Category Archives: Cyber War

Per FBI: Foreign Telecoms Likely Hacked Hillary Emails

Posted on by

The Justice Department officials also used the words “reckless”, “stunning,” and “unbelievable” in discussing the controversy swirling around Clinton’s use of a private, nongovernment email account.

FBN Exclusive: DOJ Officials Fear Foreign Telecoms Hacked Clinton Emails, Server

FBN: Officials close to the matter at the Department of Justice are concerned the emails Hillary Clinton sent from her personal devices while overseas on business as U.S. Secretary of State were breached by foreign telecoms in the countries she visited—a list which includes China.

“Her emails could have easily been hacked into by telecoms in these countries. They got the emails first, and then routed them back to her home server. They could have hacked into both,” one Justice Department official close to the matter says.

Another Justice Department official adds: “Those telecommunications companies over there often have government workers in there. That telecom in that foreign country could then follow the trail of emails back to her server in the U.S. and break into the server” remotely over the Internet. At various points in this process, there were multiple entry points to hack into Clinton’s server to steal information, as well as eavesdrop, the Justice Department officials say.

This is the first indication that officials at the Justice Department are concerned that foreign telecom workers may have broken into Clinton’s emails and home server. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently investigating the national security issues surrounding Clinton’s emails and server.

The Justice Department officials also used the words “reckless”, “stunning,” and “unbelievable” in discussing the controversy swirling around Clinton’s use of a private, nongovernment email account, as well as her use of a personal Blackberry (BBRY), an Apple (AAPL) iPad, and home server while U.S. Secretary of State. The officials did not indicate they have any knowledge of a breach at this point.

As for the effort to designate Clinton’s emails as classified or unclassified, the Justice Department officials agreed that, as one put it: “Every email she sent is classified because she herself is classified, because she is both Secretary of State and a former first lady.”

In addition, there’s a growing belief among cyber security experts at web security places like Venafi and Data Clone Labs that Clinton’s emails were unprotected in the first three months of her tenure in 2009 as the nation’s top diplomat, based on Internet scans of her server Venafi conducted at that time.

“For the first three months of Secretary Clinton’s term in office, from early January to late March, access to her home server was not encrypted or authenticated with a digital certificate,” Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi tells FOX Business. “That opens the risk that Clinton’s user name and password were exposed and captured, particularly in places she traveled to at this time, like China or Egypt. And that raises issues of national security,” adding “Attackers could have eavesdropped on communications, particularly in places like China, where the Internet and telecom infrastructure are built to do that.”

Digital certificates are the bedrock of Internet security. They verify the Web authenticity and legitimacy of an email server, and they let the recipient of an email know that an email is from a trusted source. Essentially, digital certificates are electronic passports attached to an email that verifies that a user sending an email is who he or she claims to be.

Because it appears Clinton’s server did not have a digital certificate in the first three months of 2009, “a direct attack on her server was likely at this time, and the odds are fairly high it was successful,” says Ira Victor, director of the digital forensic practice at Data Clone Labs.

In and around January 13, 2009, the day of Clinton’s Senate confirmation hearings, the clintonemail.com domain name was registered. An estimated 62,320 emails were sent and received on Clinton’s private email account during her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State. Later, 31,830 emails were erased from her private server because they were deemed personal.

Although Clinton previously has argued that there was no classified material on her home server in Chappaqua, N.Y., the U.S. Department of State has deemed 403 emails as classified, with three designated “top secret” (the State Dept. itself has been the subject of cyber hacking).

Clinton has maintained her home server did have “numerous safeguards,” but it’s unclear specifically what security measures were installed, and what those layers were. In September, Clinton apologized on ABC News for using a home server to manage her U.S. Department of State electronic correspondence.

Although Clinton and her team have indicated her emails were not hacked, not knowing about a breach is different from being hacked, cyber analysts tell FOX Business. Her campaign staffers did not return calls or emails for comment. “Even the NSA, the CIA, and Fortune 500 companies know they cannot make that claim that they have not been hacked. Everyone can be hacked,” says Bocek.

FOX News recently reported that an intelligence source familiar with the FBI’s probe into Clinton’s server said that the FBI is now focused on whether there were violations of the federal Espionage Act pertaining to “gross negligence” in the safeguarding of national defense information. Sets of emails released show that Clinton and top aides continuously sent information about foreign governments and sensitive conversations with world leaders, among other things, FOX News reported.

