CIA warns desperate Putin poses nuclear threat

WASHINGTON — Russia's setbacks in its invasion of Ukraine could lead President Vladimir Putin to resort to using a tactical or low-yield nuclear weapon, CIA director William Burns said Friday.

"Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they've faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons," Burns said during a speech in Atlanta.

The Kremlin said it placed Russian nuclear forces on high alert shortly after the assault began Feb. 24, but the United States has not seen "a lot of practical evidence" of actual deployments that would cause more worry, Burns added, speaking to students at Georgia Tech university.

"We're obviously very concerned. I know President Biden is deeply concerned about avoiding a third world war, about avoiding a threshold in which, you know, nuclear conflict becomes possible," said Burns.

Russia has many tactical nuclear weapons, which are less powerful than the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.

Russian military doctrine features a principle called escalate to de-escalate, which would involve launching a first strike nuclear weapon of low yield to regain the initiative if things go badly in a conventional conflict with the West.

But under this hypothesis, "NATO would intervene militarily on the ground in Ukraine in the course of this conflict, and that's not something, as President Biden has made very clear, that's in the cards."

Recalling that he once served as US ambassador to Russia, Burns had very harsh words for Putin, calling him an "apostle of payback" who over the years "has stood in a combustible combination of grievance and ambition and insecurity."

"Every day, Putin demonstrates that declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising ones," Burns said.

Agence France-Presse

WikiLeaks says it releases files on CIA cyber spying tools

WASHINGTON — Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks on Tuesday published what it said were thousands of pages of internal CIA discussions about hacking techniques used over several years, renewing concerns about the security of consumer electronics and embarrassing yet another U.S. intelligence agency.

The discussion transcripts showed that CIA hackers could get into Apple Inc iPhones, Google Inc Android devices and other gadgets in order to capture text and voice messages before they were encrypted with sophisticated software.

Cyber security experts disagreed about the extent of the fallout from the data dump, but said a lot would depend on whether WikiLeaks followed through on a threat to publish the actual hacking tools that could do damage.

Reuters could not immediately verify the contents of the published documents, but several contractors and private cyber security experts said the materials, dated between 2013 and 2016, appeared to be legitimate.

A longtime intelligence contractor with expertise in U.S. hacking tools told Reuters the documents included correct “cover” terms describing active cyber programs.

Among the most noteworthy WikiLeaks claims is that the Central Intelligence Agency, in partnership with other U.S. and foreign agencies, has been able to bypass the encryption on popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal.

The files did not indicate the actual encryption of Signal or other secure messaging apps had been compromised.

The information in what WikiLeaks said were 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments appears to represent the latest breach in recent years of classified material from U.S. intelligence agencies.

Security experts differed over how much the disclosures could damage U.S. cyber espionage. Many said that, while harmful, they do not compare to former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 of mass NSA data collection.

“This is a big dump about extremely sophisticated tools that can be used to target individual user devices … I haven’t yet come across the mass exploiting of mobile devices,” said Tarah Wheeler, senior director of engineering and principal security advocate for Symantec.

Stuart McClure, CEO of Cylance, an Irvine, California, cyber security firm, said that one of the most significant disclosures shows how CIA hackers cover their tracks by leaving electronic trails suggesting they are from Russia, China and Iran rather than the United States.

Other revelations show how the CIA took advantage of vulnerabilities that are known, if not widely publicized.

In one case, the documents say, U.S. and British personnel, under a program known as Weeping Angel, developed ways to take over a Samsung smart television, making it appear it was off when in fact it was recording conversations in the room.

The CIA and White House declined comment. “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents,” CIA spokesman Jonathan Liu said in a statement.

Google declined to comment on the purported hacking of its Android platform, but said it was investigating the matter.

Snowden on Twitter said the files amount to the first public evidence that the U.S. government secretly buys software to exploit technology, referring to a table published by WikiLeaks that appeared to list various Apple iOS flaws purchased by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Apple Inc did not respond to a request for comment.

