Operation Choke Point, Choke Tubes

Posted on May 19, 2014May 19, 2014 by Denise Simon

Announced and launched in 2014, the White House in collusion with the Department of Justice created an edict in the national banking system that is allegedly to protect consumers, from what exactly is still to be determined, but Operation Choke Point leads to the assassination of private business and then it is an attack on customers. There are some bankers that are happy to comply, yet others not so much.

In a recent weekly address in Spanish, White House Director of the Domestic Policy Council Cecilia Muñoz weaved the President’s budget proposal into a fictitious narrative aimed to assure the Hispanic community that the administration’s policies will contribute to provide opportunity, economic growth, and prosperity, promising “it will grow the middle class.”

But as has all-too-often been the case during the last few years, the administration’s rhetoric concerning economic opportunity flies in the face of heavy-handed political maneuvers that destroy chances for upward mobility.

For example, the Obama administration has been employing clandestine policies to cut off easy access to cash by systematically eliminating alternative lending options. In August 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department was “targeting banks that service a broad range of what it considers questionable financial ventures, including online payday lenders.” Additionally, banks like Capital One have already closed the accounts of check-cashing companies. By going after these companies, hardworking Hispanics without a bank account may not have a place to cash their paychecks.

This affects anyone who finds themselves strapped for cash, including self-employed and blue-collar workers. The administration’s regulatory assault is not an assault on the short-term lending industry, but rather on any consumer who relies on having access to cash in cash flow emergencies, especially in underserved communities. For example, two-thirds of all Hispanics work in the service industry, and they will feel the brunt of these policies more than others. In addition, alternative lenders can cater to newer immigrants without substantial credit histories — a demographic that banks fail to serve.

Contrary to the administration’s claim that these targeted financial businesses have a “disparate impact” on minorities, the truth is that these heavy-handed regulations will have a disparate impact on the country’s minorities, many of which live in communities with limited access to traditional banks. And the answer is not capping rates or creating artificial “waiting periods” as the controversial Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has considered. Those remedies will ultimately ensure that the companies will stop providing these services since they are no longer profitable.

In addition to restricting financial options for blue-collar workers, lending regulation will also hurt small-business owners and entrepreneurs, an area where Hispanics have contributed greatly to the American economy. Hispanic entrepreneurs fortified the U.S. economy by an estimated $468 billion last year. This has been pivotal for the nation’s economy, especially in the face of the economic recession.

For frame of reference, from 2010 to 2012, the total number of American entrepreneurs declined by 250,000. Yet in the same period, there were 160,000 new Hispanic entrepreneurs in the U.S.

From 1990 to 2012, entrepreneurship among Hispanics multiplied nearly 10 times that of the general population. Many of them utilized these alternative loan products for quick access to capital, capital that is harder than ever to receive from traditional banks due to the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Targeting payday lenders is only the tip of the iceberg of the administration’s broader initiative, which they tellingly named Operation Choke Point, a maneuver designed to literally choke private businesses at their financial wellsprings by intimidating banks and lending institutions into compliancy. These purely political maneuvers hold no promise for actual economic recovery.

In addition to targeting short-term lenders, another goal of the Obama Administration’s Operation Choke Point is to obstruct multi-level marketing companies, where new entrepreneurs often get their start.

Take Herbalife, a company where Hispanics make up 60 percent of direct sellers. The administration opts to gut profitable companies, condemning sales practices that they judge to be inferior while at the same time initiating no real recovery measures. These policies hurt minorities, who disproportionately make up the lower echelon of workers that are forced to seek irregular forms of employment.

Government agencies and the folks who seek to empower them with more control over the lives of ordinary people are quick to claim “disparate impact” as a justification for their regulatory excesses. But in order to understand the full story, policymakers should look at the impact those very same regulations have on the economy at large, all the people whose jobs and livelihoods are tied to the impacted industries, and the disparate impact the destruction of those industries will have on underserved communities all across the country.

Without a sane analysis, efforts like Operation Choke Point can really only be interpreted as political operatives prioritizing an ideological crusade over an interest in actual economic recovery.

Now for the Choke Tube component, it is the gun dealers and the parts dealers……the backdoor method to infringe again on the 2nd Amendment.

BankUnited N.A., which dropped Top Gun Firearms Training & Supply in Miami from its customer list, declined to comment.

In a statement to The Washington Times, Bank of America said: “We would not deny banking services to an organization solely on the basis of its industry.”

The banking giant blamed a misunderstanding with the Arizona gun manufacturers McMillan Group International and American Spirit Arms.

However, the American Banking Association, the industry’s advocacy group in Washington, said businesses deemed “risky” will be frozen out of the financial system if the Justice Department continues Operation Choke Point because the regulatory burden and risk of investigation will be too great for less-specialized banks to bear.

“We’re being threatened with a regulatory regime that attempts to foist on us the obligation to monitor all types of transactions,” Richard Riese, a senior vice president at the American Bankers Association, said in the April 28 issue of American Banker. “All of this is predicated on a notion that the banks are a choke point for all businesses.”

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Riese said the cost of doing business with gun retailers outweighs the benefits for some banks, given that regulators deem the industry as “risky,” state laws vary on the sale of guns and ammunition, and the Justice Department’s enforcement.

The Independent Community Bankers of America, an association for small banks, said enforcement actions from the Justice Department are too broad and overly aggressive.

“While preventing fraud is a top concern for community banks, it needs to be balanced with ensuring that businesses and consumers that operate in accordance with applicable laws can still access payment systems,” bankers association President Camden Fine told the Justice Department in an April 7 letter. “ICBA requests that the DOJ suspend Operation Choke Point immediately and focus its resources directly on businesses that may be violating the law, rather than targeting banks providing payment services.”

Justice’s operation threatens to “close access to the financial system to law-abiding businesses, because the mere prospect of an enforcement action is sufficient to cause financial institutions to restrict access to their payment systems to only established companies that present low risks,” the organization said.

‘No statutory authority’

Regulations on the financial industry have increased over the past few years, said Thomas P. Vartanian, chairman of Dechert LLP, a global law firm specializing in regulatory and financial matters.

He noted the chilling effect of overregulation by the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, an interagency behemoth that includes the departments of Commerce, Justice, Labor, Education, Homeland Security and Justice along with the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Secret Service, the FBI, the Social Security Administration and the Federal Trade Commission.

“The key to effective regulation is the balancing between too little and too much regulation,” Mr. Vartanian said. “The problem here is that there are now so many regulators, including the Department of Justice, with their fingers on the scales on that balancing act.”

Congressional Republicans say the Obama administration is using its regulatory powers to shutter industries it doesn’t like. Last year, 31 Republicans accused the Justice Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. of intimidating banks and payment processors to “terminate business relationships with lawful lenders.”

In a March hearing before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs subcommittee on consumer protection, Sen. David Vitter, Louisiana Republican, complained that several payday lenders — another industry labeled “risky” by the administration — were being dropped by their banks in his home state.

“There is a determined effort from [the Justice Department] to the regulators to cut off credit and use other tactics to force [payday lenders] out of business,” Mr. Vitter said. “I find that deeply troubling because it has no statutory basis, no statutory authority.”

In a House hearing in April, FDIC acting General Counsel Richard Osterman defended his agency’s definition of what constitutes a “risky” business — subject to money laundering or other criminal behavior — but made it clear that no bank is outright prohibited from serving any such companies.

“We have actually put out a policy statement on this issue to make it very clear from the very top that as long as financial institutions are properly managing their relationships and the risks, they’re neither prohibited nor discouraged from providing these services,” Mr. Osterman said.

“Basically, what we’re saying is, these types of programs can be, can involve high-risk activities that could create litigation risk and reputation risk for financial institutions,” he said. “So, they need to do due diligence to ensure that the folks who they’re banking are acting in a safe and sound manner.”

But the cost of that due diligence, coupled with the threat of a lawsuit for doing business with a customer in an industry the government has defined as risky, is having a chilling effect on legitimate companies such as gun dealers, said Mr. Weinstock, the Hunton & Williams lawyer.

“We are one of the most heavily regulated industries in America,” said Mr. Sirochman of American Spirit Arms. “We have to ship our guns to another federal licensed dealers for pickup. The people that are picking up the rifles have to go through a background check to make sure they don’t have any felonies. You can’t own a gun or pass the background check if you do.

“All this is, is an assault on our Second Amendment rights.”

Cyber: When War Isn’t War

Posted on May 19, 2014May 19, 2014 by Denise Simon

The most under reported war across the globe is cyber-spying. It has only been this week that Eric Holder and the Department of Justice decided to arrest a handful of Chinese that have been cyber-spying on America for years among other factions.

Cyber threats and hackers is nothing new, but it is rarely reported until it involves citizens like in the matter of Target stores last year. The question that remains officially unanswered is just why has the United States been so soft on cyber-wars against the United States? The answer is in fact foreign policy trumps everything and that should cause some real head-scratching as foreign policy under Barack Obama via Hillary Clinton and John Kerry is decayed.

There is the Syrian Electronic Army, Turkey’s RedHack, Serbia’s TeslaTeam, China has them, Russia has them, Iran has them. Hackers are the 21st century nuclear weapons. In fact nuclear weapons secrets is just what the Chinese hackers were after and are now sought by Eric Holder.

The United States brought first-of-its kind cyber-espionage charges Monday against five Chinese military officials accused of hacking into U.S. companies to gain trade secrets.

According to the indictment, hackers targeted the U.S. nuclear power, metals and solar products industries and are accused of stealing trade secrets and economic espionage. The victims are Alcoa World Alumina, Westinghouse Electric Co., Allegheny Technologies, U.S. Steel Corp., United Steelworkers Union, and SolarWorld, Attorney General Eric Holder said.

The charges underscore a longtime Obama administration goal of prosecuting state-sponsored cyber threats.

“The alleged hacking appears to have been conducted for no other reason than to advantage state-owned companies and other interests in China at the expense of businesses here in the United States,” Holder told a news conference at the Justice Department. “This is a tactic that the United States government categorically denounces.”

Said Bob Anderson Jr., executive assistant director of the FBI’s criminal, cyber response and services division: “This is the new normal. This is what you’re going to see on a recurring basis.”

In a statement, China’s Foreign Ministry said the U.S. charges were based on “fabricated facts” and jeopardize China-U.S. “cooperation and mutual trust.”

US Government: China Cited in Cyber-spying Case

“China is steadfast in upholding cybersecurity,” said the statement. “The Chinese government, the Chinese military and their relevant personnel have never engaged or participated in cyber theft of trade secrets. The U.S. accusation against Chinese personnel is purely ungrounded and absurd.”

The charges against the Chinese military officials come on the heels of a separate worldwide operation over the weekend that resulted in the arrest of 97 people in 16 countries who are suspected of developing, distributing or using malicious software called BlackShades, Holder said. The software allows criminals to gain surreptitious control of personal computers. An announcement on those arrests was expected for later Monday in New York.

“These two cases show that we are stepping up our cyber enforcement efforts really around the globe,” Holder said, adding that the U.S. will not tolerate these activities.

U.S. officials have previously asserted that China’s army and China-based hackers had launched attacks on American industrial and military targets, often to steal secrets or intellectual property. China has said that it faces a major threat from hackers, and the country’s military is believed to be among the biggest targets of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command.

“It is our hope that the Chinese government will respect our criminal justice system,” Holder said.

Attorney General Eric Holder, accompanied by, from …

In recent months, Washington has been increasingly critical of what it describes as provocative Chinese actions in pursuit of territorial claims in disputed seas in East Asia. For its part, Beijing complains that the Obama administration’s attempt to redirect its foreign policy toward Asia after a decade of war in the Middle East is emboldening China’s neighbors and causing tension.

The hackers allegedly stole emails and other communications that could have helped Chinese firms learn the strategies and weaknesses of American companies involved in litigation with the Chinese government or Chinese firms.

Despite the ominous-sounding allegations, at least one of the firms downplayed the hacking.

“To our knowledge, no material information was compromised during this incident, which occurred several years ago,” said Monica Orbe, Alcoa’s director of corporate affairs. “Safeguarding our data is a top priority for Alcoa, and we continue to invest resources to protect our systems.”

Last September, President Barack Obama discussed cybersecurity issues on the sidelines of a summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“China not only does not support hacking but also opposes it,” Premier Li Keqiang said last year in a news conference when asked if China would stop hacking U.S. websites. “Let’s not point fingers at each other without evidence but do more to safeguard cyber security.”

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But hacking still does threaten common citizens and yet no one tells us much less provides the tools to protect us.

Computer hacker forums lit up last week as Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and police in 17 countries began knocking on doors, seizing computers and making arrests.

On the popular websites where cyber criminals buy and sell software kits and help each other solve problems, hackers issued warnings about police visits to their homes.

The hackers quickly guessed that a major crackdown was underway on users of the malicious software known as Blackshades.

The malware sells for as little as $40. It can be used to hijack computers remotely and turn on computer webcams, access hard drives and capture keystrokes to steal passwords — without victims ever knowing it.

Criminals have used Blackshades to commit everything from extortion to bank fraud, the FBI said.

Last week, watching it all play out were about two dozen FBI cybercrime investigators holed up in the New York FBI’s special operations center, high above lower Manhattan.

Rows of computer screens flickered with updates from police in Germany, Denmark, Canada, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Investigators followed along in real time as hundreds of search warrants were executed and suspects were interviewed.

One of the largest global cybercrime crackdowns has yielded the arrests of over 100 people linked to the Blackshades malware.

