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FIRST TROLL FARMS, NOW LAPTOP FARMS – This week’s award for most creative traitor goes to an Arizona woman who just earned herself 102 months in federal prison for helping North Korean IT workers pose as Americans, defraud their way into U.S. companies, and cash in big, all to Pyongyang’s benefit. Prosecutors say the woman ran a so-called “laptop farm” out of her suburban home, letting North Korean techies appear to be working remotely from the U.S. while actually collecting paychecks for Pyongyang. Over 300 U.S. companies, including a top-five TV network and a Silicon Valley company, got duped thanks to one very [...] More

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In a recent opinion piece published in The Cipher Brief, former senior CIA Executive Mark Kelton suggests that the country’s leading intelligence organization has a trust problem both with policy makers and the public. One component of that problem that Kelton argues poses an existential threat to the Agency, is leakers. Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly talks with Kelton – who oversaw the CIA’s response to the devastating intelligence leaks made by Edward Snowden – about why he believes the future effectiveness of the Agency depends on restoring trust.

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In October1979, the most powerful cyclone in recorded history, raced across the Pacific and set in motion circumstances that caused a horrendous fire at a U.S. Marine Corps facility at the foot of Japan’s Mount Fuji. Thirteen Marines died of their burns and more than 70 other people were seriously injured. And yet few people today know of or remember these events. Chas Henry who served twenty years as a Marine and went on to have a highly successful career as a broadcast journalist – is out with a new book called “Fuji Fire: Sifting Ashes of a Forgotten U.S. Marine Corps Tragedy.” We will talk with him about his four-year-long effort to investigate the tragedy and what he learned about the chaos of the mass casualty event and the courage of those who fought the fire and battled their injuries during the long recovery process. We will ask him why a disaster of such magnitude is so little remembered and why official investigations into the fire appear to have been so limited.