Saudi Arabia Reveals Iran Spy Ring and JPOA

Posted on January 12, 2016January 12, 2016 by Denise Simon

Saudi Cites Iran Spy Ring

ABU DHABI [MENL] — Saudi Arabia, amid a propaganda war, has reported an Iranian espionage presence in the Gulf Cooperation Council kingdom.

Officials said authorities have launched prosecution of four Iranians on charges of espionage. They said at least one of the defendants was accused of working for Iranian intelligence and recruited Saudi nationals.

This marked the second alleged Iranian spy cell dismantled in Saudi Arabia over the last year. Officials said a fifth Iranian was also accused of being part of the cell and linked to attacks in the Gulf Cooperation Council kingdom since 2003.

Officials said the fifth Iranian, sentenced to 13 years, was convicted of recruiting Saudis in Iran and sending them to fight in Afghanistan. The Iranian, who was not identified, was also charged with relaying funds for recruitment.

The Iranian espionage cell, reported in the Saudi-controlled media, was disclosed amid the crisis with Teheran fueled by Riyad’s execution of a leading Shi’ite cleric. The Saudi leadership has responded to Iranian condemnations by releasing information on Teheran’s executions of hundreds of dissidents over the last two years.

The Saudi media said the latest Iranian espionage cell stemmed from the arrival of an Iranian intelligence officer to the annual pilgrimage in the Saudi city of Mecca. The media said the cell, detected as early as 2014, also planned attacks but did not elaborate.

Riyad was said to have dismantled a previous Iranian cell in 2013. The Saudi media said the cell consisted of at least 27 alleged members, 24 of them Saudis and the rest nationals from Iran, Lebanon and Turkey.

Officials said Iran has sought to infiltrate Saudi Arabia from both the northern and southern border. On Jan. 8, the Saudi military battled hundreds of Iranian-backed Houthi fighters from neighboring Yemen, 35 of them were killed in the Raboua region.

“We are looking at additional measures to be taken if it [Iran] continues with its current policies,” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir said on Jan. 9.

Meanwhile, there is little in the news about the JOPA, the P5+1 Iranian nuclear deal and there are good reasons…..lifting sanctions.

The Implications of Sanctions Relief Under the Iran Agreement

Congressional testimony by Mark Dubowitz

(1) The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’s (JCPOA) major design flaws, which provide Iran with patient paths to nuclear weapons and greater ballistic missile, heavy weaponry, and economic capabilities;

(2) The interplay between the P5+1 economic sanctions “snapback” and Iran’s “nuclear snapback” in limiting the ability of the United States to impose sanctions (a) to address Iranian non-compliance with the JCPOA and, (b) to punish Iranian illicit conduct in a range of non-nuclear activities such as support for terrorism; and,

(3) How sanctions relief under the JCPOA benefits the most hardline elements in Iran including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

First, on so-called “Implementation Day,” Iran will receive substantial sanctions relief with which it can defend its economy against future sanctions pressure. Iran may also use sanctions relief to increase its support for terrorism and other rogue regimes and to expand its conventional military power. The JCPOA front-loads sanctions relief, providing Iran with access to around $100 billion in restricted oil revenues and reconnecting Iranian banks, including the Central Bank of Iran, back into the global financial system. Sanctions on Iran’s crude oil export transactions will be lifted, as will sanctions on key sectors of the Iranian economy including upstream energy investment and energy-related technology transfers, the auto industry, petrochemicals, and shipping, as well as the precious metals trade. This sanctions relief will enable Iran to build greater economic resilience against future pressure—both sanctions aimed at isolating other illicit financial conduct and so-called “snapback” sanctions in the event of Iranian nuclear non-compliance.

