In March last year, the unmanned
X-37B US military spaceplane launched from Cape Canaveral on mission
USA-226, to "demonstrate various experiments", sensors and technology. Its original 270 day mission was
extended in November "as circumstances allow" for "additional experimentation opportunities", but a dedicated group of optical tracking specialists in the US and Europe believe that the X-37B is in fact
spying on the Chinese space station
Tiangong-1.
[more inside]
posted by adrianhon
on Jan 5, 2012 -
59 comments
Amazon has recently declared that tomorrow is
Price Check day. If you go into a brick and mortar retail store with Amazon’s new
Price Check App on your smart phone, and scan a barcode with the location settings active, and then report back to Amazon on the price of that product, Amazon will deduct $5 from your online purchase of that product. Amazon claims it’s trying to keep prices low for consumers, but others attribute the move to
a less innocuous agenda.
[more inside]
posted by Toekneesan
on Dec 9, 2011 -
143 comments
The creators of
Italian Spiderman were
hired by Australia's multicultural TV network, SBS, to produce
Danger 5: "Set in a bizarre, 1960s inspired version of World War II, action comedy series DANGER 5 follows a team of five spies on a mission to kill Adolf Hitler." The six-part TV series will air in February 2012, but the
trailer and the
first instalment of a promotional web-series are now playing.
posted by robcorr
on Nov 24, 2011 -
30 comments
If you met Phil Pressel at a party anytime over the past half-century, he couldn't tell you what he did for a living. If you were his wife, you didn't even know where he was staying on those mysterious business trips.
Today, after 46 years, the man who made the camera that prevented a war finally got to show off his magnum opus.
posted by Spike
on Oct 14, 2011 -
37 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
Graham Greene, Arthur Ransome and Somerset Maugham all spied for Britain, admits MI6 "The authors Graham Greene, Arthur Ransome, Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie and Malcolm Muggeridge, and the philosopher AJ "Freddie" Ayer, all worked for MI6, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service admitted for the first time today . They are among the many exotic characters who agreed to spy for Britain, mainly during wartime, who appear in a the first authorised history of MI6."
posted by Fizz
on Oct 11, 2010 -
27 comments
Reconnaissance will outlive the U-2, but there will always be a divot in the hearts of those who have seen the curvature of the earth, the stars seemingly close enough to touch, and known the satisfaction of having completed a mission with the Dragon Lady.
Former U-2 pilot and military correspondent
Cholene Espinoza writes a lovely adieu to these beautiful,
difficult-to-fly aircraft, as well as a requiem for the era of human pilots for surveillance, giving way now to
UAVs and other remote-control drones. The U-2 is, amazingly, still in service, but apparently soon to be grounded --
or not -- half-a-century after
Francis Gary Powers' little Cold War
incident. [
Previously]
posted by chavenet
on May 12, 2010 -
36 comments
"No one guessed the truth, which was simpler, and therefore stranger, than their wildest theories: that the scared young woman so hotly pursued by South Carolina police, the Secret Service, federal marshals and even the U.S. Army was actually on a bizarre and misguided journey of self-discovery." Rolling Stone reports on the strange case of Esther Reed:
The Girl Who Conned The Ivy League.
(via Metachat)
posted by The Whelk
on Jan 17, 2010 -
46 comments
Cyborg Spy Beetles are no longer a thing of the future. UC Berkeley (funded by DARPA) has created cyborg beetles guided wirelessly via laptop. These spy beetles were created with the intent of bugging actual conversations, literally acting as the "fly on the wall".
[more inside]
posted by scrutiny
on Oct 27, 2009 -
56 comments
Matt Helm is a fictional character created by author Donald Hamilton. He is a U.S. government counter-agent—a man whose primary job is to kill or nullify enemy agents—not a spy or secret agent in the ordinary sense of the term as used in spy thrillers. ... The character appeared in 27 books over a 33-year period beginning in 1960... A movie series was made in the mid-to-late 1960s starring Dean Martin... the series bore no resemblance at all to the character, atmosphere, or themes of Hamilton's original books, nor to the hard-edged action of Bond. One reason was the attitude of the filmmakers that the only way to compete with the Bond films was to parody them. -
Wikipedia (links may be mildly NSFW) [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Oct 14, 2009 -
17 comments
"Habsburg! A vile being, heir to an illustrious name, born to a fortune, to honours, to soldiers, to prestige, and who finished as the lowest of Montmartre pimps, living from the money of a poor and unstable girl whom he sent to commit his foul deeds in his place!"
That was
after this Polish scion of the most famous family in Europe and commander of a
soi disant "Ukrainian Legion" failed to finagle the crown as a Socialist king of The Ukraine, and became instead a patron of the rent boys of Paris who
"handled women by necessity and men for pleasure". And all that
before he turned successively a Nazi sympathizer, a British spy, and finally came, for the first and last time, to Ukraine's capital Kiev as
a victim of Stalin and the Twentieth Century.
posted by orthogonality
on Feb 7, 2009 -
24 comments
Wired: Obama Sides With Bush in Spy Case. "The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants."
posted by blue_beetle
on Jan 23, 2009 -
86 comments
I first heard of a 'Paraset' when I saw a message on the
QRP-L reflector announcing an upcoming '
June 6th Paraset D-Day' activity. A search for more information soon revealed that the Paraset was a small vacuum-tube transmitter-receiver unit built during WWII in the UK at the
Whaddon Hall headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service Communications Unit. Known officially as the '
Whaddon Mark VII', the units were either air-dropped by parachute or carried, by the jumpers themselves, into many of the occupied countries of western Europe. . .
posted by jackspace
on Nov 5, 2008 -
13 comments
Spy music! Whether it's
Lalo Schifrin's theme for
Mission Impossible, or
Jerry Goldsmith's theme for
Man from U.N.C.L.E., or the greatest of them all,
John Barry's iconic
James Bond theme, you know it when you hear it. Now, for my money, the best spy music in
recent years wasn't from a spy movie at all, but an animated superhero film: the action-packed
theme and soundtrack for
The Incredibles, in which the very talented
Michael Giacchino was clearly (and brilliantly)
channeling John Barry. And of course, you'll all want to head over
here and see what your fellow MeFiers have lately been doing with the genre.
[note: see hoverovers for link descriptions] [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Aug 1, 2008 -
54 comments
The real James Bond —
Sidney George Reilly, the shadowy '
Ace of Spies' and
inspiration for Ian Fleming's
007, was born Shlomo/Sigmund Georgievich Rosenblum in Ukraine/Poland in 1874. Perhaps illegitimate,
dapper Sidney was a tireless self-promoter, patent-medicine
chemist, world traveller, and high-stakes gambler (not only at the tables: he married four women but divorced none.) A Czarist
Okhrana informer as a Parisian student, he was hired as an undercover agent in the late 1890s by
M of Scotland Yard. Reilly worked both sides of the
Russo-Japanese War, influenced
British oil interests in Iran, brokered
World War I arms sales, and volunteered for the
Royal Flying Corps in Canada. Sent to Russia by
C of Britain's
SIS in 1918, he joined a
plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks: it failed, but he escaped to London. Returning to Russia in 1919 to help the
White Army, he was later awarded the
British Military Cross. A staunch anti-Communist, Reilly schemed against them throughout his career.
Lured back to Russia by agents of the '
Trust' — an anti-Bolshevik trap set by the Soviet
OGPU — Sidney was arrested, interrogated, and shot in 1925.
posted by cenoxo
on Oct 18, 2006 -
14 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
The New York Times (reg required) is reporting that the
National Security Agency has eavesdropped on far more domestic telecommunications at the directive of President Bush than has been previously admitted. "The N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications... N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation."
posted by chakalakasp
on Dec 23, 2005 -
243 comments
