Corporate espionage is a booming industry in India, according to a recent report. And it’s being fueled by executives spying on their rivals as well as their own employees.

The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India, known by the zingy acronym Assocham, usually releases statements on sober topics like RBI’s midterm credit policy review or industrial production figures. But last week it released a survey on corporate espionage.

“Over 35 percent of companies operating in various sectors across India are engaged in corporate espionage to gain advantage over their competitors and are even spying on their employees via social networking Web sites,” Assocham said in its report.

While checking out people’s activity on social media sites like LinkedIn or Twitter didn’t sound too alarming, Assocham made a stronger claim that about 900 respondents said that they plant a mole in other companies, usually as receptionists, photo-copiers and other low-end jobs.

“Assocham had learned about certain unconfirmed reports of prevalence of corporate espionage from many of its members which prompted us to carry out a survey to ascertain if it really was the case,” a spokesperson for the group told India Ink, asking not to be identified because of association policy.

Assocham said it conducted the “covert” survey by meeting about 1,500 corporate executives in five major cities and roughly 200 private eye agencies and trained sleuths.

Detectives said demand from companies in sectors such as information technology, infrastructure, insurance, banking and manufacturing, is overwhelming, according to D.S. Rawat, secretary general of Assocham.

“Almost all the company representatives in these domains acknowledged the prevalence of industrial espionage to gain access to information and steal trade secrets of their competitors through private deals with sleuths and spy agencies,” the survey notes, although it does not name any companies or cite specific examples.

That’s not all. About 1,200 respondents said they use detectives and surveillance agencies to constantly monitor their employees’ activities and whereabouts, using moles and social media, according to the survey.

Many detectives say that companies working with strong labor unions hire spy agencies and plant undercover agents to monitor union leaders to ensure they were not getting paid by competitors, politicians or others to create trouble, according to the report.

“About a quarter of respondents said they have hired computer experts for installing monitoring software to hack and crack the networks, track e-mails of their rivals and perform other covert activities,” Assocham notes.

Not surprisingly, the findings have been met with skepticism.

“It sounds far-fetched to me,” said Harminder Sahni, the founder and managing director of Wazir Advisors, a management consulting firm.

…

Find this story at 19 June 2012

June 19, 2012, 7:10 am
By SRUTHI GOTTIPATI
Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

DANBURY, Connecticut (AP) — For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.

They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized “cleanroom” where the equipment was stored.

They spoke in code.

Few knew the true identity of “the customer” they met in a smoke-filled, wood-paneled conference room where the phone lines were scrambled. When they traveled, they sometimes used false names.

At one point in the 1970s there were more than 1,000 people in the Danbury area working on The Secret. And though they worked long hours under intense deadlines, sometimes missing family holidays and anniversaries, they could tell no one — not even their wives and children — what they did.

They were engineers, scientists, draftsmen and inventors — “real cloak-and-dagger guys,” says Fred Marra, 78, with a hearty laugh.

He is sitting in the food court at the Danbury Fair mall, where a group of retired co-workers from the former Perkin-Elmer Corp. gather for a weekly coffee. Gray-haired now and hard of hearing, they have been meeting here for 18 years. They while away a few hours nattering about golf and politics, ailments and grandchildren. But until recently, they were forbidden to speak about the greatest achievement of their professional lives.

“Ah, Hexagon,” Ed Newton says, gleefully exhaling the word that stills feels almost treasonous to utter in public.

It was dubbed “Big Bird” and it was considered the most successful space spy satellite program of the Cold War era. From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles (100 kilometers) of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other potential foes. The film was shot back through the earth’s atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks.

The scale, ambition and sheer ingenuity of Hexagon KH-9 was breathtaking. The fact that 19 out of 20 launches were successful (the final mission blew up because the booster rockets failed) is astonishing.

So too is the human tale of the 45-year-old secret that many took to their graves.

Hexagon was declassified in September. Finally Marra, Newton and others can tell the world what they worked on all those years at “the office.”

“My name is Al Gayhart and I built spy satellites for a living,” announced the 64-year-old retired engineer to the stunned bartender in his local tavern as soon as he learned of the declassification. He proudly repeats the line any chance he gets.

“It was intensely demanding, thrilling and the greatest experience of my life,” says Gayhart, who was hired straight from college and was one of the youngest members of the Hexagon “brotherhood”.

