The conflict between secrecy and marketing within defense/security contractors has led to some entertaining gaffs in the U.S. The Spy Who Billed Me has followed up on some of the organisations openly monitoring the blog and made some interesting findings. Security contractors have to advertise their wares whilst attempting not to give away too much about the work they already do. The Spy Who Billed Me has decoded the marketing on one contractor’s web site (referred to as ‘Heckle and Jeckle’), using only publicly available contextual knowledge to reach the following conclusions:

…Heckle and Jeckle teams stand ready, custom-designed high-tech gadgets in hand, for clandestine missions in enemy territory to covertly and remotely intercept foreign communications or penetrate information systems.  This can be done independently or in conjunction with SEAL or Delta or other secret squirrel teams on behalf of SOCOM and the CIA.

In other words, they set up black sites albeit a different type than has been in the news lately.  To put it into context, such black sites such as covert listening posts in hostile territories and even in friendlier ones where discovery could create international tensions count among the Intelligence Community’s blackest secrets.  And now, thanks to the About page on Heckle and Jeckle’s website, we know that the CIA is outsourcing this to Heckle and Jeckle, whose identity would make it somewhat easier to uncover the black collection sites.

…

Heckle and Jeckle also brag about a micro-electromechanical facility which becomes particularly interesting in conjunction with their job openings announcements.  Reviewing the skill sets they’re looking for, it quickly becomes apparent that they design and program their own computer chips, so they’re clearly creating proprietary cutting-edge gadgets.  It’s notable how frequently they’re searching for engineers with experience in one of the most miserable operating systems for mobile devices:  Windows mobile.  They’re also regularly seeking programmers versed in another mobile device language:  Symbian.  Now this information taken in conjunction with their specialty and their prior claims of micro-electromechanical facilities suggests they’re designing and creating a lot of mobile, hand held covert communications devices.

And here I’d venture a pure guess that these are probably designed to look like standard run-of-the-mill Treos and other smart phones, blending their “intelligent phones” into the mobile world.  The largest consumer of such gizmos is, of course, the CIA’s DS&T, adding to suspicions that Heckle and Jeckle is a major DS&T contractor.  The primary use of such covert communications gear is for communications with nonofficial cover officers (NOCs) and agents.  So the information on Heckle and Jeckle’s site suggests that they are likely designing and creating the latest must-have accessories for NOCs and agents, a far cry from the clunky COVCOM gear of yesteryear.   (And from the Agency’s point of view, knowledge of this would be a serious security breech.  Keep in mind the CIA does not even allow contractors to acknowledge their affiliation with the Agency, let alone divulge the programs they are working on, particularly such sensitivities ones.)

…

Not only have CIA programs been compromised, so have SOCOMs.  Judging from the job postings for positions in Florida, Heckle and Jeckle are doing data mining and analytical work for SOCOM.  Among other things that can be deduced, they search for relational patterns of terrorist activity and affiliations, looking at a wide array of seemingly innocuous relationships using open source and clandestinely gathered data, particularly focusing upon financial transactional data.  I’m betting they have a very sophisticated quantitative model that they’re constantly tweaking that underlies this process.

Again, Heckle and Jeckle job postings give us hints to other SOCOM programs.  It appears that Heckle and Jeckle are involved in tracking SOCOM assets worldwide.  Moving beyond Heckle and Jeckle’s own website to other open sources, it’s possible to learn some of the specs of related handhelds including whose low-earth orbiting satellites they use.  Digging a little deeper, it’s also possible to discover the code name of Heckle and Jeckle’s RF geolocation program…

[The Spy Who Billed Me]

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Thanks to Spyblog for promoting this. Several Parliamentary committees have finally decided to take a serious look at the implications of surveillance and data collection on British Society. The House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution are going to investigate

the constitutional implications of the collection and use of surveillance and other personal data by the State and (insofar as they can be used by the State) private companies, particularly with regard to the impact on the relationship between citizen and state. [Parliamentary Call for Evidence via Spyblog]

The specific remit of the committee focuses on the technological and policy changes underpinning the collection of data, and is particularly interested in the impact of these changes on the relation between the citizen and the state. The committee will also consider the impact of current data protection legislation. This is the detail from the call for evidence:

• How has the range and quantity of surveillance and data collection by public and private organisations changed the balance between citizen and state in recent years, whether due to policy developments or technological developments? Which specific forms of surveillance and data collection have the greatest potential impact on this balance?
• What forms of surveillance and data collection might be considered constitutionally proper or improper? Can the claimed administrative, security or service benefits of such activities outweigh concerns about constitutional propriety? If so, under what circumstances? Is there a line that should not be crossed? If so, how might that line be identified?
• What effect do public or private sector surveillance and data collection have on a citizen’s liberty and privacy? Are there any constitutional rights or principles affected?
• What impact do surveillance and data collection have on the character of citizenship in the 21st century, in terms of relations with the State?
• To what extent are the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 sufficient in safeguarding constitutional rights in relation to the collection and use of surveillance or personal data?
• Is there a need for any additional constitutional protection of citizens in relation to the collection and use of surveillance material and personal data? If so, what form might such protection take?

