Mystery In New Mexico. Was it a crash of something black?

Yesterday afternoon (approximately 12:00 AM MDT) the USAF notified the FAA that a TFR (Temporary Flight Restrictions) box was needed over a remote area of Western New Mexico.

The text of the TFR HERE read:

FDC 3/9977 ZAB NM..AIRSPACE FLIGHT RESTRICTIONS WEST OF RESERVE NM. EFFECTIVE 1310221815 UTC UNTIL 1311221815 UTC. PURSUANT TO 14 CFR SECTION 91.137(A)(2) TEMPORARY FLIGHT RESTRICTIONS ARE IN EFFECT WITHIN A 5 NAUTICAL MILE RADIUS OF 333526N/1085739W OR THE ST JOHNS /SJN/ VORTAC 158 DEGREE RADIAL AT 50.7 NAUTICAL MILES AT AND BELOW 12000 FEET MSL TO PROVIDE A SAFE ENVIRONMENT FOR SEARCH AND RESCUE. UNITED STATES AIR FORCE RESCUE COORDINATION CENTER IS IN CHARGE OF THE OPERATION. 


On the surface it may indicate a crash of a military aircraft in the area and search and rescue efforts are underway, but what makes it unusual is that the TFR has been put in place for a full month. 

This may indicate that something either toxic or sensitive crashed in the area, with the possibilities ranging from a secret aircraft type, a satellite reentry or something carrying nuclear materials.

I talked to an air traffic controller who works at ZAB (under the conditions of anonymity) and he remarked that the USAF isn't giving out any information on why the TFR is in place except they requested that if any unauthorized civil aircraft violated the airspace they wanted to be notified of type and tail and the ultimate destination.

The TFR is in a very remote area and not very accessible to the public but it is in the middle of the RESERVE MOA and several military training routes go right through that area. It also isn't far from the White Sands Missile Range to the SE.

Searches on the Internet can find no reports of crashed aircraft or incident reports coming out of the area and inquiries by the press are not being answered. If it's an SAR exercise - why is the USAF not talking? If it's something innocuous - as it may turn out to be- why not just say so?

In light of that, and with the rising interest by the mainstream press, expect the USAF to issue a press release soon.

Whether it's the truth or tantamount to being the modern day equivalent of a "crashed weather balloon" story is yet to be seen.

Nothing to see here - go back to your homes.

Stay tuned - more on this story as it unfolds.


-Steve Douglass 

Wash Post: NSA harvesting hundreds of millions contact lists from e-mail and instant messaging

Washington Post:

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. 

Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.

Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.

The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.

Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions.

A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said the agency “is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.”

The spokesman, Shawn Turner, added that rules approved by the attorney general require the NSA to “minimize the acquisition, use and dissemination” of information that identifies a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.

The NSA’s collection of nearly all U.S. call records, under a separate program, has generated significant controversy since it was revealed in June. The NSA’s director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, has defended “bulk” collection as an essential counterterrorism and foreign intelligence tool, saying, “You need the haystack to find the needle.”

Contact lists stored online provide the NSA with far richer sources of data than call records alone. Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information. Inbox listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content, such as the first few lines of a message.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY AT THE WASHINGTON POST 

Libyan terror suspect now in custody in U.S.

A Libyan terrorist suspect who was held aboard a U.S. warship is now in the United States, CBS News has confirmed.

The al Qaeda suspect, known as Abu Anas al-Libi, has been under federal indictment in New York for more than a decade. He's expected to stand trial over whether he helped plan and conduct surveillance for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

U.S. special operations forces snatched Al-Libi during a raid in Libya on Oct. 5.

His full name is Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai and he used to be on the FBI's most wanted terrorists list. His family says he was not in al Qaeda.

Last week, Islamic militants in Libya vowed to avenge the arrest of Al-Libi by U.S. Special Forces.

In a statement posted to several online portals frequently used by jihadi groups operating in eastern Libya -- including Ansar al-Sharia, which is believed to have been involved in the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic posts in Benghazi which left Ambassador Chris Stephens and three other Americans dead -- the militants vowed to "strike back" at those responsible for the kidnapping.

While acknowledging that U.S. troops carried out the raid to apprehend al-Libi, the statement suggested reprisals would target the Libyan government, or, "those who betrayed their country and got implicated in this conspiracy."

READ MORE HERE

US forces capture PAK Taliban commander - Karzai not happy

BBC: US forces have captured a senior Pakistan Taliban commander, Latif Mehsud, in a military operation, the state department has confirmed.

Spokeswoman Marie Harf described Latif Mehsud as a "terrorist leader" and a "senior commander" in the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.

She gave no details of the operation.

She said he was a close confidante of the group's leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, who this week gave a rare interview to the BBC about possible peace talks.

