Download or read book Requirements for the TRAILBLAZER and THINTHREAD System written by Thomas F. Gimble and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This heavily redacted version of a 2004 report was released on June 22, 2011, in response to FOIA requests. The report is the result of a long investigation conducted after three former Nat. Security Agency (NSA) officials and a former congressional staffer filed a DoD Hotline Complaint about a huge amount of waste and mismanagement within the NSA. They maintained that the NSA had defrauded taxpayers and ignored urgent security needs by shelving a program that included critical privacy protections (THINTHREAD) in favor of an undeveloped and much more expensive program that lacked privacy protections (TRAILBLAZER). The release of this report verifies the whistleblowers' assertions. Illus. This is a print on demand report.
Download or read book The Watchdogs Didn t Bark written by Ray Nowosielski and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shocking reexamination of the failures of US government officials to use available intelligence to stop the attack on American on September 11, 2001. “The authors lay bare…an intelligence failure of historic proportions.”—John Kiriakou, former CIA officer, author, The Convenient Terrorist In 2009, documentarians John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski arrived at the offices of Richard Clarke, the former counterterror adviser to Presidents Clinton and Bush. In the meeting, Clarke boldly accused one-time Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet of “malfeasance and misfeasance” in the pre-war on terror. Thus began an incredible—never-before-told—investigative journey of intrigue about America’s intelligence community and two 9/11 hijackers. The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark details that story, unearthed over a ten-year investigation. Following the careers of a dozen counterterror employees working in different agencies of the US government from the late 1980s to the present, the book puts the government’s systems of oversight and accountability under a microscope. At the heart of this book is a mystery: Why did key 9/11 plotters Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi, operating inside the United States, fall onto the radars of so many US agencies without any of those agencies succeeding in stopping the attacks? The answers go beyond mere “conspiracy theory” and “deep state” actors, but instead find a complicated set of potential culprits and an easily manipulated system. Taking readers on a character-driven account of the causes of 9/11 and how the lessons of the attacks were cynically inverted to empower surveillance of citizens, kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, torture, government-sanctioned murder, and a war on whistleblowers and journalists, an alarm is raised which is more pertinent today than ever before.
Download or read book Outsourcing US Intelligence written by Van Puyvelde Damien Van Puyvelde and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 21st century, more than any other time, US agencies have relied on contractors to conduct core intelligence functions. This book charts the swell of intelligence outsourcing in the context of American political culture and considers what this means for the relationship between the state, its national security apparatus and accountability within a liberal democracy. Through analysis of a series of case studies, recently declassified documents and exclusive interviews with national security experts in the public and private sectors, the book provides an in-depth and illuminating appraisal of the evolving accountability regime for intelligence contractors.
Download or read book Democracy in the Dark written by Frederick A. O. Schwarz and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2012-05-29 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A timely and provocative book exploring the origins of the national security state and the urgent challenge of reining it in” (The Washington Post). From Dick Cheney’s man-sized safe to the National Security Agency’s massive intelligence gathering, secrecy has too often captured the American government’s modus operandi better than the ideals of the Constitution. In this important book, Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., who was chief counsel to the US Church Committee on Intelligence—which uncovered the FBI’s effort to push Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide; the CIA’s enlistment of the Mafia to try to kill Fidel Castro; and the NSA’s thirty-year program to get copies of all telegrams leaving the United States—uses examples ranging from the dropping of the first atomic bomb and the Cuban Missile Crisis to Iran–Contra and 9/11 to illuminate this central question: How much secrecy does good governance require? Schwarz argues that while some control of information is necessary, governments tend to fall prey to a culture of secrecy that is ultimately not just hazardous to democracy but antithetical to it. This history provides the essential context to recent cases from Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden. Democracy in the Dark is a natural companion to Schwarz’s Unchecked and Unbalanced, cowritten with Aziz Huq, which plumbed the power of the executive branch—a power that often depends on and derives from the use of secrecy. “[An] important new book . . . Carefully researched, engagingly written stories of government secrecy gone amiss.” —The American Prospect
Download or read book Dragnet Nation written by Julia Angwin and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigative journalist offers a revealing look at how the government, private companies, and criminals use technology to indiscriminately sweep up vast amounts of our personal data, and discusses results from a number of experiments she conducted to try and protect herself.
