Archive for the ‘NSA’ Category

Full NSA Sullivan Interview: Kabul Evacuation Is Very Risky and Dangerous – The Global Herald – The Global Herald

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National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan talks about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, during an interview with Meet the Press. Subscribe to NBC News: http://nbcnews.to/SubscribeToNBC

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Full NSA Sullivan Interview: Kabul Evacuation Is Very Risky and Dangerous

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Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central and South Asia. Afghanistan is bordered by Pakistan to the east and south; Iran to the west; Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan to the north; and China to the northeast.

Occupying 652,000 square kilometers (252,000 sq mi), it is a mountainous country with plains in the north and southwest. Kabul is the capital and largest city. The population is around 32 million, composed mostly of ethnic Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks.

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Full NSA Sullivan Interview: Kabul Evacuation Is Very Risky and Dangerous - The Global Herald - The Global Herald

Rubio takes an interest in the right’s NSA conspiracy theory – MSNBC

It was in late June when Fox News' Tucker Carlson claimed on the air that the National Security Agency was "monitoring" his electronic communications, as part of a scheme to take his show "off the air." The host offered no proof, but several congressional Republicans rallied behind him -- with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) even asking Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calf.) to launch some kind of probe into the odd allegations.

Weeks later, the GOP's willingness to take the matter seriously hasn't gone away.

The top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee is calling on the director of national intelligence to investigate allegations that the federal government "unmasked" Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In a letter to Avril Haines, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said that recent media reports that "Mr. Carlson was unmasked by a government agency" have "only fueled the perception that unmasking is being used as a political hammer or to satisfy curiosity."

In his written request to the DNI, the Republican senator not only referenced the "perception" of political improprieties, Rubio also argued that the public is "attuned to the perception of widespread misconduct." His letter also referenced "public suspicion and distrust."

Or put another way, the Florida Republican -- the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the panel's former chairman -- isn't aware of any wrongdoing on the part of the intelligence community, but he is aware of "perceptions."

Of course, those perceptions may very well exist, though that doesn't make them true.

Let's circle back to our earlier coverage to review how we arrived at this point. NBC News reported last month that after Carlson raised the allegations, the NSA took the unusual step of issuing a written statement, explaining that the Fox News personality "has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air. NSA has a foreign intelligence mission. We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States."

NBC News' report added, "The conservative host has a history of making false or exaggerated claims."

It was against this backdrop that Axios moved the ball forward with a related report, adding that Carlson was "talking to U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin shortly before the Fox News host accused the National Security Agency of spying on him."

Axios added that U.S. officials "learned about Carlson's efforts to secure the Putin interview. Carlson learned that the government was aware of his outreach and that's the basis of his extraordinary accusation."

If Axios' sources were correct, it raised the possibility of a scenario in which the Fox News host may have been in communication with a Kremlin official who was under surveillance. Under such a scenario, the NSA wasn't monitoring Carlson's communications; it was monitoring the communications of the person Carlson was talking to.

If you connected with a member of Vladimir Putin's team, the NSA would probably be aware of that, too. It would not, however, be proof of an NSA plot to derail your professional career.

It also wouldn't warrant a congressional investigation or weird partisan conspiracy theories.

All of this was reminiscent of Donald Trump's insistence that U.S. intelligence agencies "spied on" his 2016 campaign. When pressed for proof, Republicans have pointed to instances in which members of Team Trump were in communication with their Russian allies.

But again, this wasn't because anyone was spying on the Trump campaign, it was because U.S. intelligence agencies were spying on Russians -- whom Team Trump was chatting with before taking office four years ago.

If the reporting is correct, and something similar happened to Carlson, it wouldn't be shocking in the slightest.

So why is Marco Rubio taking an interest in this weeks later? It's possible that the senator, given his powerful position on the Intelligence Committee, has uncovered relevant information that sparked new interest in the story.

And it's also possible that the ambitious Republican is playing a partisan political game, so that he can tell his party's base and conservative media outlets that he played along with their suspicions, indifferent to whether those ideas are rooted in fact.

