50 years ago today was the cinematic birth of the man who everyone thinks of when they think about spies: James Bond. Dr. No was released October 5, 1962, and ever since James Bond has been synonymous with espionage—much to the chagrin of actual spooks, who have to work in tedious State Department cover jobs processing visa applications and recruit low-level stooges more than they get to ride around in posh cars and bed amorous, well, Bond girls. And it doesn’t matter which government you work for: you’re going to be staying in a Marriott and the per diem on travel is not going to cover those bottles of Dom Pérignon.

The early Bond films can also seem quaint to audiences today, especially when compared to the muscular antics of Daniel Craig crashing through a wall in Casino Royale or the endless Inosanto Lacoste inspired fight scenes from the Bourne movies. Let’s face it: the old Bond would get his ass handed to him by today’s Bond, and in a world where everyone is more crazy about SEAL Team 6 and robots that they are about old-fashioned spies, it’s not even clear that people care too much about today’s Bond.

But a close reading of Dr. No reveals that Ian Fleming’s insights into the real nature of intelligence work remain valid even today. When you strip away the gadgets, and the glamour, and the sex, what remains are some surprisingly real observations about the real secret world of intelligence.

Read the full post at Danger Room.

International Talk Like A Pirate Day is here again for its 10th anniversary. Which means the old gags — shivering your timbers, calling out to your maties,  mispronouncing “Sarsgaard” — are getting kind of stale, especially when there are real-life pirates roaming the high seas. If you really want to rap like a modern-day Captain Jack, it means learning a few choices phrases in a new language – one spoken by the gents hijacking ships right now.

Last year Danger Room’s hard-hitting ITLAPD coverage brought you linguistic quick guides to Somali and Yemeni Arabic. But since then pirate attacks off the Horn of Africa have dropped significantly, especially over this past summer. Some credit may be to the weather, since it turns out that rough seas during monsoon season restrict the ability of Somali pirates to operate. Some credit may also be to the combined efforts of various anti-piracy forces, including those of the United States and the EU, which have stepped up attacks against pirates in the past year. And some credit may be to increased security measures on ships that are passing through the Gulf of Aden and around the Horn of Africa — a trend which continues results reported in 2011. But whatever the reasons, the facts are that attacks are down, and so you may be starting to wonder if all the that time you’ve spent in the last year learning pirate phrases in Somali was worth it. You may even be wondering if it’s worth it to talk like a pirate at all.

Well matorka demee, sailor! Just because piracy is down around Somalia doesn't mean the high seas are safe for mariners the world over. While the drop in Somali piracy has reduced the rate of piracy worldwide, piracy remains high in the number two region for pirate activity in the world: South East Asia and the the Indian Sub-Continent. And the number one area for pirate activity in the region remains Indonesia. In the first half of 2012 there were 32 attacks in Indonesia, one in the Malacca Straits, and four in Malaysia — compared to 21, zero and 11 for all of 2011. If piracy continues at the same rate for the rest of 2012 we can expect a record year for piracy in the region, continuing a trend that started at an all time low mark for piracy in the region in 2009.

So it’s time to learn a little pirate Indonesian, me hearties.

Read the full post at Danger Room.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

Last month news broke that a team of researchers from the University of Texas had hijacked a drone by spoofing the GPS used in it’s navigation system. “Spoofing” is a hacking technique that involves fooling a computer into believing that the hacker’s computer is a trusted computer. In this case, the U of T team fooled the drone by sending a signal that pretended to be from satellites in the GPS constellation but contained inaccurate location information — information that would have caused the drone to crash if not for pilot intervention.

Which should worry you not just because GPS helps fly drones but also because none of us know how to get anywhere without it any more.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

There are a number of concerns here, but one of the biggest is that for many workers today LinkedIn has become part of their “critical infrastructure”. It’s used for business development and networking to such a level that it’s unthinkable to remove yourself from the system—even if LinkedIn can’t keep your data safe. And without the pressure of losing users, LinkedIn may have little financial incentive to clean up its security practices. Which leaves users in the position of having to trust that LinkedIn will learn from it’s mistakes—a pretty shaky proposition given recent events.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

Why? Because the global positioning system—better known as GPS—industry feared that LightSquared’s technology would interfere with the GPS signal, a service on which the world has become increasingly dependent but which it also takes almost completely taken for granted. The LIghtSquared decision a pretty big deal in and of itself—but it also opens a window into the larger debate on cyber security which is now being argued both inside the Beltway and around the world.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

My mother just bought a smart phone.

Why? Because they are new, and someone else she knows has one, and this person recently asked her if she sends text messages, and apparently this kind of peer pressure works at any age. And also because there was a sale at the Verizon store and like most Americans my mother can’t resist a sale. So despite the fact that my mother had gotten by perfectly well on a 200 minute a month senior plan on a “dumb” phone, she upgraded.

And that’s when the questions started.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

It’s the first full week of summer, and most of us are probably thinking about how to get away to escape the heat, relax, and maybe hit a wave or two. Well, it turns out that Somali pirates take a summer break, too — but for different reasons.

A recent report produced by researchers of the New Zealand Defense Force and the Royal Australian Navy (Climatic controls on piracy in the Horn of Africa region, 2010–2011) proposes a new spin on the observed temporal pattern of attacks by Somali pirates based on weather, or more specifically the monsoons that occur in the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea during the summer and winter.

Read the full post at Danger Room.

And they are scared.

Because even though it’s great to think about cyberwar when you might be on the winning side (Stuxnet? What’s a Stuxnet?), it’s terrifying when you might be on the losing side (which is maybe why Iran has reportedly taken some of its oil terminals from the internet in the wake of a possible cyberattack). And the problem is that no one seems to know if they are winning or losing.

A major reason for this is that cyberattack, cyberwar, cybercrime—cybereverything—have taken on the character of a modern day Frankenstein monster. This thing called the internet has gotten out of hand, and just like Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein, once its done tap dancing we want to hunt it down with pitchforks.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

The latest iteration of these projects is a Facebook project loosely titled "Chaff". Chaff in this sense not just being the stuff you have to wade through to get to wheat, but also the term for a kind of active countermeasure developed in the Second World War to confuse radar.

In this iteration of the project, every month I perform the following actions:

1) I generate 20 random two word phrases (adjective, noun) using http://watchout4snakes.com/CreativityTools/RandomWord/RandomPhrase.aspx
2) I enter each phrase into Google Image Search http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi
3) I download the first image that comes up in search (or in some cases a funny image from the first page of results)
4) I upload the resulting 20 images to Facebook
5) I tag each image as myself

The intent of this is to jam Facebook's facial recognition algorithms with so much bad data that they are unable to detect pictures of me on Facebook or elsewhere. Or at least make that process a lot harder.

A few results from my latest round follow.