Who You Love Shouldn't Matter When You Serve: Via Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Jene Newsome served nine years in the Air Force. She was recently discharged under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy after she was outed by South Dakota's Rapid City Police Department.

On November 20, 2009, the Rapid City Police Department came to serve a warrant on Jene Newsome's wife. Jene and her wife, Cheryl, were just married in Iowa a few weeks before the police came knocking on their door.

When the police entered the house, they saw the marriage certificate sitting on the kitchen table. The marriage certificate didn't have anything to do with Cheryl's arrest; one of the officers just saw it as an opportunity to out Jene and end her career. [ Read more ... ]

Secret Document Calls Wikileaks ‘Threat’ to U.S. Army: Via Threat Level.

Wikileaks presents a “threat to the U.S. Army” and publishes “potentially actionable information” for targeting military personnel, according to a classified intelligence report posted Monday on the whistleblowing site.

The 32-page report entitled Wikileaks.org – An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups? (.pdf) indicates the government’s concern that “current employees or moles” within the Defense Department or the U.S. government “are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.” To stop this, the 2008 report had suggested a campaign to expose and punish those who leak to the site, which was founded in 2007 by Chinese dissidents, journalists and mathematicians.

“Wikileaks.org uses trust as a center of gravity by assuring insiders, leakers, and whistleblowers who pass information to Wikileaks.org personnel or who post information to the website that they will remain anonymous,” according to the report. “The identification, exposure, or termination of employment of or legal actions against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others from using Wikileaks.org to make such information public.” [ Read more ... ]

Funeral Flap: Justices Weigh Religion, Speech Rights: Via Threat Level.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to delve into the sensitive question of whether the First Amendment protects anti-gay protesters carrying placards outside military funerals saying “America is Doomed,” “Thank God for 9/11″ and other volatile phrases like “Thank God for dead soldiers.”

The messages and picketing are part of a Kansas church’s belief that the United States’ tolerance for homosexuality is cause for soldiers’ deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The case the justices decided to review Monday tests the boundaries of free speech versus freedom of religion — doctrines embodied in the First Amendment.

Without comment, the justices agreed to review last year’s federal appellate decision overturning a $5 million verdict (.pdf) in favor of a Baltimore father who sued the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka and its pastor, Fred Phelps, in 2006. The father of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder was awarded damages for, among other things, invasion of privacy and emotional distress for the events that occurred outside his son’s funeral at a Catholic church in Maryland. [ Read more ... ]

Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet: Via Threat Level.

The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence.

McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering:  McConnell is the nice-seeming guy who is willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those not in the know.

When he was head of the country’s national intelligence, he scared President Bush with visions of e-doom, prompting the president to sign a comprehensive secret order that unleashed tens of billions of dollars into the military’s black budget so they can start making firewalls and malware into military equipment. And now McConnell, back safely in civilian life as a vice president at the secretive defense contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton, is out in front of Congress and the media, peddling the same Cybaremaggedon! gloom.

And now he says we need to re-engineer the internet. [ Read more ... ]

Pentagon Discloses Hundreds of Reports of Possibly Illegal Intelligence Activities: Via EFF.org Updates.

The Department of Defense has released more than 800 heavily-redacted pages of intelligence oversight reports, detailing activities that its Inspector General has “reason to believe are unlawful.” The reports are the latest in an ongoing document release by more than a half-dozen intelligence agencies in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by EFF in July 2009.

The reports, submitted to the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) by various Department of Defense components, cover the period from 2001 through 2008. The IOB’s role within the Executive Office of the President is to ensure that each component of the intelligence community works within the Constitution and all applicable laws. As such, the Inspector General of each intelligence agency is required to submit periodic reports to the IOB, which in turn is required to forward to the Attorney General any report identifying an intelligence activity that violates the law. Intelligence oversight reporting is rarely disclosed to the public. [ Read more ... ]

Repealing DADT + National Security = A Match Made in Heaven: Via Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Here in Washington, D.C., efforts to finally repeal the discriminatory and ineffective "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy gather increasing momentum by the day. However, some in the Pentagon could do better by more closely listening to the views of Gen. David Petraeus, Commander of U.S. Central Command, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen. In appearances before two congressional committees yesterday, Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, and Gen. Norton Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, expressed their mutual concerns about moving too swiftly in repealing DADT.

