Feds concede: WhatsApp has unbreakable encryption

WhatsApp, the world’s most popular instant-message app with more than 1 billion users, is now fully encrypted on all platforms: Android, iPhone, Blackberry and others. That’s good news for users who care about security and privacy, including journalists and dissidents. At the same time, it represents the intensification of a trend toward ubiquitous encryption that […]

Pentagon and CIA Militias Portray a Chaotic U.S. Foreign Policy

If you think the cross-currents of the U.S. presidential election constitute societal madness and national decline, revelations about actual fighting between the CIA and the Pentagon through their proxies in war-torn Syria raise more concern about U.S. foreign policy, enough at least to rate comparison with Donald Trump’s suggestions that the NATO alliance is obsolete […]

A CIA operative will be extradited to Italy for kidnapping a terrorist

A former CIA operative is to be the first to be extradited to face court over the Bush administration’s heavily criticised policy of kidnapping terror suspects and smuggling them to third countries for interrogation. In the latest twist in a decades-long transatlantic espionage scandal, the Portuguese Supreme Court has upheld a request from Italy to extradite […]

The CIA’s Problem: Subpar Spies

One year ago, CIA Director John Brennan announced sweeping changes at Langley, promising to reorganize the spy service by instituting a slew of bureaucratic fixes to its management structure. Then on Thursday, the CIA acknowledged that it left explosive training material on a children’s school bus in northern Virginia. Director Brennan’s otherwise laudable reforms have missed the mark in […]

When the CIA ran a LSD sex-house in San Francisco

On an elegant dead-end block on the north side of Telegraph Hill is 225 Chestnut St., a swanky modernist building with panoramic bay views. It’s about the last place you would have expected to find a clandestine CIA program during the Cold War. Yet from 1955 to 1965, this building was the site of “Operation […]

Obama Nixed CIA Plan That Could Have Stopped ISIS: Officials

The CIA in 2012 proposed a detailed covert action plan designed to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, but President Obama declined to approve it, current and former U.S. officials tell NBC News. It’s long been known that then-CIA Director David Petraeus recommended a program to secretly arm and train moderate Syrian rebels in […]

Inside the CIA’s Secret Drone War

In 2001, the White House concluded that it was legal to use armed drones to kill senior al-Qaeda leaders. Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, then-US President George W Bush signed off on an order which authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to capture and kill al-Qaeda operatives. For some, drones are the greatest weapon ever […]

Support the Office of Strategic Services Congressional Gold Medal Act

Urge your United States House of Representative to honor our World War II heroes of the OSS by passing a resolution to all the granting of the Congressional Gold Medal to veterans of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunners of the Central Intelligence Agency. On Nov. 4, 2015 Senators Roy Blunt [R-MO] and Mark Warner […]

CIA left explosive material on Loudoun school bus after training exercise

The CIA left “explosive training material” under the hood of a Loudoun County school bus after a training exercise last week, a bus that was used to ferry elementary and high school students to and from school on Monday and Tuesday with the material still sitting in the engine compartment, according to the CIA and […]