The sweep, capping a two-year operation, was coordinated so suspects didn’t have time to destroy evidence. It included the arrest in Moldova of a Swedish hacker who was a co-creator of Blackshades. Prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office are expected to announce the results of the probe later Monday.

700,000 victims around the world: Inside the FBI special operations center, six large computer monitors displayed key parts of the probe. Agents kept an eye on one screen showing a popular website where Blackshades was sold. The site was taken down by the FBI.

Another monitor showed a heatmap of the world displaying the locations of the 700,000 estimated victims, whose computers have been hijacked by criminals using the Blackshades software. Splotches of green on the map indicated concentrations of infected computers in highly populated parts of the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia.

The FBI said that in just a few years Blackshades has become one of the world’s most popular remote-administration tools, or RATs, used for cybercrime.

Leo Taddeo, chief of the FBI’s cybercrime investigations in New York, said the unprecedented coordination with so many police agencies came about because of concern about the fast growth of cybercrime businesses.

“These cyber criminals have paid employees, they have feedback from customers — other cyber criminals — to continually update and improve their product,” Taddeo said recently. While he spoke, agents took calls from counterparts working the case in more than 40 U.S. cities.

Blackshades had grown rapidly because it was marketed as off-the-shelf, easy to use software, much like legitimate consumer tax-preparation software.

“It’s very sophisticated software in that it is not very easy to detect,” Taddeo said. “It can be installed by somebody with very little skills.”

Hack victim: ‘I felt completely violated’: For victims whose personal computers were turned into weapons against them, the arrests bring reassurance.

Cassidy Wolf, the reigning Miss Teen USA, received an ominous email message in March 2013.

The email, from an unidentified sender, included nude photos of herself, obviously taken in her bedroom from her laptop. “Either you do one of the things listed below or I upload these pics and a lot more … on all your accounts for everybody to see and your dream of being a model will be transformed into a porn star,” the email said.

And so began what Wolf describes as three months of torture.

The email sender demanded better quality photos and video, and a five-minute sex show via Skype, according to FBI documents filed in court. He told her she must respond to his emails immediately — software he had installed told him when she opened his messages.

“I felt completely violated,” Wolf said in an interview. “I felt scared because I didn’t know if this person was a physical threat. My whole sense of security and trust was gone.”

A former classmate she knew, Jared Abrahams, had installed Blackshades malware on Wolf’s laptop. In March, the 20-year-old computer science student was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to extortion and unauthorized access of a computer.

Abrahams had been watching her from her laptop camera for a year, Wolf later learned. The laptop always sat open in her bedroom, as she played music or communicated with her friends.

Abrahams had used Blackshades to target victims from California to Maryland, and from Russia to Ireland. He used the handle “cutefuzzypuppy” to get tips on how to use malware, according to FBI documents. In all, he told the FBI, he had controlled as many as 150 computers.

Cybercriminals like Abrahams often rely on weak links in computer security, and mistakes by victims, to infect computers.

Many computer users don’t update anti-virus software. Many click on links sent in messages on social media sites such as Facebook, or in email, without knowing what they’re clicking on. In seconds, malware is downloaded. Often computer users have no idea infection has taken place.

“A hacker is going to go for the low-hanging fruit,” said Tyler Cohen Wood, a cybersecurity expert at the Defense Intelligence Agency and author of the book “Catching the Catfishers.”

Victims often don’t realize how easy they make themselves to be targeted and can better protect themselves by being careful about what they reveal online, Wood said.

Taddeo, the FBI cyber chief, said the most common way criminals have used Blackshades to target victims is by sending emails that seem legitimate, perhaps with a marketing offer, and with a link to click. “Anyone who signs on to the internet is potentially a victim of this tool,” he said.

In Wolf’s case, she received a Facebook message related to teen pageants. When her computer was infected it sent messages to other friends, whose computers also became infected.

The episode has made Wolf into a campaigner to urge young people to be better educated about online safety. She said her passwords are now more complicated and unique for each account, and she changes them often. She uses updated security software.

“I really didn’t think that everything I worked for could be lost because of this,” she said. “This can happen to anybody.”

Money, Lies and the White House

Posted on May 19, 2014May 19, 2014 by Denise Simon

The lure for cover-ups by the White House and issuing edicts to heads of agencies is a farm that incubates and hatches fraud only a daily basis.

Scandals are not only common but expected and there is never a lack of them where in the headlines we find more deception bubbling to the surface with regard to the Veterans Administration.

While we heard last week that the number two placeholder at the VA was Dr. Peltzer had resigned the day after the Congressional hearing on the VA. That is simply NOT true, he in fact submitted his retirement paperwork last year and Barack Obama already selected his replacement as Dr. Jeffrey Murawsky, who in fact comes from the VA located in Illinois, one such location currently in the dragnet sweep of lying and fraudulent actions of at least 11 VA’s across the country.

Now, there is something much worse. It goes back to the Barack Obama/Joe Biden transition team as they made their way to the White House. THEY WERE TOLD THEN ABOUT THE FRAUD AT THE VA AND DID NOTHING.

Veterans with serious heart conditions, gangrene, and even brain tumors waited months for care at the Albuquerque VA hospital, a whistleblowing doctor tells The Daily Beast.

Add Albuquerque, New Mexico’s to the growing list of VA hospitals accused of keeping secret waiting lists to hide delays for veterans seeking medical care. And it may already be too late to get to the truth and find out what harm, if any, was done to veterans there—VA officials are already destroying records to cover their tracks, a whistleblower inside the hospital tells The Daily Beast.

Last month, word broke that the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Phoenix kept a secret waiting list that allegedly led to dozens of preventable deaths. The VA’s inspector general was brought in to investigate the charges and hasn’t yet found any deaths in Phoenix linked to wait times, but his investigation is ongoing. Since then five other facilities have come under fire, leading to calls for VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to step down. And now there’s Albuquerque’s. The evidence for this new secret list may be hard to track down, however.

“The ‘secret wait list’ for patient appointments is being either moved or was destroyed after what happened in Phoenix,” according to a doctor who works at the Albuquerque VA hospital and spoke exclusively with The Daily Beast. “Right now,” the doctor said, “there is an eight-month waiting list for patients to get ultrasounds of their hearts. Some patients have died before they got their studies. It is unknown why they died, some for cardiac reasons, some for other reasons.”

There’s no proof yet that veterans died while waiting for treatment, like what allegedly happened in Phoenix. But the doctor says it’s quite possible that some veterans would still be alive if they hadn’t been pushed through a record-keeping trap door that buried their requests for medical care.

On March 19, 2014, for example, a patient with a deteriorating heart condition requested to see a doctor. The patient was finally seen only days ago, on May 16, when they were admitted to the hospital for decompensated heart failure. “A near miss” as the VA doctor familiar with the case described it. “He could have died before being seen.”

The Albuquerque VA did not respond to requests for comment but Ozzie Garza, director of the VA Regional Office of Public Affairs, provided this statement to The Daily Beast: “We are not familiar with the allegations but will call immediately for an external review as we take all allegations seriously.”

