Mrrandroid battle bears gold hack7/3/2023 ![]() That figure is expected to pass $2 trillion in just a few years’ time. Last year, total global online business-to-consumer sales were nearly $1.5 trillion. When the FBI sabotages the efforts of consumers and businesses to secure their data through encryption, the agency is essentially attacking the security foundations of the online world created over the past 20 years. If implemented, the FBI’s proposal would only make all Americans more vulnerable to malicious actors online and do nothing to stop the next terrorist attack. Using the legislative process to force companies to make defective electronic devices with exploitable communications channels in the hope that they will catch a tiny number of potential or actual terrorists is a self-defeating strategy. So it should not be treated as just another intelligence target, which is certainly the FBI’s and Natural Security Agency’s current mindset. But the Internet has become the primary means for global, real-time communications for individuals, nonprofits, businesses and governments. If these militant groups were traditional nation-states with their own dedicated communications channels, we’d all be cheering on the FBI’s efforts. The FBI’s new anti-encryption campaign is just the latest phase in the government’s attempt to deny Islamic State and related groups the ability to shield their communications. Nonetheless, Washington’s overall counterterrorism bias in funding and manpower has been toward using the most sophisticated technology available as the key means of battling a relatively low-tech enemy. The CIA has repeatedly attempted - occasionally at high cost - to penetrate militant organizations like al Qaeda and Islamic State. Ntelligence agencies that were created to oppose and penetrate other nation-state adversaries are not necessarily well equipped to go after terrorists, particularly when those groups are ethnically cohesive or recruited through family and tribal vetting, and able to operate in a low-tech fashion to negate the advantages that advanced technologies provide. As former CIA officer Philip Giraldi has noted: intelligence community have failed to adapt their intelligence-collection practices and operations to meet the challenges of the “new world disorder” in which we live. It boils down to the fact that the FBI and the U.S. This is a problem the agency must address if it is ever going to be successful in finding and neutralizing terrorist cells overseas. Compromising encryption technology will do nothing to solve the intelligence community’s human-intelligence deficit. The CIA’s failure to field agents under nonofficial cover, or to recruit enough reliable local informants on the ground who could communicate securely with CIA handlers outside Yemen, is symptomatic of the agency’s failure to break with its reliance on embassy-based operations throughout that part of the world. ![]() Among those removed were senior officers who worked closely with Yemen’s intelligence and security services to target al-Qaeda operatives and disrupt terrorism plots often aimed at the United States. The spy agency has pulled dozens of operatives, analysts and other staffers from Yemen as part of a broader extraction of roughly 200 Americans who had been based at the embassy in Sana, officials said. This problem is true for Yemen as well, as a recent Washington Post story highlighted: intelligence community’s emphasis should be on the spy on the ground who actually gathers critical information and makes any penetration of a terrorist organization possible. ![]() Notice his reference to technology “databases” rather than the importance of the human element. “The concern is in Syria,” he explained, “the lack of our footprint on the ground in Syria - that the databases won’t have the information we need.” ![]() Steinbach testified about this before the House Homeland Security Committee earlier this month. government intelligence personnel operate - is increasingly difficult in the areas of the Middle East and southwest Asia undergoing often violent political change. embassies as bases from which CIA and other U.S. Overseas, the Cold War style of spying - relying on U.S. The Justice Department’s refusal to investigate the New York Police Department’s mass surveillance and questionable informant-recruitment tactics among immigrants in the Arab- and Muslim-American communities has only made matters worse. The FBI, for example, targets the very Arab-American and Muslim-American communities it needs to work with if it hopes to find and neutralize home-grown violent extremists, including promulgating new rules on profiling that allow for the potential mapping of Arab- or Muslim-American communities. government’s counterterrorism policies have made that next to impossible. The best way to disrupt any organized criminal element is to get inside of it physically. ![]()
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