Twitter Cutting off Intel Agencies

Posted on May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 by Denise Simon

Perhaps we must be reminded that Twitter is the platform of choice for Islamic State. Through Twitter, connections and conversation can be cultivated and used to glean activity, locations, photos, videos, names and organizations. Perhaps it would be important to remember that during the bin Ladin raid in Abbottabad, a local used Twitter to describe what was happening real time. Journalists in areas of hostilities also use Twitter to report live action and terror movement.

Twitter with this decision will also likely affect the work of the FBI when it comes to solving other worldwide criminal activity such as child-trafficking, slavery and exploitation. Shameful. There is a volunteer team that searches Twitter daily for terror accounts and removes them since Twitter refuses to cooperate. There are an estimated 40,000 ISIS Twitter accounts daily. What about hostages and beheadings like James Foley?

Knowing the importance and success of Islamic State on Twitter, the U.S. State Department even launched their own Twitter strategy, now this decision by Twitter is aiding the enemy.

Twitter cuts intel agencies off from analysis service: report

Washington (AFP) – Twitter has barred US intelligence agencies from accessing a service that sorts through posts on the social media platform in real time and has proved useful in the fight against terrorism, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The newspaper, in its report Sunday evening, cited a senior US intelligence official as saying that Twitter seemed worried about appearing too cozy with intelligence services.

Twitter owns about a five percent stake in Dataminr, which uses algorithms and location tools to reveal patterns among tweets. It is a powerful tool for gleaning useful information from the unending stream of chatter on Twitter.

Dataminr is the only company that Twitter authorizes to access its entire real-time stream of public tweets and sell it to clients, the Wall Street Journal said.

The move was not publicly announced and the newspaper cited the intelligence official and people familiar with the matter.

Dataminr executives recently told intelligence agencies that Twitter did not want the company to continue providing services to them, the report said.

Dataminr information alerted US authorities to the November attacks in Paris shortly after the assault began, the Wall Street Journal said.

It has also been useful for real-time information about Islamic State group attacks, Brazil’s political crisis and other fast-changing events.

Twitter told the newspaper in a statement that its “data is largely public and the US government may review public accounts on its own, like any user could.”

The development comes as high-profile tech companies in the US face off against the government on how information should be shared in the fight against terrorism.

Earlier this year, the FBI paid more than $1 million (880,000 euros) to a third party to break into an iPhone used by one of the shooters in a killing spree in San Bernardino, California, after Apple refused to help authorities crack the device.

The tech giant cited concerns over digital security and privacy.

Facebook Suppression of Conservatives Revealed

Posted on May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 by Denise Simon

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

Gizmodo: Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

Related reading: I Asked a Privacy Lawyer What Facebook’s New Terms and Conditions Will Mean for You

These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site. As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook’s algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section. The curators write headlines and summaries of each topic, and include links to news sites. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment.

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.

Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.

Managers on the trending news team did, however, explicitly instruct curators to artificially manipulate the trending module in a different way: When users weren’t reading stories that management viewed as important, several former workers said, curators were told to put them in the trending news feed anyway. Several former curators described using something called an “injection tool” to push topics into the trending module that weren’t organically being shared or discussed enough to warrant inclusion—putting the headlines in front of thousands of readers rather than allowing stories to surface on their own. In some cases, after a topic was injected, it actually became the number one trending news topic on Facebook.

“We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said one former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.” Sometimes, breaking news would be injected because it wasn’t attaining critical mass on Facebook quickly enough to be deemed “trending” by the algorithm. Former curators cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as two instances in which non-trending stories were forced into the module. Facebook has struggled to compete with Twitter when it comes to delivering real-time news to users; the injection tool may have been designed to artificially correct for that deficiency in the network. “We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook,” one former curator said.

In other instances, curators would inject a story—even if it wasn’t being widely discussed on Facebook—because it was deemed important for making the network look like a place where people talked about hard news. “People stopped caring about Syria,” one former curator said. “[And] if it wasn’t trending on Facebook, it would make Facebook look bad.” That same curator said the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module. “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the individual said. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one’.” This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.

(In February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed his support for the movement in an internal memo chastising Facebook employees for defacing Black Lives Matter slogans on the company’s internal “signature wall.”)

