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Stephen Cambone, Hacker PWN, Used to Head DOD’s “Intelligence”

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Stephen Cambone was the first ever Under Secretary of Defense for something called “Intelligence.”

In that role, he oversaw a domestic spying program that targeted hippies and made GOP cronies rich. And then he went on to profit off that domestic spying program at a company called QinetiQ.

Which is why I’m having a hard time summoning much grief that Chinese hackers have pwned another US Defense Contractor — none other than QinetiQ (George Tenet, another noted “intelligence” figure, was there until 2008)!

Here are the kinds of things the hackers accessed, almost unimpeded.

The lengthy spying operation on QinetiQ jeopardized the company’s sensitive technology involving drones, satellites, the U.S. Army’s combat helicopter fleet, and military robotics, both already-deployed systems and those still in development, according to internal investigations.

And here is the kind of access QinetiQ allowed both Chinese and Russian hackers.

In 2008, a security team found that QinetiQ’s internal corporate network could be accessed from a Waltham, Massachusetts, parking lot using an unsecured Wi-Fi connection. The same investigation discovered that Russian hackers had been stealing secrets from QinetiQ for more than 2 1/2 years through a secretary’s computer, which they had rigged to send the data directly to a server in the Russian Federation, according to an internal investigation.

Read the whole thing — you won’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Meanwhile, the government seems more intent on violating my privacy to fix this kind of wholesale hacking, rather than blackballing those contractors who are incapable of securing their networks.

The State Department, which has the power to revoke QinetiQ’s charter to handle restricted military technology if it finds negligence, has yet to take any action against the company.

[snip]

In May 2012, QinetiQ received a $4.7 million cyber-security contract from the U.S. Transportation Department, which includes protection of the country’s critical transport infrastructure.

The same company that let China hack at will for years is being paid millions for cybersecurity.

That about says it all.

CIFA 2.0 Back in the Outsourcing Business

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Remember the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA)? Here’s how I described it back in 2007.

CIFA is, along with the National Security Letters Congress is now cracking down on, probably the biggest abuse of civil rights and privacy BushCo has hatched up. It was designed to gather intelligence on threats to defense installments in the United States–to try to collect information (in the TALON database) on threatening people scoping out domestic bases. But it ended up focusing on peace activists and the lefty blogosphere’s own Jesus’ General.  70 percent of CIFA’s employees are contractors, a figure that makes it a prime candidate for politicized contracting scandal.

Among the contractors spying on Americans was MZM, one of the companies that bribed Duke Cunningham. Prosecutors in that case started investigating MZM’s CIFA contracts in May 2006. Three months after that, the top two managers at CIFA, who had directed CIFA keep sending MZM contracts, resigned suddenly. When DOD’s Inspector General tried to investigate CIFA in 2007, it discovered (it claimed) that the entire CIFA database had been destroyed in June 2006, just as prosecutors were closing in on those contracts.

Later, in 2008, just as CIFA was claiming it couldn’t publicly reveal its unclassified contracts, we learned that Stephen Cambone (who had led one of the inquiries into CIFA), had won a contract from it, sort of a payoff for not finding anything, I guess.

Later that year, DOD “disestablished” CIFA.

Or rather, they renamed it, calling it the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center. Then, last year, we learned that database DOD claimed had been destroyed in 2006 really hadn’t been, and CIFA 2.0 was getting back in the business of keeping a database of information on big threats to the US like Quakers and bloggers.

The Defense Intelligence Agency wants to open a new repository for information about individuals and groups in what appears to be a successor to a controversial counterintelligence program that was disbanded in 2008.

The new Foreign Intelligence and Counterintelligence Operation Records section will be housed in DIA’s Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center, or DCHC, formed after the demise of the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, according to an announcement that appeared Tuesday in the Federal Register.

The “activity” was disbanded, but evidently not its records database, which seems to be headed to the new unit. One of the criticisms of CIFA was that it vacuumed up raw intelligence on legal protest groups and individuals from local police and military spies.

When the DCHC was launched in 2008, the Pentagon said “it shall NOT be designated as a law enforcement activity and shall not perform any law enforcement functions previously assigned to DoD CIFA.”

Why the new depository would want such records while its parent agency no longer has a law enforcement function could not be learned. Not could it be learned whether the repository will include intelligence reports on protest groups gathered by its predecessor, CIFA.

The only thing left, at that point, was to figure out what defense contractor was getting rich spying on American citizens.

The answer? Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed Martin has openings for talented and motivated professionals in the counterintelligence (CI) field to be part of an evolving and highly specialized team that will provide direct support to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC).

