Thursday marks a dubious anniversary in the Homeland Security Department’s brief history. A year ago Secretary Michael Chertoff, as part of a department-wide restructuring, announced he would appoint an assistant secretary for cybersecurity and telecommunications. Today, that position remains unfilled. Chertoff took the first step on Thursday toward elevating the position of national cybersecurity czar…

GroupIntel Forums members (and anyone who wants to join) please hit the new poll at: http://groupintel.net/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/9901014161/m/6351053691

As mentioned previously, I participated in a panel discussion about captured media at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday. Most of the thunder was stolen by HPSCI Chairman Hoekstra, but I didn’t mind. The guy has his finger on the pulse of related issues and frankly I wouldn’t have cared if he had talked the whole…

Crypto star and security maven Schneier trots out an academic ally to beat the “data mining is bad” horse: Floyd Rudmin, a professor at a Norwegian university, applies the mathematics of conditional probability, known as Bayes’ Theorem, to demonstrate that the NSA’s surveillance cannot successfully detect terrorists unless both the percentage of terrorists in the…

Some US intelligence experts say the government should rethink how it gathers information in the war on terror. Four intelligence community veterans led by former C-I-A deputy director Richard Kerr offer their assessment in an unofficial C-I-A journal. The group was tasked with studying how the agency botched its assessment of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of…

A Senate intelligence panel is pushing the National Security Agency to open its databases of raw signals intelligence to a wider audience within the intelligence community. […] The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence ordered the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to arrive at an agreement by the end of August to extend access to…

In another story that may not make the White House happy, The New York Times on Sunday reported that it had obtained what it calls “a sharply worded letter” by a top Republican sent to President Bush on May 18, which charged that the administration “might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress…

A friend from the biz used to say that after a few days out of the office he would delete any emails or other messages older than 72 hours old; odds are that whatever was being discussed prior to that point was likely to have been overtaken-by-events, so why bother wasting time trying to catch…

A government consultant, using computer programs easily found on the Internet, managed to crack the FBI’s classified computer system and gain the passwords of 38,000 employees, including that of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. The break-ins, which occurred four times in 2004, gave the consultant access to records in the Witness Protection Program and…