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WASHINGTON: The National Security Agency, which can go for ten years without a contract protest, currently faces three, slowing the agencys ability to issue new contracts.

We are sitting on three of them right now. Used to be you could go a decade without one, let alone sitting on three in one year,Charlie Stein, of the NSAs wonderfully named Maryland Procurement Office, told about 100 audience members at the INSA and AFCEA intelligence conference today.

For the companies involved, Stein did not sound terribly sympathetic and offered a fact that must elicit enormous envy from his colleagues in Defense Department acquisition. Ican say that we have not lost one yet, and we dont intend to.

So whats the cause of this sudden spate of protests, especially one involving an agency that normally works very closely and quietly with its contractors, often for a very long time?

Stein says they now have a junior workforce, one that isnt as adept at crossing every T and dotting every i. Combine that with fact that, as a result of the protests, their attorneys are tied up dealing with protests so they dont have time to make sure new deals are free of protestable issues.

Al Munson, first head of acquisition for the Director of National Intelligence, who appeared on the panel with Stein, notes in a recent paper for the Potomac Institute that bid protests were extremely rare, and success in causing a source selection decision to be overturned were even much rarer in the past. This has multiple effects on intelligence acquisition.

Munson writes that the government has reduced the periods within the competitive process wherein communication with potential competitors can occur and has reduced the quality of those communications. This has the effect of reducing the clarity and increasing the ambiguity in the bidders understanding of the governments needs, and therefore, in the responsiveness of the bids to those needs. Munson believes this can lead to an overly optimistic (read: unrealistic) cost proposal. And once a protest is lodged, a program can be delayed years while the issues are resolved.

We wont mention the Air Forces tanker fiasco, but you can read about it here.

Link:
Three Contract Protests Lodged Against NSA! - Breaking Defense

The ShadowBrokers, a group that for more than a year has been leaking documents they claim were taken from the National Security Agency, have resurfaced once again.

"Missing theshadowbrokers? If someone is paying then theshadowbrokers is playing," they wrote in a blog post sent Wednesday.

In the group's latest missive, the ShadowBrokers announced that they will now leak documents twice a month and will continue to double the cost to access the leaks each release. According to the blog post, written in the group's trademarkbroken English, "September dumps is being exploits."

Between the two, the systems held hostage by the ransom seeking malware totaled in the hundreds of thousands, including taking out several British hospitals, shipping and pharmaceutical giants and other major global companies.

The Brokers first emerged last summer and have tried various schemes to sell the NSA documents, which appear to be authentic but have not been confirmed by the government. Those documents includedtools that could circumvent cybersecurity hardware and breach Windows systems.

The group has tried auctioning the documents, selling them a la carte, crowdfunding a bulk release and, most recently, as a subscription leak service the Brokers have likened to a "wine of the month club."

The subscription service has generated skepticism in the cybersecurity community. The pricing system appears to be over the top the price doubles every release, leaving an upcoming October release costing more than $3.8 million, well above the market value of sophisticated hacking tools for products sent sight unseen.

There is little information about what files, if any, have actually been released to justify those prices. In their latest statement, the ShadowBrokers gave some clue, including a manual to a product they say was released in a prior leak UNITEDRAKE, described as a "fully extensible remote collection system designed for Windows targets."

Read the rest here:
ShadowBrokers accelerating NSA leaks to twice a month - The Hill

Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who served as both the director of the NSA and the CIA, said Monday that some of President Trumps rhetoric on North Korea could lead to great danger.

A very tough, but a very precise statement, Hayden told CNNs New Day, referring to the statementSecretary of Defense James MattisJames Norman MattisThis week: Harvey aid at top of long to-do list as Congress returns Week ahead in defense: Senators pick up work on defense bill | Briefings on North Korea, Afghan troop surge Chinese Ambassador: China will never allow chaos and war on the Korean Peninsula MORE made on Sunday afterNorth Korea saidthat it successfully tested a miniaturized hydrogen bomb that can be placed on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Which is a little bit different than some of the things the president has been allowing himself to say, Alisyn, which have been very tough, but very imprecise, and that could lead to great danger, Hayden told host Alisyn Camerota.

Secretary Mattis had very strong language, but it was about a North Korean threat, not a North Korean capability, Hayden explained.

In other words, Alisyn, I think he was trying to make a distinction between were willing to pre-empt an imminent threat from North Korea but were not willing, its not our policy at least not yet, to conduct a preventive war to prevent the North Koreans from acquiring that kind of capability.

Read the original post:
Former CIA, NSA head: Trump's tough N. Korea talk 'could lead to ... - The Hill

While condemning the leak of classified information, the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Committee today said that because a secret NSA document was posted online yesterday "we now have verified information" showing that Russian intelligence services were in fact behind last year's cyber-assault on the U.S. election.

"In any other circumstances this would be an earthquake," but because of "everything" going on in Washington it is a matter that has not received the attention it deserves, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, said at the start of a committee hearing. "This was Russia ... this was an international attempt to impact the elections of the United States of America."

Her comments come one day after the FBI arrested a 25-year-old government contractor, Reality Winner of Augusta, Georgia, for allegedly leaking the document to reporters at the online publication The Intercept.

The document, posted online just hours before the announcement of Winner's arrest, laid out in stark detail how Russian hackers allegedly "executed cyber espionage operations" against outside vendors dealing with voter-related information.

It's unclear exactly why Winner allegedly searched for secret documents related to the election, printed out a highly-classified NSA document and then mailed it to a media outlet. But court documents may offer a glimpse.

