At Least 34 Years of Immigration Debate, Loopholes and Dollars

Posted on June 15, 2017June 15, 2017 by Denise Simon

The proposed Department of Justice budget request for 2018 for the Executive Office of Immigration is $421.5 million and includes 2600 employees with 831 lawyers. Judges assigned to immigration courts are being hired, shuffled around the country and have in some areas have a five year base backlog.

Image result for immigration court FoxLatino

The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) was created on January 9, 1983, through an internal Department of Justice (DOJ) reorganization which combined the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA or Board) with the Immigration Judge function previously performed by the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) (now part of the Department of Homeland Security). Besides establishing EOIR as a separate agency within DOJ, this reorganization made the Immigration Courts independent of INS, the agency charged with enforcement of Federal immigration laws. The Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer (OCAHO) was added in 1987. In 2013, EOIR observed its 30th anniversary.

EOIR is also separate from the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices in the DOJ Civil Rights Division and the Office of Immigration Litigation in the DOJ Civil Division.

As an office within the Department of Justice, EOIR is headed by a Director who reports directly to the Deputy Attorney General. Its headquarters are located in Falls Church, Virginia, about 10 miles from downtown Washington, DC.

New York City Law Creates Loophole To Avoid Deporting Criminal Illegal Immigrants

A New York City law that reclassifies several low-level offenses as non-criminal went into effect Tuesday, allowing citizen offenders to keep clean records and illegal immigrant offenders to potentially avoid deportation.

The law, passed by the city council and signed by Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2016, allows police to classify trial summonses for petty crimes as civil summonses, rather than criminal summonses. The change would affect crimes including public urination and drinking and staying in the park after dark, DNA Info reports. The change critically affects the impact of an executive order from President Donald Trump this spring ordering the deportation of illegal immigrants convicted of crimes.

Under the new law, illegal immigrants convicted of these crimes would receive a civil rather than criminal summons, which frees local law enforcement from the obligation of reporting the offender’s immigration status to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The law would affect cases such as Alejandro Luna, a former gang member and an illegal immigrant caught in central park after dark June 5 who now faces deportation. This would be Luna’s second deportation, the first came in 2006 after he was convicted of home-invasion and robbery. He then illegally entered the country again only to be detained on the June 5 park offense. More here.

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Illegals presently have access to government funded healthcare. However:

The ‘Verify First Act’ by Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) would subsequently end American taxpayer-funded money going to illegal aliens in the form of healthcare insurance credits. The plan is being supported by NumbersUSA, a group which has staunchly advocated for Trump’s America First agenda.

“We applaud Rep. Lou Barletta for introducing the Verify First Act to ensure that illegal aliens cannot qualify for taxpayer-funded health insurance credits,” NumbersUSA Peter Robbio said in a statement. “We are grateful that the Ways and Means Committee and House Republican Leadership agreed to move this important bill forward.”

Since Obamacare’s enactment, illegal immigrants received more than $700 million in healthcare insurance credits by 2015, according to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

In Barletta’s plan, healthcare insurance recipients through the American Health Care Act (AHCA) would have their citizenship and immigration statuses verified by the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). More here.

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In part: Traditional sanctuary policies are often described as falling under one of three categories. First, so-called “don’t enforce” policies generally bar the state or local police from assisting federal immigration authorities. Second, “don’t ask” policies generally bar certain state or local officials from inquiring into a person’s immigration status. Third, “don’t tell” policies typically restrict information sharing between state or local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. This report provides examples of various state and local laws and policies that fall into one of these sanctuary categories. The report also discusses federal measures designed to counteract sanctuary policies. For instance, Section 434 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and Section 642 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) were enacted to curb state and local restrictions on information sharing with federal immigration authorities.

State or local measures limiting police participation in immigration enforcement are not a recent phenomenon. Indeed, many of the recent “sanctuary”-type initiatives can be traced back to

activities carried out by churches that provided refuge—or “sanctuary”—to unauthorized Central American aliens fleeing civil unrest in the 1980s.13 A number of states and municipalities issued declarations in support of these churches’ actions.14 Others went further and enacted more substantive measures intended to limit police involvement in federal immigration enforcement activities.15 These measures have included, among other things, restricting state and local police from arresting persons for immigration violations, limiting the sharing of immigration-related information with federal authorities, and barring police from questioning a person about his or her immigration status.16

Still, there is no official definition of a “sanctuary” jurisdiction in federal statute or regulation.17 Broadly speaking, sanctuary jurisdictions are commonly understood to be those that have laws or policies designed to substantially limit involvement in federal immigration enforcement activities,18 though there is not necessarily a consensus as to the meaning of this term.19 Some jurisdictions have self-identified as sanctuary cities.

The federal government’s power to regulate immigration is both substantial and exclusive.23 This authority is derived from multiple sources, including Congress’s Article I powers to “establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization” and “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states,”24 as well as the federal government’s “inherent power as a sovereign to conduct relations with foreign nations.”

The Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling in Arizona v. United States—which invalidated several Arizona laws designed “to discourage and deter the unlawful entry and presence of aliens and economic activity by persons unlawfully present in the United States”28 as preempted by federal law—reinforced the federal government’s pervasive role in creating and enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.29 “The Government of the United States,” the Court said, “has broad, undoubted power over the subject of immigration and the status of aliens.”30

Yet despite the federal government’s sweeping authority over immigration, the Supreme Court has cautioned that not “every state enactment which in any way deals with aliens is a regulation of immigration and thus per se preempted” by the federal government’s exclusive power over immigration.39 Accordingly, in Arizona the Supreme Court reiterated that, “[i]n preemption analysis, courts should assume that the historic police powers of the States are not superseded unless that was the clear and manifest purpose of Congress.”40 For example, in Chamber of Commerce of the U.S. v. Whiting, the Supreme Court upheld an Arizona law—related to the states’ “broad authority under their police powers to regulate the employment relationship to protect workers within the State”41—that authorized the revocation of licenses held by state employers that knowingly or intentionally employ unauthorized aliens.42 Even though the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) expressly preempted “any State or local law imposing civil or criminal sanctions … upon those who employ, or recruit or refer for a fee for employment, unauthorized aliens,” the Supreme Court concluded that Arizona’s law fit within IRCA’s savings clause for state licensing regimes and thus was not preempted.43

Accordingly, based on current jurisprudence, federal measures that impose direct requirements on state or municipal authorities appear most likely to withstand an anti-commandeering challenge if they (1) are not directed at a state’s regulation of the activities of private parties; and (2) apply to the activities of private parties as well as government actors.

Finally, Congress does not violate the Tenth Amendment when it uses its broad authority to enact legislation for the “general welfare” through its spending power,62 including by placing

conditions on funds distributed to the states that require those accepting the funds to take certain actions that Congress otherwise could not directly compel the states to perform.63 However, Congress cannot impose a financial condition that is “so coercive as to pass the point at which ‘pressure turns into compulsion.’”64 For example, in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court struck down a provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) that purported to withhold Medicaid funding to states that did not expand their Medicaid programs.65 The Court found that the financial conditions placed on the states in the ACA (withholding all federal Medicaid funding, which, according to the Court, typically totals about 20% of a state’s entire budget) were akin to “a gun to the head” and thus unlawfully coercive.66

violations of federal immigration law may be criminal or civil in nature, with alien removal understood to be a civil proceeding.71 Some immigration-related conduct potentially constitutes a removable offense and also may be subject to criminal sanction. For example, an alien who knowingly enters the United States without authorization is not only potentially subject to removal,72 but could also be charged with the criminal offense of unlawful entry.73 Other violations of the INA are exclusively criminal or civil in nature. Notably, an alien’s unauthorized immigration status makes him or her removable, but absent additional factors (e.g., having reentered the United States after being formally removed),74 unlawful presence on its own is not a criminal offense.

Some jurisdictions have adopted measures that restrict or bar police officers from making arrests for violations of federal immigration law. In some jurisdictions restrictions prohibit police from detaining or arresting aliens for civil violations of federal immigration law, like unlawful presence.75 Other jurisdictions prohibit police from making arrests for some criminal violations of federal immigration law, like unlawful entry.76 Still others prohibit assisting federal immigration authorities with investigating or arresting persons for civil or criminal violations of U.S. immigration laws.77 And some other jurisdictions have prohibitions that are broader in scope, such as a general statement that immigration enforcement is the province of federal immigration authorities, rather than that of local law enforcement.

Some states and localities have restricted government agencies or employees from sharing information with federal immigration authorities, primarily to prevent federal authorities from using the information to identify and apprehend unlawfully present aliens for removal.88 For instance, some jurisdictions prohibit law enforcement from notifying federal immigration authorities about the release status of incarcerated aliens, unless the alien has been convicted of certain felonies.89 Similarly, other jurisdictions prohibit their employees from disclosing information about an individual’s immigration status unless the alien is suspected of engaging in illegal activity that is separate from unlawful immigration status.90 Some jurisdictions restrict disclosing information except as required by federal law91—sometimes referred to as a “savings clause”—although it appears that the Department of Justice has interpreted those provisions as conflicting with federal information-sharing provisions. For the full summary and context with access to footnotes, go here.

Does June Cobb Hold the Secrets of JFK’s Assassination?

Posted on May 24, 2017May 24, 2017 by Denise Simon

Did you ever believe the Warren Commission Report? Me neither. Have you ever heard the name June Cobb? Well, if you can find her…what could she reveal about her time in Cuba and Mexico City?

JUNE COBB’S PENETRATION OF CASTRO’S INNER CIRCLE

What Could a Mysterious U.S. Spy Know About the JFK Assassination?

John F. Kennedy buffs are awaiting the release of documents about June Cobb, a little-known CIA operative working in Cuba and Mexico around the time of the president’s assassination.

Politico: She may have been one of the bravest and best-placed American spies in the history of the Cold War, but few people outside the CIA know the mysterious story of June Cobb.

The existing information in the spy agency’s declassified files depicts Cobb as an American Mata Hari—an adventure-loving, death-defying globetrotter who moved to Cuba to work for Fidel Castro, the country’s newly installed strongman, then found herself recruited to spy for the CIA after growing disenchanted with Castro’s revolution. The era’s rampant sexism is obvious in her job evaluation reports: Cobb’s CIA handlers wrote down speculation about her sex life and her failed romance in the 1950s with an opium farmer in the jungles of South America. And the reports are filled with appraisals of Cobb’s looks, noting especially her fetching blue eyes. “Miss Cobb is not unattractive,” her CIA recruiter wrote in 1960. “She is blonde, has a slender figure, although she has a somewhat hard look, making her appear somewhat older than her 33 years.”

According to another, undated evaluation, she had a “wiry” figure but had been attractive enough to catch the Cuban dictator’s eye. Cobb, the report said, was reputedly “a former girlfriend of Castro’s.” True or not, she was close enough to get a job on the Cuban dictator’s senior staff in Havana in 1960, the perfect perch to spy for the CIA. Cobb’s agency work in Havana and later in Mexico leads us to the most puzzling aspect of her life—that she later found herself drawn deeply into the mysteries of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. After the murder, she reported to her CIA bosses that she had identified a trio of witnesses who could tie Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to Cuban diplomats and spies in Mexico City, where Oswald had traveled just weeks before the assassination.

