Electoral battles

Foreigners Want Hillary Clinton for President: A Good Reason to Vote for Donald Trump

Is Hillary Clinton the world’s candidate for president? One headline even read: “The World is Pulling for Clinton.”

Part of that reaction reflects Donald Trump’s ugly populism. America is not unique in that respect, however. Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is more like “Trump” than Trump himself. In Europe a gaggle of populist parties are on the march, some having entered government and others threatening to win upcoming elections. A French President Marine le Pen likely would be more extreme than Trump.

Of greater concern is the fact that Trump cannot be counted on to continue Washington’s bipartisan policy of subsidizing the rest of the world. Much of the Third World expects U.S. financial assistance. Although he has not talked about “foreign aid,” he would be unlikely to continue funding countries which he views as stealing American jobs and flooding the U.S. with illegal immigrants.

Public security

Twelve terror plots to UK — most by ISIS — stopped by MI5 and MI6

M15 confirmed the UK has been targeted a dozen times since June 2013 by warped terrorists — including ISIS militants — but police and intelligence services stopped them.

Andrew Parker, director general of the MI5 domestic intelligence agency, said: "Today the most visible threat is from terrorism and in particular that posed by Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant — ISIL — or Daesh in Syria.

"Together with MI6 (the foreign intelligence service), GCHQ (the security agency), and the police, MI5 has disrupted 12 plots in the UK since June 2013."

National Crime Agency and Met Police bosses say they have seen a rise in deactivated guns being reactivated in Eastern Europe and coming into Britain by sea, air and even by post.

Human smuggling

International Human Smuggling Ring Dismantled in Peru and Chile

A multi-country operation has dismantled a human smuggling ring described as the largest criminal organization bringing Dominican migrants to Chile, as those fleeing physical and economic insecurity continue to seek the "Chilean Dream" in a country known for low crime rates and economic stability.

Operation "Desert," a multilateral undertaking involving the governments of the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile, launched simultaneous operations on October 28 in Chile and three Peruvian municipalities, El Mercurio reported.

The operations resulted in the capture of four of the network's leaders, including Soledad Maquera, who is believed to be a top figure in the smuggling ring. So far nine of the network's members -- eight Peruvians and one Colombian -- have been identified. The process of extraditing four of them to Chile has begun, reported El Mercurio.

Cybersecurity

Hackers say they’re revealing more from trove of NSA data

A group calling itself “Shadow Brokers” says it has released another gem from its trove of high-level hacking tools stolen from the U.S.’s National Security Agency, potentially offering added insight into how America’s spies operate online.

The leak discloses NSA-style code names — including “Jackladder” and “Dewdrop”— and carries internet protocol information about scores of organizations, many based in Japan, China and South Korea, according to several experts who have examined the data.

Matthew Hickey, co-founder of U.K.-based cyber security consultancy Hacker House, said it was plausible that the servers would have seen use as staging posts to help obfuscate the origin of electronic eavesdropping operations. More worrying for the NSA, the leak backs Shadow Brokers’ claims to have stolen an as-yet undisclosed set of electronic lock picks from the agency.

Military

Military chiefs enjoy millions in bonuses while UK troops endure brutal pay freeze

Ministry of Defence (MoD) bosses have raked in more than £130 million in bonuses since 2011 while the average British soldier has faced wage freezes and forced mass redundancies.

Some bureaucrats have been given bonuses of up to £50,000 ($61,000) on top of their salaries during that period, according to the Daily Mail. 

Basic wages are so high for some senior civil servants that one earned £220,000 before receiving any performance-based add-ons.

Electoral battles

Backed by Military-Industrial Complex and Neocons, Clinton Goes Nuclear on Trump

The Democratic hopeful has released a new ad that warns of the possible nuclear consequences of a Trump presidency. It’s a curious choice, given Clinton’s own standing with prominent neoconservatives.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson released a campaign ad that featured a 3-year-old girl casually picking flowers. Played by Monique Luiz, the “daisy girl” warned of a nuclear devastation if Republican rival Barry Goldwater were to win the election. Fifty-two years later, Luiz has now appeared in ad for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Environmental security

This week in pollution: Coal ash is radioactive and will be for more than 1,000 years

Arsenic? Check. Lead? Yep. Mercury. Sadly, yes. Selenium, boron, Chromium 6: Yes, yes and yes.

