Category Archives: FBI

French Report Confirms Assad Regime Ordered CW Attack

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The official report is found here. Sorry Russia, cant blame the United States for this report.

Chemical Attack in Syria – National Evaluation presented by Jean-Marc Ayrault following the Defense Council Meeting (26 April 2017)

 

France says analysis shows Syria regime behind sarin attack

PARIS (AP) — France said Wednesday that the chemical analysis of samples taken from a deadly sarin gas attack in Syria earlier this month “bears the signature” of President Bashar Assad’s government and shows it was responsible.

Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said France came to this conclusion after comparing samples from a 2013 sarin attack in Syria that matched the new ones. The findings came in a six-page report published Wednesday.

Russia, a close ally of Assad, promptly denounced the French report, saying the samples and the fact the nerve agent was used are not enough to prove who was behind it. Assad has repeatedly denied that his forces used chemical weapons and claimed that myriad evidence of a poison gas attack is made up.

But Ayrault said France knows “from sure sources” that “the manufacturing process of the sarin that was sampled is typical of the method developed in Syrian laboratories.”

“This method bears the signature of the regime and that is what allows us to establish its responsibility in this attack,” he added, saying that France is working to bring those behind the “criminal” atrocities to international justice.

France’s Foreign Ministry said blood samples were taken from a victim in Syria on the day of the April 4 attack in the opposition-held town of Khan Sheikhoun, which killed more than 80 people.

Environmental samples, the French ministry said, show the weapons were made “according to the same production process as the one used in the sarin attack perpetrated by the Syrian regime in Saraqeb” on April 29, 2013.

Ayrault said French intelligence showed that only Syrian government forces could have launched such an attack — by a bomber taking off from the Shayrat air base, which was later targeted in a retaliatory U.S. missile strike.

France’s presidency said the country’s intelligence services presented evidence showing the Syrian government “still holds chemical warfare agents, in violation of the commitments to eliminate them that it took in 2013.” It said that information will be made public, without offering details.

It’s thought that Assad’s government still has a stockpile of tons of chemical weapons, despite saying it had handed over all of them.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia’s position on the attack is “unchanged,” and that “that the only way to establish the truth about what happened… is an impartial international investigation.”

Russia has previously called for an international probe, and Peskov expressed regret that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, has turned down the Syrian government’s offers to visit the site of the attack and investigate.

The French minister’s comments came as the OPCW, which is investigating the April 4 attack, held a ceremony in The Hague marking the 20th anniversary of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

In a video message to the ceremony, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the organization’s progress over two decades seeking to eliminate chemical weapons is now under threat.

“In the Middle East, belligerents are breaking the norm against chemical weapons,” he said. “The recent attack in Syria was a horrific reminder of the stakes. There can be no impunity for these crimes.”

The United States has also blamed Assad’s government for the April 4 attack. The Trump administration ordered the cruise missile attack on the air base and issued sanctions on 271 people linked to the Syrian agency said to be responsible for producing non-conventional weapons. Syria has strongly denied the accusations.

Earlier Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the U.S. strike damaged the prospects of a political settlement for the war-torn country.

Lavrov told a security conference in Moscow the U.S. response “pushes the prospect for a wide international front on terror even further away.”

He also dismissed claims that international experts cannot visit the site in Khan Sheikhoun because of security precautions and criticized the OPCW for failing to go there. Lavrov says claims that the experts were warned by a U.N. body against traveling to the location because it’s unsafe are “lies,” adding that Moscow went back to the U.N. and found out that there was no such warning.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russia had to boost security measures at its air base in Syria after the U.S. strike at the Syrian base. Russia has been waging an air campaign since 2015 to help Assad’s forces in the civil war.

In other developments, U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces asked for the U.S.-led coalition to provide air cover over northern Syria, to protect them from Turkish and Syrian government air raids.

A series of Turkish airstrikes on Tuesday killed 20 Syrian Kurdish fighters in attacks that Ankara said targeted Kurdish rebel positions in Syria and Iraq.

Syrian Kurdish officials escorted an American officer to some of the sites targeted in the attack, as large crowds from the area followed them around, according to photos and video from the scene. Redur Khalil, the spokesman for the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, confirmed the visit to The Associated Press.

Khalil said the airstrikes were followed Wednesday by Turkish army shelling of Syrian villages along the border area. The shelling prompted an exchange of fire between Kurdish and Turkish border posts, Khalil said.

The YPG form the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the main U.S. partner in the battle against the Islamic State group in northern Syria. NATO member Turkey considers the YPG an extension of an insurgency within its own borders. The SDF includes Arab fighters.

Khalil said the Turkish escalation would “obstruct the war” against IS.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry condemned the airstrikes. The SDF and the Syrian government have largely avoided confrontations with each other over the course of the civil war. No Syrian government forces were targeted in the attack.

Hezbollah Operation in Miami Smuggling Illegal Items to Syria

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Primer: (many of these parts are for military ordnance use in air to air and air to land munitions)

On 23 July 2012, as the Syrian Civil War continued, the European Union imposed a new wave of sanctions on Syria, which included sanctions on SyrianAir. The sanctions meant that the airline cannot conduct flights to the EU, or buy any new aircraft which contain European parts. As a result, Syrian Air was forced to suspend all its operations to the EU. The company is discussing a lawsuit against European Union countries since Syrian Airlines “did not violate any laws nor did it jeopardise safety”. However EU ministers justified the sanctions on the airline because the company “provides financial and logistical support for the Syrian government”[3]
SyrianAir has assured it customers that it is pursuing a court case with the European Union for unjust sanctions based on biased claims of transporting weaponry. This had been denied by Russia. If SyrianAir was flying weaponry to the Syrian government, it would be breaking major rules with ICAO. Claims have not been proven and the European Union has been discreet on the issue.
AW-Tronics is an international trading company, active on a particular field of the electronic industry. It is an independent distributor specialised in the sourcing for the major OEMs, CEMs and ODMs that face shortage of active and passive electronics component.
Our business is complementary to the structure of the purchasing department of these companies. The credibility of AW-Tronics is based on its ability to source the required parts and to deliver on time. AW-Tronics offers the reactivity of a broker and the reliability of a distributor. AW-Tronics is not linked by any contract to a manufacturer thus it has more flexibility .When seeking parts the distributors refer to their stock whereas AW-Tronics is sourcing worldwide.

*** Indictment document here.

Eleven Individuals and One Company Charged in Florida With Exporting Prohibited Articles to Syria

Ali Caby, a/k/a “Alex Caby,” 40, a U.S. permanent resident currently residing in Bulgaria; Arash Caby, a/k/a “Axel Caby,” 43, of Miami, Florida; and Marjan Caby, 34, of Miami, Florida, were arrested and charged with exporting prohibited articles to Syria, in violation of the Syria trade embargo, commerce regulations and a U.S. Department of Treasury designation based on an Indictment charging eleven individuals and one foreign company. The defendants were charged by indictment for their alleged participation in a conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), and the Global Terrorism Sanctions Regulations by exporting dual-use goods, that is, articles that have both civilian and military application. The dual-use goods were exported to Syrian Arab Airlines, the Syrian government’s airline, which is an entity designated and blocked by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control for transporting weapons and ammunition to Syria in conjunction with Hizballah, a terrorist organization, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Also charged in the indictment were Adib Zeno, Rizk Ali, Ammar Al Mounajed, Zhelyaz Andreev, Mihaela Nenova, Lyubka Hristova, Iskren Georgiev, Ivan Sergiev, and Syrian Arab Airlines, a/k/a “Syrian Air.”

The announcement was made by Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary B. McCord, U.S. Attorney Wifredo A. Ferrer for the Southern District of Florida, Special Agent in Charge George L. Piro of the FBI’s Miami Field Office, Special Agent in Charge Robert Luzzi of the Department of Commerce’s Office of Export Enforcement (DOC) Miami Field Office and Special Agent in Charge Mark Selby of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (ICE-HSI).

