Senate Democrats early Friday morning blocked a motion to begin debate on extending the nation’s enhanced surveillance authorities, which are due to expire in a week, to protest President Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence. Every Senate Democrat except for Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.) voted against the motion… Source link
Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, speaks to the press at the White House, July 24, 2025. Sarah L. Voisin | The Washington Post | Getty Images President Donald Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte to be the acting director of national intelligence will give the president’s housing agency attack dog access to the country’s most prized secrets, a move that analysts fear could further politicize the office and erode U.S. intelligence-gathering. Trump tapped the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, who oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, on Tuesday to replace the outgoing director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Pulte is not experienced in national intelligence and was an investor and executive of the homebuilding company PulteGroup before joining the government. As director of national intelligence, Pulte will be at the top of the U.S.’ sprawling intelligence community and have access to the country’s most sensitive national secrets. That lack of experience and Pulte’s penchant for using information from the housing agencies to gin up prosecutions of Trump’s political rivals has alarmed intelligence …
Over the decades, there has been no shortage of sites using clever techniques to covertly track visitors’ browsing histories, device fingerprints, and keystrokes and mouse movements in real time. Even Meta and Yandex were recently caught joining in the privacy-invasive free-for-all. Now sites have a new way to spy on their visitors: by measuring subtle interactions with their solid-state drives. The technique, named FROST (fingerprinting remotely using OPFS-based SSD timing), allows sites to monitor other sites a visitor is viewing and what apps are open on their devices. The technique, laid out in a research paper, exploits a side channel, a form of leak resulting from physical manifestations such as electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or the time required to complete a task. By measuring the manifestations, attackers can decrypt encrypted traffic and infer other confidential data. The attack that FROST uses is known as a contention side channel, which measures the interaction of various processes all using (or competing for) a given resource. By measuring the timing of certain I/O (input-output) operations of the SSD …
I was nine years old when You Only Live Twice came out, and going to see it at my local Odeon was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in my short life. I’d been waiting for this moment ever since going to see Thunderball, and was further fired up by the circus of publicity around its release – news items, trailers, collectors cards, interviews, promos, every TV show wanting to get in on the action, with items about the locations, the “girls”, the cars, Little Nellie the miniature helicopter… So, imagine my dismay when, in his first scene, Bond is killed. One moment he’s in bed with a charming young Chinese woman and the next she presses a button, the bed folds up into the wall and two thugs with machine guns burst in and drill it full of holes. Picture my continuing horror as Bond is buried at sea, wrapped in a sail. But – wait a minute – his body’s being salvaged by divers and they’re taking him to a submarine …
Anne Keast-Butler, director of GCHQ, pictured during CYBERUK 2024 on May 14, 2024, in Birmingham, England. Matthew Horwood for CYBERUK | Getty Images News | Getty Images Britain and its allies have a “narrowing window” to keep ahead of security risks posed by China, Russia and other adversaries, the U.K.’s top intelligence agent will warn on Wednesday. In a rare public speech, Anne Keast-Butler, the director of GCHQ — the U.K.’s intelligence, cyber and security agency — will say Britain is at a “moment of consequence,” with the country facing increasingly brazen behavior from hostile nations. “China is now a science and tech superpower with sophisticated capabilities across their intelligence, cyber and military agencies,” Keast-Butler is set to say, according to excerpts from the speech released ahead of time by her office. “The ground beneath our feet is shifting,” as AI continues to develop swiftly, she will say, with new technologies creating a “narrowing window for the U.K. and allies to stay ahead.” Earlier this month, two men became the first in history to be found …
Michael Fassbender is back in action as CIA agent Martian with the return of The Agency – and this time his mission is a personal one. The intense spy thriller is back for a second season, and first-look photos show Fassbender’s character out for blood in the desert. After living undercover in his own life before being called back to London, Martian is thrown back into the chaos of the CIA when his lover Samia (played by Jodie Turner-Smith), is taken as a political prisoner in Sudan. Deciding to fix the problem himself, Martian soon goes in all guns blazing (literally, judging by the pictures) in a bid to get her back. Want to see this content? This page contains content provided by YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as YouTube may use cookies and other technologies. To view this content, choose ‘Accept and continue’ to allow YouTube and its required purposes. Accept and continue However, he soon finds himself crossing his own moral boundaries as his desperate attempts to rescue …
The English Football League (EFL) has labelled Southampton “deplorable” for pressuring a junior member of staff to spy on Middlesbrough – blaming manager Tonda Eckert for “spygate”. Source link
The incident came last month when unarmed Rivet Joint plane was securing NATO’s eastern flank in international airspace, according to the British Defence Ministry. Published On 20 May 202620 May 2026 Two Russian jets have “repeatedly and dangerously” intercepted a British Royal Air Force surveillance aircraft in April over the Black Sea, according to the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence. The Rivet Joint aircraft was unarmed and carrying out routine surveillance in international airspace over the Black Sea, securing NATO’s eastern flank, the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. There was no immediate reaction from Russia. Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list “This incident is another example of dangerous and unacceptable behaviour by Russian pilots, towards an unarmed aircraft operating in international airspace,” Defence Minister John Healey said in the statement. “These actions create a serious risk of accidents and potential escalation,” he added. It was repeatedly intercepted by a Russian Su-35 aircraft, which flew close enough to trigger emergency systems on the British plane, it said. A Russian Su-27 conducted six …
By Andrius Sytas and Tom Balmforth TALLINN, May 18 (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin has few good options in Ukraine with his armed forces unable to advance significantly on the battlefield while Western sanctions are chipping away at his resources, Estonia’s foreign intelligence chief has said. Kaupo Rosin, a top spy on NATO’s eastern flank, told Reuters Russia was losing more men than it was recruiting in the fifth year of its full-scale war, and that a general mobilisation would be deeply unpopular and potentially undermine stability. “All these factors together are creating a situation where some people in Russia including in the higher levels understand that they have a big problem. Hard to say what Putin thinks about it, but I think all these factors are starting to float into his decision-making,” he said in an interview in Tallinn. Russian forces in recent months have been registering some of their slowest rates of advance in Ukraine since 2023, one year after their full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s $3 trillion economy contracted by 0.3% …
Cloud services featured in the Finnish agency’s recent annual report, which said their adoption can obscure the digital independence of states. Martelius said that there had been discussion in Finland about putting election information in a cloud service, but given that the Finnish election system functions “extremely well,” the idea was eventually dropped. “The kind of information that is critical for securing national security, like for instance, election-related data, is one thing which definitely should not be handled by any foreign firm,” he said. On European innovation, Martelius said Finland has excellent R&D in the areas of quantum and space, but, like other parts of Europe, it lacks sufficient capital. The intelligence chief, who took up the post in 2024, questioned whether Europe could even develop European cloud services as efficient as those from U.S. hyperscalers or win the war against Russia without foreign technology. “Currently not,” he said. “But it’s also a question of how much does Europe want to win the war by itself and how much does it want to rely still …