The call for evidence can be downloaded from here. Submissions should be received by June 8th. Submissions should be emailed to constitution@parliament.uk. A single hard copy (single-sided, unbound) should also be sent to The Clerk to the Constitution Committee, House of Lords, London SW1A 0PW. Concise submissions of 1500 words or fewer are preferred.

If anyone would prefer to remain anonymous to the committee then you can send your submission to SpyBlog for inclusion in theirs.

[Thanks to SpyBlog]

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We are never surprised to discover that the arms trade uses the tactics of the military intelligence communities. Their interests are often linked and there is large scale traffic of employees from one to the other. Anger (or admiration depending on your political persuasion) might be a typical response to the discovery that BAE was spying on anti-arms trade groups [the Guardian] but not surprise. However, something seems utterly wrong with retail multi-nationals creating military intelligence units - despite their balance sheets operating on the scales of nation states. Wal-Mart seem to be creating a military intelligence unit, recruiting staff from the intelligence services with the intention of using their military contacts as part of their work.

[Business Week via Global Guerillas]

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The former Indian diplomat, M K Bhadrakumar, has written an interesting article for The Asia Times on the recent escalating tensions between the US/Europe and the Russian Federation entitled, “In the trenches of the new cold war”¹. In it he attempts to disentagle the strategies emerging in post cold war europe, paricularly in the light of the US announcement of new anti-ballistic missile systems close to russian borders.

Ostensibly, the new “missile shield” is there to provide defense against ICBMs originating in rogue states. Iran and North Korea are often mentioned in this regard, and, clearly, China is pursuing massive military development. The U.S. published a “Fact-sheet” about the systems in order, partly to calm Russian fears. Seven “facts” are highlighted:

(a) the European missile shield is meant to counter possible attacks from Iran or North Korea; (b) the US is puzzled by Russia’s anxiety, since the rockets to be deployed in Central Europe are no match for Russia’s arsenal; (c) Russia itself should be worried about the missile threat from “rogue states”; (d) the US is prepared to cooperate with Russia on missile defense; (e) the US is open to the idea of merging the missile shield with the Russian system; (f) Washington would like Moscow to take part in research and development, though it is unlikely the Russians will consider such cooperation; and (g) the US has endeavored to be “transparent” and is prepared to hold consultations with Russia to explain its case for the deployments in Central Europe. [Asia Times]

However, as Bhadrakumar points out, the Russians are deeply suspicious about the strategic capabilities of the new deployments. After all, the oft-mentioned rogue states are very far from strategically deployable ICBMs (even if the west is very far from an effective missile shield technology). General Yury Baluyevsky, chief of the Russian General Staff was quoted as saying:

The real goal [of the US deployment] is to protect [the US] from Russian and Chinese nuclear-missile potential and to create exclusive conditions for the invulnerability of the United States. [Asia Times]

There has been mounting concern in Europe as the Russian government have demonstrated an increasing willingness to use energy supplies as strategic weapons. Many European countries are now very nervously dependent on Russian natural gas. In the UK concerns are mounting about Gazprom’s desire to move into the energy supply markets. The UK currently has one of the smallest proportions of domestic gas supplies coming from Russian fields. Indeed, one flashpoint of the new cold war seems to be Kazakhstan’s role in the

US$6 billion gas-pipeline project that is an extension of the South Caucasus pipeline, linking Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, and which is expected to run from Turkey to Austria via Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. The 3,400-kilometer pipeline across the Caspian bypassing Russia, which is to be built from early next year so as to go on stream in 2011, will have a capacity of 30 billion cubic meters and promises to be a rival to Russian Gazprom’s Blue Stream-2 (scheduled to be commissioned in 2012). [Asia Times]

One part of the european strategy for evading what seems like increasingly belligerent Russian energy strategy is to deepen economic cooperation with the US. Der Speigel has reported that a “confidential draft” of a new EU-US economic treaty has already been produced. Signatures are expected on the treaty next week. However, it would be wise to see this treaty as largely focused on the increasing economic significance of Asian states - Russia is increasingly looking like a potentially destrucive distraction in a bigger game.