Specifically, the defendants are charged with: conspiracy to violate to IEEPA and to defraud the U.S. Government, in violation of Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 371; substantive violations of IEEPA and the EAR, specifically Title 15, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 746.9(a), regarding the Syrian Embargo; smuggling goods from the U.S., in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 554(a); submitting false or misleading export information, in violation of Title 13, U.S. Code, Section 305; conspiracy to commit money laundering, in violation of Title 18, U.S. Code, Section1956 (h); and false statements, in violation of Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 1001.

According to court documents, Ali Caby ran the Bulgaria office of AW-Tronics, a Miami, Florida export company that was managed by Arash Caby, and which shipped and exported various aircraft parts and equipment to Syrian Arab Airlines. Marjan Caby, AW-Tronics’ export compliance officer and auditor, facilitated these exports by submitting false and misleading electronic export information to federal agencies. All three defendants closely supervised and encouraged subordinate employees of AW-Tronics in the willful exportation of the parts and equipment to Syrian Arab Airlines, whose activities have assisted the Syrian government’s violent crackdown on its people.

An indictment is a formal charging document notifying the defendant of the criminal charges. All persons charged in an indictment are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Mr. Ferrer commended the investigative efforts of the FBI, DOC, ICE-HSI, Defense Criminal Investigative Service and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Ricardo Del Toro of the Southern District of Florida and Trial Attorney Matthew Walczewski of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the Department of Justice’s National Security Division.

New Chiquita Papers, Bankrolled Terror in Columbia

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Washington, D.C., April 24, 2017 – Ten years ago, Chiquita Brands International became the first U.S.-based corporation convicted of violating a U.S. law against funding an international terrorist group—the paramilitary United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). But punishment for the crime was reserved only for the corporate entity, while the names of the individual company officials who engineered the payments have since remained hidden behind a wall of impunity.

As Colombian authorities now prepare to prosecute business executives for funding groups responsible for major atrocities during Colombia’s decades-old conflict, a new set of Chiquita Papers, made possible through the National Security Archive’s FOIA lawsuit, has for the first time made it possible to know the identities and understand the roles of the individual Chiquita executives who approved and oversaw years of payments to groups responsible for countless human rights violations in Colombia.

Today’s posting features the first in a series of articles published jointly by the National Security Archive and Verdad Abierta highlighting new revelations from the Chiquita Papers, identifying the people behind the payments, and examining how the Papers can help to clarify lingering questions about the case.

* * *

The New Chiquita Papers: Secret Testimony and Internal Records Identify Banana Executives who Bankrolled Terror in Colombia

 

In the last few years of the 1990s, Chiquita Brands International, the U.S.-based fruit company, fell under a cloud of suspicion. An exposé in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the company’s hometown paper, revealed some of the banana giant’s dirtiest secrets—among them: the messy fallout from bribes paid to Colombian customs agents by officials at Banadex, Chiquita’s wholly-owned Colombian subsidiary.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the U.S. financial crimes watchdog—was also looking into the bribery allegations. The agency subpoenaed thousands of Chiquita’s internal records and soon made a startling discovery. Tucked away in the same accounts where Chiquita concealed the bribes were millions of dollars in additional payments to a rogues’ gallery of armed groups, including leftist insurgents, right-wing paramilitaries, notorious army brigades, and the controversial, but government-approved, “Convivir” militias.

SEC Testimony of Robert Kistinger, January 6, 2000, p. 87.

With these documents in hand, the SEC deposed seven Chiquita executives, each of whom played a different role in administering the so-called “sensitive payments.” In secret testimony on January 6, 2000 Robert F. Kistinger, head of Chiquita’s Banana Group based in Cincinnati, Ohio, told the SEC he had direct knowledge about many of the payments to armed groups, especially when they began in the late 1980s, but claimed that he had become less and less involved with the specifics over time. In his view, the amounts of money paid to the groups—hundreds of thousands of dollars per year—were simply not large enough to affect the company’s bottom line.