The documents refer to means for accessing phones directly in order to catch messages before they are protected by end-to-end encryption tools like Signal.

Signal inventor Moxie Marlinspike said he took that as “confirmation that what we’re doing is working.” Signal and the like are “pushing intelligence agencies from a world of undetectable mass surveillance to a world where they have to use expensive, high-risk, extremely targeted attacks.”

CIA cyber programs
The CIA in recent years underwent a restructuring to focus more on cyber warfare to keep pace with the increasing digital sophistication of foreign adversaries. The spy agency is prohibited by law from collecting intelligence that details domestic activities of Americans and is generally restricted in how it may gather any U.S. data for counterintelligence purposes.

The documents published Tuesday appeared to supply specific details to what has been long-known in the abstract: U.S. intelligence agencies, like their allies and adversaries, are constantly working to discover and exploit flaws in any manner of technology products.

Unlike the Snowden leaks, which revealed the NSA was secretly collecting details of telephone calls by ordinary Americans, the new WikiLeaks material did not appear to contain material that would fundamentally change what is publicly known about cyber espionage.

WikiLeaks, led by Julian Assange, said its publication of the documents on the hacking tools was the first in a series of releases drawing from a data set that includes several hundred million lines of code and includes the CIA’s “entire hacking capacity.”

The documents only include snippets of computer code, not the full programs that would be needed to conduct cyber exploits.

WikiLeaks said it was refraining from disclosing usable code from CIA’s cyber arsenal “until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the C.I.A.’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed, disarmed and published.”

U.S. intelligence agencies have said that Wikileaks has ties to Russia’s security services. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Wikileaks published internal emails of top Democratic Party officials, which the agencies said were hacked by Moscow as part of a coordinated influence campaign to help Republican Donald Trump win the presidency.

WikiLeaks has denied ties to Russian spy agencies.

Trump praised WikiLeaks during the campaign, often citing hacked emails it published to bolster his attacks on Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton.

WikiLeaks said on Tuesday that the documents showed that the CIA hoarded serious security vulnerabilities rather than share them with the public, as called for under a process established by President Barack Obama.

Rob Knake, a former official who dealt with the issue under Obama, said he had not seen evidence in what was published to support that conclusion.

The process “is not a policy of unilateral disarmament in cyberspace. The mere fact that the CIA may have exploited zero-day [previously undisclosed] vulnerabilities should not surprise anyone,” said Knake, now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they did not know where WikiLeaks might have obtained the material.

In a press release, the group said, “The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”

U.S. intelligence agencies have suffered a series of security breaches, including Snowden’s.

In 2010, U.S. military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to Wikileaks.

Last month, former NSA contractor Harold Thomas Martin was indicted on charges of taking highly sensitive government materials over a course of 20 years, storing the secrets in his home.

source: interaksyon.com

Boy Scouts of America to lift ban on gay troop leaders

WASHINGTON - The Boy Scouts of America was poised Monday to officially end its ban on gay scout leaders, a historic but controversial shift after years of legal wrangling and internal strife.

The proposed change was expected to be ratified on Monday by the organization's 80-member national executive board, after a smaller governing committee this month unanimously voted to lift the prohibition.

But while doing away with the blanket ban on gay adults in scouting, the BSA -- which already allows homosexual youths to join -- will apparently grant individual chapters license to continue to bar gay adults from being Scout leaders or employees.

The board said the planned policy change will let "scouting's members and parents to select local units, chartered to organizations with similar beliefs, that best meet the needs of their families."

"This change would also respect the right of religious chartered organizations to continue to choose adult leaders whose beliefs are consistent with their own," the BSA statement said.

The Boy Scouts, with some 2.5 million members and around a million adult volunteers, had been beset by internal fighting and legal wrangling, amid defiant moves by some scout councils to flout the national BSA ban and allow gay scoutmasters.

But about 70 percent of Boy Scout chapters are run by church groups, complicating efforts to reform the ban.

The Mormon Church -- also known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- runs the greatest number of BSA chapters.

