China, Unfettered Espionage Against U.S.

Did China Just Steal $360 Billion From America?

The principal group in question is believed to be the one codenamed APT6. The three letters stand for Advanced Persistent Threat, and this group appears to be among the first tagged as an “APT.”

Kurt Baumgartner of Russian firm Kaspersky Lab suggests APT6 is state-sponsored.That sounds correct because as Craig Williams WMB -4.47% at Talos, a part of Cisco, notes, it is “an advanced, well-funded actor.”

Baumgartner declined to identify APT6’s nationality, but others have. Vice Media’s Motherboard reports that experts think the group is Chinese. As the FireEye security firm notes, APT6 is “likely a nation-state sponsored group based in China.”

In any event, APT6 has caught the attention of the FBI. The group also appears to be the subject of the Bureau’s February 12 alert.

Related reading from the FBI

The February 12 alert says the group in question was attacking U.S. networks “since at least 2011,” but Baumgartner thinks it was active as early as 2008.

In September of last year during Xi Jinping’s state visit, President Obama said the U.S. and China had reached “a common understanding on the way forward” on cybertheft. Washington and Beijing, he said, had affirmed the principle that neither government would use cyber means for commercial purposes.

China indeed affirmed that principle, and the agreement was, as Adam Segal and Tang Lan write, “a significant symbolic step forward.” The pair correctly note that “trust will be built and sustained through implementation.”

As might be expected, there was little implementation on the Chinese side at first. CrowdStrike , the cyber security firm, for instance, in October reported no letup in China’s cyber intrusions into the networks of American corporates.

Related: Economic Terrorism

Beijing, according to the Financial Times, has since reduced its cyber spying against American companies. As Justin Harvey of Fidelis Cybersecurity told the paper, “What we are seeing can only be characterized as a material downtick in what can be considered cyber espionage.”

And FireEye noted that all 22 Chinese hacking units identified by the firm as attacking American networks discontinued operations.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration is not declaring victory quite yet, and for good reason. “The days of widespread Chinese smash-and-grab activity, get in, get out, don’t care if you’re caught, seem to be over,”says Rob Knake, who once directed cyber security policy at the National Security Council and is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There’s a consensus that activity is still ongoing, but narrower in scope and with better tradecraft.”

Whether espionage is overt or not, the damage to American business is still large. According to the May 2013 report of the Blair-Huntsman Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, “The scale of international theft of American intellectual property is unprecedented—hundreds of billions of dollars per year, on the order of the size of U.S. exports to Asia.”

William Evanina, America’s chief counterintelligence official, told reporters in November that hacking espionage costs U.S. companies $400 billion each year and that China is responsible for about 90% of the attacks. Beijing’s haul, therefore, looks like something on the order of $360 billion.

And how do we know the Chinese are culprits? For one thing, bold Chinese cyber thieves like to show their victims the information they have stolen.

Moreover, the U.S. government has gotten better at attribution, going from being able to attribute one-third of the attacks to more than two-thirds. The improvement is largely due to the government’s partnership with the private sector. Microsoft, Google, and Twitter, for example, will share information if they detect attacks on their customers.

And their customers are still getting attacked. “We continue to see them engage in activity directed against U.S. companies,” said Admiral Mike Rogers, the head of U.S. Cyber Command, in early April in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The questions I think that we still need to ask is, is that activity then, in turn, shared with the Chinese private industry?”

It’s right for Rogers to be cautious, but it would be strange for Chinese hackers not to share as they have done in the past. At the moment, there is little reason for Beijing to stop hacking, because Washington is not willing to impose costs on China for its “21st century burglary.”

There was the May 2014 indictment of five officers of the People’s Liberation Army for cyberattacking American businesses, like Alcoa and U.S. Steel, and the United Steelworkers union. That move, while welcome, was overdue and only symbolic. The Blair-Huntsman Commission suggested an across-the-board tariff on Chinese goods, but the imposition of a penalty of that sort is unlikely without a radical change of thinking in Washington.

