Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security

Resistance Recess, Townhall Protests Operations

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Attend a Resistance Recess Event: Save our Health Care, our Communities, and our Democracy

The week of February 18–26 is the first recess of the 115th Congress—time specifically set aside for members of Congress to meet with constituents and get the pulse of the communities they represent.

This is the perfect time to raise our voices. We will show up at our elected officials’ events, town halls, other public appearances, and even plan our own events, if they refuse to meet with us, to make it clear to those who represent us, as well as to the media, that tolerance of Trump’s hurtful agenda is unacceptable and politically toxic.

*** And they are fulfilling the mission:

Protesters, supporters of Trump rally outside Darrell Issa’s office

House Oversight chair Jason Chaffetz slams town hall protesters

Noisy town hall protests show how the left is trying out tea party tactics to fight Trump
McClintock is escorted by police as protesters followed him shouting "Shame on you!"
McClintock is escorted by police as protesters followed him shouting “Shame on you!” Randall Benton / Sacramento Bee
***

Resistance Recess Materials

 

General materials:

Media/Press Guides:

Issue specific materials:

Training videos:

Inauguration Day Protests, Looting, Destruction = Arrests

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Image result for black bloc A global operation that began apparently in 2001. While this article is not fully vetted, there is no reason to assume it is false.

Blocks away from the swearing in on Inauguration Day for Donald Trump, there were several pockets where all kinds of nasty things were going on by people associated with the Black Bloc. As reported by USA Today in early February:

Swarms of people dressed in black invaded what was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration against right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulous on Wednesday evening.

The group tossed smoke bombs, set fires and started fights on the University of California – Berkeley campus where Yiannopoulous was slated to speak. He never would.

The protest’s organizers, the Berkeley Against Trump coalition, said the peaceful acts of the 1,500 demonstrators were marred by 50 to 75 anti-fascist Black Bloc protestors.

Outside of Berkeley, media outlets have linked Black Blocs to a number of modern protests, most recently in efforts opposing President Donald Trump. The Nation credits a Black Bloc protestor with punching alt-right leader Richard Spencer in the face on Trump’s inauguration day.  The Washington Post said Black Blocs were involved with violent protests in Washington, D.C. on inauguration day and in Portland following Trump’s election win.

*** For more on the tactics, training and preparation of Black Bloc, go here.

So, where are we now on those protestors in Washington DC?

Per the indictment in part:

(hereinafter, the “Rioting Defendants”) willfully engaged, incited, and

urged other people to engage in a riot, that is, a public disturbance involving an assemblage of

five or more persons, that by tumultuous and violent conduct and the threat thereof, resulted in

serious bodily harm or property damage in excess of $5,000.

  1. lt was a part of this riot that the Rioting Defendants and others gathered on the

morning of January 20, 2017 , in and around Logan Circle located at 1 3m Street and P Street

NW, Washington, D.C.

  1. lt was a part of this riot that, on January 20, 2017 ,The Rioting Defendants used a

tactic called the “Black Bloc” in which individual defendants wore black or dark colored clothing,

gloves, scarves, sunglasses, ski masks, gas masks, goggles, helmets, hoodies, and other face concealing

and face protecting items to conceal their identities in an effort to prevent law

enforcement from being able to identify the individual perpetrators of violence or destruction.

  1. lt was a part of this riot that, on January 20,2017, to facilitate violence and

destruction, individual defendants and others participating in the Black Bloc armed themselves

with items that could be used to damage persons and property. These items included hammers,

crowbars, metal poles, wooden sticks, wooden poles, bricks, rocks, pieces of concrete, lighters,

flares, firecrackers, and other explosive devices.

  1. lt was a part of this riot that, on January 20, 2017, individual defendants and

others participating in the Black Bloc brought face masks, gas masks, and goggles to eliminate

or mitigate the effectiveness of crowd control measures that might be used by law enforcement.

  1. lt was a part of this riot that, at or about 10:19 AM on January 20, 2017 ‘The

Rioting Defendants and others moved south from Logan Circle on 13h Street NW as part of the

Black Bloc.

7 . lt was a part of this riot that, at about 10:19 AM on January 20′ 201 7, individuals

participating in the Black Bloc carried flares and lit firecrackers and fireworks as the Rioting

Defendants and others moved south on 136 Street NW.

  1. lt was a part of this riot that, at or about 10:2 1 AM on January 20, 201 7, within

t\ /o (2) blocks of leaving Logan Circle, individuals participating in Black Bloc started breaking (..)

