Author Archives: Denise Simon

The First Lie About the IRS Hack Gets Some Truth?

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Social security numbers are the basis and entry point to hack when it comes to the cyber intrusion into the IRS. Given the software platform the IRS uses, which is outdated completely, there are warnings there could be more intrusions.

IRS Hack Far Worse Than First Thought

USAToday:

SAN FRANCISCO — A hack of the Internal Revenue service first reported in May was nearly three times as large as previously stated, the agency said Monday.

Thieves have accessed as many as 334,000 taxpayer accounts, the IRS said.

In May, the IRS reported that identity thieves were able to use the agency’s Get Transcript program to get personal information about as many as 114,000 taxpayers.

On Monday, the IRS said an additional 220,000 accounts had also been hacked. In all, 334,000 accounts were accessed, though whether information was stolen from every one of them is not known.

The hackers made use of an IRS application called Get Transcript, which allows users to view their tax account transactions, line-by-line tax return information or wage and income reported to the IRS for a specific tax year.

To enter the Get Transcript system, the user must correctly answer multiple identity verification question.

The hackers took information about taxpayers acquired from other sources and used it to correctly answer the questions, allowing them to gain access to a plethora of data about individual taxpayers.

The Get Transcript service was shut down in May.

Hackers love authentication-based systems because it’s very difficult to distinguish between “the good guys and the bad guys” when someone is trying to get in, said Jeff Hill of STEALTHbits Technologies, a cyber security company.

“Here we have a case where a successful authentication-based attack was discovered in May, and yet the IRS is still unclear of the extent of the breach’s damage months later. Even now, how confident is the IRS they fully understand the extent of the attack completely, or should we expect yet another shoe to drop in the coming weeks?” Hill said.

Notification of the increased number of hacked accounts came Monday.

In a statement the agency said, “as part of the IRS’s continued efforts to protect taxpayer data, the IRS conducted a deeper analysis over a wider time period covering the 2015 filing season, analyzing more than 23 million uses of the Get Transcript system.”

That analysis revealed an additional 220,000 accounts had also potentially been accessed.

In addition to accounts the hackers were successfully able to access, the IRS disclosed hack attempts that didn’t succeed. There were 111,000 attempts on accounts disclosed in May and 170,000 disclosed on Monday, for a total of 281,000 of accounts where the hackers “failed to clear the authentication processes,” the agency said.

Taxpayers whose information was potentially breached will get letters in the mail from the IRS in the coming days.

They will also get access to free credit protection and Identity Protection PINs, the IRS said in a statement.

Taxpayers Fleeced

1/2 TRILLION spent on IT upgrades, but IRS, Feds still use DOS, old Windows

Examiner: President Obama’s team has spent more than a half trillion dollars on information technology but some departments, notably the IRS, still run on DOS and old Windows, which isn’t serviced anymore, according to House chairman.

“Since President Obama has taken office, the federal government has spent in excess of $525 billion dollars on IT. And it doesn’t work,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

In an address to the centrist Ripon Society, Chaffetz suggested that the slow change of the federal government’s IT led to the recent and historic hack of personal data of millions of current and former federal workers, including CIA and other clandestine employees.

“The IRS still uses the DOS operating system. You have a Patent office that just got Windows 97. They don’t even service Windows 97 anymore. And yet they just got it. So the procurement process is really, really broken in this regard,” he added.

Chaffetz also offered to praise for Obama’s pick to head the Office of Personnel Management, home to the massive computer hack.

 

Have You Met Tom Steyer?

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Tom Steyer is a billionaire having created wealth due to hedge funds with concentration on the green agenda and going against coal, fossil fuels and promoting climate change.

He has been a champion of the Obama White House and is called on often for support in California and Washington DC power circles. He is even considering running for a U.S. Senate seat to take up where Senator Barbara Boxer leaves behind as she is retiring. (yeah!)

So, read on to know more about Steyer….some truths bubble to the surface where some major failures have become real.

Lawmakers call for oversight hearings on green jobs measure

AP:   SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California lawmakers from both parties are calling for more stringent oversight of a clean jobs initiative after an Associated Press report found that a fraction of the promised jobs have been created.

The report also found that the state has no comprehensive list to show much work has been done or energy saved, three years after voters approved a ballot measure to raise taxes on corporations and generate clean-energy jobs.

“It’s clear to me that the Legislature should immediately hold oversight hearings to get to the bottom of why yet another promise to the voters has been broken,” Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff, R-San Dimas, said in a news released Monday.

The AP reported that three years after voters passed Proposition 39, money is trickling in at a slower-than-anticipated rate, and more than half of the $297 million given to schools so far has gone to consultants and energy auditors. The board created to oversee the project and submit annual progress reports to the Legislature has never met.

Voters in 2012 approved the Clean Energy Jobs Act by a large margin, closing a tax loophole for multistate corporations. The Legislature decided to send half the money to fund clean energy projects in schools, promising to generate more than 11,000 jobs each year.

Instead, only 1,700 jobs have been created in three years, raising concerns about whether the money is accomplishing what voters were promised.

Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, the Los Angeles Democrat who was the primary booster of Proposition 39 and its implementation in the state Legislature, said Monday that the measure is already successful, and said it is too soon to assess its effectiveness.

“Most school districts are either in the planning phase or are preparing to launch large-scale, intensive retrofit projects that will maximize benefits to students, school sites and the California economy,” de Leon said in a joint statement with the initiative’s chief supporter, billionaire investor and philanthropist Tom Steyer, who funded the initiative campaign with $30 million of his own money.

“We have every confidence that, as more projects break ground and come on line, Californians in every region of the state will increasingly realize the full benefits of improvements that make schools stronger and more energy-efficient,” they said.

But other Democrats said the report raised concerns.

“We should hold some oversight hearings to see how the money is being spent, where it is being spent and seeing if Prop. 39 is fulfilling the promise that it said it would,” said Assemblyman Henry Perea, D-Fresno.

Republican lawmakers sought to present Proposition 39 as a cautionary tale for other proposals as Democrats push bills to further limit greenhouse gas emissions.

“Where’s the oversight? We are talking about giving away a whole lot of power to unelected bureaucracies,” said Republican Assemblyman James Gallagher of Nicolaus.

The State Energy Commission, which oversees Proposition 39 spending, could not provide any data about completed projects or calculate energy savings because schools are not required to report the results for up to 15 months after completion, spokeswoman Amber Beck said.

Still, Beck said she believes the program is on track. The commission estimates that based on proposals approved so far, Proposition 39 should generate an estimated $25 million a year in energy savings for schools.

Not enough data has been collected for the nine-member oversight board of professors, engineers and climate experts to meet, she said.

Among the planned projects are $12.6 million in work in the Los Angeles Unified School District, that would save $1.4 million a year in energy costs. Two schools were scheduled this summer to receive lighting retrofits and heating and cooling upgrades, but no construction work has been done on either site, LAUSD spokeswoman Barbara Jones said.

School district officials around the state say they intend to meet a 2018 deadline to request funds and a 2020 deadline to complete projects. They say the money will go to major, long-needed projects and are unconcerned schools have applied for only half of the $973 million available so far, or that $153 million of the $297 million given to schools has gone for energy planning by consultants and auditors.

“If there’s money out there, we’re going for it,” said Tom Wright, an energy manager for the San Diego Unified School District, which has received $9.5 million of its available $9.7 million.

Leftover money would return to the general fund for unrestricted projects of lawmakers’ choosing.

The proposition is also bringing in millions less each year than initially projected. Proponents told voters in 2012 that it would send up to $550 million annually to the Clean Jobs Energy Fund. But it brought in just $381 million in 2013, $279 million in 2014 and $313 million in 2015.

There’s no exact way to track how corporations reacted to the tax code change, but it’s likely most companies adapted to minimize their tax burdens, nonpartisan legislative analyst Ken Kapphahn said. He also said the change applies to a very small number of corporations.

Neither the Energy Commission nor Tim Rainey, director of the California Workforce Investment Board, could identify the types of jobs created by Proposition 39 projects. They said that information would be available when the oversight board meets for the first time, likely in October or November.

Schools often prioritize lighting projects because they work well with the Energy Commission’s formula, which requires schools to save at least $1.05 on energy costs for every dollar spent.

Douglas Johnson, a state government expert at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, said the slow results show the oversight board should have gotten involved much earlier.

“They should have been overseeing all stages of this project, not just waiting until the money’s gone and seeing where it went,” Johnson said.

State Dept Gave a Safe to Hillary as Email List Grows

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Foggy Bottom is an understatement…

No….wait it IS MUCH WORSE…Those pesky FOIA requests…Seems the State Department is about to fall completely. Obstruction too is an understatement.

Gawker: Earlier this year, Gawker Media sued the State Department over its response to a Freedom of Information Act request we filed in 2013, in which we sought emails exchanged between reporters at 33 news outlets and Philippe Reines, the former deputy assistant secretary of state and aggressive defender of Hillary Clinton. Over two years ago, the department claimed that “no records responsive to your request were located”—a baffling assertion, given Reines’ well-documented correspondence with journalists. Late last week, however, the State Department came up with a very different answer: It had located an estimated 17,000 emails responsive to Gawker’s request.

On August 13, lawyers for the U.S. Attorney General submitted a court-ordered status report to the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia in which it disclosed that State employees had somehow discovered “5.5 gigabytes of data containing 81,159 emails of varying length” that were sent or received by Reines during his government tenure. Of those emails, the attorneys added, “an estimated 17,855” were likely responsive to Gawker’s request:

The Department has conducted its preliminary review of the potentially responsive electronic documents in its possession, custody, and control from Mr. Reines’ state.gov email account (as opposed to records it received from his personal email account). The assemblage comprises approximately 5.5 gigabytes of data containing 81,159 emails of varying length. Based on a review of a portion of these emails, the Department estimates that 22% of the 81,159 emails may be responsive. Therefore, the Department believes that it will need to conduct a line- by-line review of an estimated 17,855 emails for applicable FOIA exemptions. Moreover, some of the responsive records may need to be referred to other agencies for consultation or processing.

It is not clear how the State Department managed to locate this tranche of Reines’ correspondence when it had previously asserted that the emails simply didn’t exist. These newly discovered records are from Reines’ government account, and are not related to the 20 boxes of government-business emails stored on his personal account that Reines recently handed over to the government, despite his prior claims to Gawker that his official use of non-governmental email was limited: “My personal email was the last place I wanted reporters intruding.”

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Considering the number of potentially responsive emails contained in Reines’ State.gov email account, it’s hard to see the agency’s initial denial as anything other than willful incompetence—if not the conscious effort, or the result of someone else’s conscious effort, to stonewall news outlets. Either way, the precedent it establishes is pernicious: Journalists should not have to file expensive lawsuits to force the government to comply with the basic provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.

According to the same status report, the State Department intends to produce the first set of Reines’ emails on September 30, 2015—three years and six days after Gawker filed its initial request.

We’ve asked the State Department and Reines for comment and will update this post if we hear back from either.

State Department Delivered a Safe to Hillary Clinton’s Attorney to Secure Classified Emails

Breitbart: The State Department sent a safe to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer in early July in an effort to ensure a thumb drive containing classified emails was being stored securely. The unusual move by State came to light Friday, more than a week after the drive itself was turned over to the Department of Justice.

McClatchy reports that evidence of classified information on Hillary’s personal email sever first turned up in May, earlier than previously known. A debate ensued between the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community and the State Department about whether the material, including copies of Hillary’s emails on a thumb drive kept by her attorney, were properly secured. It is not known what, if any, security precautions were taken between May and July, but in early July the State Department became concerned enough that it delivered a safe to Kendall’s office.

