Hayden’s Note:

This is in addition to the new 1.5 million square foot facilities in Texas and Utah as noted by Kevin over at Cryptogon.com.

A draft environmental impact statement said that a project by the National Security Agency will bring 6,500 workers to the Fort Meade area, challenging the area’s infrastructure.  

The NSA statement said the planned expansion will cost at least $2 billion.  

The project, called Site M, will include a 1.8 million-square-foot building on land at Fort Meade that is currently used by two golf courses.

While local officials said they are excited about the job growth and benefits to the local economy, they are also worried whether the county can accommodate the growth.  

Roads, schools and other infrastructure could become congested, and Anne Arundel County officials said it does not have money for major projects.

Related posts:

1. Homesteading with a Shipping Container House, Part I
2. Lieutenant Colonel Court Martialed – Doesn’t Believe Obama is Legitimate Commander
3. Somali Pirates Captured After Attacking US Navy Frigate (Hayden’s Note Attached)

How many “free energy” companies have a former Director of the CIA and FBI on their payrolls? By my math, there’s just one: Terawatt Research, LLC.

Hayden’s Note:

Here is a graph showing certified results from UL and TUV Rheinland. I noticed that at the ~9.8Hz and ~19Hz ranges, the energy peaks most. These are nearly exponential ranges.  I wonder what energy ouput looks like at ~40 Hz…?

This article explores the backgrounds of the leading personnel at TeraWatt Research, LLC.  These men all have operational intelligence and Special Forces backgrounds at very high levels, including Director of the FBI and then the CIA.  Ever heard of the “black budget?”  Why do you think that the Pentagon needs $800 billion dollars as a yearly budget?  How much of that is siphoned off into black projects or “off the books” operations?  Does human greed not play a factor in this, as well?  Imagine the greed of KBR, Halliburton and Booze, Allen & Hamilton.  Now imagine a free energy machine in their hands, under their friend’s personal patent.  Dick Cheney, CEO of Halliburton, has extremely…extremely close ties to the Pentagon and has for decades as he rose up the ranks under George Bush Sr., the former Director of the CIA.

They could charge whatever they wanted for it.  It would drive these companies and others, such as Boeing, into the next evolution in energy, aviation, clandestine operations and limitless energy. 

Here is William Webster’s bio on the Terawatt Research website: 

Judge William H. Webster
(Milbank Tweed Hadley & Mc Cloy)
Strategic Advisor 

William H. Webster was sworn in as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on May 26, 1987. In this position he headed the United States intelligence community and directed the CIA until September, 1991. Following his departure from the CIA, he joined the law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, LLP in Washington, DC. 

Webster served as United States attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri from 1960 to 1961. In 1970, he was appointed a judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri and in 1973 was elevated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. During his service on the bench, Webster was chairman of the Judiciary Conference Advisory Committee on the Criminal Rules and was a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Habeas Corpus and the Committee of Court Administration. He resigned on February 23, 1978 to become director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he served for nearly a decade before moving on to lead all foreign intelligence agencies of the United States as CIA director. 

On July 1, 1991 Judge Webster was presented the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and on July 25, 1991 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Security Medal. 

Webster earned bachelor’s degrees in history and political science, as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, from Amherst College in Massachusetts. He received his law degree from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, in 1949. He served as a lieutenant in the United States Navy in World War II and again in the Korean War. 

Judge William H. Webster is current Chairman of the Homeland Security advisory Council (HSAC) 

The other publicly acknowledged Terawatt Research personnel with obvious black world connections are James G. Magee (Internal Security, Strategic Advisor, Finance) and Gary W. Caille, Ph.D., P.E. (Scientific Advisor). 

James G. Magee: 

James G. Magee
(Internal Security, Strategic Advisor, Finance) 

