Spying on the Spooks. Armed with binoculars and a standard camera, a different sort of birdwatcher keeps tabs on the world's spy satellites. From the courtyard of his house in the center of his Dutch hometown of Leiden, Marco Langbroek spies on American military satellites, and makes no secret about it. He blogs about it. While thousands of amateurs track the world's orbiters, Langbroek is part of a small subset - about 20 loosely affiliated members from around the world: Russia, Canada, South Africa, Texas, he says - focused on covert launches. They're generally not spies themselves, just enthusiastic fanboys. Langbroek, for example, earns his livelihood digging into the earth, not looking up at the heavens. He's an archaeologist who studies Neanderthal camp sites in order to understand how they organized their communities. Locating celestial spyware requires no special gear, just a few over-the-counter tools. That means a good pair of bird-watching binoculars, a tripod, and a first-year course in calculus. "I use a 50 millimeter lens on my camera," Langbroek says. The hobby traces its origins to Pierre Neirinck, a Frenchman the British recruited to track satellites in the 1970s. "In the early days," Langbroek says, "before the Western powers had established a large tracking network, they enlisted the help of amateur observers. But by the late 70s they no longer needed us, and the hobby went in decline." As Desmond King-Hele describes the British optical tracking effort then in his book "A Tapestry of Orbits"..."The staff melted away, being reduced by 1979 to just one (or perhaps two - Pierre by day and Pierre by night)." Then, in 1984 the U.S. stopped publishing information about "classified" orbiters. The few remaining amateurs took that as a challenge, and "our hobby in its modern incarnation was born." "We track all classified satellites - Japanese, German, Israeli, French, Indian, about 100," Langbroek says. [Read more: Shear/PacificStandard/20August2012] At NSA, Computers Sometimes Make the Policy Calls. John DeLong, the first-ever compliance director at the Pentagon's spy agency, spends his days making sure analysts are not snooping on Americans. U.S. law forbids the National Security Agency from intercepting communications between citizens. While privacy advocates argue that NSA databases nevertheless accumulate records on Americans, in fact, some of those systems are calling the shots to delete that information. "There are times when we use technology to literally make legal and policy decisions," said DeLong, 37, a lawyer whose additional math and physics degrees likely prepared him for the multifaceted task of policing code-breakers. With an ever-increasing amount of messages to crack and data patterns to follow, agents have limited time to observe what he describes as "very specific procedures that govern their use and handling of that data." So, machines sometimes patrol privacy. "There are obviously some decisions that you can't automate. You have to rely on a human for judgment. And we have lots of training" on foreign espionage authorizations, DeLong told Nextgov in an interview. "We have to make sure those authorizations pass from human to human from machine to machine very carefully." Those authorizations include minimization requirements, which tightly control any data obtained while targeting foreigners that identifies Americans. Other privacy measures include database audits and spot checking decisions about whom to pursue, according to intelligence officials. A computer, for example, can be instructed to screen out certain types of information before it is passed on to the next stage of processing, DeLong explained. "In some cases, we literally have the legal and policy rules embedded in the technology such that the technology will only do those things," he said. [Read more: Sternstein/NextGov/20August2012] Tapes Found in AP Reporter's Cold War Show Trial. The characters had been carefully chosen, the testimony rehearsed in advance, the verdict a foregone conclusion. In the city of writer Franz Kafka, the trial of AP Prague correspondent William N. Oatis had all the elements of Kafkaesque absurdity. And at the beginning of the Cold War, even the date of the ruling seemed cooked up for show: July 4. While the 1951 proceedings may have been all farce, the sentence for the American journalist was real: 10 years in a communist prison on trumped-up espionage charges. The trial named the "O'' case by Czechoslovak authorities gave Oatis first-hand experience of what it was like to be considered an enemy of the newly established Soviet-led empire. Now, the discovery of two audio tapes in the Czech capital offers unique new insight into the trial. No other audio record from the three-day trial has been found. The tapes record 29 minutes of fragments from the first two days of the trial that include Oatis' statements, but not the testimony of three Czech AP colleagues who were sentenced with him. Experts say it is not clear why the trial was recorded and preserved in such a way. "Do you feel guilty?" a judge asked through an interpreter at one point. "Yes," Oatis immediately replied in English. "That means that you committed espionage on the territory of the Czechoslovak republic?" "Yes, I did." Oatis did not hesitate to plead guilty, even though historians have established that he did nothing more than his reporting job since arriving in Prague in June 1950. Facing the machinery of the secret police known as the StB, he had no chance to escape an unfair verdict. He was not alone. But of some 240,000 unlawfully jailed, Oatis was the only Western reporter. [Read more: Janicek/AP/20August2012]
Location: Bergen County Law & Public Safety Institute. Top presenters will be featured in the areas of antiterrorism, homeland security, consequence management, and other related areas. The event is attended by a combined audience of law enforcement and emergency responders, corrections, homeland security, military, intelligence community, academia, and corporate security personnel. Several writers and staff for the IACSP's longstanding publication, The Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International, will be on hand at the symposium, as well as members of the IACSP advisory board. The IACSP's journal has been in publication since the 1980's (over 25 years). Further information available at www.iacsp.com
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