Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security

Tell Tucker the Russians Really Did Interfere

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The Obama Administration found itself in “uncharted territory” as the scope of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections became clear to senior officials, a report issued on Thursday by the Senate Intelligence Committee found.

The panel — led by Sens. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA) — found that the U.S. government “was not well-postured to counter Russian election interference activity with a full range of readily-available policy options.”

The Obama administration issued “high-level warnings of potential retaliation” to Moscow, “but tempered its response over concerns about appearing to act politically on behalf of one candidate, undermining public confidence in the election, and provoking additional Russian actions.”

The report marks the third volume in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s years-long investigation of Russia’s interference campaign in the 2016 election. Previous reports have focused on the use of social media manipulation by Russia in 2016 and its attacks on local and state election infrastructure.

Some sections of the report remain partially or totally redacted, but nonetheless a picture emerges of the uncertainty and contradictions the administration faced in figuring out how to address Russia’s attack on the U.S. elections.

Even as the U.S. government was well aware of Moscow’s decades-long campaigns against the U.S., the 2016 attack was “unprecedented” in “scale and sophistication,” Thursday’s report said, and Russia’s weaponization of the information it hacked from Democrats was unlike anything government officials had ever seen before.

Some top administration officials first learned that the DNC had been hacked and had emails stolen when it was reported by the Washington Post in June 2016.

“In fact, had the DNC not approached and cooperated with the Washington Post to publish a June 14, 2016, article, senior administration leadership probably would not have been aware of the issue until later, in all likelihood when WikiLeaks, Guccifer 2.0, and DCLeaks began to publish emails taken from the DNC’s network,” the report reads.

The administration faced several constraints as it grappled with how to respond to the attack, according to the report. One was the concern that public warnings would help Russia achieve its very goals, by sowing fear and undermining confidence in the election.

Another, however, was the fear of giving the appearance that the White House was “siding with one candidate,” particularly as then-candidate Donald Trump was amping up his rhetoric about the election being “rigged” against him, officials noted to the committee.

The report cites then-Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco recalling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) raising similar concerns.

“[Y]ou security people should be careful that you’re not getting used,” the report cites Monaco as remembering of McConnell’s reaction to the prospect of a public, bipartisan statement on the interference campaign.

Monaco, the report states, interpreted this as meaning that intelligence on Russia’s interference efforts “was being inflated or used for partisan ends.”

Sen. Burr, at a committee hearing cited in the report, phrased McConnell’s concern as “Would this not contribute to Russia’s efforts at creating concerns about our election process, if the leadership of the Congress put that letter out?”

Separate reporting has indicated that McConnell told Obama in a September 2016 meeting about Russian interference that he would interpret a public warning about the matter as an attempt to interfere in the election, and not sign on to a bipartisan announcement about the threat.

The report recounts several direct warnings Obama officials delivered to Moscow regarding the attack, including an in-person confrontation between President Obama and Vladimir Putin at a September 2016 G20 summit in China.

A paragraph titled “Secretary Kerry and Minister Lavrov” in that section is completely redacted. In Obama’s warning to Putin, which was crafted carefully with a small group of principals, the potential consequences were “purposely left ambiguous by the President in an effort to intimate that a range of diplomatic, economic, [redacted] options were available to use in response to Russia.”

Putin gave Obama an “energetic” and “non-substantive” denial, then-Ambassador Susan Rice told the committee, based on Obama’s account of the conversation to her.

CIA Director John Brennan also brought up the interference on an August call with Russian FSB head Alexander Bortnikov, as did Rice, with a phone call to then-Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and a written message from Obama that was passed through her to Putin.

“The written message was a more specific warning that contained ‘the kind of consequences that he could anticipate would be powerfully impactful to their economy and far exceed anything that he had seen to date,’” the report said, quoting Rice.

The administration also used a cyber hotline to deliver warnings to Russia, where at least eight messages — four on each side — were exchanged, but only three of them carrying substantive information, according to the committee.

At one point, the Russian government denied “technical information” that the Obama administration supplied about the interference campaign. In that message, the report reads, Moscow said that “it too had been victim to some of the same cyber activity.”

The report recounts the administration’s efforts to inform stakeholders about the threat to election infrastructure and the blowback the administration experience when DHS floated designating election systems as critical infrastructure (a designation it ultimately made in Jan. 2017).

Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told the committee that the move in October to release a public statement attributing the attacks to Russia was “a very, very big decision.” The statement was ultimately overshadowed by the revelation of the Trump Access Hollywood tape and the dump of another tranche of emails hacked from Democrats.)

Administration officials told the committee that at the time they believed that their warnings to Moscow — and particularly the Oct. 7 warning from Obama to Putin — had had a deterrent effect. However the report identified three events after that warning that showed Russia’s cyber-activity continued: the scanning Russian actors did of state and local election websites to identify vulnerabilities; spearfishing emails sent to Florida election officials and organizations; and a third episode that was completely redacted in the report.

After the election, the administration felt less constrained in how to punish Russia now that it now longer had to worry about provoking further meddling, according to the report. Among the post-election responses were the expulsion of Russian diplomats, the levy of additional sanctions and the designation by DHS of election infrastructure as critical infrastructure. Much of this section of the report is also redacted.

The White House also considered whether to impose more punitive economic sanctions that would have been severe enough to “incur significant blowback” to the U.S. and Europe.

That path was not taken, in part because of the blowback, and in part because of “uncertainty about the future Russia policy of the incoming administration” and the possibility of wavering European allies.

In an addendum to the report, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Tom Cotton (R-AR), John Cornyn (R-TX), Ben Sasse (R-NE), and James Risch (R-ID) criticized the Obama administration for being “inept.”

“Hollow threats and slow, hapless responses from the administration translated to perceived weakness on the part of the U.S., and Putin exploited that weakness with impunity,” the addendum reads. “It appears to us that either the Obama administration was woefully unprepared to address a known and ongoing national security threat, or even worse, that the administration did not take the threat seriously.

The committee said it was “appalling” that senior Obama administration officials didn’t recognize Russia’s malign activities until late July, despite intelligence pointing in that direction.

Sen. Wyden also filed an attachment to the report, bemoaning “a political environment in which one candidate was questioning the legitimacy of the election with falsehoods (“large scale voter fraud”)” as “a reason to keep the public in the dark about real threats to America’s democracy.”

He criticized the report for failing to provide detailed information about the September 2016 meeting between top Obama administration officials and Senate leaders as the White House pressed for a bipartisan statement on the interference campaign.

“As the report describes, the Obama Administration believed that any public statements about Russian interference it might make would be seen as partisan, a concern that would be mitigated if members of Congress were to publicly support the available intelligence,” Wyden wrote. “I believe that warning the public about a foreign influence campaign should not depend on the support of both parties, particularly when one of the parties stands to gain politically from that campaign. But that is how the Obama Administration felt.”

Green Light Law v. Trump Administration

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Hat tip to DHS….

The New York Department of Motor Vehicles has a rather new law called the Green Light Law where illegals can obtain state issued identification licenses and or driver’s licenses. New York is one of 13 states with such a law with slight iteration differences. It is unclear what undocumented applicants must provide to the clerk as evidence and what safeguards are in place to prevent fraud and higher risks to public safety. Law enforcement across the country use DMV databases hundreds of thousands of times a day for normal traffic stops, identification verification, outstanding warrants and in many cases criminal records across state lines.

New York is the top city as a foreign entry point and there are no real stipulations as to entry or exit factors in the law. Further, the State of New York has terminated DMV database access to Customs and Border Patrol. Remember the 9/11 commission put forth countless recommendations that all lawmakers and all state governors signed onto which mandated information sharing. Governor Cuomo appears to forget that.

Image result for global traveler program

Due to lack of DMV access for all matter regarding travel and public safety, DHS has terminated New York from the ‘Trusted Traveler Program’ and this is yet causing more outrage in the Governor’s office.

DHS: In response to New York State implementing the Driver’s License Access and Privacy Act (Green Light Law), Acting Secretary Chad F. Wolf announced New York residents will no longer be eligible to apply for or renew their enrollment in certain Trusted Traveler Programs like Global Entry. The law prohibits the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) from sharing information with U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), preventing DHS from fully vetting New York residents. The Acting Secretary informed State officials by letter of the change. The letter may be read here.

“New York’s ‘Green Light Law’ is ill-conceived and the Department is forced to take this action to ensure the integrity of our Trusted Traveler Programs. It’s very clear: this irresponsible action has consequences,” said Acting Secretary Chad Wolf. “An aspect of the law which I’m most concerned about is that it prohibits the DMV from providing ICE and CBP with important data used in law enforcement, trade, travel, and homeland security. ICE uses the information as they investigate and build cases against terrorists, and criminals who commit child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, and financial crimes. Unfortunately, because of this law, they can no longer do that”

Wolf continued: “CBP also uses that data for national security purposes and to ensure safe and lawful trade and travel. Specifically, CBP is able to offer Trusted Traveler Programs like Global Entry because we are able to use DMV data to make an evidence-based assessment that those individuals who seek this benefit are low risk and meet the eligibility requirements. Without the DMV information we aren’t able to make that assessment. DHS notified New York DMV that New York residents can no longer enroll or re-enroll in these trusted traveler programs because we no longer have access to data to ensure that New York Residents meet those programs requirements. We must do our job.”

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) runs Trusted Traveler Programs like Global Entry, FAST, SENTRI and NEXUS which rely on access to DMV data to determine whether the person is who they say they are and if they have a criminal record. When that data is denied, the security is compromised. CBP expects the move to affect up to 150,000-200,000 New York residents who seek to renew membership in a CBP Trusted Traveler Programs this fiscal year. There are almost 30,000 commercial truck drivers enrolled in the FAST program at four New York-Canada ports of entry.

Additionally, because the law hinders DHS from validating documents used to establish vehicle ownership, the exporting of used vehicles titled and registered in New York State will be significantly delayed and could also be costlier.

AG Barr/Director Wray Warning on China Threat

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Question is, who is listening? Corporation America, small business, academia, individuals? 5G needs national attention readers, what do you know? Learn it fast, it is here.

AG Barr Hints at His Dangerous Position Overseeing Deep ...

Attorney General Barr recalled, a fellow student once told him Russia wanted to conquer the world and the United States could deal with that. But China, the student said at the time, wanted to own the world and that was a bit more difficult.

“There was a certain truth in that,” Barr told the audience Thursday.

Barr made his remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, reminding his audience that the Communist Party remains in control of the Chinese economy and is “authoritarian through and through.”“Their goal is the eventual demise of capitalism,” the attorney general said.

The United States has long accused China of intellectual property theft on a grand scale. “It has been estimated that the annual cost to the U.S. economy could be $600 billion,” Barr said.

U.S. officials are also worried that China is threatening to become the dominant world force in the race to transition to 5G.

Aside from serving as the attorney general once before, Barr also spent several years in the telecom industry and used that experience to sound another dire warning.

The attorney general called the impending jump to 5G “a quantum leap” which will have major economic implications. The Chinese telecom giant Huawei “is the leading supplier of 5G on every continent except North America,” Barr said, adding that the U.S. market needed to “pick a horse” to back in the race for domestic 5G influence.

“The Chinese are using every lever of power to expand their 5G market share around the globe,” he said.

U.S. officials say Chinese leaders are working toward being the geopolitical, economic and military world leader by the year 2049, the 100th anniversary of the Peoples Republic of China.

“China wants the fruits of America’s brainpower to harvest the seeds of its planned economic dominance,” said John Demers, the assistant attorney general for the National Security Division.

***  Christopher Wray vows independence: No 'pulling punches ...

FBI Director Wray described the threat from China as “diverse” and “multi-layered.” He noted that the Chinese government exploits the openness of the American economy and society.

“They’ve pioneered an expansive approach to stealing innovation through a wide range of actors,” Wray said during opening remarks at the half-day Department of Justice China Initiative Conference in Washington, D.C.

Wray told the audience that China is targeting everything from agricultural techniques to medical devices in its efforts to get ahead economically. While this is sometimes done legally, such as through company acquisitions, China often takes illegal approaches, including cyber intrusions and corporate espionage.

“They’ve shown that they’re willing to steal their way up the economic ladder at our expense,” he said.

The FBI is using traditional law enforcement techniques as well as its intelligence capabilities to combat these threats. He said the FBI currently has about 1,000 investigations into Chinese technology theft.

“They’ve shown that they’re willing to steal their way up the economic ladder at our expense.”

Just last month, a Harvard University professor was charged with lying about his contractual arrangement with China.

Wray also called for a whole-of-society response to these threats. He urged U.S. companies to carefully consider their supply lines and whether and how they do business with Chinese companies. While a partnership with a Chinese company may seem profitable today, a U.S. company may find themselves losing their intellectual property in the long run.

Additionally, U.S. universities should work to protect their foreign students from coercion from foreign governments, Wray said. When China violates our criminal laws and well-established international norms, we are not going to tolerate it, much less enable it,” he said. “The Department of Justice and the FBI are going to hold people accountable for that and protect our nation’s innovation and ideas.”

 

Suspicious Facts Behind the Iowa App

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Remember when Hillary Clinton said nobody liked Bernie Sanders?

Remember when Hillary Clinton claimed Tulsi Gabbard was a Russian operative?

As the country waits for the first caucus results from Iowa, there are some very suspicious details behind this reporting app that you, the reader should know. Caucus chaos may have been human error with coding or possibly all purposeful….you be the judge as you read on.

Iowa Caucus Rules Change Could Produce Three Winners

The Iowa Democratic Party declined to allow officials at the Department of Homeland Security to vet the app intended to tally the votes during Monday’s botched first-of-the-nation caucuses. (remember when the Hillary presidential campaign refused FBI access to server log-ins due to foreign cyber penetrations)

Troy Price, the chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, said in a statement on Tuesday morning that officials have “every indication” the app was not hacked, noting the systems were tested by independent cybersecurity consultants prior to the caucuses on Monday. But, he said there were “inconsistencies” in the results, the underlying cause of which was “coding issues.”

*** Iowa Democratic Caucus Results Delayed by Technology ...

The app, according to several news reports, was developed by the secretive for-profit tech firm Shadow Inc., which has ties to and receives funding from ACRONYM, a Democratic digital non-profit organization. Shadow’s CEO is Gerard Niemira, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

“State campaign finance records indicate the Iowa Democratic Party paid Shadow… more than $60,000 for ‘website development’ over two installments in November and December of last year,” HuffPost reported late Monday. “A Democratic source with knowledge of the process said those payments were for the app that caucus site leaders were supposed to use to upload the results at their locales.”

Shadow has also been paid for services by the Nevada Democratic Party and the presidential campaigns of former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Democratic Party officials kept the details of the app as well as Shadow’s involvement hidden from the public ahead of the Iowa caucus. But as Monday night wore on and frustration with the delayed reporting of the caucus results boiled over, journalists began scrutinizing the new technology and its developer more closely.

The New York Times, citing anonymous people who were briefed on the app by Iowa Democratic Party officials, reported that the app was hastily constructed in just two months and “not properly tested at a statewide scale.”

In a statement released in the early hours of Tuesday morning, ACRONYM spokesperson Kyle Tharpe attempted to distance his group from Shadow’s technology.

“ACRONYM is an investor in several for-profit companies across the progressive media and technology sectors,” said Tharpe. “One of those independent, for-profit companies is Shadow Inc., which also has other private investors. We are reading confirmed reports of Shadow’s work with the Iowa Democratic Party on Twitter, and we, like everyone else, are eagerly awaiting more information from the Iowa Democratic Party with respect to what happened.”

***

An app created by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign is taking heat for the unprecedented delay in reporting Democratic caucus results from Iowa. The company wasfounded in 2017 “to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,” according to its website. Shadow started out as Groundbase, a tech developer co-founded by Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, who worked for the tech team on Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination.

