Author Archives: Denise Simon

Telegram, New Platform for Terrorists to Communicate

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Sitting on the knife’s edge when it comes to protecting people’s communication from investigative agencies like the FBI and the NSA is a slippery and inexact argument. The Director of the FBI, James Comey has begged Congress for some legislation such that some encryption can be broken for terror and other criminal cases to be investigated yet nothing is forthcoming and not likely in the future.

FBI Director James Comey spoke to legal professionals and scholars this week about cyber threats and the FBI’s abilities to counter and investigate those evolving threats.

In remarks at the American Law Institute on Tuesday and at a cyber security summit on Wednesday at Georgetown University Law Center, Comey said the group calling itself the Islamic State, or ISIL, represents the FBI’s most urgent threat. He described the organization’s use of social media to motivate troubled people in the United States to engage in acts of violence—either by traveling to the so-called caliphate or killing where they are. Comey said ISIL reaches out to individuals on Twitter and elsewhere, then moves their more sensitive communications to encrypted platforms.

“The threat we face has morphed,” Comey said on Wednesday. “It’s a chaotic spider web through social media—increasingly invisible to us because the operational communications are happening in an encrypted channel.”

Comey later elaborated on the issue of encryption, which is a process of encoding messages—on mobile phones for example—that only authorized parties can access. While it can be effective at thwarting digital thieves, strong encryption also limits the amount of information—or evidence—that law enforcement can effectively gather from a device.

“Increasingly we’re finding ourselves unable to read what we find, or unable to open a device,” Comey said, “and that is a serious concern.”

The issue of “going dark,” as the Bureau calls it, is worthy of a larger public conversation about the balance between privacy and public safety, Comey said. Momentum toward universal encryption, he explained, may have unintended consequences.

“As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, and therefore all of our lives—including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies—will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court-ordered process,” he said. “And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning.”

The Director also pointed to provisions of the Patriot Act of 2001 that, if allowed to expire on June 1, could hobble the FBI’s investigative abilities. One of the provisions is Section 215, which authorized the National Security Agency’s database of telephony records and metadata.

Comey said the FBI relies on that provision fewer than 200 times a year—in particular cases to get particular records. “If we lose that authority,” Comey said, “we can’t get information that I think everybody wants us to attain.”

Two other provisions include:

  • Roving wiretaps. The FBI has had authority since the 1980s to use legally authorized roving wiretaps in criminal cases—allowing authorities to follow surveillance targets rather than their phones, which can be easily trashed and replaced. The Patriot Act extended that authority to terrorism and counterintelligence cases.
  • The Lone Wolf provision. In 2004, Congress amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to authorize intelligence gathering on individuals not affiliated with any known terrorist organization.

“These three are going to go away June 1,” Comey said, “and I don’t want them to get lost in the conversation about metadata.”

It was not but a few months ago, the leadership of Islamic State (ISIS) published an edict for the top terror commanders to use an app called ‘Telegram’ and they are.

Now what? How is the conflict of civil liberties resolved?

Director Comey Speaks at Georgetown University Law Center

  

Why Telegram has become the hottest messaging app in the world

Secret messages and advanced cryptography pose a challenge to WhatsApp

When WhatsApp went down for four hours this weekend, nearly 5 million people signed up for messaging service Telegram. The app skyrocketed to the top of the App Store charts, and is now the top free app in 46 countries from Germany to Ecuador. In the US and several other countries, the app is no. 1 in the social networking category, ahead of Facebook, WhatsApp, Kik, and others.

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It’s not immediately clear why Telegram emerged as the alternative of choice following WhatsApp’s downtime. Users could have switched to Kik, or Facebook Messenger, or LINE — all of which have hundreds of millions of users. There’s seemingly something different about Telegram. Its rise isn’t only due to WhatsApp’s acquisition and subsequent downtime. “We have been the no. 1 app in Spanish, Arabic, and several Latin American app stores for several weeks before the Facebook deal happened,” says Telegram’s Markus Ra. “The growth was there — so the WhatsApp acquisition and problems merely multiplied the effect across all affected countries.” According to app analytics site App Annie, Telegram started truly gaining steam on February 17th, days before the WhatsApp news even hit.

Built by the pioneering Durov brothers behind Russia’s largest social network, VKontakte (also known as VK), Telegram is a messaging service combining the speed of WhatsApp with Snapchat’s ephemerality and advanced new security measures. WhatsApp might have heralded the first time we heard of Telegram, but it certainly won’t be the last.

Telegram feels in many ways like a straight-up clone of WhatsApp, from its green double-checkmark read receipts to its cartoonish wallpapers. There’s also the usual gamut of messaging app features including the ability to see a friend’s online status and attach photos, videos, your location, contacts, and documents to messages. But where it lacks originality, Telegram makes up for it in speed and security features. “Telegram is the fastest and most secure mass market messaging system in the world,” the company claims, which it attributes in part to Nikolai Durov’s open-sourced MTProto protocol. Telegram was in fact built as a testing bed for MTProto, Reuters reported when the app launched back in August. The company is so confident in the security of MTProto that it’s offering $200,000 to anyone who can crack it. It’s not unusual for companies to offer bug bounties, but bounties of this size are generally only reserved for critical bugs in widely used apps like Windows.

“The no. 1 reason for me to support and help launch Telegram was to build a means of communication that can’t be accessed by the Russian security agencies,” Durov told TechCrunch. Durov built in a feature that lets you start a “Secret Chat” with any of your friends. According to Telegram, Secret Chats offer end-to-end encryption, leave no trace on the company’s servers, and let you set Snapchat-esque self-destruct timers on messages that range from two seconds to one week. There’s also the ability to check the security of your Secret Chats using an image that serves as an encryption key. By comparing your encryption key to a friend’s, you can effectively verify that your conversation is secure and less vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, the company says. But despite Telegram’s alleged sophistication, no cryptographic method is infallible. The company has, in fact, already doled out $100,000 to one developer for finding a critical bug, TechCrunch reports.

“The no. 1 reason for me to [help launch] Telegram was to build a means of communication that can’t be accessed by the Russian security agencies.”

Telegram is interesting not just because of its stringent security standards, but also because it allows any developer to build a Telegram client of their own, and even for desktop computers. Most new messaging services today, including WhatsApp, build one-size-fits-all messaging apps and lock out third-party developers. It’s hard to blame them, since maintaining one federated language and security paradigm across dozens of apps is difficult. Also, making money off of a platform takes more thought than making money off a simple paid app. Yet, the Durovs’ VKontakte found a lot of success letting developers build alternate versions of its site. More importantly, Telegram operates as a non-profit organization, and doesn’t plan to charge for its services.

“Telegram is not intended to bring revenue, it will never sell ads or accept outside investment. It also cannot be sold,” the company writes in its FAQ. “We’re not building a ‘user base,’ we are building a messenger for the people.” If Telegram ever “runs out” of the money supplied by the Durov brothers, the company says, it will ask for donations from its users. Telegram’s noble goals echo the sentiments of many bright-eyed startup founders, but with the Durovs’ pocketbook in hand and the service’s open API available to third-party developers, it may actually have a chance at fulfilling its goals. Telegram isn’t a CryptoCat for the masses, considering it uses your phone number, of all things, as an identifier — but it’s an important step towards finding a highly encrypted messaging platform that’s accessible to anyone.

“Telegram is not intended to bring revenue, it will never sell ads.”

Championing an ostensibly noble goal, free services, and the experience of VKontakte’s creators, Telegram would seem like a great alternative to any of the leading messages apps out there. After WhatsApp’s acquisition news and downtime, the app is spiking at the right time. The company incentivized several million new users into switching over, but keeping those users will be a continuous challenge. “The switching cost for users on a phone number-based messaging services is at or near zero,” argues Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger in a blog post, but that’s only half the story. A network is only as strong as the number of friends you have using it, and convincing all of your friends to switch is no easy task. If Facebook thought that WhatsApp users were liable to switch at a moment’s notice, it wouldn’t have paid $19 billion for the company.

Facebook paid for WhatsApp’s user base, but also for its brand — a brand that spent years solving a very important problem: that it costs a fortune to text across borders. Perhaps the next messaging problem to solve is personal security, considering WhatsApp’s alleged cryptographic weaknesses and the NSA’s data collection policies. WhatsApp became synonymous with texting. Perhaps for Telegram to succeed, it will need to become synonymous with security.

New Sources and Newest Release, U.S. Drone Operations

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Being a whistleblower is not enough, but stealing documents and releasing them is over the top. Raise your hand if you think Snowden and those working in cooperation with him are covert Russian operatives and is aiding the enemy.

Perhaps it is time to question those who are aiding Snowden as well when it comes to violating the Espionage Act and a handful of other Federal laws.

A Second Snowden has Leaked a Mother Lode of Drone Documents

by Andy Greenberg:

It’s been just over two years since Edward Snowden leaked a massive trove of NSA documents, and more than five since Chelsea Manning gave WikiLeaks a megacache of military and diplomatic secrets. Now there appears to be a new source on that scale of classified leaks—this time with a focus on drones.

On Thursday the Intercept published a groundbreaking new collection of documents related to America’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles to kill foreign targets in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Yemen. The revelations about the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command actions include primary source evidence that as many as 90 percent of US drone killings in one five month period weren’t the intended target, that a former British citizen was killed in a drone strike despite repeated opportunities to capture him instead, and details of the grisly process by which the American government chooses who will die, down to the “baseball cards” of profile information created for individual targets, and the chain of authorization that goes up directly to the president.1

All of this new information, according to the Intercept, appears to have come from a single anonymous whistleblower. A spokesperson for the investigative news site declined to comment on that source. But unlike the leaks of Snowden or Manning, the spilled classified materials are accompanied by statements about the whistleblower’s motivation in his or her own words.

“This outrageous explosion of watchlisting—of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield—it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source tells the Intercept. “We’re allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it.”

Reports first surfaced in the fall of last year that the Intercept, a news site created in part to analyze and publish the remaining cache of Snowden NSA documents, had found a second source of highly classified information. The final scene of the film “Citizenfour,” directed by Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras, shows fellow Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald meeting with Snowden in Moscow to tell him about a new source with information about the U.S. drone program, whom he says has been communicating with the Intercept‘s Jeremy Scahill. At one point, Greenwald draws Snowden a diagram of the authorization chain for drone strikes that ends with the president, one that looks very similar to the one included in Thursday’s publication.

“It’s really risky,” Snowden tells Greenwald in the scene. “That person is incredibly bold.”

“The boldness of it is shocking,” Greenwald responds, “But it was obviously motivated by what you did.”

In the scene, Greenwald also tells Snowden the security tools the Intercept is using to communicate with the source, writing the names of the software on a piece of paper in what may have been an attempt to avoid eavesdroppers. Those security tools, along with the Intercept‘s reputation for combative, unapologetic investigation of the U.S. government, may help explain how the site seems to have found another Snowden-like source of national security secrets. The Intercept and its parent company First Look Media employ world-class security staff like former Googler Morgan Marquis-Boire, Tor developer Erinn Clark, and former EFF technologist Micah Lee. Far more than most news sites, its reporters use tools like the encryption software PGP and the anonymous upload system SecureDrop to protect the identities of its sources.

Whether those measures can actually protect this particular source—or whether the source Greenwald told Snowden about is even the same one who leaked the Intercept‘s Drone Papers—remains to be seen. Yahoo News reported last year that the FBI had identified a “second leaker” to the Intercept and searched his or her home as part of a criminal investigation.

If that reported search of the leaker’s home did happen, however, it doesn’t seem to have slowed down the Intercept or its whistleblower. A year later, no arrests or charges have been made public, and the site has now published what appear to be the biggest revelations yet from its new source.

In the Citizenfour scene, Snowden tells Greenwald he hopes that the new leaks could help change the perception of whistleblowers in general. “This could raise the political situation with whistleblowing to a whole new level, he says.

“Exactly,” Greenwald responds. “People are going to see what’s being hidden by a totally different part of the government.”

Read the Intercept‘s full Drone Papers release here.

1 Correction 10/15/2015 12:45pm: An earlier version of this story stated that a former US citizen, Bilal el-Berjawi, was killed by a drone. In fact, el-Berjawi was a former British citizen.

2 Updated 10/15/2015 2:15pm to include Erinn Clark in the list of First Look Media security engineers.

 

Iran’s Mullahs Say Thank You to Obama

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MEMRI October 15, 2015 Special Dispatch No.6187 Senior Iranian Negotiators Salehi, Kamalvandi: On October 19 President Obama Will Announce Lifting Of American Sanctions http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/8799.htm    

According to senior Iranian negotiators, Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and an architect of the nuclear agreement (JCPOA), and Beherouz Kamalvandi, the spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, on October 19, 2015 President Obama will announce that sanctions will be lifted and not merely suspended, contrary to the July 14,

2015 text of the agreement to which Iran is obligated.[1]  

If this report proves accurate, it means that President Obama surrendered to the threats and demands of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to amend the nuclear agreement (JCPOA) on this critical point, because lifting sanctions instead of suspending them will not allow their automatic reimposition (“snapback”). In this way, President Obama’s promise that the agreement incorporates the security mechanism of restoring the sanctions in the event of an Iranian violation, has been broken. 

It should be emphasized that Salehi’s statement has not been verified at this stage by any Western or American source.  

Khamenei issued his demands and threat on September 3, 2015 in a public address before Iran’s Assembly of Experts[2] and the Iranian Majlis incorporated them in the text that it approved on October 13, 2015.[3]  

Following Khamenei’s address in early September 2015, contacts between Iran and the US and the P5 +1 powers took place September 28, 2015, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly but their results were not published[4] and subsequently Khamenei issued a guideline on October 7, 2015 banning contacts with the US.[5]  

Endnotes:  

[1] Fars (Iran), October 15, 2015; ILNA (Iran), October 15, 2015.  

[2] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 6151, Khamenei Declares That He Will Not Honor The Agreement If Sanctions Are Merely Suspended And Not Lifted, September 4, 2015.  

[3] See MEMRI Inquiry and Analysis No. 1192, The Iranian Majlis Has Not Approved The JCPOA But Iran’s Amended Version Of It, October 13, 2015.  

[4] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 6162, Expected September 28 NY Meeting

Between P5+1 Foreign Ministers And Iran Could Signify Reopening Of Nuclear

Negotiations To Address Khamenei’s September 3 Threat That If Sanctions Are

Not Lifted, But Merely Suspended, There Will Be No Agreement, September 21,

2015.

 

 

[5] Twitter.com/khamenei_ir, October 7, 2015.

 

Quote of the Day:

President Obama and his foreign-policy admirers—a dwindling lot—hoped that the nuclear deal would make Iran more open to cooperation in the Middle East and with the U.S. Mark this down as another case in which the world is disappointing the American President.

–Wall Street Journal editorial headlined “The Mullahs Say Thanks”

The Iran deal seemed to be predicated on the notion that if we made all sorts of concessions to Iran it would become a different kind of regime. It would play nicer with President Obama’s imaginary friend “the international community.”

It hasn’t gotten off to a good start. For starters, Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, held captive for more than a year, was just convicted of espionage. Reporters keep referring to the Iranian “justice” system, as if there had been a fair trial open to the public. Sure.

The verdict was announced on Monday.  As the Wall Street Journal notes:

The timing of the conviction won’t escape students of history. Friday was the 444th day of his captivity. That was the number of days U.S. diplomats in Iran spent as hostages following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Mr. Rezaian’s conviction three days later is the mullah equivalent of mailing a dead fish to an adversary.

Mr. Rezaian’s brother has said that he thinks our government should let the Iranians know that “there will be consequences.” Strongly worded letter to follow. But even if our government responded (and it won’t), the mullahs aren’t listening.You see, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei just banned further diplomatic negotiations with Washington.

In other news from our Iranian friends, the regime tested on Sunday a guided ballistic missile that code-named Emad (“Pillar”), which the Journal notes is in violation of the nuclear deal. This is also in violation of a recent U.N. Security Council resolution banning any Iranian tests of guided missiles for eight years. It will be difficult for Secretary of State John Kerry’s crack team to glean further information directly, however, because of that Iranian ban on talking to Washington.

If Iran were not a regime bent on nuclear power and destruction and if this were not so dangerous for the world, particularly our mistreated ally (?) Israel, you’d almost have to cheer the mullahs for their gutsiness. But the regime is a totalitarian monstrosity and Israel is in danger of annihilation, which makes it all very unfunny. The Wall Street Journal comments:

The more likely outcome is that the Obama Administration will find a way to explain that the missile test doesn’t violate the nuclear accord that Mr. Obama considers a crowning achievement. Meanwhile, Iran’s government will bank up to $150 billion that it can deploy to back its militia proxies in the Middle East. Add the new Iran-Russia offensive in Syria, and Tehran would appear to have taken the nuclear deal as a signal that it can now do whatever it wants without consequence.

The American recessional continues apace with word that the U.S. is pulling our Patriot missile defense systems from Turkey. This is a nice bookend to one of President Obama’s earliest foreign affairs initiatives, scrapping the missile-defense system for Poland, which would actually be rather nice to have just now as Vladimir Putin is raging through the neighborhood.

Don’t worry, though. President Obama is heading for a climate change conference. Hat tip for this post.

Meanwhile, the IAEA completed it’s first report on an inspection site:

VIENNA (AFP) – 

The UN atomic watchdog said Thursday it has completed on schedule gathering information in its probe into Iran’s alleged past efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said that, in line with a plan agreed with Iran in July, its chief Yukiya Amano will now provide a “final assessment” on the investigation by December 15.

The IAEA keeps close tabs on Iran’s declared nuclear facilities to ensure that no atomic material is diverted by Iran to any covert weapons programme, an aim denied strenuously by Tehran.

Under a landmark July deal between Iran and six major powers, Iran will dramatically scale down its nuclear activities in order to render any effort to make an atomic bomb virtually impossible.

But the IAEA also wants to probe claims that at least until 2003, Iran conducted research into making nuclear weapons, including with explosives tests at the Parchin military base, something it also denies.

On July 14 — the same day as the wider deal with major powers — Iran and the IAEA agreed a separate “road map” agreement aimed at completing an investigation into these activities by December 15.

The plan included Iran providing the IAEA with information by August 15, which happened on schedule although the IAEA said that there remained “ambiguities” to be resolved.

Thursday’s announcement by the IAEA also helps clear the way for preparations to begin for the implementation of the wider deal between Iran and major powers.

The accord, hailed as a massive diplomatic achievement after over decade of rising tensions, won final approval in Iran on Wednesday as a top panel of jurists and clerics gave it the green light.

Members of the US Congress failed in September to torpedo the deal, with President Barack Obama securing enough support in the Senate to protect the agreement.

In return for downscaling its programme, painful UN and Western sanctions on Iran are due to be lifted. Iranian officials have said this should happen by the end of 2015 or January at the latest.

 

Even More Unknown Email Addresses on THAT server

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Mentioned more than once on this blog were questions about how many email addresses were on that server and who they belonged to. Further, how many additional email addresses were uniquely assigned exclusively to mobile devices?
For the Gowdy Benghazi commission to get immediate and full cooperation has been a Herculean task and all parties involved including the State Department has been anything but cooperative under John Kerry, but he does have an agency full of employees to protect and likely some connectivity goes to the White House itself.
Keep popcorn handy for Friday and next week but fair warning some of the hearings are behind closed doors.
A previously unknown e-mail address used by Huma Abedin was discovered on Thursday, just hours before the top Hillary Clinton aide prepares to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Conservative watchdog group Citizens United discovered the address in an e-mail exchange that shows Clinton Foundation CEO Robert Harrison forwarding a speaking invitation for then-Secretary of State Clinton to both Abedin’s State Department account and an unfamiliar Abedin address on November 6, 2012. “I tried to send this to your ‘clintonemail.com’ address, but it bounced back as undeliverable, so here it is again,” Harrison wrote.
The new address begins with “humamabedin,” and appears to be a private e-mail account. The State Department redacted the account’s domain name, citing a personal-privacy exemption. A spokesman for the Benghazi Committee did not immediately respond when asked if the committee was aware of the e-mail account, and if it is under investigation for possibly containing official or classified government information. In August, the State Department admitted to a federal judge that Abedin and others close to Clinton used private accounts to conduct government business, and that they were unable to search those accounts for official records.
Technical issues seemed to plague Clinton’s private e-mail server at times, driving State Department aides and Clinton Foundation employees to use government or private accounts to reach Clinton and her top staff. “Is your e-mail working?” Abedin wrote to Clinton Foundation executive director Stephanie Streett on October 10, 2012. “Mine has been down [since] last night.” Abedin later added that she “can’t even get into my Clinton e-mail.”
The news of an unknown e-mail account and new technical troubles will likely factor in to Abedin’s closed-door testimony before the Benghazi Committee on Friday. In Abedin’s first appearance before the committee, lawmakers are expected to focus on work she did for the private, Clinton-connected consulting firm Teneo while she was still employed at the State Department. Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA) has expressed concern that Abedin acted as a conduit between Clinton and well-heeled Teneo clients. In one spring 2012 e-mail highlighted by the senator, Teneo’s president asked Abedin to convince Clinton to back Judith Rodin, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation and a Teneo client, for an Obama administration appointment.

Oh, More Counterterrorism Bureaucracy/SPLC

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As you read through this, understand that pesky Southern Poverty Law Center is part of the bureaucracy:

From the Justice Department website:

Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Remarks as prepared for delivery

Thank you, Lorenzo [Vidino], for that kind introduction.

It is an honor to be at this event, co-hosted by the George Washington University’s new Program on Extremism and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The partnership between SPLC and GW serves as a reminder that violent extremism is neither a new phenomenon, nor one that is limited to any single population, region or ideology.

Since its creation in 1971, SPLC has been an important voice on the wide range of extremist groups throughout this country.  And over the past four decades, the existence of hate, violence and extremism has remained unfortunately all too constant.  Earlier this year, we honored and remembered the victims of the horrific Oklahoma City bombing on the 20th anniversary of that devastating attack.  Less than two months after the anniversary, we again saw unimaginable violence motivated by hate.  A young man killed nine African-American men and women attending a bible class in Charleston, South Carolina.  A senseless, racist act.  The list goes on, past and present.

But as we gather today, new and disturbing trends loom over the horizon – trends we must understand to defeat.

New initiatives, like GW’s program, which focus on empirical research and analysis, are critical to policymakers and the interested public alike.

So although the problem set is by no means new, it is changing, and we must take lessons learned in the past and couple them with trend analysis to understand these shifts.

Today’s event is a good start to that conversation.  We are here to talk about combating domestic terrorism, which the FBI has explained as “Americans attacking Americans based on U.S.-based extremist ideologies.”

Much attention has focused on those inspired by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIL) message of hate and violence spreading worldwide and reaching homes here in America through the group’s unprecedented social media recruitment efforts.  And rightly so.

But today is a good opportunity to focus the conversation broadly on violent extremism here in America.  The threat ranges from individuals motivated by anti-government animus, to eco-radicalism, to racism, as it has for decades. Many more details here.

DOJ announces new position to focus on domestic terror threat

FNC:

A new national security position is being created to help combat homegrown terror threats, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday.

John Carlin, head of the department’s national security division, announced the new Domestic Terrorism Counsel at a speech Wednesday at George Washington University, to work with DOJ assets on domestic threats.

“…in order to ensure that we are gaining the benefits of the information and input from those eyes on the ground from around the country, and in recognition of a growing number of potential domestic terrorism matters around the United Sates, we have created a new position to assist with our important work in combating domestic terrorism,” Carlin said, according to his prepared remarks.

Carlin emphasized what he called the growing risk from homegrown  terrorism and specifically white supremacy.

“We recognize that, over the past few years, more people have died in this country in attacks by domestic extremists than in attacks associated with international terrorist groups,” Carlin said

“Among domestic extremist movements active in the United States, white supremacists are the most violent. The Charleston shooter, who had a manifesto laying out a racist world-view, is just one example,” Carlin said, before also noting killings by white supremacists in Kansas and Wisconsin.

While he spoke about the threat posed by the Islamic State terror group, he emphasized that law enforcement is focused on racist and anti-government ideologies, and that such ideologies may pose a more serious threat than ISIS.

“More broadly, law enforcement agencies nationwide are concerned about the growth of the “sovereign citizen” movement.  According to one 2014 study, state, local and tribal law enforcement officials considered sovereign citizens to be the top concern of law enforcement, ranking above ISIL and Al Qaeda-inspired extremists,” he said.

Carlin said the new Domestic Terrorism Counsel will serve as the main point of contact for U.S. Attorney offices nationwide. The new official will work to identify trends that can be used to help shape a national strategy.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.