PTI – Amid maritime disputes with countries like the Philippines over the resource rich islands in the South China Sea, China has put them under active three-dimensional surveillance. China has adopted three-dimensional (3D) visual management over 4,000 islands, a report by the Ministry of Land and Resources said Thursday. Three-dimensional visual information of these islands is collected via ground vehicles, airplanes and satellites. Also 2,851 islands have been put under aviation monitoring and surveillance, and 45 islands along baseline points of China’s territorial waters are under ground watch, the report said. All the historical data of Chinese islands have been processed and put into a database to strengthen island management, the report said. The government last year also released its first list of uninhabited islands available for development in the country, the report said. Read Article
CBS — Surveillance aircraft used by the U.S. military overseas could soon be coming to the skies above Los Angeles County. KNX 1070?s Charles Feldman reports the Federal Aviation Administration is making it easier for local law enforcement agencies to fly unmanned drones. The FAA has streamlined the process that would allow agencies to fly smaller, unarmed versions of the drones that hunt down terrorists in places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Read Article
Space – China launched an optical military reconnaissance satellite Thursday (May 10) aboard a Long March 4B rocket, successfully orbiting another member in a fleet of spacecraft spying for Chinese intelligence agencies. Read article
The Week – Soon, Congress will begin drafting legislation reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which serves as the legal framework for domestic espionage against external threats. And while FISA doesn’t affect spy activities overseas, the attention it generates will shift scrutiny to the National Security Agency and its growing and astonishing capabilities. Read Article
Sun Sentinel – Criminals, beware the gardener. This city has a new way of fighting crime: Employees who are out and about, trimming trees or picking up litter on the beach, are officially on the lookout for signs of a crime. A group of about 70 landscapers and garbage truck drivers got training from the Broward Sheriff’s Office this week so they know what to look for. Another group of about 35 will train next week. Read Article
Forbes – If the world’s largest surveillance agency has a working relationship with the world’s largest Internet firm, that’s no one’s business but theirs, according to an appeals court in the DC Circuit. In the ruling issued Friday, (PDF here ) the court decided that the National Security Agency doesn’t need to either confirm or deny its relationship with Google in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, ruling that a FOIA exemption covers any documents whose exposure might hinder the NSA’s national security mission. Read Article
It seems everyone is at it, albeit some people/countries more than others! The act of governments or individuals obtaining secret and confidential information by illicit means is nothing new. What may be surprising is the lengths and actions that some will go to in order to extract the information. Find out more about government and industrial espionage by reading our news archive of 386 articles on the subject. CLICK HERE
TheGlobeAndMail – A Canadian spymaster’s business card was recovered last year in a trove of intelligence documents in Libya, providing a physical link between Canadian security agencies and Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s spy services. William “Jack” Hooper, a globetrotting deputy director for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, was apparently among the Western intelligence officials who had cultivated ties with Libya, raising new questions about possible Canadian involvement in the arrests and interrogations of Arab-Canadians in their homelands following the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the United States. Read article
Reuters – British investigators try to work out how the body of a spy ended up inside a locked sports bag with the keys to the padlock with him. Read article
NYtimes – When Hu Jintao, China’s top leader, picked up the telephone last August to talk to a senior anticorruption official visiting Chongqing, special devices detected that he was being wiretapped — by local officials in that southwestern metropolis. The discovery of that and other wiretapping led to an official investigation that helped topple Chongqing’s charismatic leader, Bo Xilai, in a political cataclysm that has yet to reach a conclusion. Read article
AsiaOne – Cheng was accused of trying to lure a former classmate, who is now a military officer, to meet with Chinese officials abroad for money but the officer turned him in to Taiwanese authorities, they said. Prosecutors raided Cheng’s office and homes in southern Taiwan on Wednesday and took him into custody along with his wife early Thursday on suspicion of violating national security law. This marked the second spying case in less than a week, after two former agents were indicted Monday on charges of collecting information for China. Taiwan and China have spied on each other ever since they split in 1949 at the end of a civil war. Beijing still claims the island as its territory awaiting reunification – by force if necessary. Read article