Download or read book Deep State written by Marc Ambinder and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a hidden country within the United States. It was formed from the astonishing number of secrets held by the government and the growing ranks of secret-keepers given charge over them. The government secrecy industry speaks in a private language of codes and acronyms, and follows an arcane set of rules and customs designed to perpetuate itself, repel penetration, and deflect oversight. It justifies itself with the assertion that the American values worth preserving are often best sustained by subterfuge and deception. Deep State, written by two of the country's most respected national security journalists, disassembles the secrecy apparatus of the United States and examines real-world trends that ought to trouble everyone from the most aggressive hawk to the fiercest civil libertarian. The book: - Provides the fullest account to date of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance program first spun up in the dark days after 9/11. - Examines President Obama's attempt to reconcile his instincts as a liberal with the realities of executive power, and his use of the state secrets doctrine. - Exposes how the public’s ubiquitous access to information has been the secrecy industry's toughest opponent to date, and provides a full account of how WikiLeaks and other “sunlight” organizations are changing the government's approach to handling sensitive information, for better and worse. - Explains how the increased exposure of secrets affects everything from Congressional budgets to Area 51, from SEAL Team Six and Delta Force to the FBI, CIA, and NSA. - Assesses whether the formal and informal mechanisms put in place to protect citizens from abuses by the American deep state work, and how they might be reformed.
Download or read book Whistleblowers written by Allison Stanger and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "brisk and interesting" (Jill Lepore, New Yorker) exploration of whistleblowing in America, from the Revolutionary War to the Trump era PROSE Award winner in the Government, Policy and Politics category Misconduct by those in high places is always dangerous to reveal. Whistleblowers thus face conflicting impulses: by challenging and exposing transgressions by the powerful, they perform a vital public service--yet they always suffer for it. This episodic history brings to light how whistleblowing, an important but unrecognized cousin of civil disobedience, has held powerful elites accountable in America. Analyzing a range of whistleblowing episodes, from the corrupt Revolutionary War commodore Esek Hopkins (whose dismissal led in 1778 to the first whistleblower protection law) to Edward Snowden, to the dishonesty of Donald Trump, Allison Stanger reveals the centrality of whistleblowing to the health of American democracy. She also shows that with changing technology and increasing militarization, the exposure of misconduct has grown more difficult to do and more personally costly for those who do it--yet American freedom, especially today, depends on it.
Download or read book The Deep State written by Mike Lofgren and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of The Party Is Over delivers a no-holds-barred exposé of who really wields power in Washington Every four years, tempers are tested and marriages fray as Americans head to the polls to cast their votes. But does anyone really care what we think? Has our vaunted political system become one big, expensive, painfully scripted reality TV show? In this powerful expose of the sins and excesses of Beltwayland, a longtime Republican party insider argues that we have become an oligarchy in form if not in name. Hooked on war, genuflecting to big donors, in thrall to discredited economic theories and utterly bereft of a moral compass, America’s governing classes are selling their souls to entrenched interest while our bridges collapse, wages, stagnate, and our water is increasingly undrinkable. Mike Lofgren was the first to use the term Deep State, in an essay and exclusive interview on Moyers and Company, to refer to a web of entrenched interests in the US government and beyond (most notably Wall Street and Silicon Valley, which controls access to our every click and swipe) that dictate America’s defense decisions, trade policies and priorities with little regard for the actual interests or desires of the American people. In this essential and eye-opening book Lofgren takes his argument one step further. Drawing on insights gleaned over three decades on Capitol Hill, much of it on the Budget Committee, he paints a gripping portrait of the dismal swamp on the Potomac and the revolution it will take to reclaim our government and set us back on course.