Secure communications and devices are routine in the federal government. For example, President Barack Obama received a secure Blackberry from the National Security Agency after he was elected, a former top NSA official tells FOX Business.

“I could not recall that I ever heard that a secure Blackberry was provided to Hillary Clinton.  No one else can either,” the former NSA official says, adding, “There is no way her calls were properly secured if she used her [personal] Blackberry.” Blackberry declined comment.

The former NSA official says the same issue is at play for Clinton’s iPad. “While there have been recent advances in securing iPhones and iPads, these were not available, in my opinion, when she was Secretary of State and there would have to be a record that she sought permission to use them with encryption,” the former NSA official says.

When traveling overseas, U.S. secretaries of states use secure phones that ensure end-to-end encryption, and in some cases, mutual authentication of the parties calling, the former NSA official said. Communications are conducted via secured satellite, digital networks or Internet telephony.

“I think I can say, with some confidence, that once any decent foreign intelligence service discovered she was using her personal phone and iPad, she would be targeted and it would be a high priority operation,” the former NSA official said, adding, “if the calls were unencrypted, it would be no challenge at all while she was overseas — they just have to get to the nearest cell tower.”

The first three months of her tenure as Secretary of State would have been an ideal time for hackers to break in, cyber security experts say.

Specifically, experts point to work done by cyber security experts at Venafi, which has revealed a three-month gap in security for Clinton’s home server after the Palo Alto, Calif. firm’s team had conducted routine, “non-intrusive Internet scanning” in January 2009.

Venafi’s Bocek tells FOX Business that he and his team had picked up Clinton’s domain, clintonemail.com, at that time, and found that her home server had not been issued a digital certificate. That means email traffic to and from her server was unprotected from early January to late March 2009. During that time, Clinton traveled as U.S. Secretary of State to China, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Belgium, Switzerland, and Turkey.

“It also means anyone accessing her home server, including Clinton and other people, would have unencrypted access, including from devices and via web browsers,” says Bocek. “This means that during the first three months of Secretary Clinton’s term in office, web browser, smartphone, and tablet communications would not have been encrypted.”

Digital certificates are vital to Internet security. All “online banking, shopping, and confidential government communications wouldn’t be possible without the trust established by digital certificates,” says Bocek. “Computers in airplanes, cars, smartphones, all electronic communications, indeed trade around the world depend on the security from digital certificates.”

The Office of Management and Budget has now mandated that all federal web servers must use digital certificates by the end of 2016, Bocek notes.

If cyber hackers broke into Clinton’s server, they also could have easily tricked it into handing over usernames, passwords, or other sensitive information, Bocek noted.

“The concern is that log-on credentials could have been compromised during this time, especially given travel to China and elsewhere,” Bocek says opening the door to more lapses. “As we’ve seen with so many other breaches, to long-term, under-the-radar compromise by adversaries, hacks that Clinton and her team may not be aware of.”

Bocek adds: “Essentially, the cyber hacker would have looked to Clinton’s server like it was Secretary Clinton emailing.”

Digital forensic analyst Victor agrees. “It’s highly likely her emails sent during this time via her devices and on her server were not encrypted. More significantly, her log-on credentials, her user name and passwords, were almost certainly not encrypted,” says Victor, who has testified in cyber security cases as an expert forensic witness. “So that means emails from Clinton’s aides, like Huma Abedin, or anyone who had email accounts on her server, their communications were also likely unencrypted.”

Victor adds: “It’s highly likely all of their user names and passwords were being exposed on a regular basis to potential cyber attackers, with the high risk they were stolen by, for instance, government employees who could get the passwords for everyone Clinton was communicating with.”

Victor explains how Clinton’s emails from her devices could have been hacked, and malware could have been planted on her server. “Say Clinton emailed from her device during her Beijing trip in that 2009 period. Her emails would first get routed through the local, state-controlled Chinese telecom. The Chinese telecom captures those bits of emails that are broken up into electronic packets by the device she uses,” Victor explains.

Any device Clinton emailed from, Victor says, was constantly “polling and authenticating communications” between her device and her server. But all of the back-and-forth communication goes through, say, the Chinese telecom. When the device is polling her server with non-secure communications, it’s giving attackers repeat opportunities to breach.”