Washington Post – The Pentagon is planning to ramp up its spying operations against high-priority targets such as Iran under an intelligence reorganization aimed at expanding on the military’s espionage efforts beyond war zones, a senior defense official said Monday. The newly created Defense Clandestine Service would work closely with the CIA — pairing two organizations that have often seen each other as rivals — in an effort to bolster espionage operations overseas at a time when the missions of the agency and the military increasingly converge. Read Article
AOL – “Expansion of this authority is necessary to permit DOD to conduct revenue-generating commercial activities to protect such operations and would provide an important safeguard for U.S. military forces conducting hazardous operations abroad,” the request for legislation says. It was first reported by my colleagues at Inside Defense. Read article
DailyMail – Gaddafi’s secret agents were supplied by MI5 with intelligence, secure mobile phones and a luxurious safe house in the heart of London’s Knightsbridge.The extraordinary revelations emerge from hundreds of secret documents unearthed from Libyan spymasters’ archives after the Gaddafi regime was toppled – with British military help – last year.Shockingly, they reveal tactics of intimidation and coercion – and expose the British agents’ specific fears that their actions might be reported by the press in the UK. Read article http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2133276/MI5-betrayed-Libya-dissidents-Gaddafi-spies-London-sting-Secret-documents-exposed-MoS-trigger-political-storm.html#ixzz1soBc2QhY
TheWeek – The men and women of the Special Collection Service are responsible for placing super-high-tech bugs in unbelievably hard-to-reach places. Data collected is then transmitted to the National Security Agency for decryption and analysis. John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists put it best: “When you think of NSA, you think satellites. When you think CIA, you think James Bond and microfilm. But you don’t really think of an agency whose sole purpose is to get up real close and use the best technology there is to listen and transmit. That’s SCS.” Read article
Haaretz – According to the report, the surveillance of Iran’s nuclear program has been gaining momentum since the last years of the Bush administration. This included increased eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, the establishment of an Iran task force, and an expanded network of spies. Read article
Dailymail – Detectives working on the case — one of the most mysterious and baffling of recent times — are convinced it was, in order to cover up the truth: that a colleague was involved in his death Read article
DailyMail – A rocket carrying a top-secret payload blasted off from the California coast yesterday. The Delta IV rocket lifted off from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, about 130 miles north west of Los Angeles. The rocket contained some form of spy technology – thought to be a hi-tech replacement for America’s ageing fleet of radar satellites. It’s not clear what capabilities the new generation might be armed with. Read article
Telegraph – Immaculately dressed, often in cream linen, Neil Heywood was the epitomy of a British gentleman abroad, but his death in a hotel room in China has left those who knew him asking what secrets he may have taken to his grave. Read article
BBC – His father Rupert founded its parent company News Corporation, which had to drop its bid for BSkyB amid a phone-hacking scandal at a UK newspaper. Sources told Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, that it was James Murdoch’s decision to leave. They said it was an attempt to pre-empt further criticism as investigations continue into phone hacking. Read article
DailyMail – ‘I expect witnesses to identify who they are, not who they think they are.’ Our investigation has revealed the woman to be 27-year-old American Missa Elizabeth Guthrie, who claims to be an international businesswoman linked to a wealthy American family worth £35?billion. Read article
NY Times – Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show. Read Article
DailyMail – The MI6 spy whose body was found locked in a sports bag may have been killed by a secret agent, his family said yesterday. Their barrister suggested a sinister cover-up had left them with no way of knowing how and why Gareth Williams died. One theory is that he died at the hands of a colleague. Another is that a foreign agent killed him because of his espionage work. The discovery of the body in his flat near the Secret Service headquarters in London sparked a 20-month police inquiry that has drawn a blank. Read article
Metro – Dozens of prominent government officials — including several blue-chip diplomats and politicians — came under RCMP suspicion of being traitors as the Mounties scrambled to uncover a suspected Soviet mole in their ranks at the height of the Cold War. Newly released archival records show that even the cream of Canada’s foreign service was not immune from scrutiny in the top secret RCMP investigation known as Operation Feather Bed. Read article
PC World – The Electronic Privacy Information Center is locking horns with the National Security Agency over a secret deal the agency cut with Google following an attack on Gmail by Chinese hackers in 2010. The information center has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the NSA to obtain information about the deal. That request was rejected by the agency. That rejection was upheld by a federal court. The hearing on the appeal of that decision is being held today in Washington, D.C. Read Article
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