Now add radioactivity to the long list of coal ash’s environmental and health concerns.

Radioactivity in coal ash has been found to contain seven to 10 times the levels present in the original hunk of coal. That finding is problematic not only for surface and groundwater, said Nancy Lauer of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, but also for the air — and the people breathing it.

For the past two days, Duke University has been hosting its annual Environmental Health Scholars forum at the 21c Museum Hotel in downtown Durham. It’s been fascinating but rather depressing. (Next year, may we suggest tins of Zoloft in a swag bag?)

Communication security

Obama Knew About Clinton's Server; Lied To American People

Hillary Clinton and her close cohorts are not the only ones whose corruption and lies have been revealed by the Podesta e-mails published by WikiLeaks. The e-mails also document that — his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding — President Obama lied to the American people when he claimed that he had been unaware of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private, unsecured e-mail server which she used to conduct official State business, including both sending and receiving classified information.

In a pre-recorded interview aired on CBS on March 8, 2015, the president said he had learned of Clinton’s server “through news reports” and that he learned of it “the same time everybody else” did. Of course, that was not true, since he had exchanged e-mails with Clinton while she was secretary of state and the e-mail address would clearly have been her private address instead of the state.gov address she should have been using.

Bay of Pigs invasion history

CIA Releases Controversial Bay of Pigs History

The CIA today released the long-contested Volume V of its official history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which it had successfully concealed until now by claiming that it was a “draft” and could be withheld from the public under the FOIA’s "deliberative process" privilege. The National Security Archive fought the agency for years in court to release the historically significant volume, only to have the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2014 uphold the CIA’s overly-broad interpretation of the "deliberative process" privilege. Special credit for today’s release goes to the champions of the 2016 FOIA amendments, which set a 25-year sunset for the exemption:  Senators John Cornyn, Patrick Leahy, and Chuck Grassley, and Representatives Jason Chaffetz, Elijah Cummings, and Darrell Issa.

Chief CIA Historian David Robarge states in the cover letter announcing the document’s release that the agency is “releasing this draft volume today because recent 2016 changes in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires us to release some drafts that are responsive to FOIA requests if they are more than 25 years old.” This improvement – codified by the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 – came directly from the National Security Archive’s years of litigation.

Long life of laptops

Clinton, Comey and the E-mail Scandal: Is There a Rebellion at the FBI?

Washington D.C. attorney Joe DiGenova said on The David Webb Show on SiriusXM Friday night that despite the FBI agreeing to destroy the laptops of Clinton aide Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson as part of immunity deals made during the initial investigation of Clinton’s email server, agents involved in the case refused to destroy the laptops.

“According to the agreement reached with the attorneys who handed over their laptops, the laptops were to be destroyed per the agreement after the testimony was given — the interviews were given — by the attorneys. The bureau and the department agreed to that,” DiGenova said. “However the laptops contrary to published reports were not destroyed and the reason is the agents who are tasked with destroying them refused to do so. And by the way the laptops are at the FBI for inspection by Congress or federal courts.”

DiGenova said the laptops have already been subpoenaed and the FBI is waiting for Congress to ask for them.

Criminal investigation

Abedin told FBI she didn't know emails were on laptop

Long time Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has told the FBI she was not aware any of her emails were on the laptop investigators seized as part of their investigation into Abedin's estranged husband, Anthony Weiner.

The FBI engaged in a back and forth over the weekend with Abedin or her attorney, when Abedin explained the situation. 

"She says she didn't know they were there," a source familiar with the investigation said. 

After obtaining a warrant to examine the data over the weekend, the FBI is now using a software program that will filter out any emails that investigators had not seen before. Those will be kept in a separate file and will be examined by FBI agents to see if they contain classified material or information relevant to the Clinton probe.