Read the full document here along with the 200+ that were arrested and charged.

California Secede from United States, Courtesy of Russia

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The movement:

In our view, the United States of America represents so many things that conflict with Californian values, and our continued statehood means California will continue subsidizing the other states to our own detriment, and to the detriment of our children.

Although charity is part of our culture, when you consider that California’s infrastructure is falling apart, our public schools are ranked among the worst in the entire country, we have the highest number of homeless persons living without shelter and other basic necessities, poverty rates remain high, income inequality continues to expand, and we must often borrow money from the future to provide services for today, now is not the time for charity.

However, this independence referendum is about more than California subsidizing other states of this country. It is about the right to self-determination and the concept of voluntary association, both of which are supported by constitutional and international law.

It is about California taking its place in the world, standing as an equal among nations. We believe in two fundamental truths: (1) California exerts a positive influence on the rest of the world, and (2) California could do more good as an independent country than it is able to do as just a U.S. state.

In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the international community with their “Brexit” vote. Our “Calexit” referendum is about California joining the international community. You have a big decision to make.

****

He’s the founder of a Californian independence movement. Just don’t ask him why he lives in Russia.

WaPo: Louis J. Marinelli is a man on a quixotic mission: to help California secede from the United States and become an independent country.

Image result for Louis J. Marinelli

Surprisingly, this quest has been going relatively well of late. Marinelli’s group, Yes California, is attempting to collect 585,000 signatures necessary to place a secessionist question on the 2018 ballot. Buoyed by California’s already tense relationship with President Trump, the campaign has received a large amount of press coverage and support over the past few months.

But for the 30-year-old Yes California president, there remains one annoying problem: People keep asking him why he lives in Russia.

In the wake of Yes California’s recently acquired momentum, a lot of people have taken note of Marinelli’s unusual home base. Numerous articles have appeared in the Californian media noting Marinelli’s choice of residence. On social media, discussions about Marinelli often take on a deeply conspiratorial tone.

“Hands off California, Putin,” a rival secessionist movement, the California National Party, tweeted in January. “We won’t take orders from your puppet Moscow Marinelli.”

Marinelli has perhaps compounded the issue by making numerous appearances on Russian state media (approximately once a week, by his own estimation), at times offering a political viewpoint that seems to line up neatly with the Kremlin’s. In late December, the Russian media gave widespread coverage to Marinelli as his group opened a “Californian Embassy” in Moscow.

Speaking via video chat from his home in Yekaterinburg earlier this month, Marinelli seemed exasperated when quizzed about his decision to live in Russia.

Image result for yekaterinburg russia

“And Barack Obama was born in Kenya, right?” he said incredulously.

“The fact that I’m an English teacher in Yekaterinburg doesn’t mean there’s some Russian government conspiracy or support for our campaign,” Marinelli said. “The fact that I studied Russian language courses at Saint Petersburg State University in 2007 or ’08 doesn’t mean that I know Vladimir Putin, who graduated from there in 1975.”

He offered an explanation for his circumstances that went into more detail than one posted in a FAQ section on the Yes California website. It presented a reasonable — though unusual — set of events that had resulted in him leading a Californian independence movement from half a world away.

It goes like this: Buffalo-born Marinelli moved to California in 2006. A year later, he upped sticks and went to Saint Petersburg State University to study Russian. He lived “on and off” in Russia between 2007 and 2011, during which time he met his wife, a Russian citizen. The pair moved back to San Diego, but Marinelli’s partner ran into problems with the U.S. immigration system.

“Her visa had expired and there was really no way for us to easily adjust her status,” Marinelli said. “If she had left the country, she’d be banned for 10 years, and so that wasn’t an option.”

Marinelli said they received a “glimmer of hope” last August that would allow his wife, who has been unable to leave the country until her legal status in the United States was secured, a chance to return home. She was desperate to visit her family, he said, so Marinelli found an apartment in Yekaterinburg and a job teaching English for a semester that provided him a visa. But then, according to his telling, “the immigration thing kind of fell through,” and his wife was unable to travel.

The end result was that Marinelli was obliged to go to Russia, he said, while his Russian wife was stuck in San Diego. “We’re still working on resolving the problem,” Marinelli said, adding that his wife was in the process of getting a green card. “Hopefully that goes well and we can end this chapter of our lives.”

It’s a strange situation — and not exactly how some of Marinelli’s partners in Yes California describe it (Marcus Ruiz Evans, the group’s vice president, told The Washington Post that Marinelli’s wife also lived in Russia).

But it is a plausible scenario.

Marinelli’s ties to Alexander Ionov are perhaps bigger conspiracy fodder. Ionov is the founder of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, a group that supports various secessionist movements around the world. Last September, he put on a Kremlin-sponsored event in Moscow for Western secessionists that Marinelli and other representatives of Yes California attended.

Reached via email, Ionov said that about 30 percent of the funding for the event came from the Russian government. But he said none of that money was given to any U.S. groups, including Yes California. Marinelli also pushed back on the idea that this represents a link with the Russian government.

“We don’t have any communication with or contact with or receive any support of any kind from the Russian government or any Russian government officials,” Marinelli said.

“We’re not actively pursuing a dialogue with Vladimir Putin here in Russia even though I’m in Russia,” he added.

Would Putin want a dialogue? Some experts said that while Ionov and his group may have some limited ties to the Kremlin, they are ultimately small fry in Moscow.

Simon Saradzhyan, the founding director of the Russia Matters Project at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said that the Russian government probably wasn’t taking the Yes California project very seriously, “if only because that chances that this movement can eventually win independence for that state are close to zero.” But Saradzhyan also noted that Russia could well be interested in getting revenge on Washington for what it saw as U.S. support for Chechen separatism in the 1990s.

Fiona Hill, a Russia expert with Brookings Institution, said in an email that historical Russian links to California added further intrigue to the situation.

“Russia had a major early-19th century colony in California and there has been quite a lot of interest in promoting this from circle’s close to the Kremlin,” Hill said, pointing to Kremlin-connected oligarch Viktor Vekselberg and his interest in Fort Ross, the former colony in what is now Sonoma County.

It sounds outlandish, but after an election in which Russian interference supposedly helped a former reality television star with no political experience gain entry to the White House — well, perhaps it doesn’t seem that outlandish. Marinelli didn’t sound like a fan of the way that election turned out. He repeatedly criticized Trump during his interview with WorldViews, noting how the U.S. president had threatened to defund California.

Marinelli also admitted that he voted for Trump — a tactical decision, he explained. “We need things that we can use to promote the cause, and I think Donald Trump is a daily advertisement for that cause,” he said, noting that his vote didn’t matter much in California, anyway.

When it comes to Marinelli’s thoughts on the other president in his life, Putin, he keeps his cards closer to his chest. He said he doesn’t have an emotional connection to Russia in the same way he does the United States, which is actually “a great thing” about living in Yekaterinburg.

Back home, he said, he was often frustrated by what he saw as America’s failings.

“I think every country has progress to make on some fronts. People say, for example, that Russia has progress to make when it comes to civil rights and human rights,” he said. “And the United States doesn’t? In Russia, police aren’t shooting people because of their skin color. There’s pros and cons.”

Read more:

‘California is a nation, not a state’: This movement wants a break from the U.S.

What did Google Know, When did The Know it?

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Image result for google russian hacking Techviral

A Glimpse Into How Much Google Knows About Russian Government Hackers

A 2014 leaked private report from Google shows how much the internet giant knows about government hacking groups.

Motherboard: In October of 2014 an American security company revealed that a group of hackers affiliated with the Russian government, dubbed APT28, had targeted Georgia and other Eastern European countries in a wide-ranging espionage campaign. Two and a half years later, APT28—also known as “Fancy Bear” or “Sofacy”—is a household name not just in the cybersecurity industry, but in the mainstream too, thanks to its attack on the US Democratic party and the ensuing leaks of documents and emails.

Before that report by FireEye, APT28 was a well-kept secret within the cybersecurity industry. At the time, several companies were willing to share information about the hacking group. Even Google investigated the group, and penned a 40-page technical report on the hacking group that has never been published before.

This sort of document, which Motherboard obtained from two independent sources, may be a common sight in the threat intelligence industry, but the public rarely gets to see what such a report from Google looks like. The report draws from one of Google’s most interesting sources of data when it comes to malware and cybersecurity threats: VirusTotal, a public malware repository that the internet giant acquired in 2012.

Sofacy and X-Agent, the report read, referring to the malware used by APT28, “are used by a sophisticated state-sponsored group targeting primarily former Soviet republics, NATO members, and other Western European countries.”

“It looks like Google researchers were well aware of Sofacy before it was publicly disclosed.”

While Google security researchers don’t dwell into who’s really behind these operations, they do hint that they agree with the now widespread belief that APT28 works for the Russian government in a clever, indirect, way—in the very title of the report: “Peering into the Aquarium.”

While that might seem like an obscure title, for those who follow Russian espionage activities, it’s a clear reference to the headquarters of the military intelligence agency known as GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, which are popularly known as “The Aquarium.”

“It looks like Google researchers were well aware of Sofacy before it was publicly disclosed,” Matt Suiche, a security researcher and the founder of Comae Technologies and the OPCDE  conference, told Motherboard in an online chat after reviewing the report. “And also attributed Sofacy and X-Agent to Russia before it was publicly done by FireEye, ESET or CrowdStrike.”

In its report Google security researcher note that APT28 attacks a large number of targets with its first-stage malware Sofacy, but only uses the more tailored and sophisticated X-Agent, which was recently used against Ukraine’s military units, for “high-priority targets.”

“Sofacy was three times more common than X-Agent in the wild, with over 600 distinct samples,” Google’s report stated.

Asked for comment, a Google spokesperson said via email that the company’s “security teams are constantly monitoring potential threats to internet users, and regularly publish information to better protect them.”

The report noted that Georgia had the highest ratio of submissions of Sofacy malware, followed by Romania, Russia and Denmark.

While this report is now a bit dated, it shows that for all its sophistication, APT28 has been often caught in the act of hacking politically interesting targets, betraying the origin of the hackers behind the dry nickname. It also reveals how much a company like Google, which doesn’t have software installed on thousands of customers computers like other antivirus and security vendors that is designed to specifically detect malware, can still learn a lot about government hacking groups thanks to the other data it has access to.

*** Related reading:

State-sponsored hackers targeting prominent journalists, Google warns

Politico: Google has warned a number of prominent journalists that state-sponsored hackers are attempting to steal their passwords and break into their inboxes, the journalists tell POLITICO.

Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine said he received several messages from Google warning him about an attack from a government-backed hacker starting shortly after the election. He said the most recent warning came two to three weeks ago.

Julia Ioffe, who recently started at The Atlantic and has covered Russia for years, said she got warnings as recently as two weeks ago. (See one of the warnings: http://bit.ly/2kMUyRb)

Some journalists getting the warnings say they suspect the hackers could be Russians looking to find incriminating emails they could leak to embarrass journalists, either by revealing alleged liberal bias or to expose the sausage-making of D.C. journalism.

“The fact that all this started right after the election suggests to me that journalists are the next wave to be targeted by state-sponsored hackers in the way that Democrats were during it,” said one journalist who got the warning. “I worry that the outcome is going to be the same: Someone, somewhere, is going to get hacked, and then the contents of their gmail will be weaponized against them — and by extension all media.”

The Russian embassy did not respond to a request for comment.

Image result for russian embassy washington dc Russian embassy Washington DC

Google cautioned that the warnings did not mean the accounts had been compromised already and were sent due to “an abundance of caution.”

“Since 2012, we’ve notified users when we believe their Google accounts are being targeted by government-backed attackers,” said a Google spokesperson in a statement. “We send these warnings out of an abundance of caution — they do not indicate that a user’s account has already been compromised or that a more widespread attack is occurring when they receive the notice.”

Ezra Klein, the founder of Vox, said he had received the warning as recently as a few days back. CNN senior media reporter Brian Stelter said he has been getting the alerts for the past few months.

Other journalists who confirmed they’ve recently gotten the warnings include New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger, Times columnist Paul Krugman and Yahoo Washington bureau chief Garance Franke-Ruta.

GQ special contributor Keith Olbermann said the warnings started a few weeks after the election, and he received the most recent alert earlier this week, a “big bright red bar” across the top of his Gmail. Some of the reporters say they are tightening up their email security to try to prevent the hackers from getting in.

Chait also said he was “contacted over email by a stranger who offered to help me by giving me an encryption key to protect me from hackers. He would not give me his name, meet me or talk on the phone, despite repeated requests.”

The stranger also emailed The Atlantic’s David Frum, James Fallows and Adam Serwer, Andrew Sullivan and Ars Technica’s Dan Goodin.

Stanford professor Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, said he also received hacking warnings from Google. He added: “Given my background, one would have to guess that it’s the Russians.”

