PARIS (AP) — The number of people linked to the Islamic State network that attacked Paris and Brussels reaches easily into the dozens, with a series of new arrests over the weekend that confirmed the cell’s toxic reach and ability to move around unnoticed in Europe’s criminal underworld.
From Belgium’s Molenbeek to Sweden’s Malmo, new names are added nearly daily to the list of hardened attackers, hangers-on, and tacit supporters of the cell that killed 130 people in Paris and 32 in Brussels. A computer abandoned by one of the Brussels suicide bombers in a trash can contained not only his will, but is beginning to give up other information as well, including an audio file indicating the cell was getting its orders directly from a French-speaking extremist in Syria, according to a police official with knowledge of the investigation. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the investigation.
Ten men are known to be directly involved in the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris; others with key logistical roles then — including the bomber, a logistics handler, and a hideout scout — went on to plot the attack March 22 in Brussels. But unlike Paris, at least two people who survived the attack have been taken into custody alive, including Mohamed Abrini, the Molenbeek native who walked away from the Brussels international airport after his explosives failed to detonate.
But investigators fear it may not be enough to stave off another attack. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, another Molenbeek native whose charisma made him a natural draw to many in the Brussels neighborhood after he joined IS extremists in Syria, said before his death that he returned to Europe among a group of 90 fighters from Europe and the Mideast, according to testimony from a woman who tipped police to his location.
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In part from NYT’s: But only in the months since then has the full scale of Mr. Zerkani’s diligent work on the streets of Molenbeek and beyond become clear, as the network he helped nurture has emerged as a central element in attacks in both Paris and Brussels— as well as one in France that the authorities said last month they had foiled.
“Mr. Zerkani has perverted an entire generation of youngsters, particularly in the Molenbeek neighborhood,” the Belgian federal prosecutor, Bernard Michel, said in February.
But court documents and interviews with Molenbeek residents and activists, as well as with Belgian security officials, suggest that he had direct or indirect connections with several crucial figures who are now dead or under arrest in connection with the November massacre in Paris that killed 130 people and the bombings last month in Brussels that killed 32. Full article here.
Top U.S. intel official: Europe not taking advantage of terror tracking tools
(CNN) A top U.S. counterterrorism official in charge of ensuring terrorists do not make it into the United States said European countries can do more to screen terrorists because they don’t take full advantage of tools the U.S. has offered in the fight against terrorism.
“It’s concerning that our partners don’t use all of our data,” said Terrorist Screening Center Director Christopher Piehota in an exclusive interview with CNN. “We provide them with tools. We provide them with support, and I would find it concerning that they don’t use these tools to help screen for their own aviation security, maritime security, border screening, visas, things like that for travel.”Piehota said the U.S. shares its watch lists with EU countries, but that EU countries don’t systematically utilize it to identify suspected terrorists or screen migrants coming.The European Union does not utilize a central terror database; instead, each country maintains its own terrorist watch list that comes with its own unique set of standards for tracking terrorists. Further complicating matters the 26 European countries that operate inside the “Schengen zone” do not perform routine border checks.Piehota said all European countries cooperate with the United States to varying degrees and information sharing has greatly improved in the wake of the ISIS threat.The daunting task of guarding the United States from foreign terrorists, he says, has become more challenging with the evolving ISIS threat in Europe.One chief concern is foreign nationals from visa-waiver countries who do not appear on any watch list could possibly slip into the U.S. to launch an attack. For example, would-be terrorists can surreptitiously travel to and from Syria from Europe and then travel to the U.S. without ever arousing the suspicion of government officials on either continent.“There are many that we do know about. And unfortunately there are some that we do not know about,” Piehota said.Counterterrorism officials like Piehota also worry about the ISIS terrorists believed to still be in Europe and possibly plotting future attacks. One such person is the man in the hat seen in the Brussels airport surveillance video who remains on the run.“It’s highly concerning,” he said. “We make sure that we know as much as we can. And we take that information and we use it the best we can to minimize threats to our communities. But we can’t know everything all the time.”European officials have acknowledged the gaps in coverage and communication in the weeks following the Brussels attacks.“The fragmented intelligence picture around this dispersed community of suspected terrorists is very challenging for European authorities,” said Rob Wainwright, director of the European Police Agency known as Europol.The EU’s Counter-Terrorism Chief Gilles de Kerchove told CNN that he was aware of problems in getting member states to act.“I do my best to put pressure, to confront them with blunt figures, and we are making progress, but not quickly enough,” he said.The European Union has been examining the sharing of passenger information for at least six years, and the European Parliament is expected to consider a measure related to that issue this month. Some members oppose the idea on privacy grounds.“That will require difficult discussions with European Parliament, because we’re sensitive about balance between security and freedom,” de Kerchove said last month.Piehota also echoed the sentiment from FBI Director James Comey that there’s risk with the U.S. plan of allowing 100,000 refugees into the U.S. a year by 2017 partially because of the lack of intelligence on people in Syria.“Nothing we can guarantee is at a 100% level,” Piehota said, adding he believes the vetting process is rigorous with a layered approach of screening, evaluation and assessment for the refugees who will be cross-referenced with all the U.S. watch lists.Piehota also addressed what he called “incorrect perceptions” about the U.S. watch lists, many that have been repeated by presidential candidates on the campaign trail claiming a majority of people on the lists are innocent Americans.Although declined to say how many people are on the watch list, he did say Americans “comprise less than 0.5% of the total populations. Very small, controlled population,” adding that those on the list are consistently re-evaulated with 1,500 changes to the list on average per day. More here.
