Category Archives: FBI

DOJ Lawyer/Donor Spent 1500+ Hours Investigation IRS Targeting

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Judicial Watch: Obama Donor/DOJ Prosecutor Spent 1529.25 Hours Investigating the IRS’ Targeting of Conservative Groups

Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released a letter from the Justice Department admitting that Democratic Party/Obama campaign donor and Justice Department attorney Barbara Bosserman spent 1,529.25 hours investigating the IRS’ targeting of conservative organizations in 2010 and 2012.  According to Federal Election Commission records, Bosserman contributed $6,750 to Obama campaigns and the DNC from 2004 to 2012, including 12 separate contributions to Obama for America between 2008 and 2012.  The Obama Justice Department and FBI investigations into the Obama IRS scandal resulted in no criminal charges.

The letter results from a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) appeal filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on February 16, 2016, which sought to overturn a lower court’s ruling allowing the Department of Justice to withhold these records (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 15-5271)).  After over two years, the Justice Department agreed to identify the number of hours just prior to the scheduling of oral arguments during which the agency would have had to justify the withholding of the information.

In February 2014 Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, for:

All Justice Department records from the Interactive Case Management System [a web-based system for storing and accessing information about contacts, calendars, cases, documents, time tracking, and billing, etc.] detailing the number of hours DOJ Attorney Barbara Bosserman expended on the investigation of the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status in the 2010 and 2012 elections cycles.

Subsequently, Judicial Watch sued the agency for failing to respond to the FOIA request.  (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:14-cv-01024)).

In what House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darryl Issa (R-CA) called “a startling conflict of interest,” Bosserman was appointed by then-Attorney General Eric Holder to oversee the FBI investigation despite her being a substantial contributor to the political campaigns of Barack Obama and to the Democratic National Committee (DNC). This lawsuit forced the Obama Justice Department to confirm the existence of a criminal investigation into the IRS’ abuses and that Bosserman, a major donor to Obama’s political campaigns and the Democratic National Committee, was part of the team of lawyers criminally investigating the issue.

In a joint letter to Holder on January 8, 2014, Issa and House Subcommittee on Economic Growth Chairman Jim Jordon (R- OH) asked that Bosserman be removed from the investigation, charging that her “conflict of interest has tainted any information she has gathered.” Holder refused to remove Bosserman, and she failed to appear at a February 6 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing titled: “The IRS Targeting Investigation: What is the Administration Doing?”

“These numbers, extracted from the Obama administration after two years of hard fought litigation, show the central role that a conflicted Obama donor played in the Justice Department investigation of the Obama IRS scandal,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Is it any surprise that this compromised investigation found no reason to prosecute anyone in the Obama IRS scandal?”

Through a separate lawsuit, Judicial Watch released FBI investigation records that document interviews with key IRS officials about the Obama IRS targeting scandal.

Remember the Cincinnati excuse?

‘DC is like a black hole.’ – Cincinnati Group Manager

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released 105 pages of newly obtained Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) “302” documents revealing that, beginning in 2010 and lasting through the Obama reelection campaign in 2012, the Obama IRS orchestrated a deliberate policy of burying conservative groups’ tax exemption applications in bureaucratic delays. Interviews with numerous Cincinnati IRS employees in mid-2013 reveal that “Tea Party” group applications were automatically denied approval and assigned to a special “Group 7822” for an extended “inventory” process while waiting for decisions from IRS headquarters in Washington, DC.  One IRS manager “asked why progressive cases were not segregated similar to the Tea Party cases, but she did not get any satisfactory answers.”  FBI “302” documents are detailed narratives of FBI investigation interviews. The Obama Justice Department and FBI investigations into the Obama IRS scandal resulted in no criminal charges.

According to a Cincinnati “Group Manager” interview in July of 2013:

Group 7822 was composed of 12 to 15 people and was simply a place for the Tea Party cases to be held in inventory while the agent waited to receive guidance from the Washington office. There had been no precedence previously on these issues. If the case said it supports politics and political activity, it would be put into Group 7822. [Redacted] and then [Redacted] held the cases in inventory.