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Rubio takes an interest in the right's NSA conspiracy theory - MSNBC

Tucker Carlson vs. the NSA | Cato at Liberty Blog – Cato Institute

  1. Tucker Carlson vs. the NSA | Cato at Liberty Blog  Cato Institute
  2. Tucker Carlson reignites NSA surveillance debate on the Right  Yahoo News
  3. The NSA Is Spying on Tucker Carlson  theTrumpet.com
  4. Tucker Carlson Reportedly 'Furious' Fox Not Backing Up His 'NSA Spied On Me' BS  NewsHounds
  5. House Republicans send letter to NSA demanding information on Tucker Carlson spying claims  Just The News
  6. View Full Coverage on Google News

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Tucker Carlson vs. the NSA | Cato at Liberty Blog - Cato Institute

Former NSA director: U.S. needs a new approach to ransomware response – Healthcare IT News

The United States, along with much of the world, finds itself battling two pandemics: the COVID-19 crisis, of course, but also the cyber pandemic that has also proliferated across the globe.

In the healthcare industry, some hospitals have been hobbled for weeks at a time and at least one patient has died because of the scourge of ransomware.

The cyberattacks have become so frequent and commonplace that it's worth asking whether ransomware, like many suspect is already happening with SARS-CoV-2, is already moving from pandemic to endemic status.

"Ransomware, I think, has become the greatest challenge for most organizations," said retired Admiral Michael Rogers, former director of the National Security Agency and the former commander of U.S. Cyber Command in a recent interview with Healthcare IT News.

"Healthcare [is] an incredibly attractive target in the middle of a pandemic," said Rogers, who will be speaking next month at HIMSS21 in Las Vegas. "And criminals are aware. That's one reason why you've seen a massive uptick, particularly focused on healthcare in the past 18 months from a ransomware activity perspective."

Indeed, since the early days of the pandemic not counting the vanishingly small window when the prospect of a hacker "ceasefire" was dangled the bad guys have been hard at work, targeting the World Health Organization and COVID-19 testing sites, academic research facilities and vaccine distribution supply chains.

Their targets have also included hospitals and health systems of all shapes and sizes. Meanwhile, the size of the ransom demands is climbing skyward.

"It's gotten worse," said Rogers, who served under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Rogers served at NSA and U.S. Cyber Command concurrently for four years before retiring in 2018.

"For a couple of reasons. Number one, the criminal segment has become much more aggressive," he said. "Why? There's a lot of money. There's a lot of money for criminal groups to be made. I may not want to pay the ransom, but I can't afford interruption or degradation of my services or operating ability to help in the middle of a pandemic. I've got to keep going."

Number two? "In the last three years since I left, nation states' risk calculus has become even more aggressive. They are willing to take even greater risks."

That's not just with ransomware. Recent headlines have shown just how far foreign cyber crooks have been willing and able to intrude upon U.S.-based information networks not just the DNC and the RNC, or Sony, but a wide array of federal agencies and private companies large and small.

Rogers points specifically to the SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange server exploits, which stunned even seasoned cybersecurity professionals in their sheer size, scope and brazenness.

Meanwhile, ransomware seizures such as the Colonial Pipeline hack have helped bring the threat into sharp focus.

Finally, the president and Congress are paying attention, and federal security agencies seem willing to give as good as they get.

"On the positive side, there is clearly a sense that we are not where we need to be,and that it's going in the wrong direction," said Rogers.

But he says he is frustrated that the cybersecurity problems are not only persisting, but worsening.

A big reason for that is the current state of incident prevention and response especially when it comes to interrelation of the public and private sectors "has failed to deliver for over a decade," said Rogers. "I only speak for myself. But my frustration is: Why do we keep doing the same things and expect a different result?"

Sure, there are valuable organizations such as H-ISAC, the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which specializes in "crowdsourced" cybersecurity, sharing threat intelligence and other best practices for protection and risk mitigation. And yes, the CISA, FBI, HHS and other agencies are good about getting out alerts and warnings to the healthcare stakeholders that need to hear them.

But too often, "the government will do its thing, the private sector will do its thing," said Rogers. "As we see things we think might be of interest to the other, as we have the time, and as we have the inclination, we'll share those insights.

"Everyone is so busy, quite frankly. Most organizations don't have time to think about it. They are just trying to defend their own systems, their own intellectual property, their own data."

To truly measure up against the scope of the cyber threatto healthcare and all industries, "I just think we've got to have a different model," he said.

"It's not about collaboration," Rogers explained. "To me, it's about integration. We've got the government and the private sector. We've got to team together 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

He acknowledged, "You can't do this at scale across every business within the private sector. But can't we start with a few sectors where the risks to our economy, to the safety and wellbeing of our citizens, to the security of our nation?Let's pick a few areas,and do some test cases, and see if a different model might produce a different result."

