Foreign Intelligence Agencies Research Articles

Foreign Intelligence in an Inter-Networked World: Time for a Re-Evaluation

This paper explores the legal and operational framework under which Canada's foreign signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) operates, with particular attention to CSE's role within the Five Eyes collective intelligence partnership. CSE is granted broad lee-way to conduct virtually unchecked electronic surveillance. It effectively interprets its own legal framework, its activities are deeply secretive subject to minimal oversight and control, its primary restriction is that it must limit its activities to the pursuit of loosely-defined 'foreign intelligence', and its primary control is a set of broadly framed directives issued by the same government Minister who most benefits from CSE's intelligence-gathering. CSE is granted such latitude on the basis that it must not direct its electronic surveillance activities towards Canadians. However, the highly integrated nature of our global communications renders this restriction effectively meaningless. Mass amounts of digital Canadian activities are incidentally captured on a regular basis in CSE's efforts to capture the entire global communications network of which they are a narrow subset. CSE's technical and practical integration into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance exacerbates this reality, by giving the agency access to additional and substantial digital resources holding significant amounts of Canadian private data. Given this significant and persistent incursion on the privacy of Canadians, the paper argues it is no longer reasonable for CSE to operate under a framework that is justified - politically and constitutionally - on the basis of its inherently foreign orientation. Finally, the paper argues that it is no longer reasonable to wholly ignore the privacy of non-Canadians. The Internet has made the world smaller, with political, social and other discourses occurring across national boundaries. Moreover, whereas the object of foreign surveillance was once largely limited in its scope to the activities of foreign governments and their agents, modern foreign intelligence agencies such as CSE focus on any and all foreigners. These agencies are now able to impact on activities far removed from any national security consideration. To chill journalism on a global level. To disrupt important democratic advocacy on various domestic issues with increasingly international dimension. To impact the reputations and religious preferences of individuals anywhere. As such, the paper argues that even if CSE were more successful in limiting its surveillance activities from impacting on Canadians, it should not be granted carte blanche to invade the privacy of foreigners without restriction.

Intelligence Reform and the Snowden Paradox: The Case of France

Taking France as a case study, this article reflects on the ongoing legalisation strategies pursued by liberal states as they seek to secure and expand the Internet surveillance programs of their domestic and foreign intelligence agencies. Following the path to legalisation prior and after the Snowden disclosures of 2013, the article shows how post-Snowden controversies helped mobilise advocacy groups against the extra judicial surveillance of Internet communications, a policy area which had hitherto been overlooked by French human rights groups. It also points to the dilemma that post-Snowden contention created for governments. On the one hand, the disclosures helped document the growing gap between the existing legal framework and actual surveillance practices, exposing them to litigation and thereby reinforcing the rationale for legalisation. On the other hand, they made such a legislative reform politically risky and unpredictable. In France, policy-makers navigated these constraints through a cautious mix of silence, denials, and securitisation. After the Paris attacks of January 2015 and a hasty deliberation in Parliament, the Intelligence Act was passed, making it the most extensive piece of legislation ever adopted in France to regulate secret state surveillance. The article concludes by pointing to the paradoxical effect of post-Snowden contention: French law now provides for clear rules authorising large-scale surveillance, to a degree of detail that was hard to imagine just a few years ago.

Islets Protect Sensitive IoT Information: Verifiably Ending Use of Sensitive IoT Information for (Foreign) Mass Surveillance and Thereby Fostering (International) Commerce