A second Cincinnati Group Manager interviewed in July 2013 told the FBI 302 interviewers a similar story, pinning the blame directly on the IRS Washington headquarters:

In the 14-month period when [Redacted] had the cases, he would ask for updates on guidance and was told they were still waiting on DC. He recalls receiving emails with contradictory guidance on whether the 501-c-3 or 501-c-4 cases should be denied. It was his understanding that a team would come and work the Tea Party cases when the guidance was provided … Nobody told him directly where the delay was in resolving the Tea Party issue. DC is like a black hole.

The FBI 302 interviews with Cincinnati IRS employees reveal that the agency adopted a series of policies assuring that Tea Party and other conservative group tax exempt applications would not be approved before the November 2012 presidential election. The strategy relied upon the IRS’ multi-tier “bucketing” system that determined from the time an application was received whether it would be quickly approved or indefinitely delayed.

The first bucket – the “incomplete bucket” – automatically kicked the application back to the applicant because of missing documents. The second bucket – the “merit close” – meant the application met all the criteria and was quickly approved. The third and fourth buckets meant that other issues needed to be addressed by the applicant.  According to FBI interviews with Cincinnati agency employees, top Washington IRS officials issued directives making certain that no BOLO (Be on the Look Out) Tea Party applications could be put in the “merit closed” bucket.

The strategy began in 2010, when the IRS Washington headquarters created its “BOLO” list and applied the term “Tea Party” to all political advocacy tax exemption applications. According to a Cincinnati Quality Assurance Specialist interviewed by the FBI, “The Tea Party was added to the emerging issues tab of the BOLO list in July or August 2010.”

Another Cincinnati agency official explained to the FBI what this designation meant to Tea Party and other conservative organizations: “If an item was on the BOLO list, that case could not be merit closed by the screeners/classifiers. [Emphasis added] A Cincinnati Grade 13 Revenue Agent explained to the FBI how this ended a Tea Party group’s hopes for early, or perhaps even eventual, IRS approval:

[Redacted] saw a few applications that were Tea Party cases and he sent them to a special group to work. [Redacted] identified cases by seeing if they had the Tea Party name or had verbiage that lined up with the Tea Party beliefs. If he saw this, he sent it for development because he knew he could not approve the case.

The “special group” the Revenue Agent sent the Tea Party applications to was known inside the IRS as Group 7822. As reported to the FBI by a Cincinnati Group Manager, “Group 7822 was composed of 12 to 15 people and was simply a place for the Tea Party cases to be held in inventory while the agent waited to receive guidance from the Washington office.”  He added, “In his experience, getting guidance from Washington takes a while; but this seemed to take longer. It was typical for cases to sit and wait until they got guidance on how to apply the tax law.”

Another Cincinnati Revenue Agent explained to FBI 302 interviewers that for those Tea Party groups consigned to Group 7822 to await Washington approval, the wait could be almost interminable:

The cases were old. He did not think that was right because the applicants were waiting so long….  He believes the problem was getting a response from Washington. People developing cases would not receive feedback from Washington for a long time.

A Cincinnati Quality Assurance Specialist told the FBI interviewers in detail of her frustrations with trying to get feedback in order to process Tea Party cases:

They called them “Tea Party cases.” She knew they were conservative groups from the stuff in the news in April 2010. Initially, she was assigned 20 cases. She received instructions from either [Redacted] or [Redacted] to contact EO Technical …

***

It then started to take longer and longer for [Redacted] to respond … By September 2010, he did not get back to her at all.… The Tea Party cases started to backlog since [Redacted] was no longer responding… She knew the Tea Party was vocal in the news, and could see the perception that big government, the IRS, was hold cases. She expressed her frustration about the delay. She felt that every taxpayer deserves as determination, approval or denial.

And an Exempt Organizations Determinations Manager in the Cincinnati IRS office told the FBI 302 interviewers that while she did not think Tea Party organizations were targeted, “The Tea Party designation [in the BOLOs] looks bad, especially since progressive cases were not included in these categories … [Redacted] asked why progressive cases were not segregated similar to the Tea Party cases, but she did not get any satisfactory answers.”

