The Chinese Sent an Uninvited Spy Ship to the Military Exercises with Russia

Russia recently concluded the 2018 edition of the massive Vostok exercise series that included Chinese forces for the first time. At Moscow’s invitation, Beijing sent People’s Liberation Army soldiers, helicopters, tanks – and one uninvited Chinese surveillance ship.

A PLA Navy Dongdiao-class auxiliary general intelligence (AGI) shadowed Russian Navy assets for the length of the at-sea portion of the exercise while Chinese and Mongolian troops exercised ashore, a U.S. official confirmed to USNI News.

The PLA sent about 3,500 troops for the ground portion, but it was unclear if the PLA Navy was invited to send warships to drill with the Russians.

Details from Russia on the exercise have been inconsistent, but Russian state-supported media claimed it was the largest exercise in modern Russian history.

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Absorption of the British Military Continues: The Defense Intelligence Agency Appoints British Officer as Deputy Director

The Pentagon's principal spy agency is appointing a British Air Force officer as its first deputy director in charge of improving "integration" between U.S. intelligence units and spy agencies of other English-speaking countries.

U.S. intelligence agencies have long had close relationships with their British counterparts, but former and current U.S. intelligence officials said this is the first time they knew of a U.S. spy agency naming a foreigner to a top executive position.

In an official announcement, the Pentagon said that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had chosen Air Vice Marshal Sean Corbett of Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) as its first "deputy director for Commonwealth Integration."

The Pentagon said that Corbett, presently the RAF's top professional intelligence officer, would be top advisor to DIA director Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart on defense and intelligence issues concerning an alliance of English-speaking countries known as the "Five Eyes."

Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA and State Department official, said the British general's DIA appointment marked a first for a foreigner, but the appointment was "not that unusual. Think of him as a senior liaison officer."

Five Eyes partners include the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Relations between these countries agencies have always been close, but the Pentagon said that over the last ten years the U.S. had sought to improve mechanisms to exchange intelligence information and to collaborate more closely.

Historically, Five Eyes spy units which have collaborated most closely have been the agencies which engage in electronic eavesdropping, notably America's National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Traditionally, these agencies have shared raw information and divided up the world for eavesdropping coverage.

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A Discussion at Stanford With General Hayden

Is Intelligence Genetic?

A chimpanzee's intelligence is largely determined by its genes, while environmental factors may be less important than scientists previously thought, according to a Georgia State University research study.

The study found that some, but not all, cognitive, or mental, abilities, in chimpanzees depend significantly on the genes they inherit. The findings are reported in the latest issue of Current Biology.

"Intelligence runs in families," said Dr. William Hopkins, professor in the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Georgia State and research scientist in the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University. "The suggestion here is that genes play a really important role in their performance on tasks while non-genetic factors didn't seem to explain a lot. So that's new."

The role of genes in human intelligence or IQ has been studied for years, but Hopkins' study is among the first to address heritability in cognitive abilities in nonhuman primates. Studies have shown that human intelligence is inherited through genes, but social and environmental factors, such as formal education and socioeconomic status, also play a role and are somewhat confounded with genetic factors. Chimpanzees, which are highly intelligent and genetically similar to humans, do not have these additional socio-cultural influences.

"Chimps offer a really simple way of thinking about how genes might influence intelligence without, in essence, the baggage of these other mechanisms that are confounded with genes in research on human intelligence," Hopkins said.

The study involved 99 chimpanzees, ranging in age from 9 to 54, who completed 13 cognitive tasks designed to test a variety of abilities. Hopkins used quantitative genetics analysis to link the degree of relatedness between the chimpanzees to their similarities or differences in performance on the various cognitive measures to determine whether cognitive performance is inherited in chimpanzees.

Genes were found to play a role in overall cognitive abilities, as well as the performance on tasks in several categories.

Traditionally, researchers studying animal intelligence or animal learning have shared the view that environment and how previous behavior is reinforced affect how animals perform on a particular task.

"In our case, at least, it suggests that purely environmental explanations don't really seem to tell the whole story," Hopkins said. "Genes matter as well."

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Extraordinary Claim: An Equation for Intelligence

A Former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge: Reform the Court

CONGRESS created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 1978 as a check on executive authority. Recent disclosures about vast data-gathering by the government have raised concerns about the legitimacy of the court’s actions. Congress can take a simple step to restore confidence in the court’s impartiality and integrity: authorizing its judges to appoint lawyers to serve the public interest when novel legal issues come before it.

The court is designed to protect individual liberties as the government protects us from foreign dangers. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that the Nixon administration had violated the Fourth Amendment by conducting warrantless surveillance on a radical domestic group, the White Panthers, who were suspected of bombing a C.I.A. recruiting office in Ann Arbor, Mich. In 1975 and 1976, the Church Committee, a Senate panel, produced a series of reports about foreign and domestic intelligence operations, including surveillance by the F.B.I. of suspected communists, radicals and other activists — including, notoriously, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Foreign Intelligence Service Act set up the FISA Court in response. To obtain authority to intercept the phone and electronic communications of American citizens and permanent residents, the government must only show probable cause that the target has a connection to a foreign government or entity or a foreign terrorist group. It does not have to show, as with an ordinary search warrant, probable cause that the target is suspected of a crime.

For decades, the court worked under the radar. That changed after 2005, when The New York Times disclosed a National Security Agency program of surveillance of e-mail to and from foreign countries. Though the surveillance was conducted outside of FISA (Congress later specified that FISA court approval was required), the disclosures brought the court to the public’s attention. Criticism of the court (on which I served for six years after 9/11, while the caseload grew enormously) revived recently after revelations that the N.S.A., without court orders specifying individual targets, gathered troves of data from companies like Google and Facebook.

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James Robertson, a retired federal judge who served with me on the FISA court, recently called for greater transparency of the court’s proceedings. He has proposed the naming of an advocate, with high-level security clearance, to argue against the government’s filings. He suggested that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which oversees surveillance activities, could also provide a check. I would go even further.

In an ordinary criminal case, the adversarial process assures legal representation of the defendant. Clearly, in top-secret cases involving potential surveillance targets, a lawyer cannot, in the conventional sense, represent the target.

Congress could, however, authorize the FISA judges to appoint, from time to time, independent lawyers with security clearances to serve “pro bono publico” — for the public’s good — to challenge the government when an application for a FISA order raises new legal issues.

During my six years on the court, there were several occasions when I and other judges faced issues none of us had encountered before. A staff of experienced lawyers assists the court, but their help was not always enough given the complexity of the issues.

The low FISA standard of probable cause — not spinelessness or excessive deference to the government — explains why the court has so often granted the Justice Department’s requests. But rapid advances in technology have outpaced the amendments to FISA, even the most recent ones, in 2008.

Having lawyers challenge novel legal assertions in these secret proceedings would result in better judicial outcomes. Even if the government got its way all or most of the time, the court would have more fully developed its reasons for letting it do so. Of equal importance, the appointed lawyer could appeal a decision in the government’s favor to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review — and then to the Supreme Court. No opportunity for such review exists today, because only the government can appeal a FISA court ruling.

The Cracking of Kryptos

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