An Emory University law student who was arrested months ago at a demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, accused of being a spy and locked in an Egyptian jail for the summer returned home to New York City on Saturday as part of a prisoner swap that also freed 25 Egyptians held in Israel.
Ilan Grapel, 27, arrived at Kennedy Airport looking tired and thin, but wearing a huge smile.
He said that after spending more than four months behind bars in Egypt, he had a new appreciation for the American legal system.
“All of a sudden, the Bill of Rights is not something for the history books,” he told reporters gathered in the terminal.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Unaware the FBI has her under surveillance, Russian spy Anna Chapman buys leggings and tries on hats at a Macy’s department store. A few months later, cameras watch her in a New York coffee shop where she meets with someone she thinks is her Russian handler. It is really an undercover FBI agent.
Tapes, documents and photos released Monday describe and sometimes show how Chapman, now a celebrity back in Russia, and other members of a ring of sleeper spies passed instructions, information and cash. The ring was shut down in June 2010 after a decade-long counterintelligence probe that led to the biggest spy swap since the Cold War.
The FBI released the material to The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The investigation was code-named “Ghost Stories,” the release of documents on Halloween a coincidence.
While the deep-cover agents did not steal any secrets, an FBI counterintelligence official told the AP they were making progress.
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BERLIN, Oct. 24 (UPI) — U.S. spies have been spying on their counterparts in East Germany and West Germany, recently released documents indicate.
The CIA was expected to monitor East German spies during the Cold War, but U.S. documents indicated Americans were spying on their allies in West Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst as well, The Local reported Monday.
The German magazine Focus said documents indicated office alliances, personal peccadilloes and health information were noted.
The spying continued into the 1990s, even after the fall of communism, with BND agents with a Nazi past drawing attention, the magazine reported.
Focus said the documents indicated telephone calls with Germany’s domestic intelligence and security authority were tapped, as were conversations with other security services in Paris and London.
BND said they weren’t surprised by the news they were being spied on by the CIA.
A former BND counterintelligence expert told Focus he and colleagues often thought such clandestine operations were undertaken.
“The cat does not let the mouse free,” the former spy said when asked if he thought the CIA were still spying on the BND.
French spy chief Bernard Squarcini. (Boris Horvat/AFP/Getty Images)
Investigators have launched an inquiry targeting Bernard Squarcini, the powerful head of France’s domestic intelligence agency, who is facing allegations that he may have illegally spied on journalists.
Squarcini, the chief of the Direction Central du Renseignement IntĂ©rieur, is alleged to have “obtained the Le Monde reporter’s telephone records to uncover a mole feeding the newspaper information about a political scandal,” Kim Willsher of the UK Guardian reported Tuesday.
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Some technology flaws don’t go away—they just get a Band-Aid applied to them that eventually falls off. Adobe says it is working on a fix to an Adobe Flash vulnerability that enables attackers to trick Flash users into turning on their microphone and/or webcams, potentially enabling attackers to visually spy on them, overhear and record conversations, and obtain sensitive information. However, unlike most zero-day Flash exploits, this one doesn’t involve the Flash plug-in itself: instead, it uses interface obfuscation techniques to get users to unwittingly change their Flash player settings using a Shockwave Flash file hosted by Adobe itself.
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