According to an article by Thom Shanker in today's New York Times, Gen. Casey told the Senate Armed Services Committee: "I do have serious concerns about the impact of repeal of the law on a force that's fully engaged in two wars and has been at war for eight-and-a-half years." [ Read more ... ]

Hackers, Troops Rejoice: Pentagon Lifts Thumb Drive Ban: Via Danger Room.

Soldiers, you are now cleared to use your thumb drives again. U.S. Strategic Command has lifted its ban on the tiny drives, memory sticks, CDs, and other “removable flash media” on military networks.

The repeal, first reported by InsideDefense.com, may be good news for troops, who depend on the drives to move data in bandwidth-starved locations. But it may be good news for hackers, too. The original network security concerns which prompted the ban haven’t really been addressed, one Strategic Command cyber defense specialist tells Danger Room: “Not much changed. STRATCOM simply does not have the support to enforce such a ban indefinitely.”

STRATCOM prohibited the drives’ use back in November, 2008 after the Agent.btz virus began working its way through military networks. A variation of the “SillyFDC” worm, Agent.btz spreads by copying itself from thumb drive to computer and back again. Once on a PC, “it automatically downloads code from another location. And that code could be pretty much anything,” iDefense computer security expert Ryan Olson said at the time. [ Read more ... ]

Most Awesomely Bad Military Acronyms 8: Via Danger Room.

Reporters groaned yesterday, when Pentagon comptroller Bob Hale introduced the Defense Department’s plans for a “Consequence Management Response Force, ‘C-SMURF,’ as it’s called.”

Even in a building known for its brain-melting jargon, “C-SMURF” was pretty horrendous. The journalists in the Pentagon briefing room knew it. And so did Hale. A moment later, he paused the briefing. ”I have a list of favorite acronyms in the Department of Defense. I shall add ‘C-SMURFs’ … to that list.” The room cracked up. [ Read more ... ]

Pentagon’s Black Budget Tops $56 Billion: Via Danger Room.

The Defense Department just released its king-sized, $708 billion budget for the next fiscal year. Much of the proposed spending is fairly detailed - noting exactly how many helicopters the Pentagon plans to buy, and how many troops it plans on playing. But about $56 billion goes simply to “classified programs,” or to projects known only by their code names, like “CHALK EAGLE” and “LINK PLUMERIA.” That’s the Pentagon’s black budget.

Cobbling together this round figure for the military’s hush-hush projects is easier than it seems. The Pentagon’s separate ledgers for operations, research, and procurement all contain line items for “classified programs.” Add those to the non-sensical, all-caps programs, and you’ve got yourself a nice round estimate for the Pentagon’s secretive efforts. [ Read more ... ]

Video Fix: Navy Spyplane Tracks Haiti Airdrop: Via Danger Room.

Editor: Visit the original article site to see the video.

Courtesy of InRelief.org, we can view recent footage shot by a Navy P-3 Orion surveillance plane of a humanitarian aid drop over Haiti. It’s part of an ongoing collaboration between the military and civilian relief agencies on the ground, an effort to “crowdsource” earthquake relief by sharing maps, satellite imagery and other time-sensitive data.

Hours after the disaster, the Pentagon released footage shot from an RQ-4 Global Hawk. [ Read more ... ]

Pentagon Searches for ‘Digital DNA’ to Identify Hackers: Via Danger Room.

One of the trickiest problems in cyber security is trying to figure who’s really behind an attack. Darpa, the Pentagon agency that created the Internet, is trying to fix that, with a new effort to develop the “cyber equivalent of fingerprints or DNA” that can identify even the best-cloaked hackers.

