Spy Pigeon Arrested... again

A pigeon suspected of being trained to “spy” by Pakistan has been captured in India along the Kashmir border. Indian officials say the bird was carrying a “coded message” which they are trying to decipher. In 2016, police in India found a bird with a note attached to it inscribed with an alleged threat to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. more

UPDATE 6/8/2020 — Indian police have released a pigeon belonging to a Pakistani fisherman after a probe found that the bird, which had flown across the contentious border between the nuclear-armed nations, was not a spy, two officials said on Friday. more

Summer Reading: Gulity Minds, by Joe Finder

New York Times bestselling author Joseph Finder delivers an exhilarating and timely thriller exploring how even the most powerful among us can be brought down by a carefully crafted lie and how the secrets we keep can never truly stay buried in Guilty Minds.

Nick Heller is a private spy—an intelligence operative based in Boston, hired by lawyers, politicians, and even foreign governments. A high-powered investigator with a penchant for doing things his own way, he’s called to Washington, DC, to help out with a delicate, potentially explosive situation.

The chief justice of the Supreme Court is about to be defamed, his career destroyed, by a powerful gossip website that specializes in dirt on celebs and politicians. Their top reporter has written an exposé claiming that he had liaisons with an escort, a young woman prepared to tell the world her salacious tale. But the chief justice is not without allies and his greatest supporter is determined to stop the story in its tracks.

Nick has just forty-eight hours to disprove the story about the chief justice. But when the call girl is found murdered, the case takes a dangerous turn, and Nick resolves to find the mastermind behind the conspiracy before anyone else falls victim to the maelstrom of political scandal and ruined reputations predicated upon one long-buried secret.

(The story may be fiction, but the technical surveillance/security details are accurate. Joe consults with several well-known specialists, including: Kevin D. Murray, and Adam Hernandez, to give his novel the ring of authenticity. This attention to detail is just one of the things that sets Joe Finder apart from other authors... not to mention his gripping plots.)

Why Are Chipmunks Wearing Mini Spy Microphones?

Miniature Russian spyware is infiltrating an underground Canadian community.

The perpetrators? Scientists studying how eastern chipmunks communicate. For the first time, the team has outfitted the little striped animals with collars bearing inch-long (2.8 centimeters) microphones, the world's smallest digital recording device, according to Guinness World Records.

Using these espionage tools, the team recorded, analyzed, and decoded constant chipmunk chatter, instead of relying on static microphones that had previously limited scientists in understanding the secret lives of wildlife.

So far, the hardy microphones, deployed on chipmunks in southern Quebec's Green Mountains Nature Reserve, have provided unprecedented data on how and when chipmunks call, which is helping reveal the burrowing rodents' individual personalities. more w/video

Log Jam - Forces You to Shut Up and Experience Where You Are

Artist and coder Allison Burtch has created a new device to save us from our cellphones and ourselves. 

It comes in the form of a 10-inch birch log that jams cellular radio signals, and it’s called the Log Jammer. Packed with about $200 of hardware including a power source, a circuit board of her own design, voltage control components, an amplifier, and an antenna, it can produce radio noise at the 1950 megahertz frequency commonly used by cellphones. It’s powerful enough to block all cellphone voice communications in a 20-foot bubble, and its log-like exterior is designed to unobtrusively create that radio-jamming zone in the great outdoors...

Burtch sees her creation as the inverse of the increasingly common sight of cellular towers disguised as trees. Instead of hiding technology in nature to let people remain connected everywhere, the Log Jammer blends into a natural setting to cut off that constant remote communication—to force people to experience the place they’re in. Burtch paraphrases French philosopher Gilles Deleuz: “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves,” she says. “It’s creating a needed gap of solitude in which they might find something to say.” (more)

Happy Feet: Espionage can look adorable, too.

Just look at a remote-controlled robot disguised as a penguin that interacts with Emperor penguins in Antarctica.

Scientists are using the fake baby penguin on four wheels to get closer to the colony and collect health and population research...



The international team tested the rover, with the chick and without it, and reported in the journal Nature Methods Sunday that both versions caused less anxiety than humans... (more) (dance-a-long)

Forget the Drones, Here Comes Spy Turtle

Weird Science: Bugging Plants & Reading Minds

Spying on plant communication with tiny bugs...
Internal communications in plants share striking similarities with those in animals, new research reveals. With the help of tiny insects, scientists were able to tap into this communication system. Their results reveal the importance of these communications in enabling plants to protect themselves from attack by insect pests. (more)

Scientists explore possibilities of mind reading...
At Yale University, researchers recently used a brain scanner to identify which face someone was looking at — just from their brain activity. At the University of California-Berkeley, scientists are moving beyond "reading" simple thoughts to predicting what someone will think next. 

And at Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just has a vision that will make Google Glass seem very last century. Instead of using your eye to direct a cursor — finding a phone number for a car repair shop, for instance — he fantasizes about a device that will dial the shop by interpreting your thoughts about the car (minus the expletives).

Mind reading technology isn't yet where the sci-fi thrillers predict it will go, but researchers aren't ruling out such a future.

"In principle, our thoughts could someday be readable," said Just, who directs the school's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. (more)

10 Most Audacious Eavesdropping Plots

Operation Ivy Bells
At the height of the cold war, the National Security Agency, CIA and the US Navy collaborated to tap into underwater communication lines used by the Soviet Union. 

Operation Stopwatch
This joint operation between the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service was again an attempt to tap into communications by the Soviet Military.

The Cambridge Spies
Rather than relying on modern eavesdropping, this operation used old fashioned infiltration.

Click to enlarge.

The Gunman Project
During 1976, the KGB managed to install miniaturized eavesdropping equipment and transmitters inside 16 IBM Selectric Typewriters used by staff at the US embassy in Moscow and consulate in Leningrad. 

The Bundesnachrichtendienst Trojan Horse Affair
Germany may have been the victim off NSA eavesdropping, but its own Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, has also engaged in such activities.

The MI6 Spy Rock
In a modern version of the dead letter drop, British spies working out of the embassy in Russia used a transmitter concealed in an artificial rock to pass classified data. 

Acoustic Kitty
Acoustic Kitty was a top secret 1960s CIA project attempting to use cats in spy missions, intended to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies. (more)

Moles in Berlin

In 1956, American and British agents tunneled into East German territory in order to tap a telephone line. This allowed them to eavesdrop on important conversations between Red Army leaders and the KGB. A segment of the tunnel can now be visited. (more)

U2
An international diplomatic crisis erupted in May 1960 when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) shot down an American U-2 spy plane in Soviet air space and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. Confronted with the evidence of his nation's espionage, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to admit to the Soviets that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been flying spy missions over the USSR for several years. (more)

Animal Spies
A former CIA trainer reveals, the U.S. government deployed nonhuman operatives—ravens, pigeons, even cats—to spy on cold war adversaries. “We never found an animal we could not train.” (more)

In the Days Before Spread Spectrum Communications - Spread Wings Communications

Read all about America's secure communications laboratory, just miles from the Countermeasures Compound, in Ft. Monmouth, NJ... (more)

The CIA’s Most Highly-Trained Spies Weren’t Even Human

There would be a rustle of oily black feathers as a raven settled on the window ledge of a once-grand apartment building in some Eastern European capital. The bird would pace across the ledge a few times but quickly depart. In an apartment on the other side of the window, no one would shift his attention from the briefing papers or the chilled vodka set out on a table. Nor would anything seem amiss in the jagged piece of gray slate resting on the ledge, seemingly jetsam from the roof of an old and unloved building. 

Those in the apartment might be dismayed to learn, however, that the slate had come not from the roof but from a technical laboratory at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In a small cavity at the slate’s center was an electronic transmitter powerful enough to pick up their conversation. The raven that transported it to the ledge was no random city bird, but a U.S.-trained intelligence asset. 

Half a world away from the murk of the cold war, it would be a typical day at the I.Q. Zoo, one of the touristic palaces that dotted the streets of Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the 1960s. With their vacationing parents inca tow, children would squeal as they watched chickens play baseball, macaws ride bicycles, ducks drumming and pigs pawing at pianos. You would find much the same in any number of mom-and-pop theme parks or on television variety shows of the era. But chances are that if an animal had been trained to do something whimsically human, the animal—or the technique—came from Hot Springs. 

Two scenes, seemingly disjointed: the John le Carré shadows against the bright midway lights of county-fair Americana. But wars make strange bedfellows, and in one of the most curious, if little-known, stories of the cold war, the people involved in making poultry dance or getting cows to play bingo were also involved in training animals, under government contract, for defense and intelligence work. (more)

Sometimes the Bird Really is a Spy

Over the past few years there have been a flock of spy stories about birds, the latest being a stork in Egypt. He was interrogated and let go, only to be found dead two days later. "...a wildlife organization claiming that it was 'eaten by local villagers.'" (more)

This story is different. Some birds do spy.

The John Downer Productions team created a set of highly realistic robotic penguins to spy on living birds for a recent BBC documentary. Some penguins are timid around humans, and may flee when a normal camera team approaches. So, these robots allow scientists and filmmakers to get up close with the colony and capture intimate details of day to day life in a penguin colony. 

The robots are more than simple spycams. They can:
• Remember the identities of individual penguins based on their patterns of spots.
• Get blown over and right themselves.
• Fall off a ledge without breaking.
• And even carry “egg-cams” to drop off at strategic locations (more)

Amazing Drone Footage - Just for fun - Enjoy Your Weekend

The SkyMotion Video team provided the aerial video services for the 2012 Tourism Partnership of Niagara commercials for the Niagara Falls region shoot - making use of their state of the art remote controlled helicopter drone.



Niagara Falls has of course been filmed countless times in the past using full sized helicopters. However, with this remote controlled helicopter, the shoot was not limited by minimum altitude restrictions, and so was able to achieve shots which were unlike any before. Flying only a couple feet above the water, the camera was able to approach the waterfall edge to give the viewer a true sense of the shear scale of the world famous falls.

However, the Niagara region is not limited to just the falls. The surrounding area is full of beautiful landscapes with quaint towns, and world class vineyards. The area is full of life, and the hope is that these dynamic shots give a real sense of the variety of things offered by not only the falls, but by the region as a whole. (more) (more movies)

PS - The security tie-in's... 
• Law Enforcement - Crime scene documentation and assessment.
• Security Consultants - Security assessment surveys.

If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody hears it...

Trees in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are being fitted with mobile phones in an attempt to tackle illegal logging and deforestation.

Devices smaller than a pack of cards are being attached to the trees in protected areas to alert officials once they are cut down and the logs are transported. 

Location data is sent from sensors once the logs are within 20 miles of a mobile phone network to allow Brazil’s environment agency to stop the sale of illegal timber. The technology, called Invisible Tracck, which is being piloted by Dutch digital security company Gemalto, has a battery life of up to a year and has been designed to withstand the Amazonian climate. (more)

UPDATE: From our "Persistence is Futile" file...

A Canadian history buff seems to have cracked a coded World War II message that was found strapped to the leg of a dead carrier pigeon.

Click to enlarge.

Last month, Englishman David Martin found the bird's bones in his chimney when he was renovating his fireplace in the town of Surrey.

Inside a red capsule strapped to the leg of the bird was a message from Sergeant William Stott, who had been deployed behind German lines to observe the enemy's activities.

When the message was taken to Britain's top code-breakers at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), they declared the code uncrackable. (more) (audio report) (our original report)

Google Funds Spy Technology - Surveillance to the Rescue!

Carter Roberts, president of the The World Wildlife Fund, says on his organization’s site, “We face an unprecedented poaching crisis. The killings are way up. We need solutions that are as sophisticated as the threats we face.”

This week, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) announced its receipt of a $5 million grant, courtesy of Google’s Global Impact Awards to test advanced technology in the fight against animal crime. 