Ms Harf said the Pakistan Taliban (TTP) were held responsible for the attempted bombing of Times Square in 2010, as well as attacks on US diplomats in Pakistan and many Pakistani civilians.

The group "had also vowed to attack the US homeland again," Ms Harf said.

An Afghan provincial official earlier told Associated Press news agency that Latif Mehsud was arrested as he was driving on a highway in Afghanistan's eastern Logar province.

The arrest took place about a week ago, the official said.

Latif Mehsud was reportedly returning from a meeting to discuss swapping prisoners.

The Washington Post said that US forces had taken him from Afghan intelligence agents who were trying to recruit him as a go-between for peace talks.

A spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, Aimal Faizi, told the Post: "The Americans forcibly removed him and took him to Bagram."

Mr Faizi said Latif Mehsud had only agreed to meet Afghan operatives after months of negotiations.

Some reports say Mr Karzai, who is currently holding talks with visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry, was furious about the US operation.Arsallah Jamal, governor of Logar province in eastern Afghanistan, said Mehsud was captured a week ago as he was driving along a main highway in Mohammad Agha district. The road links the province with the Afghan capital, Kabul. Jamal said Mehsud was in a car with two or three other men when the U.S. military arrested him.

The Pakistani Taliban confirmed the capture but claimed Mehsud was seized Oct. 5 by the Afghan army at the Ghulam Khan border crossing in the eastern province of Khost.

He was returning from a meeting to discuss swapping Afghan prisoners for money, said Pakistani Taliban commanders and intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.

The Pakistani intelligence officials said American forces seized Mehsud while he was with the Afghan army, and that they no longer know where he is.

Mehsud, believed to be around 30 years old, once served as Hakimullah Mehsud's driver but eventually became a trusted deputy. The two are not related. Mehsud is a common name in the region.

The U.S. military in Kabul referred all questions to the Defense Department in Washington. A Pentagon spokeswoman, Navy Cmdr. Elissa Smith, said the Pentagon had no comment on the report.

A U.S. defense official said Mehsud was being lawfully held by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. A senior U.S. official said the arrest did not please Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who apparently saw it as a violation of Afghan sovereignty. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the issue with the media.

A spokesman for Karzai told the Washington Post that a senior Taliban commander was captured in Logar as he was being driven to a facility operated by the intelligence service for questioning. The spokesman, Aimal Faizi, said the commander, whom he did not name, was then taken to an American detention facility in Bagram.

There was no immediate comment from Karzai's office on the report.

The detention may have contributed to a series of emotional outbursts this week by Karzai, who alleged that the U.S. and NATO have inflicted suffering on the Afghan people and repeatedly have violated its sovereignty.

There were reports that talks over the past two weeks on a bilateral security agreement were delayed because of the incident. American and Afghan officials have been meeting in recent days to negotiate the final details of the deal.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY AT THE BBC HERE.

2009 suspicions about Snowden slipped through the cracks ...

NYTIMES: WASHINGTON — Just as Edward J. Snowden was preparing to leave Geneva and a job as a C.I.A. technician in 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man’s behavior and work habits, as well as a troubling suspicion,

The C.I.A. suspected that Mr. Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access, and decided to send him home, according to two senior American officials.

But the red flags went unheeded. Mr. Snowden left the C.I.A. to become a contractor for the National Security Agency, and four years later he leaked thousands of classified documents. The supervisor’s cautionary note and the C.I.A.’s suspicions apparently were not forwarded to the N.S.A. or its contractors, and surfaced only after federal investigators began scrutinizing Mr. Snowden’s record once the documents began spilling out, intelligence and law enforcement officials said.

“It slipped through the cracks,” one veteran law enforcement official said of the report.

Spokesmen for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. all declined to comment on the precise nature of the warning and why it was not forwarded, citing the investigation into Mr. Snowden’s activities.

Half a dozen law enforcement, intelligence and Congressional officials with direct knowledge of the supervisor’s report were contacted for this article. All of the officials agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing criminal investigation.

In hindsight, officials said, the report by the C.I.A. supervisor and the agency’s suspicions might have been the first serious warnings of the disclosures to come, and the biggest missed opportunity to review Mr. Snowden’s top-secret clearance or at least put his future work at the N.S.A. under much greater scrutiny.

“The weakness of the system was if derogatory information came in, he could still keep his security clearance and move to another job, and the information wasn’t passed on,” said a Republican lawmaker who has been briefed on Mr. Snowden’s activities.

Mr. Snowden now lives in Moscow, where he surfaced this week for the first time since receiving temporary asylum from the Russian government over the summer. On Wednesday night, he met with four American whistle-blowers who have championed his case in the United States and who presented him with an award they said was given annually by a group of retired C.I.A. officers to members of the intelligence community “who exhibit integrity in intelligence.”

READ THE REST OF THE STORY AT THE NYTIMES