He describes the white-hot excitement as teams pored over hand-drawings and worked on endless technical problems, using “slide-rules and advanced degrees” (there were no computers), knowing they were part of such a complicated space project. The intensity would increase as launch deadlines loomed and on the days when “the customer” — the CIA and later the Air Force — came for briefings. On at least one occasion, former President George H.W. Bush, who was then CIA director, flew into Danbury for a tour of the plant.

Though other companies were part of the project — Eastman Kodak made the film and Lockheed Corp. built the satellites — the cameras and optics systems were all made at Perkin-Elmer, then the biggest employer in Danbury.

“There were many days we arrived in the dark and left in the dark,” says retired engineer Paul Brickmeier, 70.

He recalls the very first briefing on Hexagon after Perkin-Elmer was awarded the top secret contract in 1966. Looking around the room at his 30 or so colleagues, Brickmeier thought, “How on Earth is this going to be possible?”

One thing that made it possible was a hiring frenzy that attracted the attention of top engineers from around the Northeast. Perkin-Elmer also commissioned a new 270,000-square-foot (25,000-square-meter) building for Hexagon — the boxy one on the hill.

Waiting for clearance was a surreal experience as family members, neighbors and former employers were grilled by the FBI, and potential hires were questioned about everything from their gambling habits to their sexuality.

“They wanted to make sure we couldn’t be bribed,” Marra says.

Clearance could take up to a year. During that time, employees worked on relatively minor tasks in a building dubbed “the mushroom tank” — so named because everyone was in the dark about what they had actually been hired for.

Joseph Prusak, 76, spent six months in the tank. When he was finally briefed on Hexagon, Prusak, who had worked as an engineer on earlier civil space projects, wondered if he had made the biggest mistake of his life.

“I thought they were crazy,” he says. “They envisaged a satellite that was 60-foot (18-meter) long and 30,000 pounds (13,600 kilograms) and supplying film at speeds of 200 inches (500 centimeters) per second. The precision and complexity blew my mind.”

Several years later, after numerous successful launches, he was shown what Hexagon was capable of — an image of his own house in suburban Fairfield.

“This was light years before Google Earth,” Prusak said. “And we could clearly see the pool in my backyard.”

There had been earlier space spy satellites — Corona and Gambit. But neither had the resolution or sophistication of Hexagon, which took close-range pictures of Soviet missiles, submarine pens and air bases, even entire battalions on war exercises.

According to the National Reconnaissance Office, a single Hexagon frame covered a ground distance of 370 nautical miles (680 kilometers), about the distance from Washington to Cincinnati. Early Hexagons averaged 124 days in space, but as the satellites became more sophisticated, later missions lasted twice as long.

“At the height of the Cold War, our ability to receive this kind of technical intelligence was incredible,” says space historian Dwayne Day. “We needed to know what they were doing and where they were doing it, and in particular if they were preparing to invade Western Europe. Hexagon created a tremendous amount of stability because it meant American decision makers were not operating in the dark.”

Among other successes, Hexagon is credited with providing crucial information for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

From the outset, secrecy was a huge concern, especially in Danbury, where the intense activity of a relatively small company that had just been awarded a massive contract (the amount was not declassified) made it obvious that something big was going on. Inside the plant, it was impossible to disguise the gigantic vacuum thermal chamber where cameras were tested in extreme conditions that simulated space. There was also a “shake, rattle and roll room” to simulate conditions during launch.

“The question became, how do you hide an elephant?” a National Reconnaissance Office report stated at the time. It decided on a simple response: “What elephant?” Employees were told to ignore any questions from the media, and never confirm the slightest detail about what they worked on.

But it was impossible to conceal the launches at Vandenberg Air Force base in California, and aviation magazines made several references to “Big Bird.” In 1975, a piece on the TV news magazine “60 Minutes” on space reconnaissance described an “Alice in Wonderland” world, where American and Soviet intelligence officials knew of each other’s “eyes in the sky” — and other nations did, too — but no one confirmed the programs or spoke about them publicly.

For employees at Perkin-Elmer, the vow of secrecy was considered a mark of honor.

“We were like the guys who worked on the first atom bomb,” said Oscar Berendsohn, 87, who helped design the optics system. “It was more than a sworn oath. We had been entrusted with the security of the country. What greater trust is there?”

