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shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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 Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 4:05 am Post subject: SOCom To Open Site In Pinellas (Able Danger??) |
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Hmmm. I speculated a while back that maybe the DoD objections to public hearings on Able Danger was because they were secretly reconstituting the AD operation.
St. Petersburg Times
| Quote: | SOCom To Open Site In Pinellas
The operation responsible for coordinating the war on terror will establish a classified research center in St. Petersburg.
By PAUL DE LA GARZA, Times Staff Writer
Published October 8, 2005
TAMPA - The Pentagon is establishing a secret facility in St. Petersburg to help Special Operations Command better process intelligence.
Because the project is classified, details remain sketchy. But Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Indian Shores, confirmed the basic outline late Friday.
He said Blackbird Technologies of Virginia was awarded the $27-million contract to operate a Joint Intelligence Operations Center on behalf of SOCom, which is based at MacDill Air Force Base.
SOCom oversees the nation's secret commandoes and is coordinating the Defense Department's global war on terror.
"They're continually looking for a more effective way to deal with their intelligence issues," said Young, chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.
The center - to operate out of a building at 9th Street N and Gandy Boulevard - is intended to help National Intelligence Director John Negroponte "remodel" military intelligence at SOCom.
Reading from a prepared statement, Young said the facility "will house personnel that will help define and redesign SOCom's processes and technologies required to ensure better communications, knowledge development and information sharing within the command structure and its support elements."
He added: "The SOCom upgrade will look at better data management capabilities that include the use of open source information, emergency backup and retrieval systems and visualization tools."
Young declined to veer off the prepared statement, citing the project's secret nature.
"A lot of what they're doing is very classified," he said. "Basically, I would say that this would be creating a Joint Intelligence Operations Center for SOCom."
Larry Langebrake, a professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg who had worked to get the project downtown and is familiar with the specifics, also declined to discuss it.
A SOCom spokesman did not respond to a message seeking comment Friday night.
Open source intelligence, or "OSINT" - the kind of work that will be conducted out of the center - refers to intelligence-gathering based on information collected from open sources, such as information available to the general public.
That includes newspapers, the Internet, books, phone books, scientific journals, radio broadcasts, television and other sources.
The term has been in the news recently.
According to published reports, Able Danger, a secret SOCom project, used open source intelligence to identify the lead 9/11 hijacker as living in the United States a year before the attacks.
Asked why the facility was being established in St. Petersburg and not at MacDill, Young said: "St. Petersburg is a good place to do business. I've been telling industry for years that Pinellas County is one of the best places in the world to do business."
He also noted that SOCom is down the road from the center along Gandy Boulevard.
Young said Blackbird Technologies will have about 60 people in the facility, which is scheduled to open "as soon as possible."
The company Web site describes Blackbird Technologies as "a security consulting company specializing in intelligent responses to threats facing vital information systems, infrastructures, and facilities."
Since 9/11, SOCom has played a pivotal role in the war on terror.
Its budget has gone from $3.8-billion to $6.6-billion, and staff levels have increased by 6,000 to 51,441.
In March, President Bush signed a directive that puts SOCom in charge of "synchronizing" the war on terror. That effort will be led out of the Center for Special Operations, which is scheduled to open at MacDill on Nov. 1. |
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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| Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 4:43 pm Post subject: |
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A new player comes forward, a former senior analyst in the Office of the Defense Secretary. He is a heavyweight witness, since he actually worked with Dr. Eileen Preisser doing the data mining. And he identifies that IT WAS the Chinese connection that Colonel Shaffer referred to as what killed AD. He also quotes first-hand, the lawyer's memo that sidelined AD.
| Quote: | If We Had Only Acted
By F. Michael Maloof
Published October 9, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rep. Curt Weldon, Pennsylvania Republican, correctly asserts the terrorist attack on America on September 11, 2001, could have been averted.
The assertion was based on his efforts as early as 1999 to create a national collaborative or fusion center. It would data-mine vast amounts of information from U.S. intelligence and law enforcement to confront such asymmetrical threats as terrorism, proliferation, illegal arms trafficking, espionage, narcotics and information warfare and cyber-terrorism.
It was a process that produced, among other things, the Able Danger open-source analysis that reportedly revealed hijacker Mohamed Atta as a potential terrorist before the attack.
Mr. Weldon first sought help from Eileen Preisser, who ran the Information Dominance Center at the U.S. Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) at Fort Belvoir, Va. He then asked this writer to work with Ms. Preisser to see how the Army initiative could be expanded into a national effort.
As Mr. Weldon envisioned it, the national collaborative center would have been comprised of a system of mini-centers or "pods" of some 34 entities from the U.S. intelligence community and law enforcement agencies to function in a common operating environment.
