NATO opens second Baltic air base in Estonia with 4 Danish fighter jets amid Ukraine crisis

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TALLINN, Estonia NATO has opened its second Baltic air base in Estonia as part of the military alliance's increased regional air policing mission during the Ukraine crisis.

Estonia's military says four Danish fighter jets arrived at the Amari air base, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) southwest of the capital Tallinn on Wednesday.

The Royal Danish Air Force F-16 planes will patrol the skies of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania for four months in coordination with NATO fighter jets stationed in Lithuania. After that, Germany will take over the rotational mission.

In an opening ceremony, Estonia's Prime Minister Taavi Roivas praised NATO's decision to deploy planes to the country, saying it will boost regional security.

NATO has carried out Baltic air patrols from a former Soviet base in Lithuania since 2004.

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NATO opens second Baltic air base in Estonia with 4 Danish fighter jets amid Ukraine crisis

RAF Deploys Typhoon Jets To Bolster NATO Air Policing Mission

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Thu, May 01, 2014

Four Royal Air Force Typhoons have deployed today to take part in the NATO Baltic air policing mission over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The UK fast jets will reinforce the Polish contribution to the air policing mission; a standing defensive mission undertaken by rotations of aircraft from contributing nations on a 4-month cycle.

The Defence Secretary Philip Hammond announced this to the House of Commons in March. The deployment forms part of a series of measures taken by NATO to support and reassure its eastern member states.

"In the wake of recent events in Ukraine, it is right that NATO takes steps to reaffirm very publicly its commitment to the collective security of its members," Hammond said. "As a leading member of NATO, the UK is playing a central role, underlined by todays deployment of RAF Typhoon aircraft to Lithuania. This, alongside the other action we are taking, will provide reassurance to our NATO allies in eastern Europe and the Baltic states."

As part of standing arrangements within NATO, members of the alliance without their own air policing assets are assisted by others.

The RAFs Typhoon FGR4, based at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire and RAF Leuchars in Fife, is also used to provide air policing within UK airspace as part of the Quick Reaction Alert and in the Falkland Islands.

A multi-role combat aircraft, it is capable of being deployed in the full spectrum of air operations, from air policing through to high intensity conflict.

This Typhoon deployment comes 6 weeks after the UK Sentry E-3D aircraft, which is part of the NATO Airborne Warning and Control System Force, was deployed to Polish and Romanian airspace to provide additional reassurance to our allies.

(Image provided by the RAF)

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RAF Deploys Typhoon Jets To Bolster NATO Air Policing Mission

What's The NSA Doing Now? Training More Cyberwarriors

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hide captionComputer hacking experts from the National Security Agency and various branches of the U.S. armed services try to break into remote networks set up by competing U.S. military service academies. The hackers' war room is in a building in Columbia, Md., owned by Parsons, a U.S. defense contractor.

Computer hacking experts from the National Security Agency and various branches of the U.S. armed services try to break into remote networks set up by competing U.S. military service academies. The hackers' war room is in a building in Columbia, Md., owned by Parsons, a U.S. defense contractor.

The U.S. needs more cyberwarriors, and it needs them fast, according to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. He plans to more than triple the size of the Pentagon's Cyber Command over the next two years.

But where will they come from? These are not the kind of skills you can teach in basic training.

Enter the embattled National Security Agency. Its new director, Adm. Michael Rogers, also directs the Cyber Command. Ten miles down the road from the NSA, at a defense contractor's office in Columbia, Md., the NSA recently held a live-fire cyberwarfare exercise aimed at developing more cyberwarriors.

In a long room at the facility, big speakers pump electro house music. Several dozen people, many in military uniforms, cluster around computer stations. Hovering above them is the image of a skull and bones a big Jolly Roger pirate flag.

This is a roomful of break-in artists people who are experts at hacking into other people's computers.

hide captionU.S. Naval Academy midshipmen taking part in the cyber exercise check to see if their computer network has been hacked by the NSA's red-cell team.

U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen taking part in the cyber exercise check to see if their computer network has been hacked by the NSA's red-cell team.

Marine Capt. Robert Johnston leads what he calls a reconnaissance and initial access team.

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What's The NSA Doing Now? Training More Cyberwarriors

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NSA on Heartbleed: 'We're not legally allowed to lie to you'

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Summary: In an exclusive interview with ZDNet's David Gewirtz, a senior NSA official explains why the agency regards security and civil liberties as more than a simple balancing act: "You have to have them both."

ZDNet recently had the opportunity to sit down and discuss how the NSA approaches the difficult challenge of both protecting our security and supporting the American ideals of openness and transparency. The recent Heartbleed bug brought these issues to light in a particularly relevant way.

This article contains a transcribed version of that interview. Other than a few housekeeping clean-ups, the interview is verbatim.

Before we start, I also want to point out that I was permitted to ask whatever questions I wanted, and Neal Ziring, Technical Director in NSA's Information Assurance Directorate was willing to answer them.

Here are some tidbits from the full interview:

And now, the full interview, in its entirety...

ZDNet: Let's start out with some background. Tell us about yourself.

Neal: I've been at NSA since 1988, and I worked mostly in evaluation of security products, crypto products, things like that. I worked a little bit on mobile code security, executable content security as you sometimes call it at the DOD and IC levels. I worked a lot on router security, so if you go on NSA.gov, you can see some of the products I worked on, the guidance available on security, and I worked with NIST on security content automation protocol.

"The folks that are here on the inside get to see the intelligence that they're delivering every day. They get to see a soldier go home who they gave intelligence to his platoon so it wasn't ambushed."

Then I spent four years working over in our Technology Directorate as a security architect for some large government systems including some that went out to the field like Iraq and Afghanistan. Then I came back to my home, IAD Directorate, to be the Technical Director. You can think of it like a senior technical advisor position to our director.

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NSA on Heartbleed: 'We're not legally allowed to lie to you'

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New NSA chief: Agency has lost trust

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The NSA has lost the trust of the American people as a result of the Edward Snowden leaks, and needs to be more transparent to gain it back, the NSAs new director said Wednesday in his first public comments since taking control of the embattled spy agency.

I tell the [NSA] workforce out there as the new guy, lets be honest with each other, the nation has lost a measure of trust in us, Admiral Michael Rogers told a conference of the Women in Aerospace conference in Crystal City, Va.

In the future, he said, If we make a mistake, you will hear about it. Thats my job as director and I have no problem with it. We are not going to hide our mistakes.

(Also on POLITICO: Surveillance orders declined in 2013)

The whole media leaks issue as we call it, has caused quite a stir, said Rogers, who was sworn in as director of NSA and assumed command of U.S. Cyber Command at the beginning of April.

Rogers didnt lay complete responsibility at the doorstep of the NSA: He blamed public mistrust on the way the newsmedia had framed the issues raised in the Snowden revelations.

From my perspective the debate and the dialogue to date have been very uneven, he said.

Your neighbors are saying to you: Man, Ive been listening about you on the TV and reading about you in the papers and I had no idea what a bad person you are, he joked.

He said the NSA and its staff had to work to earn and sustain Americans trust, but could not be too open about the work of the ultra-secret agency, which specializes in electronic eavesdropping and other surveillance using the latest high technology.

I believe in transparency and I will be as transparent as possible, but I also have to be mindful that in doing so I cannot undermine the specifics of what were doing to protect the country, he said.

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New NSA chief: Agency has lost trust

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Supreme Court could weigh in on NSA case, justice says

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By Gabe LaMonica, CNN

updated 11:51 AM EDT, Fri April 18, 2014

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) -- A Supreme Court justice Thursday night suggested the legality of National Security Agency activities could be decided by the court.

Three days after Pulitzers were awarded to newspapers that revealed the NSA's surveillance activities, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg deflected a question about Edward Snowden, who leaked NSA data.

When asked, "Do you believe that Snowden is a whistleblower or a traitor?" Ginsburg, who was joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington that she could not say.

"It's also possible, is it not," she said, "that the question you raise could come before the court. And we are not at liberty to preview."

If Snowden is extradited to the United States and charged with federal crimes for his leaks, his case could come before the court.

In June of 2013, The Guardian and The Washington Post published reports that revealed the NSA's bulk collection of U.S. citizens' phone records and other clandestine surveillance activities. That sparked a firestorm concerning Fourth Amendment protections for U.S. citizens from "unreasonable searches and seizures" and the issue of where that protection weighs in the balance between national security and personal privacy.

On Thursday, the two justices were asked whether The Post deserved the highest accolade in journalism, a gold medal for public service administered by Columbia University in New York City for nearly 100 years.

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Supreme Court could weigh in on NSA case, justice says

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