Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security

Drug Traffickers Hacking Surveillance Drones

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DefenseOne; The drug cartels aren’t just buying golden Uzis anymore. As the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, or CBP, has upped its drone patrols along America’s Mexican border, narcotics traffickers have responded with expensive technology of their own.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement confirmed that Drug Traffickers are hacking surveillance drones on the border.

Small drones are another powerful tool used by the US Department of Homeland Security to monitor its borders, but drug traffickers already adopting countermeasures. In order to avoid surveillance, drug traffickers are hacking US surveillance drones used to patrol the border.

US surveillance drones

According to Timothy Bennett, a Department of Homeland Security program manager, drug traffickers are using technology to spoof and jam the US surveillance drones.

“The bad guys on the border have lots of money. And what they are putting money into is spoofing and jamming of GPSs, so we are doing funding to look at small UAS that we can counter this,” Bennett said during a panel at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. 

The principle behind the GPS spoofing attack is that sending to control system of the drone fake geographic coordinates it is possible to deceive the onboard system hijacking the vehicle in a different place for which it is commanded. Non-military GPS signals are not encrypted, this makes drones vulnerable to this kind of attacks.

Using jamming techniques against drones, it is possible to interrupt the GPS receiving transmitted to the UAVs. In this scenario the aircraft could potentially lose the capability to monitor its route and to calculate its location, altitude, and the direction in which it is traveling.

Both attack techniques are adopted by drug traffickers that belong to well-funded organizations that has access to modern advanced hacking technology.

DHS hasn’t provided further details on the attacks, but Bennett confirmed that the attacks are interfering with the operations conduced by members of the law enforcement.

“You’re out there looking, trying to find out this path [they’re] going through with drugs, and we can’t get good coordinate systems on it because we’re getting spoofed. That screws up the whole thing. We got to fix that problem,” Bennett told Defense One.

Terror threats, the New Normal

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When the Washington Post publishes an item explaining that Barack Obama has left his terror strategy and messaging to his deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, America is in trouble. Obama think he has a strategy and that all of us across the country ‘just don’t get it’.

Obama thinks his Syria strategy is right — and folks just don’t get it

Throughout the nine-day trip, which had begun less than 24 hours after the terrorist attacks in Paris, they had all heard critics at home and abroad charge that he had no coherent game plan, Obama said. There had even been suggestions that France, with tough talk and a series of retaliatory airstrikes, was now leading the anti-terrorism fight.

Aides agreed that the message they had heard on the road was “jarring,” said a senior administration official who was on the flight.

But while many outside the administration found the strategy itself lacking, Obama felt what they really needed was to do a better job of explaining it. He ordered what the official called an “uptick in our communications tempo.” More here.

Terror threats are the new worldwide normal standard. The question is when will leaders take forceful action both militarily and begin to profile, collaborate and train? Let us not forget, just this past May, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced expedited travel ‘preclearance’ programs with at least 9 foreign countries.

Terror threats will be the new normal for Europe, experts say

Guardian: Terrorism experts believe Europe faces a “new normal” of more threats and disruption to major events as security fears remain high in the months ahead.

Following the attacks in Paris, analysts in the UK and Europe say security services are coming to terms with the fact that Islamic State appears to have the intention and capability to hit European targets in professionally planned and executed attacks.

Munich was partially evacuated following a terror threat on New Year’s Eve, and events in other European cities were either cancelled or scaled down because of security concerns.

Margaret Gilmore, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said more disruption was likely.

“For the last 15 years there have been terrorist organisations who have wanted to carry out attacks in crowded places, so in that sense this is nothing new. And since the attack in 2008 in Mumbai we have been aware of the possibility of the marauding multi-site gun attacks.

“But what is new now is that Isis has proved they are capable, after Paris, of carrying out terrible attacks beyond its traditional arena of the Middle East.”

She said the attack on the French capital had underlined how quickly the group had grown. She said security services in each country would still have to judge each threat on its merits, but the knowledge that Isis has the capability to carry out large-scale attacks would mean more security – and potentially more cancellations of high-profile events.

“It is clear from what we saw in Paris that they are capable of controlling the process – able to train, plan and execute these attacks – and that is something that the security services across Europe will be taking very seriously indeed.”

Prof Rik Coolsaet, a terrorism expert at Ghent University in Belgium, said that although there was nothing new in terrorist groups wanting to attack high-profile public gatherings such as New Year’s Eve, Isis’s appeal meant Europe was entering a new era.

He said the group had become the “object of all kinds of fantasies for all kinds of individuals, from thrill-seekers to the mentally unstable”, who wanted to be part of the Isis, and that made the security services’ job much harder.

“In the months ahead we are going to be facing a new normal,” Coolsaet said. “One day the hype surrounding Isis will have vanished, but until that happens I fear there will be more threats, more disruption, more houses raided and more arrests as countries come to terms with the scale of this group and its intentions … It is something we will have to get used to.”

He also warned there was a danger of people conflating Europe’s refugee crisis with the growing terror threat.

“What I do fear is the combination of these two things into something near hysteria. We must not confuse these two separate issues and we must be wary of any politicians who try and do that for their own ends, to the detriment of the very fabric of our society.”

Entire Police Dept. Busted for Laundering Drug Money

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Entire Florida police department busted for laundering millions for international drug cartels

RawStory: The village of Bal Harbour, population 2,513, may have a tiny footprint on the northern tip of Miami Beach, but its police department had grand aspirations of going after international drug traffickers, and making a few million dollars while they were at it.

The Bal Harbour PD and the Glades County Sheriff’s Office set up a giant money laundering scheme with the purported goal of busting drug cartels and stemming the surge of drug dealing going on in the area. But it all fell apart when federal investigators and the Miami-Herald found strange things going on.

The two-year operation, which took in more than $55 million from criminal groups, resulted in zero arrests but netted $2.4 million for the police posing as money launderers. Members of the 12-person task force traveled far and wide to carry out their deals, from Los Angeles to New York to Puerto Rico.

Along the way, the small-town cops got a taste of luxury as they used the money for first-class flights, luxury hotels, Mac computers and submachine guns. Meanwhile, the Bal Harbour PD and Glades County Sheriffs were buying all sorts of fancy new equipment.

Besides these “official” uses of the money, confidential records obtained by the Miami-Herald show that officers withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars with no record of where the money went.

“They were like bank robbers with badges,” said Dennis Fitzgerald, an attorney and former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who taught undercover tactics for the U.S. State Department. “It had no law enforcement objective. The objective was to make money.”

The operation, which was not fully reported to federal authorities, funneled millions of dollars to overseas criminals and interfered with investigations being carried out on known money launderers.

The latest revelations show that at least 20 people in Venezuela were sent drug money from the Florida cops, including William Amaro Sanchez, the foreign minister under Hugo Chavez and now special assistant to President Nicolas Maduro.

They wired a total of $211,000 to Sanchez, even while the U.S. government was investigating Venezuelan government leaders involved in the drug trade. Instead of reporting their knowledge of Sanchez to federal agencies, the cops went on laundering money, taking their cut, and all the while aiding Sanchez in his machinations, which likely included political corruption.

Four other Venezuelan criminals and smugglers were major recipients of the millions being wired from the Bal Harbour PD and Glades County Sheriff’s Office, including a figure tied to one of the largest drug cartels in the hemisphere.

These actions violated strict federal bans on sending illegal money overseas, and the Florida cops never investigated the backgrounds of the people receiving their laundered drug money.

“I can’t think of a more podunk town than Bal Harbour — not in a bad way. But in the sense that these cops would have otherwise been stopping traffic or shooting radar,” said Ruben Oliva, who has represented alleged narco-traffickers since the 1980s. “In reality they were being launderers. The minute they started doing busts, it would have been over.

“This is like a movie. You’ve got these guys and they’re flying all over. They’re saying, ‘Hey, I’m in the big leagues.’ I’ve seen every kind of law enforcement money-laundering investigations. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s really one for the ages.”