Then, after five years, or earlier if the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reaches a broader conclusion that Iran’s nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes, the international arms embargo will be lifted, meaning that Iran can also expand its conventional military capabilities and those of its proxies. Former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, one of the other witnesses at this hearing, noted one week before the announcement of the JCPOA that lifting the arms embargo “would be a great mistake. Iran is selling arms, giving arms, fueling civil wars in Yemen, in Lebanon, in Syria and Iraq, and so those arms prohibitions on Iran are very important.”1 He also has explained that the arms embargo was put in place “for very good reason.” He continued that it is not in the interest of the United States “to see these arms embargos lifted from Iran. It is an issue that should not be part of these negotiations. … I think we ought to maintain these U.N. embargos.”2 In five years, however, they will disappear, giving Iran access to combat aircraft, attack helicopters, battle tanks, among other advanced weapons systems. Read the full testimony here.

Secret Companies with Secret Objectives Near You

Posted on January 12, 2016January 12, 2016 by Denise Simon

Is the nation’s largest online retailer part of a spy network? Have you given thought to the countless databases, harvesting data, human behavior, and all the interactions you have through the internet? Is Amazon now part of a larger incubation center for the federal government? You decide.

Amazon network

Why Amazon’s Data Centers Are Hidden in US Spy Country

DefenseOne: Of all the places where Amazon operates data centers, northern Virginia is one of the most significant, in part because it’s where AWS first set up shop in 2006. It seemed appropriate that this vision quest to see The Cloud across America which began at the ostensible birthplace of the Internet should end at the place that’s often to blame when large parts of the U.S. Internet dies.

Northern Virginia is a pretty convenient place to start a cloud-services business: for reasons we’ll get into later, it’s a central region for Internet backbone. For the notoriously economical and utilitarian Amazon, this meant that it could quickly set up shop with minimal overhead in the area, leasing or buying older data centers rather than building new ones from scratch.

The ease with which AWS was able to get off the ground by leasing colocation space in northern Virginia in 2006 is the same reason that US-East is the most fragile molecule of the AWS cloud: it’s old, and it’s running on old equipment in old buildings.

Or, that’s what one might conclude from spending a day driving around looking for and at these data centers. When I contacted AWS to ask specific questions about the data-center region, how they ended up there, and the process of deciding between building data centers from scratch versus leasing existing ones, they declined to comment.

The fact that northern Virginia is home to major intelligence operations and to major nodes of network infrastructure isn’t exactly a sign of government conspiracy so much as a confluence of histories (best documented by Paul Ceruzzi in his criminally under-read history Internet Alley: High Technology In Tysons Corner, 1945-2005). To explain why a region surrounded mostly by farmland and a scattering of American Civil War monuments is a central point of Internet infrastructure, we have to go back to where a lot of significant moments in Internet history take place: the Cold War.

Postwar suburbanization and the expansion of transportation networks are occasionally overlooked, but weirdly crucial facets of the military-industrial complex. While suburbs were largely marketed to the public via barely concealed racism and the appeal of manicured “natural” landscapes, suburban sprawl’s dispersal of populations also meant increased likelihood of survival in the case of nuclear attack. Highways both facilitated suburbs and supported the movement of ground troops across the continental United States, should they need to defend it (lest we forget that the legislation that funded much of the U.S. highway system was called the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956).

Unlike Google and Facebook, AWS doesn’t aggressively brand or call attention to their data centers. They absolutely don’t give tours, and their website offers only rough approximations of the locations of their data centers, which are divided into “regions.” Within a region lies at minimum two “availability zones” and within the availability zones there are a handful of data centers.

I knew I wasn’t going to be able to find the entirety of AWS’ northern Virginia footprint, but I could probably find bits and pieces of it. My itinerary was a slightly haphazard one, based on looking for anything tied to Vadata, Inc., Amazon’s subsidiary company for all things data-center-oriented.