Mr. Magee is the CEO of Level 4 Group LLC, a multi-million dollar strategic consultancy and capital funding provider to companies in the defense and security sector markets. Mr. Magee is a recognized expert on ballistic protection systems, special operations and national security issues, and has been the president of three industry leading body armor manufacturers, Point Blank Body Armor, Inc.; ArmorShield USA, Inc.; and Select Armor, Inc. during the past decade. At Point Blank, he designed the US Army’s Interceptor™ vest, still the benchmark body armor worn by US Armed Forces personnel today. Defying conventional industry history, he led Point Blank to a position of industry leader from Chapter 7 Bankruptcy in less than 12 months. After leaving Point Blank, Mr. Magee managed the Modular Body Armor (Interceptor™) program for the US Army’s Prime Contractor for MBA, Arthur D. Little, Inc. Magee served as the president of Exothermal Technology Corporation, Inc. (ETC), a torso cooling protective vest system company, and after a year’s service as president, was appointed to ETC’s Board of Directors for another two years. Mr. Magee served as the President of HIPERTEX, Inc., a manufacturer of high output lightweight diesel engines for DARPA, and a pioneer in alternative energy solutions. Mr. Magee led GartnerGroup’s Performance Management Practice for five years. His team was responsible for the Eastern half of the USA and for Federal government clients. At Gartner, Mr. Magee was the global leader in providing efficiency, effectiveness, cost and performance consulting for Fortune 500 commercial clients, as well as for major Federal and state government agencies. In his first sortie into industry after retirement from the US Marine Corps, Mr. Magee served as a senior operations analyst with Kapos Associates, Inc. (KAI, now part of L3Comm). His clients included The White House, the National Security Council (NSC), and The Atlanta Olympics, the federal departments of Defense, Army, Navy, and Treasury. While at KAI, Mr. Magee led KAI teams that assessed the interoperability for the NSC including the Defense Department’s command, control, computers and intelligence systems (C4I3) at combatant commands around the globe. 

Mr. Magee periodically consults for Georgia Tech and the U.S. Marine Corps on combat systems and armor optimization, and has been an on-screen consultant to NBC News and PBS’s The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on armor systems and military procurement issues. Mr. Magee has been published in Armed Forces Journal, the Marine Corps Gazette and the Washington Post on these and other national security issues. 

He served a full career in the Marines, retiring as a highly decorated infantry Colonel in the 1990’s after service as the Marine’s special operations expert, and commander of the largest anti-terrorist organization in DOD, the Marine Corps Security Forces with 3400 Marines and Sailors at 82 sites in 16 countries. He enjoys the distinction of having stood up and commanded the Marines first Light Armor Battalion, as well as having been selected as the 2002 recipient of the National Defense Industrial Association’s (NDIA) Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the Nation’s ability to wage special operations. 

Mr. Magee lives in the suburbs of Atlanta, GA with his wife, Carole. They have three grown children. 

Education:
MBA Studies: Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia
BS: Virginia Tech, Blacksburg,
MA Equivalent: NATO Defense College, Rome, Italy Virginia 

Did you check out Level 4 Group? For all your counter intelligence and clean energy needs? Unique Experience : Battlefield to Boardroom??? (Nope, this isn’t The Onion.)  

Next up: Gary W. Caille: 

Gary W. Caille, Ph.D., P.E.
(Scientific Advisor) 

Current: 

Director, Systems Solutions Group, CSU Ventures 

Background:
PRE/Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech Research Institute 

Dr. Caille has extensive experience in the theoretical and practical development of armor and blast resistant systems. Recently he led systems development of the ULTRA Armored Personnel Concept Vehicle and the USMC Marine personnel Carrier, focusing on the survivability and mobility of armor vehicles and their personnel. For the ULTRA APV, he delivered a next generation armored patrol vehicle and developed a new armor for under 3 million dollars all in approximately 1 year. Dr. Caille has also used his expertise in thermal systems by forming systematic solutions to energy generation that use renewable sources such as geothermal, solar and wind combined with gasification and plasma systems using other waste streams to provide optimized solutions that have positive environmental and economic impacts to the community. 

Dr. Caille was commissioned in the United Stated Navy after graduation from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (1977). He completed a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Central Florida (1985) and a Doctor of Philosophy in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech, 1988). He is a licensed Professional Engineer in Georgia, New Jersey (inactive) and Florida (inactive). 

After completing nuclear power training and submarine training, Dr. Caille served on a fast attack nuclear submarine. He served as the Reactor Controls Division Officer, Sonar Division Officer and Weapons Department Head from 1978 to 1982. From 1982 to 1984, he served as an instructor and director of the Officer Chemistry, Materials and Radiological Fundamentals Division at the Navy’s Nuclear Power School. 

In 1988, Dr. Caille reported to the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Submarine Directorate where he served as the Deputy Program Manager and Technical Director for research and development programs with an annual budget of approximately $100M. He also directly supervised the planning, installation, execution, and data analysis of ten, multi-platform, highly complex at-sea experiments. Dr. Caille retired from the Navy Reserve as a Captain with 4 commands. 

After returning to Georgia Tech in 1993, Dr. Caille served as a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Electro-Optics, Environment and Materials Laboratory, a 250-person, $25 M highly diversified research organization. In 2008, Dr. Caille formed the Systems Solutions Group of CSU Ventures which is focused on developing applied technical research from Colorado State University and partnering with industrial corporations to develop systems level solutions. 

I would be most interested in knowing where the money is coming from. If you have any information on who is actually behind this, let me know. 

Related: Terawatt Research LLC Defies Free Energy Stereotypes

Related posts:

1. License to Kill? Intelligence Chief Says U.S. Can Assassinate American Terrorist
2. Former Intelligence Chief says the US Creates Terror Groups
3. Arrested Terrorist Leader Exposes Extensive CIA Connections

THE furore sparked by the escape from Cyprus of a man said to be one of Russia’s most capable spies has intensified with authorities rejecting a request to hand over his personal effects to the FBI.

A laptop computer and several USB memory sticks confiscated from Christopher Metsos, a Canadian citizen believed to be the paymaster of an espionage ring in the US, should remain with local police, the Attorney-General decreed.

”They will stay with us for the time being, and not be given to US authorities,” police spokesman Christos Savvides told The Age. ”The laptop is currently being investigated.”

Metsos, who escaped the island in mysterious circumstances less than 48 hours after his arrest last week, is alleged to have financed the spy network shuttling between Moscow and the US. US authorities had hoped the portable computer would provide clues to his cloak and dagger activities.

The ruling by Attorney-General Petros Clerides will add to the disappointment already expressed by the US State Department over a court’s surprising decision to release the suspect on bail. There have been thinly disguised accusations that Cyprus’s communist-backed government colluded with Russia’s secret service to allow the operative’s escape.

President Demetris Christofias, the son of a construction worker who was educated in Moscow, has made no secret of his deep affection for fellow Orthodox Russia, a country Greek Cypriots have long looked to for support in reuniting the war-divided island.

Under his stewardship, Cyprus has made moves to deepen ties with Russia, the biggest private investor on the island and increasingly its most important ally internationally. About 20,000 Russians have settled in Cyprus since communism collapsed, with a growing number of oligarchs electing to live there.

As a manhunt was being launched for Metsos last Thursday, Mr Christofias was hosting a glittering reception for the arrival in Cyprus of Gazprombank, Russia’s second largest financial institution. At another cocktail party, Justice Minister Loucas Louca let slip that the agent had ”bizarrely” withdrawn €26,000 ($A38,500), the exact amount required for his bail.

”The only thing we didn’t do was give the guy a passport,” opined the Cyprus Mail, the island’s English language daily. ”Let’s face it, the comrade president has never made a secret of where his allegiances lie … we are behaving a bit like a Russian satellite state in the Mediterranean.”

Metsos has been described as a ”textbook operative” by Western intelligence officials. Canadian authorities have confirmed that even his identity was carefully constructed: it belongs to a five-year-old boy who died in the early 1990s. ”He was a very big fish,” said a security analyst in Athens. ”His expertise and connections were there for all to see in his very efficient escape.”

With its strategic location at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa, Cyprus has long been regarded as a staging post for spies. Kim Philby, the notorious double agent, was posted there in the 1950s. The stepfather of Uri Geller, the famous psychic, ran a hotel there as a front for Israel’s secret service.

MI6 has long used Cyprus as a listening post for the wider Middle East and Arab and Israeli spies are also believed to meet there regularly.

Metsos’ arrival – and disappearance – have added to the intrigue and also reinforced Cyprus’s reputation as a ”sunny place for shady people”.

Related posts:

1. 96 Dead, 139 Injured in Moscow Night Club Explosion
2. Russia Diversifies Reserves with Canadian Dollars
3. 10 Arrested as Russian Intelligence Operatives in US

Hayden’s Note:

Wondering what the ECHELON project is all about?  Go here to find out more!

(Essentially, ECHELON is a code word for an automated global interception and relay system operated by the intelligence agencies the world over.)

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has given his strongest indication yet about the next big leak from his whistleblower organisation.

There has been rampant speculation about WikiLeaks’ next revelation following its recent release of a top secret military video showing an attack in Baghdad which killed more than a dozen people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.

Bradley Manning, a US military intelligence officer based in Iraq, has been arrested on suspicion of leaking the video but it is also claimed that Manning bragged online that he had handed WikiLeaks 260,000 secret US State Department cables.

In an interview with the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent, Mr Assange said cryptically of WikiLeaks’ current project:

“I can give an analogy. If there had been mass spying that had affected many, many people and organisations and the details of that mass spying were released then that is something that would reveal that the interests of many people had been abused.”

He agreed it would be of the “calibre” of publishing information about the way the top secret Echelon system – the US-UK electronic spying network which eavesdrops on worldwide communications traffic – had been used.

