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The Forces Behind Black Lives Matter

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Who Really Runs #BlackLivesMatter?

Daily Beast: The answer might define the future of the American left, which has split over race, party politics, and the power of protest since BLM activists targeted Bernie Sanders.
Last Saturday, for the second time in a month, protesters who identified themselves as members of the Black Lives Matter movement leapt onstage to interrupt a speech by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.“I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, even with all of these progressives, but you’ve already done that for me,” said Marissa Johnson, who was roundly booed before demanding and receiving a four-minute moment of silence for the death of Michael Brown, as Sanders stood behind her and fellow protester Mara Willaford.

The Seattle protest sparked a particularly strong counter-reaction, especially among the white liberals who form the core of Bernie Sanders’ base. Sanders is not the frontrunner to win his party’s nomination. Many on both the left and right are asking: Why him?

Sanders currently trails Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, whose events have not yet been successfully interrupted, by 38 points in Quinnipiac’s most recent national poll. He has made criminal justice reform a tentpole issue early in his campaign. Jeb Bush, who trails Republican frontrunner Donald Trump by 10 points, allegedly reached out to local Black Lives Matter leaders a night before, then was shouted down at a campaign event less than 24 hours later.

Why protest Bernie and not Hillary? Why Jeb and not Trump?

Interviews with 10 members of both local and national branches of Black Lives Matter—as well as with the political campaigns they’ve tested—reveals no single, easy answer. It’s one part logistical—from the less stringent security of a second-tier candidate to the simple timing of a speech.

And it is another part—a larger part—purely organizational.

In response to the death of unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his killer, activists Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi rallied together on Twitter to create visibility with a unified phrase: Black Lives Matter. As more black Americans — like Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray — were killed by police, the phrase gained prominence and resonance — both on Twitter, and in the protests that would follow, nationwide.

In the process of trying to grow its message from a hashtag spawned by three activists into a national political movement, Black Lives Matter—a decentralized organization with official and unofficial Facebook pages, meet-ups, and blogs throughout America and the world—is splintering internally on how to express that message, and even defining what that message truly is.

After all, when an article says Black Lives Matter interrupted a campaign event, who is a part of Black Lives Matter, anyway? The answer to that question is even harder to answer.

The answer to that question might be a small group of people who self-identify as a “radical organization.” The answer to that question might also be anyone.

And the answer to that question might define the future of the American left, which has split over race, party politics, and the limits and powers of protesting since two activists took over a podium in Seattle seven days ago.

Nikki Stephens, 16, was hit with a barrage of Facebook messages and texts on Saturday night.

“My phone was blowing up,” Stephens says. “Everyone automatically assumed I was one of the two women”—the protesters who took over the Sanders event in Seattle.

Stephens, a high schooler and track athlete, had the keys to the “Black Lives Matter: Seattle” Facebook page. She had “watched the video from all angles” of Johnson and Willaford, and now—as the de facto voice of Black Lives Matter: Seattle, she believed—it was her turn to speak.

She had been drawn into the movement months ago by an activist who came to her school and compelled her to take action on the recent spate of young black men killed by police.

“I wanted to raise awareness—that this is not a joke. That people are actually dying,” she says. “That’s why I made the page.”

With the help and guidance of her friend, she started sharing stories of injustice and dispatches from the national chapter. Quickly, her page grew to be the largest Black Lives Matter page in Seattle.

Mara Jacqueline Willaford, left, holds her fist overhead as Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., waves to greet the crowd before speaking at a rally Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015, in downtown Seattle. Willaford and another co-founder of the Seattle chapter of Black Lives Matter took over the microphone just after Sanders began to speak and refused to relinquish it. Sanders eventually left the stage without speaking further and instead waded into the crowd to greet supporters.
Elaine Thompson/AP

Then Johnson and Willaford, whom Stephens had never met, took over the podium at the Bernie Sanders’ campaign event last weekend.

“I felt like I had to come up with a response,” she says.

There was, however, a problem: Stephens is a Bernie Sanders supporter. Panicked, she called her friend who had gotten her into the movement to plan her next move.

“I was like, ‘What should I do? I don’t really know what to do,’” she says.

As the night progressed, she started receiving messages filled with hate, threats, and racial slurs—especially, she says, from Bernie Sanders fans. They all wanted an apology—one for something she didn’t do.

So she crafted one.

“To the people of Seattle and ‪#‎BernieSanders‬ I am so sorry for what happened today in Seattle. I am a volunteer who just runs this page and I am only just starting to get into the movement,” she wrote. “I was unaware of what happened and now that I’ve seen the video [of the event] I would like to say again that I am sorry. That is not what Black Lives Matter stands for and that is not what we’re about. Do not let your faith in the movement be shaken by voices of two people. Please do not question our legitimacy as a movement. Again I would like to apologize to the people of Seattle and I will be trying to reach out to Mr. Sanders.”

Some in the national media ran with it. ‘Black Lives Matter’ had apologized.

That’s when Stephens received messages from both Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford.