“IRS officials described for the FBI unlawful and purposeful bureaucratic delays orchestrated by top IRS officials in Washington, DC ,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  “One IRS official details how concerns about the Obama IRS targeting of conservatives were ignored.  We hope a future Justice Department follows up on this information in a renewed criminal investigation.”

Judicial Watch previously released 294 pages of FBI 302 documents revealing that top Washington IRS officials, including Lois Lerner, who was interviewed in June 2013 and again in October 2013, knew that the agency was specifically targeting Tea Party and other conservative organizations two full years before disclosing it to Congress and the public.  The Obama Justice Department and FBI investigations into the Obama IRS scandal resulted in no criminal charges.

Border Patrol Website Promotes Lawlessness = Insurgency

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Border Patrol docTemporary Protected Status Designated Country: Syria Through 2018, which means forever.

 

 

The document above is just a suggestion. Always explained as compassion –>> A visa and passport are not required of a Mexican national who is in possession of a Form DSP-150, B-1/B-2 Visa and *Border Crossing Card, containing a machine-readable biometric identifier, issued by the Department of State and is applying for admission as a temporary visitor for business or pleasure from contiguous territory by land or sea. 

Mexican citizens using the Border Crossing Card may travel 55 miles into the U.S. – except in the Nogales/Tucson area, where travel to Tucson is authorized.

The Border Crossing Card (BCC) is acceptable as a stand-alone document (by itself) only for travel from Mexico by land, or by pleasure vessel or ferry. Together with a valid passport, though, it meets the documentary requirements for entry at all land, air, and sea ports of entry (to include travel from Canada).  Note: You must be a Mexican citizen and a resident of Mexico to have a BCC.

Border Patrol’s website offers advice on eluding … Border Patrol

FNC: Immigrants who want to enter the U.S. illegally can learn how and where to avoid the Border Patrol from an advisory on the agency’s own website, which critics say is evidence of the Obama administration’s “schizophrenic” approach to enforcement.

Safety and sanctuary can generally be found at schools, churches, hospitals and protests, where Customs and Border Protection agents are barred under a “sensitive locations policy” from carrying out their duty of enforcing border security. In fact, the agency’s website states that actions at such locations can only be undertaken in an emergency or with a supervisor’s approval.

“The policies are meant to ensure that ICE and CBP officers and agents exercise sound judgment when enforcing federal law at or focused on sensitive locations, to enhance the public understanding and trust, and to ensure that people seeking to participate in activities or utilize services provided at any sensitive location are free to do so, without fear or hesitation,” the government website states in both English and Spanish.

While the explanation is apparently meant to show the deference Customs and Border Protection agents show to sensitive societal institutions, critics, including the Media Research Center, say it also tells illegal border crossers where to go if they are being pursued. Agents are barred from interviewing, searching or arresting suspected illegal immigrants in such locations.

“So, almost any illegal alien can escape arrest by either walking with a second person (a march), attending some type of class, or finding a nearby church, medical facility or school bus stop,” the Center wrote in a post bringing the advisory to light.

A “Frequently Asked Questions” section explains in detail what the Customs and Border Patrol’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, considers safe zones for illegal immigrants.

  • Schools, such as known and licensed day cares, pre-schools and other early learning programs; primary schools; secondary schools; post-secondary schools up to and including colleges and universities; as well as scholastic or education-related activities or events, and school bus stops that are marked and/or known to the officer, during periods when school children are present at the stop;
  • Medical treatment and health care facilities, such as hospitals, doctors’ offices, accredited health clinics, and emergent or urgent care facilities;
  • Places of worship, such as churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples;
  • Religious or civil ceremonies or observances, such as funerals and weddings;
  • During public demonstration, such as a march, rally, or parade.

Critics of the Obama administration’s immigration policies have long complained that it undermines the mission of border enforcement by imposing rules on agents that they say leave them unable to do their jobs.

