Report for California, What About your State?

Golfing, tequila and spa treatments: These are the gifts given to California lawmakers in 2015

LATimes: State legislators accepted more than $892,000 in gifts last year, including foreign trips, expensive dinners, concert and sports tickets, golf games, spa treatments, Disneyland admissions and bottles of tequila and wine, according to filings released Wednesday.

Lawmakers had their expenses covered by others for educational and trade trips to France, China, Argentina, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Mexico and Israel.

 

In fact, travel costs dominate the gift tallies from last year with a large number of lawmakers deciding to fly overseas for conferences or policy meetings paid for entirely by influential interest groups and foundations.

The travel included 21 lawmakers who attended a conference in Maui in November at a cost of about $3,000 per person, paid for by a nonprofit group funded by oil and tobacco firms and other interests lobbying the Legislature.

The flood of gifts, especially from groups tied to interests seeking favorable treatment at the Capitol, raises red flags for ethics experts including Bob Stern, former general counsel for the Fair Political Practices Commission and a co-author of the state Political Reform Act.

“The people that make these gifts are trying to influence legislators and create goodwill, and clearly it does,” Stern said. “The average citizen doesn’t get these gifts. It’s only when you are in a position of power that you get these gifts.”

The total value of gifts is up by about $50,000 from 2014. A group with interest in promoting climate change policy helped send a large delegation of legislators led by Gov. Jerry Brown to a United Nations summit on climate change held in Paris in December.

Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) had $4,077 of his travel expenses to Paris covered by the Climate Action Reserve, which advocates for solutions to climate change.

In all, De León received $30,200 in gifts, among the most of any lawmaker. Much of it was for educational trips to Japan, Mexico and Australia.

The $14,055 cost for de Leon’s Australian trip to look for drought solutions was covered by the California Foundation on the Environment and the Economy, a San Francisco think tank financed by special interests including PG&E, Shell, the State Building and Construction Trades Council and Chevron.

Claire Conlon, a spokeswoman for De León, defended both the travel and the way it is financed.

“As elected representatives of the world’s seventh-largest economy and a gateway to international trade corridors, building global relationships and studying best practices in other countries is an essential part of the job description,” she said. The funding arrangements with “respected nonprofits” mean “not a single taxpayer dollar is being spent,” she added.

De León also reported gifts of USC football tickets, bottles of tequila, meals and a tie. The disclosure forms that lawmakers must file annually do not require detailed descriptions of the gifts, so there is no way to know the brand of tequila or color of the tie.

Sen. Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica) reported receiving $37,900 in gifts, the most of any lawmaker, much of it to cover the cost of educational trips to China and Argentina.

“I represent a diverse coastal district with thousands of globally focused employers creating good jobs for our local economy,” Allen said. “The trips involved important public policy, environmental, economic and cultural exchanges, and I was honored to serve as part of these educational legislative delegations. Not a single taxpayer dollar was spent, and I fully reported and disclosed all such travel.”

Sen. Anthony Cannella (R-Ceres) reported $31,100 in gifts, including expenses for trips to Singapore and Australia. He also received more than $1,100 in green fees for golf paid for by supporters including the prison guards union and the California Independent Petroleum Assn.

A spa treatment, costing $396, was provided to Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) by the Legislative Black Caucus.

In the Assembly, Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) received the most gifts, $33,832 worth and mostly involving overseas travel. Her $17,000 trip to Taiwan was paid for by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Foundation and her $14,348 trip to Australia with De León was covered by the California Foundation on the Environment and the Economy.

Evan Low (D-Campbell) received more than $31,000 in gifts, including a trip to China paid for by a group called U.S.-Asia Innovative Gateway, and a trip to Newport Beach paid for by the California Independent Petroleum Assn. He also received a $287 ticket to a Giants baseball game from PG&E.

Many of the gifts received by lawmakers would have been prohibited by legislation the governor vetoed two years ago. The bill would have banned nontravel gifts over $200, and barred tickets to amusement parks, professional sports games and concerts, as well as green fees for golf.

The public can read each legislator’s gift report on the FPPC website.

In vetoing the gifts bill, Brown wrote that it would be “adding further complexity without commensurate benefit. Proper disclosure, as already provided by the law, should be sufficient to guard against undue influence.”

The size of some of the gifts received last year troubled Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor and president of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission.

“It’s fair to ask public officials to forgo gifts over certain thresholds,” she said.

