Author Archives: Denise Simon

Iran Swapping Nuclear Material with Russia

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Sheesh, what could go wrong and what uranium and why to Russia?

In part from FreeBeacon: Russia and Iran are beginning to trade sensitive nuclear materials, an activity that is at least in part condoned by the Obama administration and permissible under the tenets of the recent nuclear accord, according to U.S. and Iranian officials.

Russian-made yellow cake, a type of uranium powder that helps turn it into a nuclear fuel, “is in Iran and Iran’s enriched uranium cargo will be sent to Russia” within the next several days, according to top Iranian officials quoted this week in the country’s state-run press.

Senior U.S. officials confirmed on Thursday that the Obama administration backs the opening of commercial nuclear trade between Moscow and Tehran.

“Commercial contracts are in place for Iran to ship its enriched uranium stockpiles to Russia,” Stephen Mull, a State Department official who is leading the administration’s charge to implement the nuclear deal, told lawmakers. More details here.

This condition is quite familiar especially with regard to Iran.

Bishkek (AKIpress) – nuke plant Russia and Kazakhstan are preparing an intergovernmental agreement on construction of a nuclear power plant, Presidential aide Yuri Ushakov told TASS on Friday.

“An intergovernmental cooperation agreement is being prepared for construction of a Russia-designed nuclear power plant within the territory of Kazakhstan,” he said, adding that the issue may be touched upon on December 21 at the meeting of presidents of Russia and Kazakhstan “on the sidelines” of the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) and the SEEC (Supreme Eurasian Economic Council) summit.

“The leaders of the two countries are expected to dwell upon the problem of boosting trade and economic cooperation,” Ushakov said.

Then there is India:

BusinessInsider: India is expected to offer Russia land in Andhra Pradesh to set up units five and six of Kudankulam nuclear power plant. This is in line with the ‘Make in India‘ initiative. The decision would be finalised during Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s visit to Moscow this week.

“We will follow principles of ‘localisation’ as per Make in India initiative for setting up Kudankulam nuclear power plant five and six,” sources told PTI.

Russia is working a deal in Jordan but back to Iran:

Back in 2013-14: WASHINGTON — Russia has agreed to build Iran two additional nuclear power plants, Iran’s state-run Press TV announced on Wednesday.

Russia will construct the new facilities next to Iran’s sole existing nuclear power plant in the city of Bushehr.

That plant was also built with Russian assistance, and was fueled for operation in 2011. The reactor was put under full Iranian control in 2013.

The deal includes two desalination plants and is reportedly in exchange for oil; Russia built first and only reactor at Bushehr.

Iran To Ship Enriched Uranium To Russia

 RFEL: Iranian nuclear officials say Tehran will export most of its enriched uranium stockpile to Russia in the coming days as it implements a nuclear deal to secure relief from international sanctions.

The Iranian news agency IRNA quotes nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi as saying on December 19 that “around nine tons of Iran’s enriched uranium will be exported to Russia.”

That is roughly the amount that Iran must export to bring its stockpile down to the required level under the sanctions-relief deal.

Salehi did not give a precise timetable for what he meant by “in the coming days.”

Under the terms of the deal it reached in July with world powers, Iran must reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium to around 300 kilograms. It must also deactivate and store most of its centrifuges, and remove the core of a heavy water reactor in Arak so it cannot be used to produce plutonium.

On December 16, Tehran said it was working to complete the requirements in the next two to three weeks, after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) closed its investigation of Iran’s past nuclear activities.

The 35-nation governing board of the IAEA passed a resolution on December 15 ending the UN nuclear watchdog agency’s 12-year-long inquiry into suspicions of “possible military dimensions” to Iran’s nuclear work.

IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said afterward that Tehran has taken the necessary steps to cooperate with the agency and that it was “not impossible” that sanctions could be lifted in January.

Iran has shown a strong apparent desire in recent weeks to build on the momentum of the nuclear deal and restore international economic links after years of sanctions.

Iranian Industry Minister Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh said on December 17 that Tehran is prepared to begin negotiations for membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Iran first applied for WTO membership in July 1996, but progress had been minimal since then due to tensions over the Iranian nuclear crisis.

Iran Behind the Bombing of the Jews in Argentina

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In Secret Recordings, Former Argentine FM Admits Iran Behind Massive 1994 Terror Attack

TheTower: Former Argentine Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman knew that Iran was responsible for the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires even as he negotiated with the regime in Tehran, secretly-recorded telephone conversations released on Friday reveal.

The previously unknown recordings of conversations between Timerman and leaders of the Argentine Jewish community confirm what has long been suspected. While negotiating the infamous “Memorandum of Understanding” in 2013 aimed at setting up a joint commission with Iran to supposedly investigate the bombing, Timerman had no doubt that Tehran was behind the atrocity that claimed the lives of 85 people and injured hundreds more.

The conversations took place in 2012. In the first recording, Timerman is speaking with Guillermo Borger, the then president of the AMIA Jewish community organization. He attempts to persuade Borger to support the negotiations with Iran that would in due course lead to the signing of the Memorandum.

Borger: We don’t regard Iran as valid [as a negotiating partner].

Timerman: And who do you want me to negotiate with, Switzerland?

Borger: I will just say that Iran lies, is not credible and denies the Holocaust.

Timerman: But we don’t have anyone else to negotiate with […] Well, tell me who you want me to negotiate with?

Borger: I understand, I wish there was someone else to negotiate with.

Timerman: If there was someone else, they [the Iranians] wouldn’t have planted the bomb. So we are back to the beginning. Do you have someone else for me to negotiate with?

The second conversation is between Timerman and José Scaliter, the Vice President of the AMIA at the time:

Timerman: Eighteen years ago they [the Iranians] planted the bomb. You don’t tell me who I should negotiate with, you tell me who I shouldn’t negotiate with. What a smartass you are, so who do you want me to negotiate with?

Scaliter: The Prosecutor [Alberto Nisman, found dead in suspicious circumstances in January 2015] working on this case, who wasn’t appointed by us, carried out a serious and important investigation and says Iran did it.

Timerman: Great! Fantastic! So how do you want me to bring them [the Iranian fugitives to Argentina]. You never know what should be done.

It’s not clear who made the recordings or why they were leaked just now. Timerman himself just made a sudden reappearance on Twitter to complain that they were made in secret by Borger and that indeed seems the likeliest explanation. (Timerman did not, notably, claim that the recordings were fake, or that they distorted his views.) By the sound of the recordings, it seems that Borger and Scaliter simply put Timerman on the speaker in their office and recorded the conversations without mentioning that they were doing so.

Considering the track record of the previous government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whom Timerman served, in publicly hounding those who crossed it, Borger and Scaliter may have wished to have a guarantee that their conversation was recorded faithfully. The recent election of Mauricio Macri as President, a completely unexpected outcome for Fernández de Kirchner and her allies, may have emboldened the AMIA leaders to leak the recordings now.

There may be others with secrets to reveal, now that they can do so without harassment from Fernández de Kirchner’s government. The mother of Alberto Nisman, the late federal prosecutor investigating the AMIA bombing, told a journalist in recent days that she has a digital copy of “all” of her son’s formal complaint against Timerman and Fernández de Kirchner over their deal with Iran, along with “all” the evidence he collected to support it.

It’s not clear whether Nisman, who was found dead in January 2015 hours before he was to present his complaint, would have had access to the recordings. As Scaliter pointed out in his conversation with Timerman, Nisman was working for the government and not AMIA, and in any case had access to other sources of information about the negotiations with Iran.

The revelation of these recordings confirms Nisman’s thesis that the Memorandum was a sham, designed to protect those guilty of the AMIA Massacre. The Argentine government, despite knowing that Iran’s responsibility was beyond doubt, agreed to let the murderers “investigate” themselves through an Orwellian “Truth Commission,” and led Iran to believe that simply signing the Memorandum would lead to Interpol dropping the arrest warrants against its citizens, which seems to have been Tehran’s initial if not principal motivation in negotiating the pact. As a result, trade relations between the two countries would flourish, allowing enormous sums to be made by Argentine officials in state-body-to-state-body deals free from market pressures or scrutiny, the preferred kirchnerista business model. Elsewhere on the recordings, Timerman speaks of the negotiations being a “great opportunity for Argentina.” It’s not difficult to imagine what kind of opportunity he had in mind and which Argentines he thought might benefit.

Every word spoken by the former Argentine government and its supporters in defense of the Memorandum has now been proven to be a lie – not that there was ever much doubt about that. As soon as her husband and predecessor Nestor Kirchner died in October 2010, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner could not wait to launch negotiations with Iran, hoping to bury the AMIA issue once and for all.

And the worst of it is that none of this should come as a shock. Shortly after Timerman’s appointment as Foreign Minister in 2010, I wrote this satire on his complaisant attitude to the Iranians on a blog sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. Looking back, it’s clear that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s handling of the AMIA case was, in fact, far worse than I imagined it was going to be. Deeper details on the Iranian mission to kill Jews in Argentina.

Forget the EMP, It’s the Hack, You’re at Risk

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Iranian hackers infiltrated computers of small dam in NY

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Iranian hackers breached the control system of a dam near New York City in 2013, an infiltration that raised concerns about the security of the country’s infrastructure, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing former and current U.S. officials.

Two people familiar with the breach told the newspaper it occurred at the Bowman Avenue Dam in Rye, New York. The small structure about 20 miles from New York City is used for flood control.

The hackers gained access to the dam through a cellular modem, the Journal said, citing an unclassified Department of Homeland Security summary of the incident that did not specify the type of infrastructure.

The dam is a 20-foot-tall concrete slab across Blind Brook, about five miles from Long Island Sound.

“It’s very, very small,” Rye City Manager Marcus Serrano told the newspaper. He said FBI agents visited in 2013 to ask the city’s information-technology manager about a hacking incident.

The dam breach was difficult to pin down, and federal investigators at first thought the target was a much larger dam in Oregon, the Journal said.

The breach came as hackers linked to the Iranian government were attacking U.S. bank websites after American spies damaged an Iranian nuclear facility with the Stuxnet computer worm.

It illustrated concerns about many of the old computers controlling industrial systems, and the White House was notified of the infiltration, the Journal said.

The newspaper said the United States had more than 57,000 industrial control systems connected to the Internet, citing Shodan, a search engine that catalogs each machine.

Homeland Security spokesman S.Y. Lee would not confirm the breach to Reuters. He said the department’s 24-hour cybersecurity information-sharing hub and an emergency response team coordinate responses to threats to and vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure.

***

Cant Sleep, You are at Risk

In part from Wired: If you want to keep yourself up at night, spend some time reading about the latest developments in cybersecurity. Airplanes hacked, cars hacked, vulnerabilities in a breathtaking range of sensitive equipment from TSA locks to voting booths to medical devices.

The big picture is even scarier. Former NSA Director Mike McConnell suspects China has hacked “every major corporation” in the US. Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks revealed the US government has its own national and international hacking to account for. And the Ponemon Institute says 110 million Americans saw their identities compromised in 2014. That’s one in two American adults.

The system is broken. It isn’t keeping us, our companies, or our government safe. Worse yet, no one seems to know how to fix it.

How Did We Get Here?

One deceptive truth seems to drive much of the cybersecurity industry down a rabbit hole: If you keep bad actors and bad software out of your system, you have nothing to worry about.

Malicious actors target “endpoints”—any device or sensor connected to a network—to break into that network. Network security seeks to protect those endpoints with firewalls, certificates, passwords, and the like, creating a secure perimeter to keep the whole system safe.

This wasn’t difficult in the early days of the Internet and online threats. But today, most private networks have far too many endpoints to properly secure. In an age of “Bring Your Own Device,” the cloud, remote access, and the Internet of Things, there are too many vulnerabilities hackers can exploit. As Ajay Arora, CEO of file security company Vera, notes, there is no perimeter anymore. It’s a dream of the past.

But the security paradigm remains focused on perimeter defense because, frankly, no one knows what else to do. To address threats, security experts should assume compromise – that hackers and malware already have breached their defenses, or soon will – and instead classify and mitigate threats.

The CIA Triad

The information security community has a model to assess and respond to threats, at least as a starting point. It breaks information security into three essential components: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Confidentiality means protecting and keeping your secrets. Espionage and data theft are threats to confidentiality.

Availability means keeping your services running, and giving administrators access to key networks and controls. Denial of service and data deletion attacks threaten availability.

Integrity means assessing whether the software and critical data within your networks and systems are compromised with malicious or unauthorized code or bugs. Viruses and malware compromise the integrity of the systems they infect.

The Biggest Threat

Of these, integrity is the least understood and most nebulous. And what many people don’t realize is it’s the greatest threat to businesses and governments today.

Meanwhile, the cybersecurity industry remains overwhelmingly focused on confidentiality. Its mantra is “encrypt everything.” This is noble, and essential to good security. But without integrity protection, the keys that protect encrypted data are themselves vulnerable to malicious alteration. This is true even of authenticated encryption algorithms like AES-GCM.

In the bigger picture, as cybercrime evolves, it will become clear that loss of integrity is a bigger danger than loss of confidentiality. One merely has to compare different kinds of breaches to see the truth of this:

A confidentiality breach in your car means someone learns your driving habits. An integrity breach means they could take over your brakes. In a power grid, a confidentiality breach exposes system operating information. An integrity breach would compromise critical systems, risking failure or shutdown. And a confidentiality breach in the military would mean hackers could obtain data about sensitive systems. If they made an integrity beach, they could gain control over these weapons systems. Full details and actions you can take to protect yourself, go here.

The Secrets and Aliases of Obama Admin

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Thank you Kimberley but it appears to the rest of the country, the secreted Obama administration goes way beyond emails and aliases. We can start with Fast and Furious and the IRS scandal is by no means the end.

The Obama Secrets Regime

Republicans ban the IRS from private email. But why not all federal employees?

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

WSJ: Some scandals come on fast, and some creep up on Washington. The slow-rolling outrage of 2015—Obama administration secrecy—received a small correction in this week’s omnibus budget bill, but it deserves far more attention. It’s time for the federal government to come back on the grid.

A steady drip of news has shown that for seven years now, the highest (and lowest) echelons of the Obama administration have conducted the people’s business in secret, via private email addresses and other hidden electronic means. They’ve been doing so in contravention of department guidelines, executive orders and statutes that require record-keeping and public accountability. Since those rules are well known and understood, it has to be assumed that they’ve been doing it purposely, to hide their actions.

The New York Times on Thursday revealed the latest email-hider: Defense Secretary Ash Carter. Mr. Carter was confirmed in February, and from the start used a private account to correspond with aides about everything from legislation to media appearances. He may well have discussed far more serious, classified matters, but we don’t know. That’s because we must rely on Mr. Carter’s word that he turned all his work correspondence over to the Defense Department. Just as we must trust that Hillary Clinton didn’t delete anything official from the private server she used as secretary of state.

Speaking of the Democratic front-runner, it seems that Mr. Carter continued to use his private email account for two full months after the news broke about Mrs. Clinton’s ether escapades. So the defense secretary either a) doesn’t read the news; b) thinks rules apply to him even less than they do Mrs. Clinton; or c) felt the secrecy afforded was worth the risk of getting caught. It seems Mr. Carter didn’t stop until White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough—who was watching the Hillary explosion—told him in May to cut it out.

Secrecy aside, this marks the second top Obama national-security official to be caught winging around potentially sensitive information on unsecured email. Mr. Carter has presumably sat in on a few briefings about the growing threat from hackers and the urgent need for better cybersecurity.

One irony of these scandals is that, in seeking to keep government business secret from Americans, officials make it more available to foreign enemies.

Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used private email accounts. She and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack also used email aliases, making it harder for Freedom of Information Act filers to track down correspondence. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius used private email. As did former Acting Labor Secretary Seth Harris, who had three private accounts.

The head of the Chemical Safety Board used a private account and didn’t preserve the correspondence. High-ranking Justice Department officials—including the former head of the criminal division—were off the government grid. Disgraced former IRS official Lois Lerner used two off-reservation email addresses, as well as an internal instant-messaging service that didn’t archive conversations.

When the folks at the top routinely break the rules, the folks lower down figure they get to as well. Mrs. Clinton’s aides conducted business off government servers. A former EPA official strategized over private email with environmental groups about how to shut down the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska. Attorney Chris Horner, of the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, recently unearthed emails showing an EPA official working with outside groups over private email to draft Mr. Obama’s climate regulations.

The Government Business Council this year interviewed 412 “high-level” federal executives about private email. A full one-third admitted it is used at least “sometimes” for government work. (The number was 41% at the Defense Department.) Only 18% said private email is “never” used. And 31% admitted these emails aren’t archived—meaning a big chunk of government business has been deleted from the public record.

Republicans this week included in the omnibus bill a rider that bars IRS employees from using private email for work. The question is why they stopped there. Conservatives complain ceaselessly about the Obama administration’s extralegal or abusive practices, and the record shows a main conduit for these shenanigans is private email. Since we can have no confidence they will provide a full record of their private correspondence, the wiser course is to bar it entirely. For every federal employee.

The best excuse any Obama official has been able to come up with for these accounts is “convenience”—and that’s a hoot in today’s world of easy-to-use technology. More to the point, who ever said federal employees are due “convenience”? They aren’t the average American. Quite the opposite. They serve the average American, and a core duty is to create a public record of their work. If Republicans want a 2016 issue that will resonate with the public, here’s one: End the Obama Secrets Regime.

One last thing….a new release of some Hillary emails and she was told her Blackberry was not an acceptable means of communication by officials at her State Department. She ignored it all.

foia black