Here’s everything we know about the secretive spy satellite launching tonight

The U.S. government is putting something big and secret in orbit tonight (Sept 30). Here’s the little we can glean from public information. Source: https://www.livescience.com/secret-sattelite-details.html

CIA’s New Tech Recruiting Pitch: More Patents, More Profits

America’s most famous spy agency has a major competitor it can’t quite seem to beat: Silicon Valley. From a report: The CIA has long been a place cutting-edge technology is researched, developed, and realized — and it wants to lead in fields like artificial intelligence and biotechnology. However, recruiting and retaining the talent capable of building these tools is a challenge…

US Spy Plane Impersonates A Malaysian Aircraft

Popular Mechanics reports:
A U.S. Air Force aircraft electronically impersonated a Malaysian plane while flying over the South China Sea this week. The RC-135W Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft flew off China’s Hainan island on Tuesday, coming within 55 miles of the Chinese mainland. The caper was outed on Twitter by a think tank operated by the Chinese government, which provided enough details…

Iranian Hackers Found Way Into Encrypted Apps, Researchers Say

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Iranian hackers, most likely employees or affiliates of the government, have been running a vast cyberespionage operation equipped with surveillance tools that can outsmart encrypted messaging systems — a capability Iran was not previously known to possess, according to two digital security reports released Friday. The operation not only targets…

Google Removes Android App That Was Used To Spy On Belarusian Protesters

Google has removed an Android app from the Play Store that was used to collect personal information from Belarusians attending anti-government protests. ZDNet reports: The app, named NEXTA LIVE, was available for almost three weeks on the official Android Play Store, and was downloaded thousands of times and received hundreds of reviews. To get installs, NEXT LIVE claimed to be the…

Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ Makes a Global Bet on the Film Industry

In Christopher Nolan’s new thriller, “Tenet,” the fate of humanity pivots on characters moving back and forth through time. It is an epic, brain-bending exploration of ideas the filmmaker has spent decades examining. But now, as “Tenet” opens after multiple delays in cinemas around the world, it comes loaded with symbolism that its writer and director could never have foreseen. From…

Report: Massive US Spy Satellite May ‘Hoover Up’ Cellphone Calls

Launching today is America’s classified NROL-44 spy satellite, which German public broadcaster DW calls “a massive, open secret”: NROL-44 is a huge signals intelligence, or SIGINT, satellite, says David Baker, a former NASA scientist who worked on Apollo and Shuttle missions, has written numerous books, including U.S. Spy Satellites and is editor of SpaceFlight magazine. “SIGINT satellites are the core of…