“This administration has systematically and maliciously attacked and deconstructed all phases of border enforcement,” said Dan Stein, president of Federation for American Immigration Reform. “It’s to the point now where virtually nobody has to go home. ICE is no longer carrying out its core mission, of finding, identifying and removing illegal aliens from the country.

“Agents are in a state of despair,” Stein added. “They are being turned into nursemaids, chaperones and bus drivers.”

Telling people suspected of breaking the law where they can seek refuge makes no sense, said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies.

“It’s schizophrenic,” Vaughan said. “What the Obama administration has done is to create sanctuaries for illegal aliens and to publicize them. That is fine for a social welfare agency, but not for a law enforcement agency. No law enforcement agency would ever want to broadcast where lawbreakers can go to be shielded from the consequences of their actions.”

The site does say the “sensitive locations policy” does not apply to places directly along the border, but warns its own agents that if they plan to move on a suspect in such a location near the border they “are expected to exercise sound judgment and common sense while taking appropriate action, consistent with the goals of this policy.”

The CBP website also provides a toll-free number and email address to allow illegal immigrants to report possible violations of the “sensitive locations” policy.

 

Half of Those Remaining at Gitmo are Cleared for Release

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There remains a key question to be asked: If those remaining are not a risk or a threat then why has it taken a more than a decade to form this conclusion? Additional questions include how much are we paying other countries to take a detainee as no agreements or conditions have ever been published.

Is this the right time to be doing this? Not so much as noted here:

Key takeaways in this month’s Terror Threat Snapshot include:

– There have been 24 ISIS-linked plots or attacks against Western targets in the first half of 2015, up from 19 in all of last year.

– The number of homegrown terror plots since 9/11 has reached 116, tripling in just the past five years.

– Foreign fighters continue to flow into Syria and Iraq.  There has been an 80 percent increase in fighters traveling to the conflict zone since ISIS declared its “caliphate” one year ago.

– More than 200 Americans are believed to have traveled—or attempted to travel—to fight in Syria, a 33 percent increase overall since the beginning of this year.

  The full report is here.

Half of Guantánamo’s uncharged captives are OK’d to go

Musab Omar Ali al Madhwani in a photo from his 2008 prison profile provided to McClatchy by WikiLeaks.

Musab Omar Ali al Madhwani in a photo from his 2008 prison profile provided to McClatchy by WikiLeaks.

McClatchy: The Guantánamo parole board on Monday said it had cleared a Yemeni captive for release to resettlement outside his homeland, reaching a milestone:

Now, 33 of the last 76 captives at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba can go to nations providing security assurances that satisfy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. Ten captives are charged with war crimes. So half of those long-held, uncharged detainees are now approved to go.

The figure could rise. Seventeen captives not currently facing charges await their parole board hearings, or decisions from them.

Musab Omar Ali al Madhwani, 36, “never held extremist views or any desire to harm Americans,” his U.S. military advocate told the Periodic Review Board on June 28. “I am confident Musab is honest in his intentions after Guantánamo” to pursue a career as an accountant, marry and have children.

Pakistani security forces captured him on Sept. 11, 2002, in a day of raids in Karachi, according to his 2008 prison profile, parts of which an updated assessment discredited. He arrived at Guantánamo on Oct. 28, 2002, after 30 or more days in CIA custody, according to a portion of the so-called Senate Torture Report on the spy agency’s secret prison network.

At Guantánamo, U.S. military intelligence dubbed him a member of the “Karachi Six,” calling him part of a six-member “al-Qaida operational cell intended to support a future attack” in the Pakistani port city, the country’s largest and most populous.

The decision released Monday by the board, however, noted that by March he had been “reassessed to be that of a low-level fighter” who was probably trying to get home to Yemen when he was arrested. The board said he should be resettled in a third country with “reintegration support” and security assurances.

His lawyer, Patricia Bronte, told the board that her client had grown at Guantánamo into someone she would welcome into her family home. She and two other no-charge defense lawyers who had represented him vowed to attend his wedding “regardless of where it takes place,” she said.

“Musab is no longer the shy, gullible youth whom two men convinced to run away from home and go to Afghanistan,” she said. Once, she added, he was “afraid of being alone in the dark.” Now, “he reaches out to calm his brothers’ fears and resolve their disputes.”