The recent malware hit on Google and other U.S. tech firms showed once again just how hard it is to pin a network strike on a particular person or group. Engineers are pretty sure the attack came from China, and it sure was sophisticated enough to come from a state military like China’s. But it’s hard to say conclusively that the People’s Liberation Army launched the strike.

It’s the kind of problem Darpa will try to solve with its “Cyber Genome” project. [ Read more ... ]

Pentagon Report Calls for Office of ‘Strategic Deception’: Via Danger Room.

The Defense Department needs to get better at lying and fooling people about its intentions. That’s the conclusion from an influential Pentagon panel, the Defense Science Board (DSB), which recommends that the military and intelligence communities join in a new agency devoted to “strategic surprise/deception.”

Tricking battlefield opponents has been a part of war since guys started beating each other with bones and sticks. But these days, such moves are harder to pull off, the DSB notes in a January report (.pdf) first unearthed by InsideDefense.com. “In an era of ubiquitous information access, anonymous leaks and public demands for transparency, deception operations are extraordinarily difficult. Nevertheless, successful strategic deception has in the past provided the United States with significant advantages that translated into operational and tactical success. Successful deception also minimizes U.S. vulnerabilities, while simultaneously setting conditions to surprise adversaries.”

The U.S. can’t wait until it’s at war with a particular country or group before engaging in this strategic trickery, however. “Deception cannot succeed in wartime without developing theory and doctrine in peacetime,” according to the DSB. [ Read more ... ]

Paging James Cameron: Pentagon Wants 3-D Surveillance: Via Danger Room.

Think Avatar, for military spies. Pentagon far-out research arm Darpa wants to turn surveillance into a 3D experience for troops. They’ve launched the Fine Detail Optical Surveillance (FDOS) Program, and are requesting proposals for prototypes of optical imaging systems that would use “advanced high-resolution 3D imaging technology.” Darpa wants two kinds of surveillance systems: portable units for active battle, and drone-ready systems for unmanned planes.

The agency wants proposals that start from scratch, using a fundamentally new model for obtaining video footage. The 3D surveillance should be able to monitor moving targets with high resolution, from different ranges, and without the need for users to do much legwork, like scanning or refocusing on a target. Darpa anticipates that 3D surveillance would boost field of vision and depth of vision “by over 100X” compared to existing systems. [ Read more ... ]

Report: U.S. Drone Goes Down Over Pakistan. Again.: Via Danger Room.

A U.S. drone reportedly crashed in Pakistan on Sunday. The Associated Press calls it “a rare mishap for a program Washington has increasingly relied on to kill Taliban and al-Qaida militants.” But that’s not quite right; American unmanned aircraft go down all the time. They’ve even gone down before in Pakistan.

According to U.S. Air Force statistics, Predator and Reapers drones have suffered at least 85 “class A mishaps” — accidents which caused a million dollars’ worth of damage or more. Typically, one of these accidents takes place about 14 times for every 100,000 hours a Predator flies.

Drones are more glitch-prone than traditional planes. Communications with their remote pilots regularly cut out, forcing the robotic aircraft into automatic holding patterns.  The unmanned planes don’t handle rain, snow, heavy clouds, or high winds particularly well; [ Read more ... ]

U.S. Diverts Spy Drone from Afghanistan to Haiti: Via Danger Room.

As part of the Haiti relief effort, the U.S. military is sharing imagery from one of its high-end, high-flying spy drones, the RQ-4 Global Hawk.

This image, shot yesterday by a Global Hawk, shows damage to the National Cathedral in Port-au-Prince. U.S. Southern Command is sharing the images so that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and relief groups can get a better picture of the situation on the ground.

Danger Room pal Paul McCleary has much, much more detail at Ares. Colonel Bradley Butz, with the Air Force’s 480th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing told at McCleary that the Global Hawk was originally supposed to fly over Afghanistan, but was retasked yesterday to Haiti, where it spent 14 hours on station and shot hundreds of images.

“Today we’re going after another 1,000 images, which will all be unclassified,” McCleary quotes Butz as saying. “SOUTHCOM will provide it to whoever needs it.” [ Read more ... ]

Navy Wants Troops Wearing Brain-Scanners Into War: Via Danger Room.

The Pentagon’s been pushing for better ways to diagnose, treat and prevent wartime brain injuries. Last year, they requested proposals for pharmacological methods to stave off PTSD. New genetic tests and brain scans, meant to identify war-fighters who are “vulnerable” to stress reactions, are ongoing. Now, the Navy’s looking to speed up the diagnosis of brain trauma, with a portable, weather-proof, multipurpose brain scanner.

The Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery is requesting proposals for a brain-scanning system that can assess a myriad of neuro-cognitive abilities, including reaction times, problem solving and memory recall. [ Read more ... ]

Medical breakthrough: VA, Kaiser to share records: Via SignOnSanDiego.com.

Kaiser Permanente and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs today will launch an electronic medical-data exchange program in San Diego that could become the seed for the much touted but equally elusive national health records system.

The collaboration, which will be detailed at a news conference in La Jolla, marks the first time a computerized patient-records system operated by a federal agency has been linked to one operated by a private organization.

Under the new partnership, Kaiser and VA doctors in San Diego County will gain instant access to certain files from both institutions for about 1,000 patients who receive care from both providers.

The U.S. Department of Defense, which uses a separate set of electronic records, will join the program in a few months, Kaiser and VA officials said. [ Read more ... ]

Suricata Beta Available for Download!!: Via The Open Information Security Foundation.

It's been about three years in the making, but the day has finally come! We have the first release of the Suricata Engine! The engine is an Open Source Next Generation Intrusion Detection and Prevention Tool, not intended to just replace or emulate the existing tools in the industry, but to bring new ideas and technologies to the field.

The OISF is part of and funded by the Department of Homeland Security's Directorate for Science and Technology HOST program (Homeland Open Security Technology), by the the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), as well as through the very generous support of the members of the OISF Consortium. More information about the Consortium is available, as well as a list of our current Consortium Members. 

The Suricata Engine and the HTP Library are available to use under the GPLv2. 

The HTP Library is an HTTP normalizer and parser written by Ivan Ristic of Mod Security fame for the OISF. [ Read more ... ]

The NYT's view of "journalistic objectivity": Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

(updated below)

I've written many times before about Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was abducted by the U.S. in late 2001, tortured at Bagram, sent to Guantanamo for seven years -- where he was never charged with any crime and was interrogated overwhelmingly about Al Jazeera's operations, not about Terrorism -- and then suddenly released without explanation last year, as though the whole thing never happened.  The due-process-free imprisonment of this journalist by the U.S. government was ignored almost completely by the American media (other than Nicholas Kristof), even as it righteously obsessed on the far shorter and far more humane imprisonment of journalists by countries such as Iran and North Korea (hey, look over there at those tyrannical countries - they imprison our journalists!!!!!).  Aside from al-Hajj, we've imprisoned numerous other journalists without charges in Iraq -- and continue to this day to do so -- including ones who work for Reuters and the Associated Press.

Today, The New York Times' media reporter Brian Stelter profiles al-Hajj, who is now an on-air correspondent for Al Jazeera.  The article recounts the details of al-Hajj's detention, his description of his torture, and the physical and psychological wounds he still suffers from his treatment at the hands of his American captors.  All things considered, the article is a decent effort to explain what happened, and Stelter deserves credit for bringing some desperately needed attention to this story.  Nonetheless, the article contains some rather striking and revealing passages, beginning with this: [ Read more ... ]

NORAD TRACKS SANTA 2008 - International (English, Deutsch, Espanol, Italiano, Francais, 中文, 日本語, ): Via The North Pole

All the preparations for this year are in place! Return on Christmas Eve to track St. Nick on his magical flight around the world!