He continues: “If the connection was not protected, a state actor at the China telecom transmitting her email back to her server in the U.S. could breach both the device and the server at that point.”

Martin C. Libicki, a senior management scientist and cyber expert at Rand Corp., says that security on Clinton’s devices could have been higher than feared. But he says that, while the Blackberry device does have strong encryption, once Clinton zoomed emails from her Blackberry through the foreign telecom networks during those first three months of her tenure, “it was much easier to hack both the device and the server then.”

Venafi’s team, which included analysts Hari Nair and Gavin Hill, found Clinton and/or her team did eventually purchase digital certificates for the server and the clintonemail.com domain name starting in March 2009.

Victor added: “But the question that needed to be asked then was, once the certificate was installed, did Clinton and her team warn anyone she had emailed during those first three months about the poor security during that time, did they warn them to reset their security passwords on all their devices?”

U.S. Spy vs. Israeli Spy on Iran

Posted on by

Some back story events leading up to the broken relationship between the Obama White House and Israel.

Spy vs. Spy, the Fraying U.S Israel Ties

WSJ: The U.S. closely monitored Israel’s military bases and eavesdropped on secret communications in 2012, fearing its longtime ally might try to carry out a strike on Fordow, Iran’s most heavily fortified nuclear facility.

Nerves frayed at the White House after senior officials learned Israeli aircraft had flown in and out of Iran in what some believed was a dry run for a commando raid on the site. Worried that Israel might ignite a regional war, the White House sent a second aircraft carrier to the region and readied attack aircraft, a senior U.S. official said, “in case all hell broke loose.”

The two countries, nursing a mutual distrust, each had something to hide. U.S. officials hoped to restrain Israel long enough to advance negotiations on a nuclear deal with Iran that the U.S. had launched in secret. U.S. officials saw Israel’s strike preparations as an attempt to usurp American foreign policy.

Instead of talking to each other, the allies kept their intentions secret. To figure out what they weren’t being told, they turned to their spy agencies to fill gaps. They employed deception, not only against Iran, but against each other. After working in concert for nearly a decade to keep Iran from an atomic bomb, the U.S. and Israel split over the best means: diplomacy, covert action or military strikes.

Personal strains between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu erupted at their first Oval Office meeting in 2009, and an accumulation of grievances in the years since plunged relations between the two countries into crisis.

This Wall Street Journal account of the souring of U.S.-Israel relations over Iran is based on interviews with nearly two dozen current and former senior U.S. and Israeli officials.

U.S. and Israeli officials say they want to rebuild trust but acknowledge it won’t be easy. Mr. Netanyahu reserves the right to continue covert action against Iran’s nuclear program, said current and former Israeli officials, which could put the spy services of the U.S. and Israel on a collision course.

A shaky start

Messrs. Obama and Netanyahu shared common ground on Iran when they first met in 2007. Mr. Netanyahu, then the leader of Israel’s opposition party, the right-wing Likud, discussed with Mr. Obama, a Democratic senator, how to discourage international investment in Iran’s energy sector. Afterward, Mr. Obama introduced legislation to that end.

Suspicions grew during the 2008 presidential race after Mr. Netanyahu spoke with some congressional Republicans who described Mr. Obama as pro-Arab, Israeli officials said. The content of the conversations later found its way back to the White House, senior Obama administration officials said.

Soon after taking office in January 2009, Mr. Obama took steps to allay Israeli concerns, including instructing the Pentagon to develop military options against Iran’s Fordow facility, which was built into a mountain. The president also embraced an existing campaign of covert action against Iran, expanding cooperation between the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad, the Israeli spy agency.

Mossad leaders compared the covert campaign to a 10-floor building: The higher the floor, they said, the more invasive the operation. CIA and Mossad worked together on operations on the lower floors. But the Americans made clear they had no interest in moving higher—Israeli proposals to bring down Iran’s financial system, for example, or even its regime.

Some covert operations were run unilaterally by Mossad, such as the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, according to U.S. officials.

The first Oval Office meeting between Messrs. Obama and Netanyahu, in May 2009—weeks after Mr. Netanyahu became prime minister—was difficult for both sides. After the meeting, Mr. Obama’s aides called Ron Dermer, Mr. Netanyahu’s adviser, to coordinate their statements. Mr. Dermer told them it was too late; Mr. Netanyahu was already briefing reporters. “We kind of looked at each other and said, ‘I guess we’re not coordinating our messages,’ ” said Tommy Vietor, a former administration official who was there.