There are some "great examples out there where we have applied a government and private-sector model and achieved some amazing results," said Rogers.

For instance,he said, "We decided as a society that the potential loss of literally hundreds of people in an aviation accident represented such a risk that we needed to do something different," he said.

"So we created mechanisms: Every time there is an aviation accident, the federal government steps in. It partners with the airplane manufacturer, the airline that operated the aircraft, the union, et cetera. It pores over all the maintenance records. It pores over the production history of the aircraft. It looks at all the software and the hardware. It looks at how it was operated. It determines the cause of the crash.

"And then it goes a step further," he added. "It mandates that we're going to change maintenance. Sometimes we're going to change production. We're going to change the way we do software, we're going to change how the aircraft is operating.

"The net impact is we are flying more aircraftwith more people than we ever have, and yet aviation safety has actually been very strong. While we have aviation accidents, they tend not to be recurring patterns, the same cause over and over."

Compare that with cybersecurity, where we've been seeing the same techniques used by the bad guys "working over and over and over," he said.

"We have got to get to a point where the pain of one leads to the benefit of the many," said Rogers. "And yet what is happening now? The pain of the one is not shared. We don't learn from it. And so it is repeated over and over and over again. We have got to change that dynamic."

Admiral Michael S. Rogers will offer more insights at HIMSS21 as a participant in the keynote panel discussion, Healthcare Cybersecurity Resilience in the Face of Adversity. Its scheduled for Tuesday, August 10 from 8:30-9:30 a.m. in Venetian, Palazzo Ballroom.

Twitter:@MikeMiliardHITNEmail the writer:mike.miliard@himssmedia.comHealthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.

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Former NSA director: U.S. needs a new approach to ransomware response - Healthcare IT News

Home, But Not Free: NSA Whistleblower Reality Winner Adjusts to Her Release From Prison – The Texas Observer

By Taylor Barnes. Originally published on July 10, 2021. Republished with permission from The Intercept, an award-winning nonprofit news organization dedicated to holding the powerful accountable through fearless, adversarial journalism. Sign up for The Intercepts Newsletter.

In the latest phase of her record sentence for whistleblowing, former National Security Agency linguist Reality Winner is a short drive to the blazing hot summertime beaches on Texass Gulf coast. But she cant get near them. She cant even go into the yard of a neighbor who invited her to aid in his beekeeping project.

Convicted under the Espionage Act for having shared a classified document on threats to election security with the media, Winner has been released to home confinement but wears an unwieldy ankle bracelet. It beeps even if she strays too far within her familys yard.

Not wanting her to miss out, a high school friend showed up on a recent day with a kiddie swimming pool and some sand. Mom, Im going to the beach today, Winner said, her mother Billie Winner-Davis recalled. The pair filled the kids toy and Winner waded in.

Winners family and friends are thrilled to have her home after four years behind bars a stint that took miserable turns as her release date neared. Shecontracted COVID-19as part of a mass infection in her prison, filed asexual assault complaintagainst a guard, and wentthirsty and cold when her facility lost heat and water in February during Texass deadly winter storm.

Despite their elation that she is out of prison, though, Winners family and friends say she is far from free. Every day is still marked by intrusions, like the app carceral authorities require her to put on her phone to monitor her and needing prior approval to go to Walmart with her mother for errands. Winner is projected to be transferred from home confinement to supervised release in November.

Thats why they are continuing theiryear-and-a-half-long campaignfor a presidentialpardon or clemency, saying the whistleblower is being gagged from telling her own story.

I really want the public to know that theyre not seeing Reality Winner, theyre not hearing from Reality Winner, because she is under some serious restrictions, Winner-Davis said.

Winner-Davis added that Reality, who is under a gag order, is also banned from using social media, a condition her attorney, Alison Grinter, said is normal and up to the discretion of halfway house authorities.

Grinter,speakingrecently on Democracy Now, said a pardon for Winner is both something she and her country deserve.

Reality released a document that gave us information that we needed to know at a time that we absolutely needed to know it, Grinter said. And she was in prison not because the information was a danger or put anyone in danger. She was in prison to salve the insecurities of one man who was concerned about the validity of his election win.

*

Winner is currentlyserving thelongestprison sentence of its kind under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law used in recent years to send journalists sources to prison, even as comparable defendants have simply gotten probation for charges of mishandling classified information.

The government itself acknowledges that Winners intent was to send the document she leaked to journalists and therefore warn the American public, rather than use it for personal gain. The NSA report detailed phishing attacks by Russian military intelligence against local U.S. election officials and was published in a June 2017articleby The Intercept. (The Press Freedom Defense Fund which is part of The Intercepts parent company, First Look Institute supportedWinners legal defense.)

Released from a Fort Worth, Texas, federal prison one day shy of the four-year anniversary of her June 3 arrest, Winners path to her parents remote southern Texas home was a bumpy one. The journey began with a 23-day quarantine with five other women in a hospital patient-sized room. After that, her family picked her up for a long drive down through Texas in which they had a matter of hours to deliver her to a halfway house, where she stayed for a week before being released toher rural childhood home. There, paper labels with Arabic vocabulary words are still taped to household items early remnants from the series of events that would lead her to prison when, as a teenager eager to learn foreign languages, she signed up for the military.

Taking advantage of the window of time they had with her as they drove her to the halfway house, her family and close friends planned a series of surprises. Winner met her infant niece, whom the whistleblower had only seen on video chats and Shutterfly-printed postcards, due to visitation bans at prisonamid the pandemic.

While sitting in her parents car and sorting through her belongings, she saw the blond hair of her sister, Brittany Winner, in the distance in a park and tried to jump out of the moving vehicle. She dropped everything on her lap and just ran, her mother said. She ran to Brittany and the baby.

Her sister said the whistleblower was trembling, still unnerved by a guard who had told her that morning that she would not be released. Just the look in her eyes, she almost looked, like, dead, so traumatized and not really believing that everything was happening, Brittany Winner said. And, at some point, I was talking to her, she just reached up in the middle of my sentence to touch my face, and she said, Youre real, right?

At the southernmost point in their trip toward home, two other loved ones were waiting for her: Wendy Collins, a family friend from Philadelphia who spearheads a social media campaign calling for her pardon, and Collinss partner.

They ate at a Thai restaurant as they counted down the minutes to her report time to the halfway house. Collins hugged the whistleblower for the first time since their friendship and Collinss tireless advocacy began.

Collins said, I flew for the hug.

*

At her familysquiet home, Winner schedules her days in an orderly way, similar to her life before the arrest time slots for online yoga courses, cycling exercise routines, and a new part-time job as a researcher for a documentary filmmaker. She relishes spending time with her family dog, Domino, and cat, Fiona, since Winner lost ownership of her own pets, a dog named Mickey and cat named Mina, in the chaos after her arrest. In her down time, she sorts through books supporters have sent her and boxes of belongings from her Augusta, Georgia, home, which was raided by a fleet of armed federal agents whoseinterrogationof Winner would later be characterized by the government as a voluntary interview one in which she wasnever read her Miranda rights.

When the heat breaks in the evenings, her mother says Reality prefers to not watch TV, opting instead to breathe in fresh air on the back patio.

Looking toward the future, when she can speak publicly and take more control over her life, her sister said she expects the whistleblower to advocate for incarcerated people. Shes seen people from all walks of life just be completely taken advantage of by the system, especially people of color, Brittany Winner said. And that is something that she just cant tune out. She cant just live her quiet life.

When shes free to go to the water the Gulf of Mexico, not the kiddie pool out back the whistleblower hopes to go the Texas shoreline to plant mangroves, something Winner, long an environmental advocate, told her sister she wants to do in order to heal coastal ecosystems.

Grateful for even this incomplete freedom, the sisters send each other a near-constant flurry of updates. Not a day goes by when she and her sister dont exchange50 or more text messages and phone calls, including baby photos and videos of Reality practicing yoga with her ankle bracelet in her parents garage. I feel lucky to have my sister back, Brittany Winner said. And one of the things that I was scared of was that she was going to be changed you know, like damaged, like she wasnt going to be the same person because of four years in prison.

How can that not mess you up? But despite the trauma, I feel like shes the same,she said. At least with me. Shes the same person.

By Taylor Barnes. Originally published on July 10, 2021. Republished with permission from The Intercept, an award-winning nonprofit news organization dedicated to holding the powerful accountable through fearless, adversarial journalism. Sign up for The Intercepts Newsletter.

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Home, But Not Free: NSA Whistleblower Reality Winner Adjusts to Her Release From Prison - The Texas Observer