Criminal investigation

The Clintons are a ‘crime family’: Ex-FBI big

A high-ranking FBI official talked of La Cosa Clinton Sunday — as he placed the Democratic political family in the same category as the Gambinos, Colombos and Lucheses.

“The Clintons, that’s a crime family,” declared former New York FBI chief James Kallstrom in a radio interview.

“It’s like organized crime, basically. The Clinton Foundation is a cesspool.”

He echoed many of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s talking points as he described Clintons as dishonest, greedy and scheming, during the interview with supermarket billionaire John Catsimatidis on AM970.

“It’s just outrageous how Hillary Clinton sold her office for money,” said Kallstrom who has long been a critic of the Clintons and President Obama.

“And she’s a pathological liar, and she’s always been a liar. And God forbid if we put someone like that in the White House.”

Whistleblowing

WHEN CIA AND NSA WORKERS BLOW THE WHISTLE, CONGRESS PLAYS DEAF

DO THE COMMITTEES that oversee the vast U.S. spying apparatus take intelligence community whistleblowers seriously? Do they earnestly investigate reports of waste, fraud, abuse, professional negligence, or crimes against the Constitution reported by employees or contractors working for agencies like the CIA or NSA? For the last 20 years, the answer has been a resounding “no.”

My own experience in 1995-96 is illustrative. Over a two-year period working with my wife, Robin (who was a CIA detailee to a Senate committee at the time), we discovered that, contrary to the public statements by then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell and other senior George H. W. Bush administration officials (including CIA Director John Deutch), American troops had in fact been exposed to chemical agents during and after the 1991 war with Saddam Hussein. While the Senate Banking Committee under then-Chairman Don Riegle, D-Mich., was trying to uncover the truth of this, officials at the Pentagon and CIA were working to bury it.

Spy story

Stalin's last American spy: new book tells the strange tale of Noel Field

And who was Noel Field? He was a Boston quaker, born in 1904, a brilliant mind who completed Harvard in two years and joined the state department. He was also a devout communist who died in exile in Hungary, far from Washington DC. As the title of Kati Marton’s remarkable new book has it, he was a True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy.

On a glorious October morning in New York, in a cafe on West 76th, Marton and I discuss that new book, her ninth. It mines a rich seam: spies and spying, central Europe between the wars and after, the devastating effects of totalitarianism, fanaticism and betrayal.

“I have a fascination with espionage that goes back to my earliest childhood,” she says. “I think I first heard the word ‘spy’, the Hungarian word for it, when I was six years old when my parents were falsely accused of being spies – for being good journalists really, the last independent journalists in Budapest in the 1950s. 

Information security

Hillary Clinton White House a National Security Risk

When people have secrets, they can be manipulated. Intimidated. Extorted. Blackmailed.

The more we learn about Hillary Clinton, her emails, and the Clinton Foundation, the more we realize she is hiding a lot.

With the recent Anthony Weiner revelation that has encouraged the FBI to reexamine the Clinton email scandal, we must realize that the very fact that Hillary Clinton has so much to hide makes her a national security risk should she attain a new position of power. . . especially if she becomes President of the United States.  Never mind whether or not she can be bought - it turns out she can be blackmailed.

Hillary Clinton couldn’t even pass a basic background check if she wanted to be a janitor in a government building, yet we have voters willing to make the most crooked, corrupt and untrustworthy politician in this country’s history a return resident to the White House.  For the intelligence community, the fact that she has so much to hide, and that it can be used to intimidate the United States and blackmail her, creates an intelligence nightmare.

Terror threat

Children radicalised by parents are taken into care amid ISIS national security fears

Mark Rowley, assistant commissioner for specialist operations at the Metropolitan police and head of national counterterrorism policing says the moves show the scale of the threat of homegrown Islamic extremism.

In an interview assistant commissioner Rowley said it represents an unprecedented problem and that this is the first time national security has become an issue for family courts.

He told the Sunday Times: "The most extreme cases that end up ... with children being made wards of courts or care proceedings is real tricky stuff because we've never had to deal with national security issues before in a family court ... We had never done [a case] before 2015 but ... the fact that it's [now] into 40 or 50 cases is illustrative of the scale of the problem.

Environmental security

300 million children breathe extremely toxic air, 600k die annually – UNICEF

One in seven of the world’s children breathe extremely polluted air, which is six and more times above the levels allowed by international guidelines, according to a new UN Children’s Fund report.

UNICEF has released a new report, indicating that air pollution is one of the major factors in infant deaths worldwide. According to the fund, of every seven children on the planet inhales daily six times more toxins, than is allowed by international regulations and standards.

Navy

‘Undersea supremacy’: US commissions $2.7bn nuclear submarine ‘Illinois’

The US has officially welcomed its latest Virginia class nuclear submarine to the fleet, which the Navy believes has the capabilities required to maintain the US “undersea supremacy” in the 21st century.

The Navy called the ‘USS Illinois’ the “next-generation attack submarine” when the ship was commissioned Saturday in Groton, Connecticut.

The $2.7 billion black behemoth is the 13th ship in the Virginia class of attack submarines to be included in the US fleet of just over 70 subs stationed around the globe. The vessel weighs nearly 8,000 tons and is slightly longer than a football field at 114.9 meters (377ft) in length. It has a 10.3 meters diameter and accommodates a crew of over 130.

Communication security

Hillary's emails matter: A retired CIA officer explains why

Where all this goes from here remains unclear. That said, in the interest of helping a scandal-weary electorate put these new developments in context, shall we review a few things?

I have worked in national security my entire life. Most of that has been in the intelligence community surrounded by classified information. For twenty years, I worked undercover in the Central Intelligence Agency, recruiting sources, producing intelligence and running operations. I have a pretty concrete understanding of how classified information is handled and how government communications systems work.

Nobody uses a private email server for official business. Period. Full stop.

The entire notion is, to borrow a phrase from a Clinton campaign official, “insane.” That anyone would presume to be allowed to do so is mind-boggling. That government officials allowed Hillary Clinton to do so is nauseating. 

Classified and unclassified information do not mix. They don’t travel in the same streams through the same pipes. They move in clearly well defined channels so that never the twain shall meet. Mixing them together is unheard of and a major criminal offense.

If you end up with classified information in an unclassified channel, you have done something very wrong and very serious.

Accidentally removing a single classified message from controlled spaces, without any evidence of intent or exposure to hostile forces, can get you fired and cost you your clearance. Repeated instances will land you in prison.

Every hostile intelligence agency on the planet targets senior American officials for collection. The Secretary of State tops the list. Almost anything the Secretary of State had to say about her official duties, her schedule, her mood, her plans for the weekend, would be prized information to adversaries.

Criminal investigation

FBI Obtains Warrant for Newly Discovered Emails in Clinton Probe — as Reid Accuses Comey of Hatch Act Violation

The FBI obtained a warrant to search emails related to the probe of Hillary Clinton's private server that were discovered on ex-congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop, law enforcement officials confirmed Sunday.

The warrant came two days after FBI Director James Comey revealedthe existence of the emails, which law enforcement sources said were linked to Weiner's estranged wife, top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The sources said Abedin used the same laptop to send thousands of emails to Clinton.

The FBI already had a warrant to search Weiner's laptop, but that only applied to evidence of his allegedly illicit communications with an underage girl.

Communication security

Emails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

The presidential campaign was rocked on Friday after federal law enforcement officials said that emails pertinent to the closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server were discovered on a computer belonging to Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of a top Clinton aide.

In a letter to Congress, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said the emails had surfaced in an unrelated case, which law enforcement officials said was an F.B.I. investigation into illicit text messages from Mr. Weiner to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, is married to Huma Abedin, the top aide.