Kistinger, who is a named defendant in a massive civil litigation case pending against former Chiquita executives in U.S. federal court, and a likely target of future investigations in Colombia, said it was “not realistic” to halt Chiquita’s Colombia operations over such insignificant amounts of money. “I’m sorry,” he said, “it doesn’t hit the scorecard.”

“We’re not going to stop doing business in Colombia, because, you know, we’re going to have to spend an extra $25,000. That’s not realistic. Right?”

In 2013, Chiquita brought a rarely-seen “reverse” Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the SEC in an effort to block the agency from releasing transcripts of these depositions (and thousands of additional documents) to the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research group based in Washington, D.C. Two years later, a federal appeals court panel rejected Chiquita’s claim, clearing the way for the release of more than 9,000 pages of the company’s most sensitive internal records.

It’s easy to see why the company would want to keep them under wraps. The secret, sworn statements from the SEC probe are the de facto oral history of Chiquita’s ties to terrorist groups in Colombia—a unique and damning firsthand account of how one multinational corporation developed and routinized a system of secret transactions with actors on all sides of the conflict in order to maintain normal business operations—even thrive—in one of the most conflictive regions of the world, all the while treating the payments as little more than the “cost of doing business in Colombia.”[1]

Chiquita auditor’s notes, ca. 1997.

This article is the first in a series from the National Security Archive and Verdad Abierta, the award-winning Colombian news website, highlighting new revelations from the Chiquita Papers, identifying the people behind the payments, and examining how the Papers can help to clarify lingering questions about the case. What was behind Chiquita’s decision to wind down payments to guerrillas and increase payments to their right-wing rivals? Exactly how much money did Chiquita pay to the various armed groups? What was the role of the Colombian security forces in encouraging the tilt toward paramilitaries? Did Chiquita knowingly fund specific acts of violence? And at what point did employees and executives with knowledge of the payments understand that the company was dealing with paramilitary death squads and not a government-sponsored militia group?

* * *

The new set of Chiquita Papers has for the first time made it possible to know the identities and understand the roles played by individual Chiquita executives like Kistinger who approved and oversaw years of payments to groups responsible for countless human rights violations in Colombia. These records are of particular importance now that Colombian authorities have signaled that they are prepared to prosecute business executives for funding groups that committed war crimes and other atrocities during the conflict.

Ten years ago, Chiquita became the first major multinational corporation convicted of “engaging in transactions with a specially-designated global terrorist.” In a March 2007 sentencing agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Chiquita admitted transferring some $1.7 million[2] to the United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) from September 10, 2001, when the group was first named on the U.S. State Department’s terrorist list, through June 2004, when the payments ceased.

Even after outside attorneys warned in February 2003 that it “[m]ust stop payments” to the outlaw paramilitary organization, Chiquita continued to pay the AUC for another 16 months. Until that point, Chiquita’s strategy, set forth by senior executives in Cincinnati, was to “just let them sue us, come after us.”[3]

The AUC was a loose federation of rightist militants and drug traffickers responsible for a terrible legacy of violent acts in Colombia going back to the 1980s. Chiquita began to pay the AUC sometime in 1996-1997, just as the group launched a nationwide campaign of assassinations and massacres aimed at unionists, political activists, public officials and other perceived guerrilla supporters, often working with the collaboration or complicity of Colombian security forces. Over the next several years, the AUC dramatically increased its numbers and firepower, raised its political profile, infiltrated Colombian institutions, drove thousands of Colombians from their homes, and for the first time challenged guerrilla groups for control of strategic areas around the country.

Chiquita agreed to pay a relatively modest $25 million fine as part of its deal with the DOJ, but not a single company executive has ever been held responsible for bankrolling the AUC’s wave of terror. Nor have any Chiquita officials faced justice for millions more in outlays to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), and practically every other violent actor in the region.