In 2010, the risk of covert action became clear. A computer virus dubbed Stuxnet, deployed jointly by the U.S. and Israel to destroy Iranian centrifuges used to process uranium, had inadvertently spread across the Internet. The Israelis wanted to launch cyberattacks against a range of Iranian institutions, according to U.S. officials. But the breach made Mr. Obama more cautious, officials said, for fear of triggering Iranian retaliation, or damaging the global economy if a virus spread uncontrollably.

Israel questioned whether its covert operations were enough, said aides to Mr. Netanyahu. Stuxnet had only temporarily slowed Tehran’s progress. “Cyber and other covert operations had their inherent limitations,” a senior Israeli official said, “and we reached those limitations.”

Mr. Netanyahu pivoted toward a military strike, raising anxiety levels in the White House.

The U.S. Air Force analyzed the arms and aircraft needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and concluded Israel didn’t have the right equipment. The U.S. shared the findings, in part, to steer the Israelis from a military strike.

The Israelis weren’t persuaded and briefed the U.S. on an attack plan: Cargo planes would land in Iran with Israeli commandos on board who would “blow the doors, and go in through the porch entrance” of Fordow, a senior U.S. official said. The Israelis planned to sabotage the nuclear facility from inside.

Pentagon officials thought it was a suicide mission. They pressed the Israelis to give the U.S. advance warning. The Israelis were noncommittal.

“Whether this was all an effort to try to pressure Obama, or whether Israel was really getting close to a decision, I don’t know,” said Michéle Flournoy, who at the time was undersecretary of defense for policy.

Mr. Obama, meanwhile, was moving toward diplomacy. In December 2011, the White House secretly used then-Sen. John Kerry to sound out Omani leaders about opening a back channel to the Iranians.

At the same time, the White House pressed the Israelis to scale back their assassination campaign and turned down their requests for more aggressive covert measures, U.S. officials said.

The president spoke publicly about his willingness to use force as a last resort to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon—“I don’t bluff,” Mr. Obama said in March 2012—but some of Mr. Netanyahu’s advisers weren’t convinced.

In early 2012, U.S. spy agencies told the White House about a flurry of meetings that Mr. Netanyahu convened with top security advisers. The meetings covered everything from mission logistics to the political implications of a military strike, Israeli officials said.

Warning signs

U.S. spy agencies stepped up satellite surveillance of Israeli aircraft movements. They detected when Israeli pilots were put on alert and identified moonless nights, which would give the Israelis better cover for an attack. They watched the Israelis practice strike missions and learned they were probing Iran’s air defenses, looking for ways to fly in undetected, U.S. officials said.

New intelligence poured in every day, much of it fragmentary or so highly classified that few U.S. officials had a complete picture. Officials now say many jumped to the mistaken conclusion that the Israelis had made a dry run.

At the time, concern and confusion over Israel’s intentions added to the sense of urgency inside the White House for a diplomatic solution.

The White House decided to keep Mr. Netanyahu in the dark about the secret Iran talks, believing he would leak word to sabotage them. There was little goodwill for Mr. Netanyahu among Mr. Obama’s aides who perceived the prime minister as supportive of Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign.

Mr. Netanyahu would get briefed on the talks, White House officials concluded, only if it looked like a deal could be reached.

The first secret meeting between U.S. and Iranian negotiators, held in July 2012, was a bust. But “nobody was willing to throw it overboard by greenlighting Israeli strikes just when the process was getting started,” a former senior Obama administration official said.

Israeli officials approached their U.S. counterparts over the summer about obtaining military hardware useful for a strike, U.S. officials said.

At the top of the list were V-22 Ospreys, aircraft that take off and land like helicopters but fly like fixed-wing planes. Ospreys don’t need runways, making them ideal for dropping commandos behind enemy lines.

The Israelis also sounded out officials about obtaining the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the U.S. military’s 30,000-pound bunker-busting bomb, which was designed to destroy Fordow.

Mr. Netanyahu wanted “somebody in the administration to show acquiescence, if not approval” for a military strike, said Gary Samore, who served for four years as Mr. Obama’s White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction. “The message from the Obama administration was: ‘We think this is a big mistake.’ ”

White House officials decided not to provide the equipment.

Messrs. Obama and Netanyahu spoke in September 2012, and Mr. Obama emerged convinced Israel wouldn’t strike on the eve of the U.S. presidential election.

By the following spring, senior U.S. officials concluded the Israelis weren’t serious about a commando raid on Fordow and may have been bluffing. When the U.S. offered to sell the Ospreys, Israel said it didn’t have the money.

Former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who championed a strike, said Mr. Netanyahu had come close to approving a military operation against Iran. But Israel’s military chiefs and cabinet members were reluctant, according to Israeli officials.

While keeping the Omani talks secret, U.S. officials briefed the Israelis on the parallel international negotiations between Iran and major world powers under way in early 2013. Those talks, which made little headway, were led on the U.S. side by State Department diplomat Wendy Sherman.

Robert Einhorn, at the time an arms control adviser at the State Department, said that during the briefings, Mr. Netanyahu’s advisers wouldn’t say what concessions they could live with. “It made us feel like nothing was going to be good enough for them,” Mr. Einhorn said.

U.S. spy agencies were monitoring Israeli communications to see if the Israelis had caught wind of the secret talks. In September 2013, the U.S. learned the answer.

Yaakov Amidror, Mr. Netanyahu’s national security adviser at the time, had come to Washington in advance of a Sept. 30 meeting between Messrs. Netanyahu and Obama.

On Sept. 27, Mr. Amidror huddled with White House national security adviser Susan Rice in her office when she told him that Mr. Obama was on the phone in a groundbreaking call with Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani.

Mr. Amidror had his own surprise. During a separate meeting in the Roosevelt Room, he told several of Mr. Obama’s top advisers that Israel had identified the tail numbers of the unmarked U.S. government planes that ferried negotiators to Muscat, Oman, the site of the secret talks, U.S. officials said.

Mr. Amidror, who declined to comment on the White House discussions, said that it was insulting for Obama administration officials to think “they could go to Oman without taking our intelligence capabilities into account.” He called the decision to hide the Iran talks from Israel a big mistake.

U.S. officials said they were getting ready to tell the Israelis about the talks, which advanced only after Mr. Rouhani came to office. During the Sept. 30 meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, the president acknowledged the secret negotiations. The secrecy cemented Israel’s distrust of Mr. Obama’s intentions, Israeli officials said.

Mr. Samore, the former White House official, said he believed it was a mistake to keep Israel in the dark for so long. Mr. Einhorn said: “The lack of early transparency reinforced Israel’s suspicions and had an outsize negative impact on Israeli thinking about the talks.”

Israel pushed for the U.S. to be more open about the Iran negotiations. Ms. Rice, however, pulled back on consultations with her new Israeli counterpart, Yossi Cohen, who took over as Mr. Netanyahu’s national security adviser, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.
In exchanges with the White House, U.S. officials said, Mr. Cohen wouldn’t budge from demanding Iran give up its centrifuges and uranium-enrichment program. Israeli officials said they feared any deviation would be taken by the U.S. as a green light for more concessions.

In one meeting, Mr. Cohen indicated Mr. Netanyahu could accept a deal allowing Iran to keep thousands of centrifuges, U.S. officials said. Soon after, Mr. Cohen called to say he had misspoken. Neither side was prepared to divulge their bottom line.

In November 2013, when the interim agreement was announced, Mr. Samore was in Israel, where, he said, the Israelis “felt blindsided” by the terms. U.S. officials said the details came together so quickly that Ms. Sherman and her team didn’t have enough time to convey them all. Israeli officials said the Americans intentionally withheld information to prevent them from influencing the outcome.

Listening in

As talks began in 2014 on a final accord, U.S. intelligence agencies alerted White House officials that Israelis were spying on the negotiations. Israel denied any espionage against the U.S. Israeli officials said they could learn details, in part, by spying on Iran, an explanation U.S. officials didn’t believe.

Earlier this year, U.S. officials clamped down on what they shared with Israel about the talks after, they allege, Mr. Netanyahu’s aides leaked confidential information about the emerging deal.

When U.S. officials confronted the Israelis over the matter in a meeting, Israel’s then-minister of intelligence said he didn’t disclose anything from Washington’s briefings. The information, the minister said, came from “other means,” according to meeting participants.

Ms. Sherman told Mr. Cohen, Israel’s national security adviser: “You’re putting us in a very difficult position. We understand that you will find out what you can find out by your own means. But how can we tell you every single last thing when we know you’re going to use it against us?” according to U.S. officials who were there.

Mr. Netanyahu turned to congressional Republicans, one of his remaining allies with the power to affect the deal, Israeli officials said, but he couldn’t muster enough votes to block it.

U.S. officials now pledge to work closely with their Israeli counterparts to monitor Iran’s compliance with the international agreement.

But it is unclear how the White House will respond to any covert Israeli actions against Iran’s nuclear program, which current and former Israeli officials said were imperative to safeguard their country.

One clause in the agreement says the major powers will help the Iranians secure their facilities against sabotage. State Department officials said the clause wouldn’t protect Iranian nuclear sites from Israel.

Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA, said the U.S. and Israel could nonetheless end up at odds.

“If we become aware of any Israeli efforts, do we have a duty to warn Iran?” Mr. Hayden said. “Given the intimacy of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, it’s going to be more complicated than ever.”

Govt Warns: Raise Your Shield

Posted on by

When one considers all the major hacking events including the Office of Personnel Management, this is truly a warning.

Sounds like they are telling us we are on our own but the advise is good and must be heeded.

NEWS RELEASE

National Counterintelligence and Security Center
Releases Social Media Deception Awareness Videos

Videos are second in a series released in the wake of the OPM records breach
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                      
ODNI News Release No. 21-15
October 23, 2015

Today the ODNI’s National Counterintelligence and Security Center released the second in a four-part series of videos from its “Know the Risk—Raise Your Shield” campaign.

The latest campaign videos focus on social media deception, and are intended to help build public awareness of the inherent dangers that the use of social media—Facebook, Twitter, etc.—could present when appropriate protective measures are not taken.  There are two videos: a shorter attention-grabber and a second longer video which provides details about social media deception, how government officials or the public can recognize threats and what steps can be taken to minimize the risk of being deceived.

“The information the social media deception videos and overall campaign convey will increase individuals’ awareness of the dangers in cyberspace and provide common-sense tools to protect themselves from bad actors, be they criminals or foreign intelligence entities,” said NCSC Director Bill Evanina.

The NCSC launched the campaign last month in the wake of the Office of Personnel Management records breach to help those individuals, government or otherwise, whose personal information has been compromised.  The launch videos focused on “Spear Phishing Attacks,” while the final sets of videos—to be released in November and December, respectively—will focus on human targeting and awareness for travelers.  Each release contains a 30-45-second overview video and a more in-depth two minute video.

The NCSC provides effective leadership and support to the counterintelligence and security activities of the U.S. Intelligence Community, the U.S. government, and U.S. private sector entities who are at risk of intelligence collection or attack by foreign adversaries.

Russia is WAY too close to Compromising Communications Cables

Posted on by

 

Russian aggression and look who is in the White House…..chilling….

Submarine Cable Map

PopularScience: For the past five years, John Rennie has braved the towering waves of the North Atlantic Ocean to keep your e-mail coming to you. As chief submersible engineer aboard the Wave Sentinel, part of the fleet operated by U.K.-based undersea installation and maintenance firm Global Marine Systems, Rennie–a congenial, 6’4″, 57-year-old Scotsman–patrols the seas, dispatching a remotely operated submarine deep below the surface to repair undersea cables. The cables, thick as fire hoses and packed with fiber optics, run everywhere along the seafloor, ferrying phone and Web traffic from continent to continent at the speed of light.

The cables regularly fail. On any given day, somewhere in the world there is the nautical equivalent of a hit and run when a cable is torn by fishing nets or sliced by dragging anchors. If the mishap occurs in the Irish Sea, the North Sea or the North Atlantic, Rennie comes in to splice the break together.

On one recent expedition, Rennie and his crew spent 12 days bobbing in about 250 feet of water 15 miles off the coast of Cornwall in southern England looking for a broken cable linking the U.K. and Ireland. Munching fresh doughnuts (a specialty of the ship’s cook), Rennie and his team worked 12-hour shifts exploring the rocky seafloor with a six-ton, $10-million remotely operated vehicle (ROV) affectionately known as “the Beast.”

As  Russia scopes undersea cables, a shadow of the United States’ Cold War past

WaPo: On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Russian submarines and spy ships are operating near vital undersea fiber-optic cables that transmit the majority of the planet’s communication and economic data.

The fear, the report stipulates, is that Russia might be looking for weak spots that could be attacked and severed during a conflict.

Though the tactics and threat are reminiscent of the Cold War, the Russians appear to be taking a page out of the book that the U.S. Navy and the NSA wrote in the 1970s in a series of undersea wire-tapping missions that became known as Operation Ivy Bells.

Briefly mentioned in the Times report, Operation Ivy Bells is written about extensively in the book “Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage” by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew. The missions used submarines to listen in on previously untapped Soviet “hard-lines” to glean information about Soviet ballistic missile submarine deployments and strategy.

In 1970, at the height of the Cold War, James Bradley, the director of undersea warfare at the Office of Naval intelligence dreamed up one of the most daring submarine spy missions in modern history. He wanted to send the specially outfitted 350ft nuclear-powered submarine, the Halibut, to land over the ocean floor under the Sea of Okhotsk and tap a phone line that connected the Soviet submarine base at Petropavlovsk to its Pacific Fleet headquarters near Vladivostok.

Besides the risk of international incident if Halibut was caught or detected, there was no evidence that the phone line even existed. The only evidence that Bradley had was the notion that the sub base in Petropavlovsk was probably required to give constant updates back to its higher headquarters. So Bradley, sitting in his Pentagon office at 3 a.m., thought back to his childhood, racking his brain to figure out where the Soviets might have laid their cables.

According to “Blind Man’s Bluff,” Bradley, in his predawn stupor, recalled from his youth written signs that had been posted along the Mississippi River to mark undersea cables. The signs, posted along the shore, were meant to prevent passing from hooking the cables with their anchors.

With this in mind, Bradley reasoned that there had to be similar signs near the shallower points on the Sea of Okhotsk.

So, with Bradley’s childhood in mind, “the most daring acts of tele-piracy of the Cold War” was born.

After an extensive multi-year refit that began in the late 60s, Halibut was ready to depart from Mare Island Naval Shipyard outside of San Francisco for Okhotsk in 1972. One of the sub’s most noticeable additions was a giant hump mounted behind its conning tower, a hump that was publicly declared as a hangar for a deep sea rescue vehicle but was actually a “decompression and lockout chamber” for the team of divers that would exit the sub to tap the Soviet cables.

So in October 1972, the crew of Halibut made its way across the Pacific, its older nuclear reactor pushing her across the sea at just over 10 knots. First the spy sub moved north to the Aleutian Islands, then past the Bering Straight and into the Sea of Okhotsk. The captain of the Halibut, Navy Cmdr. Jack McNish, had not told the crew where it was going—only that they were leaving home for three months and that they were searching for the remnants of a new Soviet infared anti-ship missile that the United States was desperately seeking a counter-measure for.

Once inside the Sea of Okhotsk, the Halibut slowly patrolled with its periscope up, scanning the coastline for Bradley’s signage that would mark the cables. And then, after a week of patrolling with no luck, the Halibut found a sign on the northern shore of the Sea of Okhotsk that said something to the extent of “Do Not Anchor. Cable Here” in Russian.

The Halibut, after locating the sign, launched a specially designed submersible or “fish,” that then proceeded to search for the cables. The fish had a very basic video camera, and a higher definition camera. While the video was relayed in real-time back to the submarine, the film from the camera had to be retrieved from the fish and subsequently developed while the Halibut was near the surface so that the sub’s dark room could properly vent or “snorkel” the chemicals used to develop the film.

Hours after the fish’s launch, footage began to come back of foot-long bumps in the sand, a sort of Morse code etched in the sea bottom. The Halibut had found the cables.

According to “Blind Man’s Bluff,” the fish was then retrieved and the film developed, revealing the Soviet cables strewn along the seafloor.

After identifying the cables, McNish maneuvered the Halibut well outside the 3-mile territorial limit of the Soviet Union and located a spot just above the cable where he could lower the submarine’s two massive anchors in a sort-of hover.

Using specially designed rubber wet suits that fit loosely and were pumped full of hot water to counter the freezing temperatures of the Sea of Okhotsk, the divers departed the Halibut armed with pneumatic air-guns to blow debris off the cables and emergency oxygen bottles in case their “umbilical cords” that connected them back to the Halibut were severed.

