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History, Documents and Contexts Since its creation in 1947, the CIA has been at the heart of America’s security apparatus. Written by intelligence scholars and experts, The CIA and the Pursuit of Security offers the reader a lively survey of the CIA past and present. The history of the agency is presented through the prism of its declassified documents, with each being supplemented by insightful contextual analysis. The book chronicles the evolution of the CIA, its remarkable successes, clandestine operations, and its ongoing struggle to maintain American security in an age of proliferating threats.

A Transatlantic Perspective James Lockhart blends Chilean, inter-American and transatlantic national, regional and world-historical trends into a century-long Cold War narrative. He argues that Chileans made their own history as highly engaged internationalists while reassessing American and other foreign-directed intelligence, surveillance and secret warfare operations in Chile and southern South America. The book transcends a well-known, US-centred historiography while offering a more equitable and global interpretation of Chile’s Cold War experience than previously possible. This advances research that has progressively expanded the framework of Chile’s Cold War experience since the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in the UK for human rights violations more than 20 years ago.

Divided into two parts, the book adopts a thematic approach to the topic, guiding the reader through the collection and analysis of information and its use by policymakers, before looking at intelligence sharing. Lomas and Murphy also explore the important associated activities of counterintelligence and the use of covert action, to influence foreign countries and individuals. Topics covered include human and signals intelligence, the Cuban Missile Crisis, intelligence and Stalin, Trump and the US intelligence community, and the Soviet Bloc. This analysis is supplemented by a comprehensive documents section, containing newly released documents, including material from Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified material. Intelligence and Espionage: Secrets and Spies provides a global introduction to the role of intelligence – a key, but sometimes controversial, aspect of ensuring national security. Separating fact from fiction, the book draws on past examples to explore the use and misuse of intelligence, examine why failures take place and address important ethical issues over its use.

Highlights of the volume include pioneering essays on the methodology of intelligence studies by Michael Fry and Miles Hochstein, and the future perils of the surveillance state by James Der Derian. Two leading authorities on the history of Soviet/Russian intelligence, Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, contribute essays on the final days of the KGB. Also, the mythology surrounding the life of Second World War intelligence chief, Sir William Stephenson, The Man Called Intrepid’, is penetrated in a persuasive revisionist account by Timothy Naftali. The collection is rounded off by a series of essays devoted to unearthing the history of the Canadian intelligence service. Espionage: Past, Present, Future? (Studies in Intelligence) is a collection of essays. In this volume were, for the most part, first produced for a conference held at the University of Toronto in November 1991.

Australia telecoms giant Optus said current and former customer data was accessed following a cyberattack on its systems.

Optus said in a press release on Thursday that an unspecified number of customer names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, and addresses and identity document numbers, such as driver’s license or passport numbers, were taken in the breach.

The Australian government on Sunday levelled its harshest criticism yet against Optus, the second-biggest telecoms company, for a cybersecurity breach that affected the equivalent of 40% of the country’s population.

Optus will be probed by two Australian regulators over the circumstances that led to the company’s massive data breach that exposed the personal information of millions of customers last month. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) announced separate but coordinated investigations on Tuesday into Optus.

Singapore Telecommunications Ltd has announced that its Australian unit Dialog faced a cyberattack that potentially affected 1,000 current and former employees and fewer than 20 clients, weeks after a massive data breach at Sydney-based unit Optus. Singtel said on Monday the attack on Dialog, an Australia-based information technology services consulting firm, was first detected on September 10.

China outpaces efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to harness power of publicly available data.

As Russian troops surged toward Ukraine’s border last fall, a small Western intelligence unit swung into action, tracking signs Moscow was preparing to invade. It drew up escape routes for its people and wrote twice-daily intelligence reports.

The unit drafted and sent to its leaders an assessment on Feb. 16, 2022, that would be eerily prescient: Russia, it said, would likely invade Ukraine on Feb. 23, U.S. East Coast time.

General Hockenhull, Commander Strategic Command, discussed the use of open source intelligence at a RUSI Members Webinar.

“We shouldn’t believe that everything that goes on is always new. Indeed, if we go back to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service from 1941, or the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications, we should recognise that this is in a long tradition of exploiting available information. Now this has been scaled at both volume and at pace by the availability of technology, and also the ability of mass to engage in this activity.”

Russia’s aggressive actions against Ukraine have seriously undermined Euro-Atlantic security. Ukraine has engaged constructively towards a settlement. But the key for the normalisation of relations between NATO, Russia and Ukraine remains Russia’s recognition of Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. Sanctions relief in the absence of significant moves would undermine the West’s credibility and risk further destabilisation.

European Union Agency for Cyber Security releases its report on cyber espionage. Cyber espionage is considered both a threat and a motive in the cybersecurity playbook. It is defined as ‘the use of computer networks to gain illicit access to confidential information, typically that held by a government or other organisation’.

Cyberattacks and data breaches continue to rise year-over-year and another so-called silver bullet technology isn’t going to stop that trend. The reality is the bad guys are looking at the entire playing field, but we are not because organizational structure, personalities and politics get in the way.

We’ve all marveled at the latest innovations from Tesla, the skill of Google’s self-driving cars, or, at the very least, enjoyed playing a podcast on our phone through our car’s speakers.

The automotive industry continues to innovate, bringing connectivity to vehicles in new ways from the cockpit to the engine. These new tools change the way people drive and view their cars. An automobile is no longer just for transportation from point A to point B, but cars are rolling data centers that transmit a wealth of actionable intelligence to the networks and systems around them. However, that same information is also a valuable commodity to hackers – who are looking to steal it at any cost.

We speak with Daniel O’Toole, Senior Adviser for Space within the Sector Team for Defence, Space and Infrastructure at the Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade). In addition to his role at Austrade, Daniel has also served as partial secondee at the Australian Space Agency since 2018. In this capacity he works on joint Austrade-Space Agency initiatives that help promote the growth of the Australian space industry through international market programs and opportunities.

Spy: Espionage in Australia reveals the personal experiences of secret agents and the curious history of espionage and counter-espionage in Australia, from Federation through to the present day.

On tour from the National Archives of Australia, Spy will bring the stories of real spies out of the shadows and into the light at The Workshops Rail Museum.