How’d you do the one-time donation? I’m not into membership and I agree with your sentiments on auto-renewal, but I would like to support the work done here…

Thanks for all the great work.

I asked this in the “Bringing Discredit” thread but didn’t get a response. In that post, you stated that Wikileaks’ claims to have decrypted Collateral Murder “was a ruse–-it was not encrypted.” Can you please source? Pardon me for having missed that development, but it’s an important one to me and my feeble searches apparently aren’t up to snuff. Thank you.

they announced decrypting it ["Collateral Murder"] (which was a ruse–it was not encrypted)

Can you please source? I’m aware of speculation on the topic (eg this entry and discussion from April 7, 2010 on Bruce Scheier’s blog), but have not seen a definitive refutation of Wikileaks’ claims. FWIW, Assange stated on ~April 6, 2010:

a team of cryptologists spent three months working on the clip. It had to do with trying a few million of the most likely passwords in order to find the right one.

As recently as May 16, 2010, he again claimed the encryption was broken “by us.”

found it: http://cryptome.org/0003/hbg/HBG-Fed-OA.pdf

Jan. 22, 2010:

Exhibit B

HB Gary Federal, LLC Operating Agreement

CAPITAL CONTRIBUTION

CONTRIBUTED INITIAL CAPITAL

Member / Interest Holder’s Percentage / Amount Paid ($ Amount – Matches Pro Rata %)

Penelope Christine Leavy / 48% / $50,000.00

Can you/anyone please provide a source re: Penny Leavy owning 50% of HBGary Federal? Not finding this in my searches. Thanks.

Misread you on the B-29–my fault but thanks for the clarification.

Re: Russian v. US spies, I can’t help but wonder how much we don’t know about American espionage successes. But of course that’s just speculation.

I’ve had some interest in the F-117 shootdown in the past, but never realized how many conflicting or at least incomplete stories are out there (I count 3 or 4 different versions). Prof Foland’s links (above) even raise the possibility that “Chinese radar and materials specialists … assist[ed] the Yugoslavian government in using multi-location radar to detect Stealth aircraft.” Curious. Who knows which of the stories is disinformation, and which is truth…

All due and sincere respect, but your example of why the “effectiveness of Soviet/Russian spying against the US is really difficult to overstate” is the B-29? That’s a seventy+ year-old propeller aircraft that’s been out of service since 1960. The Soviets copied the design not through ace spying, but after appropriating three planes that made emergency landings in the USSR in 1944.

Also, can anyone provide a credible, sourced citation on the alleged cell-phone tower network/F-117 take down? My searches bring up a lot of conjecture and conflicting rumors, but nothing remotely authoritative. The closest I’ve found is a 2001 Daily Telegraph article–”Mobile telephone masts ‘can detect stealth bombers’“:

According to military sources, a rough version of a similar system might have been used in Serbia to shoot down an American F117 stealth fighter 40 miles west of Belgrade during the Kosovo campaign.

A lot of uncertainty in that sentence. The innovation discussed in that article might explain why the F-117 was phased out generally, but I question the cell phone tower saturation of Serbia in 1999, among other things. FWIW, according to Wikipedia, which cites an unavailable Jane’s source:

According to NATO Commander Wesley Clark and other NATO generals, Yugoslav air defenses detected F-117s by operating their radars on unusually long wavelengths, making the aircraft visible to radar for brief periods. It is also possible that the aircraft was visible due to a disruption of its radar signature caused by open bomb-bay doors. This was the justification given by Colonel Dani in a 2007 interview.

Cheers.

Sounds like a line-item veto.