WITH ALL DUE RESPECT: The news/opinion site The Intercept apparently has intercepted a recent internal policy directive from the head of the National Security Agency, General Paul Nakasone, in which the general instructed his employees to treat the foreign targets of intelligence gathering “with dignity and respect.” The Intercept published the 14-page policy directive they intercepted. The document says that “In recognition that SIGINT activities must take into account that all persons should be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their nationality or wherever they might reside, and that all persons have legitimate privacy interests in the handling of their personal information as required by Executive Order 14086 (Reference a), the USSS shall…” and then there is a lot of bureaucratic whereases and wherefores. (“USSS” is the United States Signals Intelligence System.) If real, we’re guessing that the document may have been issued in an effort to calm fears in some quarters that NSA and company might get carried away in their electronic eavesdropping. Somehow, we’re not sure this promise of “dignity and respect” is going to mollify all the critics.
TREAT YOUR TRAITORS WITH RESPECT: If you think that last item was hard to believe – wait till you hear this one. A website calling itself The Brush Pass has a wild tale about James Harper, a Silicon-Valley based entrepreneur, who has been in jail since the mid 1980’s after being convicted of selling highly-sensitive classified information to the Polish intelligence service which, in turn, was passing it on to the Soviets. Having a lot of time on his hands while doing time – Harper reportedly has been submitting FOIA requests about his own case. Sometime in the 1990s, the imprisoned Harper FOIA’d for the Pentagon damage assessment on his case. But someone in DoD got a little confused and mistakenly redacted (blacked out) only the unclassified parts…and sent in the clear – only the classified portions of the document. Harper subsequently made the mistake of sending another FOIA request for the same document – and someone in DoD reportedly figured out how they had screwed up the first request. The Pentagon got the prison warden to confiscate the secret version. It is unclear how many months/years elapsed with Harper having the sensitive bits in his cell – and if there would have been anything to prevent him from making a copy or auctioning it off to the highest bidder. The whole Harper tale is told in a podcast called Spy Valley.
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STEALING THE FAMILY JEWELS: Well, fake family. Here is another very odd story. The BBC reports that artifacts originally belonging to groundbreaking World War II codebreaker Alan Turing have been returned to the U.K. from the U.S. after going missing nearly 40 years ago. The items include a miniature Order of the British Empire medal, a letter from King George VI to Turing, and other bits of memorabilia. Who took the Turing tokens? Apparently, a woman now known as Julia Turing. But here is the weird part. She is not related to the mathematician. The BBC reports thast Ms. Turing was previously known as Julie Schwinghamer but legally changed her name to Turing around the time she allegedly swiped the items from a British school where young Mr. Turing had once studied and where the items had been on exhibit. The British broadcaster reports that the former Ms. Schwinghamer was living in Colorado in 2018, when she attempted to loan the items to the University of Colorado for a display – claiming she was kin to Turing. Exactly how authorities figured out the stuff was stolen – and how it made its way back to the UK is a bit of a mystery – about which we have yet to break the code. Ms. Turing reportedly settled a civil lawsuit in 2020, but as far as we can tell, she was never sent to the slammer.
POCKET LITTER: Dead Droplets and bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
LEGGING IT AT LANGLEY: What do you do when you want to count your steps, but your boss tells you to skip the Fitbit because you work in a SCIF? Well, The Wall Street Journal this week provided the answer in a story about an annual competition at CIA headquarters where each June, teams of Agency officers compete to see who can rack up the most mileage on their feet. But security rules say no Fitbits, smart phones or other high-tech devices are allowed inside CIA HQ. So, employees rely on old fashioned analog pedometers. The WSJ story includes some fun names for the teams…like “Led Steppin” and “Red Hot Chili Steppers.” There were 457 teams made up of 4,000 participants this year. All told, something just shy of 1.2 billion (with a B) steps were taken and recorded. We took the step (while sitting down) of looking up how long a typical adult stride is (answer: 2.5 feet.) Multiplying that by the number of steps recorded in the month-long Agency competition – we calculate that participants logged enough mileage to go from the earth to the moon and back (with a little left over for side trips.)
OUT OF THE BOX THINKING: At first, it seemed like the most disappointing opening since Geraldo Rivera cracked Al Capone’s safe as the U.S. Military Academy pried open what was believed to be a nearly two-century-old time capsule. The container was buried under a monument to Thaddeus Kosciuskzo. Before a hushed crowd at the West Point auditorium, an archeologist gently opened the box and found – dirt. Well, they called it “silt” which is a nice word for dirt. You can watch the anti-climax on YouTube if you have 40 minutes to spare and have a low threshold for suspense. We thought that maybe some cadets buried the container in 1828 and forgot to put something in it. Or maybe they imagined what a fun prank it would be a couple centuries later when the (lack of) secret stash would be revealed. In the spirit of inter-service cooperation, we were just glad the container didn’t hold a “Beat Navy” banner. But then, two days later the Military Academy announced that they found six silver American coins dating from 1795 to 1828 and a commemorative medal buried in the sediment. Now, experts say that the container had a crack and water and sediment may have seeped in destroying other stuff that may have been in there. On the other hand, one of the cadets responsible for burying the object around 1829, was Cadet Robert E. Lee – so maybe he just seceded the stuff.
PLEASE SEND US SOME DIRT FOR NEXT WEEK’S DEAD DROP. NOT THE SILTY KIND, BUT INFO WE CAN USE. SEND IT TO: TheDeadDrop@theCipherBrief.com.