Hayden’s Note II:

This excerpt is written by Kevin over at Cryptogon.com, a source I trust when it comes to intelligence matters:

If they [WikiLeaks] have information related to tasking the system, such as the words and phrases used, or the targets of the system, or actual intercepts [from Echelon], that would be pretty astonishing. It’s hard to believe that they would have stuff like this, but who knows…

Look at the 9/11 pager data dump. Where did that come from?

If you are not familiar with the extensive…extensive amount of data that was culled from pagers and text messages during the morning of Sept. 11th, have a look.  This is not simply someone pulling phone company records as it spans every carrier in the region and includes govt. messages.  If you look hard enough, you’ll find random funny ones or even some that are quite suggestive of what the pager owner was doing the night before.  LoL

Mr Assange also confirmed that WikiLeaks has a copy of a video showing a US military bombing of a western Afghan township which killed dozens of people, including children.

He noted, though, it was a very intricate case “substantially more complex” than the Iraq material WikiLeaks had released – referring to the gunship video.

European news media are reporting that Mr Assange has “surfaced from almost a month in hiding”, speaking at a freedom of information seminar at the European parliament in Brussels.

But during the course of the past month, Mr Assange has been talking to Foreign Correspondent for a program examining the efficacy of the WikiLeaks model.

“What we want to create is a system where there is guaranteed free press across the world, the entire world, that every individual in the world has the ability to publish materials that is meaningful,” he said.

Whistleblower speaks

The program has also spoken directly to former computer hacker Adrian Lamo who blew the whistle on Bradley Manning after a boastful online discussion in which Lamo alleges the military intelligence adviser revealed himself as a significant WikiLeaks source.

“He proceeded to identify himself as an intelligence analyst and pose the question: What would you do if you have unprecedented access to classified data 14 hours a day seven days a week?” Mr Lamo said.

“He (Manning) was firing bullets into the air without thought to consequence of where they might land or who they might hit.”

WikiLeaks has built an information repository it thinks is foolproof. Instead of secret documents physically changing hands, they are anonymously sent to digital drop boxes and stored on servers around the world. Finally, they are posted on the WikiLeaks site.

During Foreign Correspondent’s assignment Mr Assange had been preparing to fly to New York to meet his hero – Daniel Ellsberg – the former US military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers which amounted to a devastating expose of the Vietnam War.

Instead, concerned about travelling in the US and attracting the interest of authorities, he used Skype to speak to the conference.

He told the crowd: “Leaking is inherently an anti-authoritarian act. It’s inherently an anarchist act.”

Mr Assange has been quoted as saying he feels perfectly safe in Europe, “but I have been advised by my lawyers not to travel to the US during this period”.

Daniel Ellsberg, named by Henry Kissinger as “the most dangerous man in America”, told Foreign Correspondent that Mr Assange was “a good candidate for being the most dangerous man in the world, in the eyes of people like the one who gave me that award”.

“I’m sure that Assange is now regarded as one of the very most dangerous men and he should be quite proud of that.”

Truth or Dare, Foreign Correspondent’s examination of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, airs tonight at 8PM on ABC 1

Related posts:

1. Senior House Republican says Everyone Responsible for Wikileaks Release Should be Investigated
2. Wikileaks Releases Classified Afghanistan War Logs: “largest intelligence leak in history”
3. U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe – Editorial Added

Editorial from Kevin at Cryptogon.com

I have a bit of trouble believing what Wired is reporting here.

One just can’t go “rummaging through” compartmented files. Each person with access to a particular compartment would have to be individually cleared for that compartment.

Say the compartmented thing is a new spy plane that is designated with the codeword AAA. Bob works on one of the sensors that has the codeword AAA/BBB. Jim works on the avionics. That compartment is AAA/CCC. Bob, feeling bored one day, can’t just go have a look at the AAA/CCC avionics data. He wouldn’t have access. Jim, likewise, can’t access the AAA/BBB sensor compartment.

Also, I’ve heard stories from people with access to various classified, “air gapped” systems and they report that there’s no way to get data off of those systems because the floppy and optical drives are removed and USB is disabled or the ports have been filled in with epoxy to prevent the use of flash drives.

Obviously, there’s the way that things are supposed to work in theory, and then there’s what happens on the ground. Are there TS/SCI systems with CDRW drives and working USB ports? That would be hilarious and encouraging if true.

Then there’s this:

From the chat logs provided by Lamo, and examined by Wired.com, it appears Manning sensed a kindred spirit in the ex-hacker. He discussed personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated, and said he had been demoted and was headed for an early discharge from the Army.

In other words, this guy wouldn’t have access to jack shit if this is true. The first thing they would do is pull his access if there were issues with his superiors.

Read about what happened to Russell Tice when he got on the wrong end of his supervisors at the NSA. He went from intercept operations to fueling and cleaning NSA vehicles and then unloading the NSA’s furniture at its warehouses!

Where am I going here? I don’t know. I’m just saying that some of this doesn’t make any sense.

Via: Wired:

Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”

“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote.

Wired.com could not confirm whether Wikileaks received the supposed 260,000 classified embassy dispatches. To date, a single classified diplomatic cable has appeared on the site: released last February, it describes a U.S. embassy meeting with the government of Iceland. E-mail and a voice mail message left for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday were not answered by the time this article was published.

The State Department said it was not aware of the arrest or the allegedly leaked cables. The FBI was not prepared to comment when asked about Manning.

Army spokesman Gary Tallman was unaware of the investigation but said, “If you have a security clearance and wittingly or unwittingly provide classified info to anyone who doesn’t have security clearance or a need to know, you have violated security regulations and potentially the law.”

Manning’s arrest comes as Wikileaks has ratcheted up pressure against various governments over the years with embarrassing documents acquired through a global whistleblower network that is seemingly impervious to threats from adversaries. Its operations are hosted on servers in several countries, and it uses high-level encryption for its document submission process, providing secure anonymity for its sources and a safe haven from legal repercussions for itself. Since its launch in 2006, it has never outed a source through its own actions, either voluntarily or involuntarily.

Manning came to the attention of the FBI and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed to be the Wikileaks video leaker.

“If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?” Manning asked.

From the chat logs provided by Lamo, and examined by Wired.com, it appears Manning sensed a kindred spirit in the ex-hacker. He discussed personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated, and said he had been demoted and was headed for an early discharge from the Army.

When Manning told Lamo that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables, Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his house in Carmichael, California, where he passed the agents a copy of the chat logs. At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators.

Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he’s frequently contacted by hackers who want to talk about their adventures, and he’s never considered reporting anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genuinely dangerous to U.S. national security.

“I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger,” says Lamo, who discussed the details with Wired.com following Manning’s arrest. “He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air.”

Manning told Lamo that he enlisted in the Army in 2007 and held a Top Secret/SCI clearance, details confirmed by his friends and family members. He claimed to have been rummaging through classified military and government networks for more than a year and said that the networks contained “incredible things, awful things … that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC.”

He first contacted Wikileaks’ Julian Assange sometime around late November last year, he claimed, after Wikileaks posted 500,000 pager messages covering a 24-hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. ”I immediately recognized that they were from an NSA database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward,” he wrote to Lamo. He said his role with Wikileaks was “a source, not quite a volunteer.”

Manning had already been sifting through the classified networks for months when he discovered the Iraq video in late 2009, he said. The video, later released by Wikileaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” shows a 2007 Army helicopter attack on a group of men, some of whom were armed, that the soldiers believed were insurgents. The attack killed two Reuters employees and an unarmed Baghdad man who stumbled on the scene afterward and tried to rescue one of the wounded by pulling him into his van. The man’s two children were in the van and suffered serious injuries in the hail of gunfire.

“At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter,” Manning wrote of the video. “No big deal … about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory. So I looked into it.”

In January, while on leave in the U.S., Manning visited a close friend in Boston and confessed he’d gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it, according to the friend. “He wanted to do the right thing,” says 20-year-old Tyler Watkins. “That was something I think he was struggling with.”

Manning passed the video to Wikileaks in February, he told Lamo. After April 5 when the video was released and made headlines Manning contacted Watkins from Iraq asking him about the reaction in the U.S.

“He would message me, Are people talking about it?… Are the media saying anything?,” Watkins said. “That was one of his major concerns, that once he had done this, was it really going to make a difference?… He didn’t want to do this just to cause a stir. … He wanted people held accountable and wanted to see this didn’t happen again.”

Watkins doesn’t know what else Manning might have sent to Wikileaks. But in his chats with Lamo, Manning took credit for a number of other disclosures.

The second video he claimed to have leaked shows a May 2009 air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan that the local government says killed nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The Pentagon released a report about the incident last year, but backed down from a plan to show video of the attack to reporters.

As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo, his purported leaking was made possible by lax security online and off.

Manning had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.

The networks, he said, were both “air gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.

“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’, erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”

“[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis… a perfect storm.”

Manning told Lamo that the Garani video was left accessible in a directory on a U.S. Central Command server, centcom.smil.mil, by officers who investigated the incident. The video, he said, was an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file.

