"Top Canadian Intelligence Official Charged With Leaking Secrets"

NYT:

Mr. Ortis joined the national police force’s intelligence division at a time of great upheaval, Mr. Wark said. After performing only limited intelligence work for decades, the national force tried to greatly expand its capabilities after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But a high-profile inquiry in 2006 found that the police erroneously concluded that a Canadian computer engineer was an Al Qaeda member and had passed along that false information to the United States. The engineer, Maher Arar, was arrested while changing planes in the United States and deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured.

*Previously: "Netflix apologizes for using actors to meet press at Canadian launch"

"TSA bans Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge 'thermal detonator' Coke bottles from checked and carry-on luggage"

In a response to an online inquiry, the official AskTSA Twitter account replied that the Galaxy’s Edge Coke bottles were prohibited on flights because 'replica and inert explosives aren't allowed in either carry-on or checked bags.'"

*Buy Galaxy's Edge goods at ebay.

Time is a flat circle, Al-Qaeda edition

pic.twitter.com/ctc3FARidQ

— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) August 17, 2019

The Wikipedia entry starts:

Al-Qaeda, translation: "The Base", "The Foundation" or "The Database"

"The Strange Case of the C.I.A. Interpreter and the 9/11 Trial"

Carol Rosenberg for the NYT:

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — On a Monday morning four and a half years ago, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the men accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks, made a stunning announcement for all in the military courtroom to hear: He knew the new Arabic translator sitting beside him from the secret C.I.A. prison network where the United States tortured its detainees.

...

By blurting out the man’s name in open court, Mr. bin al-Shibh had undercut the government’s efforts to keep under wraps the identities of most people who worked at the black sites. The interpreter’s name, initially included in the court transcript for that day, was later redacted. Defense lawyers were instructed — in secret — that what happened was a security breach and that they were forbidden, by a national security directive, to publicly acknowledge what had happened in open court.

Never mind that the interpreter’s name was called out publicly at the Guantánamo air terminal at the end of that week as lawyers and journalists checked in for their flight back to the United States.

...

The episode has elements of the absurd. But it offers a graphic illustration of why the effort to try, convict and execute the five men accused of conspiring in the hijackings that killed 2,976 people has been mired in pretrial hearings since 2012.

...

When a defense lawyer . . . argued for open-court testimony by the interpreter, a court security officer on two occasions triggered a white noise button, preventing journalists and other members of the public from hearing what she had said.

At the Guantánamo court, the audio emerges from the court to a spectators’ gallery on a 40-second delay, time enough for a security officer to block spectators from hearing classified information — something that did not happen the day Mr. bin al-Shibh named his interpreter in open court.

But last month, the public heard [the defense attorney]’s words turn into white noise midsentence.

*Previously: "A wildfire ignited mines laid by the Cuban military decades ago and jumped the fence line at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay on Thursday, threatening buildings and forcing evacuations of six neighborhoods"

"The FBI translator who went rogue and married an ISIS terrorist"

"Within weeks of marrying Cuspert, Greene, 38, seemed to realize she had made a terrible mistake."

"Adjusted for inflation, American spending to reconstruct Afghanistan now exceeds the total expended to rebuild all of Western Europe under the Marshall Plan"

"Though the United States has spent $8.5 billion to battle narcotics in Afghanistan, opium production there has reached an all-time high."

"How ISIS Guides World’s Terror Plots From Afar"

NYT:

When he used his laptop, he was told to contact the handler via Pidgin, another encrypted tool. He was told to create an account with Tutanota, a secure email service. And the handler taught Mr. Yazdani how to use the Tails operating system, which is contained on a USB stick and allows a user to boot up a computer from the external device and use it without leaving a trace on the hard drive.

...

“OK, brother, now pay attention,” one of the messages begins, instructing the then-23-year-old to head to the suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, where he would find the automatic weapons in a bag left in a locked car parked near a sandwich shop. “Search among the cars that are parked there near the big road and look for a Renault Mégane,” the message said. “Look at the front right tire — you’ll find the keys placed on top.”

The handler then instructed him to store the weapons in another car in a parking garage 10 miles away, a precaution in case his apartment was searched.

"The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda program in Iraq"

TDB:

The third and most sensitive program described by Wells was the production of fake al Qaeda propaganda films. He told the Bureau how the videos were made. He was given precise instructions: “We need to make this style of video and we’ve got to use al Qaeda’s footage,” he was told. “We need it to be 10 minutes long, and it needs to be in this file format, and we need to encode it in this manner.”

US marines would take the CDs on patrol and drop them in the chaos when they raided targets. Wells said: “If they’re raiding a house and they’re going to make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they’d just drop an odd CD there.”

The CDs were set up to use Real Player, a popular media streaming application which connects to the internet to run. Wells explained how the team embedded a code into the CDs which linked to a Google Analytics account, giving a list of IP addresses where the CDs had been played.

The tracking account had a very restricted circulation list, according to Wells: the data went to him, a senior member of the Bell Pottinger management team, and one of the U.S. military commanders.

Wells explained their intelligence value. “If one is looked at in the middle of Baghdad…you know there’s a hit there," he said. "If one, 48 hours or a week later shows up in another part of the world, then that’s the more interesting one, and that’s what they’re looking for more, because that gives you a trail.”

...

The awarding of such a large contract to a British company created resentment among the American communications firms jostling for Iraq work, according to a former employee of one of Bell Pottinger’s rivals.

“Nobody could work out how a British company could get hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. funding when there were equally capable U.S. companies who could have done it,”

Link roundup

1. TA:

The sand that we use to make buildings is finite just like any other resource, there is only so much of it. Now we are churning through it at an alarming rate, 40 billion tons per year. The sand of deserts is no good for construction, only certain sand will do, mainly granite. The sand that is already concrete can never be destroyed and reconstituted, its chemical reactions are permanent. A time will come in the not too distant future where no more concrete as we currently know it will be able to be used to build the structures in which we live. Illegal trade in construction sand has killed as many people as the cocaine wars in South America.

2. Joseph Kahn (best director):

So @mtv just told me I can't get any moonmen statues I won because they ran out this year. Oh well. I should have waited in line.

3. Arabic-speaking street artists hired to decorate sets for the TV series Homeland posted anti-Homeland graffiti.

Link roundup

1. TC:

I don’t understand why in the United States the only thing that is really noncompetitive is sports. In Europe, the only thing that is really competitive is sports. In Italy, soccer you are the first division, second division, you are promoted or demoted, according to performance. You don’t buy your way into the NFL or the Major League, et cetera.
Here, you buy the franchise, and once you’re in, no matter how incompetent you are, you stay there, which is completely un‑American.

2. TNY:

Breaking with a pattern of quietly transferring predator priests, the Vatican under Benedict and Bertone began removing significant numbers of them from the priesthood—defrocking some three hundred and eighty-four priests in 2011 and 2012, the last years of Benedict’s papacy.
...
VatiLeaks was partly the result of widespread dissatisfaction with Bertone’s management of the Vatican. Both he and the Vatican insist that there were sound legal reasons for not granting regulators access to the I.O.R.’s records—not least, the defense of Vatican sovereignty. It took two years for the I.O.R. to reach substantial compliance with international standards of transparency, and it has quietly closed around forty-six hundred accounts.

3. "I created a fake business and bought it an amazing online reputation"

For $5, I could get 200 Facebook fans, or 6,000 Twitter followers, or I could get @SMExpertsBiz to tweet about the truck to the account’s 26,000 Twitter fans. A Lincoln could get me a Facebook review, a Google review, an Amazon review, or, less easily, a Yelp review.

4. Designing Lara Croft Go:

“I didn't replay those old games because I feel the best version of the first Tomb Raider is in my heart,” says Routon. Maybe that's cheesy, but so often if you go back and look at a game you loved so much that's twenty years old, and you play it....it sucks. I didn't want to have that feeling, you know? I just didn't even want to check. So I keep the version I have in my memory, and tried to design a game around that.”

There were other influences too, of course. The Lara Croft Go team took art design cues from Eric Chahi’s seminal adventure game Another World, as well as the Tintin adventure comics created by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. But Routon says the team returned again and again to the idea of trying to recreate how it felt to play those classic Tomb Raider games.

5. Pancake machine:

I had the sublime pleasure of being served a continental breakfast at a Best Western that included pancakes produced by this miracle machine. It had instructions pinned on the wall above it:

1) Place your plate on the right.

2) Press the OK button.

Ugly Shirt

The ugly shirt from William Gibson's outstanding Zero History is real:

In their malware demonstration, the researchers used a distinctive image to signal to their software that the scanner should replace a certain person’s image with an innocuous one.

All the edits made to the Iraq War Wikipedia entry

12-volume set of the edits made to the Wikipedia entry for the Iraq War. Via these sites.

Best sentence I've read about anticipating terrorist attacks

"Most targets are 'vulnerable' in that it is not very difficult to damage them, but invulnerable in that they can be rebuilt in fairly short order and at tolerable expense."

Click through to read more by John Mueller (pdf). Via.

5 sights the U.S. government won't let Google show you

Interesting list here.

Awesome U.S. Military Patches Part 4

I thought it'd be fun to post some military patches, and ended up finding a treasure trove of good ones. I'll be posting more soon.












Awesome U.S Military Patches Part 1

Awesome U.S Military Patches Part 2

Awesome U.S. Military Patches Part 3


These patches (and many, many more) are all on sale at McGrogan's.