The Americans seem to have decided that they need to put the mutually-assured destruction arrangement with Russia behind them in order to focus on a more important game. The only way to achieve this is to put the reciprocal stability of the cold war behind them and move to a position of strategic dominance. Bhadrakumar points out that this, at least, is how the Russians perceive the US strategy. Sergei Rogov of the USA and Canada Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences has proposed cost-effective ways the Russian military can counter the ongoing extensions to the US-European military capacity without getting involved in an economically damaging arms race.

Commentators on post-Soviet affairs are pointing to events in the Ukraine and Georgia as the hot spots of the new cold war. With Europe and the US attempting to undermine Russian influence in these strategically important states, Russia has no choice but to try to maintain its influence there by whatever means it can.

Tensions are increasing in the Baltic states where ethnic Russians are often sizeable minorities and are increasingly seen as vehicles for the continuation of Russia influence after the withdrawal of the Soviet state. Estonia is currently experiencing large scale rioting in the aftermath of the removal of a statue commemorating a soviet soldier’s involvement in the defeat of Nazism (BBC news item here). Estonians often regard such monuments as symbols of their occupation by the Soviets. Many commentators are claiming that the Russian state is participating in the escalation of Russian nationalist sentiment in this situation.

1. Bhadrakumar, M.K. (2007) “In the Trenches of the New Cold War”. Asia Times 28 April 2007 [Online] Internet: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/ID28Ag01.html (Accessed 28 April 2007)

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2006 saw the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) cutting back its funding of fundamental science in favour of product-based research of tactical and strategic significance for the US. University researchers have found themselves starved of funding for basic science and having to conform to war-footing security procedures for smaller scale projects. The focus on deliverables has led to funding being directed towards corporate and covert research programmes. The cumulative effect of IP legislation in the US has further eroded the openness of traditional academic methods.

According to David Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery, DARPA funding has decreased [for universities] while National Science Foundation funding has been rising, although NSF funding tends to focus on very much smaller scale projects than was conventional for DARPA. It should be noted that the funding numbers referred to by Patterson are ‘excluding classified projects or those where the university functioned as a subcontractor’ ( IEEE Spectrum Online ). The New York Times reported on April 2nd that:

This week, in responding to a query from the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darpa officials acknowledged for the first time a shift in focus. They revealed that within a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose slightly from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million last year, the portion going to university researchers has fallen from $214 million to $123 million. [New York Times]

The Computing Research Association, an association of computer science academics from US universities, produced a report for the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee subcomittee on cybersecurity R&D criticising government policy for the near-sightedness of DARPA’s venture-capital firm approach to easily measurable progress in research; for the increased use of classification to hide research from the academic community; and for the pernicious influence of IP law in preventing open discourse about research.

According to the CRA report, under the stewardship of its director, Anthony Tether, DARPA has been transformed into an organization resembling a ‘high-tech venture capital firm’ focused on projects whose development schedules can be mapped onto 12/18 monthly milestones. Since there can be no guarantees in the development schedules of fundamental science these constraints place the emphasis of funding squarely on those projects having only to overcome implementation problems.

The CRA report also criticises the increased use of classification to render the results of research beyond the scrutiny and peer-review of the academic community. Clearly, research with a focus on deliverables of tactical and strategic importance is going result in classified research. However, where there is a redistribution of resources in favour of such projects there will be a dwindling amount of academic material available to contribute to the broader research community. Starving the academic community of cutting edge developments is hardly a recipe for expanding the pool of researchers and theories out of which future projects will emerge.

The growing proportion of DARPA funding for tactically relevant research brings with it inevitable security concerns. One consequence of this is the increase in classification of research and the associated extension of the state security apparatus to include the assessment of membership qualification for research programmes. The New York Times article reports that academics have discovered DARPA funding can entail tough constraints on the membership of research programmes. One academic, Dr. Kleinrock (UCLA) ‘said that he decided that he was not interested in the project when he learned that the agency was insisting that he employ only graduate assistants with American citizenship’ (New York Times). Needless to say, severing US research from the pool of international talent wanting to study in the US deprives science (and US science) of a tremendously powerful resource.