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Intelligence written by Michael Warner and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-20 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sweeping history of the development of professional, institutionalized intelligence examines the implications of the fall of the state monopoly on espionage today and beyond. During the Cold War, only the alliances clustered around the two superpowers maintained viable intelligence endeavors, whereas a century ago, many states could aspire to be competitive at these dark arts. Today, larger states have lost their monopoly on intelligence skills and capabilities as technological and sociopolitical changes have made it possible for private organizations and even individuals to unearth secrets and influence global events. Historian Michael Warner addresses the birth of professional intelligence in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent rise of US intelligence during the Cold War. He brings this history up to the present day as intelligence agencies used the struggle against terrorism and the digital revolution to improve capabilities in the 2000s. Throughout, the book examines how states and other entities use intelligence to create, exploit, and protect secret advantages against others, and emphasizes how technological advancement and ideological competition drive intelligence, improving its techniques and creating a need for intelligence and counterintelligence activities to serve and protect policymakers and commanders. The world changes intelligence and intelligence changes the world. This sweeping history of espionage and intelligence will be a welcomed by practitioners, students, and scholars of security studies, international affairs, and intelligence, as well as general audiences interested in the evolution of espionage and technology.
Download or read book Financial Cryptography and Data Security written by Rainer Böhme and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This books constitutes the thoroughly refereed papers and poster abstracts from the FC 2014 Workshops, the First Workshop on Bitcoin Research, BITCOIN 2014, and the Second Workshop on Applied Homomorphic Cryptography and Encrypted Computing, WAHC 2014, co-located with the 18th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, held in Christ Church, Barbados, on March 7, 2014. The 15 full papers and 3 poster abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. They are grouped in topical sections on Bitcoin transactions, policy and legal issues; Bitcoin security; improving digital currencies; posters, and WAHC papers.
Download or read book Freedom of Speech written by David K. Shipler and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative, timely assessment of the state of free speech in America With his best seller The Working Poor, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times veteran David K. Shipler cemented his place among our most trenchant social commentators. Now he turns his incisive reporting to a critical American ideal: freedom of speech. Anchored in personal stories—sometimes shocking, sometimes absurd, sometimes dishearteningly familiar—Shipler’s investigations of the cultural limits on both expression and the willingness to listen build to expose troubling instabilities in the very foundations of our democracy. Focusing on recent free speech controversies across the nation, Shipler maps a rapidly shifting topography of political and cultural norms: parents in Michigan rallying to teachers vilified for their reading lists; conservative ministers risking their churches’ tax-exempt status to preach politics from the pulpit; national security reporters using techniques more common in dictatorships to avoid leak prosecution; a Washington, D.C., Jewish theater’s struggle for creative control in the face of protests targeting productions critical of Israel; history teachers in Texas quietly bypassing a reactionary curriculum to give students access to unapproved perspectives; the mixed blessings of the Internet as a forum for dialogue about race. These and other stories coalesce to reveal the systemic patterns of both suppression and opportunity that are making today a transitional moment for the future of one of our founding principles. Measured yet sweeping, Freedom of Speech brilliantly reveals the triumphs and challenges of defining and protecting the boundaries of free expression in modern America.