What did June Cobb know at the time? Historians of the Cold War—and anyone with an interest in JFK’s 1963 assassination and the possibility of Cuban involvement—are on the verge of learning much more about the extraordinary, often bizarre, sometimes tragic life of the American spy who was born Viola June Cobb, the full name that appeared on her birth certificate back home in Ponca City, Oklahoma, in 1927. The National Archives has recently acknowledged that it is preparing to release a 221-page file of long-secret CIA documents about Cobb that—for reasons the Archives says it cannot yet divulge—are somehow linked to JFK’s murder.

The Cobb file is among the most tantalizing of an estimated 3,600 assassination-related documents scheduled to be made public by late October under the 25-year deadline established by the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. Under the 1992 law, the full library of long-secret files will be released automatically by the National Archives later this year unless President Donald Trump blocks their release on national security grounds. The White House has not signaled what Trump, who for years has promoted mostly baseless conspiracy theories, including about JFK’s assassination, will do.

What we know about Cobb so far comes largely from millions of pages of other documents from the CIA, FBI and other federal agencies that were declassified years ago under the 1992 law. Within those documents are dozens of files that identified Cobb as a paid CIA operative when she worked on Castro’s staff in Havana and later when she moved to Mexico. Some of the documents tie her to a lingering questions about Oswald’s trip to Mexico City in late September 1963, not long before Kennedy’s November assassination. In Mexico, Oswald came under CIA surveillance when he met there with both Soviet and Cuban spies. Previously released documents also show Cobb’s involvement in CIA surveillance of a U.S.-based pro-Castro group, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which Oswald championed in the months before Kennedy’s murder.

There is one document about Cobb that has remained completely off-limits to the public all these years: the 221-page file identified as “FOLDER ON COBB, VIOLA JUNE (VOL VII)” on a skeletal index released by the Archives last year. It is one of the 3,600 documents that were withheld from public view entirely in the 1990s at the request of the agencies that originally produced them—in Cobb’s case, the CIA. The index prepared by the Archives shows that, as of 1998, when her file was last officially reviewed, the spy agency said the document was “not believed relevant” to the Kennedy assassination but could do unspecified harm if made public before the October 2017 deadline.

But the history of the assassination has needed to be rewritten since the 1990s, in part because of the CIA’s documented duplicity, which raises the question of whether Cobb’s file could in fact be relevant. A 2013 report by the CIA’s in-house historian acknowledged that the agency had conducted a “benign cover-up” in the years immediately after Kennedy’s assassination in an effort to keep investigators focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” The agency told the Warren Commission—the panel led by Chief Justice Earl Warren that concluded in 1964 that Oswald had acted alone—that there was no evidence of a conspiracy in JFK’s death. The CIA has also admitted that it failed to tell the commission that the agency had attempted throughout Kennedy’s presidency to assassinate Castro and that Castro knew about the plots, which could have given the Cuban an obvious motive to retaliate. Many of the Castro plots involved CIA operatives working out of Mexico City at the time Oswald visited the city in 1963. In the late 1970s, the CIA refused to help investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations find Cobb for an interview about what might have happened to Oswald in Mexico, according to the panel’s declassified files.

Gus Russo, a historian and journalist who has written two widely praised books about the assassination, managed to track down Cobb when she living in New York City more than a decade ago and interviewed her about her spying career. “I have always felt that June Cobb was one of the most fascinating characters I came across over decades of looking at this story,” he said in an interview. “She came across as a female James Bond at a time when there were few, if any, female James Bonds.” He added, “I found her to be completely credible and utterly uninterested in notoriety.” Her whereabouts today are a mystery.

A listed phone number for Cobb in Manhattan is disconnected. Messages sent to her email address, the one Russo used years ago, were returned as “undeliverable.” Phone calls to women with her name in her home state of Oklahoma were unreturned. If still alive, she would have turned 90 this year.

During the 1960s, when her prominent work on Castro’s staff in Havana drew the attention of curious journalists, Cobb granted a few interviews in which she explained how she ended up in Cuba. After dropping out of the University of Oklahoma in the late 1940s, she decided to seek excitement far from the flatlands of Oklahoma and moved to Mexico City, to study at a university there. In Mexico, she fell in love with a fellow student, a young Colombian, who enticed her to join him on an adventure in the jungles of Ecuador, where he hoped to open a business growing poppies for opium production—not clearly illegal in Ecuador at the time. She said she went for several months, only to leave him when he grew addicted to his own product. In a 1962 article about Cobb, the muckraking columnist Jack Anderson reported that, according to U.S. government sources, Cobb had other motives for fleeing: Her boyfriend had taken up with other women in Ecuador, and so—“in a fit of jealousy”—Cobb flew back to the United States and “squealed on him” to American narcotics agents.

Whatever really happened in the South American jungle, Cobb found herself working as a journalist in New York as Castro came to power in 1959. She told Anderson that she had gotten swept up in the initial excitement of Castro’s revolution after meeting the Cuban leader when he traveled to New York shortly after taking the reins, before he acknowledged he was a Communist. Within weeks of the meeting, Cobb said, she was invited to Havana to serve as one of Castro’s principal English-language translators—she spoke fluent Spanish—and to handle his contacts with American news organizations. “I suppose you can call me a sucker for lost causes,” she told Anderson.

She was assigned an office only several hundred feet away from Castro’s and, according to CIA reports, saw him face-to-face regularly. Within months, she said, she found herself disenchanted with the revolution, especially as Castro became more vocally anti-American and drew closer to the Soviet Union. “I do doubt that he was a Communist all along,” she later told congressional investigators. “I think that is one of his many falsehoods.”

In 1960, previously declassified CIA records show, she was recruited to begin spying for the United States. In interviews at the time, Cobb tried to deny ties to U.S. intelligence but acknowledged how close she had been to Castro and his key deputies, including his brother Raúl and guerilla leader Che Guevara. CIA files describe Cobb as having had an adventurous love life—she is “promiscuous,” her American handler in Mexico said flatly—but make no final judgment about whether she had a physical relationship with the Cuban leader.

“Her association with Fidel Castro and his entourage has been another shattered ‘dream,’ one of a whole series in her life,” her CIA recruiter wrote at the time, explaining her motives for becoming a spy. “Miss Cobb has undergone much emotional stress in her life and is no longer sure that the revolutionary movement she was so idealistically motivated by a few months ago is the right thing.” Previously declassified CIA document show that Cobb’s information was valuable in preparing the spy agency’s detailed psychological profiles of Castro and his deputies and in monitoring their activities.

A photograph of June Cobb from an August 1962 profile in Parade magazine. | Parade Magazine

By choosing to spy, the records show, Cobb knew she was risking her life, especially after another American prominent in Castro’s government, William Morgan of Toledo, Ohio, who had fought alongside Castro’s army in the revolution, was charged with treason in 1961 by his former Cuban allies and executed by firing squad. “He was a boy with ideals,” Cobb said later of Morgan.

Fearing she faced a similar end, Cobb decided to leave Cuba shortly after Morgan’s arrest and was transferred by the CIA to Mexico City, where she took on assignments monitoring Cuban agents, as well Mexicans who were sympathetic to Castro’s government—work that would eventually draw her into investigations of the Kennedy assassination.

Cobb figures prominently in one of the greatest of the unsolved mysteries about Oswald’s trip to Mexico weeks before the assassination—whether he was in contact there with Cuban or Soviet agents who knew he had spoken openly about killing Kennedy, possibly as an act of retaliation for JFK’s efforts to overthrow Castro’s government. Previously declassified government files suggest that, at one point, Oswald marched into the Cuban embassy compound in Mexico City and announced loudly: “I’m going to kill Kennedy.”

According to other declassified files, Cobb reported to the CIA’s Mexico City station in October 1964, nearly a year after JFK’s assassination, that she had learned from a prominent Mexican writer and two other Mexican sources that they had all seen Oswald at a dance party during his trip the year before that was also attended by Cuban diplomats and others who had spoken openly of their hope that Kennedy would be assassinated. Cobb’s sources said Oswald had been at the party in the company of two other young American men, who appeared to be his traveling companions and whose identifies have never been established. The questions raised by Cobb’s reports were obvious: Had any of those people encouraged Oswald to murder JFK or offered to help him escape after the assassination? (Nothing in the previously released documents involving Cobb support theories that Castro personally ordered Kennedy’s death.)

Cobb speaks with Amazonian natives in Ecuador. | Parade Magazine

The CIA’s Mexico City station, its files reveal, was determined to dismiss Cobb’s report, perhaps eager to have the official record show that Oswald was a lone wolf whose plans to kill Kennedy could never have been foiled by the spy agency’s officials. Cobb’s key witness, the Mexican novelist and playwright Elena Garro, was interviewed by the FBI, but the CIA disparaged her account, even though other witnesses would come forward to support it. Other leads offered by Cobb were never pursued. And in any case, by the time all of this came out, it was too late for the Warren Commission to act: Two weeks before Cobb’s information landed with her CIA handlers in Mexico, the commission had issued its final report in Washington and shut down its investigation.

Moscow’s Igor Sergun: Cong. Rohrabacher to your ‘Like Button’

Posted on May 19, 2017May 19, 2017 by Denise Simon

One part of this Moscow mess began in 2012, when the FBI held a private session with Congressman Dana Rohrahacher, (CA), Mike Rogers, Michigan, and according to one former official, Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger, telling them they were the targets of Russian influence and possible targets of recruiting.

Of note, Igor Sergun died in January of 2016, but his operations were already underway.

Image result for igor sergun

Sergun is credited as an important figure in the renaissance of the GRU, which had suffered deep staff and budget cuts prior to his arrival. Under Sergun, the agency regained political power within the Russian government as well as control over the Spetsnaz special forces, making it “crucial in the seizure of Crimea and operations in the Donbas,” as well as “as the lead agency for dealing with violent non-state actors.”

Perhaps the United States should take a hard look at the actions Ukraine has taken regarding Russian intrusion.

Poroshenko this week ordered Ukrainian Internet providers to block Vkontakte and Odnoclassniki. The sites are similar to Facebook and are two of the most popular social networking sites in the former Soviet space.

More than 25 million Ukrainians, in a country of about 43 million people, use the Russian sites to connect with friends, join groups and use the online messaging systems.

Poroshenko said the new restrictions were necessary to further protect Ukraine from Kremlin hybrid warfare, including disinformation campaigns, propaganda and military attacks. The two neighbors and former Soviet republics have been embroiled in a brutal, three-year war that has killed more than 10,000 people and displaced about 1.7 million eastern Ukrainians.

Supporters of the ban said it would also protect Ukrainians from the Russian security services’ ability to monitor and gather metadata from the sites’ users. Ukrainian government officials said the sites are closely monitored by Russia’s FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. More here from LATimes.