Earlier this month it issued a statement after the executive board vote asserting that it "has always had the right to select Scout leaders who adhere to moral and religious principles that are consistent with our doctrines and beliefs."

The organization said, however, that the move lifting the ban was inevitable, given US social and political changes of recent years.

Back in May, the BSA's national president Robert Gates warned at its annual meeting that the courts could force the organization to change its membership policies if it failed to do so of its own accord.

"We must all understand that this will probably happen sooner rather than later," said Gates, a former CIA director and defense secretary.

Gates was himself an avid scout as a youngster, having attained the coveted top rank of Eagle Scout.

Founded in 1910, the Boy Scouts describes itself as a "values-based youth development organization."

Through camping, hiking and skills building activities, the BSA "provides a program for young people that builds character, trains them in the responsibilities of participating citizenship, and develops personal fitness."

The BSA in January 2014 officially began accepting gay youths into their ranks, after a more than two-decade-long ban.

A few months earlier, in May 2013, the Boy Scouts' national council voted to no longer deny membership to youths on the basis of sexual orientation, but it retained its ban on gay and lesbian adult Scout leaders.

source: interaksyon.com

Ex-CIA director calls ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ a ‘good movie’

WASHINGTON – The man who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, ex-CIA director Leon Panetta, vouched Friday for “Zero Dark Thirty,” calling it a “good movie” even though the tale of the biggest manhunt in history had to be simplified for the big screen.

“It’s a movie,” Panetta said, laughing. “And it’s a good movie. But I lived the real story,” he told AFP in an interview.

Panetta, who is due to step down as US defense secretary this month, said the film should not be seen as a historical account of the secret operation that he was intimately involved with as the head of the CIA from 2009 to 2011.

“It’s a little tough for me to take everything I saw and all of the work that was done and that was involved in that operation… and all of the people that worked at it and think you could put that all into a two-hour movie. You really can’t.”

But Panetta indicated that the Oscar-nominated film did convey some sense of the years of legwork it took the CIA to track down the Al-Qaeda mastermind to a hideout in Pakistan.

“I think people ought to make their own judgments. There are parts of it that give you a good sense of how the intelligence operations do work. But I also think people in the end have to understand that it isn’t a documentary, it’s a movie.”

The film, starring Jessica Chastain as a relentless CIA officer, suggests that torture and abuse of some suspects helped generate information that led to the May 2011 raid that ultimately took out bin Laden.

The portrayal has sparked criticism from some senators, rights advocates and even the acting head of the CIA, Michael Morell.

But Panetta said harsh interrogation methods, including water boarding or simulated drowning, did play a role in locating bin Laden, though not a decisive one.

“The whole effort in going after bin Laden involved 10 years of work, in piecing together various pieces of intelligence that were gathered. And there’s no question that some of the intelligence gathered was a result of some of these methods,” he said.

“But I think it’s difficult to say that they were the critical element. I think they were part of the vast puzzle that you had to put together in order to ultimately locate where bin Laden was.”

Asked if the Al-Qaeda leader would have been discovered even without the interrogation methods widely condemned as torture, Panetta said: “I think we would have found him, even without that piece of the puzzle.”

The CIA and the Pentagon cooperated heavily with the filmmakers, who were given access to officials and even offered a meeting with a Navy SEAL commando familiar with the raid.

Panetta declined to offer a critique of how he was portrayed on screen by Hollywood star James Gandolfini.

“Somebody came up to me and said I saw you in that movie but you lost a lot of weight,” he joked.

And Panetta, who often speaks of his Italian immigrant parents, said he was grateful the actor chosen to play him shared his Italian-American heritage.

“You know, I’m glad that it was an Italian.”

source: interaksyon.com

How the US shapes its military’s big screen image

WASHINGTON – The CIA and the Pentagon pulled out all the stops for the creators of “Zero Dark Thirty,” staging interviews with officials and a Navy SEAL for an inside account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Critics praised the movie’s gritty and gripping feel but, with the film due for release in major European markets this week, controversy has erupted over claims that it justifies US agents’ use of torture on detainees.