The team Lockheed Martin is assembling a team which will function in CI areas such as: force protection; support to Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF); CI in Cyberspace; research, development and acquisitions; critical infrastructure protection; CI support to Offensive CI Operations; analysis & production (A&P); collections; campaigns; policy; assessments; TSCM; security; information assurance, and Enterprise governance support (administrative).

Not only is the entire concept wrong, using contractors to spy on Quakers and bloggers. Not only is it especially troublesome that Lockheed–a company with close ties to NSA–is doing this work (which would make it easy for reports from physical surveillance to migrate into the signals surveillance NSA does). But note what else is now included in CIFA 2.0: “CI in Cyberspace.” That is, Lockheed with its close ties to NSA is now in charge of spying on those claimed to present an online counterintelligence threat to the United States. And maybe doing things like hacking a media site to try to exercise illegal prior restraint.

Rummy’s Dump

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Donald Rumsfeld, channeling Julian Assange, has now made the database of documents accompanying his book available.

As Spencer notes, making these documents available is largely self-serving; a way for Rummy to point to early moments of reflection that were followed by later moments of rash stupidity or lies.

To put it uncharitably: when you’ve got a rep for being less-than-honest and unwilling to debate, you might as well let the documents speak for themselves.

So take, for instance, one that Rumsfeld’s promoting on his website. It’s a September 9, 2002 summary from the Joint Staff’s top intelligence official confessing that U.S. assessments of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction “rely heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence.” Rumsfeld told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to “take a look” at the memo, because “what we don’t know about WMD… is big.”

Aha! Rumsfeld was a voice for moderation on the Iraq WMD all along! He looks pretty good for bravely disclosing that, right? Not when you remember that after he received that summary, he continued to portray the evidence against Iraq as ironclad, up to and after the invasion. (“We know where [the WMD] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”)

Spencer points to similar examples relating to Afghanistan and interrogation.

But there are some fascinating documents in here. As Marc Ambinder noted yesterday, there’s Rummy’s memo to General Myers and Stephen Cambone supporting George Tenet’s recommendation that John Brennan head the Terrorist Threat Integration Center; in that position Brennan oversaw targeting for Cheney’s illegal wiretap program. But in news relevant to today, the memo also emphasizes Brennan’s experience as CIA’s Chief of Station in Cairo.

Then there’s this memo from retired General Wayne Downing to Rummy recommending some changes to Special Operations. Among other things, this memo recommends that special operations report directly to the Secretary of Defense:

To flatten the chain of command, JSOC should report directly to the SD for the immediate future. There is precedent for this new approach to the combat employment of SOF that will better position DoD for the future fight. JSOC reported directly to the CJCS prior to Goldwater-Nichols legislation and the Nunn-Cohen Amendment.

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Stephen Cambone Collects on His Handiwork with CIFA

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I’ve long suspected that the GOP has used the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) as a way to spy on domestic enemies even while making their friends rich. CIFA is the organization that collected information on both Jesus’ General and Quakers, then stuck it into a database without following requisite privacy protections. And then, when Congress and the Carol Lam started focusing on CIFA, its database on private citizens got quickly disappeared.

70% of its staff are contractors. And one of the early CIFA contractors was the company of Mitch Wade–Duke Cunningham’s briber–MZM.

Which is why I noted, back in May 2006, that CIFA seemed like a huge improvement (from a Republican perspective) on Nixon-era domestic spying.

Back when Nixon was spying on his enemies, he used the agencies of the US government. He was using civil servants subject to congressional oversight to do his dirty work. But the newfangled Republican party learned in Iran-Contra that, if you outsource the dirty work far enough, you’re more likely to avoid the oversight that will lead to discovery.

[snip]

So let me connect the dots here. Republican legislators have set up this nifty scheme, whereby their buddies ply them with golf trips, swank real estate deals, and prostitutes. In exchange for that booty, they give their buddies contracts at Defense or Homeland Security or CIA. Spying contracts. Under those spying contracts, the buddies spy on American citizens, even funny bloggers and peaceniks. And although it is known that these buddies are a little sloppy with the way they spy on American citizens, they continue to get more work.

Now, as I said, back in 2006, as the whole Cunningham scandal was erupting, all of a sudden people decided it might be good to start exercising some oversight over CIFA. The Cunningham investigation extended to Wade’s contracting on CIFA. Congress held some hearings. More interestingly, Stephen Cambone claimed to lead an inquiry.

Undersecretary of Defense Stephen A. Cambone has ordered an internal study of how funding earmarked in a bill by then-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) led to contracts for MZM Inc. to do work for the Pentagon’s newest intelligence agency, the Counterintelligence Field Activity, a Defense Department spokesman said. Read more →