[Infowarrior] - The CIA's New Black Bag Is Digital

[Richard Forno]

(c/o ST)

The CIA's New Black Bag Is Digital
When the NSA can't break into your computer, these guys break into your house.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/07/16/the_cias_new_black_bag_is_digital_nsa_cooperation

During a coffee break at an intelligence conference held in The
Netherlands a few years back, a senior Scandinavian counterterrorism
official regaled me with a story. One of his service's surveillance
teams was conducting routine monitoring of a senior militant leader
when they suddenly noticed through their high-powered surveillance
cameras two men breaking into the militant's apartment. The target was
at Friday evening prayers at the local mosque. But rather than ransack
the apartment and steal the computer equipment and other valuables
while he was away -- as any right-minded burglar would normally have
done -- one of the men pulled out a disk and loaded some programs onto
the resident's laptop computer while the other man kept watch at the
window. The whole operation took less than two minutes, then the two
trespassers fled the way they came, leaving no trace that they had
ever been there.


It did not take long for the official to determine that the two men
were, in fact, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives conducting
what is known in the U.S. intelligence community as either a "black
bag job" or a "surreptitious entry" operation. Back in the Cold War,
such a mission might have involved cracking safes, stealing code
books, or photographing the settings on cipher machines. Today, this
kind of break-in is known inside the CIA and National Security Agency
as an "off-net operation," a clandestine human intelligence mission
whose specific purpose is to surreptitiously gain access to the
computer systems and email accounts of targets of high interest to
America's spies. As we've learned in recent weeks, the National
Security Agency's ability to electronically eavesdrop from afar is
massive. But it is not infinite. There are times when the agency
cannot gain access to the computers or gadgets they'd like to listen
in on. And so they call in the CIA's black bag crew for help.

The CIA's clandestine service is now conducting these sorts of black
bag operations on behalf of the NSA, but at a tempo not seen since the
height of the Cold War. Moreover, these missions, as well as a series
of parallel signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection operations
conducted by the CIA's Office of Technical Collection, have proven to
be instrumental in facilitating and improving the NSA's SIGINT
collection efforts in the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Over the past decade specially-trained CIA clandestine operators have
mounted over one hundred extremely sensitive black bag jobs designed
to penetrate foreign government and military communications and
computer systems, as well as the computer systems of some of the
world's largest foreign multinational corporations. Spyware software
has been secretly planted in computer servers; secure telephone lines
have been bugged; fiber optic cables, data switching centers and
telephone exchanges have been tapped; and computer backup tapes and
disks have been stolen or surreptitiously copied in these operations.

In other words, the CIA has become instrumental in setting up the
shadowy surveillance dragnet that has now been thrown into public
view. Sources within the U.S. intelligence community confirm that
since 9/11, CIA clandestine operations have given the NSA access to a
number of new and critically important targets around the world,
especially in China and elsewhere in East Asia, as well as the Middle
East, the Near East, and South Asia. (I'm not aware of any such
operations here on U.S. soil.) In one particularly significant
operation conducted a few years back in a strife-ridden South Asian
nation, a team of CIA technical operations officers installed a
sophisticated tap on a switching center servicing several fiber-optic
cable trunk lines, which has allowed NSA to intercept in real time
some of the most sensitive internal communications traffic by that
country's general staff and top military commanders for the past
several years. In another more recent case, CIA case officers broke
into a home in Western Europe and surreptitiously loaded
Agency-developed spyware into the personal computer of a man suspected
of being a major recruiter for individuals wishing to fight with the
militant group al-Nusra Front in Syria, allowing CIA operatives to
read all of his email traffic and monitor his Skype calls on his
computer.

The fact that the NSA and CIA now work so closely together is
fascinating on a number of levels. But it's particularly remarkable
accomplishment, given the fact that the two agencies until fairly
recently hated each others' guts.


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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.