Efforts to hold individual Chiquita executives accountable for financing the groups are complicated by a deliberate decision on the part of the U.S. Justice Department to withhold the names of the people behind the payments scheme. At the September 2007 sentencing hearing in the terror payments case, U.S. government attorneys specifically argued against the public identification of the Chiquita officials “to protect the reputational and privacy interests of uncharged individuals.”

Instead, the Factual Proffer memorializing the plea agreement revolves around ten anonymous “Relevant Persons” identified only as “Individual A” through “Individual J.” The public version of a 2009 report by Chiquita’s Special Litigation Committee (SLC) likewise omits the names of most of the individuals identified in the report, replacing them with anonyms like “Chiquita Employee #2,” “Banadex Employee #1,” and “Chiquita lawyer.”

In 2011, the Archive published its first Chiquita Papers, posting, revealing, among other things, that the company appeared to have engaged in quid pro quos with guerrilla and paramilitary groups in Colombia, contrary to the Factual Proffer’s finding that Chiquita had not derived any benefit from the payments.

The original Chiquita Papers revealed the company had engaged in quid pro quos with guerilla and paramilitary forces in Colombia

The first Chiquita Papers collection offered some important new revelations, but lacked a coherent contextual narrative. There were few indications as to who had written the documents, and it was nearly impossible to say for sure how the named individuals related to one another. Handwritten notes, auditing records, legal memos, and accounting schedules—among thousands of pages of internal records released under FOIA by the DOJ—offered tantalizing clues, but few concrete conclusions could be drawn from them.

The key that unlocks many of the mysteries of the Chiquita Papers is the secret testimony given by Kistinger and six other Chiquita officials during the SEC’s expansive bribery investigation. Through a relatively simple, if laborious, process of cross-referencing among the three sources, it is possible to identify almost all of the individuals whose names were scrubbed from the Factual Proffer, the SLC Report, and the SEC testimony—effectively stripping away the redactions that have shielded Chiquita personnel from scrutiny and that have helped guarantee impunity for individuals linked to the payments.

CIA WikiLeaks Mole a Russian or Defector?

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The truth is often stranger than fiction and when it does finally come out, the twists and turns to the stories are shocking. So, it has been announced that the FBI and CIA are on a full blown mole search investigation to determine who within or as a contractor to the CIA is loyal or on the payroll of a foreign rogue nation such as Russia.

Schindler at the Observer wrote and explained that the last major Soviet penetration of NSA during the Cold War was Ron Pelton, a former agency analyst who started selling secrets to the KGB in 1980. Pelton betrayed highly sensitive signals intelligence programs to Moscow and was convicted of espionage in 1986 after Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB officer who temporarily defected to the United States, tipped off the FBI about an NSA source selling secrets to the Kremlin.

Image result for ron pelton espionage Quazoo

So, could it be Bernie Sanders? After all, he honeymooned in Yaroslavl, Soviet Union…not modern day Russia. Anyone hear of Evgeny Buryakov who is alleged to have attempted to recruit Carter Page an early advisor to Donald Trump? Could it be John Kerry himself as part of a larger plot for Russian cooperation over Syria or Iran? It is thought that the mole is an insider or contractor, yet who could pass thumb drives or envelops via dead drops?

None of the above is real or proven, it is just suggested to think out of the box as we are only restrained by our own limits of imagination. We had never heard of Edward Snowden either right?

*** What about those ‘Shadow Brokers’? One must understand the world of espionage and how it has adjusted due to the internet and global communications with encryption.

A message from Vladimir Putin can take many forms.

It can be as heavy-handed as a pair of Russian bombers buzzing the Alaska coast, or as lethal as the public assassination of a defector on the streets of Kiev. Now Putin may be sending a message to the American government through a more subtle channel: an escalating series of U.S. intelligence leaks that last week exposed a National Security Agency operation in the Middle East and the identity of an agency official who participated.

