FAS | Intelligence | News | 2000 ||||

April 2000 Intelligence News

• Pentagon: Chinese Approach U.S. Jets By ROBERT BURNS, Associated Press April 27, 2000 - Two Chinese F-8 fighters approached within a couple of miles of an American RC-135 reconnaissance plane flying in international airspace over the South China Sea. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the Rivet Joint aircraft are capable of conducting electronic and communications intercepts against targets at ranges of up to 240 kilometers.
• LOCKERBIE TRIAL / HEARING Voice of America 27 April 2000 -- A Scottish judge has rejected a prosecution request for more time to prepare the case against two Libyans charged with the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
• SIMULATED TERRORIST ATTACK Voice of America 26 April 2000 -- Early Wednesday, police and emergency workers converged on the port of Long Beach, California, to test the city's readiness for a terrorist attack.
• OKLAHOMA MEMORIAL MUSEUM Voice of America 26 April 2000 -- The United States' newest national memorial honors the victims and survivors of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
• Text: U.S. to Issue New Currency 26 April 2000 -- U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers says the United States will begin introducing new $10 and $5 currency notes May 24 that will feature new and modified security features to deter counterfeiting.
• Text: Treasury's Johnson on Fighting Money Laundering 25 April 2000 -- Treasury Under Secretary for Enforcement James Johnson says the U.S. National Money Laundering Strategy for 2000 attacks the crime from three angles -- domestic enforcement, partnerships of banks and financial institutions with state and local governments, and international cooperation to undermine foreign jurisdictions that offer no-questions-asked banking services.
• MISSING LAPTOP / SECRETS Voice of America 24 April 2000 -- Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has ordered a series of new security measures following the recent disappearance of a laptop computer containing highly classified information.
• Lee Disputes Classification of Weapons Data Walter Pincus Washington Post April 20, 2000; Page A10 - According to security specialist Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, PARD was a category that evolved because the enormous amount of data in Los Alamos computers posed a "practical difficulty" for classification.
• MEMORIAL DEDICATION Voice of America 19 April 2000 -- A memorial is being dedicated to the victims and survivors of the United States' deadliest terrorist attack, the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
• COMPUTER ATTACKS ARREST Voice of America 19 April 2000 -- Canadian police have arrested a teenage suspect in connection with recent attacks on some of America's most popular internet (World Wide) web sites.
• FBI INVESTIGATING DISAPPEARANCE OF LAPTOP COMPUTER FROM STATE DEPARTMENT CONTAINING HIGHLY SENSITIVE GOVERNMENT SECRETS TODAY April 18, 2000 -- Mr. JOHN PIKE : It's not the sort of thing that anybody would have any business putting on a laptop computer that could easily be lost or stolen.
• OKLAHOMA MEMORIAL Voice of America 18 April 2000 -- Today (Wednesday) is the fifth anniversary of the deadliest terrorist act committed on United States soil. The truck bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building killed 168 people and injured 850.
• TERRORISM CONFERENCE Voice of America 17 April 2000 -- This week, Oklahoma City is hosting an international conference on terrorism. The meeting is designed to assess how terrorism has changed during the last 20 years and to try to predict its future course.
• Navy confirms classified data was mishandled By Steve Liewer Pacific Stars & Stripes Monday, April 17, 2000 -- Two diskettes containing secret data found aboard Japanese ship, Navy memo says.
• Lee's Files Given `Secret' Label After He Left New twist challenges lab's case William J. Broad, New York Times Saturday, April 15, 2000 -- Steven Aftergood, a secrecy and classification expert at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington, said the development would throw the government on the defensive.
• CRIME CONGRESS SECRETARY-GENERAL APPEALS FOR QUICK APPROVAL OF CONVENTION AGAINST TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME Press Release SOC/CP/225 - 14 April 2000 -- The high-level segment of the Tenth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders began in Vienna this morning.
• GLOBAL RISE OF TERRORISM Voice of America 12 April 2000 -- Terrorist attacks are committed by people who are confused by global changes and perceive the world as becoming too secular. There has been an increase of such attacks in the 1990-s.
• SENATE-COLOMBIA AID Voice of America 12 April 2000 -- The U-S Senate majority leader says Colombia could receive American anti-drug aid next month or in June.
• U-S / COLOMBIA PLOT Voice of America 12 April 2000 -- The head of U-S drug control operations says Colombian paramilitary groups are plotting to assassinate Colombia's President Andres Pastrana in retaliation for the government's crackdown on their activities.
• Text: NTSB Chairman Hall Testifies on EgyptAir Crash Investigation 11 April 2000 -- Jim Hall, Chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), April 11 told members of the House Subcommittee on Aviation, Transportation and Infrastructure that his agency is recommending that video recorders be installed in the cockpits of commercial airplanes, as a result of its investigation into the fatal crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 last October.
• U-S / COLOMBIA Voice of America 11 April 2000 -- Colombian President Andres Pastrana is meeting with top U-S officials in Washington, in an effort to rescue a one-point-six billion dollar anti-narcotics aid package.
• Lee Data Constraints Unclear By Ian Hoffman Albuquerque Journal April 10, 2000 - Lee's tapes were full of data designated as PARD, or protect as restricted data. "This is ... an indication of potentially lesser sensitivity," said Steve Aftergood, a classification expert at the Federation of American Scientists.
• CIA-EMBASSY Voice of America 09 April 2000 -- The U-S Central Intelligence Agency has disciplined several employees blamed for mistakes that led to last year's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
• TERRORISM OUTLOOK Voice of America 08 April 2000 -- Terrorism is clearly a threat, but can the threat be exaggerated? At a recent Washington conference, two analysts said it can be and that this is exactly what the terrorists want.
• Memorandum For The Vice President, et al., The White House, Office of the Secretary, 07 April 2000 -- "Under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, including sections 1412(a)(2) and 1415(d)(1) of the Act, I designate the Attorney General to replace the Secretary of Defense as the lead Federal official with responsibility for carrying out these programs."
• U-N / SUMMARY EXECUTIONS Voice of America 07 April 2000 -- More and more oppressive governments are using what she calls "non-state actors" -- unofficial militant forces -- to deal with individuals or groups who challenge their authority.
• MEXICO BORDER Voice of America 07 April 2000 -- Mexico's foreign minister is proposing new mechanisms to avoid accidental confrontations between Mexican and US law enforcement officials.
• U-S / RUSSIA SPY Voice of America 05 April 2000 -- The U-S State Department says consular affairs officials have visited a U-S citizen being held by Russian authorities on spy charges.
• RUSSIA / SPY Voice of America 05 April 2000 -- Russian Security Services have detained a United States citizen in Moscow on suspicion of espionage.
• HUNGARY / F-B-I Voice of America 05 April 2000 -- A task force from the U-S Federal Bureau of Investigation, the F-B-I, has arrived in Hungary to help combat organized crime in Eastern Europe.
• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) 05 April 2000 -- You can ask your Internet Service Provider (ISP) if they have configured their routers properly. Of course, they probably won't tell you if their routers are misconfigured, but your call can sound an alarm for them to take immediate action.
• PC security frequently asked questions Tuesday, 04 April 2000 -- Hundreds of thousands of notebook computers are stolen every year. Which represents nearly 1/4 of the notebooks sold.
• SENATE-COLOMBIA- Voice of America 04 April 2000 -- The Senate will not take up a so-called emergency supplemental spending bill, which includes one-point-seven billion dollars in anti-drug aid for Colombia.