When stories about Facebook itself would trend organically on the network, news curators used less discretion—they were told not to include these stories at all. “When it was a story about the company, we were told not to touch it,” said one former curator. “It had to be cleared through several channels, even if it was being shared quite a bit. We were told that we should not be putting it on the trending tool.”

(The curators interviewed for this story worked for Facebook across a timespan ranging from mid-2014 to December 2015.)

“We were always cautious about covering Facebook,” said another former curator. “We would always wait to get second level approval before trending something to Facebook. Usually we had the authority to trend anything on our own [but] if it was something involving Facebook, the copy editor would call their manager, and that manager might even call their manager before approving a topic involving Facebook.”

Gizmodo reached out to Facebook for comment about each of these specific claims via email and phone, but did not receive a response.

Several former curators said that as the trending news algorithm improved, there were fewer instances of stories being injected. They also said that the trending news process was constantly being changed, so there’s no way to know exactly how the module is run now. But the revelations undermine any presumption of Facebook as a neutral pipeline for news, or the trending news module as an algorithmically-driven list of what people are actually talking about.

Rather, Facebook’s efforts to play the news game reveal the company to be much like the news outlets it is rapidly driving toward irrelevancy: a select group of professionals with vaguely center-left sensibilities. It just happens to be one that poses as a neutral reflection of the vox populi, has the power to influence what billions of users see, and openly discusses whether it should use that power to influence presidential elections.

“It wasn’t trending news at all,” said the former curator who logged conservative news omissions. “It was an opinion.”

[Disclosure: Facebook has launched a program that pays publishers, including the New York Times and Buzzfeed, to produce videos for its Facebook Live tool. Gawker Media, Gizmodo’s parent company, recently joined that program.]

Illegal Border Crossings v. Visa Overstays

Posted on May 6, 2016May 6, 2016 by Denise Simon

No one can get the image of the train carrying illegals out of their memory and with good reason. When anyone does a search on the internet to determine the actual and factual numbers of immigrants coming across the southern border by year, you will be disappointed, the charts and records are not there. Countless outlets and agencies report but with caveats and obscure labels. Still we are told the border is as secure as it has ever been.

What is more chilling, are the reports that once again we are in a spike season of illegal entry due in part to threats of presidential candidates. Further, those already here are filing at an accelerated rate for citizenship for the exact same reason.

There is a clash however in the facts over which is worse, those coming across the border versus those coming in by air or other means possessing a v The Visa Waiver Program (VWP) enables most citizens or nationals of participating countries* to travel to the United States for tourism or business for stays of 90 days or less without first obtaining a visa, when they meet all requirements explained below. Travelers must have a valid Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) approval prior to travel. If you prefer to have a visa in your passport, you may still apply for a visitor (B) visa.isa that has an expiration date. Take note that any international airport across the United States is a port of entry. Once a visa is issued by State Department contractors, it becomes the burden of the Department of Homeland Security to ensure compliance to dates. This is where the problem, yet another lays with fault.

One cannot overlook the Visa Waiver Program concocted by the U.S. State Department of which several in Congress are calling for a suspension.

Citizens or nationals of the following countries* are currently eligible to travel to the United States under the VWP, unless citizens of one of these countries are also a national of Iraq, Iran, Syria, or Sudan.

Andorra Hungary Norway

Australia Iceland Portugal

Austria Ireland San Marino

Belgium Italy Singapore

Brunei Japan Slovakia

Chile Latvia Slovenia

Czech Republic Liechtenstein South Korea

Denmark Lithuania Spain

Estonia Luxembourg Sweden

Finland Malta Switzerland

France Monaco Taiwan*

Germany Netherlands United Kingdom**

Greece New Zealand

There are an estimated 35 unique types of visa classifications under the management of the U.S. State Department.

Obama Admin Deported Less Than One Percent of Visa Overstays

Nearly half a million individuals overstayed visas in 2015, fewer than 2,500 deported

Kredo/FreeBeacon: The Obama administration deported less than one percent of the nearly half a million foreign nationals who illegally overstayed their visas in 2015, according to new statistics published by the Department of Homeland Security.

Of the 482,781 aliens who were recorded to have overstayed temporary U.S. visas in fiscal year 2015, just 2,456 were successfully deported from the United States during the same period, according to DHS’s figures, which amounts to a deportation rate of around 0.5 percent.