Madhwani was one of two Yemeni clients for whom Bronte bought socks and shoes last year after she noticed the men’s footwear looked scruffy. She said she didn’t mind the expense, but was disturbed by what appeared to be prison camp cost-cutting. The spokesman at the time called reports of shortages at the Most Expensive Prison on Earth “baseless”

*****

MIAMI (AP) — A review board has decided that a Saudi prisoner at Guantanamo Bay who attended flight school in the U.S. and was trained to make explosives by al-Qaida should continue to be held without charge.

The Periodic Review Board said in a decision released Friday that Ghassan Abdallah al-Sharbi should remain in custody at the U.S. base in Cuba because he remains a security threat.

Factors cited by the board include what it said was his past involvement in terrorism as well as “hostile behavior” while detained, including organizing confrontations between detainees and the guard force at the detention center.

A short statement added that “the board considered the detainee’s prior statements expressing support for attacking the United States, and the detainee’s refusal to discuss his plans for the future.”

The 41-year-old al-Sharbi attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, and later went to a U.S. flight school, where he “associated with” two of the hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, according to a profile released by the Pentagon before his review board hearing in June.

Authorities said he later received training by al-Qaida in the manufacture of improvised explosive devices and was captured in a raid on a terrorist safe house in Pakistan in 2002.

He faced charges that included providing material support for terrorism before the military commission at the base. But U.S. courts have ruled that material support at the time of the alleged offenses did not constitute a war crime that could be prosecuted at Guantanamo and the case was withdrawn. He cannot be tried in civilian court because Congress has prohibited the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the U.S. for any reason, including prosecution.

Al-Sharbi is one of 76 prisoners held at Guantanamo, including 32 who have been approved for release and are awaiting transfer.

 

Refugees Have Temporary Status in U.S. but not under DHS

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The United States has been taking in refugees, migrants and asylees from Latin America and several dozen countries for decades. This is supposed to be a temporary condition but the truth is it has never been temporary.

Image result for manbij

Now with 45 million people from just 2015 displaced from their home countries around the world, there is a crisis that is hard to define much less solve. The United Nations is the lead organization that is under pressure to find solutions and world leaders are not in any kind of collective agreement. Meanwhile, there are people, mostly innocent that are suffering. This is a historical time, one that was in fact not only predictable but solvable if civil war, conflicts and terrorism was addressed long before it manifested.

At issue is the total cost of war where there is no end in sight but more, the cost of creating a viable and living long term solution for migrants to include education, healthcare, law enforcement, jobs, entitlements to list a few. No country is monetarily prepared for the future costs many yet to be known, studied or funded.

Related reading: Bodies found off coast of Libya as migrant toll climbs

The United States had every opportunity in 2011 to launch humanitarian action missions to offset refugee conditions especially as Islamic State was born, and predicted to become a global terror operation directly after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed. He is the original father of Islamic State…al Qaeda in Iraq.

Image result for zarqawi

As a result of the long war in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, the complete damage to cities and towns where normal infrastructure has been destroyed, there is no viable location to go back to. There are no schools, hospitals, roads, buildings and commerce has stopped except for black markets and smuggling. Further, no countries are stepping up with funds to help rebuild or as many call it, nation building.

In summary, refugees are in fact a new permanent status for wherever they are located, including the United States.

Consequently, the United Nations is chartered with drafting a global solution with world leaders.

The first cut a the draft is found here.

In part from the NewYorkTimes: Refugees and migrants will be the biggest issue at the gathering of world leaders at the United Nations next month. President Obama plans to lead a meeting at the General Assembly in an effort to nudge countries to take in more refugees and contribute to countries that have taken them in for years.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, also plans to hold a meeting on the plight of refugees and migrants. The document under negotiation will be the centerpiece of his meeting.

While the draft text has no force of international law, every sentence has been argued and negotiated. The resulting language is sometimes so vague that it is likely to bring little comfort to the millions of men, women and children who are seeking safety and opportunity abroad.