Immigration security

Kremlin In Turmoil After Clinton Foundation CEO Requests “Urgent And Immediate” Asylum

An extraordinary Security Council (SC) report circulating in the Kremlin today says this morning President Putin was “officially presented” with a Main Directorate for Migration Affairs (GUVM) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) “file for review” relating to a request for “urgent and immediate” political asylum requested by an American citizen named Eric Braverman—who was the former CEO of the Clinton Foundation, and is known as the man who can expose “The Real Hillary Clinton Scandal”. [Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]

Requests for the granting of political asylum in the Federation, this report explains, is regulated by a separate government resolution rather than the Law on Refugees and is issued to those seeking “asylum or protection from persecution or a real threat of becoming a victim of persecution” in their home country for “social-political activities or convictions that do not contradict the democratic principles recognized by the international community and norms of international law”—and though Russia has the world’s highest number of asylum applications, political asylum requests are very rarely granted.

In his apparent knowing of these facts, however, this report continues, Eric Braverman, yesterday (23 October), arrived at the Consulate of Russia in New York City and presented his “urgent and immediate” request for asylum on a visa application—as is “protocol/custom” because the Federation does not accept mail or electronic visa applications from residents of the continental United States.

Electoral battles

Will Hillary sack her top aide to save herself? Huma in hiding as she pleads ignorance about emails on Weiner's laptop and faces jail if it's proved she lied. And new poll puts Trump a POINT behind




Questions are mounting about Huma Abedin's future in Hillary Clinton's campaign after FBI director James Comey announced the agency is investigating potentially classified emails on her disgraced husband Anthony Weiner’s laptop.

Abedin is in hiding at her Manhattan apartment while her boss continues to campaign – as a new ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll, taken after the revelation, shows her campaign in crisis with Trump just one point behind Clinton, with 45 percent support to her 46 percent.

Last week, Clinton was up 12 points, meaning that she lost a double-digit lead in a week's time.

A third of the likely voters polled said they were less likely to cast a vote for Clinton because of this additional email probe.

Clinton’s closest aide has reportedly pleaded ignorance about how the emails ended up on her husband’s laptop – and were subsequently found by FBI agents after DailyMail.com exposed him sexting a 15-year-old girl.

And even worse for her situation, Abedin swore under oath that she had handed over all of her devices that could hold emails relevant to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. If she’s found to have lied she could face up to five years in jail.

Middle East

Russia, US and Turkey May Join Together in Operation to Retake Raqqa

Even before the US-supported coalition led by Iraqi forces set foot in Iraqi Mosul, the plans had been announced to retake Raqqa, the de facto capital of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) caliphate, from the extremist group.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on October 27 that Turkey-backed opposition fighters inside Syria would eventually reach Raqqa after securing the towns of al-Bab and Manbij. According to him, he had discussed the issue with US President Barack Obama. Mr. Erdogan wants the operation to take place without involvement of Syrian Kurdish forces. Turkey regards the Syrian Kurdish fighters, known collectively as the YPG (The People's Protection Units), as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the Kurdish rebel group that has sought autonomy from Turkey. The Turkish government believes the group is a terrorist organization. The US has supported the YPG as the best ground fighting force against IS.

Navy

Admiral: Attacks Like Those on USS Mason Will Become More Common

The Navy should prepare for a future operating environment where anti-ship weapons propagate globally and attacks such as the recent ones against guided-missile destroyer USS Mason (DDG-87) are more commonplace, one the service’s top budget officials said.

Vice Adm. Joseph Mulloy, deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources, said at the Naval Submarine League’s annual conference Wednesday that the service is not only focused on the current threats posed by potential adversaries such as Russia, Iran and North Korea, but also potential threats down the road if these countries sell their weapons to third-world countries and non-state actors.

“USS Mason down there off the coast of Yemen – we can’t prove anything right now, but I guarantee that Yemen by itself is not going to produce a Silkworm missile, a bunch of different radars – it just isn’t going to happen in a third-world country,” Mulloy said.

Terror threat

Does west fail to prevent lone-wolf attacks?

Islamic State’s lone wolf terrorism in west is increasingly becoming trendy. After series of losses in its overall operational capabilities in the central and franchise capture areas, the Islamic State terrorist outfit has encouraged lone-wolf attack against the west. Lone terrorist attack against the west has been Islamic State’s (IS) top priority.

Recently IS claimed responsibility for the September 17 lone-wolf stabbings in the Minnesota Mall in the United States. They claimed credit for the devastating Orlando nightclub shooting on June 12, 2016, which is so far the biggest and deadliest attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 terrorist attacks. IS also claimed credit for the San Bernardino attack on December 2, 2015. Despite all necessary Counter-Terrorism (CT) measures effective to thwart dozens of coordinated terrorist attacks, the U.S and EU security forces failed to prevent Lone-Wolf terrorist attacks.

The U.S has not only been a victim of IS-inspired lone-wolf attacks, even Europe has faced worst terrorist attacks ever. Wave of attacks against France (Paris & Nice), Germany (Wuerzburg & Ansbach), and attack on police officers in Belgium’s Charleroi proves that it is not easy to thwart the lone-wolf terrorist attacks. IS senior leaders have continued to urge its followers to carry out attacks against the West. Its propaganda machine intensifies its effort to encourage radical environments and instructs its followers to inspire lone wolf attacks. IS has relied on lone wolf attacks to ‘take revenge’ against the West.

Intel value

The Strategic Value of Intelligence to Confront 21st-Century Threats

I think when nation-states decide that intelligence services are bad, that is troubling. I argue that Europe is suffering over the hangover of World War II. They have geared their laws toward the activities of their intelligence services based on what they witnessed and suffered under intelligence services whose business it was to oppress their populations. So you can’t blame them. You can’t blame how they got there.

When you look at what happened in Brussels, or Paris, or even the United Kingdom, you can see where those rules, those laws, those restrictions are pushing in on the strategic value of intelligence services, preventing them from protecting their population. They are based on the fundamental building block that intelligence services are bad.

Weapons

BREAKING: Remington Finally Introduces RP9 and RP45 Striker-Fired Handgun

Big Green is going “Glock”: Remington is finally introducing its long-in-development polymer handgun. The new handgun is a tilting-barrel striker-fired affair, but it possesses some unique features that hint at a wider family of Remington striker-fired pistols. The pistol will come in two varieties, the first to be launched will be the RP9 followed by the RP45.

One of the most distinctive features of the RP9 / RP45 is its heavily chamfered barrel surface. Most tilting-barrel recoil operated Browning guns use a slight chamfer on the barrel to allow it to pass underneath the slide, but the RP9 / RP45 has a much more extreme chamfer than normal. This has led some to speculate that the RP9 / RP45 might represent a unified slide and frame design that will be used for 9mm and .40 S&W variants in the future, in addition to the .45 ACP version just released. They also appears to feature an internal serialized chassis – a key feature of pistol’s designed for the US Army’s Modular Handgun System program.

Laser

Innovative Laser Weapon – to Equip Aircraft and Drones

General Atomics is to start testing a potentially revolutionary weapon: a 150-kilowatt class laser. It is not the only company developing laser weapons, however, “the technology is ripe for application on an AC-130”, says Lt. Gen. Bradley Heithold, head of US Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), in an interview with Breaking Defense.

General Atomics hopes to see the Command install a version of the weapon on the AC-130 gunship in the next few years. They also envision equipping the company’s new jet-powered Predator C Avenger drone with a laser derived from their High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS).

Heithold elaborated on the various possible targets for an AC-130 laser. The silent, invisible beam might be used prior to a hostage rescue mission, for example, to covertly disable motor vehicles, boats, airplanes or any other “escape mechanism” an enemy might use to move the hostages or flee from U.S. forces. The laser might also be used to disable or disrupt an enemy’s communications, he said.

Weapons

Russia Developing Anti-UAS Weapon

The Russian government is backing a military research project to develop a microwave-based weapon designed to take out unmanned enemy drones from up to half a mile away.

