Does Sen. Gillibrand Know this About ICE?

Posted on November 26, 2018November 26, 2018 by Denise Simon

In recent days, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand while wanting to shut down ICE and ‘re-imagine’ the agency has tweeted about silencing women, children with mothers not being allowed to cross the border illegally and then about how real climate change is, perhaps should have her staff research a little further on the duties and work that ICE performs.

Back in July, Senator Gillibrand declared that when the Democrats assume control of Congress, abolishing ICE is the first thing they should do.

Well how about counterfeit goods and websites? Seems she and her staff have no clue.

Over a million websites seized in global operation

WASHINGTON – More than 1 million copyright-infringing website domain names selling counterfeit automotive parts, electrical components, personal care items and other fake goods were criminally and civilly seized in the past year through the combined efforts of law-enforcement agencies across the world, high-profile industry representatives and anti-counterfeiting associations.

The ongoing intellectual property enforcement initiative targeting fake websites, dubbed Operation In Our Sites, was facilitated by the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), a joint-task force agency led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The IPR Center, which stands at the forefront of the U.S. government’s response to IP theft, worked directly with key international law-enforcement authorities and industry organizations representing the electronics sector, luxury brand-name designers, film and entertainment and several entities specializing in apparel and accessories through the major enforcement effort.

Roughly 33,600 website domain names were criminally seized in a collaborative effort between ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Europol, Interpol and police agencies from 26 different countries. Industry partners participating in the operation were fully responsible for civilly seizing 1.21 million domain names and shutting down 2.2 million erroneous ecommerce links featured on social media platforms and third-party marketplaces.

“The IPR Center is committed to supporting enforcement actions that target copyright-infringing websites threatening the health and safety of unsuspecting consumers by offering dangerous counterfeit goods,” said IPR Center Director Alex Khu. “Collaborative efforts with external law enforcement agencies and industry have led to a crackdown on intellectual property theft that negatively impacts economies and funds organizations involved in other criminal activities.”

Investigations led by HSI resulted in the removal of copyright-infringing websites that sold counterfeit airbags and integrated sensors, both commodities that present a potential safety hazard. An investigation based in Louisiana led to the seizure of five website domain names – including Chinaseatbelt.com; Airbagpart.com; Chinasafetybelt.com; Fareurope.com; and Far-europe.com – involved in the sale of fake automotive parts. A joint case between HSI and Department of Defense investigative agencies resulted in the removal of PRBlogics.com, a copyright-infringing website offering counterfeit integrated sensors.

Each year, the market is flooded with counterfeit products being sold at stores, on street corners and online. Additionally, criminals have taken advantage of the internet to deceive, sell and ship fake products directly to American consumers. The most popular counterfeit products seized each year include watches, jewelry, handbags, wallets, wearing apparel/accessories, consumer electronics/parts, pharmaceuticals and personal care products.

The IPR Center – formally codified in the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015 – is one of the U.S. government’s key weapons in the fight against criminal counterfeiting and piracy. The center uses the expertise of its 24 member agencies to share information, develop initiatives, coordinate enforcement actions, and conduct investigations related to IP theft. Through this strategic interagency partnership, the IPR Center protects the public’s health and safety, the U.S. economy and the warfighters.

This the Reason N Korea Cancelled the Meeting?

Posted on November 12, 2018November 12, 2018 by Denise Simon

The excuses both sides explain scheduling conflicts. C’mon, lil Kim is not exactly that busy to take a meeting with America, right? As North and South Korea have begin to dismantle 20 guard posts along the DMZ. South Korea has 60 such positions while North Korea has an estimated 160. Allegedly, all firearms have been already removed from the guard posts. Personnel is still there but it is said they are unarmed.

Back to that cancelled meeting….

A satellite image of a secret North Korean ballistic missile base. The North has offered to dismantle a different major missile launching site while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others.CreditCreditCSIS/Beyond Parallel, via DigitalGlobe 2018

More detail is explained here.

What is the reason then? Missile sites….hummm

North Korea are still operating undeclared missile bases and even improving some of their missile sites instead of shutting them down.

The latest report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington said it had identified 13 of an estimated 20 secret missile operating bases inside North Korea.

They could be used to house ballistic missiles of various ranges, with the largest believed to be capable of striking anywhere in the United States.