A new bill proposes to outlaw travel gifts like the annual Maui convention put on by the Independent Voter Project, which received financing for the event from groups including the Western State Petroleum Assn., Shell Oil, Sempra, tobacco giant Altria, AT&T, the California Cable and Telecommunications Assn. and Koch Industries.

Many event sponsors send lobbyists or representatives to rub elbows with the elected officials poolside or on the golf course.

When Sharia/ISIS Goes Capitalist and Trading

Islamic State ‘earning millions by playing the stock market’

Group using cash looted from banks in Mosul to speculate on international currency markets

Telegraph: Isil is making millions of dollars for its war chest by playing foreign currency markets under the noses of bank chiefs, it was revealed today.

The terror group is earning up to $20m (£14.29m) a month by funnelling dollars looted from banks during its takeover of the Iraqi city of Mosul into legitimate currency markets in the Middle East.

It then makes huge returns on currency speculation, which are then wired back via unsuspecting financial authorities in Iraq and Jordan, a parliamentary committee was told on Wednesday.

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (Isil) extraordinary venture into white collar crime is now a major source of income, along with oil smuggling and extortion from people living in Isil-controlled areas.

Details of the scam emerged during a hearing of a specially-convened Foreign Affairs sub-committee set up to examine Britain’s role in Isil financing.

The hearing was told that Isil finance chiefs would play the international stock markets using cash looted during their 2014 take over of Mosul, in which the group got its hands on an estimated $429m from the city’s central bank.

They also used money “siphoned off” from pension payments that are still being made by the Iraqi government to civil servants living in the city.

The details were revealed to the hearing by John Baron, the sub-committee’s chair, who demanded to know whether the British government – which has pledged to help cut off Isil’s finance networks – was taking proper action against it.

“The cash that Isil has looted, along with siphoned off pension payments, is routed into Jordanian banks and brought back into the system via Baghdad,” he said. “That allows the system to be exploited by Isil, in that they take a turn (profit) on the foreign currency actions and siphon that cash back.”

The profits were channeled back into Isil coffers by “hawala” transfers, an unregulated system of money transfer whereby cash payments are made via agents in one country after a similar amount is presented as collateral in another.

Infographic: How Does ISIS Fund Itself?  | Statista

Tobias Ellwood, a junior Foreign Office minister, admitted to the committee that there was a “porousness” in the local financial system but said that work was now underway to shut it down. It had been done without the active connivance of bank staff, he added.

In December, the Central Bank of Iraq named 142 currency-exchange houses in Iraq that the US suspected of moving funds for Islamic State. It banned them from its twice-monthly dollar auctions in a bid to stop the terror group getting its hands on the cash – a main source of exchange in war-torn Iraq.

But Mr Ellwood conceded: “Iraq could have moved faster on this”. Asked if the similar moves had been made in Jordan, he said he was unable to give an answer.

“Jordan plays an important role in the (anti-Isis) coalition,” he added. “Work is being done to close it down, I don’t think there is anything near as much from that source of revenue as before.”

The committee heard claims that Isil’s “rake off” from foreign currency speculation was a “significant part of their income stream”, although Mr Ellwood said he thought that estimates of $20m were excessive.

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Spiegel: Some members of the intelligence community even view spying in the global financial system with a certain amount of concern, as revealed by a document from the NSA’s British counterpart — the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — that deals with “financial data” from a legal perspective and examines the organization’s own collaboration with the NSA. According to the document, the collection, storage and sharing of “politically sensitive” data is a highly invasive measure since it includes “bulk data — rich personal information. A lot of it is not about our targets.”

Indeed, secret documents reveal that the main NSA financial database Tracfin, which collects the “Follow the Money” surveillance results on bank transfers, credit card transactions and money transfers, already had 180 million datasets by 2011. The corresponding figure in 2008 was merely 20 million. According to these documents, most Tracfin data is stored for five years.

Monitoring SWIFT

The classified documents show that the intelligence agency has several means of accessing the internal data traffic of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a cooperative used by more than 8,000 banks worldwide for their international transactions. The NSA specifically targets other institutes on an individual basis. Furthermore, the agency apparently has in-depth knowledge of the internal processes of credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard. What’s more, even new, alternative currencies, as well as presumably anonymous means of payment like the Internet currency Bitcoin, rank among the targets of the American spies.

