The FBI recently released a tranche of documents on the USA Network TV series Burn Notice. While most of the file is redacted - in many cases every paragraph of every page - the small amount of unredacted information shows that the FBI and NSA are keeping tabs on how ...
Read more

Air Force One is one of the great military commercials disguised as a feature film. Laden with Russophobic rhetoric and corny dialogue about the heroism of the US military, it ticked every box for the DOD so they granted it full production support. The Pentagon's script notes for the movie ...
Read more

Reality Winner is a former Air Force language specialist who was working for an NSA contractor when she stole a single document and sent it to The Intercept. The document described supposed Russian attempts to ‘hack the US election’ and so this one act of whistleblowing or espionage, however you ...
Read more

After numerous requests I have uploaded (most of) the documents we used to write National Security Cinema in one handy zip file so that people don't have to search around all over this site to find them. This pack of over 4000 pages includes office diary reports from the military ...
Read more

In the five years running up to 9/11 the NSA were monitoring Osama Bin Laden's satellite phone and Al Qaeda's communication hub, and the CIA were closely following their key operatives, including to the so-called '9/11 summit' in Malaysia. So why didn't they prevent the attacks? This week we look ...
Read more

National Security Cinema is a new book that uses over 4,000 pages of documents to reveal government censorship and propaganda in Hollywood. From the Pentagon's rewriting of James Bond to the CIA's manipulation of Meet the Parents this is the biggest and best book ever written about military-intelligence propaganda in ...
Read more

Once more I joined Pearse Redmond on Porkins Policy Radio to discuss recent developments: The Reality Winner NSA leak story, Chelsea Manning and Dennis Rodman's latest trip to North Korea to visit his good friend Kim Jong-un ...
Read more

The Intercept recently published a leaked NSA report describing a cyberattack presumed to be carried out by Russia military intelligence. While many have seen this as the confirming proof that Trump only got elected because of Putin the truth is a lot more complicated. It seems the leaker wanted to ...
Read more

In this month's subscriber-only podcast I review the TV series Braindead, which is about an invading army of extraterrestrial bugs who burrow into people's heads and eat their brains. On top of this comic-horror there is a lot of well-observed satire about the polarised political climate we've experienced in the ...
Read more

In our latest dissection of season 6 of Homeland, I joined Pearse on Porkins Policy Radio to discuss the latest few episodes. With the revelation that Dar Adal has been running a sock puppet click farm to manipulate US public opinion, Homeland has dragged this season right up to date ...
Read more

Paranoid thriller Enemy of the State provoked such a reaction within the NSA that they instigated a large PR campaign to counter public perceptions of a surveillance agency running wild. NSA emails show that even while the movie was being made, agency employees were unhappy about the producers filming from ...
Read more

Recently made available by Cryptome this NSA report originally appeared in an issue of their publication Cryptolog in 1992. It examines the role that signals intelligence (SIGINT) plays in the storylines of several John le Carré novels and considers whether the inaccuracies and limitations in these portrayals are of benefit ...
Read more