It would not have been just another analytical unit. The effect of data-mining information that had already been analyzed was to game-plan particular issues and offer options to policymakers and national commanders to deal with them.
For example, say terrorists in South America work with drug cartels raise money to buy weapons on the "gray" arms market to smuggle to terror cells in the U.S. Information from independent analytical centers dedicated to the elements in this hypothetical scenario would be fused at the center to determine a course of action.
Potential end-users would have been the White House, Congress, State and Defense Departments, Joint Chiefs of Staff, the regional commanders-in-chiefs (CINCs) and government operation centers.
In a July 30, 1999, letter to then-Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre, Mr. Weldon proposed creating a national entity "that can acquire, fuse and analyze disparate data from many agencies to support the policymaker in taking action against asymmetrical threats. "These challenges are beginning to overlap, thereby blurring their distinction while posing increasing threats to our nation."
Mr. Weldon pointed out that the Defense Department "has a unique opportunity" to create a centralized national center, which he called the National Operations Analysis Hub (NOAH, to protect against the "flood of threats."
The NOAH would have been created by presidential executive order as a tool of the National Security Council. The Defense Department would have been designated to run it.
Mr. Weldon's proposal, however, met with immediate opposition from the Defense Department. The office of the assistant secretary for command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I), now renamed networks and information integration, especially pushed for creating the Joint Central Analytic Group (JCAG). C3I was concerned that money for the national collaborative center would be diverted from the long-sought JCAG counterintelligence analytical center.
Unfortunately, the JCAG, now at the Defense Intelligence Agency at Bolling Air Force Base, doesn't talk to other analytical centers that deal with various asymmetrical threats.
Nor do the other existing analytical centers dedicated to collecting information on terrorism, proliferation, arms smuggling and other threats talk to each another regularly.
Following the initial DoD turndown, Ellen Preisser and this writer then data-mined unclassified information to report to Mr. Weldon on possible Chinese front companies in the United States seeking technology for the People's Liberation Army.
It showed how Chinese front companies in the United States listed as U.S. corporations were acquiring U.S. weapons technology from U.S. defense contractors, and improving China's military capability. Such access to U.S. technology then would allow the Chinese over time to duplicate U.S. military systems down to the widget.
Indeed, a June 27, 2005 article in The Washington Times reported U.S. investigators were concerned with China and its middlemen increasingly and illegally obtaining "sensitive or classified U.S. weapons technology" from U.S. companies.
Reaction to the study on Chinese front companies in the United States from the Army and the General Counsel's office in the Office of the Defense Secretary was immediate. In November 1999, they ordered the study destroyed, but not before Mr. Weldon complained to then Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki.
Mr. Weldon also wrote a letter to then-FBI Director Louis Freeh requesting an espionage investigation. Mr. Freeh never responded to the Weldon request.
Then in an April 14, 2000, memorandum from the legal counsel in the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Capt. Michael Lohr wrote that the concern over the LIWA initiative potentially bumped into what amounted to domestic spying.
"Preliminary review of subject methodology raised the possibility that LIWA 'data mining' would potentially access both foreign intelligence (FI) information and domestic information relating to U.S. citizens (i.e. law enforcement, tax, customs, immigration, etc," Capt. Lohr wrote.
"I recognize that an argument can be made that LIWA is not 'collecting' in the strict sense (i.e. they are accessing public areas of the Internet and non-FI federal government databases of already lawfully collected information)," Capt. Lohr added. "This effort would, however, have the potential to pull together into a single database a wealth of privacy-protected U.S. citizen information in a more sweeping and exhaustive manner than was previously contemplated."
In effect, the national collaborative center experiment based on the LIWA example was sidelined.
If the concept of the NOAH had been in effect on September 11, 2001, events may have been different. The cost for such a system would have been minimal compared to the heavy cost in human life and resources the nation suffered.
F. Michael Maloof is a former senior analyst in the Office of the Defense Secretary. |
The Washington Times
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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kate
Admin
Joined: 14 May 2004
Posts: 1891
Location: Upstate, New York
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| Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 6:42 pm Post subject: |
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something new to stir in the pot
Fox News Channel
October 8, 2005
Congressman Curt Weldon
Able Danger: Intel Gag
Clip from Fox News
Weldon says Able Danger warned of something to happen in Yemen
two weeks before, then two days before the USS Cole bombing.......
AD told senior leadership in Pentagon, there’s something going to happen in Yemen and we better be on high alert, but, they were discounted
(Weldon also comments on what is happening to Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer -vs- the Sandy Burger slap on the hand)
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