Pentagon: Social Media Charting Maps on Syrian Exodus

Posted on March 21, 2016March 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

Harvesting posts on social media platforms has become necessary to track all kinds of human conditions. There was once a time it was a scandal when Edward Snowden revealed NSA platforms but now it is widely accepted apparently.

When it comes to tracking people movement, medical and humanitarian issues and patterns, the Pentagon is working social media. If there are protests, intermittent battles or hostilities or airstrikes, social media is the go to immediate source.

It is so valuable, the United Nations is now passing out phones and or sim cards to migrants and refugees. Question is who is paying the full connectivity access and to what wireless company?

Pentagon Mapmakers Are Using Social Media to Chart Syrians’ Exodus

Officials admit the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s approach has its limitations

DefenseOne: Streams of Facebook, Instagram, and other social media posts shared by smartphone-toting children and families at border crossings are providing U.S. intelligence analysts with a real-time map of the Syrian exodus. It’s not picture perfect, but it fills in gaps for the nation’s spy cartographers, a top Defense Department official says.

By searching public posts, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency fulfills its duty to provide decision-makers with past, present and future insights into locations during a global emergency.

Viewing Defense Department satellite imagery from “space isn’t a great way to sense human activity of that magnitude, but people talking on the ground and people tweeting about lack of food, or pictures about lines at gates at borders is really incredibly useful,” Sue Gordon, the spy map agency’s deputy director, tells Nextgov. “You will have the ability to see what’s going on from an intelligence perspective, but social media will give you that on-the-ground look to help you correlate disparate activities or to get a different view of what is real.”

Photos and vignettes that refugees and relief workers publish depict the kindnesses and bloodshed arising from a civil war that has torn an estimated 14 million people from their homes.

The images are made possible, in part, by governmental organizations. As of August, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had distributed 33,000 mobile SIM cards to displaced Syrians in Jordan alone.

Geotags on posts — metadata indicating where and when messages were sent — can be searched or plotted on a map.

For example, one government vendor that specializes in the marriage of geographic data and social media pins refugee-related items from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networks on a map of the Middle East and Europe. (Here is a map of posts filtered by the keywords, “Hamah, Syria.”)

By clicking on a marker, federal analysts can see when and where the messages were sent, as well as their images and words. (Here are a few tweets, containing Instagram links, that depict a blocked Hungary-Serbia border.)

The firm, Canada-based Echosec, uses maps from geospatial software provider Esri. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency spokeswoman Don Kerr told Nextgov the agency does not currently contract with Echosec but it does use Esri’s technology.

While declining to identify specific federal clients, Echosec marketing executive Kira Kirk said that as the Syrian conflict has escalated, the company’s tools have followed the growing numbers of displaced civilians moving into countries like Turkey, Lebanon, Greece and Hungary.

At the Za’atari Syrian Refugee Camp in Jordan, 86 percent of the young refugees owned mobile handsets and 83 percent owned SIM cards, according to a March 2015 paper presented by Pennsylvania State University scholars Carleen Maitland and Ying Xu for the 43rd Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet.

Last month, Defense One contributor Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, reporting from the Turkish Border, said: ”Russian air strikes are among the first things you hear when spending any time among Syrians constantly monitoring what is happening to family and friends via What’sApp and Facebook. YouTube videos are played and the carnage people are witnessing is discussed.”

Unlike law enforcement authorities or covert operatives, NGA personnel do not engage social media users they follow online.

“We’re not out there interacting with it and trying to influence it,” said Gordon, during an interview at Esri’s FedGIS conference in Washington. Rather, analysts subscribe to various feeds, open accounts and watch YouTube videos,

This passive approach to social media monitoring has its limitations, including spin.

Intelligence analysts can get the wrong impression from trolls, propagandists or other users with selective memories, just as Facebook stalkers sometimes feel down when bombarded with pictures of parties and achievements on their friends’ timelines.

“They get depressed because they see all these people having this great life, but I think it makes the point that all this stuff that is produced by humans comes with a perspective and you may perceive it to be true but you still have to think about what it is” indicating, Gordon said. “And then you have other truths that can help out.”

To her point, Jill Walker Rettberg, a University of Bergen digital culture professor, said of a Vocativ Instagram narrative showing one Syrian man’s journey to Germany, ”The absence of women and children is striking.”

Still, localized data points can make life a little easier for an agency dealing with information overload.

“It has a real lovely temporal quality to it because it’s always being captured by somebody who cares about that event and that event in time,” Gordon said. ”The Syrian migration is just a really great example, or any humanitarian crisis or migratory crisis, because we have overhead assets but the real intelligence is on the ground.”

Secret: EU to Deport 80,000

Posted on March 21, 2016March 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

Primer:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Foreign militants fighting under the black flag of ISIS are conquering territory in northern Afghanistan, terrorizing residents and outmatching the Taliban’s brutality, villagers and local officials told NBC News.

The development suggests ISIS is expanding its sphere of influence beyond the Middle East and North Africa, and are moving into areas previously controlled by the Afghan Taliban.

Most of the fighters hail from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and the Caucuses — and are even more brutal than the Afghan Taliban, according to local lawmakers, police and residents interviewed.

America’s 14-year project to defeat the Taliban and build a stable Afghanistan is teetering on the brink of failure, according to a sobering report Friday by a government watchdog.

The Taliban controls more of the country than at any time since U.S. troops invaded in 2001, notes the quarterly report to Congress by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The fragile economy is worsening. One of the few bright spots of the troubled reconstruction effort — getting more girls in school — has been tainted by allegations of fraud.

“The lack of security has made it almost impossible for many U.S. and even some Afghan officials to get out to manage and inspect U.S.-funded reconstruction projects,” wrote John Sopko, the inspector general.

Secret EU plan to deport 80,000 Afghans

Revealed: Confidential EU discussion document proposes using aid summit as ‘leverage’ for removal of migrants to Afghanistan, as Brussels relies on chequebook diplomacy to curtail the crisis

Telegraph: More than 80,000 Afghans will need to be deported from Europe “in the near future” under a secret EU plan, amid warnings of a new influx as parts of the country fall back under Taliban control.

The European Commission should threaten to reduce aid that provides 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s GDP unless the “difficult” Kabul government agrees to the mass removal of tens of thousands of failed asylum migrants, a leaked document suggests. It admits the threat, if carried through, could result in the collapse of the fragile state.

The Afghan elite will be rewarded with university places in Europe, under a new EU strategy to use aid and trade as “incentives” to secure deportation agreements for economic migrants from “safe” areas of Afghanistan.

The plan is revealed in a joint “non-paper” discussion document, marked EU Restricted, which was prepared by the European Commission and its foreign policy arm, the External Action Service, and sent to national ambassadors on March 3.

Record violence amid a Taliban insurgency, with 11,000 civilian casualties last year, and economic failure means there is a “high risk of further migratory flows to Europe,” it warns. There are 1.1 million internally displaced Afghans and 5.4 million sheltering in Pakistan and Iran, whose situation is “precarious without reliable long-term perspectives.”

A man from Afghanistan carrying a baby cries during a demonstration at the Greece-Macedonia border near the village of Idomeni, northern Greece Photo: AFP

In October, the European Union is hosting an international donor summit for Afghanistan, with the intention of raising enough aid for the period 2017-20 to keep flows at their current levels.

Jean-Claude Juncker’s officials propose using the summit as “leverage” to secure a deportation deal, noting that the EU has pledged more to Afghanistan than any other country with €1.4 billion earmarked until 2020.

“The EU should stress that to reach the objective of the Brussels Conference to raise financial commitments ‘at or near current levels’ it is critical that substantial progress has been made in the negotiations with the Afghan Government on migration by early summer, giving the member states and other donors the confidence that Afghanistan is a reliable partner able to deliver,” it says.

Under a section entitled “Afghan interests,” it says President Ghani’s government is “highly aid dependent”. “Without the continued high levels of international transfers… [it] is unlikely to prevail, as it is being faced by multiple security, economic and political challenges”.

An Afghan migrant girl holds the hand of a woman as they arrive on a beach on the Greek island of Kos Photo: AFP/Angelos Tzortzinis

Some 176,000 Afghans claimed asylum in the EU last year, with around six in ten eligible, a rate that has risen as the security situation deteriorates. They make up a quarter of refugees landing in Greece.

The paper, which was first obtained by the Statewatch civil liberties website, says the EU’s co-operation with Afghanistan so far has been “difficult and uneven”. Despite President Ghani’s public statements, “other members of the Government do not appear to facilitate the return of irregular migrants, while attempting to re-negotiate conditions to restrict the acceptance of returnees.”

In exchange for accepting “forced returns” of economic migrants from designated “safe areas” of the country, European universities could offer places to Afghan students and researchers under the Erasmus+ scholarship scheme, the paper says under a section entitled: “Possible components of EU incentives package”.

The document cautions, however, that “the risk that those students apply for asylum once in the EU and make their outmost not to return is however very high, as demonstrated by several cases recently.”

The CAPD development deal, which commits the EU to help in rural development, health, education and counter-drugs programs for a decade, could also be used as a bargaining chip to get a deportation agreement, the document says.

The EU will also provide training and healthcare to those who are deported.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani (R) shakes hands with British Prime Minister David Cameron during a press conference at the Presidential palace in Kabul. The Ghani government is being “difficult”, the report says. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

It admits that identifying the safe areas of Afghanistan when processing asylum claims is “not obvious, given the rising insecurity in many provinces”.

The plan also suggests using the laissez passer, a legally controversial deporting document issued by the EU to migrants who have lost or destroyed their own papers.

The EU has publicly embraced a strategy of chequebook diplomacy as it struggles to contain the biggest migrant crisis since 1945.

The proposed deal appears similar to a gambit rejected by African leaders in Malta last year, in which the EU offered €1.8 billion in aid , university places and looser conditions for holders of diplomatic passports in exchange for accepting the forcible deportation of hundreds of thousands of African economic migrants. In the end, leaders settled on a voluntary scheme of returns.

It follows a controversial deal on Friday with Turkey, which was awarded €6 billion and visa liberalisation in exchange for the near-automatic return of all asylum seekers reaching the Greek islands.

Earlier this month Theresa May won a Court of Appeal case to resume deportations to Afghanistan under a separate arrangement. Judges ruled that while several provinces are dangerous, Kabul is safe enough for returns.

Germany, a major destination for Afghan migrants, is pushing hard for its own deportation agreement.

Judge to WH: Unseal Records of Trump Business Partner?

Posted on March 21, 2016March 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

This site has published articles here and here about Felix Sater, a mafia linked frauster that is/was a partner of Donald Trump. It seems this unsavory character is known to many in New York and Washington DC including Attorney General, Loretta Lynch as well as Senator Jeff Sessions. Seems some interesting powers are working phones to determine future damage to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and others with their fingerprints on the matter.

Judge Wants US to Protect Trump Associate’s Secret History

ABC: A U.S. judge is urging the Obama administration to protect from public disclosure federal court records related to the once-secret criminal history of a former Donald Trump business partner.

In a highly unusual order prompted by The Associated Press, U.S. District Judge Brian M. Cogan said that unless the Justice Department acts before April 18, he will decide whether to make the court files public under the assumption that federal prosecutors don’t care.

The case involves Felix Sater, a Trump business associate who had pleaded guilty in a major Mafia-linked stock fraud scheme and cooperated with the government. The AP reported in December that, even after learning about Sater’s background, Trump tapped Sater for a business development role in 2010 that included the title of senior adviser to Trump. Sater received Trump Organization business cards and was given an office within the Trump Organization’s headquarters, on the same floor as Trump’s own.

“It seems to me that the government has a unique interest in keeping documents that relate to cooperation agreements under seal,” the judge wrote in his order. “The government should speak and assert its position as to whether the public’s right to access each document in the record is outweighed by a compelling need for secrecy.”

Lawyers for the AP had asked the judge to justify sealing a five-year criminal contempt proceeding in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Not only did Cogan seal all documents in the contempt case, he also initially sealed the AP’s request that he unseal his justification for their sealing. When The New York Times asked the judge to unseal the AP’s request to unseal the sealing order, that request was sealed, too. Late last week, he made the requests by the AP and the newspaper publicly accessible — but ordered that the parties to the case file any response to them under seal.

The defendants in the contempt case, Frederick Oberlander and Richard Lerner, are attorneys whom the government said revealed once-secret court records about Sater’s crimes and cooperation. Sater’s lawyers, who once included Leslie Caldwell, now the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, have said that Sater’s cooperation was vital to national security and disclosures about his past put him in danger.

Oberlander and Lerner said they never revealed sealed records. Some of what they had been ordered not to disclose is already publicly available in the Congressional Record, they said.

“We wish that people could inspect the documents, because it would reveal judicial and prosecutorial misconduct of the highest levels,” Oberlander told the AP.

Also at issue in the case are statements that U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch — formerly the top prosecutor in Cogan’s district — made about Sater’s case before the Senate confirmed her last year. Oberlander and Lerner said the government improperly permitted Sater to use his status as a secret cooperator to commit new crimes and avoid paying restitution to past victims, who are owed millions of dollars.

In February 2015, Lynch told Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, of the Senate Judiciary Committee that information about Sater’s restitution “remains under seal,” and that the Justice Department would never waive victims’ right to restitution as part of a cooperation agreement. Court records already publicly available at the time showed that Sater was not ordered to pay restitution and the government never requested it. One of Sater’s attorneys said in a statement at the time that the government had waived restitution payments partly out of gratitude to Sater.

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Melanie Newman, told the AP that Lynch’s comments were accurate because some documents related to restitution in Sater’s case remain under seal.

Oberlander told the AP that the original cooperation agreement Sater signed in 1998, which has been publicly available since 2013, said Sater acknowledged that the penalty for his crime included roughly $60 million in restitution payments to victims.

The New York judge has twice asked the Justice Department to pursue contempt charges against the two lawyers who revealed Sater’s cooperation. In both cases, local federal prosecutors recused themselves over unspecified conflicts of interest after consulting with Justice Department officials in Washington. They referred the case to federal prosecutors in Albany, New York, who likewise did not act.

In his latest order, Cogan again urged prosecutors to go after Oberlander and Lerner.

“One would think that the desire to ensure that further informants cooperate in government investigations should also motivate the government to take swift action against individuals who seek to expose the identity of informants, their proffered criminal history and the details of their cooperation,” the judge wrote.

Sater’s attorney, Robert Wolf, said the judge was right.

“Mr. Sater shares and supports the court’s frustration and outrage as to why these rogue lawyers have not yet been criminally prosecuted,” Wolf said in a statement. He credited Sater with providing information that “potentially saved tens of thousands, if not millions, of our citizens’ lives.”

Sater pleaded guilty in 1998 to one count of racketeering for his role in a broad stock fraud scheme involving the prominent Genovese and Bonanno crime families, according to court records. Five years earlier, a New York State court had sentenced Sater to more than a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass.

Goggle, State Dept and Overthrowing Assad

Posted on March 21, 2016March 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

For reference on how Hillary’s communications were vulnerable and shared.

Clinton email reveals: Google sought overthrow of Syria’s Assad

WashingtonExaminer: Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week.

Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s team and one of the company’s executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region.

“Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool … that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from,” Jared Cohen, the head of what was then the company’s “Google Ideas” division, wrote in a July 2012 email to several top Clinton officials.

“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” Cohen said, adding that the plan was for Google to surreptitiously give the tool to Middle Eastern media.

“Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria,” he said.

“Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything [else] you think we need to account for or think about before we launch. We believe this can have an important impact,” Cohen concluded.

Hillary Emails: Google tried to boost Assad defections https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12166#efmAMoAbj … More: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ … pic.twitter.com/nvNG0lFJWt

The message was addressed to deputy secretary of state Bill Burns; Alec Ross, a senior Clinton advisor; and Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan. Sullivan subsequently forwarded Cohen’s proposal to Clinton, describing it as “a pretty cool idea.”

Cohen worked as a low-level staffer at the State Department until 2010, when he was hired to lead Google Ideas, but was tied to the use of social media to incite social uprisings even before he left the department. He once reportedly asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to hold off of conducting system maintenance that officials believed could have impeded a brief 2009 uprising in Iran.

https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12166#efmAMoAbj

Google Is Not What It Seems, by Julian Assange (must read)

Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, at the “Pulse of Today’s Global Economy” panel talk at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, 26 Sept. 2013 in New York. Eric Schmidt first attended the CGI annual meeting at its opening plenary in 2010. (Photo: Mark Lennihan)

The unusual involvement by Google in foreign affairs highlights the difficulty of involvement in the internal politics of foriegn states. While Cohen seemed to consider his company’s effort as helpful to American interests, the effort to overthrow Assad helped spur the rise of the Islamic State, which eventually filled a vaccuum resulting from Assad’s loss of control over of Syria.

The exchange on Syria was highlighted by Wikileaks on Saturday. Earlier in the week, the secret-leaking website posted more than 30,000 emails that Clinton sent or received during her tenure leading the State Department.

Corruption, Shell Companies, Cartels and the Mexican President

Posted on March 20, 2016March 20, 2016 by Denise Simon

Conditions and corruption in Mexico sound vaguely familiar to well…..home…The United States….sigh

Report: Juarez Cartel Used Shell Companies to Finance Mexican President’s Election

An in-depth investigation has revealed that through the use of shell companies, members of the Juarez Cartel financed the political campaign of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. The cartel members appear to have also used government programs to launder money and profit form their networks of contacts.

Breitbart: The bombshell revelation was made this week by the independent news outlet Aristegui Noticias who claim that top officials of the Juarez Cartel financed thousands of cash cards that were handed out by Mexico’s Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) during the 2012 political campaign that resulted in the victory of Enrique Pena Nieto. According to the Mexican journalists, the cash cards were provided by a company called Monex. They were reported to be financed through a series of shell corporations by key players with the Juarez Cartel.

Through a three part series, the Mexican news organization identified Rodolfo David “El Consul” Avila Cordero as a key figure in the financial scandal that implicates the leading figures in Mexico’s ruling party the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI).

Avila Cordero was arrested in 2005 in Mexico City in connection with the seizure of almost $750,000 in cash. At the time authorities had identified him as a top tier operative with the Juarez (Carrillo Fuente) Cartel who worked as their financial operator an a key figure in their connections with Colombian drug lords. Avila Cordero had earned the nickname “The Consul” because of his links to high ranking officials within the Mexican government and acted as an ambassador of sorts, Aristegui Noticias reported.

Eight years after his arrest, Avila Cordero became a contractor for a government funded program called Crusade Against Hunger. Using a company called Conclave SA de CV and Prodasa SA de CV, Cordero was able to secure more than $396 million pesos or $25 million in government contracts through rigged bidding processes by government officials.

The Crusade Against Hunger is a pet project of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto who claimed that with that program he would improve the quality of life for his people.

According to the investigation by the Mexican journalists, Conclave and Prodasa are shell companies that do not have real offices or staff.

As previously reported by Breitbart Texas, Carmen Aristegui, the founder of Aristegui Noticias, was a top rated radio journalists in Mexico, however her investigation into properties given to Pena Nieto as bribes led to her news outlet firing her and her staff. Despite being off the air, Aristegui continues reporting through her website.

As part of the investigation Aristegui Noticias also confirmed that Conclave was involved in the trading of soccer players with European soccer clubs.

Mexico’s ‘Anti-Corruption’ Guerrillas Declare War on Politicians

But one state governor said the shotgun-toting gunmen are a ‘joke’

InSight: An armed group declaring war on Mexico‘s corruption has sprung up in a regional hotbed of organized crime and insurgency, where public distrust in state institutions continues to stir conflict.

The group, which calls itself the Insurgency for Institutional and Social Rescue (Insurgencia por el Rescate Institucional y Social — IRIS), has declared a “war” against politicians with alleged ties to organized crime in the southern state of Michoacán, Proceso reported.

IRIS, which has released at least three short videos on social media, recently granted Proceso an interview with its representative and spokesperson, who calls himself José María.

“Our objectives are corrupt politicians,” María stated. “We will not kill them, we are not terrorists, we are not assassins. We will expose them.” Although armed, María told Proceso that the insurgents will only use their weapons for self-defense.

The group has accused Michoacán governor Silvano Aureoles and former Michoacán security commissioner Alfredo Castillo of links with drug-trafficking organizations.

IRIS first announced its existence via banners and social media postings in February 2016. This was around the same time other banners appeared, announcing the creation of the “Nueva Familia” organization, a group that some government officials said had criminal ties.

Following the publication of Proceso‘s report, Michoacán Attorney General José Martín Godoy Castro stated that there was no evidence of a guerrilla insurgency in Michoacan, and that this was a case of false video recordings. State governor Silviano Aureoles Conejo also dismissed the group as a “joke.”

InSight Crime analysis

It is so far unclear whether or not this new armed group should be considered a genuine threat, or whether they are a small mix of idealists who pose no danger to the state.

As security analyst Alejandro Hope has pointed out, although IRIS appears to be poorly armed and low in numbers, the group should not be immediately be given the brush-off.

While the group’s motives may appear to be too vague to appeal to a large following, “anyone looking at the autodefensas [the self-defense forces of Michoacán, which IRIS members participated in] in early 2013 would have probably said the same thing,” Hope stated.

The comparison is a significant one. Michoacán’s vigilante movement was created to fight violent organized criminal groups in the region. Although it managed to gain significant power and local support, it later became embroiled in drug trafficking and in 2014 it was integrated into a questionable rural police force.

The disappearance of 43 students in the nearby state of Guerrero further fueled widespread distrust of the government, sparking concern that this dissatisfaction could feed broader insurgent movements.

Michoacán remains in disarray, and its weak institutions are unable to prevent numerous small armed groups from taking shape. With tensions still bubbling under the surface, how much influence IRIS or other new armed groups will amass remains to be seen.