One must take the time to see the evidence the domestic intelligence agencies and private cyber companies along with data analysis experts are uncovering and studying. Further, since we citizens cannot attend meetings, some in classified settings that are held in Congress and we don’t get any information from the investigations, there are some interviews with professionals that are sounding the alarm bells.

Are you sick of Russia and hearing about Putin? Sure you are, but so is our government and other global leaders, rightly so. You are going to have to understand some facts and buckle in….there is more to come. Until the United States crafts a policy, decides on responses and pass legislation, Russia has nothing to stop their actions. What actions?

In part from Time: On March 2, a disturbing report hit the desks of U.S. counterintelligence officials in Washington. For months, American spy hunters had scrambled to uncover details of Russia’s influence operation against the 2016 presidential election. In offices in both D.C. and suburban Virginia, they had created massive wall charts to track the different players in Russia’s multipronged scheme. But the report in early March was something new.

It described how Russia had already moved on from the rudimentary email hacks against politicians it had used in 2016. Now the Russians were running a more sophisticated hack on Twitter. The report said the Russians had sent expertly tailored messages carrying malware to more than 10,000 Twitter users in the Defense Department. Depending on the interests of the targets, the messages offered links to stories on recent sporting events or the Oscars, which had taken place the previous weekend. When clicked, the links took users to a Russian-controlled server that downloaded a program allowing Moscow’s hackers to take control of the victim’s phone or computer–and Twitter account.

As they scrambled to contain the damage from the hack and regain control of any compromised devices, the spy hunters realized they faced a new kind of threat. In 2016, Russia had used thousands of covert human agents and robot computer programs to spread disinformation referencing the stolen campaign emails of Hillary Clinton, amplifying their effect. Now counterintelligence officials wondered: What chaos could Moscow unleash with thousands of Twitter handles that spoke in real time with the authority of the armed forces of the United States? At any given moment, perhaps during a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, Pentagon Twitter accounts might send out false information. As each tweet corroborated another, and covert Russian agents amplified the messages even further afield, the result could be panic and confusion.

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Americans generate a vast trove of data on what they think and how they respond to ideas and arguments–literally thousands of expressions of belief every second on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Google. All of those digitized convictions are collected and stored, and much of that data is available commercially to anyone with sufficient computing power to take advantage of it.

That’s where the algorithms come in. American researchers have found they can use mathematical formulas to segment huge populations into thousands of subgroups according to defining characteristics like religion and political beliefs or taste in TV shows and music. Other algorithms can determine those groups’ hot-button issues and identify “followers” among them, pinpointing those most susceptible to suggestion. Propagandists can then manually craft messages to influence them, deploying covert provocateurs, either humans or automated computer programs known as bots, in hopes of altering their behavior.

That is what Moscow is doing, more than a dozen senior intelligence officials and others investigating Russia’s influence operations tell TIME. The Russians “target you and see what you like, what you click on, and see if you’re sympathetic or not sympathetic,” says a senior intelligence official. Whether and how much they have actually been able to change Americans’ behavior is hard to say. But as they have investigated the Russian 2016 operation, intelligence and other officials have found that Moscow has developed sophisticated tactics.

In May 2016, a Russian military intelligence officer bragged to a colleague that his organization, known as the GRU, was getting ready to pay Clinton back for what President Vladimir Putin believed was an influence operation she had run against him five years earlier as Secretary of State. The GRU, he said, was going to cause chaos in the upcoming U.S. election.

What the officer didn’t know, senior intelligence officials tell TIME, was that U.S. spies were listening. They wrote up the conversation and sent it back to analysts at headquarters, who turned it from raw intelligence into an official report and circulated it. But if the officer’s boast seems like a red flag now, at the time U.S. officials didn’t know what to make of it. “We didn’t really understand the context of it until much later,” says the senior intelligence official. Investigators now realize that the officer’s boast was the first indication U.S. spies had from their sources that Russia wasn’t just hacking email accounts to collect intelligence but was also considering interfering in the vote. Like much of America, many in the U.S. government hadn’t imagined the kind of influence operation that Russia was preparing to unleash on the 2016 election. Fewer still realized it had been five years in the making.

Putin publicly accused then Secretary of State Clinton of running a massive influence operation against his country, saying she had sent “a signal” to protesters and that the State Department had actively worked to fuel the protests. The State Department said it had just funded pro-democracy organizations. Former officials say any such operations–in Russia or elsewhere–would require a special intelligence finding by the President and that Barack Obama was not likely to have issued one.

After his re-election the following year, Putin dispatched his newly installed head of military intelligence, Igor Sergun, to begin repurposing cyberweapons previously used for psychological operations in war zones for use in electioneering. Russian intelligence agencies funded “troll farms,” botnet spamming operations and fake news outlets as part of an expanding focus on psychological operations in cyberspace.

One particularly talented Russian programmer who had worked with social media researchers in the U.S. for 10 years had returned to Moscow and brought with him a trove of algorithms that could be used in influence operations. He was promptly hired by those working for Russian intelligence services, senior intelligence officials tell TIME. “The engineer who built them the algorithms is U.S.-trained,” says the senior intelligence official.

Soon, Putin was aiming his new weapons at the U.S. Following Moscow’s April 2014 invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. considered sanctions that would block the export of drilling and fracking technologies to Russia, putting out of reach some $8.2 trillion in oil reserves that could not be tapped without U.S. technology. As they watched Moscow’s intelligence operations in the U.S., American spy hunters saw Russian agents applying their new social media tactics on key aides to members of Congress. Moscow’s agents broadcast material on social media and watched how targets responded in an attempt to find those who might support their cause, the senior intelligence official tells TIME. “The Russians started using it on the Hill with staffers,” the official says, “to see who is more susceptible to continue this program [and] to see who would be more favorable to what they want to do.”