Even wives — who couldn’t contact their husbands or know of their whereabouts when they were traveling — for the most part accepted the secrecy. They knew the jobs were highly classified. They knew not to ask questions.

“We were born into the World War II generation,” says Linda Bronico, whose husband, Al, told her only that he was building test consoles and cables. “We all knew the slogan ‘loose lips sink ships.'”

And Perkin-Elmer was considered a prized place to work, with good salaries and benefits, golf and softball leagues, lavish summer picnics (the company would hire an entire amusement park for employees and their families) and dazzling children’s Christmas parties.

“We loved it,” Marra says. “It was our life.”

For Marra and his former co-workers, sharing that life and their long-held secret has unleashed a jumble of emotions, from pride to nostalgia to relief — and in some cases, grief.

The city’s mayor, Mark Boughton, only discovered that his father had worked on Hexagon when he was invited to speak at an October reunion ceremony on the grounds of the former plant. His father, Donald Boughton, also a former mayor, was too ill to attend and died a few days later.

Boughton said for years he and his siblings would pester his father — a draftsman — about what he did. Eventually they realized that the topic was off limits.

“Learning about Hexagon makes me view him completely differently,” Boughton says. “He was more than just my Dad with the hair-trigger temper and passionate opinions about everything. He was a Cold War warrior doing something incredibly important for our nation.”

For Betty Osterweis the ceremony was bittersweet, too. Not only did she learn about the mystery of her late husband’s professional life. She also learned about his final moments.

…

Find this story at 13 August 2012

Helen O’Neill is a New York-based national writer for The Associated Press. She can be reached at features(at)ap.org.

August 13, 2012
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First Posted: 12/25/11 07:31 PM ET Updated: 12/27/11 08:50 AM ET

This volume re-publishes The Hexagon Story as part of the Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance’s (CSNR) Classics series. The introductory information explains how this history of the Hexagon program focuses on the Air Force involvement with the program as it became operational and matured and contains limited discussion of the early Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contributions to development of the program.

Find the story 10 August 2012 

See the pictures 10 August 2012 

Mit Spionagesatelliten kundschafteten die USA während des Kalten Krieges die Militärgeheimnisse des Gegners aus. Dann stürzte plötzlich eine Kapsel mit Überwachungsfotos in den Pazifik – und eine panische Rettungsaktion begann. 40 Jahre später hat der CIA die spektakulären Bilder der Operation freigegen. Neun Monate und mehr als 100.000 Dollar hatte die CIA investiert – und alles, was die Geheimdienstler schließlich in Händen hielten, war ein verwischtes Foto. Wer wollte, sah Puderzucker auf einem dunklen Tisch oder die ersten Schreibversuche eines Kindes. Nur ganz entfernt erinnerte das Foto an das, was es eigentlich war: ein Luftbild, fotografiert von einem Satelliten. Das Foto war von KH-9 Hexagon aufgenommen worden, einem Spionagesatelliten, den die USA am 15. Juni 1971 ins All geschickt hatten. Der unsichtbare Knipser war eine Hightech-Waffe im Kalten Krieg, mit ihm sollten die militärischen Geheimnisse der Sowjetunion festgehalten werden: Häfen, Werften, Flugplätze, Radaranlagen. Jedenfalls war das der Plan. KH-9 Hexagon war neben den beiden Kameras auch mit vier Kapseln ausgerüstet, die die hochauflösenden High-Definition-Aerial-Filme des Typs 1414 der Firma Eastman Kodak zurück zum Boden befördern sollten. Das Transportprinzip war so genial wie spektakulär: Die Kapseln lösten sich vom Satelliten und fielen Richtung Erde. Irgendwann öffnete sich ein Fallschirm, die Fotofracht wurde abgebremst und schließlich mitten in der Luft von einer Militärmaschine eingesammelt. Doch schon bei der ersten Mission von KH-9 kam es am 10. Juli 1971 zu einer verhängnisvollen Panne: Der Fallschirm öffnete sich nicht. Statt eingefangen zu werden, stürzte die Kapsel mit der Bezeichnung RV 1201-3 bei Hawaii in den Pazifik. Wenig später begannen CIA, der Militärnachrichtendienst NRO und die US Navy mit der Suche nach dem versunkenen Schatz. Doch warum dauerte die Bergung fast neun Monate? Und was passierte genau in jener Zeit? Die CIA hat nach 40 Jahren jetzt Akten freigegeben, die einen seltenen Einblick in die Arbeit des Geheimdienstes bieten – und spektakuläre Fotos einer Mission zeigen, die beinahe gescheitert wäre. Auffällige Luftblasen In einem internen Geheimdienst-Memo vom Tag des Unfalls wird zunächst von einem Helikopter berichtet, der den Bremsfallschirm gesichtet habe. Und: Militärmaschinen hätten Funksignale der Kapsel empfangen – doch schon im nächsten Telegramm folgt die Ernüchterung: Die Funksignale stammen nicht von der Kapsel, sondern von einem Flugzeug. Die Suche an der mutmaßlichen Aufprallstelle wird ergebnislos abgebrochen. Während die Fotokapseln RV 1 und 2 sicher aufgenommen wurden, fehlt von Nummer 3 zunächst jede Spur. Erst die Meldung einer Militärmaschine über auffallend viele Luftblasen auf dem Ozean bringt eine erste Spur. Schließlich können die Koordinaten der Absturzstelle ungefähr festgestellt werden: 24 Grad 50 Minuten nördliche Breite. 164 Grad 0 Minuten westliche Länge. Zwei Wochen sind seit der Panne vergangen. Weitere zwei Wochen später steht ein grober Rettungsplan. In einem Memo an den Direktor des Militärnachrichtendienstes wird das Vermessungsschiff “USNS DeSteiguer” genannt, das in der Lage sei, “ein Suchgerät mehr als 20.000 Fuß in die Tiefe zu lassen.” Die Suche durchführen soll ein Expertenteam des Marine-Physik-Labors MPL – für die Bergung fällt in dem Memo der Name des Hightech-Tauchboots “Trieste II”, das seit 1964 für die Marine im Einsatz ist. Bergung in 5000 Metern Tiefe Vier Tage Suchzeit plant das NRO für die “DeSteiguer” ein, unmittelbar danach soll das bemannte Tauchboot den wertvollen Geheimnisträger sichern. Beginnen soll das Unternehmen am 1. Oktober 1971. Doch auch dieses Datum ist bald Makulatur. Erst im Dezember geht die “Trieste II” auf Tauchfahrt, sichtet die Kapsel – und kann doch nicht bergen. Stürme mit 40 bis 50 Knoten und mehr als vier Meter hohe Wellen peitschen über den Pazifik. Die Bergung der so wichtigen Fotokapsel hat fast schon komische Züge angenommen, als die Sicherung von RV 3 schließlich auf März 1972 verschoben wird. Grund dafür ist nicht das Wetter, sondern die anstehende Nachfolge-Satellitenmission “1202”. Wegen der seien auch die Druck-Kapazitäten beim Kooperationspartner Eastman Kodak “bis Februar 1972 belegt”, heißt es in einem Geheimschreiben vom Dezember 1971. Kodak hätte also ohnehin keine Zeit für die Fotos der versunkenen Kapsel. …

Find this story at 13 August 2012 Eingereicht von: Christian Gödecke © SPIEGEL ONLINE 2008 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Vervielfältigung nur mit Genehmigung der SPIEGELnet GmbH

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is beefing up its spy service to send several hundred undercover intelligence officers to overseas hot spots to steal secrets on national security threats after a decade of focusing chiefly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The move comes amid concerns that the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy service, needs to expand operations beyond the war zones and to work more closely with the CIA, according to a senior Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the classified program.

The new Defense Clandestine Service will comprise about 15% of the DIA’s workforce. They will focus on gathering intelligence on terrorist networks, nuclear proliferators and other highly sensitive threats around the world, rather than just gleaning tactical information to assist military commanders on the battlefield, the official said.

“You have to do global coverage,” the official said.

Some of the new spies thus are likely to be assigned to targets that now are intelligence priorities, including parts of Africa and the Middle East where Al Qaeda and its affiliates are active, the nuclear and missile programs in North Korea and Iran, and China’s expanding military.

The initiative, which Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta approved last Friday, aims to boost the Pentagon’s role in human intelligence collection, and to assign more case officers and analysts around the globe. The CIA has dominated that mission for decades, and the two agencies have long squabbled over their respective roles.

An internal study by the director of National Intelligence last year concluded that the DIA needed to expand its traditional role and should gather and disseminate more information on global issues. It also found that the DIA did not promote or reward successful case officers, and that many often left for the CIA as a result.

Find this story at 23 April 2012

By David S. Cloud

April 23, 2012, 10:37 a.m.

Former police spy provides ‘investigative services, risk and threat assessments’ for Densus Group
Mark Kennedy posed as Mark Stone, a long-haired, tattooed campaigner, and took part in many demonstrations between 2003 and 2010. Photograph: Guardian

A former police spy who infiltrated the environmental movement for seven years has been hired by a private security firm in the US to give advice on how to deal with political activists.

Mark Kennedy has become a consultant to the Densus Group, providing “investigative services, risk and threat assessments”, according to an entry on his LinkedIn profile.

He says he has given lectures to firms and government bodies drawing on his experiences “as a covert operative working within extreme left political and animal rights groups throughout the UK, Europe and the US”.

Kennedy, 42, went to live in Cleveland, Ohio, after he was unmasked by activists in late 2010. He has claimed to have developed sympathies for the activists while undercover, although many campaigners have scorned this claim.

The disclosure of his clandestine deployment has led to a series of revelations over the past 18 months about the 40-year police operation to penetrate and disrupt political groups. The convictions of one group of protesters were quashed after it was revealed that prosecutors and police had withheld key evidence – Kennedy’s covert recording of campaigners – from their trial. A second trial of activists collapsed after it emerged that Kennedy had infiltrated them.

Kennedy was one of a long line of undercover officers since 1968 sent to spy on political activists under a fake identity. He posed as Mark Stone, a long-haired, tattooed campaigner, and took part in many demonstrations between 2003 and 2010. He has admitted sleeping with activists he was spying on, even though police chiefs say this is strictly forbidden.

Even after the police ended his deployment, he continued to pretend he was a campaigner and to fraternise with activists he had known while undercover. In particular, Kennedy developed a sudden interest in animal rights campaigns, according to activists.

After he was exposed, he sold his story to the Mail on Sunday which reported that soon after he left the police he worked for Global Open, a security firm that advises corporations on how to thwart campaigners promoting animal rights and other causes. He denied this in a later interview.

A month before he left the police he set up the first of three commercial firms whose work has not been described. For the past four months he has been working for the Texas-based Densus Group, which advises firms on “countering current and developing threats” from protesters.

…

Find this story at 21 June 2012

Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 June 2012 17.29 BST
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

ENTEBBE, Uganda — Four small, white passenger planes sit outside a hangar here under a blazing sun, with no exterior markings save for U.S. registration numbers painted on the tails. A few burly men wearing aviator sunglasses and short haircuts poke silently around the wing flaps and landing gear.

The aircraft are Pilatus PC-12s, turboprops favored by the U.S. Special Operations forces for stealth missions precisely because of their nondescript appearance. There is no hint that they are carrying high-tech sensors and cameras that can film man-size targets from 10 miles away.

To further disguise the mission, the U.S. military has taken another unusual step: It has largely outsourced the spying operation to private contractors. The contractors supply the aircraft as well as the pilots, mechanics and other personnel to help process electronic intelligence collected from the airspace over Uganda, Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

In October, President Obama sent about 100 elite U.S. troops to central Africa to scour the terrain for Joseph Kony, the messianic and brutal leader of a Ugandan rebel group. But American contractors have been secretly searching for Kony from the skies long before that, at least since 2009, under a project code-named Tusker Sand, according to documents and people familiar with the operation.

The previously unreported practice of hiring private companies to spy on huge expanses of African territory — in this region and in North Africa, where a similar surveillance program is aimed at an al-Qaeda affiliate — has been a cornerstone of the U.S. military’s secret activities on the continent. Unlike uniformed troops, plainclothes contractors are less likely to draw attention.

But because the arms-length arrangement exists outside traditional channels, there is virtually no public scrutiny or oversight. And if something goes wrong, the U.S. government and its partners acknowledge that the contractors are largely on their own.

U.S. Africa Command, which oversees military operations on the continent, declined to discuss specific missions or its reasons for outsourcing the gathering of intelligence.