The collected information often provides a complete picture of individuals, including their movements, contacts and communication behavior. The success stories mentioned by the intelligence agency include operations that resulted in banks in the Arab world being placed on the US Treasury’s blacklist.

In one case, the NSA provided proof that a bank was involved in illegal arms trading — in another case, a financial institution was providing support to an authoritarian African regime. Full article here.

Freed Dealer, Obama Released, Kills 3

Crack Dealer Freed Early Under Obama Plan Murders Woman, 2 Kids

JW: A convicted crack dealer who left prison early as part of the Obama administration’s mass release of federal inmates has been indicted by a grand jury for fatally stabbing his ex-girlfriend and her two kids in Columbus, Ohio. The gory crime drew national attention because the children, ages 7 and 10, were murdered to eliminate them as witnesses in the brutal massacre of their 32-year-old mother.

This week a grand jury in Franklin County returned a 10-count, death-penalty indictment against the ex-con, 35-year-old Wendell Callahan, for the triple murders. Callahan broke into his ex-girlfriend’s apartment and stabbed the three victims, according to a statement issued by Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien announcing the indictment. The bloody crime scene was discovered by the woman’s current boyfriend, who subsequently engaged in a fight with Callahan before he fled. The indictment includes charges of aggravated murder with prior calculation and design and aggravated murder of victims under the age of 13. “There are multiple charges regarding the three victim deaths because there are different methods to commit the crime of murder and the Prosecutor’s Office typically charges all methods”, O’Brien stated. Callahan is in jail on $3 million bail and is scheduled to be arraigned later this week.

Callahan should have been in jail when the crimes occurred, but he was released four years early because federal sentencing guidelines for crack dealers got reduced. The change is part of President Obama’s effort to reform the nation’s justice system as a way of ending racial discrimination. The initiative was technically launched back in 2010 when the president signed a measure that for the first time in decades relaxed drug-crime sentences he claimed discriminated against poor and minority offenders. This severely weakened a decades-old law enacted during the infamous crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged urban communities nationwide in the 1980s. As part of the movement the U.S. Sentencing Commission lowered maximum sentences for drug offenders and made it retroactive, leading to the early release of thousands of violent thugs like Callahan.

In November the administration began releasing 6,000 drug convicts coined “non-violent” offenders whose sentences were too long under the old guidelines. News reports quickly surfaced contradicting the administration’s assessment that the newly released convicts were not violent. Among them was the leader of a multi-million dollar operation that smuggled drugs from Canada to Maine. Prosecutors refer to the 29-year-old con as a “drug kingpin” who was one of “America’s Most Wanted.” Shortly before the administration’s mass release of drug convicts, federal prosecutors warned that drug trafficking is inherently violent and therefore the phrase “non-violent drug offenders” is a misnomer. The nation’s prosecutors also cautioned that reducing prison sentences for drug offenders will weaken their ability to bring dangerous drug traffickers to justice.

As if it weren’t bad enough that the administration is rewarding thousands of criminals with get-out-of-jail cards, huge amounts of taxpayer dollars are being spent on programs to help them find housing and jobs. In the aftermath of the mass release of federal prisoners Judicial Watch reported on two “re-entry” programs to ease the transition from jail. One received $1.7 million and ordered public housing facilities not to reject tenants with criminal records. The other allocated $20 million to the Department of Labor (DOL) to help ex-cons find work and thus end the “cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration.”

More here including photos.

Hillary calls for sentencing reform too.

This all began in 2013 between Obama and Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch continues to carry the baton.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has announced a major shift in how the federal government plans to prosecute nonviolent criminals involved in drug crimes, with the aim of easing overcrowding in the nation’s prisons.

Holder outlined several policy changes in a speech to the American Bar Association meeting in San Francisco.

The attorney general said too many Americans go to prison for far too long and for no truly good law enforcement reason.  His main focus was low-level drug crimes that can often bring minimum mandatory sentences of five or 10 years in prison.

Holder says the federal government will now follow the lead of several states that emphasize drug treatment and community service programs as alternatives for non-violent drug offenders who are not associated with criminal gangs or drug cartels.

“Widespread incarceration at the federal, state and local levels is both ineffective and unsustainable,” he said. “It imposes a significant economic burden totalling $80 billion in 2010 alone and it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate.”

Hey Pentagon, Hiring Hackers, a Good Idea?

Personally I do see some positives, but I see more downsides….what say you?