Islets is a system for users to coordinate with IoT devices and other users. They serve two important functions 1) protect sensitive citizen information and 2) foster international commerce.IoT poses extreme challenges for sensitive personal information, including psychological, sexual, social, financial, legal, and medical. Enormous amounts of sensitive information is being stored in datacenters controlled by foreign-domiciled companies and extensively sold on the market by data brokers.Consumer health and medical IoT are becoming ever more intimate. Many people have pacemakers and even more have insulin pumps. Soon mixed reality glasses are likely to become as common as cell phones because they offer heads-up, hands-free, transparent operation. DARPA is developing an implantable neural interface able to provide unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world. Before long, many workers and military personnel may not be competitive unless they have brain implants.IoT will soon be in almost all manufactured devices thereby threatening the economic survival of tans-national manufacturers as well as Internet companies because of their current Internet business model of storing information in their datacenters. EU, China, and other nations are absolutely determined to verifiably end mass surveillance of the their citizens by foreign intelligence agencies using datacenters of foreign-domiciled companies. However, information stored in the datacenters of foreign domiciled corporations will inevitably become accessible to the government in which the company is domiciled. Consequently corporations that store sensitive information in their datacenters must be domestically incorporated to ensure that foreign intelligence agencies do not have bulk access to the information. Islets provide a means for trans-national companies to escape this trap by storing sensitive information of users IoT in Islets and only storing non-sensitive information in their datacenters.

The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's purge of the Soviet military

On June 11, 1937, a closed court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin. There followed a massive purge, from the officer corps through the rank-and-file, that many consider a major factor in the Red Army's dismal performance in confronting the German invasion of June 1941. Why take such action on the eve of a major war? The most common theory has Stalin fabricating a military to tighten his control over the Soviet state. In The Red Army and the Great Terror, Peter Whitewood advances an entirely new explanation for Stalin's actions—an explanation with the potential to unlock the mysteries that still surround the Great Terror, the surge of political repression in the late 1930s in which over one million Soviet people were imprisoned in labor camps and over 750,000 executed. Framing his study within the context of Soviet civil-military relations dating back to the 1917 revolution, Whitewood shows that Stalin sanctioned this attack on the Red Army not from a position of confidence and strength, but from one of weakness and misperception. Here we see how Stalin's views had been poisoned by the paranoid accusations of his secret police, who saw spies and supporters of the dead Tsar everywhere and who had long believed that the Red Army was vulnerable to infiltration by foreign intelligence agencies engaged in a conspiracy against the Soviet state. Recently opened Russian archives allow Whitewood to counter the accounts of Soviet defectors and conspiracy theories that have long underpinned conventional wisdom on the purge. By broadening our view, The Red Army and the Great Terror demonstrates not only why Tukhachevskii and his associates were purged in 1937, but also why tens of thousands of other officers and soldiers were discharged and arrested at the same time. With its thorough reassessment of these events, the book sheds new light on the nature of power, state violence, and civil-military relations under the Stalinist regime.

A Review of Intrusion Detection Technique using Various Technique of Machine Learning and Feature Optimization Technique

Cyber’ terrorism has recently been said to be the biggest threat to our modern society. Every day a new cyber-scare story makes the headlines. The national government recognizes the importance of cyber security, as several officials have made clear in the past few years “Cyber security is among the most serious economic and national security challenges we will face in the 21st Century, we face a long-term challenge in cyberspace from foreign intelligence agencies and militaries, criminals, and others, and, this struggle will wreak serious damage on the economic health and national security. for the prevention and detection of cyber terrorism used intrusion detection system, intrusion detection system detect illegal behaviour of network over data. in current research trend performance of intrusion detection system is important issue. Now various authors’ used machine learning and feature optimization technique for intrusion detection system. Machine learning technique is collection of all learning algorithm such as classification, clustering and regression. for the improvement of machine learning technique used feature optimization technique. In this paper presents review of intrusion detection technique using machine learning and feature optimization process.

