A Yemeni Gitmo ‘Forever Prisoner’, Approved for Release

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

So much for the ‘forever prisoner’ as this will likely apply to the rest of the forever prisoners.

Parole board OKs Yemeni’s release from Guantánamo on fifth review

MiamiHerald: The Guantánamo parole board has approved the release of a Yemeni “forever prisoner” on his fifth review, the latest sign that showing up at a Periodic Review Board hearing actually helps a captive win release from the downsizing war-on-terror prison in Cuba.

The decision, released by the Pentagon Monday, means 27 of the 80 captives currently held at the U.S. detention center in Cuba can leave to a transfer deal that satisfies Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.

Salem bin Kanad, about 40, got to Camp X-Ray in the second week of its existence and was profiled as a veteran jihadist who left his homeland for Afghanistan a year ahead of the 9/11 attacks.

He was initially captured by the Northern Alliance in late 2001 and held at a prison fortress near Mazar-i-Sharif where captives staged an uprising in which CIA agent Johnny Spann was killed, according to a leaked 2008 prison profile. Fellow revolt survivor John Walker Lindh at one point cast Kanad as a commander of their Taliban-linked force, the profile said.

But subsequent U.S. intelligence assessments recast him as having a “low-level leadership role” in a Taliban front-line unit. It cast him alternately as “mostly compliant” with his guards and having “an extremist mindset” that “has continued to praise terrorist groups and activities.”

The Periodic Review Board first considered Kanad’s case in January 2014 and concluded that his release could present a “significant threat to the security of the Untied States.” He didn’t go to his hearing and neither did he offer information about his family or a plan for employment after Guantánamo. The board reviewed his file three times in 2015 and upheld that opinion.

Then he went before the board April 5 but it is not known what he told them. At Kanad’s request, according to the Pentagon, the transcript of his hearing was withheld from the public.

But, according to his file, a military officer assigned to his case provided the board with information about his family, their commitment to help him reintegrate into an Arabic-speaking society and his agreement to participate in a rehabilitation program — an argument that apparently won the favor of the board. He has a father and siblings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and would like to join them, study English and computer science and launch a career in sales to support them there.

“The board encourages the detainee to continue regularly attending classes” at Guantánamo, it wrote in its May 5 decision to approve his transfer, “and continue engaging with family members to prepare himself for transfer.”

The decision comes at a busy time — as the board is hearing from an unprecedented nine captives in a single month, May. It follows the Pentagon’s April 16 transfer of nine Yemenis with similar close family in the Saudi Kingdom to a rehabilitation program there.

****

JTF-GTMO Assessment:

(S) Recommendation: JTF-GTMO recommends this detainee for Continued Detention

Under DoD Control (CD). JTF-GTMO previously recommended detainee for Continued

Detention Under DoD Control (CD) on 1 January 2007.

(S//NF) Executive Summary: Detainee is a member of al-Qaida. Detainee served as a

sub-commander in Usama Bin Laden’s (UBL) 55th Arab Brigade during hostilities against

US and coalition forces.1 Detainee is assessed to have commanded the Tameem Center on

the Khwaja Ghar front lines and received basic and advanced training, including tactics and

artillery, at probably the al-Qaida al-Faruq Training Camp in Afghanistan. Detainee

acknowledged traveling to Afghanistan expressly for jihad in 2000, and his name was found

on al-Qaida affiliated documents. Detainee’s passport was used to attempt entry into Iraq by

suspected al-Qaida operatives and his true identity is in question. JTF-GTMO determined

this detainee to be:

A HIGH risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.Prior History: Detainee belongs to the Bin Kinad tribe. Detainee finished high
school and then worked on a small farm for approximately six months before leaving for

Afghanistan. Detainee was issued a passport on 31 July 2000 in Aden, YM and departed

Yemen for Afghanistan in approximately October 2000. For his full summary file, go here.

DoJ and North Carolina Trading Lawsuits Over Bathrooms

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

Really? How did we get here after all these years? Loretta Lynch, U.S. Attorney General made her official statement today and one key word she used was ‘privacy’….exactly whose privacy is protected? This is so twisted.

The Justice Department had alleged the North Carolina law violated Title IX, the federal law that bars sex discrimination in education. But the lawsuit is silent about Title IX, likely because of a recent decision by the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. This could place North Carolina in jeopardy of billions of dollars of federal aid…..nothing about violating the 10th Amendment…..