“Of course, you can’t tell tone by text. But when they approached me, through texting, it felt sort of aggressive,” says Stephens. “But it wasn’t like they were mad. They were like, ‘Who are you? Why’d you start your page?’”

They told Stephens to change the name of her page—that she had no claim to Black Lives Matter: Seattle.

However, Willaford, 25, and Johnson, 23, had not been public leaders of any Black Lives Matter: Seattle pages up until the day of the event.

At 5:45 a.m. on Saturday morning, Johnson and Willaford created a separate Facebook page, also, confusingly enough, called “Black Lives Matter Seattle.” At 6:35 p.m., they issued a press release—the page’s first post—called “Black Lives Matter #BowDownBernie Action” that listed Johnson as a press contact and was signed by both Johnson and Willaford.

At the bottom of the note, they are listed as “Black Lives Matter Seattle co-founders.”

Johnson and Willaford were previously leaders of the group Outside Agitators 206, an activist coalition based in Seattle. According to OA206’s website, the fourth of the organization’s four points of unity is this:

Co-founder of Black Lives Matter Alicia Garza speaks onstage during the Black Lives Matter panel hosted by Al Sharpton Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza during the 2015 BET Experience at the Los Angeles Convention Center on June 27, 2015 in Los Angeles, California.
Jason Kempin/BET via Getty

“Fuck the police: As an institution fundamentally rooted in white supremacy and anti-Blackness we reject the police presence in our communities, absolutely. It is our responsibility to hold each other accountable and keep each other safe.”

The organization appeared largely dormant over the last several months. According to its website, the group’s sole activity in July was the reposting of a Movement for Black Lives event invitation and an article from TheRoot.com.

After the event, Stephens—thinking she had accidentally claimed a page that wasn’t her own and facing mounting pressure—ceded the name of the page. She changed the name to “Black in Seattle.” Willaford and Johnson’s page was now the primary Black Lives Matter Seattle group on Facebook.

“They said, ‘We appreciate what you’re doing. We appreciate you trying to be involved,’” she says of the texts. “‘But it’s not an official message. We’ve gotten calls from the national people at Black Lives Matter.’”

Then, later on, another Facebook group claiming to be a part of Black Lives Matter instead demanded Bernie Sanders and his Seattle-based organizers apologize to the movement. Some national media reported that as a Black Lives Matter response, as well.

The national Black Lives Matter Facebook page then posted a statement at 2:15 a.m. Sunday morning.

“The ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ organization did not create any petitions demanding apology from Seattle based organizers. We have not issued a public apology, neither have we made any public statements demanding an apology.”

So who is Black Lives Matter in this situation? Did the movement send protesters to disrupt Bernie Sanders?

“The point of disruption is to challenge business as usual, to really challenge the community of Seattle—largely white liberals—and their inability to see anti-black racism.”

“I didn’t. My chapter did,” says Patrisse Cullors—one of three people credited with starting and spreading the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag that was used to help grow a national movement. She’s also the founder of Dignity and Power Now, a Los Angeles-based organization that works for the rights of incarcerated people and their families. “What we do is we support the chapters. We support their local demands and goals. They tell us what they need us to build support around.”

Cullors, 32, says she met up with Willaford at a Black Lives Matter national retreat and that they “talk all of the time,” but she never gave direct instructions to interrupt Sanders’ rally. She calls Willaford and Johnson’s branch “a very new chapter.”

“That chapter did all the work. And we supported it by ensuring they were a part of the chapter,” says Cullors. “It’s very rare there’s a national directive for people to do things. We amplify and support.”

But what about the leader of the larger Black Lives Matter Facebook group in Seattle—one that existed publicly well before Johnson and Willaford got in front of a podium in Seattle?

“I’m not sure where she was coming from,” says Cullors. “I think what’s important is that folks understand the point of disruption: to challenge business as usual, to really challenge the community of Seattle—largely white liberals—and challenging their inability to see anti-black racism, as a part of a larger pushback against the state.”

Does she understand why there might be confusion over who has true ownership of the message in Seattle? If Stephens had publicly acted first and not Willaford and Johnson, would she not be in charge?

“I don’t know how to answer that question,” says Cullors. “There is a network called Black Lives Matter, with chapters and local affiliates. It could be very confusing for some to think it’s all the same. There could be some that use our name, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s in alignment with our message.”

Cullors says there are now “registered chapters” of the national Black Lives Matter movement, and cites Boston, Los Angeles, the Bay Area and now Seattle as those who have filled out the necessary paperwork.

But a list of official chapters does not appear on the official Black Lives Matter website and is not publicly available, according to Cullors. There is no registration form on the official website and no statement noting that local Black Lives Matters groups must sign up with the national branch.

Willaford and Johnson did not respond to repeated requests for comment by phone, email, and social media channels. And Cullors wanted to note that she has no problem with Stephens, herself—in fact, she’d like her to meet with Johnson and Willaford to see how she can help the movement—but she believed the apology to be off-message.

“I don’t think it’s necessary to issue an apology trying to censor black folks,” she says.