Facebook data-center

Google’s web crawlers don’t particularly care about AWS’ preference of staying below the radar, and searching for Vadata, Inc. sometimes pulls up addresses that probably first appeared on some deeply buried municipal paperwork and were added to Google Maps by a robot. It’s also not too hard to go straight to those original municipal documents with addresses and other cool information, like fines from utility companies and documentation of tax arrangements made specifically for AWS. (Pro tip for the rookie data-center mapper: if you’re looking for the data centers of other major companies, Foursquare check-ins are also a surprisingly rich resource). My weird hack research methods returned a handful of Vadata addresses scattered throughout the area: Ashburn, Sterling, Haymarket, Manassas, Chantilly. Much more of the report is here.

Amazon’s Cloud center

CNBC: Palantir is notorious for its secrecy, and for good reason. Its software allows customers to make sense of massive amounts of sensitive data to enable fraud detection, data security, rapid health care delivery and catastrophe response.

Government agencies are big buyers of the technology. The FBI, CIA, Department of Defense and IRS have all been customers. Between 30 and 50 percent of Palantir’s business is tied to the public sector, according to people familiar with its finances. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, was an early investor.

Annual revenue topped $1.5 billion in 2015, sources say, meaning Palantir is bigger than top publicly traded cloud software companies like Workday and ServiceNow. It has about 1,800 employees and is growing headcount 30 percent annually, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the numbers are private.

Palantir serves up free meals for employees at 542 High Street, home to its cafeteria. A red sign reading “Private Company Meal” is attached to the window, and a neon blue sign on the inside says “Hobbit House.”

Other perks, according to people with knowledge of the company’s policies, include subsidized housing for employees who live in the neighborhood and help with monthly commuter Caltrain passes for those traveling down from San Francisco or up from San Jose. Employees who drive in get complimentary parking permits.

“They’re making a commitment here,” said Cannon.

“The idea is that it’s physically locked down and there’s no way you can take information out.” -Avivah Litan, Gartner analyst

For Palantir to stay, it has no choice but to spread out. Only one building in downtown Palo Alto even tops 100,000 square feet, and last year city officials limited total annual development in the commercial districts to 50,000 square feet.

There’s another benefit to having a disparate campus. In doing highly classified work for government agencies, some contracts require the use of particular types of units called Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs.

Avivah Litan, a cybersecurity analyst with Gartner, says qualities of a SCIF building include advanced biometrics for security, walls that are impenetrable by radio waves and heavily protected storage of both physical items and digital data.

“They have to make the walls so that no signals can be transmitted out of those walls,” said Litan, who is based in Washington, D.C. “The idea is that it’s physically locked down and there’s no way you can take information out.”

Having entirely separate facilities makes it easier to clear that hurdle, but even so, the vast majority of Palantir’s offices aren’t SCIFs. Read the full summary here.

Facts of the Guzman Re-Capture, Warning Graphic

Posted on January 11, 2016January 11, 2016 by Denise Simon

Sean Penn is gonna make a movie? He used a Mexican actress as the go-between? Signals intelligence and cell (burn) phone tracking? Yes all of those but much more.

The region where el Chapo Guzman lives is well protected by all other residents in the area, they are on the Guzman payroll. We have known for years his location, at issue was crafting a well organized and well trained military style operation to re-capture him. There is some chatter that finally too, Mexico will extradite Guzman to the United States, but that could take at least a year. What is worse, Guzman was not taken to another prison with higher security but rather back to the very prison from which he escaped. What????

So, what role did the United States play in this recent capture of Guzman? A BIG one.

JSOC’s Secretive Delta Force Operators on the Ground for El Chapo Capture

Murphy/SofRep: Mexico’s most notorious drug lord, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, was recaptured following an intense firefight between Mexican Marines and Chapo’s goons in Sinaloa, Mexico, last Friday. Although Mexican officials claimed that the entire operation to recapture El Chapo after he escaped from prison for the second time was planned and executed by Mexico, multiple sources report to SOFREP that American law enforcement officers and JSOC operators were involved in the mission.