Eritrea, for instance, recently complained that the many references to human rights in the document were “redundant.” (A United Nations committee earlier this year accused Eritrea of atrocities against its own citizens.)

Russia resisted a sentence that called for countries to share in the “burden” of taking in refugees. (Russia takes in very few, except lately, from parts of Ukraine.)

The United States suggested a phrase asserting that detention is “seldom” good for children. Activists for immigrants and refugees found that suggestion so appalling that they fired off a letter on Friday to President Obama. They argued that any international agreement should make clear that detention is “never in the best interests of children” and should commit to ending the practice. (The United States detains children who arrive from Mexico without legal papers.)

Amnesty International said in a statement over the weekend that “with some states trying to dilute the agreement to suit their own political agendas, we may end up with tentative half-measures that merely reinforce the status quo or even weaken existing protection.”

This draft agreement sets out a long list of principles, most already enshrined in existing laws. It says refugees deserve protection and should not be sent back to places where they could face war or persecution. It urges countries to allow refugees to work and to let their children attend school, though it stops short of saying refugees have a right to either jobs or schools.

It asserts that migration can be good for the world, which is wording that migrant-sending countries wanted. It also calls for countries to take back their citizens if they travel illegally and fail to get asylum, which is what migrant-receiving countries, especially in Europe, wanted.

An early draft had proposed a global compact to allocate where refugees could be permanently resettled, but that proposal failed. African and Latin American countries wanted to know why the compact was on refugees alone, according to diplomats involved in the negotiations. Why not also have a compact on the rights of migrants, they asked.

The latest draft sets a 2018 deadline for two compacts — one for refugees, a second for migrants.

The draft text also says nothing about the rights of the 40 million people who are displaced in their own countries, or about those who are leaving their homes because of climate change.

 

 

Fake URL’s and Shortening During Arab Spring/Iran

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In 2014, it was reported but not widely so.

Edward Snowden leaked a top-secret GCHQ document which details the operations and the techniques used by JTRIG unit for propaganda and internet deception.

SecurityAffairs: The JTRIG unit of the British GCHQ intelligence agency has designed a collection of applications that were used to manipulate for internet deception and surveillance, including the modification of the results of the online polls. The hacking tools have the capability to disseminate fake information, for example artificially increasing the counter of visit for specific web sites, and could be also used to censor video content judged to be “extremist.” The set of application remembers me the NSA catalog published in December when the Germany’s Der Spiegel has revealed another disturbing article on the NSAsurveillance, the document leaked by tge media agency was an internal NSA catalog that offers spies backdoors into a wide range of equipment from major vendors.

The existence of the tools was revealed by the last collection of documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the applications were created by GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) and are considered one of the most advanced system for propaganda and internet deception. JTRIG is the secret unit mentioned for the first time in a collection of documents leaked by Snowden which describe the Rolling Thunder operation, the group ran DoS attack against chatrooms used by hacktivists. More here.

It is being reported again and it may be just good tradecraft by British intelligence.

British Spies Used a URL Shortener to Honeypot Arab Spring Dissidents

Motherboard: A shadowy unit of the British intelligence agency GCHQ tried to influence online activists during the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests and the 2011 democratic uprisings largely known as the Arab Spring, as new evidence gathered from documents leaked by Edward Snowden shows.

The GCHQ’s special unit, known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group or JTRIG, was first revealed in 2014, when leaked top secret documents showed it tried to infiltrate and manipulate—using “dirty trick” tactics such as honeypots—online communities including those of Anonymous hacktivists, among others.

The group’s tactics against hacktivists have been previously reported, but its influence campaign in the Middle East has never been reported before. I was able to uncover it because I was myself targeted in the past, and was aware of a key detail, a URL shortening service, that was actually redacted in Snowden documents published in 2014.

THE HONEYPOT

A now-defunct free URL shortening service—lurl.me—was set up by GCHQ that enabled social media signals intelligence. Lurl.me was used on Twitter and other social media platforms for the dissemination of pro-revolution messages in the Middle East.