The access granted to director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal has turned the Oscar-nominated movie into the most detailed public account that exists of the May 2011 raid on a Pakistani compound to kill Bin Laden.

Nate Jones of the National Security Archives research institute dubbed it “the closest thing to the official story behind the pursuit of bin Laden.”

Bigelow has been forced to release a statement denying widespread allegations that the film set out to justify or sanitize the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed during the so-called ‘war on terror’.

Although the assistance offered to the “Zero Dark Thirty” crew sparked accusations that the White House used the movie as a propaganda tool, cooperation between Hollywood and the Pentagon or CIA is nothing new.

The first film ever to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, “Wings” in 1929, featured dogfight scenes with bi-planes thanks to help from the army.

It was the beginning of a relationship that has grown over decades.

The film industry covets access to hardware and expertise that only the armed forces can provide, while in return, defense officials want to burnish the military’s image on the big screen.

The Pentagon’s criteria for justifying cooperation on any film or television project is loosely defined, but until recently has never been seriously questioned by Congress.

“It just basically says: ‘Is it something that might be of benefit for recruiting and retention? And/or is it something that might tell the American public more about the US military?” explained Philip Strub, who leads the Pentagon’s liaison unit with the entertainment industry.

For the Pentagon, the decision whether to work on a film project all comes down to the script.

Characters in uniform need to reflect what officials consider to be an accurate picture of the practices and the ethos of the military.

If not, then the Defense Department refuses to grant permission to film at a base or to rent out US tanks or aircraft for a production.

To the Pentagon’s critics, the arrangement amounts to stealthy propaganda, with the military using its leverage to effectively censor screenplays.

“They make prostitutes of us all because they want us to sell out to their point of view,” director Oliver Stone told author David Robb in the book “Operation Hollywood,” which blasts the Pentagon’s role.

“Most films about the military are recruiting posters,” the director said.

It is out of the question for the Pentagon to assist movies with a sadistic drill sergeant, like a memorable character in “Full Metal Jacket,” or the reckless, rule-breaking soldier in “The Hurt Locker,” officials said.

“I wouldn’t claim pure innocence to the notion of trying to shape military portrayals so that they come a little closer to what we believe is the real military,” Strub told AFP.

Hollywood heavyweight Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of “Black Hawk Down,” “Top Gun” and “Pearl Harbor,” said the horse-trading with the Pentagon is about finding a practical compromise.

“If we feel it’s hurting the integrity of the film, then we won’t do it. And if they think it’s going to hurt their image, then they won’t do it,” he said in “Operation Hollywood.”

“So there are certain ways to change things, to change wording that they’ll feel comfortable with and you’ll get what you want.”

Sometimes attempts at compromise fail, and movie makers have to spend more cash tracking down old US-made military equipment in foreign countries.

Kevin Costner clashed with the Pentagon over the script of “Thirteen Days,” a film recounting the Cuban missile crisis.

Defense officials objected to the portrayal of Air Force chief General Curtis LeMay as a bellicose hawk, a description shared by most historians. But the Pentagon wanted his character depicted in a more positive light.

As a result, the production had to be moved to the Philippines at great cost.

Ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood frayed in the aftermath of the unpopular Vietnam War, and most movies about that conflict received no assistance from the military, including Stone’s “Platoon” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”

But the release of the gung-ho fighter pilot movie “Top Gun” in 1986 was a watershed, reflecting a shift in American attitudes and a resurgence of collaboration between the Pentagon and Hollywood.

Strub’s office receives dozens of proposals every year, and fewer than half get the green light.

He and his small team spend much of their time reading through scripts, looking for scenes or characters that are unrealistic, inaccurate or inappropriate.

But he dismissed the idea that the Pentagon coerces movie makers into sanitizing screenplays.

“The whole idea that we can force these creative people to do our bidding is quite hilarious,” he said. “There are people who won’t come to us just because they don’t want the perceived taint of having even talked to us.”

source: interaksyon.com