Category Archives: Gangs and Crimes
Venezuela, There She Blows
Statement of Secretary Lew on the Venezuela Executive Order
3/9/2015U.S.Treasury: We are committed to defending human rights and advancing democratic governance in Venezuela through the use of financial sanctions.We will use these tools to target those persons involved in violence against anti-government protesters, serious human rights abuses, and those involved in the arrest or prosecution of individuals for their legitimate exercise of free speech.
Corrupt actions by Venezuelan government officials deprive Venezuela of needed economic resources that could be invested in the Venezuelan people and used to spur economic growth. These actions also undermine the public trust in democratic institutions and the human rights to which Venezuelan citizens are entitled. This Executive Order will be used to protect the U.S. financial system from the illicit financial flows from public corruption in Venezuela.
Beginning in 2013, perhaps earlier:
Venezuela is running out of money fast and has started selling its gold
CNN: The cash-strapped country could default by next year when lots of debt payments are due. Venezuela’s reserves, which are mostly made up of gold, have fallen sharply this year as the country needs cash to pay off debt and tries to maintain its social welfare programs.
Venezuela owes about $15.8 billion in debt payments between now and the end of 2016.
But it doesn’t have enough to make good on its payments. Venezuela only has $15.2 billion in foreign reserves — the lowest amount since 2003. A lot of those reserves are in gold.
Less than $1 billion of Venezuela’s reserves are in cash, and it has a couple billion in reserves at the IMF.
Venezuela risks a descent into chaos
Police arrest students during a protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in San Cristobal. Two officers died and four more were hurt
FT: At the main morgue of central Caracas, the stench forces everyone to cover their nostrils. “Now things are worse than ever,” says Yuli Sánchez. “They kill people and no one is punished while families have to keep their pain to themselves.”
Ms Sánchez’s 14-year-old nephew, Oliver, was shot five times by malandros, or thugs, while riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle. His uncle, Luis Mejía, remarked that in a fortnight three members of their family had been shot, including two youths who were shot by police.
An economic, social and political crisis facing Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s unpopular president, is being aggravated by a rise in violence which is prompting fears that this oil-rich country risks becoming a failed state.
“What can we do?” Mr Mejía asks. “Give up.” The morgue employee in charge of handling the corpses notes that a decade ago he received seven or eight bodies every weekend. These days, he says, that number has risen to between 40 and 50: “This is now wilder than the wild west.”
Critics say that the Venezuelan government is increasingly unable to provide citizens with water, electricity, health or a functioning economy which can supply basic food staples or indispensable medicines, let alone personal safety.
Last month alone, Venezuelans learned of the summary execution of at least 17 gold miners supposedly by a mining Mafia, the killing of two police officers allegedly by a group of students who drove a bus into a barricade, and a hostage drama inside a prison at the hands of a grenade-wielding criminal gang. On Wednesday, three policemen were killed when an armed gang busted a member out of a lock-up in the capital.
At least 10 were killed in a Caracas shanty town after a confrontation between local thugs armed with assault rifles, while a local mayor was gunned down outside his home in Trujillo state last month. There are widespread reports of lynchings.
All this is creating a broad unease that Mr Maduro is unable to maintain order. Venezuela has the world’s fastest inflation and its dire recession is worsening. Mr Maduro last week declared every Friday a holiday for the next two months to save electricity as a prolonged drought has exacerbated chronic power shortages. There is a lack of basic goods. Analysts warn that the economic crisis risks turning in to a humanitarian one.
