Category Archives: NSA Spying

Hillary Server-Gate Operative Pleas 5th?

Posted on by

From this blog in an earlier post, I mentioned Brain Pagliano and he is in the news again today. Wait for it…..he is fending off a subpoena and will likely plea the Constitutional protection of the 5th Amendment. Will Hillary take down the White House?

Staffer who worked on Clinton’s private e-mail server faces subpoena

Washington Post: A former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server this week tried to fend off a subpoena to testify before Congress, saying he would assert his constitutional right not to answer questions to avoid incriminating himself.

The move by Bryan Pagliano, who had worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009, came in a Monday letter from his lawyer to the House panel investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

The letter cited the ongoing FBI inquiry into the security of Clinton’s e-mail system, and it quoted a Supreme Court ruling in which justices described the Fifth Amendment as protecting “innocent men . . . who otherwise might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances.’ ”

The FBI is investigating whether Clinton’s system — in which she exclusively used private e-mail for her work as secretary of state — may have jeopardized sensitive national security information.

Thousands of e-mails that have been released by the State Department as part of a public records lawsuit show Clinton herself writing at least six e-mails containing information that has since been deemed classified. Large portions of those e-mails were redacted before their release, on the argument that their publication could harm national security.

“While we understand that Mr. Pagliano’s response to this subpoena may be controversial in the current political environment, we hope that the members of the Select Committee will respect our client’s right to invoke the protections of the Constitution,” his attorney, Mark MacDougall, wrote.

Two other Senate committees also have contacted Pagliano in the past week, according to a copy of the letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post. The requests came from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Homeland Security Committee, according to people familiar with the requests.

The Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed Wednesday that it sought to ask Pagliano about his work for Clinton.

“In response to questions . . . Mr. Pagliano’s legal counsel told the committee yesterday that he would plead the Fifth to any and all questions if he were compelled to testify,” a spokesperson for committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the chairman of the House Benghazi committee, had subpoenaed the computer staffer Aug. 11 and ordered that he appear for questioning before the committee Sept. 10. Gowdy also demanded that Pagliano provide documents related to the servers or systems controlled or owned by Clinton from 2009 to 2013.

Pagliano, who worked in the State Department’s information-technology department from May 2009 until February 2013, left the agency when Clinton departed as secretary. He now works for a technology contractor that provides some services to the State Department.

The committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), complained yesterday that Gowdy unilaterally issued the subpoena. He said the subpoena of a low-level aide is one of several signs that Gowdy is using the committee for the political purpose of trying to smear a Democratic presidential candidate.

“Although multiple legal experts agree there is no evidence of criminal activity, it is certainly understandable that this witness’s attorneys advised him to assert his Fifth Amendment rights, especially given the onslaught of wild and unsubstantiated accusations by Republican presidential candidates, members of Congress and others based on false leaks about the investigation,” Cummings said. “Their insatiable desire to derail Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign at all costs has real consequences for any serious congressional effort.”

MacDougall declined to comment late Wednesday evening.

Will Hillary Clinton’s Emails Burn the White House?

DailyBeast: Counterintelligence specialists suspect that the former Secretary of State wasn’t the only member of the Obama administration emailing secrets around.
Hillary Clinton’s email problems are already causing headaches for her presidential campaign. But within American counterintelligence circles, there’s a mounting sense that the former Secretary of State may not be the only Obama administration official in trouble. This is a scandal that has the potential to spread to the White House, as well.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation can be expected to be tight-lipped, especially because this highly sensitive case is being handled by counterintelligence experts from Bureau headquarters a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, not by the FBI’s Washington Field Office. That will ensure this investigation gets the needed “big picture” view, since even senior FBI agents at any given field office may only have a partial look at complex counterintelligence cases.

And this most certainly is a counterintelligence matter. There’s a widely held belief among American counterspies that foreign intelligence agencies had to be reading the emails on Hillary’s private server, particularly since it was wholly unencrypted for months. “I’d fire my staff if they weren’t getting all this,” explained one veteran Department of Defense counterintelligence official, adding: “I’d hate to be the guy in Moscow or Beijing right now who had to explain why they didn’t have all of Hillary’s email.” Given the widespread hacking that has plagued the State Department, the Pentagon, and even the White House during Obama’s presidency, senior counterintelligence officials are assuming the worst about what the Russians and Chinese know.

EmailGate has barely touched the White House directly, although it’s clear that some senior administration officials beyond the State Department were aware of Hillary’s unorthodox email and server habits, given how widely some of the emails from Clinton and her staff were forwarded around the Beltway. Obama’s inner circle may not be off-limits to the FBI for long, however, particularly since the slipshod security practices of certain senior White House officials have been a topic of discussions in the Intelligence Community for years.

Hillary Clinton was far from the only senior Obama appointee to play fast and loose with classified materials, according to Intelligence Community insiders. While most counterspies agree that Hillary’s practices—especially using her own server and having her staffers place classified information into unclassified emails, in violation of Federal law—were especially egregious, any broad-brush investigation into security matters are likely to turn up other suspects, they maintain.

“The whole administration is filled with people who can’t shoot straight when it comes to classified,” an Intelligence Community official explained to me this week. Three U.S. officials suggested that Susan Rice, the National Security Adviser, might be at particular risk if a classified information probe goes wide. But it should be noted that Rice has made all sorts of enemies on the security establishment for her prickly demeanor, use of coarse language, and  strategic missteps.

However, Clinton should take no comfort from the fact that others may be in trouble with the FBI too. Just how many of her “unclassified” emails were actually classified is a matter of dispute that will take months for the FBI to resolve with assistance from the State Department and Intelligence Community. The current figure bandied about, that something like 300 of the emails scanned to date by investigators contained information that should have been marked as classified, is somewhat notional at this point, not least because the Intelligence Community has yet to weigh in on most of them.

Spy agencies typically take a harder line on classification than the State Department does, including a tendency to retroactively mark as classified mundane things—for instance press reports that comment on security matters can be deemed secret—that other, less secrecy-prone agencies might not. That said, there’s little doubt that our intelligence agencies fear that the compromise engendered by Hillary’s email slipshod practices was significant.

Although it will be months before intelligence agencies have reviewed all Clinton emails, counterintelligence officials expect that the true number of classified emails on Hillary’s servers is at least many hundreds and perhaps thousands, based on the samplings seen to date.

Excuses that most of the classified emails examined to date are considered Confidential, which is the lowest level, cut no ice with many insiders. Although the compromise of information at that level is less damaging than the loss of Secret—or worse Top Secret—information, it is still a crime that’s taken seriously by counterintelligence professionals. Most of the classified that Hillary and her staff seem to have compromised dealt with diplomatic discussions, which is a grave indiscretion as far as diplomats worldwide are concerned.

“Of course they knew what they were doing, it’s a clear as day from the emails,” opined one senior official who is close to the investigation. “I’m a Democrat and this makes me sick. They were fully aware of what they were up to, and the Bureau knows it.” That Hillary and her staff at Foggy Bottom were wittingly involved in a scheme to place classified information into ostensibly unclassified emails to reside on Clinton’s personal, private server is the belief of every investigator and counterintelligence official I’ve spoken with recently, and all were at pains to maintain that this misconduct was felonious.

It’s clear that many people inside the State Department had to be aware, at least to some degree, of what Clinton and her inner staff were engaged in. How far that knowledge went is a key question that the FBI is examining. The name Patrick Kennedy pops up frequently. A controversial character, Kennedy is the State Department’s undersecretary for management (hence his Foggy Bottom nickname “M”). A longtime Clinton protégé, Kennedy is believed by many to be the key to this case, since his sign-off likely would have been needed for some of Clinton’s unorthodox arrangements.

 

Russian Connection with Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and OPM?

Posted on by

Pvt. Bradley Manning describes as noted by Gawker in part:

The story begins with Manning’s own disillusionment with U.S. foreign policy and its wars, sparked by his wide-ranging research as an analyst. “I began to become depressed with the situation that we found ourselves increasingly mired in year after year,” he said. He wanted to give the public access to some of the same information he had seen, so they might come to a similar conclusion. Manning said he leaked a massive database of incident reports from Iraq and Afghanistan because he believed they might “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it relates to Iraq and Afghanistan.” He hoped people who saw the dramatic video of a 2007 Apache helicopter strike in Iraq he leaked would be outraged by the “delightful bloodlust” of the pilots. The U.S. State Department cables he gave to Wikileaks detailed shady deals and backroom intimidation and were “a prime example of a need for a more open diplomacy.” 

But Manning’s ideas and actions did not develop in a vacuum. In walking us through the genesis of and rationale behind each leak, Manning’s statement emphasizes they were not hit-and-run jobs. Wikileaks plays a pivotal role in this story, and not just as a passive leaking “platform.” As Manning tells it, his relationship with Wikileaks was not unlike the relationship between a traditional journalist and their source. Manning said he was originally drawn to Wikileaks after their release in 2009 of half a million pager messages from 9/11. In January, 2010, Manning joined a chatroom linked on Wikileaks’ official site out of curiosity. He wanted to know how Wikileaks got the pager messages. “I am the type of person who likes to know how things work,” he said in his statement. “And, as an analyst, this means I always want to figure out the truth.”

Over the years I’ve periodically visited that same, now-defunct chatroom to try to figure out how Wikileaks works. Whenever I dropped by it seemed pretty dead, a few Wikileaks fanboys idling during the work day. But in early 2010 Manning found a lively collection of geeks discussing stimulating topics.

Later the official investigation and charges were brought against Bradley Manning. The charge sheet is here describing his full actions.

As noted in this blog yesterday, the Chinese and the Russians are in fact cultivating and applying the stolen data (hacked) and are working against the West.

Enter Julian Assange and the Russians.

Hat tip to John:

Wikileaks is a Front for Russian Intelligence

August 31, 2015

The part played by Wikileaks in the Edward Snowden saga is an important one. The pivotal role of Julian Assange and other leading members of Wikileaks in getting Snowden from Hawaii to Moscow, from NSA employment to FSB protection, in the late spring of 2013 is a matter of record.

For years there have been questions about just what Wikileaks actually is. I know because I’ve been among those asking. Over two years ago, little more than two weeks after Snowden landed in Moscow, I explained my concerns about Wikileaks based on my background in counterintelligence. Specifically, the role of the Russian anti-Semite weirdo Israel Shamir, a close friend of Assange, in the Wikileaks circle merited attention, and to anyone trained in the right clues, the Assange group gave the impression of having a relationship with Russian intelligence. As I summed up my position in July 2013, based on what we knew so far:

It’s especially important given the fact that Wikileaks is playing a leading role in the Snowden case, to the dismay of some of Ed’s admirers and even members of his family. Not to mention that Snowden, as of this writing, is still in Moscow. One need not be a counterintelligence guru to have serious questions about Shamir and Wikileaks here. It may be a much bigger part of the story than it appears to the naked eye.

Evidence that Wikileaks is not what it seems to be has mounted over the years. Assange’s RT show didn’t help matters, neither did the fact that, despite having claimed to possess secret Russian intelligence files, Wikileaks has never exposed anything sensitive, as they have done with the purloined files of many other countries. To say nothing of Assange & Co. taking unmistakably pro-Russian positions on a host of controversial issues. Questions logically followed.

Now answers are appearing. It’s long been known that Wikileaks, by their own admission, counseled Ed Snowden in June 2013 to leave Hong Kong and head to Moscow. Contrary to the countless lies propagated by Snowden Operation activists, Snowden’s arrival in Russia was his choice; it had nothing to do with  canceled passports in Washington, DC.

An important gap has been filled this week by Julian Assange, who admitted that Snowden going to Moscow was his idea. Ed wanted to head to Latin America, Julian asserted, especially Ecuador, whose London embassy Assange has been hiding out in for years on the lam from rape changes in Sweden. As Assange explained, “He preferred Latin America, but my advice was that he should take asylum in Russia despite the negative PR consequences, because my assessment is that he had a significant risk he could be kidnapped from Latin America on CIA orders. Kidnapped or possibly killed.”

Only in Russia would Ed be safe, Julian counseled, because there he would be protected by Vladimir Putin and his secret services, notably the FSB. One might think that seeking the shelter of the FSB — one of the world’s nastiest secret police forces that spies on millions without warrant and murders opponents freely — might be an odd choice for a “privacy organization.” But Wikileaks is no ordinary NGO.

Why Assange knew Russia would take in Snowden — it could be a big political hassle for Moscow — is a key question that any counterintelligence officer would want answered. Was Julian speaking on behalf of the FSB or did he just “know” Ed could obtain the sanctuary plus protection he sought?

Just as telling is the recent report on Assange’s activities in Ecuador’s London embassy, where it turns out Ecuadorian intelligence has been keeping tabs on him. Which is no surprise given the PR mess Assange has created for Ecuador with his on-going antics.

Especially interesting is the revelation that, while holed up in London, Assange “requested that he be able to chose his own Security Service inside the embassy, suggesting the use of Russian operatives.” It is, to say the least, surpassingly strange that a Western “privacy advocate” wants Russian secret police protection while hiding out in a Western country. The original Spanish is clear: Assange “habría sido la elección de su propio Servicio de Seguridad en el interior de la embajada, llegando a proponer la participación de operadores de nacionalidad rusa.”

Why Assange wants FSB bodyguards is a question every journalist who encounters Julian henceforth should ask. Until he explains that, Wikileaks should be treated as the front and cut-out for Russian intelligence that it has become, while those who get in bed with Wikileaks — many Western “privacy advocates” are in that group — should be asked their feelings about their own at least indirect ties with Putin’s spy services.

P.S. For those familiar with espionage history, there is a clear precedent for such an arrangement. In 1978 the magazine Covert Action Information Bulletin appeared to expose the secrets of US and Western intelligence. Its editor was Phil Agee, a former CIA officer who had gotten into bed with Cuban and Soviet intelligence; think of Agee as the Snowden of the pre-Internet era. CAIB was in fact founded on the direction of the KGB and for years served as a conduit for Kremlin lies and disinformation that seriously harmed Western intelligence. While CAIB presented itself as a radical truth-telling group, in actuality it was a KGB front, though few CAIB staffers beyond Agee knew who was really calling the shots. One suspects much the same is happening with WikiLeaks.

It is a Day that Ends in ‘Y’ and Another Hillary Email Revelation

Posted on by

While a big 9000 email dump is expected tonight at 9PM, August 31 by the State Department of more court ordered emails to be released, seems yet another 150 contained classified information.

EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Shared An Email Network With The Clinton Foundation

Hillary Clinton’s private email server was housed at the same physical location and on the same network as an email server used and operated by the Clinton Foundation, Breitbart News has exclusively learned.

Breitbart: Records reveal that Hillary Clinton’s private clintonemail.com server shared an IP address with her husband Bill Clinton’s email server, presidentclinton.com, and both servers were housed in New York City, not in the basement of the Clintons’ Chappaqua, New York home.

Web archives show that the Presidentclinton.com Web address was being operated by the Clinton Foundation as of 2009, when Hillary Clinton registered her own clintonemail.com server.

Numerous Clinton Foundation employees used the presidentclinton.com server for their own email addresses, which means that they were using email accounts that, if hacked, would have given any hacker complete access to Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, as well.

The bombshell revelation raises new concerns about the possible illegality of Hillary Clinton’s private email use. The former Secretary of State is under federal investigation for potentially violating the Espionage Act by allowing people without a security clearance to access classified information. The fact that Hillary was sharing an email network with a private foundation means that people without a security clearance almost certainly had physical access to her server while she was working at the State Department.

Here’s what we know:

The Servers Have The SAME IP Address

Hillary’s clintonemail.com server and the Foundation-run presidentclinton.com email server have exactly the same IP address, and the same SSL certificate (which an organization purchases for an email server to verify its trustworthiness).

mail.clintonemail.com and mail.presidentclinton.com both have an IP address of 64.94.172.146, according to an SSL Certificate Checker.

The two servers both have that same IP address, 64.94.172.146, according to DNS records. (Here are records for Hillary’s server, and here are records for Bill’s server).

Both servers have the same IP address, according to another independent Internet records database, robtex.net.

The fact that both of these email servers have the same IP address means that they were operating on the same network, and sharing physical space. A computer expert tells Breitbart News that the servers were probably operating on the same machine. It is also possible that they were operating on different machines on the same network, which still means that the machines would have to be close enough to exist in the same physical location.

President Clinton’s server was created in 2002, while Hillary’s was created in 2009, which means that Hillary’s server was simply added to Bill’s Foundation-run server network.

They Had The SAME IP Address When She Was Secretary of State

Hillary’s server and Bill’s Foundation-run server also shared a different IP address during her tenure as Secretary of State.

From September 8, 2009 until June 24, 2011, Bill Clinton’s Foundation-run mail.presidentclinton.com server had an IP address of 24.187.234.187, according to DNS records.

Hillary’s mail.clintonemail.com server had the same exact IP address, 24.187.234.187, from the dates May 21, 2010 until October 21, 2010, according to DNS records.

Their Shared IP Address Can Be Traced to Midtown Manhattan

A geographical search for the IP address that both servers shared at registration traces to Midtown Manhattan, according to three different databases: infosniper.net, which locates a Midtown latitude/longitude point, ip-tracker.org, which also gives a Midtown latitude/longitude point, and whatsmyip.org.

Clinton Foundation headquarters are currently located at 1271 6th Avenue in Midtown. Bill Clinton’s office is at 55 West 125th Street

The Denver-based firm Platte River Networks told Breitbart News that it physically moved Hillary Clinton’s private email server out of the basement of her Chappaqua home in 2013. But the Clintons could have moved the server from Manhattan to Chappaqua before Platte River got there.

Clinton Founation Employees Had presidentclinton.com email addresses

The employees who have used presidentclinton.com email addresses included former Bill Clinton right-hand man Doug Band, as well as Justin Cooper, a Hillary aide who has worked with the Foundation, Terry Krinvic, Laura Graham, and John Zimmerebner.

Was Chelsea Clinton On The Server?

The email server for mail.chelseaoffice.com, which is no longer active, resolves to clintonemail.com, according to DNS records. Wikileaks confirms that the chelseaoffice.com server was used by Chelsea Clinton employees.

Hillary Even Admitted That She Used Her Husband’s “System”

“Well the system we used was set up for President Clintons office and it had numerous safeguards it was on property guarded by the Secret Service and there were no security breaches, so I think that the use of that server which started with my husband proved to be effective and secure,” Hillary Clinton said in a March 2015 press conference.

Clinton has not returned to that talking point since.

The Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s campaign did not return requests for comment by press time.

The Words you Use can Be a Cause for Investigation

Posted on by

On the knife’s edge, Americans are threatened by some entity every day. It is the work of government to keep the homeland safe and the methods or tactics used can infringe on our protected rights.

Wonder what words are used in Hillary’s emails….

When it comes to words, the Department of Homeland Security has a list and they have systems to cultivate interactions on the internet where social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and YouTube are the top three locations where you are being watched. Have you ever posted something to Facebook and it was removed?

This is not a new circumstance, but often we need to be reminded.

Dept. of Homeland Security Forced to Release List of Keywords Used to Monitor Social Networking Sites

Forbes: If you are thinking about tweeting about clouds, pork, exercise or even Mexico, think again. Doing so may result in a closer look by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

In a story appearing earlier today on the U.K’s Daily Mail website, it was reported that the DHS has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor various social networking sites. The list provides a glimpse into what DHS describes as “signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.”

The list was posted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center who filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, before suing to obtain the release of the documents. The documents were part of the department’s 2011 ’Analyst’s Desktop Binder‘ used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify ‘media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities’.

The information sheds new light on how government analysts are instructed to patrol the internet searching for domestic and external threats. The Daily Mail’s article noted the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote a letter to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counter-terrorism and Intelligence, describing it’s choice of words as ‘broad, vague and ambiguous’.

What wasn’t disclosed is how the agency actually gains access to the various search engines and social networks to monitor the specified keywords. My guess is the DHS has a “special arrangement” with companies like Google GOOG -1.94%, Facebook FB -1.12%, Microsoft MSFT +0.00%, Yahoo and Twitter to gain secure direct API access. This type of access would allow it to use distributed cloud technologies to monitor the daily flow of social media and search activity in something close to real time.

I would love to learn more about the technologies used to accomplish this type of social / web monitoring. The applications for monitoring trends and social statics are fascinating when applied to other industry sectors. Given the extent of the monitoring, I’m sure this post itself is now coming up on the DHS radar, so please feel free to leave a comment with any insights.

2014:

(Update 1: Reading through the Desktop Binder, I discovered the DHS Twitter account is @dhsnocmmc1 and DHS appears to be using tweetdeck to monitor the various keywords. See Page 38 – Also interesting to note they seem to be using a Mac Mini as a server, and no password vaults. All Passwords appear to be shared in a plain text word document.)

(Update 2: On page 37, DHS instructs analysts to accept invalid SSL certificates forever without verification. Although invalid SSL warnings often appear in benign situations, they can also signal a man-in-the-middle attack. Not a good practice for the security conscious. Thanks to @obraon twitter for the tip.)

List1

List

list3

For the full DHS document, click here.

Destruction by Foreign Hackers Cannot be Measured

Posted on by

The job of the future appears to be cyber soldiers, warriors trained to protect America from cyber-terrorism.

US Army Looks Inward for Next Batch of Cyber Specialists

The Army has turned to its own ranks in hopes of satisfying its growing need for talented cybersecurity professionals.

In June, the agency announced that all E-1- through E-8-ranked soldiers, regardless of their technical background, could apply to participate in a yearlong cyber training program, according to a recent Army press release.

Those successful candidates who complete the program would then be reclassified into the 17C military occupational specialty – also known as cyber operations specialist.

As cyber operations specialists, these soldiers will be tasked with supporting the military through offensive and defensive cyber operations.

China and Russia are using hacked data to target U.S. spies, officials say

LATimes:

Foreign spy services, especially in China and Russia, are aggressively aggregating and cross-indexing hacked U.S. computer databases — including security clearance applications, airline records and medical insurance forms — to identify U.S. intelligence officers and agents, U.S. officials said.

At least one clandestine network of American engineers and scientists who provide technical assistance to U.S. undercover operatives and agents overseas has been compromised as a result, according to two U.S. officials.

The Obama administration has scrambled to boost cyberdefenses for federal agencies and crucial infrastructure as foreign-based attacks have penetrated government websites and email systems, social media accounts and, most important, vast data troves containing Social Security numbers, financial information, medical records and other personal data on millions of Americans.

 

Counterintelligence officials say their adversaries combine those immense data files and then employ sophisticated software to try to isolate disparate clues that can be used to identify and track — or worse, blackmail and recruit — U.S. intelligence operatives.

Digital analysis can reveal “who is an intelligence officer, who travels where, when, who’s got financial difficulties, who’s got medical issues, [to] put together a common picture,” William Evanina, the top counterintelligence official for the U.S. intelligence community, said in an interview.

Asked whether adversaries had used this information against U.S. operatives, Evanina said, “Absolutely.”

Evanina declined to say which nations are involved. Other U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments, say China and Russia are collecting and scrutinizing sensitive U.S. computer files for counterintelligence purposes.

U.S. cyberspying is also extensive, but authorities in Moscow and Beijing frequently work in tandem with criminal hackers and private companies to find and extract sensitive data from U.S. systems, rather than steal it themselves. That limits clear targets for U.S. retaliation.

The Obama administration marked a notable exception last week when a U.S. military drone strike near Raqqah, Syria, killed the British-born leader of the CyberCaliphate, an Islamic State hacking group that has aggressively sought to persuade sympathizers to launch “lone wolf” attacks in the United States and elsewhere.

Junaid Hussain had posted names, addresses and photos of about 1,300 U.S. military and other officials on Twitter and the Internet, and urged his followers to find and kill them, according to U.S. officials. They said he also had been in contact with one of the two heavily armed attackers killed in May outside a prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas. Hussain is the first known hacker targeted by a U.S. drone.

The Pentagon also is scouring the leaked list of clients and their sexual preferences from the Ashley Madison cheating website to identify service members who may have violated military rules against infidelity and be vulnerable to extortion by foreign intelligence agencies.

Far more worrisome was last year’s cyberlooting — allegedly by China — of U.S. Office of Personnel Management databases holding detailed personnel records and security clearance application files for about 22 million people, including not only current and former federal employees and contractors but also their families and friends.

“A foreign spy agency now has the ability to cross-check who has a security clearance, via the OPM breach, with who was cheating on their wife via the Ashley Madison breach, and thus identify someone to target for blackmail,” said Peter W. Singer, a fellow at the nonprofit New America Foundation in Washington and coauthor of the book “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar.”

The immense data troves can reveal marital problems, health issues and financial distress that foreign intelligence services can use to try to pry secrets from U.S. officials, according to Rep. Adam B. Schiff of Burbank, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

“It’s very much a 21st century challenge,” Schiff said. “The whole cyberlandscape has changed.”

U.S. intelligence officials have seen evidence that China’s Ministry of State Security has combined medical data snatched in January from health insurance giant Anthem, passenger records stripped from United Airlines servers in May and the OPM security clearance files.

The Anthem breach, which involved personal data on 80 million current and former customers and employees, used malicious software that U.S. officials say is linked to the Chinese government. The information has not appeared for sale on black market websites, indicating that a foreign government controls it.

U.S. officials have not publicly blamed Beijing for the theft of the OPM and the Anthem files, but privately say both hacks were traced to the Chinese government.

The officials say China’s state security officials tapped criminal hackers to steal the files, and then gave them to private Chinese software companies to help analyze and link the information together. That kept the government’s direct fingerprints off the heist and the data aggregation that followed.

In a similar fashion, officials say, Russia’s powerful Federal Security Service, or FSB, has close connections to programmers and criminal hacking rings in Russia and has used them in a relentless series of cyberattacks.

According to U.S. officials, Russian hackers linked to the Kremlin infiltrated the State Department’s unclassified email system for several months last fall. Russian hackers also stole gigabytes of customer data from several U.S. banks and financial companies, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., last year.

A Chinese Embassy spokesman, Zhu Haiquan, said Friday that his government “firmly opposes and combats all forms of cyberattacks in accordance with the law.” The Russian Embassy did not respond to multiple requests for comment. U.S. intelligence officials want President Obama to press their concerns about Chinese hacking when Chinese President Xi Jinping visits the White House on Sept. 25.

After the recent breaches, U.S. cybersecurity officials saw a dramatic increase in the number of targeted emails sent to U.S. government employees that contain links to malicious software.

In late July, for example, an unclassified email system used by the Joint Chiefs and their staff — 4,000 people in all — was taken down for 12 days after they received sophisticated “spear-phishing” emails that U.S. officials suspect was a Russian hack.

The emails appeared to be from USAA, a bank that serves military members, and each sought to persuade the recipient to click a link that would implant spyware into the system.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said the hack shows the military needs to boost its cyberdefenses.

“We’re not doing as well as we need to do in job one in cyber, which is defending our own networks,” Carter said Wednesday. “Our military is dependent upon and empowered by networks for its effective operations…. We have to be better at network defense than we are now.”

Carter spent Friday in Silicon Valley in an effort to expand a partnership between the Pentagon, academia and the private sector that aims to improve the nation’s digital defenses. Carter opened an outreach office in Mountain View this year to try to draw on local expertise.

U.S. intelligence officers are supposed to cover their digital tracks and are trained to look for surveillance. Counterintelligence officials say they worry more about the scientists, engineers and other technical experts who travel abroad to support the career spies, who mostly work in U.S. embassies.

The contractors are more vulnerable to having their covers blown now, and two U.S. officials said some already have been compromised. They refused to say whether any were subject to blackmail or other overtures from foreign intelligence services.

But Evanina’s office, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, based in Bethesda, Md., has recently updated pamphlets, training videos and desk calendars for government workers to warn them of the increased risk from foreign spy services.

“Travel vulnerabilities are greater than usual,” reads one handout. Take “extra precaution” if people “approach you in a friendly manner and seem to have a lot in common with you.”