The Department of Defense announced today that it will invite vetted hackers to test the department’s cybersecurity under a unique pilot program.  The “Hack the Pentagon” initiative is the first cyber bug bounty program in the history of the federal government.

 

Under the pilot program, the department will use commercial sector crowdsourcing to allow qualified participants to conduct vulnerability identification and analysis on the department’s public webpages.  The bug bounty program is modeled after similar competitions conducted by some of the nation’s biggest companies to improve the security and delivery of networks, products, and digital services. The pilot marks the first in a series of programs designed to test and find vulnerabilities in the department’s applications, websites, and networks.

 

Participants in the bug bounty will be required to register and submit to a background check prior to any involvement with the pilot program.  Once vetted, these hackers will participate in a controlled, limited duration program that will allow them to identify vulnerabilities on a predetermined department system.  Other networks, including the department’s critical, mission-facing systems will not be part of the bug bounty pilot program.  Participants in the competition could be eligible for monetary awards and other recognition.

This innovative project is a demonstration of Secretary Carter’s continued commitment to drive the Pentagon to identify new ways to improve the department’s security measures as our interests in cyberspace evolve.

Pentagon to Establish Defense Innovation Advisory Board

WASHINGTON, March 2, 2016 — In an effort to enhance the Defense Department’s culture, organization and processes by tapping innovators from the private sector in Silicon Valley and beyond, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced plans today to establish a Defense Innovation Advisory Board, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said.

 Google, CEO

The initiative represents the secretary’s enduring commitment to building lasting partnerships between the public and private sectors, Cook said in a statement.

“Just as the Defense Business Board provides advice to the department on best business practices from the private sector, the Defense Innovation Advisory Board will provide advice on the best and latest practices in innovation that the department can emulate,” Cook added.

The board’s mandate is to provide department leaders independent advice on innovative and adaptive means to address future organizational and cultural challenges, the press secretary said, including the use of technology alternatives, streamlined project management processes and approaches — all with the goal of identifying quick solutions to DoD problems.

Areas Deeply Familiar in Silicon Valley

The board will seek to advise the department on areas that are deeply familiar to Silicon Valley companies, such as rapid prototyping, iterative product development, complex data analysis in business decision making, the use of mobile and cloud applications, and organizational information sharing, Cook said, and will not engage in discussion of military operations or strategy.

Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will chair the board, which will be composed of up to 12 people who have successfully led large private and public organizations and excelled at identifying and adopting new technology concepts, Cook said.

Carter and Schmidt will jointly select the board, Cook said. “Members will represent a cross-section of America’s most innovative industries, drawing on technical and management expertise from Silicon Valley and beyond,” he added.

As chairman of Alphabet and as the author of “How Google Works,” Schmidt has a unique perspective on the latest practices in harnessing and encouraging innovation and in the importance of technology in driving organizational behavior and business operations, Cook said.

**** Background

US spy chief James Clapper highlights cyber threats

BBC: US intelligence agencies have placed cyber attacks from foreign governments and criminals at the top of their list of threats to the country.

Online assaults would increasingly undermine US economic competitiveness and national security, said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

A report issued by his office said Russia’s military was setting up a cyber command to carry out attacks.

The report also describes China, Iran and North Korea as leading threats.

In testimony to a congressional committee on Thursday, Mr Clapper said he no longer believed the US faced “cyber Armageddon”.

The idea that major infrastructure such as financial networks or power grids could be disabled by hackers now looked less probable, he said.

However he warned: “We foresee an ongoing series of low-to-moderate level cyber attacks from a variety of sources over time, which will impose cumulative costs on US economic competitiveness and national security.”

Mr Clapper highlighted the case of Russia, which he said posed the greatest a cyber risk to US interests. He said that threat from the Russian government was “more severe” than previously realised.

He also said profit-minded criminals and ideologically driven hackers were also increasingly active.

Over the past year there have been a series of high-profile cyber attacks against US targets.

North Korea was accused of being behind the theft of a huge data cache from Sony Pictures in November.

Mr Clapper also mentioned the example of an alleged Iranian attack on the Las Vegas Sands Casino Corporation last year.

Meanwhile in January the Twitter and YouTube accounts of the US military command were hacked by a group claiming to back Islamic State (IS).

During the hearing, Mr Clapper acknowledged that the US had its own “offensive capabilities”.