Therefore, the FBI, even after all these years, is just playing catch up. The February alert is a tacit admission that the U.S. government is not in control of its own networks said Michael Adams, who served in U.S. Special Operations Command. “It’s just flabbergasting,” Adams told Motherboard. “How many times can this keep happening before we finally realize we’re screwed?”

The People’s Republic of China is still committing monumental thefts in large part because successive American governments cannot get beyond half-measures.

Beijing may be an intruder, but Washington somehow finds it unseemly to lock the door and punish the thief.

 

Questions and Anger on Transfer of El Chapo

The Transfer of Mexican Drug Boss ‘El Chapo’ to a Less-Secure Prison Raises Concerns
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” says the former head of the DEA


Time: (MEXICO CITY) — Questions arose on both sides of the border about the decision to relocate convicted drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to a region that is one of his cartel’s strongholds, and a Mexican security official acknowledged Sunday that the sudden transfer was to a less-secure prison.

The official said that in general the Cefereso No. 9 prison on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, is not as impregnable as the maximum-security Altiplano facility near Mexico City where he had been held. The official wasn’t authorized to discuss Guzman’s case publicly and agreed to do so only if not quoted by name.

The official said, however, that Guzman is being held in a maximum-security wing where the same protocols are being enforced as in Altiplano, including 24-hour monitoring via a camera in his cell.

Multiple analysts told The Associated Press that there was no sign of a link between the prison switch and extradition.
There will be no escape, ” Duarte told local media. “If he was brought here from Altiplano it’s because the security conditions are way above those of Altiplano, that’s what the federal government settled on.”

Related reading from FBI

Authorities said the move was due to security upgrades at Altiplano and also part of a routine policy to rotate inmates for security reasons. Analysts said officials may also have wanted to shake up his confinement to thwart any escape plans that could have been in the works.

Vigil said it would be a mistake to try to hold Guzman in the Juarez prison for long.

“If they keep him there for a prolonged period of time, the Mexican government certainly is risking that he escapes,” Vigil said. “And if he escapes, it would just completely decimate the credibility of the Mexican government.”

According to a 2015 report by the governmental National Human Rights Commission, Cefereso No. 9 got the lowest overall quality rating for any of Mexico’s 21 federal prisons at 6.63 on a scale of 0 to 10. Altiplano was the 10th best, with a rating of 7.32.

Cefereso No. 9 got low marks for guaranteeing a “dignified” stay and for handling inmates with special requirements. It got middling scores for guaranteeing prisoners’ safety and well-being, and for rehabilitation.

It was also listed as somewhat overcrowded, with 1,012 inmates living in a facility designed to hold 848. Authorities acknowledge overcrowding is a widespread problem throughout Mexico’s penitentiary system.

Overall, Cefereso No. 9 got a “yellow” evaluation for 2015 on the report’s stoplight-style rating system. That was improved from “red” in 2014, even if its numerical score was still the country’s lowest.

“Governability” was the only area where the prison received a “green,” or good, rating. Altiplano also got a “green” rating for the category.

“El Chapo” first broke out of prison in 2001 and spent more than a decade on the run, becoming one of the world’s most-wanted fugitives. He was recaptured in 2014, only to escape the following year. Mexican marines re-arrested him in the western state of Sinaloa in January, after he fled a safe house through a storm drain.

Guzman was returned to Altiplano, where officials beefed up his security regimen. He was placed under constant observation from a ceiling camera with no blind spots, and the floors of top-security cells were reinforced with metal bars and a 16-inch (40-centimeter) layer of concrete. Prison authorities also restricted his visits.

Twitter Cutting off Intel Agencies

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

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

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.

Related reading: The Human Tragedy of Illegal Immigration: Greater Efforts Needed to Combat Smuggling and Violence

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 vThe 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.

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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.