The report, written by researcher Joseph Bermudez, said maintenance and minor infrastructure improvements have been observed at some of the sites.

The sites identified in the report are scattered in remote, mountainous areas across North Korea.

It even identified improvements being made to its Sakkanmol site, close to the border with South Korea.

President Trump is still hoping to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

The North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to work towards ‘denuclearization’ at their landmark June summit in Singapore.

Shortly after the summit, Trump tweeted that there was no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.

North Korea declared its nuclear force ‘complete’ and halted missile and nuclear bomb testing earlier this year.

North Korea has said it has closed its Punggye-ri nuclear testing site and the Sohae missile engine test facility.

It also raised the possibility of shuttering more sites and allowing international inspections if Washington took ‘corresponding measures’.

Last week, North Korea called off a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York.

The country’s state media said on Monday the resumption of some small-scale military drills by South Korea and the United States violated a recent agreement aimed at lowering tensions on the Korean peninsula.

‘Missile operating bases are not launch facilities,’ Bermudez wrote.

‘While missiles could be launched from within them in an emergency, Korean People’s Army (KPA) operational procedures call for missile launchers to disperse from the bases to pre-surveyed or semi-prepared launch sites for operations.’

None of the missile bases have been acknowledged by North Korea, and analysts say an accurate disclosure of nuclear weapons and missile capabilities would be an important part of any denuclearization deal.

Birthright v. Jurisdiction

Posted on October 31, 2018October 31, 2018 by Denise Simon

Let’s begin with the 39th Congress shall we?

1865-1867, it was a time of reconstruction. For context, scan this summary of the activity of Congress.

On the matter of ratification of the 14th Amendment, a year long study was completed by a 15 member committee. Much of the debate was on citizenship for slaves. For reference, the Joint Resolution was H.R. 127.

Of particular note is the text in the middle column under ‘Reconstruction’. This document is found in the Library of Congress. This matter has been debated often over many decades and there is no law defining natural born v. foreign ownership, loyalty or jurisdiction. Hence the reason the debate continues and proposed legislation in addition to President Trump considering an Executive Order. Frankly, the common existing definition on birthright gives an additional argument to chain migration, somewhat in reverse.

Here is a cogent presentation on the case against birthright.

Need more?

Claremont Senior Fellow Matthew Spalding

Spalding raised the question in “Should the Children of Illegal Aliens Be U.S. Citizens?” and his U.S. News & World Report op-ed: “14th Amendment Doesn’t Make Illegal Aliens’ Children Citizens”

Others

Frequent Claremont Review of Books contributor and summer fellowship faculty member Richard Samuelson provides more historical and legal context in his essay for The Federalist: “Birthright for Whom?”

*** Is it okay that there are actually birthing hotels in California where Chinese woman take full advantage?Federal agents raided several maternity hotels in January of 2018 where these pregnant women paid between $40,000 to $80,000 to give birth in the United States. This has been the case for many years. There was/is a list of sites for birthing tourism for California.

How about pregnant Russian women making the long trip to Miami just to give birth? Birthing tourism is a thriving business for Russians in Miami. It is all for dual citizenship. If the mainstream media complains about President Trump authorizing an Executive Order, the text is most important. He cannot alter any Constitutional amendment but he can issue an order to stop birthing tourism. Even NBC News is quite aware of the issue.

“for a growing number of Russian women, the draw isn’t sunny beaches or pulsing nightclubs. It’s U.S. citizenship for their newborn children. In Moscow, it’s a status symbol to have a Miami-born baby, and social media is full of Russian women boasting of their little americantsy.”

*** If President Trump signs an Executive Order it will be legally challenged with a lawsuit before the end of the day. Perhaps this is a good thing to begin a final legal opinion on the matter.

When Will the US Begin to Sanction China?

Posted on October 29, 2018October 29, 2018 by Denise Simon

Last week, Defense Secretary Mattis said:

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis this week voiced new U.S. opposition to China’s continued militarization of islands in the South China Sea.

“We remain highly concerned with continued militarization of features in the South China Sea,” Mattis told reporters on Monday as he traveled to Vietnam.

Mattis also said China is using predatory economics to seek control over other nations.