In 2010 Iran experienced a cyber attack on its nuclear program. Tehran accused Israel and the US of planting malware.

ISIS in Pakistan and 51 countries Sourced for IED’s

Islamic State group in competition for recruits in Pakistan

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP)— Trying to lure him into the Islamic State group, the would-be recruiter told Pakistani journalist Hasan Abdullah, “Brother, you could be such an asset to the Ummah”— the Islamic community. Abdullah replied that he was enjoying life and had no plans to join the jihadis.

“The enjoyment of this life is short-lived. You should work for the Akhira” — the Afterlife, the recruiter pressed.

IS had its eye on Abdullah not because he adheres to any extremist ideology but because, as a journalist, the group believed he could be a boon to its propaganda machine, Abdullah told The Associated Press, recounting his meeting with the recruiter.

His encounter was a sign of how the Islamic State group is looking for sophisticated skills as it builds its foothold in new territory: Pakistan. It is courting university students, doctors, lawyers, journalists and businessmen, and using women’s groups for fundraising. It is also wading into fierce competition with the country’s numerous other militant groups, particularly the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaida in the Subcontinent, the new branch created by the veteran terror network.

Here in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, IS loyalists have set up their strongest presence, carrying out multiple attacks in the past year and setting up networks.

The port city of some 20 million people on the Arabian Sea has always been a favorite for militants to operate. Wealthy districts running on the city’s profitable commerce hold potential for fundraising, while the crowded, cramped poorer districts that have spread around the city provide recruits and places to hide. It also gives recruiters links to other parts of the country, since its population is full of people who have migrated from tribal regions or Afghanistan, looking for work.

The Karachi police’s top counterterrorism official, Raja Umer Khitab, warns that IS has great potential to grow in Pakistan, not only because of its large reservoir of Sunni extremists but also because of the virulent anti-Shiite sentiment among their ranks. Hatred of Shiites and attacks against them are a keystone of the Islamic State group’s ideology and one source of its appeal among some hard-line Sunnis as it set up its self-declared “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria.

IS first announced its presence in Pakistan with a bloody attack in May in Karachi in which gunmen boarded a bus carrying Shiites, ordered them to bow their heads, then opened fire, killing 45. The gunmen left behind a tattered piece of paper proclaiming, “Beware … We have entered the battlefield for retribution and the implementation of Shariah.”

Since then, it has killed more than 35 policemen in targeted attacks, attacked two schools and killed rights activist Sabeen Mehmud, who was gunned down in her car with her mother at her side.

IS was able to expand into two tribal regions near the border with Afghanistan — Bajour and Orakzai — when Taliban leaders there switched allegiance to the Islamic State group. The IS branch in neighboring Afghanistan is also aggressively trying to expand its presence, putting it in direct competition with the Taliban.

The number of IS loyalists in Pakistan is not known. Government officials only recently admitted that they have a presence and insist loyalists here have no known operational links to the IS leadership in Iraq and Syria. Still, in one of the first warnings by an official about IS, intelligence chief Aftab Sultan told a Senate committee earlier this month that hundreds of Pakistanis have gone to fight in Syria, and some are now coming home to Pakistan to recruit.

One way IS militants are trying to recruit and build is through women. One academy for women in Karachi’s Baloch Colony neighborhood recruited women by playing IS videos in the classrooms, Khitab told the AP. The 20 female students then reached out to middle-class and wealthy Karachi women, urging them to donate their religious tithes to the IS cause of establishing a caliphate.

Several women were detained, including the wife of a suspected IS operative, and were released after questioning, Khitab said.

IS recruiters have been stalking university campuses. For example, the suspected mastermind in the bus attack, Saad Aziz, was a graduate of the U.S.-funded Institute of Business Administration in Karachi.

A professor at the Institute, Huma Baqai, said there are radicalized professors teaching in some of the country’s top universities. They “are using the classrooms to mold (students’) minds,” she said. “There is no scrutiny in what happens in the classroom.”

An intelligence official told the AP that security officials have interrogated several university professors suspected of supporting IS and trying to recruit students. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to talk to the press.

“Finding people who are willing to strap on a suicide vest and blow themselves up is easy. There are hundreds, thousands,” said Abdullah, the journalist. But the educated are a bigger prize. He said he knows two other journalists whom IS tried to enlist. Abdullah said IS probably sought him because he was known from his work writing on extremism in the region and has met many militants personally.