The European Approach to Privacy

This paper critically assesses the character of European (Union’s) privacy law and policy in the field of online media and electronic communications. Contrary to current understanding, this field of law is more fragmented and ill-developed than is often assumed, in particular by those discussing privacy law and policy in an international and transatlantic context. In fact, some of the most challenging regulatory issues in the field of online media and electronic communications still lack a well-developed common European approach and remain the subject of regulation at the level of the different member states of the European Union. Drawing on historic insights, the paper shows how EU policy making in the field of privacy and data protection is and remains strongly influenced by the EU institutional setting. In particular, the paper shows that the specific substantive outcome of European privacy law and policy is strongly influenced by and can only be understood properly through the lens of the ongoing project of European integration more generally. The paper will develop its main thesis by focusing on three important and current privacy issues and their treatment by EU lawmakers and the EU legal system. These are: (I.) the question of retention of communications meta-data (e.g. traffic and location data) in the field of electronic communications; (II.) the legal framework for liability of search engines for privacy and reputational harms in the online environment, including a 'right to be forgotten', and (III.) the question of the security of and the potential lawful access by foreign governments to data in the cloud. After discussing these substantive privacy policy issues and the legal frameworks that have developed (and are developing) to address them at the EU level, the paper will analyze these frameworks in view of the apparent interplay of the substance of privacy law and policy at the EU level on the one hand and the broader constitutional and institutional dynamics related to EU competency and integration. The paper starts with a discussion of the basic underlying motivations, rationales and competences for addressing privacy issues at the European level, which until recently were predominantly economic in nature. The implication of this is that some of the most pressing data privacy issues which are primarily non-economic in character, have been addressed at the fringes of what could be called the European approach to data privacy, in which the establishment of a functioning European internal market and the free flow of personal data under sufficient safeguards relating to data privacy are the dominant concerns. More recently, the adoption of the Lisbon treaty, the establishment of a binding right to data protection and privacy in the EU Charter and a new legal basis for the establishment of data protection rules at the EU level, EU privacy law and policy has become increasingly connected to the furtherance of the protection of privacy and data protection as fundamental rights more generally. Through the case studies in the paper, this dynamic of how policy rationales end up playing out at the EU level and inform the substance of privacy policies adopted, is illustrated in detail. In particular, the analysis shows how EU policy making tends to strive towards a common and comprehensive European approach, but typically fails to take account of some of the leading concerns, and is often simply not equipped or even allowed to include them in the process. For instance, there is significant disagreement about the weight that should be attributed to freedom of expression concerns in the online environment and the role of the EU with respect to media and the proper balancing of freedom and privacy in the media remains limited. With respect to national security concerns there are no European harmonization of national approaches at all. The result is that important policy concerns from the perspective of privacy in electronic communications end up being addressed indirectly, inefficiently and incompletely, through the European data privacy frameworks that may aspire to be comprehensive but would need significant reforms to achieve this aim. The article will discuss possible reforms but will warn against aspirations of further harmonization and unification of European Privacy Law. In the absence of fundamental institutional reform of the EU, further harmonization could end up being detrimental to other important policy goals currently addressed largely outside of the EU legal framework, including the issues of media freedom, criminal procedural justice and the protection of privacy and information security in relation to foreign intelligence agencies specifically discussed in this paper.

Bezpieczeństwo informacji na przykładzie tajnej współpracy i wywierania wpływu przez funkcjonariuszy Agencji Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego na dziennikarzy - przepisy de lege lata i de lege ferenda

The text addresses the issue of information security as exemplified by clandestine collaboration and the influence exerted by the Internal Security Agency officers upon journalists. The texts analyzes the de lege lata regulations as well as the de lege ferenda ones. As for the former, the penal provisions of the Act, that is Articles 153b–153d (Chapter 10a) are applicable, whereas as for the latter, the applicable regulations are the 2013 Bill Articles numbered 197-199 (Chapter 10). In both the 2002 Act on the Internal Security Agency and Foreign Intelligence Agency as well as in the 2013 draft Bill of the Internal Security Agency, the legislator penalizes the employment by the officers of the information acquired while fulfilling or in connection with official duties for the purpose of affecting the operation of public authority bodies, entrepreneurs or broadcasters, editors-in-chief, journalists and persons conducting publishing activity. Also, the text analyzes regulations concerned with the penalization of clandestine collaboration engaged in by ABW officers with a broadcaster, editor-in-chief, a journalist and a person conducting publishing activity.

