Star Jones illustrates oh so clearly why celebrities are about as qualified to comment on national security issues as I am qualified to comment on the relative merits of pads vs. tampons. Yesterday, the co-hose of ABC’s THE VIEW told viewers during a discussion of bin Laden’s latest audio tape: “You know what? At some…

ABC sheds some light: Midhat Mursi, 52, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, was identified by Pakistani authorities as one of four known major al Qaeda leaders present at an apparent terror summit in the village of Damadola early last Friday morning. The United States had posted a $5 million reward for Mursi’s capture. He…

As far as FBI CI goes, confidence remains high:   By the government’s own account, FBI analyst Leandro Aragoncillo was spying in plain sight. He rummaged through FBI computers for intelligence reports unrelated to his work and then e-mailed the classified documents to opposition leaders in the Philippines.   He had traveled more than a…

Cyber lawyer Jennifer Granick weighs in: The United States government either currently has, or soon will have, new technology that makes mass surveillance possible. The next question for citizens and other policy makers is whether and when to use this capability. [ . . .] The president [is] wrong to suggest that the FISA warrant…

The New York Times would have us believe that slow, limited progress = failure: […] the results of the [NSA intercept] program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who…

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.…