Abdullah said his courtship by IS began when he received a message on social media from someone offering information for him for a story. Abdullah didn’t hear from him again until weeks later, when a man using the same name approached Abdullah as he had lunch in a park outside his office. The man told Abdullah he closely followed his writings — then said he was from the Islamic State group. Abdullah quizzed him about militants he knew to verify his claims. Near the end of the conversation, the man noted that many professionals were joining IS.

“This was basically his invitation to me to join their rank,” Abdullah said. And the man made his pitch.

Professionals can hold leadership posts or be involved in the group’s prolific and powerful propaganda machine, which includes sophisticated videos produced with the latest technology and vigorous use of social media.

Al-Qaida in particular is pursuing a similar caliber of recruits. Khitab said it isn’t clear who is winning the competition but there are known instances of al-Qaida militants in Pakistan crossing over to IS. Most notably, Khitab said, al-Qaida operatives Abdullah Yusuf and Tayyab Minhas defected to IS and are believed to have orchestrated much of the group’s violence in Karachi.

The past stereotype of a militant as a tribesman from the mountains in traditional garb with bandoliers of ammo slung over his shoulder has been replaced, said analyst Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University in Washington.

The new generation comes from “well-educated, cosmopolitan, university educated Pakistanis from middle-class backgrounds who can navigate our globalized space whether virtually or physically with facility and confidence.” They can use social media, cross borders and fit “seamlessly into global societies.”

“They are the new force multipliers of terrorist groups,” he said.

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Islamic State IED Sources?

WiB: Islamic State builds its improvised explosive devices using components from 51 different companies in 20 countries. That’s the startling conclusion of a new report from Conflict Armament Research.

“These findings support growing international awareness that [Islamic State] forces in Iraq and Syria are very much self-sustaining — acquiring weapons and strategic goods, such as IED components, locally and with ease,” said James Bevan, CAR’s executive director.

The group’s investigation, spanning 20 months, took researchers to Kirkuk, Mosul and Kobani alongside anti-Islamic State groups including the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Unit, the Iraqi Federation Policy and the Kurdistan Regional Security Council.

Some products Islamic State used in its IEDs are commercially available, including cell-phones and transistors. Products such as aluminum paste, urea and other chemicals as well as detonators are also widely available in the region.

map
CAR map

Turkey and Iraq boast large mining and agriculture industries that rely on these products. For this reason, these products are rarely, if ever, subject to transfer controls and export licensing that could help prevent such goods from moving across border with such ease.

Potential bomb components that are subject to controls, such as detonators, are still easy for Islamic State to acquired due to their popularity among farmers. “Licensing alone has not been sufficient to prevent acquisition by IS forces,” CAR reports.

Islamic State IEDs. Photo via CAR

“In all identified cases, producers have lawfully traded components with regional trade and distribution companies,” the investigation concludes.

“These companies, in turn, have sold them to smaller commercial entities. By allowing individuals and groups affiliated with IS forces to acquire components used in IEDs, these small entities appear to be the weakest link in the chain of custody.”

Due to their proximity to Islamic State territory, Turkish firms have been the main supplier of IED parts. “With 13 companies involved in the supply chain, Turkey is the most important choke point for components used in the manufacture of IEDs by IS forces,” CAR explains, adding that “proximity is a major reason why the goods traded by Iraqi and Turkish companies appear throughout the supply chains of components that IS forces use to manufacture IEDs.”

Dual-purpose technologies with civilian and military uses have long played a role in irregular warfare. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong made small bombs out of rubber bands, mason jars and drink cans. Similarly, the Irish Republican Army became highly adept at building out IEDs out of commercial materials and explosives the group smuggled from Libya.

The IED Islamic State allegedly used to destroy a Russian passenger jet in October 2015

The device the IRA used in the bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel on Oct. 12 1984 — Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet were the targets — used a delay made from a video recorder and a memo park timer, which allowed for the bomb to be planted almost a month before its detonation. Five people died, but Thatcher and the cabinet survived.

In the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, IEDs have become insurgents’ weapons of choice. In 2007, IEDs were responsible for three out of five combat deaths in Iraq and one in four in Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System found that in 2009, 56 percent of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted from IEDs, a figure that increased to 63 percent in 2011.

CAR’s report should make it clear — with Islamic State benefiting from an extensive, albeit informal, bomb-supply network, the IED problem is not going away.