Niemira had previously worked at kiva.org, a nonprofit that makes loans to entrepreneurs and others in the developing world, and Davis had spent eight years as an engineer at Google. ACRONYM’s founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.

There were signs of trouble with the app even before Monday night. Opportunities to train on the app in advance of caucus night did not bode well, Grennan said.

“They had all these issues,” he said. “We were supposed to be getting invitations to use it. The invites would never arrive.” The communications he did receive were confusing, he said.

When the big night came, Grennan, who was running the caucus site at Grinnell College, said the app appeared to be working as he input results, but he couldn’t tell with certainty.

“I kept getting kicked off,” Grennan said, adding that the app would reset if stopped part-way through. He decided to call the party’s hotline with a question, but after nearly half an hour on hold, he gave up. “I’m 90% sure it went through [on the app.] I’ll have to work under the assumption that if it’s not there, they’re going to call me.”

Among Shadow’s clients is Pete Buttegieg’s presidential campaign, which paid $42,500 to the firm in July 2019 for “software rights and subscriptions,” according to disclosures to the FEC. A spokesman for the campaign says the payment was for a service used to send text messages to voters. The campaigns of Joe Biden and Kirsten Gillibrand, who withdrew from the race last year, also made smaller payments to Shadow. More from the LATimes.

al Qaeda Leader to be Extradited From Arizona to Iraq

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He ran an Arizona driving school and was described by friends and acquaintances in Phoenix as an outgoing, friendly member of the city’s Iraqi community and had been in the U.S. for more than a decade and had recently married and had a child. He arrived in the U.S. in January 2008 as a refugee from Iraq.

Ahmed and other members of al Qaeda shot and killed a lieutenant and an officer with the Fallujah Police Directorate in 2006, according to the Department of Justice. A warrant was issued for his arrest on Wednesday.

Jabir Algarawi, a board member of the Phoenix refugee assistance organization Refugees and Immigrants Community for Empowerment, said he met Ahmed in 2010 and knew him well.

Al-Qaeda Leader Wanted by Iraq for Murder Arrested in Arizona - C-VINE Network Ali Ahmed's arrest as suspected al-Qaida terrorist stuns Phoenix friends

PHOENIX – On January 31, 2020, a Phoenix-area resident, who is alleged to have been the leader of a group of Al-Qaeda terrorists in Al-Fallujah, Iraq, appeared today before a federal magistrate judge in Phoenix, Arizona in connection with proceedings to extradite him to the Republic of Iraq. He is wanted to stand trial in Iraq for two charges of premeditated murder committed in 2006 in Al-Fallujah.

The arrest was announced by Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Michael Bailey for the District of Arizona.

An Iraqi judge issued a warrant for the arrest of Ali Yousif Ahmed Al-Nouri, 42, on murder charges. The Government of Iraq subsequently requested Ahmed’s extradition from the United States. In accordance with its treaty obligations to Iraq, the United States filed a complaint in Phoenix seeking a warrant for Ahmed’s arrest based on the extradition request. U.S. Magistrate Judge John Z. Boyle issued the warrant on January 29, 2020, and Ahmed was arrested the following day.

According to the information provided by the Government of Iraq in support of its extradition request, Ahmed served as the leader of a group of Al-Qaeda terrorists in Al-Fallujah, Iraq, which planned operations targeting Iraqi police. Ahmed and other members of the Al-Qaeda group allegedly shot and killed a first lieutenant in the Fallujah Police Directorate and a police officer in the Fallujah Police Directorate, on or about June 1, 2006, and October 3, 2006, respectively.

The details contained in the complaint are allegations and have not yet been proven in court. If Ahmed’s extradition is certified by the court, the decision of whether to surrender him to Iraq will be made by the U.S. Secretary of State.

Ahmed’s arrest was executed by the FBI Phoenix Field Office, HSI Phoenix Field Office and the U.S. Marshals Service. The extradition case will be handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona and the Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs.