In a striking departure from the hush-hush culture of intelligence community IT, the CIO’s office for the Director of National Intelligence is running an open online forum about certification and accreditation issues, as well as other technology matters. It might not seem like it, but this is very, very important. It is probably the most…

A perfectly good and entirely feasable idea via Bruce Schneier: There are a variety of encryption technologies that allow you to analyze data without knowing details of the data: I am reminded of the after-action meeting held after a major cyber threat event about, oh, eight years ago. In one room sat the working-level experts…

Did you see Bruce’s post this morning? So much for your profiling argument. Which is what exactly? Were we to continue the parlor game of listing terrorist attacks and linking them to race or religion I’m fairly confident that there would be more tick marks in the swarthy-ethnic-man column than in the pissed-off-whitey column. In…

As part of an effort to break down barriers between intelligence agencies, [Intelligence Community] employees will be required to serve tours of duty outside their home offices to qualify for promotion into the government’s senior ranks. A directive mandating “joint duty” assignments was recently issued by John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. It…

I predict that US and coalition forces will be out of Iraq much sooner than anyone expects. I base this prediction in part on the intelligence and military aftermath following Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death; though not necessarily for the same reasons that other commentators have offered up. Frankly, I think al-Qaida in Iraq is too…

Courtsey of Time (oddly enough): U.S. intelligence got its first inkling of the plot from the contents of a laptop computer belonging to a Bahraini jihadist captured in Saudi Arabia early in 2003. It contained plans for a gas-dispersal system dubbed “the mubtakkar” (Arabic for inventive). Fearing that al-Qaeda’s engineers had achieved the holy grail…

(H/T Bruce Schneier) Yet another disturbing story about DHS, the punch line being: Homeland Security, the $40-billion-a-year agency set up to combat terrorism after 9/11, has been given universal jurisdiction and can hold anyone on Earth for crimes unrelated to national security — even me for a court date I missed while I was in…

The U.S. FBI may have lost 400 pieces of equipment, National Journal’s Technology Daily reported Monday.The Federal Bureau of Investigation still has not told the Government Accountability Office what has happened to hundreds of pieces of equipment that were supposed to be part of a failed department-wide case-management system. “The FBI also has not provided…

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff no longer has a problem with spam. Not wanting to be deluged with lots of garbage, Chertoff no longer uses e-mail. His conversion to Luddism started after Hurricane Katrina last year, when a deluge of overnight messages about levee breaches flooded his e-mail account, according to a report in U.S.…

“John Doe,” late of the CIA, sounds off with his ideas on how to shake things up (via Washington Times): Why not reform the intelligence community to make core functions the centerpiece of a truly effective intelligence service? A small but efficient DNI office can manage the community and serve as the link to policy-makers.…