Word: spycraft
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...Obama's pick to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Panetta has no significant intelligence experience and is known around the capital mainly for his budgetary prowess, bipartisanship and management skills. While these are all important traits for a spymaster, so is some experience with actual spycraft: backlash to Panetta started immediately, with Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein noting that she believed "the agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time." The dilemma Obama faced - and perhaps the reason he chose someone from outside the spy community - is that...
...larger probe in light of indications that many prominent politicians, actors and athletes - often devout mobile-phone users - might also have been compromised. Phone companies O2 and Vodafone have been cooperating with detectives to identify any other targeted customers. Was the dirt worth the drama? Goodman's alleged spycraft revealed nothing as salacious as Charles' famous 1989 declaration that he wanted to be reincarnated as one of then-mistress Camilla's feminine products. But he did manage to reveal that heartthrob-in-waiting William had consulted his knee surgeon after pulling a tendon...
What are we to think, sitting in our living room or stranded on a tarmac, as harrowing details of the latest terrorist plot spill forth? Is this a victory of the spycraft and force on our side adroitly employed to avert disaster? Or is the plot--with its ingenious formula for off-the-shelf explosives--a frightening display of how many ways an invisible army of Islamic radicals might come...
That provided an opening. The disgruntlement was enough to begin working a few potential informants. It was an operation of relationship building that reflected traditional European spycraft. Build common bonds. Show sympathy to the sources' concerns. Develop trust. While al-Qaeda recruits were ready for martyrdom, that was something its more senior officials seemed to have little taste for. As one CIA manager said, "Masterminds are too valuable for martyrdom." Whatever Ali's motivations, his reports - over the preceding six months - had been almost always correct, including information that led to several captures...
...account of how Bush authorized the National Security Agency to wiretap telephone and e-mail communications inside the U.S. without court-sanctioned warrants. The Times ran the article on Dec. 16, touching off a blogospheric scrum: conservatives accuse the Times of aiding terrorists by revealing secrets of U.S. spycraft while liberals say the paper caved to White House pressure by not dropping the bombshell sooner. At the center of the article's backstory is Risen, who unsuccessfully pushed to publish the wiretap report last year, then took a leave to write a book, State of War: The Secret History...