The country’s United Instrument Manufacturing Corporation (UIMC) created the gun to interfere and disrupt the electronics of enemy missiles. Using the ultra-high frequency waves the weapon can completely disable aircraft communications, resulting in loss of control.

Destructive rays, which belong to a group of warfare technologies known as directed-energy weapons (DEW), will be emitted from surface-to-air Buk missile systems.

Nuclear security

Peacemaker: How the Soviet Tsar Bomba Helped Prevent Nuclear War

Fifty-five years ago the Soviet Union detonated a 50-megaton bomb over an uninhabited island north of the Arctic Circle. The most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever built by man, aptly called the Tsar Bomba gave the USSR nuclear parity with the US.

The super bomb was a necessity The “thaw” in Soviet-US relations resulted, among other things, from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in the fall of 1959 ended on May 1, 1960, when a US U-2 spy plane flown by CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down in Soviet airspace while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance of the Baikonur cosmodrome and a number of Soviet military and nuclear facilities. Powers parachuted safely, was captured and admitted the military nature of his mission. As a result, Khrushchev cancelled the scheduled opening of an east-west summit in Paris.

Prediction

An artificial intelligence system that correctly predicted the last 3 elections says Trump will win

The polls have consistently showed Hillary Clinton with a lead over Donald Trump in recent weeks, but an artificial intelligence system has a different prediction for the outcome of the presidential election.

The system, called MogIA, uses 20 million data points from online platforms like Google, YouTube, and Twitter to come up with its predictions, according toCNBC. MogIA correctly predicted the past three presidential elections as well as the Democratic and Republican primaries.

"While most algorithms suffer from programmers/developer's biases, MoglA aims at learning from her environment, developing her own rules at the policy layer and develop expert systems without discarding any data," Sanjiv Rai, the founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai who developed MogIA, told CNBC.

Communication security

E-mails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

The presidential campaign was rocked on Friday after federal law enforcement officials said that emails pertinent to the closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server were discovered on a computer belonging to Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of a top Clinton aide.

In a letter to Congress, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said the emails had surfaced in an unrelated case, which law enforcement officials said was an F.B.I. investigation into illicit text messages from Mr. Weiner to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, is married to Huma Abedin, the top aide.

Mr. Comey's letter said that the F.B.I. would review the emails to determine if they improperly contained classified information, which is tightly controlled by the government. Senior law enforcement officials said that it was unclear if any of the emails were from Mrs. Clinton’s private server. And while Mr. Comey said in his letter that the emails “appear to be pertinent,” the F.B.I. had not yet examined them.

National security

Next US President Likely to Follow 'National-Security Regime Obama Maintained'

Absent a terror attack of devastating proportions, however, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer and US Army intelligence officer Philip Giraldi does not expect the US next commander in chief will be inclined toward a get-tough approach. This extends to political foes in the aftermath of the heated campaign between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, he added.

"If there is an actual major terrorist attack, civil liberties will be effectively dead in this country, no matter who is elected," Giraldi said, predicting expanded surveillance and arrest powers for federal authorities. Whoever wins the November 8 election, Giraldi said, the next president will likely preserve the national-security regime George W. Bush established and his successor, Barack Obama, has maintained.

Declassification

CIA to make 11mn declassified docs available to public online

The CIA is finally putting its database of declassified documents up for public access. Since 2000, the 11 million documents had only been accessible to academic researchers at a special facility in Maryland.

CREST – or the CIA Records Search Tool – was a notoriously difficult thing to access, with anyone wishing to use it having to travel to the National Archives and Records Administration, which held the only computers capable of patching in.

But the CIA has announced it will now be searchable on its website, CIA.gov.

To clarify – these aren’t Snowden-level revelations and you likely won’t unearth any vote-rigging testimonies by murdered Congressional staffers or anything of the sort. CREST is, however, a treasure trove of historical agency records that any budding history buff can now pore over.

The collection had been digitized in 2000, but this did little to remove the frustration from the whole process of getting to it, Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, writes.