Manning’s aunt, with whom he lived in the U.S., had heard nothing about his arrest when first contacted by Wired.com last week; Debra Van Alstyne said she last saw Manning during his leave in January and they had discussed his plans to enroll in college when his four-year stint in the Army was set to end in October 2011. She described him as smart and seemingly untroubled, with a natural talent for computers and a keen interest in global politics.

She said she became worried about her nephew recently after he disappeared from contact. Then Manning finally called Van Alstyne collect on Saturday. He told her that he was okay, but that he couldn’t discuss what was going on, Van Alstyne said. He then gave her his Facebook password and asked her to post a message on his behalf.

The message reads: “Some of you may have heard that I have been arrested for disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons. See CollateralMurder.com.”

An Army defense attorney then phoned Van Alstyne on Sunday and said Manning is being held in protective custody in Kuwait. “He hasn’t seen the case file, but he does understand that it does have to do with that Collateral Murder video,” Van Alstyne said.

Manning’s father said Sunday that he’s shocked by his son’s arrest.

“I was in the military for 5 years,” said Brian Manning, of Oklahoma. “I had a Secret clearance, and I never divulged any information in 30 years since I got out about what I did. And Brad has always been very, very tight at adhering to the rules. Even talking to him after boot camp and stuff, he kept everything so close that he didn’t open up to anything.”

His son, he added, is “a good kid. Never been in trouble. Never been on
drugs, alcohol, nothing.”

Lamo says he felt he had no choice but to turn in Manning, but that he’s now concerned about the soldier’s status and well-being. The FBI hasn’t told Lamo what charges Manning may face, if any.

The agents did tell Lamo that he may be asked to testify against Manning. The Bureau was particularly interested in information that Manning gave Lamo about an apparently-sensitive military cybersecurity matter, Lamo said.

That seemed to be the least interesting information to Manning, however. What seemed to excite him most in his chats was his supposed leaking of the embassy cables. He anticipated returning to the states after his early discharge, and watching from the sidelines as his action bared the secret history of U.S. diplomacy around the world.

“Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed,” Manning wrote. “It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”

Related posts:

1. Wikileaks Releases Classified Afghanistan War Logs: “largest intelligence leak in history”
2. WikiLeaks Releases Video of Reporters Being Killed by US Military (Hayden’s Note)
3. Soldier in WikiLeaks Video Responds; Sought Mental Health Care & Was Threatened

Coincidences sure are funny things. Booz Allen Hamilton — the defense contractor that’s become synonymous with the idea that the U.S. is getting its ass kicked in an ongoing cyberwar — has racked up more than $400 million worth of deals in the past six weeks to help the Defense Department fight that digital conflict. Strange how that worked out, huh?

Everyone in the Pentagon from Defense Secretary Bob Gates on down says that the military needs to cut its reliance on outside contractors. But few firms are as well-connected as Booz Allen, the one-time management consultancy that today pulls in more than $2.7 billion in government work. And few firms sound the alarm as loudly about a crisis that they’re in the business of fixing. Back in February, for instance, former National Security Agency director and Booz Allen Hamilton executive vice president Mike McConnell declared that “the United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing.” The White House’s information security czar is one of many experts who calls such rhetoric overheated, at best. That hasn’t stopped Booz Allen from pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars from Washington to wage those battles.

Booz Allen’s latest awards were announced last Thursday — nine contracts with the Air Force, totaling over $150 million. One deal gives the firm $24 million to “provide combat-ready forces to conduct secure cyber operations in and through the electromagnetic spectrum.” A $19.8 million contract asks Booz Allen to “define information assurance scientific and technical analysis to be applied to future military satellite communication systems development.” Earlier in the month, the company got $14 million to “provide threat monitoring, detection, characterization, and actionable information for the computer network operations in order to help advance Department of Defense Global Information Grid initiative and nationally oriented cyber security priorities.”

That sounds not dissimilar to what McConnell asked for in February. “We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds,” he wrote.

I asked Booz Allen spokesman James Fisher what the government was really getting for all that cash. His response: “I’m sorry but I don’t have any additional information on these beyond what’s been issued publicly.”

And what, if anything, do these contracts have to do with Mike McConnell’s um, inflated, estimation of network war? “Admiral Mike McConnell has become well versed in the seriousness of the cyberthreat in public service during the last 15 years, and as Director of National Intelligence he delivered the same messages of concern about the vulnerability of our cyber infrastructure to President George W. Bush and presidential candidate Barack Obama — well before McConnell’s more recent public comments on the subject,” Fisher e-mailed. “As a longstanding intelligence professional, McConnell has an awareness across the full spectrum of classification, and sees it as his duty in public service to foster the right kind of discussion so the nation’s leadership can debate and mitigate the risks.”