Download or read book Intel Wars written by Matthew M. Aid and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shock of the 9/11 attacks sent the American intelligence community into hyperactive growth. Five hundred billion dollars of spending in the Bush-Cheney years turned the U.S. spy network into a monster: 200,000-plus employees, stations in 170 countries, and an annual budget of more than $75 billion. Armed with cutting-edge surveillance gear, high-tech weapons, and fleets of armed and unarmed drone aircraft, America deploys the most advanced intel force in history. But even after the celebrated strike against Osama Bin Laden, America's spies are still struggling to beat a host of ragtag enemies around the world. In Intel Wars, preeminent secrecy and intelligence historian Matthew Aid ("our reigning expert on the NSA"-Seymour M. Hersh) delivers the inside stories of how and why our shadow war against extremism has floundered. Spendthrift, schizophrenic policies leave next-generation spy networks drowning in raw data, resource-starved, and choked on paperwork. Overlapping jurisdictions stall CIA operatives, who wait seventy-two hours for clearance to attack fast-moving Taliban IE D teams. U.S. military computers-their classified hard drives still in place-turn up for sale at Afghan bazaars. Swift, tightly focused operations like the Bin Laden strike are the exception rather than the rule. Intel Wars-based on extensive, on-the-ground interviews, and revelations from Wikileaks cables and other newly declassified documents-shows how our soldier-spies are still fighting to catch up with the enemy. Matthew Aid captures the lumbering behemoth that is the U.S. military-intelligence complex in one comprehensive narrative, and distills the unprecedented challenges to our security into a compelling- and sobering-read.
Download or read book Crisis of Conscience written by Tom Mueller and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are living in a time of mind-boggling corruption, but we are also living in a golden age of whistleblowing. Over the past two decades, whistleblowers have emerged as both the government's best weapon against corporate misconduct and the citizenry's best defence against government. Drawing on relentless original research, including in-depth interviews with more than 200 whistleblowers, Crisis of Conscience is a modern-day David-and-Goliath saga, told through a series of riveting cases drawn from Big Pharma, the military, and beyond.
Download or read book Power Wars written by Charlie Savage and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 1067 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage's penetrating investigation of the Obama presidency and the national security state. Barack Obama campaigned on changing George W. Bush's "global war on terror" but ended up entrenching extraordinary executive powers, from warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention to military commissions and targeted killings. Then Obama found himself bequeathing those authorities to Donald Trump. How did the United States get here? In Power Wars, Charlie Savage reveals high-level national security legal and policy deliberations in a way no one has done before. He tells inside stories of how Obama came to order the drone killing of an American citizen, preside over an unprecendented crackdown on leaks, and keep a then-secret program that logged every American's phone calls. Encompassing the first comprehensive history of NSA surveillance over the past forty years as well as new information about the Osama bin Laden raid, Power Wars equips readers to understand the legacy of Bush's and Obama's post-9/11 presidencies in the Trump era.
Download or read book Pay Any Price written by James Risen and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War corrupts. Endless war corrupts absolutely. Ever since 9/11 America has fought an endless war on terror, seeking enemies everywhere and never promising peace. In Pay Any Price, James Risen reveals an extraordinary litany of the hidden costs of that war: from squandered and stolen dollars, to outrageous abuses of power, to wars on normalcy, decency, and truth. In the name of fighting terrorism, our government has done things every bit as shameful as its historic wartime abuses -- and until this book, it has worked very hard to cover them up. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. FDR authorized the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans. Presidents Bush and Obama now must face their own reckoning. Power corrupts, but it is endless war that corrupts absolutely.
Download or read book The Shadow Factory written by James Bamford and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-07-14 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Bamford has been the preeminent expert on the National Security Agency since his reporting revealed the agency’s existence in the 1980s. Now Bamford describes the transformation of the NSA since 9/11, as the agency increasingly turns its high-tech ears on the American public. The Shadow Factory reconstructs how the NSA missed a chance to thwart the 9/11 hijackers and details how this mistake has led to a heightening of domestic surveillance. In disturbing detail, Bamford describes exactly how every American’s data is being mined and what is being done with it. Any reader who thinks America’s liberties are being protected by Congress will be shocked and appalled at what is revealed here.
Download or read book Listverse com s Epic Book of Mind Boggling Lists written by Jamie Frater and published by Ulysses Press. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features lists that cover a broad range of subjects including bizarre births, weird jobs, crazy diets, strange phobias, historical oddities, religious scandals, ridiculous criminal acts, and weird superstitions.