The wire-tap, according to “Blind Man’s Bluff,” was three-feet long and composed of a tape recorder and a lithium ion battery. A connector would wrap around the cable and draw out the words and data through induction. There was no cutting into the cable.

For the next few hours the recording device attached to the cable relayed Soviet communications back to a select group of spies aboard the Halibut who would then, after the completion of the mission and a successful return to port, send the tapes to Fort Meade, Md, where they would be subsequently analyzed.

With the tap successful, the Halibut then moved to its secondary mission of locating the Soviet missile fragments before returning to port. With the mission a success, Bradley saw a future filled with taps around the globe that could record for months and years continuously, without the presence of an American sub to collect the data.

In August 1972, the Halibut departed once more for the Sea Okhotsk to repeat the tap. This time, however, the sub was rigged with explosives in case the sub and her crew were ever compromised. This time too, according to Blind Man’s Bluff, McNish told his crew about their actual mission and the risks it entailed.

In the years following more submarines would be outfitted like Halibut, and they too would conduct similar wire-taps. Operation Ivy Bells had begun.

 

Iran Defying Iran Deal, WH and Kerry Still Trust ‘Em

Posted on by

Iran holds 4 Americans in their prisons, while the Obama administration says the track for talks to have them released was separate from the Iran talks. Yet, it must be know, the United States actually holds several Iranians in our prisons and one such detainee Iran wants back badly.

Iran wants it both ways as noted with this scientist they demand to be released.

An Iranian-American engineer has been sentenced to more than eight years in prison for sending sensitive U.S. military documents to his native Iran.

U.S. prosecutors say Mozaffar Khazaee, who had worked as an employee of U.S. defense contractors, stole and shared with Iran information on U.S. military jet engine programs over the span of several years.

Khazaee, a 61-year-old dual citizen, was arrested in January 2014 as he tried to leave the United States with sensitive military documents in his luggage.

A swap is likely part of the obscure talks with John Kerry and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif.

The matter of the PMD’s (Possible Military Dimension) sites are still in dispute and Iran declares they are defying the JPOA by stating they will not remove the uranium stockpile. They will also not repurpose the heavy water reactor, both of which are stipulations of the JPOA.

“Any action regarding Arak and dispatching uranium abroad … will take place after the PMD file is closed,” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wrote in a letter to President Hassan Rouhani.

The letter, published on Khamenei’s website, approved implementation of a nuclear deal agreed with world powers in July, subject to certain conditions.

Meanwhile, the waivers are being signed to lift selected sanctions against Iran, demonstrating the White House, the State Department and the National Security Councils as well as those Democrats in Congress have not said a single word about the contraventions of the P5+1 Iran agreement.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The United States approved conditional sanctions waivers for Iran on Sunday, though it cautioned they will not take effect until Tehran has curbed its nuclear program as required under a historic nuclear deal reached in Vienna on July 14.

“I hereby direct you to take all necessary steps to give effect to the U.S. commitments with respect to sanctions described in (the Iran deal),” U.S. President Barack Obama said in a memo to the secretaries of state, treasury, commerce and energy released by the White House press office.

Several senior U.S. officials, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, said actual implementation of the deal was still at least two months away. In addition to Washington’s conditional orders to suspend U.S. nuclear-related sanctions, U.S. officials said the United States, China and Iran were re-emphasizing their commitment to the redesign and reconstruction of the Arak research reactor so that it does not produce plutonium.

The fate of the Arak reactor was one of the toughest sticking points in the nearly two years of negotiations that led to the July agreement.

Other steps Iran must take include reducing the number of uranium-enrichment centrifuges it has in operation, cutting its enriched uranium stocks and answering U.N. questions about past activities that the West suspects were linked to work on nuclear weapons.

Kerry noted that the IAEA had already said Iran had met its obligation to provide answers and access to the agency.

The Democrats, the White House and the State Department have a real talent for ignoring threats, facts and actions when it comes to reality.

It is beyond dispute that each item in question for Iran and the JPOA, Iran is rupturing the agreement and Barack Obama is ignoring the infractions. Perhaps someone should begin to ask Hillary about the JPOA since it was her State Department that deployed Jake Sullivan to open the Iran doors to these talks…what is she thinking now?