Homecoming as a National Founding Myth: Jewish Identity and German Landscapes in Konrad Wolf’s I was Nineteen

Konrad Wolf was one of the most enigmatic intellectuals of East Germany. The son of the Jewish Communist playwright Friedrich Wolf and the brother of Markus Wolf—the head of the GDR’s Foreign Intelligence Agency—Konrad Wolf was exiled in Moscow during the Nazi era and returned to Germany as a Red Army soldier by the end of World War Two. This article examines Wolf’s 1968 autobiographical film I was Nineteen (Ich war Neunzehn), which narrates the final days of World War II—and the initial formation of postwar reality—from the point of view of an exiled German volunteer in the Soviet Army. In analyzing Wolf’s portrayals of the German landscape, I argue that he used the audio-visual clichés of Heimat-symbolism in order to undermine the sense of a homogenous and apolitical community commonly associated with this concept. Thrown out of their original contexts, his displaced Heimat images negotiate a sense of a heterogeneous community, which assumes multi-layered identities and highlights the shared ideology rather than the shared origins of the members of the national community. Reading Wolf from this perspective places him within a tradition of innovative Jewish intellectuals who turned Jewish sensibilities into a major part of modern German mainstream culture.

The Application of Information Flow Control Technology Based on Electronic Confidentiality Level Identifier in the Removable Storage Medium

With the rapid development of information technology, the electronic information is ubiquitous, which has brought severe challenges to the transmission and reception of classified information. The common electronic information protection technology and measures were described and the primary means of foreign spy and intelligence agencies attack theft were pointed out. Through the introduction of electronic confidentiality level identifier technology and information flow control technology, the security of electronic information was achieve. Take the secret exchange of special U disk of a company in Mianyang as an example, the application of information flow control system based on electronic confidentiality level identifier in the removable storage medium to transmit information was introduced

Struggling for Citizenship: Civic participation and the State in Russia

Abstract: This paper discusses shifting relationships between civic organizations and state in contemporary Russia. Drawing on a case study of provincial city of Tver, paper explores how local activists and authorities interpret citizenship and draw state-society boundaries at juncture between Socialist past and capitalism of today. The paper argues that authorities advocate a statist model of citizenship that conceives of civic organizations as an auxiliary of state, taking over formerly state-provided services and activating citizens to assist state in governance. Organizations founded during Soviet era attempt to retain Soviet citizenship model and paternalist social contract underpinning it, while organizations founded during post-Soviet period call for more participatory notions of citizenship. Keywords: citizenship, civic organizations, Russia, state ********** I think these notions are somewhat strange to us, that there should be an agreement, public decision, some joint symposia, congresses, compacts, deals. People power. Today, we need strict power--I may be wrong though--but it should be a strict vertical power arrangement, to establish some kind of order in our country. This quotation from an official of regional government in Tver, contemplating whether citizens and their organizations should have more say about local issues, captures prevailing ethos in state-society relations in contemporary Russia. While during Yeltsin era political landscape was characterized by dispersion of power from federal to regional and municipal levels and mushrooming of independent civic organizations, Vladimir Putin's and Dmitry Medvedev's terms in office have been marked by a recentralization of power and a more active and interventionist role of state in steering social development in spirit of sovereign democracy. In terms of civic activism, this process has been riddled with contradictions. On one hand, civic organizations and governmental structures have started collaborating with one another more than before, and various mechanisms of cooperation have been established. For example, two federal-level civic forums were organized in Moscow in 2001 and 2008, followed by a number of similar regional forums, and a system of federal and regional public chambers (obshchestvennye palaty) has been created that seeks to foster dialogue between state and society. (1) The authorities have also begun distributing funding to civic organizations, prioritizing in particular youth and social-welfare initiatives. (2) The political elite also actively circulate concept of civil society in public discourse and emphasize its importance--implying that concept has certain symbolic value in their own concept of political development. (3) On other hand, state has also placed several new restrictions on activism and increased its bureaucratic control, most importantly via amendments made to law on civic associations in 2006. (4) This law gives authorities considerable powers to investigate, and ultimately close down, any organization suspected of threatening the sovereignty, political independence, territorial integrity, national unity, unique character, cultural heritage, and national interests of Russian Federation. (5) According to Russia-based Center for Development of Democracy and Human Rights, law has created massive bureaucracy, complicated registration of organizations, and increasingly marginalized independent civic activism. (6) Moreover, at same time that organizations enjoying Western funding have been frequently labeled in public as unpatriotic and stooges of foreign intelligence agencies, and public protests organized by political opposition have been forcefully suppressed, Russian public sphere has witnessed a mushrooming of youth organizations, such as Nashi, which are closely connected with and enjoy considerable financial support from government. …