The leaks by self-described hackers calling themselves “the Shadow Brokers” began in the final months of the Obama administration and increased in frequency and impact after the U.S. bombing of a Syrian airfield this month—a move that angered Russia. The group has not been tied to the Kremlin with anything close to the forensic certitude of last year’s election-related hacks, but security experts say the Shadow Brokers’ attacks fit the pattern established by Russia’s GRU during its election hacking. In that operation, according to U.S. intelligence findings, Russia created fictitious Internet personas to launder some of their stolen emails, including the fake whistleblowing site called DCLeaks and a notional Romanian hacker named “Guccifer 2.0.”

“I think there’s something going on between the U.S. and Russia that we’re just seeing pieces of,” said security technologist Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at IBM Resilient. “What happens when the deep states go to war with each other and don’t tell the rest of us?”
The Shadow Brokers made their deubt in August, appearing out of nowhere to publish a set of secret hacking tools belonging to the “Equation Group”—the security industry’s name for the NSA’s elite Tailored Access Operations program, which penetrates foreign computers to gather intelligence. At that time, the Shadow Brokers claimed to be mercenary hackers trying to sell the NSA’s secrets to the highest bidder. But they went on to leak more files for free, seemingly timed with the public thrusts and parries between the Obama administration and the Russian government.

From the start, outside experts had little doubt that Russian intelligence was pulling the strings. “Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility,” exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted last August. “Why did they do it? No one knows, but I suspect this is more diplomacy than intelligence, related to the escalation around the [Democratic National Committee] hack.”

The FBI started investigating, and in August agents arrested an NSA contractor named Hal Martin after discovering that Martin had been stockpiling agency secrets in his house for two decades. But even as Martin cooled his heels in federal custody, the Shadow Brokers continued to post messages and files.

Snowden and other experts speculated that the Russians obtained the code without the help of an insider. As a matter of tradecraft, intelligence agencies, including the NSA, secretly own, lease, or hack so-called staging servers on the public internet to launch attacks anonymously. By necessity, those machines are loaded up with at least some of the agency’s tools. Snowden theorized that the Russians penetrated one of those servers and collected an NSA jackpot. “NSA malware staging servers getting hacked by a rival is not new,” he wrote.
Whatever their origin, the leaks dried up on Jan. 12, when the Shadow Brokers announced their “retirement” 10 days before Donald Trump’s swearing-in. The group didn’t reemerge until this month, after the Syrian military’s deadly chemical-weapons attack in Ghouta. Reportedly moved by images of the Syrian children injured or killed in the attack, Trump responded by ordering the launch of 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian government air base—departing drastically from the will of Putin, who considers Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a strategic ally.

The Russian government immediately condemned the U.S. response. Two days later, so did the Shadow Brokers. The group broke its months-long silence and released another tranche of NSA secrets along with a lengthy open letter to Trump protesting the Syrian missile strike. Abandoning any pretense of a profit motive, the Shadow Brokers claimed now to be disillusioned U.S. voters—“the peoples who getting you elected,” as they put in, using phrasing that holds dual meaning coming from a suspected Kremlin operation.

The Shadow Brokers have been playing hardball ever since. Their most recent release, on Friday, exposed the code for a sophisticated NSA toolkit targeting Windows machines, putting some of the agency’s capabilities, circa 2013, in the hands of every newbie hacker able to use a keyboard.

This time, the Shadow Brokers didn’t stop with code. For the first time in their short history, they also released internal NSA spreadsheets, documents, and slide decks, some bedecked with the insignia and “Top Secret” markings familiar to anyone who’s browsed the Snowden leaks.