These messages were intended to attract people who were protesting against their government in order to manipulate them and collect intelligence that would help the agency further its aims around the world. The URL shortener made it easy to track them.

I was able to uncover it because I was myself targeted in the past

The project is linked to the GCHQ unit called the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group or JTRIG, whose mission is to use “dirty tricks” to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt” enemies by “discrediting” them, according to leaked documents.

The URL shortening service was codenamed DEADPOOL and was one of JTRIG’s “shaping and honeypots” tools, according to a GCHQ document leaked in 2014.

Leaked GCHQ document listing shaping and honeypot tools used by JTRIG.

Earlier in the same year, NBC News released a leaked document showing that JTRIG attacked the hacktivist outfits Anonymous and LulzSec by launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on chatroom servers know as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks.

The group also identified individuals by using social engineering techniques to trick them into clicking links—a technique commonly used by cybercriminals.

One slide showed a covert agent sending a link—redacted by NBC in the slide—to an individual known as P0ke. According to the slide, this enabled the signals intelligence needed to deanonymize P0ke and discover his name, along with his Facebook and email accounts.

In the fall of 2010, I was an early member of the AnonOps IRC network attacked by JTRIG and used by a covert GCHQ agent to contact P0ke, and in 2011 I co-founded LulzSec with three others. The leaked document also shows that JTRIG was monitoring conversations between P0ke and the LulzSec ex-member Jake Davis, who went by the pseudonym Topiary.

Through multiple sources, I was able to confirm that the redacted deanonymizing link sent to P0ke by a covert agent was to the website lurl.me.

Leaked GCHQ slide from document titled “Hacktivism: Online Covert Action.”

COVERT DISRUPTION

Further investigation of the URL shortener using public data on the web exposed a revealing case study of JTRIG’s other operations that used the DEADPOOL tool, including covert operations in the Middle East.

The Internet Archive shows that the website was active as early as June 2009 and was last seen online on November 2013. A snapshot of the website shows it was a ”free URL shortening service” to ”help you get links to your friends and family fast.”

Snapshot of lurl.me.

Public online resources, search engines and social media websites such as Twitter, Blogspot and YouTube show it being used to fulfill GCHQ geopolitical objectives outlined in previously leaked documents. Almost all 69 Twitter pages that Google has indexed referencing lurl.me are anti-government tweets from supposed Iranian or Middle Eastern activists.

The vast majority are from Twitter accounts with an egg avatar only active for a few days and have a few tweets, but there were a couple from legitimate accounts that have been tweeting for years, who have retweeted or quoted the other accounts tweeting from the URL shortener.

According to agency documents published by The Intercept, one of the strategies for measuring the effectiveness of an operation is to check online to see if a message has been “understood accepted, remembered and changed behaviour”. This could for example involve tracking those who shared or clicked on the lurl.me links created by GCHQ.

The group also identified individuals by using social engineering techniques to trick them into clicking links

Another JTRIG document published by The Intercept titled “Behavioural Science Support for JTRIG’S Effects and Online HUMINT Operations” can be used to understand the content associated with social media accounts that used the URL shortener.

JTRIG has an operations group for global targets, which then has a subteam for Iran, According to the document. It further states that “the Iran team currently aims to achieve counter-proliferation by: (1) discrediting the Iranian leadership and its nuclear programme; (2) delaying and disrupting access to materials used in the nuclear programme; (3) conducting online HUMINT; and (4) counter-censorship.”

The document goes on to detail the methods that JTRIG employs to achieve these goals, such as creating false personas, uploading YouTube videos, and starting Facebook groups to push specific information or agendas. Many of the techniques outlined are evident in social media accounts that aggressively use the URL shortener.

Page from leaked GCHQ document titled “Behavioural Science Support for JTRIG’S Effects and Online HUMINT Operations,” published at The Intercept.

AGENTS OF THE CAMPAIGN

There appear to be a small number of Twitter accounts that were only active during the month of June 2009, have very few followers, and repeatedly tweet the same content and links from lurl.me. One of the earliest and prolific accounts to tweet using the URL shortener is 2009iranfree.   Read more here from Motherboard.