“When everyone found out the IG was doing the audit, the word I heard was ‘Make sure nothing is left out in the open,’” the VA doctor said. “And that ranged from make sure there’s no food out to make sure there’s no information out in the open.” The doctor is not involved in the scheduling process and was unsure of how exactly VA officials would purge the secret wait lists but has heard it discussed among colleagues.

As VA officials reacted nervously to news of an impending audit, the doctor described hearing officials involved in scheduling patient appointments say, “The database had been removed or renamed.” To cover their tracks the doctor said they decided, “Instead of calling it a wait it would be called something like a precedence list.”

When another of the doctor’s colleagues, a physician in a managerial position at the Albuquerque VA, saw the initial story about secret wait lists break he heard him say, “I always knew that Phoenix was better than us at playing the numbers game.”

Secret waiting lists may not be the only problems at the Albuquerque VA, in fact they may only be an accounting trick to mask the deeper issues.

Veterans with heart problems are waiting an average of four months to see a cardiologist at the Albuquerque VA, according to the doctor there who has access to patient records.

There are eight physicians in the cardiology department. But at any given time, only three are working in the clinic, where they see fewer than two patients per day, so on average there are only 36 veterans seen per week. That means the entire eight-person department sees as many patients in a week as a single private practice cardiologist sees in two days, according to the doctor.

For perspective, 60% of cardiologists reported seeing between 50 and 124 patients per week, according to a 2013 survey of medical professionals’ compensation conducted by Medscape. On the low end, the average single private practice cardiologist who participated in the study saw more patients in a week than the Albuquerque VA’s entire eight-person cardiology department.

In some cases, a long wait to see a doctor is just another routine inconvenience of the sort people expect in a large bureaucracy, but other times it can be a matter of life and death.

One veteran’s heart troubles were serious enough that a physician requested they be seen in the next available slot on January 8, 2014. Over three months later, the patient was seen in late April.

A patient whose initial blood test on December 8, 2013 suggested he might have a brain tumor waited until April 28 2014 before he was seen again. Another veteran, diagnosed with gangrene, was referred for surgery so doctors could try to salvage his limb or amputate it if necessary—it’s 36 days after he was initially supposed to see the surgeons and he’s still waiting now.

A second source inside the Albuquerque VA, a medical technician, said the facility provided high quality care. But the technician acknowledged it could take a long time before veterans get in the door to receive it.

The list of patients waiting for tests grew so long in one department that the technician became disheartened and stopped checking it around Christmas of last year. “I honestly stopped doing that because it just overwhelmed me personally,” the technician said.

The VA’s Office of Inspector General began investigating the Albuquerque medical center last year, according The Albuquerque Journal, after employees there reported that appointments were being manipulated to conceal patients’ actual wait times. That would mean that the inspector general, and the VA itself, knew about allegations of corruption there long before the Phoenix story broke in April.

Rep. Jeff Miller, chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, has been beating the drum about wait times and advocating reform since before the latest crisis put the VA back in the spotlight. “VA’s delays in care problem is real and has already been linked to the recent deaths of at least 23 veterans,” Miller told The Daily Beast.

Yet it wasn’t until the latest VA scandal broke nationally—months after the inspector general first investigated claims that are strikingly similar to what was later reported in Phoenix—that Albuquerque’s came back into focus. The status of the initial investigation still hasn’t been made public.

Last week, New Mexico Senator Tom Udall requested a new investigation into his state’s VA hospitals. Udall called for the audit after his office received dozens of complaints from veterans about long wait times at the VA, and reports that Albuquerque’s schedulers were forging appointment records.

New Mexico is now the seventh state where allegations have emerged about VA medical facilities cooking the books. As new incidents continue to display the same features uncovered in past cases, the details are revealing a common language of bureaucratic corruption communicated across state lines between different VA facilities.

Yet, even as evidence builds of a systemic problem within the VA, the department itself has been slow to acknowledge it and even slower to act. In his testimony before the Senate last week, VA Secretary Shinseki referred to the six cases that had been revealed up to that point as “isolated incidents.”

Veterans, for their part, are divided over the proper response; many believe that the actual care provided by the VA is good and the problem is primarily about access. But as each new week brings another case that seems to show the same pattern of duplicity inside the VA, some are growing impatient.

“Our members are outraged and are demanding true accountability and systemic reform for what appears to be increasingly widespread problems,” said Derek Bennett, chief of staff for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). “We cannot fix the problems until all the facts are on the table,” Bennett said but added that, “scapegoating and politicization of this issue will not reform the Department of Veterans Affairs nor best serve our veterans.”

To encourage getting the facts on the table, the IAVA has started its own initiative to gather stories from veterans and VA employees. “We have partnered with the Project on Government Oversight on vaoversight.org to provide a safe place for whistleblowers to come forward for this very reason,” Bennett said.

Despite the volume of incidents that have already been publicly revealed and the inspector general’s admission last week that he had more evidence pointing to new mismanagement, the VA has not announced any broad reforms or disciplinary actions. In the only major leadership shakeup since the VA became embroiled in the secret wait list charges, Secretary Shinseki announced the resignation last week of Dr. Robert Petzel, his undersecretary for health. But as many were quick to point out, and in what the IAVA called a “cynicial twist,” Petzel was already scheduled to retire this year after a 40-year career.

For Rep. Miller, the time is overdue for change within the VA. “We simply can’t afford to wait for the results of another IG investigation or VA’s internal review when veterans may be at risk,” Miller said. Immediate actions can be taken now, Miller added, even before formal investigations draw their conclusions. “Sec. Shinseki needs to take emergency steps,” he said, “to ensure veterans who may have fallen victim to these schemes get the medical treatment they need.”

On Sunday, the White House, which has remained relatively quiet on the VA’s latest troubles, weighed in with an interview by President Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough.

“The president is madder than hell, and I’ve got the scars to prove it, given the briefings that I’ve given the president,” McDonough told CBS’ Face the Nation. “Madder than hell” was the first echo of Secretary Shinseki, amplifying a phrase he used in his testimony last week to describe his own feelings. The second echo of Shinseki came when McDonough said the president had sent staff to look into the VA investigation and “find out if this is a series of isolated cases or whether this is a systemic issue.”

The VA’s own investigation is ongoing and will continue to attract attention as more revelations, like the claims about the Albuquerque VA, keep coming out. It remains to be seen how leaders who are “madder than hell” will react to the evidence they find and what, if anything, they will order done about the situation.

But hold on it does go back to Barack Obama and it was never about under-funding the VA, it was likely at pilot test of a system of single-payer of Obamacare and gaining access to even see a doctor in a reasonable period of time. Barack Obama, Joe Biden and their transition team knew well about the issues at the VA. Sure you can blame the previous administration, which is common however, Eric Shinseki took the position to clean up the VA and for 5 years has done nothing.

The Obama administration received clear notice more than five years ago that VA medical facilities were reporting inaccurate waiting times and experiencing scheduling failures that threatened to deny veterans timely health care — problems that have turned into a growing scandal.

Veterans Affairs officials warned the Obama-Biden transition team in the weeks after the 2008 presidential election that the department shouldn’t trust the wait times that its facilities were reporting.

“This is not only a data integrity issue in which [Veterans Health Administration] reports unreliable performance data; it affects quality of care by delaying — and potentially denying — deserving veterans timely care,” the officials wrote.

The briefing materials, obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act, make clear that the problems existed well before Mr. Obama took office, dating back at least to the Bush administration. But the materials raise questions about what actions the department took since 2009 to remedy the problems.

In recent months, reports have surfaced about secret wait lists at facilities across the country and, in the case of a Phoenix VA facility, accusations that officials cooked the books to try to hide long wait times. Some families said veterans died while on a secret wait list at the Phoenix facility.

Violators and Criminals of Enforcing Law

Posted on May 18, 2014May 18, 2014 by Denise Simon

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) freed 36,007 convicted criminal aliens from detention who were awaiting the outcome of deportation proceedings. The group included aliens convicted of hundreds of violent and serious crimes, including homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping, and aggravated assault. The list of crimes also includes more than 16,000 drunk or drugged driving convictions. Since many had committed multiple crimes, the 36,007 aliens had nearly 88,000 convictions among them.

In response to the report, the Obama administration claimed that some of the releases were mandated by a Supreme Court ruling from 2001.¹ The central case is Zadvydas v. Davis, which held that the federal government can detain aliens for deportation up to six months, but generally must release them back into the United States after that point if there is “no significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future”. One of the main reasons such a situation arises is that a criminal alien’s home country will refuse to take its nationals back. Instead of demanding that countries cooperate, the White House simply let thousands of criminal aliens go free. Vaughan estimates around 3,000 releases were based on this ruling. A spokesperson for ICE claimed that “mandatory releases account for over 72% of the homicides listed”.

Read more here, PLEASE.

Below is a handful of cases where the threat became reality.

Many freed criminals avoid deportation, strike again

FLUSHING, N.Y. — Qian Wu thought the man who brutally attacked her was gone forever.

She was sure that Huang Chen, a Chinese citizen who slipped into America on a ship and stayed in the country illegally, would be deported as soon as he got out of jail for choking, punching, and pointing a knife at her in 2006.

But China refused to take Chen back. So, after jailing Chen on and off for three years in Texas, immigration officials believed they were out of options and did what they have done with thousands of criminals like him.

They quietly let him go.

Nobody warned Wu, or prosecutors, or the public. The petite, 46-year-old woman learned Chen was still here when he stormed into her unlocked apartment one day in January 2010 and announced, “I bet you didn’t expect to see me.” Terrified, she called the police, and he fled. But for two weeks, Chen was free to stalk her and finally, to catch her as she hurried home with milk and bread one afternoon.

Chen then finished what he had started earlier, bashing Wu on the head with a hammer and slashing her with a knife. As she lay crumpled in a grimy stairwell, he ripped out her heart and a lung and fled with his macabre trophies.

“She lived in horror in the last two weeks of her life,” said Yongwei Guo, Wu’s widower, through an interpreter in New York. “She knew there was somebody coming to kill her and we asked the police for protection, and also the government, but they did nothing.”

Yongwei Guo’s wife was killed in 2010 by a criminal who had been released by immigration officials.

Wu is just one casualty of an immigration system cloaked in a blanket of secrecy that the Founding Fathers could not have imagined, a blanket that isn’t lifted even when life is at risk. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its sister agencies have emerged as the largest law enforcement network in the United States since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and they are increasingly dealing with criminals, but they play by very different rules than the local police, prosecutors, or even the FBI.

A yearlong Globe investigation found the culture of secrecy can be deadly to Americans and foreigners alike: Immigration officials do not notify most crime victims when they release a criminal such as Chen, and they only notify local law enforcement on a case by case basis. And even though immigration officials have the power to try to hold dangerous people longer, that rarely occurs.

The Globe also found that the pattern of secrecy extends to the treatment of immigrants who end up behind bars, though they have no criminal records. Foreigners in immigration detention have fewer rights than ordinary criminal suspects and limited ability to get word to the outside world about their plight. Even their names are kept secret, purportedly for their own protection, and many never get a public hearing to make their case.

Taken together, the system produces a litany of consequences: A young Lynn woman with no criminal record died in immigration custody from a heart ailment without a chance to ask a judge for medical help; a father of five in Texas disappeared from his family for several days after he was detained; a Cuban man in a wheelchair languished for an extraordinary 14 years in immigration detention, invisible to the world outside.

It is also a system in which — as Wu would learn in her final days of terror — Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, routinely releases dangerous detainees to the streets of America without warning the public. Over the past four years, immigration officials have largely without notice freed more than 8,500 detainees convicted of murder, rape, and other crimes, according to ICE’s own statistics, mainly because their home countries would not take them back.

Deporting illegal immigrants requires more than simply putting them on an airplane to their own country. People being deported need travel papers — such as a passport — like anyone else who travels abroad. If their native country refuses to issue the necessary papers , the United States cannot send deportees there. And the Supreme Court has said ICE cannot hold the immigrants forever; if immigration officials cannot deport them after six months, the court said, they should generally set the immigrants free.

When the Globe requested the names of the released criminals under the Freedom of Information Act, federal immigration officials refused, saying it would be a “clearly unwarranted invasion” of the immigrants’ privacy. Officials said public interest in their names was “minimal” anyway.

“In the absence of any identified public interest or explanation as to how the disclosure of the arrestees’ information will advance that interest, the personal privacy interests will prevail,” Matthew Chandler, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration, said in a written statement to the Globe.

But a disturbing number of foreigners have been arrested after their release, including some for heinous crimes. Abel Arango, an armed robber who was released when his native Cuba wouldn’t take him back, shot and killed a Fort Myers, Fla., police officer who responded to a report of a loud fight between Arango and his girlfriend in 2008. Binh Thai Luc, an armed robber from Vietnam, couldn’t be deported either, so he was released. In March, he allegedly massacred five people in a San Francisco home.

McCarthy Larngar, a Liberian national who served several years in prison for shooting and wounding a man in Rhode Island, was released in 2007 when Liberia would not take him back — even though a Boston immigration official had described him in court records as “a danger to the community.” After multiple brushes with the law, Larngar was arrested last year and charged with tying up and robbing a man and a woman in a bizarre kidnapping in Pawtucket. His lawyer said in court documents that he is not guilty, and he is now in a Rhode Island jail on a violation from an earlier crime.

In New England, immigration officials have released as many as 10 convicted murderers since 2008.