The State Department has previously mentioned that it had physically verified the security of the thumb drive in Kendall’s office, but never mentioned providing a safe. On July 30th, about a week after word of the thumb drive’s existence became public knowledge, a State Department spokesman told Politico, “We’ve provided the lawyers with instructions regarding appropriate measures for physically securing the documents and confirmed via a physical security expert that they are taking those measures.”

Nearly a week later, State spokesman Mark Toner again noted that State had sent a security expert to Kendall’s office. He told CBS News, “We simply cleared the site where they’re being held, made sure that it was a secure facility, and capable of holding what could be classified material.” Again, there was no mention of State providing a safe in which to keep the thumb drive.

Throughout this time the State Department has firmly denied that any material on Hillary’s server was classified at the time it was generated. But two Inspectors General–for State and for the Intelligence Community–have been equally firm in saying some of the emails were classified “when they were generated.”

State’s decision to deliver the safe to Kendall’s office in July could be seen in one of two ways: as an admission by the Agency that there is indeed classified material on the drive, despite what its spokespeople have said publicly, or as an effort by State to placate the Inspectors General.

Earlier this week, Senator Chuck Grassley published a letter from the Intelligence Community Inspector General which indicated that two emails in Hillary’s inbox had been judged to contain Top Secret information. Shortly afterwards, Hillary announced that she had agreed to turn over her email server, which had been wiped clean and was sitting in a data center in New Jersey.

McClatchy reports that the thumb drive in Kendall’s possession was actually turned over on August 6th, a day after stories indicated the FBI was seeking to verify the security of the drive. It’s not clear what prompted the decision to take the drive at that time or why the FBI waited another week to collect the server.

There is no word on whether the State Department has retrieved its safe from Kendall’s office.

*** First there were 2 emails, then 60 and now over 300?

New Clinton email count: 305 documents with potentially classified information

WashingtonTimes:

More than 300 of former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails — or 5.1 percent of those processed so far — have been flagged for potential secret information, the State Department reported to a federal court Monday.

Officials insisted, however, that the screening process is running smoothly and they are back on track after falling behind a judge’s schedule for making all of the emails public.

The reviewers have screened about 20 percent of the 30,000 emails Mrs. Clinton returned to the department, which means if the rate of potentially secret information remains steady, more than 1,500 messages will have to be sent to intelligence community agencies, known in government as “IC,” to screen out classified information.

“Out of a sample of approximately 20% of the Clinton emails, the IC reviewers have only recommended 305 documents — approximately 5.1% — for referral to their agencies for consultation,” the Obama administration said in new court papers.

 

Officials are trying to head off a request by the plaintiffs, who sued to get a look at Mrs. Clinton’s emails and who want the court to impose new oversight to make sure the State Department is working quickly and fairly.

Dozens of messages already released publicly have had information redacted as classified, raising questions about Mrs. Clinton’s security practices when she declined to use the regular State.gov system and instead issued herself an email account on a server she kept at her home in New York.

Mrs. Clinton has insisted she never sent any information that was classified and said she never received information from others that was marked classified at the time — though it has since been marked as such.

“I was permitted to and used a personal email and, obviously in retrospect, given all the concerns that have been raised, it would have been probably smarter not to,” she told Iowa Public Radio last week. “But I never sent nor received any classified email, nothing marked ’Classified.’ And I think this will all sort itself out.”

She also took credit for the release of the emails, which she returned to the government nearly two years after she left office, saying that “if I had not asked for my emails all to be made public, none of  this would have been in the public arena.”

The emails, however, are being made public by federal District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, in response to the lawsuit from Jason Leopold, a reporter at Vice.

Judge Sullivan has set a strict schedule for the State Department to meet in releasing the emails on a monthly basis. The department, however, missed the July target by more than 1,000 pages of emails, and blamed the need to screen out classified information as the reason for breaking the judge’s order.

In its new filing Monday, the State Department said it will catch up by the end of September, saying intelligence community screeners are now integrated into the process.

 

Why is Putin in Ukraine?