The evidence of state failure is very concrete in the country that sits on top of the world’s largest oil reserves
– Moisés Naím, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
“Failed state is a nebulous concept often used too lightly. That’s not the case with today’s Venezuela,” says Moisés Naím a Venezuelan distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The evidence of state failure is very concrete in the country that sits on top of the world’s largest oil reserves.”
Venezuela is already one of the world’s deadliest countries. The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a local think-tank, says the murder rate rose last year to 92 killings per 100,000 residents. The attorney-general cites a lower figure of 58 homicides per 100,000.
In 1998, a year before former leader Hugo Chávez took office, the rate was 19 per 100,000, says the think-tank’s director Roberto Briceño León, adding that after 17 years of socialist “revolution”, it is the poor who make up most of the victims.
“I think it is evident that the Venezuelan state cannot act as a state in many areas of the country, so it could be considered failed,” says Mr Briceño, adding that the state now “lacks a monopoly on violence”.
But the state is indeed to blame for some of that violence, according to a report by advocacy groups Human Rights Watch and the Venezuelan Human Rights Education-Action Programme presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
“Venezuelans are facing one of the highest murder rates in the hemisphere and urgently need effective protection from violent crime,” said José Miguel Vivanco HRW’s Americas director. “But in multiple raids throughout the country, the security forces themselves have allegedly committed serious abuses.”
Their findings show that police and military raids in low-income and immigrant communities in Venezuela have led to widespread allegations of abuse, including extrajudicial killings, mass arbitrary detentions, maltreatment of detainees, forced evictions, the destruction of homes, and arbitrary deportations.
Country’s bitter power struggle reflects institutional weakness across the region
The government usually blames violence within its borders on Colombian rightwing paramilitaries engaged in a war against its revolution. But as David Smilde and Hugo Pérez Hernáiz of the Washington Office on Latin America, a think-tank, recently wrote: “Attributing violence in Venezuela to paramilitary activity has been a common rhetorical move used by the government over the past year, effectively making a citizen security problem into a national security problem.”
For many Venezuelans it no longer matters who is to blame. “It is a state policy of letting anarchy sink in,” says a former policeman outside the gates of a compound in Caracas.
That former police station now houses the Frente 5 de Marzo, one of the political groups that consider themselves the keepers of socialism’s sacred flame. The gates bear the colours of the Venezuelan flag and are marked with bullet holes. The man believes there is something akin to a civil war going on.
“Venezuela is pure chaos now. It seems to me there is no way back,” he says.
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Iran has been outsourcing for many years and that includes to Iran:
Iran’s ambassador to Venezuela said Tuesday that a check worth about $70 million, found by German authorities in the luggage of Iran’s former central bank chief, was going to be used by an Iranian company for its expenses while building public housing in Venezuela.
Iranian Ambassador Hojattolah Soltani made the remarks in an interview with the Venezuelan television channel Globovision, saying the check for 300 million Venezuelan bolivars was to be used for the expenses of the Kayson Company, a Tehran-based construction business that is building thousands of homes for the Venezuelan government.
The Iranian ambassador noted that the man with the check whom German authorities stopped last month is not currently a government official. Soltani said that Tahmasb Mazaheri, a former chief of Iran’s central bank and former economy minister, has been working as an adviser to the Iranian company.
Venezuelan authorities had to comment on the issue, and stressed that everything was above board (link is external). The Iranian Ambassador to Caracas would later recant his opinion, as cited by AP above, saying about the caught check-courier (link is external) “[he] is by no means an official of the Government (of Iran); neither has his name been affixed to the confiscated check”, and adding that the check “was signed in Iran and Mr. Mazaheri was on his way to Venezuela to bring the check to cash it in Banco Venezuela.”
So Mazaheri, who is not an official of the Government of Iran as per Iran’s Ambassador to Venezuela claims, was entrusted to carry a check worth $70 million, just like that? Mazaheri was a director of Banco Internacional de Desarrollo (link is external), an OFAC-designated entity targeted by the U.S. Treasury Department “for providing or attempting to provide financial services to Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL). (link is external)” The European Union also included the bank in its list of sanctioned entities involved in “nuclear or ballistic missiles activities
– See more at: http://infodio.com/250414/venezuela/corruption/kayson/tahmasb/mazaheri#sthash.8z4z99bY.dpuf
He Did it, He Turned Over the Fast and Furious Documents
Maybe the whistleblowers will receive some vindication like Sharyl Attkisson.
Obama relents in fight over Fast and Furious documents
Politico: Four years after asserting executive privilege to block Congress from obtaining documents relating to a controversial federal gun trafficking investigation, President Barack Obama relented Friday, turning over to lawmakers thousands of pages of records that led to unusual House votes holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt in 2012.
In January, a federal district court judge rejected Obama’s executive privilege claim over records detailing the Justice Department and White House’s response to Operation Fast and Furious, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigation that may have allowed as many as 2,000 firearms to pass into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
In her ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson did not turn down Obama’s privilege assertion on the merits. Instead, she said authorized public disclosures about the operation in a Justice Department inspector general report essentially mooted the administration’s drive to keep the records secret.
Both sides had until midnight Friday to file an appeal. Instead, the Obama administration turned over a set of documents to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
“In light of the passage of time and other considerations, such as the Department’s interest in moving past this litigation and building upon our cooperative working relationship with the Committee and other Congressional committees, the Department has decided that it is not in the Executive Branch’s interest to continue litigating this issue at this time,” Justice Deparment legislative liaison Peter Kadzik wrote in a letter Friday to House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).
Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush confirmed that the administration does not plan to appeal. He argued that Jackson’s ruling validated Obama’s initial claim of privilege.
“The Department of Justice is pleased that the district court … continued to recognize that the deliberative process component of the executive privilege exists and was a valid basis for the Department to withhold certain documents when requested by the House in 2011. Although the Department disagrees with the district court’s conclusion that the privilege was overcome in this particular case by disclosures and statements made in other contexts, the Department has decided not to appeal the court’s judgment and has provided a production of documents to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,” Rodenbush said in a statement.
While the House largely won in the January decision, it did file an appeal earlier Friday afternoon, apparently unaware of the administration’s plans to comply with the judge’s order. The appeal suggested that House leaders were dissatisfied with aspects of Jackson’s rulings that narrowed the set of documents the administration had to turn over.
“As we’ve long asserted, the Committee requires and is entitled to these documents,” Chaffetz said in a statement. “They are critical to the Committee’s efforts to complete meaningful oversight. The Committee has a duty to understand and shine light on what was happening inside DOJ during the time of this irresponsible operation. Yet DOJ has obstructed our investigative work for years.”
After getting word that the Justice Department was turning over records, Chaffetz updated his statement, indicating that the House plans to press its appeal to get records beyond the ones the administration is providing.
“Today, under court order, DOJ turned over some of the subpoenaed documents. The Committee, however, is entitled to the full range of documents for which it brought this lawsuit. Accordingly, we have appealed the District Court’s ruling in order to secure those additional documents,” Chaffetz said.
Guns sold by dealers or informants used in the ATF operation wound up at numerous crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S. In December 2010, two of the weapons were found at the scene of the murder of a Border Patrol agent in Arizona.
Obama’s privilege claim in the Fast and Furious fight was broad-ranging, seeking to cover not only internal deliberations about how to respond to congressional inquiries but also discussions about media strategy related to the congressional probes.
The June 2012 claim in the Fast and Furious case was the only formal assertion of executive privilege by Obama to try to defeat a congressional demand for records or testimony, though the administration has raised executive privilege concerns when declining to comply with other congressional inquiries. Most of those were resolved through negotiations. The administration has also asserted executive privilege in response to a variety of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.
Eyes in the Sky, Tracking Unstable Areas
BuzzFeed: Each weekday, dozens of U.S. government aircraft take to the skies and slowly circle over American cities. Piloted by agents of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the planes are fitted with high-resolution video cameras, often working with “augmented reality” software that can superimpose onto the video images everything from street and business names to the owners of individual homes. At least a few planes have carried devices that can track the cell phones of people below. Most of the aircraft are small, flying a mile or so above ground, and many use exhaust mufflers to mute their engines — making them hard to detect by the people they’re spying on.
The government’s airborne surveillance has received little public scrutiny — until now. BuzzFeed News has assembled an unprecedented picture of the operation’s scale and sweep by analyzing aircraft location data collected by the flight-tracking website Flightradar24 from mid-August to the end of December last year, identifying about 200 federal aircraft. Day after day, dozens of these planes circled above cities across the nation.
Some graphics and images are interactive, click here to access.
Day after day, dozens of these planes circled above cities across the nation.
The FBI and the DHS would not discuss the reasons for individual flights but told BuzzFeed News that their planes are not conducting mass surveillance.
The DHS said that its aircraft were involved with securing the nation’s borders, as well as targeting drug smuggling and human trafficking, and may also be used to support investigations by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. The FBI said that its planes are only used to target suspects in specific investigations of serious crimes, pointing to a statement issued in June 2015, after reporters and lawmakers started asking questions about FBI surveillance flights.
“It should come as no surprise that the FBI uses planes to follow terrorists, spies, and serious criminals,” said FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, in that statement. “We have an obligation to follow those people who want to hurt our country and its citizens, and we will continue to do so.”
But most of these government planes took the weekends off. The BuzzFeed News analysis found that surveillance flight time dropped more than 70% on Saturdays, Sundays, and federal holidays.
“The fact that they are mostly not flying on weekends suggests these are relatively run-of-the-mill investigations,” Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Project on Speech, Privacy, and Technology, told BuzzFeed News.
The government’s aerial surveillance programs deserve scrutiny by the Supreme Court, said Adam Bates, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. “It’s very difficult to know, because these are very secretive programs, exactly what information they’re collecting and what they’re doing with it,” Bates told BuzzFeed News.
The BuzzFeed News analysis also revealed how the government responded to the mass shooting last December in San Bernardino, California.
Surveillance flight time dropped more than 70% on Saturdays, Sundays, and federal holidays.
In the weeks leading up to the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, nearby neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles were watched intensively by FBI aircraft. But San Bernardino itself was apparently ignored: Our data shows no FBI surveillance flights over the city.
That changed abruptly after the attack on the morning of Dec. 2. Within 90 minutes, two planes — one an FBI Cessna, the other a DHS Pilatus PC-12 surveillance aircraft — were circling the scene. Later that afternoon, the FBI plane flew around the home of the two shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik.
Farook attended the nearby Dar Al Uloom Al-Islamiyah of America mosque. And starting Dec. 3, FBI planes traced circles with the mosque near their center. Three different FBI planes flew around the mosque, some circling for more than three hours at a time. There were flights on each day in the week after the attack — except for Saturday and Sunday.
The FBI told BuzzFeed News that it cannot launch investigations based on race, ethnicity, or religion — surveillance means that individual criminal suspects are being watched, not groups of people.
But Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, an umbrella organization representing the region’s mosques and Islamic centers, told BuzzFeed News that he is alarmed that the FBI’s knee-jerk reaction to the San Bernardino massacre seems to have been to send its planes to watch the Dar Al Uloom mosque.
“That is extremely troubling, and reconfirms the fears that we continue to talk about,” Syed said. “I don’t know that they have ever done surveillance of churches or synagogues when people of those traditions have committed acts of criminality.”
In the months before the San Bernardino attack, some of the government’s surveillance planes circled over other neighborhoods with large Muslim populations. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, there was a clear circle above Little Kabul in Fremont, home to the largest concentration of ethnic Afghans in the nation. The main concentrations of surveillance in Minneapolis, meanwhile, were above an area known as Little Mogadishu for its large Somali population.
But these neighborhoods did not come under heightened aerial scrutiny after the terrorist mayhem in Paris on Nov. 13, nor after San Bernardino. And on Thanksgiving Day, less than two weeks after the Paris attacks, with the nation under a State Department–issued global terrorism alert, federal surveillance planes almost entirely stopped flying, only to resume once the holiday was over.
The BuzzFeed News analysis almost certainly underestimates the scope of surveillance by federal aircraft. Some two dozen planes operated by the FBI and more than 130 registered to the DHS never appeared on Flightradar24, suggesting that some surveillance planes may be hidden from public view on plane-tracking websites. (See here for details on the BuzzFeed News analysis.)
FBI planes have also on occasion been used to support local law enforcement. In April 2015, after riots broke out in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, FBI planes were sent to monitor the situation, documents obtained by the ACLU show. FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the agency’s aircraft also flew over Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, after a local police officer shot Michael Brown.
Responding to the BuzzFeed News analysis, FBI spokesman Christopher Allen said that planes may circle over cities while waiting for a suspect to emerge from a building. In some cases, the BuzzFeed News analysis showed that FBI aircraft indeed seemed to be following a vehicle from place to place, pausing to circle at each stop. Other flights, however, circled a single location for several hours, and then returned to their airfields.
Left image shows plane likely following a suspect; right shows repeated circling
As to the big drop-off in flights on the weekends, Allen told BuzzFeed News that the agency’s surveillance depends on the needs of individual investigations.
“If we need it, it’s going to happen,” Allen said. The targets of surveillance may simply be less active on the weekends, he said. And because traffic is lighter, he added, it’s easier for the FBI to follow suspects on the ground instead of by air.
That explanation did not convince James Wedick, a former FBI agent based near Sacramento, California.
“That’s painful,” Wedick told BuzzFeed News. He suspects that the weekend dip reflects the controversial practice of using undercover agents and informants to entice suspects into joining fake terrorist plots devised by the FBI. “The FBI today is better able to control investigations, enabling agents to orchestrate events when more resources were available,” Wedick said.
US Customs and Border Patrol
US Customs and Border Patrol
Courtesy William Larkins
Left: Two DHS aircraft patrol the U.S. border; Center: DHS helicopter, with cameras beneath the cockpit door; Right: Cessna 208, operated by an FBI front company
In June of last year, the Associated Press reported that it had linked more than 50 planes, mostly small Cessna Skylane 182 aircraft, to 13 fake companies created as fronts for the FBI. Also using Flightradar24, AP reporters tracked more than 100 flights in 11 states over the course of a month.
BuzzFeed News extended the list of FBI front companies, drawing from other sources that have investigated the agency’s airborne operations. We then looked for planes registered to these front companies in data provided by Flightradar24. (Its data comes from radio signals broadcast by transponders that reveal planes’ locations and identifying information, picked up by receivers on the ground that are hosted by volunteers across the country.)
We detected nearly 100 FBI fixed-wing planes, mostly small Cessnas, plus about a dozen helicopters. Collectively, they made more than 1,950 flights over our four-month-plus observation period. The aircraft frequently circled or hovered around specific locations, often for several hours in the daytime over urban areas.
We also tracked more than 90 aircraft, about two-thirds of them helicopters, that were registered to the DHS, which is responsible for border protection, customs, and immigration. Not surprisingly, these planes were especially active around border towns such as McAllen, Texas, which faces the Mexican city of Reynosa across the Rio Grande.
But the DHS’s airborne operations also extended far into the U.S. interior. And over some cities, notably Los Angeles, its aircraft seemed to circle around particular locations, behaving like those in the FBI’s fleet.
The DHS would not comment on flights over specific cities, but confirmed that its planes regularly support other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.
DHS spokesman Carlos Lazo told BuzzFeed News by email that its planes are mainly used to combat the illegal drug trade, human trafficking, and violent crime. In 2015, he said, DHS aerial surveillance missions supported investigations that “resulted in 706 arrests including violent criminals and sex traffickers, the seizure of more than 10,000 lbs of cocaine, 342 lbs of heroin, more than 1,000 lbs of methamphetamine, 350 weapons, and $24 million in cash.”
BuzzFeed News
Regulations require that a plane’s owners submit documents to the Federal Aviation Administration describing modifications that might affect a plane’s airworthiness, and BuzzFeed News obtained this paperwork for about 130 of the planes identified in our analysis — giving a strong sense of what the aircraft are capable of.
Many FBI Cessnas, for example, are fitted with exhaust mufflers to reduce engine noise. FBI and DHS aircraft carry sophisticated camera systems in steerable mounts that can provide conventional video, night vision, and infrared thermal imaging. These include Talon devices, manufactured by FLIR Systems of Wilsonville, Oregon. The company’s website boasts that these devices “deliver high-resolution imagery day or night.”
On FBI planes, cameras are typically paired with augmented reality systems, which superimpose a variety of information over the video, and can embed the feed from a camera into a wider scene built up from stored satellite images.
This promotional video from Churchill Navigation of Boulder, Colorado, whose systems are installed on FBI surveillance aircraft, explains some of their capabilities.
Over the past few years, news organizations and advocacy groups have also accumulated evidence that some government surveillance planes can carry equipment to track cell phones on the ground.
Federal and local law enforcement agencies are known to use devices called cell-site simulators that mimic cell phone towers, emitting powerful signals that trick people’s phones into connecting to them as if they were the real thing. Sometimes called “Stingrays” for the brand name of one popular model, these devices read the unique identification codes of the cell phones that connect to them, and so can be used to track people — even if they are indoors, in dense crowds, or otherwise hidden from view.
Official records indicate that both the DHS and the FBI can connect to cell phones from the air. Documents obtained by Chris Soghoian, principal technologist with the ACLU’s Project on Speech, Privacy, and Technology, show that in 2010 the DHS spent almost $190,000 under a contract that included the purchase of cell-site simulators and an “airborne flight kit” for a Stingray device — consisting of “specialized antennas, antenna mounts, cables and power connections.” The contract also covered training for up to four DHS Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to be instructed on how to operate Stingrays from an aircraft.
Other government spending records, reviewed by BuzzFeed News, show that in 2008 the FBI purchased a Stingray airborne kit for $55,000.
And in March, the San Francisco–based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a series of documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information lawsuit, in which FBI officials discussed the use of cell-site simulators from aircraft. The documents reveal that the agency was unsure how many times the devices had been used, when pressed for information by the Senate judiciary committee.
“I cannot say for certain that the mission numbers are 100% accurate,” one official wrote, noting that so far, five flights involving Stingrays had been identified.
The FBI told BuzzFeed News that cell-site simulators are used very rarely, and only to track suspects. Calls are not intercepted, and personal data is not captured, Allen said.
The DHS declined to comment on how often it used the devices from the air, but Lazo, the department’s spokesman, said the technology provides “invaluable assistance” in hunting down criminal suspects. “Cell-site simulators used by DHS are not used to collect the contents of any communication, including any data contained on the phone itself,” he added.
BuzzFeed News
Still, tracking the movements of specific criminal suspects may entail connecting to the phones of thousands of people who just happen to be nearby. And although government policies say that information about nontarget phones should be quickly discarded, privacy advocates remain concerned about cell-site simulators, which may not require a warrant in emergency situations.
“In our opinion, any time Stingrays or the like are used, they need to have a warrant based on probable cause,” Nate Cardozo, senior staff attorney with the EFF, told BuzzFeed News.
One of the most sensitive questions surrounding the government’s surveillance flights is whether Muslims are being disproportionately targeted.
Even before San Bernardino, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump was calling for surveillance of certain mosques. And in the wake of the bombings in Brussels in March, rival Ted Cruz said that surveillance in Muslim neighborhoods should be intensified.
BuzzFeed News mapped mosques and Islamic centers throughout the nation, as detailed in a database maintained by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research in Connecticut. Some mosques were at the center of the circles traced by FBI planes, but BuzzFeed News could see no clear pattern indicating widespread surveillance of mosques.
Privacy advocates argue that all of the flights should be subjected to greater official scrutiny, to ensure that a balance is being struck between effective law enforcement and privacy.
“When people think of surveillance, they think of the NSA, or of specific people being tracked, or mosques being infiltrated,” Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York, told BuzzFeed News. “They aren’t necessarily thinking about planes circling overhead of American cities and doing god knows what. It’s important for people to be aware.”
Guzman, Miami Laundering Pesos: Operation Neymar
And so it continues the underworld of the cartels with money laundering through Miami.
*****
22 face charges in Miami drug money-laundering ring involving ‘El Chapo’ cartel
Police say the sophisticated schemes moved millions of illegal profits to Colombia
The large-scale probe into the “black market peso exchange” is a first for state prosecutors
The arrests come amid global scrutiny on financial transactions, including in South Florida
MiamiHerald: A sophisticated ring of money launderers — with an array of pop cultural nicknames like “Tony Montana,” “Pitbull” and “Neymar” — has been busted on charges of sending untold millions in illegal cocaine profits to Colombia using nearly a dozen businesses in Miami-Dade.
Miami-Dade authorities announced arrest warrants for 22 people believed to have worked in a scheme that included the suspected chief money launderer for the Mexican drug cartel headed by notorious kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
The wide-reaching probe into the so-called “black market peso exchange” — which involved monitoring deals in 17 countries — is the first such case to be filed in Miami-Dade state court, and offers the most recent window into the drug-fueled underground lending system that law enforcement authorities believe props up hundreds of South Florida businesses.
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle talks about the disruption of an international money-laundering ring during a press conference, Thursday on Operation Neymar. DANIEL BOCK FOR THE MIAMI HERALD
A chart from the press conference held by Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle showing how an international money-laundering ring works. DANIEL BOCK FOR THE MIAMI HERALD
Agents seized $134,980 in cash in Chicago in August 2015 as part of a wide-ranging money-laundering investigation that lead to criminal charges against 18 people being filed in Miami-Dade County. Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office“They use Miami’s strong international economy as the actual funnel of all of their international money-laundering operations,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle told reporters at a press conference on Thursday. ‘We are surely the global hub for money laundering.”
Three people were arrested in Miami this week, while another major player has been jailed in Cali, Colombia, to await extradition to the United States. One more was arrested in Boston. In all, 18 people — most remain fugitives — will be tried in Miami-Dade, with the rest being tried in other U.S. cities.
The two-year probe — dubbed Operation Neymar because one suspect used the name of the Brazilian soccer star and other players as his aliases — was conducted by agents from the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, Miami-Dade police and state prosecutors. As part of the investigation, undercover agents laundered a “small fraction” of drug proceeds to build evidence against the group, prosecutors said.
