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When Bill Bratton became a Boston street cop after his return from serving in Vietnam, he was dismayed by the corrupt old guard, and it is fair to say the old guard was dismayed by him, too. But his success fighting crime could not be denied. Propelled by extraordinary results, Bratton had a dazzling rise, and ultimately a dazzling career, becoming the most famous police commissioner of modern times. The Profession is the story of that career in full.

The Profession is both a searching examination of the path of policing over the past fifty years, for good and also for ill, and a master class in transformative leadership. Bill Bratton was never brought into a police department to maintain the status quo; wherever he went–from Boston in the ’80s to the New York Police Department in the ’90s to Los Angeles after the beating of Rodney King to New York again in the era of unchecked stop-and-frisk–root-and-branch reinvention was the order of the day and he met the challenge.

Four decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure; indeed, many Americans view Carter as the only ex-president to have used the White House as a stepping-stone to greater achievements. But in retrospect the Carter political odyssey is a rich and human story, marked by both formidable accomplishments and painful political adversity.

In this deeply researched, brilliantly written account, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Kai Bird expertly unfolds the Carter saga as a tragic tipping point in American history. Drawing on interviews with Carter and members of his administration and recently declassified documents, Bird delivers a profound, clear-eyed evaluation of a leader whose legacy has been deeply misunderstood. The Outlier is the definitive account of an enigmatic presidency—both as it really happened and as it is remembered in the American consciousness.

For many years, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s penchant for teenage girls was an open secret in the high society of Palm Beach, Florida and Upper East Side, Manhattan. Charged in 2008 with soliciting prostitution from minors, Epstein was treated with unheard of leniency, dictating the terms of his non-prosecution. The media virtually ignored the failures of the criminal justice system, and Epstein’s friends and business partners brushed the allegations aside. But when in 2017 the U.S Attorney who approved Epstein’s plea deal, Alexander Acosta, was chosen by President Trump as Labor Secretary, reporter Julie K. Brown was compelled to ask questions.

Tracking Epstein’s evolution from a college dropout to one of the most successful financiers in the country—whose associates included Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, and Bill Clinton—Perversion of Justice builds on Brown’s original award-winning series, showing the power of truth, the value of local reportage and the tenacity of one woman in the face of the deep-seated corruption of powerful men.

Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it’s no surprise that its myths bite deep. There’s no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett and a band of rebels went down in a blaze of glory fighting for independence from Mexico, losing the battle but setting Texas up to win the war. However, that version of events, as Forget the Alamo definitively shows, owes more to fantasy than reality. Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos–Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels–scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico’s push to abolish slavery papered over.

Forget the Alamo provocatively explains the true story of the battle against the backdrop of Texas’s struggle for independence, then shows how the sausage of myth got made in the Jim Crow South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear for some, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness.

GCHQ has turned to social media in place of the traditional “tap on the shoulder” approach as part of its biggest ever recruitment drive for cyber operations.

The agency’s cyber spies have been allowed to lift the lid on their roles in the first-ever Reddit and Instagram Q&A sessions, in a bid to attract more creative people with a Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degree, from diverse backgrounds.

Cyber operatives using the names Anika and Jane have been taking questions from the public on Reddit since August, ahead of the looming September 7 deadline for applications.

A former CIA agent who bought into QA non conspiracy culture has seemingly died from COVID.

The death of Robert David Steele, a guest on the far right-wing program “Infowars,” was confirmed by a friend of his on social media Sunday. Steele prided himself as one of the first people to identify COVID — which Vice reports caused his death — as a “hoax.”

The 69-year-old ex-marine was reportedly hospitalised in Florida earlier this month, but remained sceptical about the virus that was killing him until his dying breath.

The World Health Organization said it has identified a new coronavirus “variant of interest,” named mu—also known by its scientific name, B.1.621—in its weekly pandemic update Tuesday, warning it was becoming increasingly prevalent in Colombia and Ecuador and shows signs of possible resistance to vaccines.

All viruses mutate over time and most mutations have little to no impact on the virus’ behaviour. The WHO keeps track of “variants of interest,” those which have mutations “predicted or known to affect virus characteristics” like transmissibility, resistance to vaccines and disease severity. Mu is the fifth variant of interest to be monitored by the WHO since March.

In this episode of Intelligence Matters, host Michael Morell speaks with Mike Orlando, the acting director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, about the range of foreign espionage threats facing the U.S. from adversaries and challengers like Russia and China. Orlando and Morell discuss how “non-traditional collectors” within the academic and business sectors are increasingly tasked by foreign governments to steal intellectual property and other secrets. Orlando, a career FBI agent who has specialized in counterintelligence, explains how NCSC has sought to warn U.S. private sector entities against espionage threats that have evolved in range and sophistication.

Chinese defector Wei Jingsheng has revealed sensational claims about what really happened in Wuhan as the Covid-19 pandemic emerged.

American leaders were allegedly warned of a new coronavirus circulating in Wuhan a staggering five months before the World Health Organisation declared the virus a pandemic.

If you thought hackers being able to make use of any ordinary light bulb to spy on your conversations from 80 feet away was ingenious, wait until you see what they have come up with now. Hackers exploit new passive attack method to eavesdrop from a distance.

The map frames a section of the world: the Persian Gulf is at left, a sprawling India and China are in the centre and North America is at top right. Australia is a little mauve island at the bottom, labelled “Beach”.

Quaint it may seem but, in some respects at least, the map shows what we know today as the Indo-Pacific.

Indo-Pacific, a term once used mostly by marine biologists and bio-geographers, has become common parlance among diplomats, bureaucrats and politicians, finding particularly free and full expression at events such as G7 meetings.

The horrific Aug. 26 complex attack against Afghan civilians and U.S. Marines at the Kabul airport has put international attention on the Islamic State in Khorasan (ISIS-K), a relatively small and obscure offshoot of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS-Core). The attack raised an important question about the group’s capabilities to conduct further attacks against U.S. interests, both in Afghanistan and abroad.

In the aftermath of the attack, focus will naturally fall to questions about the group’s leadership and organizational structure. But to fully understand the group and disrupt future terrorist attacks, policymakers must recognize how the group raises revenues to fund its activities as well as steps already taken by the international community.

Improving the quality of policy advice — and the capability to produce it — is on the agenda of many organisations and jurisdictions around the world. For example, Aotearoa-New Zealand’s Policy Project, and the UK’s Head of the Policy Profession unit are well established agents of change. The Delivering Great Policy program in Canberra has similar aims for the APS.

Regardless of who is leading their governments, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies maintain a quiet, steady relationship, as that link remains a vital part of national security for both countries. Top U.S., Israeli leaders detail most dangerous, complex foreign threats.

The Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan has raised fears that the country will once again become a safe haven for Islamist militants intent on perpetrating acts of international terrorism. In light of the Taliban’s history of harboring such radical groups, these fears are justified. But the two movements vying for influence in the country, al Qaeda and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), both face serious obstacles in their quest to use Afghanistan as a platform to bolster their strength and launch a new wave of terrorist attacks.

In this Policy Options Paper, Alasdair Gordon — CEO of Ecosse Global — argues that to harness rapid advances in machine learning, data analytics, automation and related data-driven technologies, Australia’s intelligence and security community must broaden and deepen partnership with the private sector.

The FBI has been responsible for identifying and neutralizing ongoing national security threats from foreign intelligence services since 1917, nine years after the Bureau was created in 1908. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, which is housed within the National Security Branch, has gone through a lot of changes over the years, and throughout the Cold War the division changed its name several times. But foiling and countering the efforts of the Soviet Union and other communist nations remained the primary mission.

At the behest of the CIA, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) established a “station” in Santiago in 1971 and conducted clandestine spy operations to directly support U.S. intervention in Chile. On 48th Anniversary of the Military Coup, Archive Posts Never-Before-Seen Australian Intelligence Service Documents on Anti-Allende Covert Ops, CIA Requested Clandestine Australian Support After Allende Election; Australian Intel Service Opened Station in Santiago, Records Confirm.

Biden administration officials may try to blame the U.S. intelligence community for the Afghanistan debacle. The New York Times on Aug. 18 cited an unidentified senior administration official, who claimed that as the situation grew more volatile in July, U.S. intelligence agencies never offered a clear “high confidence” prediction of an imminent Taliban takeover. But the role of intelligence in critical national security decisions is to reduce uncertainty, not to provide perfect clarity.

When Gen. David Petraeus became director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2011, he filled his office with weapons, military challenge coins and other mementos of war — in other words, he made it look like the Pentagon.