After the Department of Justice busted the Bal Harbour PD for misspending seized money to pay police salaries, the Miami-Herald began deeper investigations and found a much bigger pool of money that was never noticed by the feds. Soon after that, the ambitious sting operation—which was really just a money-making scheme—began to fall apart.

“The Miami Herald gained unprecedented access to the confidential records of the undercover investigation, reviewing thousands of records including cash pickup reports, emails, DEA reports, bank statements and wire transfers for millions of dollars. The inquiry found:

▪ Police routinely withdrew cash — thousands at a time — totaling $1.3 million from undercover bank accounts, but to this day there are no records to show where the money was spent. “In all my years of law enforcement, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Chief Overton said.

▪ Bal Harbour officials say they cannot find receipts for hundreds of thousands in expenses, including five-star hotel bookings, dinners that ran up to $1,000 and scores of purchases like laptops, iPads, electronic money counters, flower deliveries, and even iTunes downloads.

▪ While posing as launderers, police delivered nearly $20 million to storefront businesses in Miami-Dade to launder the money for drug groups — gathering critical evidence against the business owners — yet took no action against them. Years later, the businesses are still open, some still suspected by federal agents of laundering for the cartels.”

Cash deposits to SunTrust Bank totaling $28 million do not appear anywhere in police records. It’s no coincidence that the operation was launched “at a time law enforcement agencies across Florida were looking to boost their budgets during one of the state’s toughest economic periods.”

“We had to find a revenue stream,” said Duane Pottorff, chief of law enforcement for Glades. “It allowed us to have resources we wouldn’t normally have.”

Federal authorities and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement have launched probes into the Bal Harbour police, which will surely confirm the rampant abuses of power. However, the fact that these types of shady operations, carried out with the help of agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, can occur at all is even more troubling.

Government creates a black market of drugs and blood money through prohibition, then under the War on Drugs it grants itself the power to break the law and get involved in money laundering operations. While the professed goal is to “sting” the bad guys, government rakes in millions upon millions of dollars to further bolster its prohibition and war on drugs.

When Countries Fail, Terror Spreads

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While Donald Trump is cresting the political wave running for President, he did get one thing wrong. His statement about ‘letting Syria and Islamic State fight’, it becomes a matter of 300,000 dead and an estimated 4 million displaced people, many that are flowing into Europe and causing epic financial burdens on other countries.

In the case of the most recent Paris attack, Syria and Belgium failed causing a massacre in France.

Investigation Uncovers New Details About How the Paris Terror Attacks Unfolded

ViceNews: As the investigation into the Paris terror attacks continues, one thing has become clear: The attacks started in — and may have been directed from — neighboring Belgium.

After accessing 6,000 official records from the ongoing police investigation, French daily Le Monde has reconstructed the days that led to the coordinated attacks that brought the French capital to a standstill and left 130 people dead.

On November 13, three teams of gunmen attacked three targets in Paris: the Stade de France, the Bataclan concert hall, and cafés and restaurants in the 11th and 12th Arrondissements. The attackers used three vehicles: a Renault Clio, a SEAT, and a Volkswagen Polo.

In the early hours of November 12, the Clio and the SEAT were spotted in a backstreet of Molenbeek, a neighborhood of Brussels that has been labeled “the heart of jihadism” in Europe. Three men reportedly exited the vehicles and exchanged a package.

According to investigators, the men in the cars were Salah Abdeslam, now one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, his brother Brahim, who blew himself up at the Comptoir Voltaire café, and Mohamed Abrini, a 30-year-old Belgian man who helped mastermind the attack. Like Abdeslam, Abrini still remains at large.

First Stop: Charleroi
Le Monde revealed that, prior to meeting up in Molenbeek, the cars made a brief stop in the Belgian city of Charleroi, spending time in a neighborhood infamous for weapons and drugs trafficking.

At around 4pm on November 12, the two cars set off for Paris. There, they were met by a third vehicle, which would transport the third team of attackers.