The third of the CRA’s concerns was with the consequences of US intellectual property law for the dissemination of academic research:

[T]he “anti-circumvention provisions” of the DMCA interfere with many legal, non-infringing uses of digital computing and prevent scientists and technologists from circumventing access technologies to recognize shortcomings in security systems, to defend patents and copyrights, to discover and fix dangerous bugs in code, to analyze and stop malicious code (e.g., viruses), and to conduct forms of desired educational activities. In some instances, the threat of legal action under the DMCA has deterred scientists from publishing scholarly work or even publicly discussing their research, both fundamental tenets of scientific discourse.[CRA Report]

Whether your politics are left- or right-leaning, the issue at this point in history is whether anyone can afford to cut fundamental science in favour of covert military research when the operational constraints on covert research remove the mechanisms science has established to sustain the quality of its work. The place of the university at the heart of science is not metaphysically guaranteed role. Even if research increases the intensity of its migration into corporatate institutions the same principles of openness, peer-review and criticism are still its best guarentors of quality. The danger of the drift in emphasis towards deliverables and security in an age of almost permanent national emergency is that will see increasing political interference in matters of science and we will have removed the protections against a new breed of corporate Lysenkoism.

Ref:

Computing Research Association (2006) Testimony Of The Computing Research Association For The Pitac Cyber Security Subcommittee Town Hall Meeting On Cyber Security Research And Development. (Report) [Online] Internet: http://www.cra.org/ (Accessed 26 Dec 2006)

Kumagai, Jean (2006) “U.S. Defense Dollars for Computer Science Plunge”. IEEE Spectrum. 43 (2) [Online] Internet: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb06/2814 (Accessed: 26 Dec 2006 )

Markoff, John (2006) “Pentagon Redirects its Research Dollars”. The New York Times. 2 April 2006 [Online] Internet: http://www.nytimes.com/ (Accessed: 26 Dec 2006 )

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A recent Bloomberg.com article [via: slashdot] reports that police in Middlesbrough, UK have begun equipping CCTV cameras with loudhailers so council surveillance operatives can chastise wrongdoers caught in the act:

It’s Saturday night in Middlesbrough, England, and drunken university students are celebrating the start of the school year, known as Freshers’ Week.

One picks up a traffic cone and runs down the street. Suddenly, a disembodied voice booms out from above:

“You in the black jacket! Yes, you! Put it back!'’The confused student obeys as his friends look bewildered.

“People are shocked when they hear the cameras talk, but when they see everyone else looking at them, they feel a twinge of conscience and comply,'’ said Mike Clark, a spokesman for Middlesbrough Council who recounted the incident. The city has placed speakers in its cameras, allowing operators to chastise miscreants who drop coffee cups, ride bicycles too fast or fight outside bars.[Bloomberg.com]

The article reminds us that in the UK ‘about 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world’s largest DNA database’. In an earlier article I linked to a story on spyblog referring to parliamentary revelations that that more than one million innocent people have their DNA held by the police in the UK.

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Military failure is forcing strategic analysis to bridge the chasm between the social sciences and military thinking that has existed since the Vietnam war. A couple of articles have been published this year highlighting the increasing influence of social theorists on the US’ anti-terrorist and anti-insurgency strategies [source: Mind Hacks]. Both articles mentioned below are worth reading. Keefe’s article is concerned with counter-intelligence work, Packer’s with counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency.

Ref:

Keefe, Patrick Radden (2006) ” Can Network Theory Thwart Terrorists?”. New York Times. 12 Feb 2006 [Online] Internet: http://www.tcf.org (Accessed: 22 Dec 2006 )

Packer, George (2006) “Knowing the Enemy”. The New Yorker. 18 Dec 2006 [Online] Internet: http://www.newyorker.com (Accessed: 21 Dec 2006 )

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According to the Strategic Security Blog, ‘all the nuclear weapon states were busy flight-testing ballistic missiles for their nuclear weapons during 2006. According to a preliminary count, eight countries launched more than 26 ballistic missiles of 23 types in 24 different events’. View a table of all the tests here.

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The home office sneaked out the admission that over 1 million innocent people, who had never been cautioned or charged with any offences, have their DNA held in the national police DNA database. While the media’s attention was focused on the hunt for a serial killer the statistics emerged as a parliamentary written answer to a question by the Tory MP Bob Spink. spyblog point out that the answer is buried amongst other, more innocuous, questions about the administration of the DNA database.

[source: spyblog]

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Space War have published an article by Tatyana Sinitsyna of UPI, pointing out the interpretation of the Litvinenko assassination which views the event as a demonstration of the capability to deliver a dirty bomb in London. It is interesting how little attention this view has gained. This interpretation of events was the subject of an angry Charlie Stross rant on November 28.

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