Finish reading this remarkable report here. There is much more detail, including cyber operations, candidates, analysis and concocted political scandals. If one wonders why there is yet no evidence presented yet by the FBI and what the members of Congress are told, you now have a clue. This investigative process is a very long one and attributions as well as analysis is cumbersome and heavy on expert resources.

CIA WikiLeaks Mole a Russian or Defector?

Posted on April 20, 2017April 20, 2017 by Denise Simon

The truth is often stranger than fiction and when it does finally come out, the twists and turns to the stories are shocking. So, it has been announced that the FBI and CIA are on a full blown mole search investigation to determine who within or as a contractor to the CIA is loyal or on the payroll of a foreign rogue nation such as Russia.

Schindler at the Observer wrote and explained that the last major Soviet penetration of NSA during the Cold War was Ron Pelton, a former agency analyst who started selling secrets to the KGB in 1980. Pelton betrayed highly sensitive signals intelligence programs to Moscow and was convicted of espionage in 1986 after Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB officer who temporarily defected to the United States, tipped off the FBI about an NSA source selling secrets to the Kremlin.

Image result for ron pelton espionage Quazoo

So, could it be Bernie Sanders? After all, he honeymooned in Yaroslavl, Soviet Union…not modern day Russia. Anyone hear of Evgeny Buryakov who is alleged to have attempted to recruit Carter Page an early advisor to Donald Trump? Could it be John Kerry himself as part of a larger plot for Russian cooperation over Syria or Iran? It is thought that the mole is an insider or contractor, yet who could pass thumb drives or envelops via dead drops?

None of the above is real or proven, it is just suggested to think out of the box as we are only restrained by our own limits of imagination. We had never heard of Edward Snowden either right?

*** What about those ‘Shadow Brokers’? One must understand the world of espionage and how it has adjusted due to the internet and global communications with encryption.

A message from Vladimir Putin can take many forms.

It can be as heavy-handed as a pair of Russian bombers buzzing the Alaska coast, or as lethal as the public assassination of a defector on the streets of Kiev. Now Putin may be sending a message to the American government through a more subtle channel: an escalating series of U.S. intelligence leaks that last week exposed a National Security Agency operation in the Middle East and the identity of an agency official who participated.

The leaks by self-described hackers calling themselves “the Shadow Brokers” began in the final months of the Obama administration and increased in frequency and impact after the U.S. bombing of a Syrian airfield this month—a move that angered Russia. The group has not been tied to the Kremlin with anything close to the forensic certitude of last year’s election-related hacks, but security experts say the Shadow Brokers’ attacks fit the pattern established by Russia’s GRU during its election hacking. In that operation, according to U.S. intelligence findings, Russia created fictitious Internet personas to launder some of their stolen emails, including the fake whistleblowing site called DCLeaks and a notional Romanian hacker named “Guccifer 2.0.”

“I think there’s something going on between the U.S. and Russia that we’re just seeing pieces of,” said security technologist Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at IBM Resilient. “What happens when the deep states go to war with each other and don’t tell the rest of us?”
The Shadow Brokers made their deubt in August, appearing out of nowhere to publish a set of secret hacking tools belonging to the “Equation Group”—the security industry’s name for the NSA’s elite Tailored Access Operations program, which penetrates foreign computers to gather intelligence. At that time, the Shadow Brokers claimed to be mercenary hackers trying to sell the NSA’s secrets to the highest bidder. But they went on to leak more files for free, seemingly timed with the public thrusts and parries between the Obama administration and the Russian government.

From the start, outside experts had little doubt that Russian intelligence was pulling the strings. “Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility,” exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted last August. “Why did they do it? No one knows, but I suspect this is more diplomacy than intelligence, related to the escalation around the [Democratic National Committee] hack.”

The FBI started investigating, and in August agents arrested an NSA contractor named Hal Martin after discovering that Martin had been stockpiling agency secrets in his house for two decades. But even as Martin cooled his heels in federal custody, the Shadow Brokers continued to post messages and files.

Snowden and other experts speculated that the Russians obtained the code without the help of an insider. As a matter of tradecraft, intelligence agencies, including the NSA, secretly own, lease, or hack so-called staging servers on the public internet to launch attacks anonymously. By necessity, those machines are loaded up with at least some of the agency’s tools. Snowden theorized that the Russians penetrated one of those servers and collected an NSA jackpot. “NSA malware staging servers getting hacked by a rival is not new,” he wrote.
Whatever their origin, the leaks dried up on Jan. 12, when the Shadow Brokers announced their “retirement” 10 days before Donald Trump’s swearing-in. The group didn’t reemerge until this month, after the Syrian military’s deadly chemical-weapons attack in Ghouta. Reportedly moved by images of the Syrian children injured or killed in the attack, Trump responded by ordering the launch of 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian government air base—departing drastically from the will of Putin, who considers Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a strategic ally.

The Russian government immediately condemned the U.S. response. Two days later, so did the Shadow Brokers. The group broke its months-long silence and released another tranche of NSA secrets along with a lengthy open letter to Trump protesting the Syrian missile strike. Abandoning any pretense of a profit motive, the Shadow Brokers claimed now to be disillusioned U.S. voters—“the peoples who getting you elected,” as they put in, using phrasing that holds dual meaning coming from a suspected Kremlin operation.

The Shadow Brokers have been playing hardball ever since. Their most recent release, on Friday, exposed the code for a sophisticated NSA toolkit targeting Windows machines, putting some of the agency’s capabilities, circa 2013, in the hands of every newbie hacker able to use a keyboard.

This time, the Shadow Brokers didn’t stop with code. For the first time in their short history, they also released internal NSA spreadsheets, documents, and slide decks, some bedecked with the insignia and “Top Secret” markings familiar to anyone who’s browsed the Snowden leaks.

The leak exposes in detail a 2013 NSA hacking operation called Jeep Flea Market that gained deep access to Dubai-based EastNets, a company that handles wire transfers for a number of Middle East banks, something of obvious interest to U.S. intelligence. (EastNets denies the breach.) But the Shadow Brokers exposed more than just an NSA operation. Metadata left in the files identified the full name of a 35-year-old NSA worker in San Antonio who was apparently involved in the hack. (The Daily Beast was unable to reach him for comment.)
NSA hackers don’t face the same danger as CIA officers working undercover in a foreign country, but the likelihood that Russia has begun exposing them by name, while linking them to specific operations, raises the stakes for the intelligence community. If nothing else, the San Antonio NSA worker could plausibly face criminal and civil charges in the United Arab Emirates, just as hackers working for Russian and Chinese intelligence have been indicted in the U.S.

It’s conceivable that the Shadow Brokers included the name by mistake. Groups like WikiLeaks and the journalists with the Snowden cache are accustomed to scrubbing identifying metadata from documents. But a less-experienced hand might overlook it. Schneier is doubtful. “If we’re assuming an intelligent and strategic actor, which I think we are, then you have to assume that they did that on purpose,” he said.

Nothing is certain; the Shadow Brokers are a puzzle with missing pieces. But Friday’s Shadow Brokers release obliterated one theory on the spot. The NSA would never have put classified spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides on a staging server. They could only have come from inside the NSA.

Which sets the stage for a revival of a storied Cold War intelligence ritual, with the declining agency morale that comes with it: the Russian mole hunt. “I think we’re most likely looking at someone who went rogue from within, or a contractor who had access to this information,” said Eric O’Neill, national-security strategist for Carbon Black. “Either way, we have someone in the intelligence community that’s a pretty high-placed spy.”

A former FBI surveillance specialist, in 2001 O’Neill helped bring down Robert Hannsen, a double agent in the bureau who’d been secretly spying for Russia. “The FBI must be scrambling right now,” he said. “There’s so many leaks going on: this leak, the CIA Vault7 leaks, and at the same time there’s the investigation into any administration ties to Russia, and the DNC intrusion, and all these leaks coming out of the White House. There’s only so much that the FBI’s national security agents can do.”

If Russia did have a mole inside the NSA in 2013, the most recent date of the documents, Schneier thinks it unlikely that it does now, or else the Shadow Brokers wouldn’t exist. “You only publish when it’s more useful as an embarrassment than as intelligence,” he said. “So if you have a human asset inside the NSA, you wouldn’t publish. That asset is too important.”

It’s also possible, though unprecedented in the public record, that Russia found a way into the NSA’s classified network. A competing theory focuses on the FBI’s early suspect, Hal Martin. He’s not the Shadow Brokers, but he reportedly worked in the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations program and had 50,000 gigabytes of classified material in his home. Might he himself have been hacked? Martin is charged in Maryland with 20 counts of willful retention of national defense information, but prosecutors have not made any accusation that his trove slipped into enemy hands.

As Snowden demonstrated when he walked out of the NSA with a thumb drive of secrets, it’s comparatively easy now to steal and smuggle classified information. But O’Neill says the FBI’s counterintelligence mission is easier too, because of the rampant audit trails and server logs in classified networks.

“It’s much easier getting the secrets out now, but on the flip side, it’s also easier for law enforcement and the FBI to track down who had access to the data,” he says. “I like to think this mole hunt is going to be a little easier than it was in the past.”

Until then, expect the Shadow Brokers to stick around. In their Friday dump, they hinted at more revelations this week: “Who knows what we having next time?”

*** WASHINGTON — Forget about spies. It’s rogue insiders that cause heartburn at U.S. intelligence agencies these days.

Few spy cases have broken in the past decade and a half. In contrast, a proliferation of U.S. intelligence and military insiders have gone rogue and spilled secrets to journalists or WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group.

The leaks are as damaging as any major spy case, perhaps more so. And they have underscored the ease of stealing secrets in the modern age, sometimes with a single stroke of a keyboard.

Since early March, WikiLeaks has published part of a trove of documents purportedly created by cyber units of the Central Intelligence Agency. WikiLeaks continues to upload the documents and hacking tools, dubbed Vault 7, to the internet for all to see.

For its part, a mysterious group that calls itself the Shadow Brokers has re-emerged and dumped a large catalog of stolen National Security Agency hacking tools on the internet, including evidence the agency had penetrated Middle Eastern banking networks.

“In the past, we’ve lost secrets to foreign adversaries,” retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of both the CIA and the NSA, said in an interview. “Now we’ve got the self-motivated insider that is our most important counterintelligence challenge.”

Hayden cited the cases of Army Pfc. Chelsea Manning, convicted in 2013 for releasing three-quarters of a million classified or sensitive military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. He also mentioned Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who shook public opinion with his disclosures to journalists in 2013 about U.S. surveillance practices. Hayden added the Vault 7 disclosures last month, which others presume were stolen by a contract employee at the CIA. Read more here.