North Carolina Turns to Prominent Conservative Lawyer to Defend ‘Bathroom’ Law

Provided by the National Law Journal:

Judge assigned to the case is a Reagan appointee whose nomination to the Fourth Circuit stalled amid Democratic opposition.

The 10 page lawsuit is found here.

A go-to lawyer for Republican governors facing scandal and controversy will represent North Carolina Gov. Patrick McCrory as he defends a state law that requires transgender state employees to use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender on their birth certificates.

Karl “Butch” Bowers Jr. of Bowers Law Office in Columbia, South Carolina, is part of the legal team that sued the U.S. Department of Justice on McCrory’s behalf on Monday. Last week, the Justice Department threatened legal action over the law, known as HB2.

Bowers is a lead attorney in one of three lawsuits filed on Monday related to the contested North Carolina law, known as HB2. Several hours after McCrory filed suit, two state legislators sued the Justice Department in defense of the law. Then the Justice Department sued McCrory, several days after threatening legal action.

A former special counsel for voting matters in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, Bowers is also representing McCrory in separate litigation over the state’s voter identification law in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Gupta last week called HB2 discriminatory and in violation of the federal Civil Rights Act. She asked McCrory to respond by Monday with a pledge not to enforce the law. McCrory struck back with Monday’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. The complaint seeks a ruling that HB2 is lawful.

Bowers did not immediately return a request for comment, nor did his co-counsel, Robert Stevens, general counsel in the governor’s office, and William Stewart Jr. of Millberg Gordon Stewart in Raleigh.

The case is before U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle, appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. A former legislative aide to former North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, Boyle repeatedly faced Democratic opposition when two presidents—the elder Bush and the younger Bush—unsuccessfully tried to nominate him to the Fourth Circuit.

Boyle was nominated to the Fourth Circuit in 1991, and then six more times between 2001 and 2006, according to judiciary records. The Senate never voted on his nomination. Legal Times reported in 2007 that Democratic opposition to Boyle was in part political payback for Helms’ blocking of judicial nominees during the Clinton administration.

Governors’ go-to lawyer

McCrory is the latest in a line of Republican governors to seek Bowers’ help.

Bowers represented South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in ethics proceedings in the state Legislature about whether she illegally lobbied for private companies while she was a member of the House. The ethics committee cleared her of wrongdoing in 2012.

Bowers counseled former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who faced impeachment after he disappeared for several days in 2009 on what was later revealed to be a trip to Argentina to visit his mistress. Sanford also faced an ethics investigation into his use of state resources for personal travel. South Carolina Republicans ultimately censured Sanford but did not vote to impeach him.

In 2007, Bowers took a one-year leave from private practice to serve as special counsel for voting matters in the Justice Department. The following year, he served as a lawyer to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, in Florida.

In 2012, Bowers joined a team of lawyers representing South Carolina in litigation over the state’s voter identification law. A special three-judge panel in Washington found that the law was not discriminatory, although the judges blocked it from taking effect for the November 2012 election.

Less than a year later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key section of the federal Voting Rights Act that in effect eliminated the requirement that states such as South Carolina seek court approval before making changes to election processes.

There are now four lawsuits pending over HB2.

Updated at 4:05 p.m.

In March, the American Civil Liberties Union, joined by Jenner & Block and Lambda Legal, filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina arguing that the law is unconstitutional.

The two North Carolina legislators who filed suit on Monday in the Eastern District of North Carolina—Phil Berger, president pro tempore of the state Senate, and Tim Moore, speaker of the House of Representatives—are represented by Gene Schaerr and S. Kyle Duncan of Schaerr | Duncan in Washington.

Schaerr in 2014 left a partnership at Winston & Strawn to defend Utah’s same-sex marriage ban. Kyle is the former general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

In remarks on Monday announcing the Justice Department’s lawsuit, Lynch said that discriminatory measures against transgender individuals that followed the Supreme Court’s ruling last year legalizing same-sex marriage was akin to the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation and the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Addressing the transgender community, Lynch said that the Justice Department and the Obama administration “want you to know that we see you, we stand with you, and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”

Updated with information on additional lawsuits filed on Monday. North Carolina’s lawsuit is posted below.

China, Unfettered Espionage Against U.S.

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

Did China Just Steal $360 Billion From America?

Gordon G. Chang/Forbes:

“The FBI has obtained information regarding multiple malicious cyber actor groups that have compromised sensitive business information from U.S. commercial and government networks through cyber espionage,” warned the law enforcement agency on the 2nd of this month. At about the same time, the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Security Service of the Department of Defense issued similar alerts.

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

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

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.”

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.]