In Paris, the attackers split up into two groups. The Bataclan attackers took a hotel room in the southeast Paris suburb of Alfortville. The men who would carry out the attacks at the stadium and along the busy sidewalks of the 11th and 12th Arrondissements spent the night in a house in the northeastern Paris suburb of Bobigny. Investigators found a roll of Scotch tape in the house that the attackers used to assemble their explosive belts.

A Mysterious Trip to the Airport
At 6pm on November 13, the Clio traveled to the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and remained there until 7:20pm. Investigators still aren’t sure about the purpose of this brief stop. At 7:40pm, the three Bataclan attackers left their hotel in the Polo. At 8:29pm, Salah Abdeslam drove the third car to the Stade de France, where he dropped off three of his accomplices, each of them wearing a belt packed with explosives. At 8:39pm, the SEAT continued toward the 11th Arrondissement.

Salah Abdeslam, Bilal Hadfi, and two unidentified men carrying fake Syrian passports rode in the Clio. So far, the only thing known about the unidentified men is that they entered Europe at the start of October.

Riding in the SEAT were Abdelhamid Abaaoud, Brahim Abdeslam, and a third man, who may have died in the police raid on Abaaoud’s hideout in Saint-Denis, in the early hours of November 18.

Omar Ismail Mostefaï, Samy Amimour, and Foued Mohamed-Aggad rode in the Polo. Their car was headed to the Bataclan concert hall, where 1,500 people gathered to hear the Eagles of Death Metal perform.

Attacks Likely Coordinated in Belgium
Le Monde also confirmed earlier reports that three Bataclan gunmen were communicating with an individual in Belgium until the moment the attack began. Investigators found a white Samsung mobile phone bearing the DNA of Mostefaï and Mohamed-Aggad in a trash can near the Bataclan. The discarded phone contained a text message sent at 9:42pm to an unknown contact in Belgium.

“We’ve left,” the message said. “We’re starting.” The contact communicated a total of 25 times with the attackers, disabling the line immediately after receiving the text message announcing the start of the attack.

Abaaoud was also in touch with someone in Belgium on the night of November 13. Investigators have established that the two Belgian phone lines were situated at the exact same location, suggesting both teams in Paris were communicating with the same person.

Paris Associate Killed in Syria
An associate of the Paris attackers was recently killed in an airstrike in Syria. Charaffe Al-Mouadan, a 26-year-old Syria-based member of the Islamic State (IS), was born in the northeastern Paris suburb of Bondy and was a close friend of Amimour, one of the Bataclan gunman. They were both arrested in October 2012 for suspected terror activity, a year before Al-Mouadan relocated to Syria to join IS.

Al-Mouadan — who went by the nickname “Souleymane” — was also friends with Abaaoud. Radio station France Info revealed the existence of a photograph that shows Al-Mouadan posing with Abaaoud’s younger brother in Syria.

Investigators turned their attention to Al-Mouadan after one of the Bataclan survivors said he overheard Mostefaï refer to a man called “Souleymane.” According to the witness, Mostefaï asked Amimour whether he was planning to “get in touch with Souleymane.”

In a statement released on Tuesday, US coalition spokesman Steve Warren said that Al-Mouadan was one of 10 IS leaders killed in targeted airstrikes. Several of these leaders, he noted, were directly linked to attacks abroad — including the Paris attacks.

According to David Thompson, a reporter for French radio station RFI, Al-Mouadan was not a leader of the group — just a fighter with a strong social media presence.

Cheyenne Mtn: Pentagon Went Pro-Active, EMP

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Given the recent missile tests by Iran and North Korea, there is cause for attention, further, Russia is never out of the equation. Paying attention to offensive measures and completion dates is an indication of the Pentagon having clues, seeing violations of agreements and resolutions and adversarial military build up of advanced technology.

Pentagon Moves More Communications Gear into Cheyenne Mountain

Largely abandoned a decade ago, the iconic Cold War bunker is getting an upgrade.

In April of 2015: The Pentagon is beefing up its communications setup inside a hollowed-out section of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains less than a decade after it had largely abandoned the site.

The gear is being moved into Cheyenne Mountain to protect it from electromagnetic pulses, said Adm. William Gortney, commander of U.S. Northern Command and NORAD.