The operation stands in stark contrast to the now disgraced and disbanded money-laundering sting unit run by Bal Harbour Police, which by 2012 had laundered millions for cartels but never made any arrests.
The arrests also come as the “Panama Papers” and other investigations have put intense scrutiny on financial shenanigans in South Florida real estate — leading the County Commission to pass a resolution this week asking the federal government to stop singling out Miami as a hub for money laundering.
Prosecutors say Operation Neymar — which netted more than $1 million in seized drug cash — proves that major drug money laundering is still thriving in Miami.
According to them, one of the major players in the group was Mexican Sinaloa Cartel member Juan Manuel Alvarez Inzunza, 34, who was arrested by Mexican authorities last month. He is suspected of laundering billions of dollars of drug proceeds.
He is now awaiting extradition to the United States, where he will first stand trial on federal charges in San Diego. For now, he has not been charged in the Miami-Dade case.
The two big players being charged are suspected money-laundering brokers for the cartel in Cali, Colombia: Ivan Alfredo Castro Santana and Ivan Andres Lizarazo Mendoza, who was nearly kidnapped and killed by the Colombian cartel after police in Miami seized $200,000 in drug money.
They are being charged with racketeering and money laundering. Lizarazo’s sister in Miami, Sidia Milady Lizarazo Mendoza, is also accused of money laundering and is now being held on a $1 million bond in a Miami-Dade jail.
Prosecutors say the group used throwaway Blackberry phones, employing ever-changing pass codes that, in English, seem nonsensical. One example: “Con mollo departe del panzon” – or “with the dark-skinned one, on behalf of the potbellied.”
To unravel the money-laundering operation — which was washing about $1 million a month — investigators used wiretaps, surveillance, reviews of thousands of financial transactions and cooperation from informants, according to an arrest warrant by HSI agent Charles Thomas, Miami-Dade Detective Jonathan Santana and prosecutor Jared Nixon.
Money laundering, of course, is nothing new in South Florida. And while drugs don’t flow into the United States through Florida in the volume they did in the 1980s, Miami remains the main hub for laundering the illicit profits.
The reason: So many businesses here, particularly in Doral, do business with Colombia. In April 2015, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a warning to 700 Miami businesses believed to be involved in laundering drug money.
According to law enforcement, the black-market peso exchange requires a number of steps to launder drug proceeds.
The Mexican cartels use credit to buy loads of cocaine from their counterparts in Colombia. The drugs are smuggled into the United States, then routed to cities across the country where they are sold to dealers who peddle them to users.
The resulting millions in drug dollars, temporarily stored in “stash houses,” must then be converted to pesos for the Colombian cartel.
So the cartel employs a money broker know as the primera mano, or first hand, who arranges to buy U.S. dollars in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. He, in turn, puts out a “bid” — all arranged through covert Blackberry text messages — for sub-brokers willing to buy the dollars.
Sub-brokers then turn to Colombian businesses that need U.S. dollars to buy goods or services from the United States. For those businesses — say a Bogotá electronics store needing to buy U.S. cellphones — it’s way cheaper to buy dollars from the black market than through official Colombian channels that charge high exchange rates, plus hefty taxes and fees.
A Bogotá business might place an order with a Miami distributor for a load of phones, makeup or textiles, telling them their payment will arrive via a wire transfer from an unnamed “third party.”
“If as a business you are receiving funds or interacting with third parties that are alien to your business transaction, you’re in the middle of a black-market scheme,” said John Tobon, South Florida’s HSI Deputy Special Agent in Charge.
Investigators believe most Miami companies involved in the black-market peso exchange have a general idea of what’s going on — but ask no questions. In Operation Neymar, prosecutors identified, but did not charge, 11 local businesses, including M2 Wireless of Doral, Dis Cells Corporation of Miami Beach and Hair and Accessories of Opa-locka.
“Pick-up crews” are hired to get the cash from couriers, always in mundane public spots, the money stuffed in shopping bags, backpacks or shoe boxes. In the newly charged case, some of the pick-up spots included a Starbucks in Doral, a parking lot at the Dolphin Mall and a Dunkin’ Donuts in New Jersey, prosecutors said.
The next step: The pick-up crew begins depositing the cash into a “funnel” bank account, all in small increments to avoid attention from law enforcement. Those accounts then wire the money to the Miami business, which in turn sends its goods such as cellphones to the Colombian business.
Back in Colombia, that legitimate business pays back its pesos to the brokers, who can finally pass the money to the cartel.