In response to written questions from The Washington Post, the command stated that contractors would not get special treatment in case of a mishap. Instead, they “would be provided the same assistance that any U.S. citizen would be provided by the U.S. Government should they be in danger.”

Perils of the job

There is precedent for the use of contractors in spying operations. The military hired private firms to conduct airborne surveillance in Latin America in the 1990s and early 2000s, with sometimes-disastrous results.

In 2003, for instance, one American was killed and three others were taken hostage by Colombian insurgents after their plane crashed in the jungle. The contractors, who were working for Northrop Grumman on a Defense Department counter-narcotics program, endured five years of captivity before they were freed in a raid by Colombian police.

Peter W. Singer, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and an expert on military contracting, said the Pentagon typically turns to the private sector for “deniability,” but he added that “it rarely turns out that way.”

“When things go bad, you can have two scenarios,” he said. “Either the contractors are left holding the bag, complaining about abandonment, or else some kind of abuse happens and they’re not held accountable because of a mix of unclear legal accountability and a lack of political will to do something about it.”

Indeed, contractors knowledgeable about the central Africa mission appear to be aware that the downing of one of their planes could have far-reaching implications.

“From a purely political standpoint it is obvious the fallout of such an incident would be immense, especially if hostile forces reached the crash site first,” Commuter Air Technology, an Oklahoma defense firm, wrote in May 2010 in response to a U.S. Africa Command solicitation to expand operations. “This could turn into a prisoner/hostage situation at worst, or at the least a serious foreign relations incident highly damaging to both AFRICOM and the U.S.”

The warning was prescient. That summer, a PC-12 surveillance aircraft operated by a New Jersey contractor as part of Tusker Sand was forced to make an emergency landing in Obo, an isolated town in the Central African Republic where Kony’s forces had terrorized the population.

On board were a handful of Americans working for the firm R-4 Inc., as well as a Ugandan military officer and a Congolese officer.

The unexpected appearance of two foreign soldiers and some Americans aroused the suspicions of tribal leaders, who had been kept in the dark about Tusker Sand by their national government. They detained the crew for several hours as they debated what to do.

“We felt like we were going to prison,” said one of the American contractors involved, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive operation.

The contractor said that his group contacted State Department and United Nations officials but that they declined to intervene. It was even harder to track down Africa Command officials, whose headquarters are in Stuttgart, Germany.

“Eventually, we were able to talk our way out of it,” the contractor said. “That’s all we did over there, pay people off and talk our way out of situations.”

Dwight Turner, vice president of overseas operations for R-4, said he was not personally familiar with the incident. He confirmed that his company had been involved in Tusker Sand but declined to comment further.

A growing appetite

When Tusker Sand began in late 2009, it consisted of a single PC-12, operating out of a Ugandan military hangar at Entebbe airport. The hangar also housed a Gulfstream aircraft for the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni.

According to the contractor who worked for R-4, the presidential palace was so protective of Museveni’s plane that the Americans were required to push their PC-12 out of the hangar by hand, instead of with a tractor, to avoid inadvertent scrapes.

The U.S. military’s appetite for surveillance quickly grew. On June 11, 2010, the Africa Command participated in an “Industry Day” to drum up interest. More than 50 private contractors were invited to develop proposals to expand Tusker Sand and Creek Sand, the program aimed at al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which operates mainly in Mali.

Unclassified documents prepared for the event show that the military wanted contractors to provide at least a combined 44 personnel for the programs, with double that number if the Africa Command decided to “surge” either one of them. At a minimum, contractors were told that they would have to keep planes flying for 150 hours a month.

Among the jobs to be outsourced: pilots, sensor operators, intelligence analysts, mechanics and linguists. The expectation was that the personnel would be veterans; most needed to certify that they had passed the military’s survival, resistance and escape training course, because of the possibility of aircrews being downed behind enemy lines.

Contractors would have to supply the surveillance gear, including electro-optical and infrared sensors that work in the dark, and a laser-emitting sensor that can peer under the jungle canopy. All had to be concealed within the body of the plane with retractable mounting to avoid attracting suspicion.

Another document stipulated that prospective firms fly “innocuous” aircraft that would “blend into the local operating area.” In a PowerPoint presentation posted on a federal government Web site for contractors, the Africa Command warned firms bidding for the work that African countries would be “uncomfortable” with activities that might look suspicious, adding: “Don’t want covert aircraft, just friendly looking aircraft.”