The Chinese are engaged in a global infrastructure development plan called the Belt and Road Initiative that U.S. officials have said is being used by Beijing to expand influence and control abroad, and expand Chinese military bases around the world.

Mattis said the predatory economic policies include loans “where massive debt is piled on countries that fiscal analysis would say they are going to have difficulty, at best, repaying in the smaller countries.”

The defense secretary, echoing the new U.S. hardline policy toward China, said the United States is not seeking to “contain” China but wants more reciprocal relations.

In part from Newsweek:

“Beijing can now deploy military assets, including combat aircraft and mobile missile launchers to the Spratly Islands at any time,” said the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) on Monday in a report that included images of the three man-made islands—Fiery Cross reef, Subi, and Mischief. Its director Greg Poling told Voice of America that new antennas had been spotted on Subi and Fiery Cross, so he expected deployments there soon.

The Spratly Islands are around 500 miles from the coast of China, and Fiery Cross Reef about 740 miles from mainland China. It is approximately 170 miles off the coast of Vietnam. Why did China build these islands and how did they manage to make land out of sea?

***

But media is not paying attention.

It gets worse.

Researchers have mapped out a series of internet traffic hijacks and redirections that they say are part of large espionage and intellectual property theft effort by China.

The researchers, Chris Demchak of the United States Naval War College and Yuval Shavitt of the Tel Aviv University in Israel, say in their paper that state-owned China Telecom hijacked and diverted internet traffic going to or passing through the US and Canada to China on a regular basis.

Tel Aviv University researchers built a route tracing system that monitors BGP announcements and which picks up on patterns suggesting accidental or deliberate hijacks and discovered multiple attacks by China Telecom over the past few years.

In 2016, China Telecom diverted traffic between Canada and Korean government networks to its PoP in Toronto. From there, traffic was forwarded to the China Telecom PoP on the US West Coast and sent to China, and finally delivered to Korea.

Normally, the traffic would take a shorter route, going between Canada, the US and directly to Korea. The traffic hijack lasted for six months, suggesting it was a deliberate attack, Demchak and Shavitt said.

Demchak and Shavitt detailed other traffic hijacks, including one that saw traffic from US locations to a large Anglo-American bank’s Milan headquarters being terminated in China, and never delivered to Italy, in 2016.

During 2017, traffic between Scandinavia and Japan, transiting the United States, was also captured by China Telecom, ditto data headed to a mail server operated by a large Thai financial company.

China Telecom is able to divert the traffic by announcing bogus routes via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that governs data flows between Autonomous Systems, the large networks operated by telcos, internet providers and corporations.

After the traffic was copied by China Telecom for encyption breaking and analysis, it was delivered to the intended networks with only small delays. Demchak and Shavitt said.

Such hijacking is difficult to detect as China Telecom has multiple points of presence (PoPs) in North America and Europe that are physically close to the attacked networks, causing almost unnoticeable traffic delivery delays despite the lengthened routes.

China in comparison does not allow overseas telcos to establish PoPs in the country, and has only three gateways into the country, in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. This isolation protects the country’s domestic and transit traffic from foreign hijacking.

BGP hijacking of internet traffic is a common phenomenon, one which requires the support of large network operators to exploit at scale.

While the US and China agreed in 2015 to not hack one another’s computer networks, the deal did not cover hijacking of internet backbones, Demchak and Shavitt pointed out.

The researchers suggest the allied democratic nations establish an “access reciprocity” policy for internet PoPs located in their countries, to address the traffic hijacking.

Under the access reciprocity policy US telcos and providers should be allowed to set up PoPs in China, Demchak and Shavitt said.

If access reciprocity is refused, “then an appropriate defence policy in response could state that no traffic to or from the US or ally is allowed to enter a China Telecom PoP in the US or in the ally’s networks,” the researchers suggested.

Such a policy could be inserted into BGP routing tables as required for automatic implementation.

DHS Concerns on Election Related Incidents, Facebook Doesn’t Care

Posted on October 16, 2018October 16, 2018 by Denise Simon

The Department of Homeland Security notices an increase of election-related incidents, but thinks midterm voting will go off relatively unproblematically. Anomali reports a surge in black-market trafficking of voter records.

Voting Records of Over 40 Million Americans for Sale on ...

But you wont find out from Facebook if there are any issues….Facebook is going to block all posts regarding voting issues.

What could be the issues?

Anomali Labs researchers in close partnership with Intel 471, a leading cybercrime intelligence provider, have uncovered a widespread unauthorized information disclosure of US voter registration databases. To be clear, this voter information is made generally available to the public for legitimate uses. Anomali and Intel 471 researchers discovered dark web communications offering a large quantity of voter databases for sale. The databases include valuable personally identifiable information and voting history. The disclosure reportedly affects 19 states and includes 23 million records for just three of the 19 states. No record counts were provided for the remaining 16 states, but do include prices for each state. We estimate that the entire contents of the disclosure could exceed 35 million records. Researchers have reviewed a sample of the database records and determined the data to be valid with a high degree of confidence.

Of note, the seller indicates they receive weekly updates of voter registration data across the states and that they receive information via contacts within the state governments. Certain states require the seller to personally travel to locations in-state to receive the updated voter information. This suggests the information disclosure is not necessarily a technical compromise but rather a likely targeted campaign by a threat actor redistributing possibly legitimately obtained voter data for malicious purposes on a cybercrime forum.

To our knowledge, this represents the first reference on the criminal underground of actors selling or distributing lists of 2018 voter registration data, including US voters’ personally identifiable information and voting history. With the November 2018 midterm elections only four weeks away, the availability and currency of the voter records, if combined with other breached data, could be used by malicious actors to disrupt the electoral process or pursue large-scale identity theft. More here.

Meanwhile, over to Facebook…. (who are they to determine what is false? See something, say something and Facebook will punish us all.)

MENLO PARK, Calif. (Reuters) – Facebook Inc will ban false information about voting requirements and fact-check fake reports of violence or long lines at polling stations ahead of next month’s U.S. midterm elections, company executives told Reuters, the latest effort to reduce voter manipulation on its service.

The world’s largest online social network, with 1.5 billion daily users, has stopped short of banning all false or misleading posts, something that Facebook has shied away from as it would likely increase its expenses and leave it open to charges of censorship.

The latest move addresses a sensitive area for the company, which has come under fire for its lax approach to fake news reports and disinformation campaigns, which many believe affected the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, won by Donald Trump.

The new policy was disclosed by Facebook’s cybersecurity policy chief, Nathaniel Gleicher, and other company executives.

The ban on false information about voting methods, set to be announced later on Monday, comes six weeks after Senator Ron Wyden asked Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg how Facebook would counter posts aimed at suppressing votes, such as by telling certain users they could vote by text, a hoax that has been used to reduce turnout in the past.

The information on voting methods becomes one of the few areas in which falsehoods are prohibited on Facebook, a policy enforced by what the company calls “community standards” moderators, although application of its standards has been uneven. It will not stop the vast majority of untruthful posts about candidates or other election issues.

“We don’t believe we should remove things from Facebook that are shared by authentic people if they don’t violate those community standards, even if they are false,” said Tessa Lyons, product manager for Facebook’s News Feed feature that shows users what friends are sharing.

Links to discouraging reports about polling places that may be inflated or misleading will be referred to fact-checkers under the new policy, Facebook said. If then marked as false, the reports will not be removed but will be seen by fewer of the poster’s friends.

Such partial measures leave Facebook more open to manipulation by users seeking to affect the election, critics say. Russia, and potentially other foreign parties, are already making “pervasive” efforts to interfere in upcoming U.S. elections, the leader of Trump’s national security team said in early August.

Just days before that, Facebook said it uncovered a coordinated political influence campaign to mislead its users and sow dissension among voters, removing 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram. Members of Congress briefed by Facebook said the methodology suggested Russian involvement.

Trump has disputed claims that Russia has attempted to interfere in U.S. elections. Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied it.

WEIGHING BAN ON HACKED MATERIAL

Facebook instituted a global ban on false information about when and where to vote in 2016, but Monday’s move goes further, including posts about exaggerated identification requirements.

Facebook executives are also debating whether to follow Twitter Inc’s recent policy change to ban posts linking to hacked material, Gleicher told Reuters in an interview.

The dissemination of hacked emails from Democratic party officials likely played a role in tipping the 2016 presidential election to Trump, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats has warned that Russia has recently been attempting to hack and steal information from U.S. candidates and government officials. More here.