The sinking rate of deportations by the Obama administration is drawing criticism from Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are warning that the administration is ignoring illegal overstays and potentially opening the United States to terrorist threats.

The 482,781 figure accounts for aliens who entered the United States on a nonimmigrant visitor visa or through the Visa Waiver Program, which streamlines travel between the United States and certain other countries. The figure encompasses foreign nationals who were found to have remained in the United States after their visas expired or after the 90-day window allowed by the Visa Waiver Program.

The actual number of overstays could be higher. The latest figures published by DHS do not include overstays from other visa categories or overstays by individuals who entered the United States through land ports, such as those along the Mexican border.

Deportations by the Obama administration have decreased steadily since 2009, according to figures codified by the Senate’s Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest and provided to the Washington Free Beacon.

Since 2009, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has expelled 51,704 individuals who overstayed their visas. The total number of those expelled has decreased every fiscal year.

At least 12,538 illegal overstays were deported in fiscal 2009, while 11,259 were removed in 2010, 10,426 in 2011, 6,856 in 2012, 4,240 in 2013, 3,564 in 2014, and 2,456 in 2015, according to the committee.

The drop is being attributed by sources to an Obama administration policy directing DHS and ICE not to pursue visa overstays unless the offender has been convicted of major crimes or terrorism.

“The decision by the Obama administration not to enforce immigration laws by allowing those who have overstayed their visas to remain in the country has not gone unnoticed by the American people,” sources on the Senate subcommittee told the Free Beacon. “A Rasmussen Reports poll released earlier this year indicates that approximately 3 out of 4 Americans not only want the Obama administration to find these aliens who overstay their visas, but also to deport them.”

“The same poll indicates that 68 percent of Americans consider visa overstays a ‘serious national security risk,’ and 31 percent consider visa overstays a ‘very serious’ national security risk,” according to the sources.

Congress has long mandated the implementation of a biometric entry-exit system to track individuals who overstay their visas and ensure they leave the United States.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), chair of the Senate’s immigration subcommittee, recently proposed an amendment aimed at speeding up implementation of this system. Senate Democrats blocked the amendment.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has received substantially more taxpayer money in recent years despite the plummeting rate of deportations. At least 43 percent fewer aliens were removed from the United States from 2012 to 2015, according to DHS statistics.

Permit to Kill Eagles?

Posted on May 5, 2016May 5, 2016 by Denise Simon

Reprehensible….sounds like a death panel for a historic American icon.

A federal depredation permit authorizes you to capture or kill birds to reduce damage caused by birds or to protect other interests such as human health and safety or personal property. A depredation permit is intended to provide short-term relief for bird damage until long-term, non-lethal measures can be implemented to eliminate or significantly reduce the problem.

You should review Title 50 parts 10, 13 and 21.41 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) with your application. You are responsible for reviewing and understanding these regulations before you request and accept a permit. These regulations are on our website at: http://www.fws.gov/permits/ltr/ltr.html.

The process, conditions, text and application document is found here.

U.S. proposes giving wind farms 30-year permits to kill eagles

Reuters: U.S. wildlife managers on Wednesday again proposed granting 30-year permits to wind farms that would forgive them for thousands of eagle deaths expected during that time frame from collisions of the birds with turbines, towers and electrical wires.

The proposed rule, like one struck down by a federal judge last year, would greatly extend the current five-year time frame in the permits required under U.S. law for the “incidental take” of eagles, including those killed by obstacles erected in their habitat.

Wind energy companies have pressed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to lengthen the terms of the eagle permits, saying a five-year duration left too much uncertainty and hampered investment in the burgeoning renewable power industry.

The agency in 2013 approved a similar plan extending eagle-take permits to 30 years. But a U.S. judge overturned it last year, agreeing with conservation groups that the Fish and Wildlife Service had failed to properly assess impacts of the rule change on federally protected eagle populations.

The revised proposal cites significant expansion within many sectors of the U.S. energy industry, particularly wind energy operations in the Western states, at a time when bald eagle numbers are growing while golden eagles appear to be in decline.

Nevertheless, the Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that the U.S. population of roughly 40,000 golden eagles could endure the loss of about 2,000 birds a year without being pushed toward extinction. And the agency suggested that bald eagles, estimated to number about 143,000 nationwide, could sustain as many as 4,200 fatalities annually without endangering the species.