The leak exposes in detail a 2013 NSA hacking operation called Jeep Flea Market that gained deep access to Dubai-based EastNets, a company that handles wire transfers for a number of Middle East banks, something of obvious interest to U.S. intelligence. (EastNets denies the breach.) But the Shadow Brokers exposed more than just an NSA operation. Metadata left in the files identified the full name of a 35-year-old NSA worker in San Antonio who was apparently involved in the hack. (The Daily Beast was unable to reach him for comment.)
NSA hackers don’t face the same danger as CIA officers working undercover in a foreign country, but the likelihood that Russia has begun exposing them by name, while linking them to specific operations, raises the stakes for the intelligence community. If nothing else, the San Antonio NSA worker could plausibly face criminal and civil charges in the United Arab Emirates, just as hackers working for Russian and Chinese intelligence have been indicted in the U.S.

It’s conceivable that the Shadow Brokers included the name by mistake. Groups like WikiLeaks and the journalists with the Snowden cache are accustomed to scrubbing identifying metadata from documents. But a less-experienced hand might overlook it. Schneier is doubtful. “If we’re assuming an intelligent and strategic actor, which I think we are, then you have to assume that they did that on purpose,” he said.

Nothing is certain; the Shadow Brokers are a puzzle with missing pieces. But Friday’s Shadow Brokers release obliterated one theory on the spot. The NSA would never have put classified spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides on a staging server. They could only have come from inside the NSA.

Which sets the stage for a revival of a storied Cold War intelligence ritual, with the declining agency morale that comes with it: the Russian mole hunt. “I think we’re most likely looking at someone who went rogue from within, or a contractor who had access to this information,” said Eric O’Neill, national-security strategist for Carbon Black. “Either way, we have someone in the intelligence community that’s a pretty high-placed spy.”

A former FBI surveillance specialist, in 2001 O’Neill helped bring down Robert Hannsen, a double agent in the bureau who’d been secretly spying for Russia. “The FBI must be scrambling right now,” he said. “There’s so many leaks going on: this leak, the CIA Vault7 leaks, and at the same time there’s the investigation into any administration ties to Russia, and the DNC intrusion, and all these leaks coming out of the White House. There’s only so much that the FBI’s national security agents can do.”

If Russia did have a mole inside the NSA in 2013, the most recent date of the documents, Schneier thinks it unlikely that it does now, or else the Shadow Brokers wouldn’t exist. “You only publish when it’s more useful as an embarrassment than as intelligence,” he said. “So if you have a human asset inside the NSA, you wouldn’t publish. That asset is too important.”

It’s also possible, though unprecedented in the public record, that Russia found a way into the NSA’s classified network. A competing theory focuses on the FBI’s early suspect, Hal Martin. He’s not the Shadow Brokers, but he reportedly worked in the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations program and had 50,000 gigabytes of classified material in his home. Might he himself have been hacked? Martin is charged in Maryland with 20 counts of willful retention of national defense information, but prosecutors have not made any accusation that his trove slipped into enemy hands.

As Snowden demonstrated when he walked out of the NSA with a thumb drive of secrets, it’s comparatively easy now to steal and smuggle classified information. But O’Neill says the FBI’s counterintelligence mission is easier too, because of the rampant audit trails and server logs in classified networks.

“It’s much easier getting the secrets out now, but on the flip side, it’s also easier for law enforcement and the FBI to track down who had access to the data,” he says. “I like to think this mole hunt is going to be a little easier than it was in the past.”

Until then, expect the Shadow Brokers to stick around. In their Friday dump, they hinted at more revelations this week: “Who knows what we having next time?”

*** WASHINGTON — Forget about spies. It’s rogue insiders that cause heartburn at U.S. intelligence agencies these days.

Few spy cases have broken in the past decade and a half. In contrast, a proliferation of U.S. intelligence and military insiders have gone rogue and spilled secrets to journalists or WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group.

The leaks are as damaging as any major spy case, perhaps more so. And they have underscored the ease of stealing secrets in the modern age, sometimes with a single stroke of a keyboard.

Since early March, WikiLeaks has published part of a trove of documents purportedly created by cyber units of the Central Intelligence Agency. WikiLeaks continues to upload the documents and hacking tools, dubbed Vault 7, to the internet for all to see.