They include Hung Truong, a robber who repeatedly stabbed a bound and gagged 15-year-old Everett girl during a 1989 kidnapping that left the girl and her mother dead. Massachusetts released Truong on parole about 20 years into his life prison sentence in hopes that he would be deported to his native Vietnam in 2010. But ICE could not deport him because Vietnam has refused to accept deportees who came to the United States before 1995. Now, he’s back in prison after failing a drug test that was part of his release deal with the state Parole Board.

As part of its investigation, the Globe filed more than 20 different public records requests to obtain more detailed information about the people held — and released — by the immigration system. Many requests were rejected or the responses were heavily censored, prompting the Globe to file a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security in November. But this much is clear from the available documents: Federal officials are releasing people that they regard as dangerous and doing little to force recalcitrant countries to take their citizens back.

More than 20 governments from Jamaica to China routinely block deportation of their citizens, even dodging calls from US immigration officers seeking to expedite the process, and critics say they suffer few consequences. Some, such as US Representative Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, argue that the United States should stop accepting diplomats from countries who do not repatriate their citizens, but the State Department has shown little interest, preferring to work through diplomatic channels to deport immigrants. Federal officials have refused to issue visas to only one nation, tiny Guyana in South America.

Even when foreigners cannot be deported, immigration officials, under a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, could seek to hold them longer on the grounds that they are a danger to the public. Immigration officials say the legal standard for holding an immigrant longer for that reason is very high, limiting their ability to use it. They point out that immigrants are detained for civil immigration violations and not crimes.

But the Globe found that immigration officials almost never try to declare a detainee dangerous: In the past four years, immigration officials have released thousands of criminals, but court officials say they have handled only 13 cases seeking to hold immigrants longer because they are dangerous.

Too dangerous to release

Immigration agent Earl DeLong and his colleagues wasted little time in trying to put Shafiqul Islam on a plane back to his native Bangladesh two years ago. As soon as he finished his prison term in New York for taking pictures of himself sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl when he was 17, immigration agents called the Bangladeshi consulate in Manhattan.

Initially, the Bangladeshis were reassuring and a consular official, Mamunur Rashid, said he sent the agent’s request for clearance to deport Islam to authorities in Dhaka. But as time dragged on, the cooperation waned.

Whenever DeLong and others called the consulate over the next few months, Rashid was increasingly unavailable. The receptionist said he was not in. He was on vacation or out to lunch. Sometimes, a person at the consulate answered the phone and just hung up. Other times, the phone rang but nobody answered.

“Spoke to a person at the consulate four different times, never able to speak with Mamunur Rashid,” one agent wrote in a secret federal log that became public as part of a lawsuit.

US officials had seen stalling tactics from Bangladesh before: The impoverished Asian nation typically took several months to provide passports for criminals being deported last year — if they provided the documents at all, according to federal statistics.

Foreign countries are understandably reluctant to accept criminals, especially those such as Islam who were raised in the United States, and they have little incentive to do so since the United States rarely takes action against them, such as refusing to issue them visas.

State Department officials acknowledge that they try to avoid reaching the point of sanctions with nations like Bangladesh, but insist that they do apply diplomatic pressure.

“It is a matter we take very seriously, and consistently raise it at high levels with all countries where this is a concern,” said department spokesman Ken Chavez.

Hoping Bangladesh would clear Islam’s return, US immigration officials told Islam in April 2011 that they were going to continue to hold him even though more than six months had passed since Islam’s sexual abuse sentence ended. Islam responded with a lawsuit, charging that immigration could not continue to detain him because it was unlikely that Bangladesh would take him back. In the lawsuit, he pointedly noted that the consulate appeared to be dodging the immigration agent’s calls.

Islam’s lawsuit made public a host of immigration documents that are normally kept secret. The documents revealed both immigration officials’ concerns that Islam is dangerous and their frustrating attempts to contact the Bangladeshis.

But there is no evidence in the file that immigration officials requested an immigration court hearing to determine if they could continue to hold him as a threat to public safety.

Instead, the records show that on Oct. 3, 2011, immigration officials gave up and released Islam.

Seven weeks later, Islam was at Lois Decker’s door.

Everyone loved the retired school lunch lady, a friendly 73-year-old grandmother who taught Sunday school and lived her whole life in Hillsdale, N.Y., a rural hamlet just across the border from the Massachusetts line. Decker raised five children, but she lived alone in the house her daughter bought for her on Cold Water Street.

Sheriff’s deputies say they are unsure what drew Islam to Decker’s house that day, but family members said she had planned to rent out an apartment in the basement. Islam had a construction job in the Berkshires.

Hours after Islam visited Decker’s house, police arrested him in a traffic stop in a nearby city. He had stolen Decker’s white Hyundai, crashed it, and then tried to steal the truck of good Samaritans who had stopped to help him. He finally stole yet another truck, but did not get far. When police arrested him, he was spattered with blood, and had Decker’s credit card in the truck.

Sheriff’s deputies discovered a gruesome scene at Lois Decker’s house. The woman had been strangled, court records showed, and her face and throat were slashed. Officials found Islam’s semen on a sheet in the house, though officials did not find bodily evidence that Decker was sexually assaulted.

Columbia County officials were incensed and demanded to know why ICE had let such a dangerous person go free. They had convicted the high school dropout on sex abuse charges in 2008. Now he’s serving 20 years to life for Decker’s murder.

Paul Czajka, the silver-haired district attorney and a former judge in Columbia County, said immigration officials should have argued that Islam was dangerous enough to hold longer.

He was a child abuser and registered sex offender, therefore by definition he was a danger to the community,” said Czajka. “It would not have been a difficult hearing to make that case.”

But ICE spokesman Ross Feinstein said the agency had little choice but to release criminals such as Islam and Chen because the courts have made it difficult to hold even mentally ill immigrants longer without new criminal charges against them.

“For this reason, the agency’s ability to utilize the continued detention of removable aliens . . . is extremely limited,” Feinstein said.

Lois Decker’s grieving relatives say they’ve been told very little about how Islam gained his release and was able to kill her. Until a Globe reporter contacted the family, they had no idea that Islam had filed a federal lawsuit to get out of jail.

“It’s crazy to me that we don’t know this information,” said Decker’s daughter Diane Demarest, a veterinarian who lives in Oregon.

Some US and Bangladeshi officials involved with Islam’s case did not even realize he had killed Decker until contacted by the Globe.

Gail Y. Mitchell, an assistant US attorney in New York who defended ICE against Islam’s lawsuit to get out of jail, said the case ended because immigration officials released him. She would not say why they didn’t pursue the case and did not know that Islam had gone on to murder Decker.

Bangladesh consul M. Shahedul Islam said he did not know that Islam had killed Decker either. “This guy?” the consul said, raising his eyebrows and pointing to four passport-sized photos of Islam in a file with letters from US immigration officials asking for help with deportation.

The Bangladeshi consulate said Bangladesh did not approve Islam for return because they could not verify he was a citizen of their country.

“We always cooperate with Homeland Security,” said the consul, who is not related to Shafiqul Islam, and he apologized if his staff hung up on ICE agents.

But, for Decker’s family, the conflicting explanations don’t help.

“How could someone not have stopped him along the way?” asked Demarest.

Light sentences for heavy crimes

The uncertainties of the deportation process have another little known effect: Some foreigners get reduced prison sentences when they are convicted of crimes because judges believe they are sure to be deported after their sentence is over. Federal immigration officials warn against the practice, saying that deportation is not a 100 percent certainty even for the worst offender.

No one knows that better than the man Antonino Rodrigues allegedly shot between the eyes this year.

Rodrigues, a convicted drug dealer in the country illegally from Cape Verde, was facing almost four years in federal prison in October 2010 for possessing a stolen, loaded weapon. New Bedford police had caught him: They knew Rodrigues had outstanding arrest warrants and they were pleased when a detective spotted him bar-hopping on the city’s south side.

When Rodrigues appeared for sentencing before US District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock in Boston for the latest in a string of convictions, federal guidelines called for 37 to 46 months in prison.

But defense lawyer Syrie Fried argued that Rodrigues deserved a lighter punishment because he was going to deported anyway. She told the judge Rodrigues had “no prospect of release back into our society.”

Woodlock went along, giving Rodrigues just two years in prison with credit for time served, clearing the way for Rodrigues to finish his prison sentence in March 2011.

“Given the defendant’s near certainty of deportation, the sentence is sufficient but not greater than necessary,” the judge ruled.

But Cape Verde officials did not take Rodrigues back, so immigration officials released him late last year. The Cape Verde consulate in Boston did not respond to questions about why they did not accept Rodrigues.

On June 17, 2012, Rodrigues resurfaced outside an apartment on New Bedford’s Walnut Street, where police say he shot Monzes Goncalves in the forehead with a .22-caliber gun. Goncalves miraculously survived and identified Rodrigues as the shooter.

Rodrigues denied shooting Goncalves and turned himself in to police because he heard they were looking for him.

Fried, the lawyer who helped Rodrigues win a shorter prison sentence in 2010, said she was surprised to learn that her client was still in the United States. She said she did not stay in touch with him because, typically, foreigners who are convicted of serious crimes leave the country.

“I was under the impression . . . that he was going to go straight from serving his jail sentence and be deported,” she said.

The fact is, Rodrigues’ case is not unusual. In Massachusetts over the past four years, the Parole Board has granted early release to 22 immigrants convicted of second-degree murder or manslaughter, several times stating that their willingness to free the prisoner was influenced by his expected departure from the United States. Some prisoners told the board they planned to leave voluntarily for a job in Sierra Leone or a place to live in Cambodia.

However, at least five of the 22 were still here as of July, and, it’s unclear what happened to the other 17. One of the five still here under state supervision is Hung Truong, the Vietnamese national who helped murder an Everett mother and her daughter. Truong had been disciplined more than 30 times in prison, but the board said his behavior had improved — and Truong was possibly leaving anyway.

“It is the judgment of the board that he should be paroled [to federal immigration officials] for possible deportation,” wrote the parole board in its unanimous vote on Sept. 24, 2010.

More than two years later, Truong is still here — in MCI-Shirley, a Massachusetts prison, after flunking a drug test he was required to take as a condition of his release.

No one has to tell Qian Wu’s widower about immigrants getting light sentences for heavy crimes. Yongwei Guo’s wife was killed by an illegal immigrant who prosecutors said was initially sentenced to only 30 days in prison for attacking her the first time. Immigration officials ultimately detained Huang Chen off and on for more than three years in hopes of deporting him, but it wasn’t enough.

“They are not taking responsibility,” Guo said. “They can’t let such a dangerous man free merely because China won’t take him.”

No warning for victims

Long after her assailant went off to prison, Qian Wu kept an eye out for him in her Flushing, N.Y., neighborhood, scanning the crush of pedestrians flowing into the markets, the take-out joints, and the massage parlors nearby. She quizzed the fruit vendors on the street. Nobody had seen Huang Chen. Nonetheless, Wu kept a restraining order out against him — just in case.

Wu had a tough exterior, but those close to her said her attitude masked her fear. She was thin and walked with a limp from injuries she suffered in a car accident years ago. She hardly spoke English, and she had fled political repression in China. And until she remarried in 2008, Wu was a woman on her own, running an employment service for immigrants.

“She was disabled, so she had to be tougher than the others,” said Guo.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country at a detention center in El Paso, federal officials were trying to figure out what to do with Chen, a man who could seem normal one moment and mentally unbalanced the next. Immigration officials continued to hold Chen for another year after his 30-day sentence ran out, holding out hope that China would take him back.

When that didn’t happen, an immigration agent dropped Chen off at a local homeless shelter, in April 2008.

But just two months later, El Paso police arrested Chen after he punched two men in a plaza downtown. Then, just days after Chen got out of jail for the assaults, police arrested him again on a disorderly conduct charge for attacking a man on a bicycle right in front of them. Police described him as “a danger” to himself and others in their report.

Chen returned to the El Paso detention center to await deportation, but again China refused to take him back, so in October 2009, immigration officials again released him. This time, he made it clear that he wanted to get back to New York. He blamed Qian Wu for his troubles, court records later showed, and he knew exactly where to find her: Apartment 3F in a building on 40th Road.

When Chen walked through Wu’s unlocked front door for the first time since 2006, she ran downstairs and begged neighbors to call 911. She asked police and prosecutors for help with a new restraining order, since hers had expired, but never managed to get one. Guo warned his wife to stay inside.

One desperate night, Guo recalled, he asked Wu what they should do, and she responded bitterly.

“She said we can just wait to die,” he said.

Most victims, including Wu, have no idea that the criminal who victimized them has been released, based on a Globe analysis of ICE’s little-known victim notification program and the number of immigrants released from its custody. Federal immigration statistics show ICE has released or deported more than 1 million criminals over the past decade, but they have made just 1,000 to 3,000 victim notifications.

Currently, only 336 crime victims are enrolled in ICE’s program, compared with 2.2 million victims in the Justice Department’s electronic notification system in 2010 alone.

Immigration officials say they want more crime victims to sign up for their system, but it’s up to the victims to register. Wu’s widower was unsure whether she had been offered the opportunity to enroll, though he knows she would have been interested.

The Queens district attorney’s office, which handled Chen’s attacks on Wu, said they were not aware of Chen’s release. ICE officials say they are under no obligation to contact law enforcement officials when civil immigration detainees are released, though they do so when officials request it.

In Flushing, court records show, Chen stalked the panicked Wu for days. He moved into the same building, a few doors down. He tried to reach through the metal gate on her door and unlock it. He even took the $200 her husband gave him to go away.

On Jan. 26, 2010, security camera footage showed Chen leaving Wu’s building, his green sweater soaked in blood. Police arrested him at a local hospital seeking treatment for a hand wound.

Chen, now 50, made no secret in court that he wanted to kill Wu as revenge for his long stint in prison. Justice Richard L. Buchter called the murder “cold-blooded and grotesque,” and especially senseless because Chen was not supposed to be here at all.

“I just — I am just disturbed by what you told me regarding the fact that this person should have been deported and was not,” said Buchter, who sentenced Chen to 27 to 29 years in prison.

Wu’s widower has filed claims against ICE and multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the New York City Police Department and Chen.

From his offices in Times Square, lawyer George W. Clarke said Guo’s case is one of the toughest he’s had in years, because immigration officials provide so little information. They ask him questions he said they should answer, such as when they released Chen, and refuse to provide documents.

“They’re not telling us anything,” Clarke said. Later, he added: “I think it’s just the immigration service doesn’t want to be bothered or exposed to liability for releasing people who may be guilty of crimes and who have no right to be here, such as Huang Chen.”

Officials at the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to e-mails and phone calls about Chen’s case.

The whole experience has shaken the Rev. Bill Morton, an El Paso priest who gave Chen a cleaning job when he got out of detention and sometimes drove him to meetings with ICE. Over time, he became concerned about Chen’s mental health and, looking back, he wonders why immigration officials didn’t express similar concerns, or warn volunteers like him.

“I’m totally pro-immigrant, but I’m certainly not pro-ignorance or indifference where you’re exposing criminal people or insane people on an unknowing public,” Morton said. “That’s not helping immigrants or the US or the person themselves.”

The Persian Incursion the U.S. Ignores

Posted on May 18, 2014May 18, 2014 by Denise Simon

Once again, John Kerry’s attempt to restart the peace talks between Israel and Palestine failed again yesterday with no progress. Talks are slated to go another round in June, all of this is a fool’s errand.

While Kerry is on his way to log as many travel miles as Hillary flew during her term at SecState, Kerry has abandoned concentration on several fronts least of which is Iran’s nuclear program. Rouhani is moving completely unchecked and quite aggressively against the United States with regard to declaring victory in Syria, his nuclear weapons program and signing deals all over the globe. Diplomatic efforts by Barack Obama and John Kerry are folly. Yet, what else is Iran doing that should terrify America? One victory Iran is having is their clandestine cyber war, titled Saffron Rose.

A group of Iranian hackers have allegedly been targeting American defense contractors, and attempting to quell dissent in Iran itself, in an elaborate and technically advanced campaign that American security researchers call “Operation Saffron Rose.” The attacks began in October 2013 and continued until at least April 8, according to Milpitas, California-based security company FireEye, which documented the operation in a report released yesterday (May 13).

FireEye suspects that the group behind Saffron Rose is Ajax Security Team, whose members are thought to have conducted politically-motivated website defacements for several years. The group’s “graduation” from vandalism to espionage shows that Iranian actors in the cyber attack space are becoming more sophisticated, FireEye says.

The “proxy software” was, of course, malicious.

According to FireEye, Ajax Security Team often uses a type of spyware that FireEye calls “Stealer.” Stealer often arrives as a Trojan horse, secretly bundled into other software such as proxies or VPN clients.

Once a target installs an infected program, Stealer runs a program called IntelRS.exe, which snoops on infected computers in a variety of ways. These methods include keylogging, taking screenshots, gathering system information (IP addresses, usernames, hostnames, open ports, installed applications), collecting email and instant messaging information, and collecting browser-based information such as login credentials, browsing history, cookies and bookmarks.

Stealer encrypts the data it gathers, then sends it to a command-and-control server. FireEye said one such server contained information on 77 individuals targeted in Operation Saffron Rose.

Many of the programs used to conceal Stealer are anti-censorship programs such as Psiphon, which don’t seem to be targeted toward the American defense companies that have been Ajax Security Team’s most recent targets. (One of Psiphon’s lead developers at the University of Toronto was Nart Villeneuve, who went on to become a malware researcher and is lead author of FireEye’s Saffron Rose report.)

The anti-censorship programs often appeared to be set to Iran Standard Time (which is uniquely three and a half hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time) and had a Persian-language setting. FireEye believes that Ajax Security Team may also be targeting Iranians who use anti-censorship programs to dodge Iran’s strict Internet regulations.

Interestingly, FireEye’s report observed that Ajax Security Team has not been spotted using zero-day exploits, or secret vulnerabilities in program code, although the team has been seen using publicly known and unpatched exploits in its cybervandalism activities.

“It is unclear if they or other Iranian actors are capable of producing or acquiring exploit code,” FireEye’s researchers wrote.

FireEye’s report compared Saffron Rose to Shamoon, a highly destructive espionage campaign that targeted the Saudi Arabian oil company Saudi Aramco in August 2012. The Shamoon spyware gathered company data from infected computers, then disabled them by overwriting their master boot records, which PCs need to start up. Some experts suspected Shamoon came from Iran, but nothing has been proven.

The relationship between Ajax Security Team and the Iranian government is unclear, but FireEye said that Saffron Rose is proof that Iran’s online capabilities are becoming more sophisticated.

“There is increasing evidence to suggest that the hacker community in Iran is engaged in a transition from politically motivated defacements and denial-of-service attacks to cyberespionage activities,” its report concluded.

As Iran continues unchecked, it is important to know what else Iran is doing.

Washington-based analysts say Iran has pressed ahead with operations at a military base suspected to have hosted nuclear weapon-related experiments.

An April 25 satellite image of Iran’s Parchin installation suggests the nation, since January, has moved “possible building material and debris” near a building that the International Atomic Energy Agency has sought unsuccessfully for more than two years to visit, according to a Monday assessment by the Institute for Science and International Security. The U.N. nuclear watchdog believes the structure may once have been capable of hosting explosion tests relevant to nuclear-arms development.

“Two trucks or containers have been removed from the area surrounding the suspected high-explosives test building, while a larger object, possibly a truck or large container, appears slightly north of it,” ISIS analysts David Albright and Serena Kelleher-Vergantini said in their report.

Iran, which insists that its atomic ambitions are strictly peaceful, began altering the Parchin facility weeks after IAEA officials began seeking access to the location, the independent experts said.

The nation last year undertook a months-long pause in activities at the site, but a January image analysis revealed an apparent resumption of operations there, the analysis says.

This week’s findings came as Iran launched a new round of multilateral talks aimed at defusing international fears over Tehran’s suspected nuclear-arms aspirations.

“By continuing to modify the site and denying the IAEA access, Iran is reducing the chances of reaching a comprehensive solution by the initial deadline of July 20,” when an interim nuclear agreement with major powers is scheduled to expire, the ISIS report says.

Certain specialists have questioned the U.N. agency’s rationale for pressing to visit the Parchin compound. The evidence prompting those requests — intelligence gathered and furnished to the agency by IAEA member governments — remains confidential.