The new proposal, which is open for public comment through July 5, would make wind farms and other energy developers responsible for monitoring eagle deaths from collisions with facility structures.

That arrangement was decried by the American Bird Conservancy, which led the successful legal challenge against the previous eagle permit plan.

The conservancy’s Michael Hutchins said a system that relies on industry rather than government regulators to monitor and report problems fails to protect a beloved bird of prey stamped on the great seal of the United States.

The American Wind Energy Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The number of eagles killed each year at wind facilities is not precisely known, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. An estimated 545 golden eagles are thought to perish annually from collisions with obstacles ranging from turbines to vehicles, the agency said.

Porn Scandal in Federal Govt Continues

Posted on May 4, 2016May 4, 2016 by Denise Simon

SMH = Shaking my Head

Feds Have Found ‘Unbelievable’ Amounts of Child Porn on National Security Computers. Is This the Solution?

A top National Security Agency official wants to keep tabs on national security personnel off-the-clock, in part by tracking their online habits at home. The aim is to spot behavior that might not be in America’s best interests.

Historically, some illicit activity, like downloading child pornography, which is different to perfectly legal and enjoyable content from sites similar to tubev, has occurred on government computers and been prosecuted.

But today, the digital lives of employees cleared to access classified information extend beyond the office.

About 80 percent of the National Security Agency workforce has retired since Sept. 11, 2001, says Kemp Ensor, NSA director of security. When the millennial and Gen Y staff that now populate the spy agency get home, they go online.

“That is where were we need to be, that’s where we need to mine,” Ensor said.

Currently, managers only look for aberrant computer behavior on internal, agency-owned IT systems – it’s a practice known as “continuous monitoring.”

But the military and intelligence communities are beginning to broaden checks on cleared personnel in the physical and digital worlds. It used to be that national security workers were re-investigated only every five or 10 years.

Under the evolving “continuous evaluation” model, the government will periodically search for signs of problems through, for example, court records, financial transactions, and — if authorized — social media posts.

Ensor and other federal officials spoke April 28 about new trends in personnel security at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance symposium in Chantilly, Virginia.

On government devices, “the amount of child porn I see is just unbelievable,” said Daniel Payne, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Service. The point being, there’s a need to routinely scan agency network activity and criminal records to gauge an individual’s suitability to handle classified information.

Payne, whose 34 years of counterintelligence experience have spanned the military, CIA and National Counterintelligence and Security Center, was not referring to any specific agency or any specific timeframe, his current employer told Nextgov.

Payne just returned to the Defense Security Service in February, after starting his career there.

“Director Payne provided this example to demonstrate the range of issues identified during the personnel security process, and the range and value of different data sources that have a bearing on an individual’s ability to access sensitive information,” the Defense Security Service said in an emailed statement.

Ensor echoed his colleague’s concerns, noting he sees child pornography on NSA IT systems. In the national security space, “what people do is amazing,” he said. Ensor’s guess about the presence of explicit material is that there are many “introverts staring at computer screens” day in and day out. This is why it is so important to look at individuals holistically when determining who might be a so-called insider threat, Ensor said.

In the past, military and intelligence personnel have exploited minors online, without notice, for years or even an entire career.

The Boston Globe broke a story in 2010 that a significant number of federal employees and contractors with high-level security clearances downloaded child pornography — sometimes on government computers — at NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office, among other defense agencies.

At least one NSA contractor holding a top secret clearance told investigators in 2007 he had been spending $50 to $60 monthly fees on various sexually explicit websites similar to hdpornvideo.xxx for the past three years, according to a Defense inspector general report on the matter. After each session on the porn sites, he would wipe the browsing history of that system. The Pentagon investigation did not state who owned the computer.

More recently, a military official pleaded guilty to pedophile crimes and accessing child pornography through the Internet — but at home.

On April 15, a U.S. district judge sentenced former Army Corps of Engineers official Michael Beeman, of Virginia, to 30 years in prison for molesting minors, beginning in the 1980s while working in public affairs at Patrick Air Force Base. He later downloaded child pornography to personal devices, court records show.

Case files state the illegal online activity occurred between 2010 and 2014, which according to LinkedIn, was when Beeman served as an Army Corps of Engineers public affairs regional chief.