The FBI’s CIO says we should pay no attention to the man behind the curtain: The FBI must overhaul its personnel practices, shape up its enterprise architecture and embrace commercial software, or it risks another case management system fiasco, analysts inside and outside the government say. […] In a recent letter [to Congress] GAO cited…

Inside CIA headquarters, a high-tech monitoring operation scores an intelligence coup, obtaining a close-up photo of an Iranian nuclear facility. The source: an Iranian blog discovered in the vast labyrinth of the Internet […] Elliot Jardines is this United States’ first director for open source intelligence, an unusual job in a business that usually keeps…

A National Journal story about how life in DC will end up killing more of us: It felt like the end of a traveling show. The players looked tired. A bittersweet air hung about them. For Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chair and vice chair of the 9/11 commission, Monday, Dec. 5, was the…

I am not one to attract attention. Part of it is cultural; part of it is learned through two-decades of serving in silence in the US Intelligence Community. Coming out as a named contributor in a recent article in the Weekly Standard is unusual for me in the sense that I’d just as soon my…

ThreatsWatch is one of those sites that I’ve always meant to hit. They get a lot of play from other sites I visit, but for whatever reason I never got around to getting there. After reading about the digital scuffle between TW blogger Bill Roggio and the Washington Post, I had to surf on over.…

The Baltimore Sun reports that Gen (Ret) Clapper is dusting off his fishing pole: After clashing with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the director of the government’s third largest intelligence agency will be leaving his position in June, according to current and former government officials. For the past four years, James R. Clapper Jr. has…

The Washington Times updates us on the latest with former colleague Russ Tice: Russ Tice, a whistleblower who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by…

Just in case you thought CIA officers were in danger of not being able to set foot in Rome any time soon . . . The mainstream U.S. media outlets have failed to report a major terrorist plot against the U.S. – because it would tend to support President Bush’s use of NSA domestic surveillance,…

I really enjoy reading William Arkin’s Early Warning blog. Our opinions on the intel business don’t always jibe (96Bs and 98Cs will never get along all that well) but in his latest post he hits what I think is a home run: And sorry for being cynical, but when I lived in Washington, from 1978-1993,…

Very clever. Makes me wish I’d kept up my script-writing skillz. http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks