Intelligence challenges in the digital age : Cloaks, daggers, and tweets -- The education crisis : How fictional spies are shaping public opinion and intelligence policy -- American intelligence history at a glance-from fake bakeries to armed drones -- Intelligence basics : Knowns and unknowns -- Why analysis is so hard : The seven deadly biases -- Counterintelligence : To catch a spy -- Covert action - "a hard business of agonizing choices" -- Congressional oversight : Eyes on spies -- Intelligence isn't just for governments anymore : Nuclear sleuthing in a Google earth world -- Decoding cyber threats.
In 1998, a trio of young white men chained a black man to the bumper of a truck and dragged him down a country road. From the initial investigation and through the trials and their aftermath, "A Death in Texas" follows the turns of events through the eyes of Sheriff Billy Rowles and other townspeople trying to come to grips with the killing. 16 page photo insert.
In this pathbreaking book, Amy Zegart provides the first scholarly examination of the intelligence failures that preceded September 11. Until now, those failures have been attributed largely to individual mistakes. But Zegart shows how and why the intelligence system itself left us vulnerable. Zegart argues that after the Cold War ended, the CIA and FBI failed to adapt to the rise of terrorism. She makes the case by conducting painstaking analysis of more than three hundred intelligence reform recommendations and tracing the history of CIA and FBI counterterrorism efforts from 1991 to 2001, drawing extensively from declassified government documents and interviews with more than seventy high-ranking government officials. She finds that political leaders were well aware of the emerging terrorist danger and the urgent need for intelligence reform, but failed to achieve the changes they sought. The same forces that have stymied intelligence reform for decades are to blame: resistance inside U.S. intelligence agencies, the rational interests of politicians and career bureaucrats, and core aspects of our democracy such as the fragmented structure of the federal government. Ultimately failures of adaptation led to failures of performance. Zegart reveals how longstanding organizational weaknesses left unaddressed during the 1990s prevented the CIA and FBI from capitalizing on twenty-three opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot. Spying Blind is a sobering account of why two of America's most important intelligence agencies failed to adjust to new threats after the Cold War, and why they are unlikely to adapt in the future.
“We are dropping cyber bombs. We have never done that before.”—U.S. Defense Department official A new era of war fighting is emerging for the U.S. military. Hi-tech weapons have given way to hi tech in a number of instances recently: A computer virus is unleashed that destroys centrifuges in Iran, slowing that country’s attempt to build a nuclear weapon. ISIS, which has made the internet the backbone of its terror operations, finds its network-based command and control systems are overwhelmed in a cyber attack. A number of North Korean ballistic missiles fail on launch, reportedly because their systems were compromised by a cyber campaign. Offensive cyber operations like these have become important components of U.S. defense strategy and their role will grow larger. But just what offensive cyber weapons are and how they could be used remains clouded by secrecy. This new volume by Amy Zegart and Herb Lin is a groundbreaking discussion and exploration of cyber weapons with a focus on their strategic dimensions. It brings together many of the leading specialists in the field to provide new and incisive analysis of what former CIA director Michael Hayden has called “digital combat power” and how the United States should incorporate that power into its national security strategy.
Spy tells, for the first time, the full, authoritative story of how FBI agent Robert Hanssen, code name grayday, spied for Russia for twenty-two years in what has been called the “worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history”–and how he was finally caught in an incredible gambit by U.S. intelligence. David Wise, the nation’s leading espionage writer, has called on his unique knowledge and unrivaled intelligence sources to write the definitive, inside story of how Robert Hanssen betrayed his country, and why. Spy at last reveals the mind and motives of a man who was a walking paradox: FBI counterspy, KGB mole, devout Catholic, obsessed pornographer who secretly televised himself and his wife having sex so that his best friend could watch, defender of family values, fantasy James Bond who took a stripper to Hong Kong and carried a machine gun in his car trunk. Brimming with startling new details sure to make headlines, Spy discloses: • the previously untold story of how the FBI got the actual file on Robert Hanssen out of KGB headquarters in Moscow for $7 million in an unprecedented operation that ended in Hanssen’s arrest. • how for three years, the FBI pursued a CIA officer, code name gray deceiver, in the mistaken belief that he was the mole they were seeking inside U.S. intelligence. The innocent officer was accused as a spy and suspended by the CIA for nearly two years. • why Hanssen spied, based on exclusive interviews with Dr. David L. Charney, the psychiatrist who met with Hanssen in his jail cell more than thirty times. Hanssen, in an extraordinary arrangement, authorized Charney to talk to the author. • the full story of Robert Hanssen’s bizarre sex life, including the hidden video camera he set up in his bedroom and how he plotted to drug his wife, Bonnie, so that his best friend could father her child. • how Hanssen and the CIA’s Aldrich Ames betrayed three Russians secretly spying for the FBI–including tophat, a Soviet general–who were then executed by Moscow. • that after Hanssen was already working for the KGB, he directed a study of moles in the FBI when–as he alone knew–he was the mole. Robert Hanssen betrayed the FBI. He betrayed his country. He betrayed his wife. He betrayed his children. He betrayed his best friend, offering him up to the KGB. He betrayed his God. Most of all, he betrayed himself. Only David Wise could tell the astonishing, full story, and he does so, in masterly style, in Spy.
From New York Times bestselling author and former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Stanford University professor Amy B. Zegart comes an examination of the rapidly evolving state of political risk, and how to navigate it. The world is changing fast. Political risk-the probability that a political action could significantly impact a company's business-is affecting more businesses in more ways than ever before. A generation ago, political risk mostly involved a handful of industries dealing with governments in a few frontier markets. Today, political risk stems from a widening array of actors, including Twitter users, local officials, activists, terrorists, hackers, and more. The very institutions and laws that were supposed to reduce business uncertainty and risk are often having the opposite effect. In today's globalized world, there are no "safe" bets. POLITICAL RISK investigates and analyzes this evolving landscape, what businesses can do to navigate it, and what all of us can learn about how to better understand and grapple with these rapidly changing global political dynamics. Drawing on lessons from the successes and failures of companies across multiple industries as well as examples from aircraft carrier operations, NASA missions, and other unusual places, POLITICAL RISK offers a first-of-its-kind framework that can be deployed in any organization, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Organizations that take a serious, systematic approach to political risk management are likely to be surprised less often and recover better. Companies that don't get these basics right are more likely to get blindsided.
Challenging the belief that national security agencies work well, this book asks what forces shaped the initial design of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council in ways that meant they were handicapped from birth.
Bruce Berkowitz and Allan Goodman draw on historical analysis, interviews, and their own professional experience in the intelligence community to provide an evaluation of U.S. strategic intelligence.
The official report that has shaped the international debate about NSA surveillance "We cannot discount the risk, in light of the lessons of our own history, that at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking. Americans must never make the mistake of wholly 'trusting' our public officials."—The NSA Report This is the official report that is helping shape the international debate about the unprecedented surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. Commissioned by President Obama following disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, and written by a preeminent group of intelligence and legal experts, the report examines the extent of NSA programs and calls for dozens of urgent and practical reforms. The result is a blueprint showing how the government can reaffirm its commitment to privacy and civil liberties—without compromising national security.
How quickly can you compute the remainder when dividing by 120143? Why would you even want to compute this? And what does this have to do with cryptography? Modern cryptography lies at the intersection of mathematics and computer sciences, involving number theory, algebra, computational complexity, fast algorithms, and even quantum mechanics. Many people think of codes in terms of spies, but in the information age, highly mathematical codes are used every day by almost everyone, whether at the bank ATM, at the grocery checkout, or at the keyboard when you access your email or purchase products online. This book provides a historical and mathematical tour of cryptography, from classical ciphers to quantum cryptography. The authors introduce just enough mathematics to explore modern encryption methods, with nothing more than basic algebra and some elementary number theory being necessary. Complete expositions are given of the classical ciphers and the attacks on them, along with a detailed description of the famous Enigma system. The public-key system RSA is described, including a complete mathematical proof that it works. Numerous related topics are covered, such as efficiencies of algorithms, detecting and correcting errors, primality testing and digital signatures. The topics and exposition are carefully chosen to highlight mathematical thinking and problem solving. Each chapter ends with a collection of problems, ranging from straightforward applications to more challenging problems that introduce advanced topics. Unlike many books in the field, this book is aimed at a general liberal arts student, but without losing mathematical completeness.