The operation, dubbed “Black Swan” by the Mexican government, was actually targeting Chapo’s lead sicario (assassin) but came across the cartel leader by chance. The Mexican Marines stormed the house, and in the ensuing firefight five cartel gunmen were killed and six were injured. One Marine was also injured. During the firefight, Chapo escaped through a series of tunnels and then tried to flee in a stolen vehicle. Federal agents caught sight of him and arrested him on the spot. According to one account, the arresting agents had not even been aware of the larger mission being carried out in the area by Mexican Marines. Arresting Chapo was simply a chance encounter, a stroke of good luck.

Rumors of American special operations personnel roaming around the badlands of Mexico have been floating around for well over a decade at this point, but the idea of bearded, ball cap- and Oakley-wearing American soldiers south of the border has been more fiction than fact. JSOC maintained a small analysis cell in Mexico, but the Mexican government has been extremely wary of an American military presence on the ground. Much of this has to do with fears of neocolonialism, as well as Latin American machismo—insecurity over the fact that Mexico cannot manage its own internal affairs.

(Pics of the recent raid that resulted in the capture of El Chapo)

While America’s so-called “war on drugs” is perhaps at an all-time low socially and politically, with our focus on the Middle East, the capture of El Chapo is still a tactical win for the United States, even if it only gets us incrementally closer to securing the rule of law in Mexico.

In the lead for the capture were the Mexican Marines, who are the go-to preferred force for counter-drug cartel operations in a country where public officials are often hopelessly corrupt. It is interesting to see how, around 2006 or 2007, the Mexican Marines suddenly became very effective at direct-action (DA) raids. Such raids were responsible for capturing and killing high-value targets (HVTs), causing speculation that the Marines were receiving a little help from their North American neighbors. America has also leveraged its significant signals intelligence (SIGINT) capabilities to help the Mexican authorities track down drug cartel leaders.

(Another Chapo goon killed in the raid that resulted in his capture)

In regards to the latest El Chapo capture, SOFREP has been told that it was actually the U.S. Marshals who had an important role in tracking down the drug lord. Also on the ground was the U.S. Army’s elite counterterrorism unit, Delta Force. Operators from Delta served as tactical advisors but did not directly participate in the operation.

This type of arrangement is hardly unprecedented, as Delta also worked in the shadows during the search for, and eventual killing of, Pablo Escabar in Colombia. They’ve also served in advisory capacities during hostage-rescue missions in places as diverse as Sudan and Peru. Delta Force has also remained behind the scenes in the capture of other HVTs, from Manuel Noriega in Panama during the 1989 invasion, to the killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein in Iraq in 2003. Also worth noting is the unit’s role in tracking down and arresting Bosnian war criminals in the 1990s.

Although Delta had some level of involvement in the operation, their presence is probably less interesting than many would assume. Law enforcement agencies often request the presence of Delta operators as advisors to sensitive operations. These operators are often there putting in face time to appease the request of a federal agency, but may have little if any actual participation in the planning and execution of events. Such was the case when Delta was asked to consult on the Waco stand-off between the ATF, FBI, and the Branch Davidians in 1993. Law enforcement agencies are said to regard the presence of a JSOC operator as a sort of lucky talisman.

The good news is that it is now unlikely that Chapo will be escaping from prison a third time as the Mexican government is signaling that he will be extradited to the United States to face prosecution. When the black Chinook comes for Chapo, we will know that he will finally face the justice that he has long evaded.

SERCO, Unknown but Really Known….

Posted on January 10, 2016January 10, 2016 by Denise Simon

Serco U.S. political donations found here. This is the exact type of company where spies…spy.

Further reading, Serco’s 2014 financial results and strategy review.

By Zerohedge: Serco. Chances are you’ve never heard of the company. If you have heard of the company, chances are you misunderstand the shear enormity of the global company and their contracts.

From transport to air traffic control, getting your license in Canada, to running all 7 immigration detention centers in Australia, private prisons in the UK, military base presence, running nuclear arsenals, and running all state schools in Bradford, Serco, somewhere, has played a part in moving, educating, or detaining people.

New contracts awarded to Serco include a Saudi Railway Company, further air traffic control in the US and also IT support services for various European agencies. You can read more on their future projects below.

Serco HY15 Results SEA 11 August 2015

A Very Brief History

Serco’s history began in 1929 as a UK subsidiary, RCA Services Limited to support the cinema industry.

In the 1960s the company made a leap into military contracts to maintain the UK Air Force base Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. From there, the company continues to grow.

Now trading as Serco Group, 2015 trading as of August 11 2015, maintained a revenue of £3.5 billion, and an underlying trading profit of £90 million. The data was presented at JPMorgan in London.

In 2013 Serco was considered a potential risk, and became a representation of the dangers of outsourcing. The U.K. government developed contingency plans in case Serco went bankrupt. When the concerns came to light, Serco faced bans (along with G4S, another outsourcing contractor) from further bidding on new U.K. government work for six months. It wasn’t until Rupert Soames OBE – Sir Winston Churchill’s grandson – took on the job as Serco’s Chief Executive in 2014, that Serco turned a new corner of profit growth.

Serco Today

Serco today is one of the biggest global companies to exist. They have contracts with:

Alliant – the vehicle for IT services across the Federal IT market;

National Security Personnel System (NSPS) – For “(NSPS) training and facilitating services throughout the Department of Defense (DoD) and agencies that needs NSPS training and implementation services;”

Seaport – The NAVSEA SEAPORT Multiple Award contract focuses on “engineering, technical, and programmatic support services for the Warfare Centers.” This is inclusive of Homeland Security and Force Protection, Strategic Weapons Systems, and multiple warfare systems.

CIP-SP3 Services and Solutions (Cost $20 Billion, expiration date 2022) – biomedical-related IT services with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with the main objective focused on Biomedical Research and Health Sciences extending to information systems throughout the federal government. Also implementation in several key areas of Biomedical Sciences including legislation and critical infrastructure protection.

The few contracts listed above are among the vast array of transport, detention center and private prison contracts.

Serco, the biggest company you’ve never heard of…..

Yes!, the FBI’s Successful Child Porn Sting

Posted on January 10, 2016January 10, 2016 by Denise Simon

FBI hacks world’s largest child porn site, 1,300 arrested

The ‘unprecedented’ sting op saw 1,300 people arrested.

The site, known as ‘Playpen’, launched in August 2014 and allowed users to sign up and upload images, primarily for “the advertisement and distribution of child pronagraphy”. This websites isn’t like an adult pornography website as it’s on the dark web, adult pornography websites such as fulltube you can find simply by searching in your normal browser but sites like Playpen you need to access the dark web first.

Within a month of Playpen’s launch, the website had garnered nearly 60,000 members. By 2015 that number had jumped to almost 215,000, with 11,000 unique users visiting the site each week, and a total of 117,000 posts.

Many of those posts contained some of the most extreme child abuse images one could imagine, according to FBI testimony seen byMotherboard.

Although the website also included advice on how users could avoid online detection, a sting operation began in February 2015 when the FBI hacked into the website’s server, but decided not to shut it down.

The bureau took the ‘unprecedented’ measure of running Playpen to spy on its users and hack their IP addresses, leading to the arrests.

According to Motherboard, a public defender for one of the accused called the operation an “extraordinary expansion of government surveillance and its use of illegal search methods on a massive scale.”

*** The Dark Web and the FBI

Motherboard: While it looks like several of those already charged will plead guilty to online child pornography crimes, one defense team has made the extraordinary step of arguing to have their client’s case thrown out completely. Their main argument is that the FBI, in briefly running the child pornography site from its own servers in Virginia, itself distributed an “untold” amount of illegal material.