Trump’s Aggressive Immigration Plan Released

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When it comes to asylum seekers, a person under the Obama administration only needed to say they were seeking asylum. Trump’s plan raises the bar where conditions for being granted asylum must be proven.

Image result for trump immigration plan Image result for trump immigration detention centers

In part from Reuters:

WHAT IS “CREDIBLE FEAR”?

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, an applicant must generally demonstrate “a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

Immigration lawyers say any applicants who appear to meet that criteria in their initial interviews should be allowed to make their cases in court. They oppose encouraging asylum officers to take a stricter stance on questioning claims and rejecting applications.

Interviews to assess credible fear are conducted almost immediately after an asylum request is made, often at the border or in detention facilities by immigration agents or asylum officers, and most applicants easily clear that hurdle. Between July and September of 2016, U.S. asylum officers accepted nearly 88 percent of the claims of credible fear, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data.

Asylum seekers who fail the credible fear test can be quickly deported unless they file an appeal. Currently, those who pass the test are eventually released and allowed to remain in the United States awaiting hearings, which are often scheduled years into the future because of a backlog of more than 500,000 cases in immigration courts.

Between October 2015 and April 2016, nearly 50,000 migrants claimed credible fear, 78 percent of whom were from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala or Mexico, according to statistics from USCIS.

The number of migrants from those three countries who passed credible fear and went to court to make their case for asylum rose sharply between 2011 and 2015, from 13,970 claims to 34,125, according to data from the Justice Department. More here from Reuters.

 

Implementing the President’s Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements Policies by USA TODAY on Scribd

FNC: Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly moved Tuesday to implement a host of immigration enforcement changes ordered by President Trump, directing agency heads to hire thousands more officers, end so-called “catch-and-release” policies and begin work on the president’s promised U.S.-Mexico border wall.

“It is in the national interest of the United States to prevent criminals and criminal organizations from destabilizing border security,” Kelly wrote in one of two memos released Tuesday by the department.

The memos follow up on Trump’s related executive actions from January and, at their heart, aim to toughen immigration enforcement.

The changes would spare so-called “dreamers.” On a conference call with reporters, a DHS official stressed that the directives would not affect Obama-era protections for illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and others given a reprieve in 2014. But outside those exemptions, Kelly wrote that DHS “no longer will exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”

A DHS official said the agencies are “going back to our traditional roots” on enforcement.

The memos cover a sprawling set of initiatives including:

  • Prioritizing criminal illegal immigrants and others for deportation, updating guidance from previous administration
  • Expanding the 287(g) program, which allows participating local officers to act as immigration agents – and had been rolled back under the Obama administration
  • Starting the planning, design and construction of a U.S.-Mexico border wall
  • Hiring 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and officers
  • Hiring 5,000 Border Patrol agents
  • Ending “catch-and-release” policies under which illegal immigrants subject to deportation potentially are allowed to “abscond” and fail to appear at removal hearings

It’s unclear what timelines the secretary is setting for some of these objectives, and what budgetary and other constraints the department and its myriad agencies will face. In pursuing an end to “catch-and-release,” one memo called for a plan with the Justice Department to “surge” immigration judges and asylum officers to handle additional cases.

While congressional Republicans have vowed to work with Trump to fund the front-end costs associated with his promised border wall, the same memo also hints at future efforts to potentially use money otherwise meant for Mexico – following on Trump’s repeated campaign vow to make Mexico pay for the wall. The secretary called for “identifying and quantifying” sources of aid to Mexico, without saying in the memo how that information might be used.

Mexican officials repeatedly have said they will not pay for a border barrier. DHS said it has identified initial locations to build a wall where current fencing is not effective, near El Paso, Texas; Tucson, Ariz.; and El Centro, Calif.

The DHS directives come as the Trump White House continues to work on rewriting its controversial executive order suspending the U.S. refugee program as well as travel from seven mostly Muslim countries. The order was put on hold by a federal court, and Trump’s team is said to be working on a new measure.

The directives also come as the Trump administration faces criticism from Democratic lawmakers and immigration advocacy groups for recent ICE raids of illegal immigrants.

DHS officials on Tuesday’s conference call stressed that they are operating under existing law and once again shot down an apparently erroneous news report from last week claiming National Guard troops could be utilized to round up illegal immigrants. That will not happen, an official said.

“We’re going to treat everyone humanely and with dignity, but we are going to execute the laws of the United States,” a DHS official said on the conference call.