North Korea’s Weapons Program Includes More Countries

Posted on March 20, 2017March 20, 2017 by Denise Simon

We can go back to 1968 when North Korea hijacked our naval intelligence ship USS Pueblo as a reminder for the basis on how to address North Korea today.

Image result for uss puelbo

Then as today, Russia collaborated with North Korea as does Iran. North Korea dispatched 2 MiG fighter jets along with several attack submarines in the capture of the Pueblo. At the time was also the Vietnam war of which Russia provided unmeasured military support to North Vietnam and did not want to add another theater of conflict with the United States, as noted by the Blue House raid. noted by the In fact, China cannot be overlooked either for many reasons.

Newly placed U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is traveling the region meeting with Asian leaders on the matter of stopping North Korea. The question is how far and wide are these talks with regard to additional countries cooperation with North Korea.

As for Iran and North Korea, The Telegraph reported the following:

The Shahab-3 is a modified version of North Korea’s Nodong missile which itself is based on the old Soviet-made Scud.

The Nodong, which Iran secretly acquired from North Korea in the mid-1990s, is designed to carry a conventional warhead. But Iranian engineers have been working for several years to adapt the Shahab-3 to carry nuclear weapons.

“This is a major breakthrough for the Iranians,” said a senior US official. “They have been trying to do this for years and now they have succeeded. It is a very disturbing development.”

The Shahab 3 has a range of 800 miles, enabling it to hit a wide range of targets throughout the Middle East – including Israel.

Image result for north korea high thrust engine UPI

Further in 2015, Forbes reported collaboration between Iran and North Korea where the exchange of engineers and scientists between the two countries is common:

North Korea and Iran are believed to be exchanging critical stuff – North Korean experts and workers remaining in place while Iran sends observers to check out intermittent North Korean missile launches and see what North Korea is doing about staging a fourth underground nuclear explosion.

The nuclear exchange revolves around North Korea’s program for developing warheads with highly enriched uranium – with centrifuges and centrifuge technology in part acquired from Iran. At the same time, North Korea is able to assist Iran in miniaturizing warheads to fit on missiles – a goal the North has long been pursuing – and also can supply uranium and other metals mined in its remote mountain regions.

“North Korea continues to supply technology, components, and even raw materials for Iran’s HEU weaponization program,” says Bruce Bechtol, author of numerous books and studies on North Korea’s military and political ambitions. Moreover, he says, “They are even helping Iran to pursue a second track by helping them to build a plutonium reactor.”

That assessment supports the view of analysts that Iran is counting on North Korean expertise in constructing a reactor that produces warheads with plutonium. The reactor would be a more powerful version of the aging five-megawatt “experimental” reactor with which the North has built perhaps a dozen warheads at its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, including three that it’s tested underground — in October 2006, May 2009 and February 2013, two years ago this month.

Then comes China, where the entire North Korea internet platform used by North Korea is hosted by China. Beyond managing cyber systems for North Korea, China is also collaborating with North Korea on nuclear weapons at key production sites producing lithium for thermonuclear and boosted fission research and development.

Sanctions have been placed on North Korea due to violations of UN resolutions due to the weapons of mass destruction operations which does include missiles and the nuclear program. However, North Korea has not been affected with regard to the research/development and production due to out of country front operations where China and Malaysia are involved.

Forbes also reported:

Although the UN resolutions have highly restricted North Korea’s access to the financial system on paper, the report suggests that these sanctions have not affected the ability of North Korean networks such as Pan Systems Pyongyang to finance its operations, asserting that the network maintains bank accounts in China, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Middle East. By conducting financial transactions under the names of its affiliates such as Pan Systems Singapore, the company has been able to maintain sufficient financial access to the international financial system that it was able to transfer funds to a supply chain of more than twenty companies in China, and has also used front companies to conduct transactions via Hong Kong-registered companies that were cleared through U.S. correspondent banks in New York. The Panel of Experts report also provides details on the interception in the Suez Canal of the Cambodian-flagged and North Korean-crew piloted Jie Shun in what it categorizes as the “largest interdicted ammunition consignment in DPRK sanctions history,” superseding the 2013 interdiction of the North Korean flagged Chong Chon Gang ship that was loaded with vintage Cuban munitions and airplane parts. The interdiction of the Jie Shun by Egypt revealed a cargo from North Korea through the Suez Canal containing 30,000 PG-7 rocket propelled grenades (RPG) and related sub-components shipped in wooden crates concealed under 2,300 tons of limonite (iron ore). The Jie Shun evaded detection by cutting off GPS during most of its journey, with the exception of transit through heavily trafficked straits and ports. The shipment from Haeju in North Korea to an undisclosed Middle Eastern destination were falsely labeled as “assembly parts for an underwater pump,” and the bill of lading showed the address of the “Dalian Haoda Petroleum Chemical Company, Ltd.”

Rex Tillerson stated that ‘strategic patience’ has run out with regard to North Korea and all options remain on the table including preemptive strikes. North Korea has launched 46 missiles since 2011 and the most recent launch was to test a super high thrust rocket steering engine which was designed by Russian blueprints and engineers.

Tillerson at the DMZ lexpress.fr

The addition of a four-chamber steering engine further points toward a design rooted in Soviet missile technology as RD-250 and its descendants – when used on the R-36 missile and Tsiklon-2/3 orbital launchers – were coupled with a four-chamber RD-68M steering engine.

Photo: KCNA

This engine adaptation in all likelihood uses Unsymmetrical Dimethylhydrazine and Nitrogen Tetroxide propellants – a more powerful combination in terms of specific impulse compared to the Nitric Acid / UDMH propellant used by North Korea’s Unha booster