“Anyone can be a Black Lives Matter activist,” she adds. “That [statement] wasn’t official.”

***

The Seattle disruption exacerbated a nascent divide on the activist left between black and white progressives.

Some white writers, like Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, wrote after the event that the Black Lives Matter movement was alienating the candidate that best served the movement’s interests—or, as he titled his post, “Don’t Piss On Your Best Friend.”

“Many on the left find it hard to come out and say ‘this was stupid,’ because they support both Bernie Sanders and the Black Lives Matter movement,” he wrote. “That is a misperception of the political landscape. Believing that a small group of angry young protesters did something that was not well thought out need not make you feel guilty or racist; rash and counterproductive things are what young people do.”

After criticism about the story surfaced—including a piece in Death+Taxes titled “Bernie Sanders Fans: White Paternalism Ain’t Just for Conservatives”—New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait took up Nolan’s cause.

“But maybe there is a more important question here than mere tactics,” he wrote. “Perhaps shutting down a political speech is, normatively, wrong.”

In The New Republic, Jamil Smith took issue with some of the responses by white progressive media after the speech.

“These are supposed to be the white people who want Black Lives Matter to succeed. These people were willing to throw black people under the bus for the white dude they want to win. That’s the same anti-blackness energy that we’re fighting against.”

“Since when are protest tactics designed to make the people whom they are targeting feel more comfortable and less annoyed?” he asked. “And since when is Sanders, or (Republican presidential candidate Ben) Carson, or any candidate exempt from being pushed?”

His story’s title signified a rallying cry for what some protesters believe to be a growing fissure at the left end of American politics: “Black Lives Matters Protesters Are Not The Problem.”

“What was most shocking to me about the reactions to the Bernie Sanders shutdown was the amount of rage from progressive white people for two African-American women who were standing up for what they believe in. The reaction was gross,” Julius Jones, founder of the Black Lives Matter chapter in Worcester, Mass., tells The Daily Beast.

“These are supposed to be the white people who want Black Lives Matter to succeed. These people were willing to throw black people under the bus for the white dude they want to win. That’s the same anti-blackness energy that we’re fighting against.”

By late Saturday night, Nikki Stephens, a rising high school junior in Washington state, may have accidentally received the worst and most vocal of that hate—and some of it from fans of the candidate she had already supported.

“I heard from so many people and, although you are liberal and you do support Bernie Sanders—and you do say you support Black Lives Matter—I saw a lot of them come out and say some very nasty things about the movement. There were so many people posting claiming to be liberals, then going back and using slurs, and perpetuating stereotypes. And the sexism I saw from men,” she says, trailing off.

***

Protesters in Massachusetts’ Black Lives Matters chapters say there’s a simple logistical reason Bernie Sanders’ speeches have been interrupted twice—once in Seattle, and once before in Phoenix last month—but Hillary Clinton hasn’t yet been disrupted.

That reason? The Secret Service, which Boston Black Lives Matter activist Daunasia Yancey describes as “50 men in the building who are willing to kill you.”

Neither Bernie Sanders nor Jeb Bush have those protective details. Hillary Clinton most certainly does.

“They’re not to be pressed in any way. The Secret Service are very dangerous people, and their operation is protect their asset at all costs,” said Jones, who was part of a group of activists who spoke to—instead of protesting against—Hillary Clinton last weekend in New Hampshire. “To be confronting an issue such as police brutality—and then to tell that same group of people that they should go charge at the [former] first lady—is a little short-sighted.”

Yancey, 22, views Black Lives Matter as a “radical” group. But she says that rushing the stage with the intention of taking over the microphone at a Hillary Clinton campaign event is not viable.

“We’re a radical organization, with radical politics, and we have radical tactics. There’s no way of softening that. But we are strategic, and we’re interested in remaining safe and alive. Something like storming the stage was not a possibility with the Secret Service [present],” Yancey says.

According to New England-area Black Lives Matter activists like Yancey and Jones, they came to demonstrate at Clinton’s New Hampshire event last weekend—only to be offered a private meeting with the Democratic frontrunner herself.

But the Clinton campaign has a slightly different story to tell about the night the former Secretary of State met with local Black Lives Matter reps. The campaign contends that the Black Lives Matter activists arrived late to the event and were unable to enter because the room was at capacity.

“There were another 15 people who also came late and couldn’t get in, so they all were taken to an overflow room. Our team on the ground offered to essentially swap some people out so that they could go into the town hall with Hillary but they declined and asked to meet with her after the event.  She met with them for about 15 minutes after the event,” a Clinton spokesperson tells The Daily Beast.

Some activists for criminal justice reform, like Families Against Mandatory Minimums strategic initiatives director Kevin Ring, believe that Clinton is the candidate who deserves the most scrutiny for her previous stances on mass incarceration.

“It’s incumbent on her, more than others, to explain what precisely she got wrong, and what the country got wrong—and what she would do to reverse that,” Ring says.

In 1994, as the House and Senate were considering whether to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, