Jeffrey Sterling, Convicted of Leaking About Botched CIA Program, Has Been Released From Prison

Jeffrey Sterling, the former CIA agent convicted under the Espionage Act for talking to a New York Times reporter, has been released from prison after serving more than two years of his 42-month sentence, and is now in a halfway house.

Sterling’s case drew nationwide attention because the Obama-era Department of Justice unsuccessfully tried to force the reporter, James Risen, to divulge the identity of his sources for “State of War,” a book in which he revealed the CIA had botched a covert operation against Iran’s nuclear program. Risen reported that instead of undermining the Iranians, the CIA had provided them with useful information on how to build a nuclear bomb. (Risen is now The Intercept’s senior national security correspondent and directs First Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund.)

Former CIA agent arrested for keeping notebook full of sensitive information

A former CIA officer has been arrested for keeping details of US agents, safe houses and other secrets years after retiring from the agency and moving to Hong Kong.

The former intelligence officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was detained at JFK airport on Monday, more than five years after FBI agents discovered he had kept a small address book and pocket calendar containing secret operational notes from his time at the CIA, about “asset meetings, operational meeting locations, operational phone numbers, true names of assets and covert facilities” according to court documents.

Iran prosecutor blames CIA, Israel, Saudi for protests

Employees at nearly a dozen Tim Hortons outlets across Ontario tell CBC News they are facing the loss of paid breaks, benefits, and perks by franchise owners citing Ontario's minimum wage increase.

The cuts go beyond the iconic coffee chain, with minimum wage workers at other businesses being told they're also going to take a hit as a result of the hike.

Harvard rescinds Chelsea Manning's visiting fellowship after CIA chief protests

Harvard University has rescinded an offer to make Chelsea Manning a visiting fellow after the director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, cancelled an appearance at the university.

Pompeo had been scheduled to appear at Harvard’s John F Kennedy school of government to give a speech on global security concerns, but withdrew on Thursday, calling the university’s invitation to Manning a “shameful stamp of approval”.

Meet the Midwestern Contractor That Appears Hundreds of Times in the CIA WikiLeaks Dump

In a suburb of Cincinnati about 30 minutes north of the Ohio River, right down the street from the local Hooters, a little known subsidiary of defense giant Northrop Grumman works on contracts for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Xetron Corporation, whose products range from military sensors to communications systems to information security software, shows up in nearly 400 documents published earlier this month by WikiLeaks. Those documents describe some of the tools the CIA uses to hack phones, smart TVs, and other digital products to conduct espionage overseas — and some of the partners that help them do it, like Xetron.

Ex-acting CIA director tells MSNBC: Russia carried out its ‘most effective covert operation in decades’

The Russian effort to disrupt the American political process has worked beyond the country’s wildest dreams, says a former acting CIA director who served under the George W. Bush administration.

In an interview with Chris Jansing on MSNBC, McLaughlin explained that Russian efforts to interfere with our presidential election have sowed chaos and created an atmosphere of mistrust that is harming our government’s ability to properly function.

Apple to 'rapidly address' any security holes as companies respond to CIA leak

Apple has promised to “rapidly address” any security holes used by the CIA to hack iPhones, following the release of a huge tranche of documents covering the intelligence agency’s stockpile of software vulnerabilities.

The leak, dubbed “Vault 7” by its publisher WikiLeaks, is made up of a collection of around 10,000 individual documents created between 2014 and 2016. A spokesman for the CIA said it would not comment “on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents” and the Trump administration spokesman Sean Spicer also declined comment.

Russia accuses cybersecurity experts of treasonous links to CIA

Two of Moscow’s top cybersecurity officials are facing treason charges for cooperating with the CIA, according to a Russian news report.

The accusations add further intrigue to a mysterious scandal that has had the Moscow rumour mill working in overdrive for the past week, and come not long after US intelligence accused Russia of interfering in the US election and hacking the Democratic party’s servers.

NSA and CIA Double Their Warrantless Searches on Americans in Two Years

FROM 2013 to 2015, the NSA and CIA doubled the number of warrantless searches they conducted for Americans’ data in a massive NSA database ostensibly collected for foreign intelligence purposes, according to a new intelligence community transparency report.

The estimated number of search terms “concerning a known U.S. person” to get contents of communications within what is known as the 702 database was 4,672—more than double the 2013 figure.

The CIA Is Investing in Firms That Mine Your Tweets and Instagram Photos

SOFT ROBOTS THAT can grasp delicate objects, computer algorithms designed to spot an “insider threat,” and artificial intelligence that will sift through large data sets — these are just a few of the technologies being pursued by companies with investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, according to a document obtained by The Intercept.

‘Panama Papers’ Law Firm Helped CIA Operatives, Gun-Runners Set Up Shell Companies

After journalists started naming names in the massive document dump known as the Panama Papers, which details the shadow networks of shell companies and tax havens used by the super-rich, many wondered why Americans went unmentioned in the international scandal. Now, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has implicated the CIA as one of the players of this secret — if technically legal — game of hiding money from tax collectors.

The CIA Is an Ethics-Free Zone

I joined the CIA in January 1990.

The CIA was vastly different back then from the agency that emerged in the days after the 9/11 attacks. And it was a far cry from the flawed and confused organization it is today.

One reason for those flaws — and for the convulsions the agency has experienced over the past decade and a half — is its utter lack of ethics in intelligence operations.

Former CIA Detainees Are Suing The Psychologists Who Developed The Torture Program

WASHINGTON -- Three former CIA detainees are suing over being tortured at the agency's infamous "black sites," the first suit to seek accountability in a U.S. court for the CIA's tactics since the Senate Intelligence Committee released the executive summary of its groundbreaking torture report. But the ex-detainees aren't suing the CIA.

They’re suing the pair that sold the spies the program.

Investigators Seek Evidence Implicating the CIA in 1976 Murder of Chilean Diplomat on U.S. Soil

Recently declassified documents make it clear that the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet ordered the killing of Chile’s former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier near the White House in 1976. However, an important question remains: Did the CIA have anything to do with the assassination?

US spy chief's 'highly unusual' reported contact with military official raises concerns

Barack Obama’s intelligence chief is said to be in frequent and unusual contact with a military intelligence officer at the center of a growing scandal over rosy portrayals of the war against the Islamic State, the Guardian has learned.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, is said to talk nearly every day with the head of US Central Command’s intelligence wing, Army Major General Steven Grove – “which is highly, highly unusual”, according to a former intelligence official.

Shocker: The CIA Isn't Sorry For Torture

WASHINGTON -- More than a year after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify its massive study on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program -- and nearly 10 months after its gruesome executive summary was publicly released -- the CIA’s George W. Bush-era guard is still bitter.

And unsurprisingly, the former spies aren’t sorry.

In a volume to be released later this week, former CIA leaders Porter Goss, Jose Rodriguez and George Tenet, along with several other CIA leaders and lawyers, accuse the Intelligence panel’s now-minority Democrats of compiling a slanted report, and unequivocally defend the use of torture against high-level terror suspects.

CIA torture appears to have broken spy agency rule on human experimentation

The Central Intelligence Agency had explicit guidelines for “human experimentation” – before, during and after its post-9/11 torture of terrorism detainees – that raise new questions about the limits on the agency’s in-house and contracted medical research.

Sections of a previously classified CIA document, made public by the Guardian on Monday, empower the agency’s director to “approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research”. The leeway provides the director, who has never in the agency’s history been a medical doctor, with significant influence over limitations the US government sets to preserve safe, humane and ethical procedures on people.

Exclusive: The CIA Is Shuttering a Secretive Climate Research Program

On Wednesday, when President Barack Obama spoke at the US Coast Guard Academy's commencement ceremony, he called climate change "an immediate risk to our national security." In recent months, the Obama administration has repeatedly highlighted the international threats posed by global warming and has emphasized the need for the country's national security agencies to study and confront the issue.

So some national security experts were surprised to learn that an important component of that effort has been ended. A CIA spokesperson confirmed to Climate Desk that the agency is shuttering its main climate research program. Under the program, known as Medea, the CIA had allowed civilian scientists to access classified data—such as ocean temperature and tidal readings gathered by Navy submarines and topography data collected by spy satellites—in an effort to glean insights about how global warming could create security threats around the world. In theory, the program benefited both sides: Scientists could study environmental data that was much higher-resolution than they would normally have access to, and the CIA received research insights about climate-related threats.

But now, the program has come to a close.

How the World’s Largest Psychological Association Aided the CIA’s Torture Program

The public exposure in mid-2004 of a government-sanctioned and highly bureaucratized program of torture and cruel treatment caused a political crisis that threatened to derail the Bush administration’s interrogation and detention policies. In the wake of that crisis, some American Psychological Association (APA) senior staff members and leaders colluded, secretly, with officials from the White House, Defense Department and CIA to enable psychologists’ continuing participation in interrogations at CIA black sites, Guantánamo, and other overseas facilities. One result of this collusion was a revision in 2005 of the APA’s code of ethics for interrogations in order to provide cover for psychologists working in these facilities.

CIA Torture Report Sinks A Little More, As Agencies Don't Bother To Read It

WASHINGTON -- When the new Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Richard Burr (R-N.C.), announced that, allegedly unbeknownst to him, the former chairwoman had widely distributed the panel's study of CIA torture, he said he was perturbed. A sensitive document -- one whose validity he has vehemently challenged -- now being spread within the executive branch? Concerning, Burr said, to say the least.

Except most of the recipients that Burr is concerned about never even opened their copy.