“There is no law enforcement exemption, or statutory exemption for the distribution of child pornography,” Colin Fieman, one of the federal public defenders filing the motion to dismiss the indictment, claimed in a phone interview earlier this week. Jay Michaud, a Vancouver teacher arrested in July 2015, is also being represented by Linda Sullivan.

“THE GOVERNMENT’S OPERATION OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST ‘HIDDEN SERVER’ CHILD PORNOGRAPHY SITE AND ITS GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION OF UNTOLD NUMBERS OF PICTURES AND VIDEOS IS OUTRAGEOUS CONDUCT THAT SHOULD RESULT IN DISMISSAL OF THE INDICTMENT,” a court filing dated November 20, 2015 reads.

Fieman and Sullivan reason that if the methods of the investigation that supposedly identified his client “cannot be reconciled with fundamental expectations of decency and fairness,” then the indictment should be dismissed.

A section of the filing, which outlines the defense lawyers’ argument.

In February 2015, the FBI seized the server of “Playpen,” which court documents described as “the largest remaining known child pornography hidden service in the world.” Instead of shutting the site down straight away, however, the FBI moved Playpen to a government controlled server in Virginia, and deployed a network investigative technique (NIT)—the agency’s term for a hacking tool—in an attempt to identify people logging into the site. This NIT, according to other court documents, collected approximately “1300 true internet protocol (IP) addresses” between February 20 and March 4.

In their argument, Fieman and Sullivan point to the Department of Justice’s own view on the harm caused by the proliferation of child pornography. “Once an image is on the Internet, it is irretrievable and can continue to circulate forever,” the Department of Justice website reads. In an April 2015 press release, US Attorney Josh J. Minkler said that “Producing and distributing child pornography re-victimizes our children every time it is passed from one person to another.”

In essence, the lawyers’ point is that the FBI was, by running Playpen from its own servers, essentially distributing child pornography.

So, according to their argument, it is unclear how the “Government can possibly justify the massive distribution of child pornography that it accomplished in this case.”

They then posit that, rather than taking over the site to deploy a bulk hacking technique, and allowing the site to continue to distribute child pornography material in the process, the FBI could have posted individual links to malware-laden files on the site without running it from their own servers. Or, after seizing the site, the agency could have redirected users to a spoofed version of it, minus the child pornography material.

“We are in a protracted street fight with the Department of Justice and the FBI”

Instead, the FBI “continued to distribute thousands of illicit pictures and videos to thousands of visitors,” the filing states. It compares the case to “Operation Fast and Furious”: Between 2009 and 2011, law enforcement agents infamously proliferated illegal weapons in an attempt to trace them to Mexican drug cartels. Some of the weapons, however, ended up being used in the murder of a US Border Patrol agent.

The Department of Justice did not reply to repeated requests for comment. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication, but a spokesperson previously told Motherboard, “We are not able to comment on ongoing investigations, or describe the use of specific investigative techniques.”

This argument to dismiss the indictment is just one of the more recent phases of a heated legal back-and-forth between Michaud’s lawyers and the government. Since October, dozens of documents have been filed in the case, including motions to seal documents, affidavits, modifications to protective orders, and delays to responses.

“We are in a protracted street fight with the Department of Justice and the FBI,” Fieman told Motherboard.

Some of the issues circle around evidence: the defense argues that its client has not had access to important discovery information. It has had some success on that front though: on December 10, the Government wrote that the defense counsel will be provided with the computer code of the NIT under a protective order. The defense is also expected to receive a detailed list of the number of child pornography materials on Playpen while it was being run from an FBI server.

The government’s response to the motion to dismiss the indictment is currently sealed. It’s unclear how the government has replied to the lawyer’s arguments, but this move to have the indictment against a suspected online child pornographer totally scraped is a surprising and dramatic turn in a case that continues to grow in scope.

11 20 2015 Motion to Dismiss Indictment