Intel collection

NGA Taps Maxar To Do Land Use Change Detection

Satellite imagery behemoth Maxar Technologies has won $20 million in contracts from NGA to provide land use change detection analysis. Near real-time change detection analysis is a bit of a holy grail for US intelligence agencies as they keep tabs on adversaries.

As Maxar explains in its press release today, “Automated change detection visually exposes areas of important change, enabling rapid and effective intelligence gathering across thousands of images from multiple sources.”

Under the contracts, the company will provide “updates and enhancements using its sophisticated change detection model and deliver land cover and classification solutions in support of NGA’s needs.” Land cover classification, the Maxar release says, “provides a global view of the current landscape by applying machine learning to perform automated spectral, spatial and temporal classification, enabling a better understanding of how specific regions of Earth are being used on a micro scale.”

Intel collection

Private and government defense and intelligence agencies must work together

To address today’s national security threats, the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, and broader national security community needs to hasten the use of 21st century technologies like machine learning and data analytics. But the current big proposals aren’t going to provide serious innovation at the scale the U.S. Government needs.

Highly respected innovators, including Eric Schmidt of Alphabet and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, recently rolled out a new series of recommendations to increase innovation across the Department of Defense (DoD).

Having led the implementation of similar programs at CIA, their recommendations sounded eerily familiar and I fear they won’t break the DoD out of its technology rut any more than they have at the CIA.

 Schmidt and deGrasse Tyson’s newest recommendations include: Building an accelerator, establishing a system to elevate new ideas, creating a new data science and innovation career field and launching a training program for technology adoption.

Intel collection

Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies

In the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, which is one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. Black Cube, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, offers its clients the skills of operatives “highly experienced and trained in Israel’s elite military and governmental intelligence units,” according to its literature.

Intel collection

FORMER MOSSAD AGENTS WORKED ON WEINSTEIN'S BEHALF, REPORT CLAIMS

US film producer Harvey Weinstein contracted former Mossad agents to track down and ultimately silence women preparing to accuse him of sexual assault, says a report published in The New Yorker.

Weinstein, the magazine reported on Monday, retained the services of Black Cube – a firm that describes itself on its website as “a select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units specializing in tailored solutions to complex business and litigation challenges” – in fall 2016. The firm has a branch in Tel Aviv, but operates across Europe and the United States.

The explicit goal of Weinstein’s agreement with Black Cube, according to a written contract, was to “stop the publication of the abuse allegations against Weinstein that eventually emerged,” according to the report, which has yet to be independently confirmed by The Jerusalem Post.

Ronan Farrow, who authored the piece, is one of the reporters who broke the original news that Weinstein had been accused of assaulting several women over the course of decades.

The tactics of Black Cube operatives include undercover intelligence collection through the use of aliases. They approached some of the women preparing to come forward as well as reporters investigating the case.

Intel collection

Maintaining America’s Ability to Collect Foreign Intelligence: The Section 702 Program

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will come up for reauthorization in 2017. The Section 702 program targets non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States, in order to acquire foreign intelligence. Over the past several years, this surveillance of the online activities of foreigners has been an invaluable source of information for American intelligence professionals and officials. Some say that more than 25 percent of all current U.S. intelligence is based on information collected under Section 702. Still, critics believe that the program infringes on Americans’ rights. Their concern hinges on the inevitable reality that in the course of collecting information about foreign actors, the Section 702 program will also collect information about American citizens. As a result, some opponents liken the Section 702 program to the government telephony metadata program disclosed by Edward Snowden, and characterize Section 702 as an instance of government overreach. Such comparisons are misguided. The program is so vital to America’s national security that Congress should reauthorize Section 702 in its current form.