In late March, Winner allegedly used a Gmail account to contact The Intercept, and she "appeared to request transcripts of a podcast," according to court documents.

Little more than a week earlier, The Intercept hosted a podcast online looking at, among other things, the public outcry over Russia's alleged collusion with associates of President Donald Trump and the Kremlin's alleged interference in last year's presidential election.

Host Jeremy Scahill said "there is a tremendous amount of hysterics" and "a lot of premature conclusions being drawn around all of this Russia stuff," but "there's not a lot of hard evidence to back it up."

As a guest on the podcast, Intercept reporter Glenn Greenwald agreed, saying that while "it's very possible" Russia was behind election-related hacks last year, "we still haven't seen any evidence for it."

At the Senate hearing today, McCaskill said the NSA document allegedly leaked by Winner now offers such evidence, and she pressed the hearing's witness, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, to make sure his department takes appropriate steps to protect voting-related systems in the future.

Kelly said he couldn't confirm or deny any specific information "about what actually took place" last year, particularly because the intelligence behind it is so highly classified.

In January, the U.S. intelligence community issued a report calling Russia's alleged meddling in last year's presidential campaign "a significant escalation" of efforts "to undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order."

"We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election," the report said. "We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help [Donald] Trumps election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary [Hillary] Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him."

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied those conclusions and President Donald Trump and others in his administration have similarly questioned whether Russia was truly behind last year's hack of the Democratic National Committee and subsequent attempts to infiltrate election-related systems.

Speaking in Washington last month, however, the NSA's recently-departed deputy director wholly rejected such skepticism, insisting there is "no question it was the Russians."

"NSA had a huge role in making that determination," the former deputy director of the agency, Richard Ledgett, said. "There is no question that thats what it was. I cant lay out for you all of the reasons for that, because there's a lot of really sensitive sources that led to that, but it was definitely the Russians."

Ledgett said such conclusions are based on "a variety of different good sources of information."

"It's more than just looking at the code. It's more than just looking at the targets. It's more than looking at the tactics and the techniques and procedures," and U.S. agencies "have a really good ability to do attribution" thanks to the intelligence work of both the U.S. government and allies around the world, he said.

Ledgett, who stepped down from the NSA in April, was speaking at Georgetown Law Schools annual Cybersecurity Law Institute.

Read the original:
Leaked NSA document is proof of Russian election hacking, top ...

Uncle Sam's intelligence agencies have embarked on the next stage of their plan to retain spying powers over US citizens: getting Donald Trump onboard.

Knowing what we do about Donald's approach to policy issues, it seems unlikely that the American president is aware of what is going on. But somehow he has been persuaded to revive a civil liberties oversight body that was torn apart for criticizing a controversial spying program that requires reauthorization by Congress at the end of the year.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has been dead for over a year. After it concluded that several of the NSA's spying programs were unconstitutional back in 2014, the intelligence services set about shutting it down. And they succeeded.

In 2016, Congress passed legislation that formally prohibited the board from reviewing covert activity, and gave politicians budget control over the board, requiring it to report directly to legislators.

In response, most of the PCLOB's staff and board resigned. Between January and March that year, three board members quit and a fourth's term was not renewed. That left a single person Elisebeth Collins to sit as chair.

Collins' position was renewed until 2020 with the entry of the Trump Administration in order to keep the PCLOB in existence, but the board has not done a single piece of work since its former chair David Medine resigned in March 2016. With no quorum of board members present, and no executive director, the PCLOB has been in stasis for 18 months.

This month however and on the same day that the NSA started a PR campaign to retain mass spying laws under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) President Trump suddenly decided to nominate a new chair to the PCLOB. (The PCLOB has a few choice words [PDF] about Section 702.)

"Adam I Klein of the District of Columbia to be a Member and Chairman of the Privacy & Civil Liberties Oversight Board," said the announcement, buried at the bottom of a four-appointee announcement that was put out with the trash on Friday.

It then lists Klein's achievements: "Mr Klein is the Robert M Gates Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where his research centers on the intersection of national security policy and law. He previously served as a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court and Judge Brett M Kavanaugh of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. He has also worked on national security policy at the RAND Corporation..." and so on.

In the context of the PCLOB however, what Mr Klein is renowned for is his defense of Section 702 of the FISA Act.

He even wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal just last month that defended the most controversial aspect of the spying program: the ability of the FBI to search a vast database of information on US citizens that was compiled using Section 702 a law that explicitly notes it is only to be used for foreign intelligence targets and exempts US citizens.

Klein claims that, despite the law, "keeping officials from searching this data would make it more difficult to prevent homegrown terrorist attacks."

His choice as chair of the PCLOB goes against everything the body is supposed to represent, and is akin to Trump's choice of climate-change denier Scott Pruitt as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, or Rick Perry as head of the Department of Energy after he publicly vowed to eliminate the government agency.

The NSA and FBI also know exactly what they will be getting with Klein heading up the PCLOB: a civil liberties fig leaf to continue their spying of US citizens using legislation explicitly designed not to include US citizens.

The legislation in question has to be reauthorized by Congress before the end of the year, and has already become a major political wrangle in the corridors of power. Many lawmakers, tech companies and civil liberties groups have argued for specific changes to make to the law to remove its worst aspects.

With the revival of the defunct PCLOB and the proposed appointment of Klein as its chair, it is clear that the powers-that-be already have a strategy in place to retain their powers, and are following through on it.

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See the rest here:
NSA enters stage two of its spying revival plan: Getting Trump onboard - The Register