One of the major shifts in American intelligence after the terror attacks of 911 was the creation of the Director of National Intelligence and a whole new agency to serve him in his task of ensuring America’s 17 intelligence agencies (including the DNI) played well together, effectively shared information and didn’t waste too much in… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The persistent grumbles from the CIA and other bastions of the Intelligence Community that the Director of National Intelligence is just an unneeded layer of bureaucracy has caught the ear of House Intelligence chairman Rep. Devin Nunes. He promised to try and pass legislation to change this but admitted it would be “tough” to get… Keep reading →

UPDATED: Adds Trump Riposte WASHINGTON: When a group of Republican national security experts signed a letter denouncing Donald Trump during the primaries, we didn’t report it because it was still intramural politics. Today, some of the most respected Republican experts in national security released a letter saying Trump “would be a dangerous President and would put… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend, but he can be useful. In a speech he’d ripped up and rewritten since Friday’s horrific attacks on Paris, CIA chief John Brennan said even the only superpower needs help in a dangerous world. That sometimes requires working with countries that make the world worse,… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Hacks are hard to do damage assessments on. Just ask Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper about the Chinese theft of data from the Office of Personnel Management. “We don’t actually know what was actually exfiltrated,” Clapper told several hundred people at Georgetown University’s Healy Hall today. Why don’t we really know if 5.6 million fingerprints — or… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: “The world of manned reconnaissance is gone, and soon manned reconnaissance itself will be gone.” So says Charles E. Allen, whose opinion on such matters carries more weight than most. Charlie Allen joined the CIA in 1958 and spent the last seven of his 40 years there as assistant director of central intelligence for collection.… Keep reading →

If the United States arms the so-called “moderate Syrian opposition” to try and overthrow both ISIL and Bashar al Assad, president of Syria, will it work? A close look at the United States’ long and checkered history backing proxy forces reveals a very mixed record when we arm surrogates. The ledger includes historic fiascos such as the… Keep reading →

SOMEWHERE IN WASHINGTON: Spy movie makers love retinal scans and ever-more inventive ways to steal or modify fingerprints. Former CIA Director David Petraeus and the Joint Special Operations Command relied heavily on retinal scans, DNA sampling, fingerprints, facial and body recognition — all cross referenced with other intelligence — to build enormous cross-linked databases that helped track and… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Apple, Amazon, and Google long since outstripped the Pentagon in information technology. But as the military and intelligence community try to take advantage of commercial IT innovation, especially in cloud computing, they have run into harsh limits. Security, long-range bandwidth and the sheer volume of data have created problems for the Pentagon that current commercially… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: How well did the American Intelligence Community do in its most fundamental job: providing strategic warning of war and major strategic events to the president when it came to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and ISIL’s invasion of Iraq? The heads of the Central Intelligence, Defense Intelligence, National Geospatial Intelligence and National Security agencies claimed today… Keep reading →