Emmanuel "Toto" Constant led a paramilitary organization called FRAPH that terrorized Haiti after the overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. When FRAPH's fortunes declined, Toto mysteriously appeared in New York City, where he was scorned by the Haitian community. Justice eventually caught up to Toto, who is now imprisoned in New York state. [more inside]
posted by reenum on Apr 27, 2011 - 6 comments

Earlier this year, the Washington Post exposed the increasing size of the US intelligence community: 1,931 private companies, 10,000 offices, and hundreds of thousands of employees (previously). Today we have a better picture on how much it's costing taxpayers: 80 billion every year. [more inside]
posted by notion on Oct 28, 2010 - 73 comments

The NSA Bibliographies The NSA internally publishes thousands of papers every year, on every topic from spycraft to cryptography to physics & aliens (no, really!). Each year the titles of these papers gets indexed & those indexes are also published internally. The Memory Hole has made a successful FOIA request for a large number of these, spanning almost 50 years. We don't get to see the actual papers, but just the titles are fascinating - including such page turners as "Computer Virus Infections: Is NSA Vulnerable?", "KAL 007 Shootdown: A View from [redacted]", "NSA in the Cyberpunk Future", "Telephone Codes and Safe Combinations: A Deadly Duo", "Coupon Collecting and Cryptology", "Cranks, Nuts, and Screwballs" & my personal favorite, "Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages". When you're done browsing the titles, there's a sample form you can use to request some of the documents yourself!
posted by scalefree on Oct 2, 2006 - 10 comments

Richard Tomlinson is a former spy. Jailed under the Official Secrets Act in 1995 for publishing his memoirs, famed for claiming there's a cover up surrounding Princess Diana's death and allegedly leaking a list of active MI6 agents, he is still fuming about his dismissal from the Secret Intelligence Service. So he started a weblog, complete with posts containing sensitive information. The British authorities are displeased.
posted by jack_mo on May 24, 2006 - 33 comments

The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping [book review: for access: "legion" "legion"] Remember chatter? After 9/11, it was all over the news. For months, snatches of cellphone conversations in Karachi or Tora Bora routinely made the front page. Television newscasters could chill the blood instantly by reporting on "increased levels of chatter" somewhere in the ether. But what exactly was it? Who was picking it up, and how were they making sense of it? Patrick Radden Keefe does his best to answer these questions and demystify a very mysterious subject in "Chatter," a beginner's guide to the world of electronic espionage and the work of the National Security Agency, responsible for communications security and signals intelligence, or "sigint." In a series of semiautonomous chapters, he describes Echelon, the vast electronic intelligence-gathering system operated by the United States and its English-speaking allies; surveys the current technology of global eavesdropping; and tries to sort out the vexed issue of privacy rights versus security demands in a world at war with terrorism.
posted by Postroad on Mar 2, 2005 - 16 comments