“[T]here is a lot of movement to put capability into Cheyenne Mountain and to be able to communicate in there,” Gortney said Tuesday during a news briefing at the Pentagon.

Electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs, can occur naturally or by manmade devices such as nuclear weapons. For years, the Pentagon has been working on building weapons that could fry the electronic equipment of an enemy during battle.

“Because of the very nature of the way that Cheyenne Mountain is built, it’s EMP-hardened,” Gortney said. “It wasn’t really designed to be that way, but the way it was constructed makes it that way.”

Being able to communicate during an EMP attack is important, Gortney said.

“My primary concern was: ‘Are we going to have the space inside the mountain for everybody that wants to move in there?’ … but we do have that capability,” he said.

Last week, the Pentagon awarded defense firm Raytheon a $700-million contract to install new equipment inside the mountain. The company said the contract, which runs through 2020, will “support threat warnings and assessments for the North American Aerospace Defense Command Cheyenne Mountain Complex.”

The Pentagon’s March 30 contract announcement said Raytheon will provide sustainment services and products supporting the Integrated Tactical Warning/Attack Assessment (ITW/AA) and Space Support Contract covered systems. “The program provides ITW/AA authorities accurate, timely and unambiguous warning and attack assessment of air, missile and space threats,” it said.

Since 2013, the Pentagon has awarded contracts worth more than $850 million for work related to Cheyenne Mountain.

The Colorado complex is the embodiment of the Cold War, an era when bunkers were built far and wide to protect people and infrastructure. Cheyenne Mountain was the mother of these fallout shelters, a command center buried deep to withstand a Soviet nuclear bombardment. The complex was locked down during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Air Force Space Command runs the mountain and maintains sleeping quarters, fresh water and a power station that would be used during an attack.

Almost a decade ago, NORAD pulled most of its staff out of Cheyenne Mountain and moved its command center into the basement of a headquarters building at nearby Peterson Air Force Base. Since then, Cheyenne Mountain has served as a back-up site.

Now the Cheyenne Mountain staff is set to grow again. Still, the command center at Peterson will remain operational, Gortney said.

In June 2013, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel gave a speech in front of the mammoth blastproof doors on the roadway leading into the mountain.

“These facilities and the entire complex of NORAD and NORTHCOM represent the nerve center of defense for North America,” he said at the time.

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MissileThreat: The U.S. has no ballistic-missile early-warning radars or ground-based interceptors facing south and would be blind to a nuclear warhead orbited as a satellite from a southern trajectory. The missile defense plans were oriented during the Cold War for a northern strike from the Soviet Union, and they have not been adapted for the changing threats.

The Pentagon was wise to move Norad communications back into Cheyenne Mountain and to take measures elsewhere to survive an EMP attack. But how are the American people to survive? In the event of a yearlong nationwide blackout, tens of millions of Americans would perish from starvation and societal chaos, according to members of the Congressional EMP Commission, which published its last unclassified report in 2008.

Yet President Obama has not acted on the EMP Commission’s draft executive order to protect national infrastructure that is essential to provide for the common defense. Hardening the national electric grid would cost a few billion dollars, a trivial amount compared with the loss of electricity and lives following an EMP attack. The U.S. also should deploy one of its existing transportable radars in the Philippines to help the ground-based interceptors at California’s Vandenberg Air Force defend the country against an attack from the south.

Congress also has failed to act on the plans of its own EMP commission to protect the electric grid and other civilian infrastructure that depends on a viable electric grid—such as communications, transportation, banking—that are essential to the economy. In recent years, the GRID Act, the Shield Act, and the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act have gained bipartisan and even unanimous support in the House, yet they died in the Senate.

States are not waiting for Washington to act. Maine and Virginia have enacted legislation and undertaken serious studies to consider how to deal with an EMP attack. Florida’s governor and emergency manager are considering executive action to harden their portion of the grid. Colorado legislators are holding hearings on legislation to protect their citizens. Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Indiana, Idaho and New York have initiatives in various stages to deal with an EMP attack.