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One of the key players during the Snowden affair was Director of National Intelligence James Clapper . He is responsible for coordinating all 16 American intelligence agencies, a role which is reflected by the number and the types of telephone equipment in his office. Clapper has six phones, more than for example the director of the NSA, or the Defense Secretary. Here we will take a close look at these telecommunication devices used by the US Director of National Intelligence. The office of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was created in 2004, after the 9/11 Commission Report recommended a stronger and separate leadership for the US intelligence community. Before, it was the director of the CIA who acted as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) in order to coordinate the various intelligence agencies. Australian foreign affairs minister Kevin Rudd (right) meeting DNI James Clapper (left) (Photo: Australian Foreign Affairs Department - Click to enlarge) The telecommunications...

On July 24, the US National Archives released a series of 356 never-before-seen photos, most of them taken on September 11, 2001 inside the emergency bunker under the White House. The bunker is officially called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), but White House officials also call it the shelter. It was constructed in 1942 underneath the East Wing of the White House, which was primarily built to cover the building of the bunker. It is said the PEOC can withstand the blast overpressure from a nuclear detonation. One of the very few photos from inside the PEOC available before the recent release (White House photo - Click to enlarge) The photos were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Colette Neirouz Hanna, coordinating producer for the FRONTLINE documentary film team. They focus on the reaction from then-vice president Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials during the terrorist attacks. How Cheney reached ...

(Updated: October 6, 2015) Last Tuesday, June 23, the website Wikileaks (in cooperation with Libération and Mediapart ) published a number of NSA-documents showing that between 2006 and 2012, NSA had been able to eavesdrop on the phone calls of three French presidents. This is the first time we see actual finished intelligence reports that prove such eavesdropping, and being classified as TOP SECRET//COMINT-GAMMA they are much more sensitive than most of the documents from the Snowden-archive. Also it seems that these new Wikileaks-documents are not from Snowden, but from another source, which could be the same as the one that leaked a database record about NSA's eavesdropping on German chancellor Merkel. Update: On Monday, June 29, Wikileaks published two Information Need (IN) requests and five additional intelligence reports , but the latter are not as highly classified as the ones revealed earlier. - Intelligence reports - Tasking database records - A second source - - S...

(Updated: March 17, 2017) Recently, a mysterious telephone was offered for sale at eBay . The device was made by the little-known company Tektron Micro Electronics, Inc. from Hanover, Maryland, and seems to be a secure phone for military use. Apart from the pictures shown below, nothing more is known about it, but maybe some readers of this weblog recognize the device and have some more information about its purpose and where it was used (see the update !) A Tektron secure military telephone (Photo via eBay - Click to enlarge) The phone comes without a handset, but it has a display and a common 12-button key pad, with some additional special purpose buttons. According to the seller, all of them are made of some kind of rubbery material instead of hard plastic. The big round buttons reveal that this is a secure phone, capable encrypting the calls: a green button with a green light for Secure and a red button with a (probably) red light for Non-Secure: Keypad of the Tektron telephone (P...

(Updated: January 1, 2017) With last year's news of NSA eavesdropping on the mobile phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel in mind, Dutch online media assumed it was big news that the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte has a phone that cannot be intercepted. As was the case with chancellor Merkel, most people do not seem aware of the fact that political leaders usually have two kind of phones: an ordinary one that is easy to intercept and a secure one, that is very difficult to tap. That prime minister Rutte has a secure phone was said by the director for Cyber Security in a radio-interview last week. Afterwards this was seen a slip of the tongue, because the government has the policy to never say anything about the security methods they use. But from pictures and other sources we can still get a fairly good idea of which phones, both secure and non-secure, are used by the Dutch prime minister. As we will show here, he currently has three landline and two mobile phones at his di...