The GDR—As Seen by the Federal German Foreign Intelligence Agency (BND) 1985–1990

(2006). The GDR—As Seen by the Federal German Foreign Intelligence Agency (BND) 1985–1990. Journal of Intelligence History: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 85-103.

Bricks and Mortar for a Theory of Intelligence*

Intelligence may be thought of as three kinds of activities carried out by secretive agencies: first, the gathering, interpreting, anddistribution of information (collection and analysis, for short); second, clandestine attempts to manipulate events abroad (covert action); and, third, the guarding against the hostile operations of foreign intelligence agencies (counterintelligence). This paper examines a core set of propositions about these activities that, taken together, point toward the outlines of a theoretical framework for understanding intelligence. The propositions andthe evidence suggest that effective collection and analysis is, above all, a function of national wealth, but depends as well on focused targeting, all-source synergism, and good communication links (“liaison”) between intelligence officers and policy officials. Successful, sustained covert action also relies on national wealth, and is a function in addition of modest objectives, weak targets, and the support of well-armed local allies. Successful counterintelligence requires national wealth and technical sophistication, along with an attitude of serious attention to security matters (which usually rises only after a major security breach).

Fusion of intelligence information: a Bayesian approach.

The attack that occurred on September 11, 2001 was, in the end, the result of a failure to detect and prevent the terrorist operations that hit the United States. The U.S. government thus faces at this time the daunting tasks of first, drastically increasing its ability to obtain and interpret different types of signals of impending terrorist attacks with sufficient lead time and accuracy, and second, improving its ability to react effectively. One of the main challenges is the fusion of information, from different sources (U.S. or foreign), and of different types (electronic signals, human intelligence. etc.). Fusion thus involves two very distinct and separate issues: communications, i.e., ensuring that the different U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies communicate all relevant and accurate information in a timely fashion and, perhaps more difficult, merging the content of signals, some "sharp" and some "fuzzy," some dependent and some independent into useful information. The focus of this article is on the latter issue, and on the use of the results. In this article, I present a classic probabilistic Bayesian model sometimes used in engineering risk analysis, which can be helpful in the fusion of information because it allows computation of the posterior probability of an event given its prior probability (before the signal is observed) and the quality of the signal characterized by the probabilities of false positive and false negative. Experience suggests that the nature of these errors has been sometimes misunderstood; therefore, I discuss the validity of several possible definitions.

Sources of information about the Soviet Union in U.S. government publications

U.S. government publishing on Soviet affairs constitutes an important contribution to the literature on the Soviet Union. This article provides an overview of the history of government research in this field and explores the relationship between government and academic research efforts. The government's current publishing program is described, with particular emphasis on unclassified literature produced by the foreign affairs and intelligence agencies. Finally, the article discusses the problems of access to and dissemination of this important source material.