If it works, the new system will include sensors placed in wildlife environments and on the animals themselves, which would be monitored by a network of surveillance drones overhead. When poachers are detected, the drones will signal mobile ranger patrols on the ground to move in, hopefully stopping the poachers’ attack. (more)

Business Counterintelligence Conference at Kwa Maritane Bush Lodge, South Africa - September 17-19

CBIA will be hosting South Africa’s first conference on business counterintelligence  September 17-19, 2012, at the Kwa Maritane Bush Lodge in the Pilanesberg, North West Province...

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One of the key aims of the conference is to involve and to provide decision makers, managers and business unit leaders with the insight to understand business counterintelligence and how it differs from other streams of information management and security practices.

Corporate information gathering is a fact of life, even more so during hard and tough economic times...

The conference will take participants on an eye-opening journey regarding information protection issues. Attendees will gain a practical understanding of the value added role counterintelligence plays in competitive strategy and the protection of business information. 

Click to enlarge.

Conference Topics
• What is the scope of the business espionage and information theft threat to businesses;
• Non-cyber methods of information gathering and economic espionage;
• Social engineering, tradecraft and other psychological tricks used to penetrate a target company;
• The “insider” threat and motivational factors;
• Importance of information security awareness training;
• How to protect sensitive data and high value employees;
• Countering electronic espionage in business;
• Technical surveillance countermeasures (TSCM) risk management;
• The evolving cyber threat. The cyberspace is now providing relative small scale operators the opportunity to become involved in business espionage and information theft;
• Background screening and vetting, pre-employment and existing employee screening;
• The dark side of social media and what it means for business;
• The threat of consumerisation and BYOD;
• Policies, procedures and guidelines on how to build an effective business counterintelligence capability;
• A corporate case study;
• Active dialogue session (Ask the Expert) – An interactive brainstorming session to solve common challenges and to share innovative solutions;
• Technical security product demonstrations.

(brochure) (conference program)

Monkey Discovers Game Reserve’s ‘Hidden’ Spy Cam, Takes Smug Self-Shot

According to the Houston Zoo, this seemingly self-satisfied monkey has a good reason to "smile": He's uncovered the camera set up by a Borneo-based game reserve to spy on him.

"Looks like someone knew about the 'hidden' cameras," tweeted the zoo. Naturally, monkeys don't bare teeth to express joy or amusement, they do so to communicate anger.

Given that he's being spied on by a game reserve, I'd say he's earned the right to be pissed. (more)

Turkey Bird Spy Found Dead

Turkey - In the latest bizarre espionage claim leveled at Israeli intelligence services, Turkish authorities claimed that a dead bird found by a Turkish farmer in a field may have been conducting covert surveillance for Israel.

Merops apiaster

The dead Merops apiaster bird -- commonly known as the European Bee-Eater -- was discovered by the Turkish farmer wearing a band on its leg with the word "Israel" written on it.

The bird also had "unusually large nostrils," leading to speculation that it was implanted with a surveillance device and sent to Turkey on an aerial espionage mission. (more)

How to Bug a Germ

The world's smallest ear doesn't belong to any animal. Instead, it's a tiny piece of gold suspended in a laser beam. It can hear sounds a million times fainter than any human ear can, making it a powerful acoustic microscope.

The nano-ear is the work of Jochen Friedmann and Andrey Lutich of Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians University. The setup is a progression from the 1986 development of so-called "optical tweezers", which use laser beams to trap microscopic particles inside the most powerful part of the electric field. This effectively suspends the particle so that it no longer moves on its own - the only way it can move if something nearby disturbs it...

FutureWatch: The nano-ear would be hugely useful in bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms, as being able to "hear" the sounds they make could provide vital new data on what distinguishes different strains. (more)

And on his farm he had a cow, E-I-E-I-O With a "moo-moo" here and a... You're under arrest!

Iowa is on the verge of becoming the first state to criminalize recording sights and sounds at farms without permission from owners.

The hot-button issue surfaced in the waning days of the legislative session and pits environment and animal rights groups against farmers and agribusiness.

On one side are activists who surreptitiously record how animals are raised or slaughtered. On the other, owners who don't want what they see as interference.

The activists maintain their actions are protected under the First Amendment. Farmers counter the acts represent an invasion of privacy intentionally designed to damage their industry. (more)