Until then, come back each day to receive updates from the North Pole and to discover new surprises in the Kids' Countdown.

And you can get a little history about this from Wikipedia. And for those of you who prefer making phone calls the official hotline: 1-877-HI-NORAD Google Analytics also has some details about this tracking program. [ Read more ... ]

Behind the scenes: NORAD's Santa tracker: Via Geek Gestalt - CNET News.

All joking aside, NORAD has been taking its Santa tracking project seriously for decades. But it actually began in 1955 with a wrong number.

One morning that December, U.S. Air Force Col. Harry Shoup, the director of operations at CONAD, the Continental Air Defense Command--NORAD's predecessor--got a phone call at his Colorado Springs, Colo., office (see video below). This was no laughing matter. The call had come in on one of the top secret lines inside CONAD that only rang in the case of a crisis.

Grabbing the phone, Shoup must have expected the worst. Instead, a tiny voice asked, "Is this Santa Claus?" [ Read more ... ]

Salon Radio: Critical state secrets hearing today: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

(updated below w/transcript - Update II)

[link to recorder fixed]

The case of Mohamed v. Jeppesen -- brought by five victims of Bush's torture/rendition program against the Boeing subsidiary that shipped them to be tortured -- was the Obama DOJ's first test of its commitment to restore basic accountability and the rule of law.  Back in February, it resoundingly failed that test when they demanded that the case be dismissed in its entirety by invoking the same radicalized version of the "state secrets" privilege which the Bush DOJ, to great controversy, repeatedly invoked.  That was the first sign that things would go terribly awry with Obama's rule of law and civil liberties record.  This warped rendition of the "state secrets" doctrine transforms it from a long-standing, simple evidentiary privilege (i.e., this specific document is too sensitive to use in the litigation) into a sweeping, dangerous shield of immunity for government lawbreaking (i.e., courts have no right to review the legality of the crimes we commit in secret). 

The Obama administration now insists that courts must dismiss lawsuits alleging presidential lawbreaking whenever the CIA Director claims the lawsuit would jeopardize state secrets; or, as the ACLU Brief puts it, "torture victims must be denied a day in court based on an Affidavit submitted by their torturers."  The Obama DOJ has gone on to invoke that same Bush-created version of the secrecy theory to demand dismissal of numerous other cases alleging various types of lawbreaking by the Executive Branch. [ Read more ... ]

Predator drones use less encryption than your TV, DVDs: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

What three-letter Internet acronym best fits the bizarre news out of Iraq and Afghanistan that militants there have been intercepting US Predator drone video feeds using laptops and a $30 piece of Russian software: LOL, WTF, or OMG? [ Read more ... ]

Intelligence Agencies Release Docs Describing Misconduct in Response to EFF Lawsuit: Via EFF.org Updates.

Today the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Agency released 162 pages of intelligence oversight reporting in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by EFF in July.

The reports, made to a presidential advisory committee called the Intelligence Oversight Board, detail intelligence activities that the agencies "have reason to believe may be unlawful."

EFF is reviewing the documents now and has posted them on our website. Some of our initial finds include reports that: [ Read more ... ]

Probe Targets Archives’ Handling of Data on 70 Million Vets: Via Threat Level.

The inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration is investigating a potential data breach of tens of million of records about U.S. military veterans, after the agency sent a defective hard drive back to its vendor for repair and recycling without first destroying the data.

At issue is a hard drive that helped power eVetRecs, the system veterans use to request copies of their health records and discharge papers. When the drive failed in November of last year, the agency returned the drive to GMRI, the contractor that sold it to them, for repair. GMRI determined it couldn’t be fixed, and ultimately passed it to another firm to be recycled.

The incident was reported to NARA’s inspector general by Hank Bellomy, a NARA IT manager, who charges that the move put 70 million veterans at risk of identity theft, and that NARA’s practice of returning hard drives unsanitized was symptomatic of an irresponsible security mindset unbecoming to America’s record-keeping agency. [ Read more ... ]