Firstfruits

Firstfruits (database,  surveillance)
CIA database that contained both the articles and the transcripts of telephone and other communications of particular Washington journalists.

"Firstfruits" was a was a database that contained both the articles and the transcripts of telephone and other communications of particular Washington journalists known to report on sensitive U.S. intelligence activities, particularly those involving the NSA.

History

It was a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. Firstfruits was authorized as part of a DCI "Countering Denial and Deception" program responsible to an entity known as the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC). Since the intelligence community's reorganization, the DCI was replaced by the Director of National Intelligence headed by John Negroponte and his deputy, former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden," Wayne Madsen wrote in the December 29, 2005, Alternative Press Review.

"Firstfruits was a database that contained both the articles and the transcripts of telephone and other communications of particular Washington journalists known to report on sensitive U.S. intelligence activities, particularly those involving NSA. According to NSA sources, the targeted journalists included author James Bamford, the New York Times's James Risen, the Washington Post's Vernon Loeb, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the Washington Times' Bill Gertz, UPI's John C. K. Daly, and this editor [Wayne Madsen], who has written about NSA for The Village Voice, CAQ, Intelligence Online, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)."

Snowden files

In 2020 Barton Gellman told how he was targeted:

Someone had taken control of my iPad, blasting through Apple's security restrictions and acquiring the power to rewrite anything that the operating system could touch...I did not understand how my adversary had even found the iPad. If intruders had located this device, I had to assume that they could find my phone, too, as well as any computer I used to access the internet. I was not meant to see the iPad do what it had just done; I had just lucked into seeing it. This was the first significant intrusion into my digital life—that I knew of. It was far from the last.
In the first days of 2014, an NSA whistleblower, Tom Drake, told me he had received an invitation from one of my email addresses, asking him to join me for a chat in Google Hangouts. It looked exactly like an authentic notice from Google, but Drake had the presence of mind to check whether the invitation had really come from me. It had not. An impostor posing as me wanted to talk with Drake.

Gellman also told of how a colleague was set up with a honey trap:

Overtures of another kind came to my colleague Ashkan Soltani soon after his byline appeared alongside mine in The Washington Post. "Within the span of a week, three hot, really attractive women messaged me out of the blue" on OkCupid, he later told me over beers. Two of the women made their intentions known right away. As it happened, the Snowden files were at that time locked in a Washington Post vault, and kept separate from the electronic keys that allowed access to them, but outsiders would not know that. And an attractive spy might assume that, with the right enticements, anything was possible.

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References

This page imported content from Sourcewatch on 11.11.2024.
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