CNN's Tapper: Obama has used Espionage Act more than all previous administrations

[Freewill]

Once again the intent, or stated intent, of a liberal results in EXACTLY the opposite outcome. Oh yeah we will hear there has been an uptick in those who have leaked information, but at 70 percent it would seem that Obama is setting yet another record. For the libs that love Snowden he would be number 12 or 8. Sad what Obama has done to this country simply sad.

CNN s Tapper Obama has used Espionage Act more than all previous administrations PunditFact

Most tallies, like the one by the investigative service ProPublica, begin with Daniel Ellsberg and the release of the Vietnam War era documents known as the Pentagon Papers. Including Ellsberg, the government has used the Espionage Act 10 times to prosecute government workers who shared classified information with journalists. If we push back to 1945, there is one more case. So of those 11, seven have taken place while Barack Obama has been president.

 

[waltky]

Crook or spy - or both?...

Crime and Espionage Becoming Tangled Online
September 05, 2015 WASHINGTON — To say that 2015 has so far been seen new heights of corporate and government computer attacks, as well as an escalation in the sheer daring of those hacks, is to risk understatement.

The list grows daily: 80 million health insurance records stolen from Anthem Insurance; 27 million private personnel records swiped from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management; the breach of unclassified systems and the White House, State Department, and Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on and on. Computer network security professionals have been left scrambling just to fix the hacks that have already happened, let alone prevent new attacks. The situation is so dire that some analysts told VOA they worry the “good guys” might never catch up.

These attacks, of course, occur for a wide range of reasons: hunting for credit cards, governments spying on adversaries, or “hacktivists” trying to make a statement are a few examples. Yet as distinct as the reasons and actors may be, some security analysts increasingly worry about a new trend of groups and attacks that are trying to blurring the traditional lines between crime and espionage. And that, they say, is only going to make preventing future attacks all the more difficult.

A magnifying glass is held in front of a computer screen in this picture illustration taken in Berlin

Understanding threats

When cybersecurity analysts talk about the Internet, they tend to uses phrases like “threat field” or “threat space,” meaning the entire range of threats that any given group, corporation or government might face online. Different targets have widely varying threat fields. For example, an aerospace firm working on classified military projects will have a very different threat space from that of a large consumer retailer like giant retailer Target, which in turn would have a different threat space than a small political activist group. “Groups conducting cyberattacks may use similar tactics, like spear-phishing, but they’re very different, both in nature and in motivations,” says Patrick McBride, vice president of communications at iSight Partners, one of the largest U.S. cyber-threat intelligence firms. “The starting point is the difference between information and intelligence.”

McBride says it isn’t enough for government or corporate security officials to build strong cyber defenses around their systems to fend off future hacks. They have to understand the threats unique to their enterprise – and that means understanding the opponents they face and their motivations. “The bad guys are the competition,” he said. “You need to head into this as you would against any adversary, with knowledge about what they do and have a strategic plan to fight back.”

Information versus intelligence