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Putin calls an emergency defense meeting as tensions mount in Ukraine

Russian-backed rebel forces in Ukraine are building up to “full combat readiness” after an urgent meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and some of his top military advisers.

The announcement that the rebels were getting prepared in eastern Ukraine came hours after Putin called the defense meeting.

The situation on the ground in Ukraine has been tense lately. Violence has surged in recent months.

Ukrainian officials have claimed that the pro-Russian forces have violated a peace treaty signed in February and have targeted Ukrainian troops with heavy weaponry.

The head of Ukraine’s national security and defense council has said that the “shelling is carried out around the clock using large-calibre artillery and multiple launch rocket systems, prohibited by the [peace agreements]. During the day, the enemy carried out 153 artillery attacks.”

War, apparently, is imminent and soldiers in the area had their August vacation leave taken away following concerns that the violence might escalate more and result in an all out confrontation.

Also on Friday, it was reported that Russia and Finland might be preparing to go to war with one another. The two countries share over 800 miles of border. The reserve units in Finland on active duty jumped from 6,000 to 18,000 from last year to this year as tensions between Helsinki and Moscow have become increasingly strained. More details found here.

Ukraine Live Day 546: Devastating Attack On Village Outside Mariupol Leaves Two Dead, Six Wounded

Putin Visits Russian-Occupied Crimea, Raising Tension As Fighting Escalates
14:04 (GMT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin is visiting Russian-occupied Crimea today at a time when the fighting in Ukraine looks like it is about to explode.

Ukraine Today reports that, among other things, Putin will be chairing a meeting of the Russian State Council to discuss increasing tourism to the peninsula which was illegally annexed by Russia last March. Tourism has been hindered due to three key factors: sanctions passed by the US and the EU prohibit tourism, Ukrainian citizens are not visiting the peninsula, and the collapse of the Russian economy means that many Russian citizens cannot afford to go on vacation either.

Any visit by Putin to Crimea is seen as a provocation by the Ukrainian government and many in the West, but the timing of this visit has not gone unnoticed by Kiev. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called Putin’s trip a “challenge to the civilized world” and stressed that it needed to be viewed in context of events in eastern Ukraine. RFE/RL reports:

“Such trips mean further militarization of the occupied Ukrainian peninsula and lead to its greater isolation,” the presidential spokesman quoted Poroshenko as saying.

Poroshenko said that Crimea has a future only as a part of Ukraine.

Reuters adds:

“This is a challenge to the civilized world and a continuation of the plan to escalate the situation which is being carried out by Russian troops and their mercenaries in the Donbass (east Ukraine),” Poroshenko said in a Facebook post.

The reasons that Poroshenko and the Ukrainian people might be upset by Putin’s visit are obvious — the Russian military seized control of the peninsula at the end of February, 2014, all the while claiming that the gun-wielding “little green men” were local activists (Putin later admitted the obvious — these were Russian troops), and then held an illegal, deeply flawed, and internationally unrecognized referendum on annexation. Russia then directly intervened in the Donbass, culminating in the “Russian invasion” that effectively cut a large part of the Donbass off from the rest of Ukraine.

But is Poroshenko right that Putin’s visit is linked to violence in eastern Ukraine?

Last week a key leader of the self-declared “Donetsk People’s Republic,” Denis Pushilin, warned that “full-scale fighting could break out at any moment.” We noted at the time that his statement was part of a flurry of warnings and heated rhetoric coming out of both the Kremlin (and the Russian state-run media) and the leadership of the Russian-backed separatists, corresponding to an increase in fighting and troop movement in eastern Ukraine. We also noted that this pattern matched what preceded other major escalations in Ukraine such as the “Russian invasion” one year ago, the conclusion of the battle for Donetsk airport, and the run-up to February’s capture of Debaltsevo.

Since we wrote than analysis on August 12, daily fighting has only grown more intense, civilian and military casualties have risen, and the conflict feels even closer to an ignition point.

— James Miller

Islamists in Government Roles There and Here

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Why Are Londoners Uncomfortable with a Muslim Mayor?

by Raheem Kassam

One-third of Londoners are said to be “uncomfortable” with the idea of a Muslim mayor, according to a new YouGov poll for LBC radio. What seems to have especially excited some is the revelation that 73 percent of UK Independence Party (UKIP) voters in London feel the same way. But can they really be blamed?

The reason some of the people are “uncomfortable” is undoubtedly going to be a level of xenophobia. But the majority, I believe, are subconsciously internalising the public performances of Muslim politicians in the United Kingdom and are rightly concerned by them.

Critics might point to the fact that UKIPers, across the board according to the poll, are less “progressive,” leading the field in discomfort for the idea of a female mayor (12 percent), a homosexual mayor (26 percent) and an ethnic minority mayor (41 percent). Well, yes, UKIP is a party of traditionalists and conservatives first and libertarians second. I don’t think anyone should try to hide from that or try to explain it away. But the discomfort about a Muslim mayor (73 percent) requires some deeper thought.

Sayeeda Hussain Warsi (left) resigned from Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet, calling his Israel policy “morally indefensible.” Former Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman (center) fell due to corruption charges. MEP Amjad Bashir (right) was kicked out of UKIP for “grave” financial irregularities.

Look at the shining examples we have of high profile Muslim politicians in the United Kingdom: Baroness Warsi, former Mayor Lutfur Rahman, ex-UKIPer Amjad Bashir, and of course one of the people tipped to challenge for the Labour candidacy, Labour MP Sadiq Khan.

“But wait! What about Syed Kamall? Sajid Javid? Khalid Mahmood? Rehman Chishti?” I hear you ask.

Quite. But what about Humza Yousaf, Rushanara Ali, Shabana Mahmood, and Yasmin Qureshi?

By and large, Muslim politicians in the UK tend to be far more … divisive, to be polite. There are several camps. Some, like Lutfur Rahman and Baroness Warsi, have Islamist links. Some have questionable backgrounds, such as the defence of Louis Farrakhan or Guantanamo Bay detainees (Sadiq Khan), and one let UKIP down in a big way, while being investigated for improper behaviour (Amjad Bashir).

Humza Yousaf (left), a member of the Scottish parliament, was previously media spokesman for a radical Islamist charity. Labour MPs Shabana Mahmood (center) and Yasmin Qureshi (right) are more concerned with boycotting Israel than serving their constituents.

Others engage in sectarian politics at a whim. George Galloway, though he doesn’t claim to be a Muslim (others claim he converted), divided and conquered in Bradford West and was, as a result, turfed out. Politicians like Ali, Mahmood, and Qureshi are united by their demonisation of Israel and tolerance of extremism.

And Tory-elected officials like Kamall, Javid, and Chishti are precisely why Conservative voters in London are more comfortable (39 percent against) with a Muslim mayor. One of their leading candidates is a practicing Muslim – they’d have to be.

Perhaps the argument can be made that UKIP voters are not xenophobic or anti-Muslim – although one might argue they are more likely to be anti-Islam, and that’s a discussion for another time – but rather that they have simply been paying attention.

When you couple the backgrounds of a lot of leading Muslim politicians in Britain with the more objective, black-and-white worldview that UKIP voters have, they are naturally predetermined to be more sceptical.

You might argue that UKIP voters shouldn’t see things in such a clear-cut way and shouldn’t attribute the failings of one Muslim politician to others. There are evident trends, similarities, and commonalities, but that contention would be a decent compromise approach.

Unfortunately, while there are a handful of decent Muslim politicians in Britain, I can’t help but think that the highest-profile ones have let people with my name and background down. It’s no different than UKIPers being sceptical of a Conservative mayor, or Labour being sceptical of a Tory one.

Maybe I should run for London mayor on a UKIP ticket? Or maybe not.

***

In America:

Muslims in the U.S. military

Muslim police officers

White House has approved Muslims serving in government

Government internships for Muslims on Capitol Hill

Exactly how is there a reconciliation with taking an oath?