
“The strategic interests of the United States lie more to the east of Afghanistan, for the future. Pakistan is a nuclear state, next to it is another nuclear state India,” Jones said, in an interview to Fox News.

Ariane rocket to launch French spy satellite
The satellite, Helios 2B is slated to blast off on a European Ariane rocket at 1:26 p.m. (1626 GMT) on Wednesday from the European Space Agency launch site in French Guiana.

DoD: Cloud Will Save Us ‘Hundreds of Millions’
“This is a radical shift,” Sienkiewicz said yesterday at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas. “We really believe we will be able to save hundreds of millions of dollars as we go forward with this model.”

IT weaknesses plague DHS
Weak internal controls are putting Homeland Security’s financial information at risk, according to an independent audit from accounting firm KPMG.

Cyber hacking could be a thing of the past
High-profile websites are constantly under threat from hackers attempting to paralyse their websites but new research could make such attacks computationally impossible. This research will be one of the topics discussed at a major international conference on the theory and application of cryptology and information security in Japan this week. Three papers by academics from Bristol University’s Department of Computer Science will be presented at the ASIACRYPT conference in Tokyo

Technology and Cyber War
This excerpt from my chapter The Four Pillars of Cyber War that will appear in the soon to be published Surviving Cyber War(Government Institutes, 2010) may serve as a basis for considering the weaponization of digital technologies for engaging in cyber war.

Boot The Warrior Off Our Internet
Nations are beginning their foray into the “weaponization” or “militarization” of our open Internet and will continue unless stopped.

A Talk with Mohsen Kadivar (and friends): Justice and Political Islam
Yesterday I went to a talk by Mohsen Kadivar, an Iranian cleric who is currently lecturing stateside and on a speaking tour. He is one of the intellectual leaders of the Green Movement that picked up after the Iranian elections this year.

Orbital Sciences moves ahead with plan to create satellites with orbiting clusters of modules
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., plans to award a $77 million follow-on contract to Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va., to continue developing fractionated satellite technology, which uses separate orbiting modules connected by wireless links, rather than a monolithic satellite architecture.

General Dynamics wins $54 million by U.S. Marine Corps for Combat Operations Centers
The COCs will enable command and control operations for Marines deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, from division or air-wing headquarters to the regimental level. The COCs also support pre-deployment training at locations in the United States.

Worth Watching: SouthCaucasus

Is Obama’s Afghanistan Strategy Ripping Off America?
In political terms, then, Obama’s speech was a win. But in practical terms, his plan is not, because it won’t really secure Afghanistan — given our multiple bankruptcies, we can’t afford to. Can I offer a better way out? I can only offer a frightening array of potential counterparties to the proposed settlement, a group of regional powers Obama has, to date, studiously avoided referencing.

Salahis Breach Found on Facebook
During the hearing regarding the White House security breach, several members of the committee questioned Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan about the events leading up to, during and after the state dinner. When Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton took the floor she asked, ”How did you discover that the Salahis had entered? Did you discover it through their facebook, or was it your own discovery that some interlopers had entered?” Sullivan answered, “We did not discover that on our own, we were advised of it the following day.” “And advised by whom, sir?” continued Norton. “Uh, facebook,” stated Sullivan.

McAfee: U.S. Needs Clear Cyber War Doctrine
It is easy to blame North Korea or China for intrusions that seem to be launched from computers in those countries, but the location of a computer or network launching an attack says little about who is behind it.

To read tea leaves in Moscow, watch its treatment of Tehran
One thing is certain: Russia plays a key role in Iran, due to its military and industrial ties with Tehran. Relations between Russia and Iran are now increasingly strained.

ISAlliance Delivers Cyber Security Report
The landmark report, entitled Implementing the Obama Cyber Security Strategy via the ISA Social Contract Model, is the culmination of nearly one decade of ISAlliance advocacy for market incentive based security reforms, and echos their previous cautions against pursuing costly regulatory constraints.

Eric Prince says he’s walking away from the company former known as Blackwater
The founder of the security firm Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, Erik Prince, says he’s done with the company and is walking away. The Holland native says he was betrayed by the US government in Iraq. Prince says he was labeled as a mercenary, and that’s just not true.

The Blogfather and the Spy
The “secret witness” in Tehran’s show trials may be the man who started Iran’s blogging revolution.

Iranian Crackdown Goes Global
His first impulse was to dismiss the ominous email as a prank, says a young Iranian-American named Koosha. It warned the 29-year-old engineering student that his relatives in Tehran would be harmed if he didn’t stop criticizing Iran on Facebook. Two days later, his mom called. Security agents had arrested his father in his home in Tehran and threatened him by saying his son could no longer safely return to Iran.

US spy opposes Israel-Palestinian prisoner swap
An American convicted of spying for Israel is reportedly proposing that Israel kill Hamas prisoners rather than swap them for a captive Israeli soldier. The Jerusalem Post daily reports that Jonathan Pollard says Israel should kill one Hamas prisoner every day until the militant group frees Sgt. Gilad Schalit

CIA can expand using drones in Pakistan
The White House has authorized the CIA to expand the use of unmanned aerial drones in Pakistan to track down and strike suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda members, the New York Times reported Friday.

Records of man claiming to be Calif. spy unsealed
A judge on Thursday lifted a seal on court records and transcripts that a Southern California man says will prove he was an informant for the FBI. Craig Monteilh claims he has not been fully paid by the FBI for spying on mosques — an activity that angered the Muslim community and brought accusations that worshippers and clerics were being targeted instead of possible terrorists.

NATO Pledges 7,000 More Troops for Afghanistan
Responding to American entreaties for more soldiers in Afghanistan, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO secretary general, announced Friday that the alliance had agreed to contribute a further 7,000 “new forces” to the coalition there following Washington’s decision to commit some 30,000 American reinforcements.

Somalia graduation ceremony blast kills 23
The death toll rose to 23 on Friday in a suicide bombing attack at a Somali graduation ceremony, which killed three members of Somalia’s U.N.-backed interim government, according to an independent media report. The attack in Mogadishu on Thursday was carried out by a male suicide bomber dressed in women’s clothing, witnesses said.

30,000 U.S. Troops Not Fighting 100 Al Qaeda Terrorists, Officials Insist
Intelligence officials on Wednesday disputed suggestions that President Obama is sending 30,000 more troops just to fight 100 Al Qaeda operatives estimated to be remaining in Afghanistan, arguing that their influence with the Taliban makes them far more harmful than their numbers would indicate.

National security threat changing: Zuma
“The emphasis on human security, and the explosion of information has led to the borderless movement of people and finances. These rapid global changes create uncertainty in the future of any nation.

Napolitano Toughens Language on Domestic Terrorism
Speaking to the America-Israel friendship league in New York, the secretary said the spate of recent terrorism arrests left no doubt that extremists are inside the country. “We are seeing young Americans who are inspired by Al Qaeda and radical ideology,” she said.

Book it to Jabberwocky this Saturday; Meet a Secret Agent Man
Area youths will have an opportunity for a firsthand tutorial about the intriguing world of espionage and intelligence when Peter Earnest–author of “The Real Spy’s Guide to Becoming a Spy”–comes to Fredericksburg this Saturday. With the experience of a 35-year career in the clandestine service of the CIA, as well as his role as the founding (and current) executive director of the International Spy Museum, Earnest is a wealth of information on the vast intelligence arena–comprising more than 200,000 employees in the United States.

Northrop Grumman Founds Cybersecurity Consortium
The new private sector-academic cybersecurity consortium could put the massive system integrator at an even bigger advantage within the government security market..

Worth Watching: AtlanticCouncil