In addition to expanding Tusker Sand and Creek Sand, the Africa Command said it wanted to start a drone-based program, dubbed Tusker Wing, to search for members of Kony’s militia, the Lord’s Resistance Army.

That plan envisioned contractors using blimps equipped with cameras as well as ScanEagles, small and unmanned aircraft that can be launched with a catapult but stay aloft for 22 hours at a time, according to Gene Healey, a contractor who helped prepare a study for the Africa Command.

Healey said the Africa Command was initially enthusiastic about Tusker Wing but canceled the program, without explanation, before it got off the ground. Africa Command officials declined to comment.

Nonetheless, the number of manned surveillance flights for Tusker Sand has gradually increased. A new contractor, Sierra Nevada Corp., began operating PC-12 flights out of Entebbe in August.

Michelle Erlach, a spokeswoman for Sierra Nevada Corp., based in Sparks, Nev., declined to answer questions about Tusker Sand or the firm’s activities in Africa. “I cannot give any details on that,” she said.

The Africa Command declined to answer questions about the contract for Tusker Sand, saying it was “proprietary in nature.”

Allies on the Hill

Tusker Sand could soon receive another boost.

In March, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), one of Congress’s leading voices on Africa, issued a statement expressing concern that the U.S. military was being hindered in its efforts to track the Lord’s Resistance Army.

He called on the Obama administration to give the Africa Command “the full availability” of surveillance aircraft and equipment necessary to catch Kony and conduct other counterterrorism missions.

In an interview a month later, however, Inhofe said Africa Command officials told him that things had improved and that they were no longer being shortchanged. “I have been reassured,” he said. “I think they right now have the assets they need.”

Asked whether he had any qualms about private contractors operating spy missions on behalf of the U.S. military, Inhofe said he’d “rather not get into that.”

“They are working with contractors on these things, and I know there are a lot of people involved,” he added. “I’m just not going to elaborate on where they are or what they’re doing.”

Late last month, however, the Senate Armed Services Committee passed a measure authorizing $50 million for the Defense Department to “enhance and expand” surveillance operations to help Ugandan and other regional militaries search for Kony.

A congressional staff member said the legislators’ priority was to increase and improve the surveillance operations as quickly as possible, adding that Congress was not necessarily opposed to using private companies for the Kony manhunt.

“It’s a concern, but when you’re short on resources, it’s what you have to do,” said the staffer, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive operations. “It’s a permissive environment. Nobody’s getting shot at, and we’re just collecting intelligence.”

…

Find this story at 15 June 2012

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

By Craig Whitlock, Published: June 15

© The Washington Post Company

New evidence of the disturbing practices of private sector companies seeking ‘intelligence’ on protest organisations was revealed by documentary photographer and investigative journalist Marc Vallée at Sundays Netpol conference.

Speaking on the subject of Olympic policing, Marc Vallée told how he had been personally approached for information on protest groups by a private sector company specialising in risk analysis. The company, Exclusive Analysis, asked him to provide any information he had about direct action and protest groups, particularly the groups No Tar Sands, Rising Tide UK, Climate Camp and UKuncut.

Exclusive Analysis promotes themselves as “a specialist intelligence company that forecasts commercially relevant political and violent risks.” Their website claimed they work with a range of private sector and government clients, including intelligence and national security agencies.

Marc Vallée was approached by a Richard Bond, who stated he was an employee of Exclusive Analysis. He told Mr Vallée that Exclusive Analysis had a number of clients that ‘had interests in’ the Olympic games. Asked whether there was an Olympic context to the information they were after, Richard Bond replied, “We have followed these groups for a long time. Yes we are looking at them for the Olympics.”

Exclusive Analysis are one of a growing number of private sector organisations providing intelligence or vetting information to private sector companies on protest activity. One of the roles of Exclusive Analysis appears to be the provision of intelligence and information that enables private companies to better manage or control the ‘risks’ from political action.
The company website claimed that as well as dealing with global terrorism threats, “Our regional teams analyse data and risk indicators on other groups (from violent single-issue groups focused on animal rights, the environment and pro-life activism to politically motivated groups such as anarchists and the extreme right and extreme left.”

Find this story at 22 May 2012