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/05/cyberwar-cassandras-get-400-million-in-conflict-cash/#ixzz0oV4tP6PJ

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via Cryptogon.com

More than 30 years after it was written, the Pentagon has released a memorandum detailing its involvement in the CIA’s infamous Cold War mind-control experiments.

…

The 17-page document (.pdf), “Experimentation Programs conducted by the Department of Defense That Had CIA Sponsorship or Participation and That Involved the Administration to Human Subjects of Drugs Intended for Mind-Control or Behavior-Modification Purposes,” was prepared in 1977 by the General Counsel of the Department of Defense and released on May 6 after a Freedom of Information Act request.

Most of the details have been revealed in earlier CIA papers. And if anything, the Pentagon’s recap is a reminder of how little the Department of Defense cops to knowing about the CIA projects.

Still, there are some tantalizing new details. Take the origins of MK-ULTRA, the notorious CIA program that dosed thousands of unwitting participants with hallucinogenic drugs.

Initially funded by the Navy, the project set out to study the effects of brain concussion. Soon after, scientists noted that a blow to the head prompted amnesia, leading to the pursuit of a drug-based technique to “induce brain concussion … without physical trauma.” Shortly thereafter, the project was transferred entirely to the CIA, because it involved “human experiments … not easily justifiable on medical-therapeutic grounds.”

Other programs, described briefly focused on mind control. MK-NAOMI was after “severely incapacitating and lethal materials … [and] gadgetry for their dissemination,” and MK-CHICKWIT was designed to “identify new drug developments in Europe and Asia,” and then “obtain samples.”

Edgewood Laboratories, where many of the programs were carried out, is also identified as having tested an incapacitating chemical on prisoners and military personnel without the agency’s approval. The drug, EA#3167, was “appl[ied] to the skin” of subjects using an adhesive tape.

Another program, MK-OFTEN, started as a study on dopamine. But the scope was soon expanded to evaluate ibogaine, a hallucinogen, and then several more drugs, in hopes of creating “new pharmacologically active drugs affecting the central nervous system [to] modify men’s behavior.”

And the Navy is reported to have “obtain[ed] heroin and marijuana” in an effort to develop speech-inducing drugs for use on defectors and prisoners of war. The drugs were eventually tested on 14 people: six volunteer research assistants, and eight unwitting Soviet defectors.

…

Not surprisingly, the released report also doesn’t address darker questions that persist about the specifics of the CIA projects. Last year, a group of vets sued the agency for illnesses and trauma caused by the “diabolical and secret [MK-ULTRA] testing program,” which they allege included experiments with nerve gas, psychochemicals, and brain implants.

Read the entire article here –

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Yesterday, we reported on the curious disappearance of a WCBS report that military spy planes had been used to capture the Times Square bomber. Why was this story scrubbed? We have the answer. Sort of.

The original WCBStv.com article, “Army Intelligence Planes Led to Suspect’s Arrest,” by Marcia Kramer, read:

In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did him in. Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Then, a few minutes after we wrote about it, the article was rewritten with no mention of spy planes, and no indication it had been updated. Spooky! We asked WCBS what happened, and a spokesman responded:

The story that was broadcast by WCBS-TV did not include any mention of a military plane, although the station did have unconfirmed information about the use of a plane that we looked into but were unable to confirm. A line about the use of military aircraft was inadvertently included in the story that appeared on the station’s Web site but was removed.

According to WCBS, they simply got caught up in the frenzy of breaking news and “inadvertently” put in an unconfirmed detail. There is a problem with this account: The detail about the Army intelligence planes was featured prominently in the title of the originally article. Clearly, the line wasn’t “inadvertently included”—it was put in and deliberately promoted. After all, it was the most eye-catching detail of the story.

Since then, no other news organizations have reported that Army spy planes helped capture Faisal Shahzad. (Though few blogs speculated on the WCBS report, and its disappearance.) The New York Times reports that what ultimately led to Shahzad’s capture was the crew of the Emirates flight he was on sending a passenger list to customs officials before takeoff. They discovered Shahzad had been put on a no-fly list as a result of the FBI’s investigation. Authorities were then able to keep the plane from taking off and dragged Shahzad off it.

But that doesn’t necessarily rule out the possibility that Army Special Ops—or their planes—were involved. The Nation points out the two guys running the investigation have deep backgrounds in secret Pentagon “Special Access Programs.” (In certain cases dealing with terrorism and WMDs, military Special Ops forces are allowed to act on U.S. soil. See: PowerGeyser) At some point in their investigation, the FBI began following Shahzad, then lost him until he turned up on the Emirates passenger list. It’s possible that the planes were used during this time to try to find him. Although the original WCBS account, that planes “intercepted a call to Emirates” doesn’t fit with the New York Times’ report that authorities didn’t know Shahzad was on the flight until that last-minute customs cross-check.

So, why did WCBS scrub the intelligence planes detail?

Two possibilities: 1) They made the bad call to promote flimsy reporting, and when their story started getting picked up by blogs (Drudge also picked up their story) they realized it wouldn’t be able to stand up to widespread scrutiny. So they quietly backed away. 2) They were very confident about the spy planes detail—which is why the put it in the headline—but someone made them remove it because it was super secret information. When the WCBS spokesperson emailed us, there was some sort of Jason Bourne-like character standing behind him with a silenced pistol softly telling him to, “Do what’s best for your country…” Again, they quietly backed away.

Honestly, the first possibility is probably the likeliest. But the second possibility is way cooler. So, let’s just say Jason Bourne caught Faisal Shahzad.

Update: Maybe it was actually a drone? Over at Pajamas Media, Annie Jacobs spoke with a retired NSA source, who told her this:

A retired National Security Agency (NSA) source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says signals intelligence was a key factor in catching Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.

Working with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, NSA agents apparently tracked Shahzad’s movements by locating signals from his cell phone, possibly via a drone.

Jacobs notes that a spy plane would violate the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which limits military operations on American soil. But a drone might not be covered; apparently, DHS and coastguard have in the past expressed interest in using drones in civilian operations.

Send an email to Adrian Chen, the author of this post, at adrian@gawker.com.

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The airspace along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border is pretty crowded these days: Along with U.S., Afghan and Pakistani military missions, the CIA is running its own covert drone ops. Less well known, but perhaps equally controversial, is the State Department’s counter-narcotics air force, staffed by mercenaries.

A recently released State Department Inspector General report, however, gave an unusually detailed look at the size and scope of these operations. The report fills in more details about America’s growing and undeclared war in Pakistan.

The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (known by the abbreviation INL) operates an air wing of around 14 aircraft in Afghanistan and another 17 in Pakistan. The aircraft help monitor the border, fly crop-eradication and interdiction missions, and move equipment and personnel around the region.

These kinds of missions aren’t new: The State Department has similar Air Wing programs in Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru. Perhaps more importantly, the State Department has outsourced much of this mission. The INL’s air wing in Afghanistan and Pakistan is operated by private military company DynCorp, and the presence of U.S. contractors in Pakistan has proven extremely controversial (the released IG report, not surprisingly, was originally marked “sensitive but unclassified”).

For instance, when it was disclosed earlier this month that the U.S. government was seeking land for an aircraft maintenance base DynCorp, the Pakistani press had a field day. Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik had repeatedly denied the presence of U.S. private security contractors on Pakistani soil, but here was the U.S. government, asking for a maintenance base for its contracted air wing. “This is worth recalling here that Interior Minister Rehman Malik had told the National Assembly in February this year, ‘Neither Blackwater nor any other security agency with such name is operating in Pakistan,’” Pakistan’s The Nation newspaper snarkily noted.

In fairness, the State Department hasn’t really been too secretive about this: INL’s winter newsletter featured a news announcement about the delivery to Pakistan of more Huey II helicopters, similar to the rotorcraft pictured here. More interesting is what the recent Inspector General report hints at the extent to which the Pakistani government relies on this air wing for domestic policing and security operations. “In Pakistan, the Air Wing program, funded at $32 million to date, has been generally effective in providing critical air support for activities along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, including a variety of missions for the Pakistan Government,” the report states.

Inevitably, the report also notes some shortcomings. DynCorp, the IG found, “had problems meeting some of the contract terms, particularly flying hour goals. The inability to meet the required aircraft readiness rate is directly related to low levels of maintenance personnel and, according to INL/A, is also affected by issues with staff from Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior.”

In addition, the IG also found the Pakistani government was less than forthcoming about how it was using State’s aircraft. The government of Pakistan, the report said, “continues its reticence in providing information on flights.”

Incidentally, the inspector general also alluded to another contracted air force, called “Kabul 40.” That air wing provides passenger and cargo movement for diplomatic staff in Afghanistan.

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ADL Extremism Report

http://www.adl.org/extremism/Anti-Government-Extremism-Report.pdf

I won’t go into too much detail regarding this latest report.  It’s worth a read to see what the ADL are up to and is pretty self-explanatory.

If you’ve read any of the Homeland Security reports or SPLC intelligence reports, this is very similar, although it consists of a LOT of comments left on various websites and forums, such as Prison Planet, InfoWars, various militia websites and even survival / emergency preparedness sites.

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