For its part, a mysterious group that calls itself the Shadow Brokers has re-emerged and dumped a large catalog of stolen National Security Agency hacking tools on the internet, including evidence the agency had penetrated Middle Eastern banking networks.

“In the past, we’ve lost secrets to foreign adversaries,” retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of both the CIA and the NSA, said in an interview. “Now we’ve got the self-motivated insider that is our most important counterintelligence challenge.”

Hayden cited the cases of Army Pfc. Chelsea Manning, convicted in 2013 for releasing three-quarters of a million classified or sensitive military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. He also mentioned Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who shook public opinion with his disclosures to journalists in 2013 about U.S. surveillance practices. Hayden added the Vault 7 disclosures last month, which others presume were stolen by a contract employee at the CIA. Read more here.

 

 

 

Jeff Sessions/FBI and MS-13

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Four members of the violent, foreign MS-13 gang were convicted on federal racketeering charges, some of which involved murder.

Miguel Zelaya, 20-years-old, Luis Ordonez-Vega, 36-years-old, Jorge Sosa, 24-years-old and William Gavidia, 23-years-old, were all convicted on a count of conspiracy to commit racketeering, according to the Charlotte Observer:

Zelaya, who also goes by “Most Wanted” and “Ne Ne” is a member of MS-13’s “Coronados Little Cycos Salvatrucha” clique. On Dec. 18, 2013, he shot and killed Jose Orlando Ibarra, an associate of The Latin Kings, a rival gang, the release said.

Ordonez-Vega, also known as “Big Boy,” is a member of the Brentwood Locos Salvatrucha” clique, according to the news release. On June 6, 2013, Ordonez-Vega shot and killed Noel Navarro Hernandez in a strip mall parking lot in Charlotte, believing the victim was a member of a rival gang.

Sosa, who goes by “Koki” and “Loco” is a member of the “Charlotte Locotes Salvatrucha” clique. Prosecutors say he’s been involved in multiple gang-related crimes. In Feb. 2008, he flashed MS-13 gang signs at a rival gang member’s mother and pointed a gun at her while they were stopped in traffic. In June, 2013, he was involved in a gang-related shooting where he and another person followed victims in a neighborhood in Charlotte and opened fire with a high-caliber rifle, the release said.

All of the gang members are either immigrants or the children of immigrants in the U.S. and they are also facing state charges for their crimes.

“Today’s guilty verdicts underscore that even though gang membership may in some ways ‘protect’ gangsters from outsiders, it certainly won’t protect them from the vast reach of the US. Attorney’s Office and our law enforcement partners,” U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina Jill Westmoreland Rose said in a statement.

The MS-13 gang members were four of 37 who were charged with racketeering after an investigation into the criminal activity by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Thirty of the other gang members charged with racketeering are either awaiting sentencing or have pleaded guilty to the charges.

According to the U.S. District Attorney, Ordonez-Vega and Zelaya were convicted on charges to murder in aid of racketeering. Those charges are connected to two separate murders. Meanwhile, Sosa was convicted for attempted murder in the aid of racketeering.

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Image result for ms-13  InSightCrime

In 2015 the U.S. Treasury Department froze the assets of three members of the gang who were funneling funds back to higher-ups in El Salvador from prison. These actions were an attempt “disrupt” MS-13’s financial network by cutting off profits from illegal activities in the United States, the Treasury Department said. In 2012 the Obama administration designated MS-13 a transnational crime organization and implemented sanctions against six members in 2013.

While the U.S. government attempts to target MS-13’s earnings, targeting its culture is proving more difficult. The fierce loyalty among members is unique, Ron Hosko, former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, told FOX Business.

“They’re very cohesive and often directed by imprisoned bosses in El Salvador to recruit and expand in American communities. That tends to mean there’s an aggressive internal enforcement mechanism which equates to internal discipline involving physical violence and murder for disrespect or betrayal,” he said.

The FBI in El Salvador Because of MS-13: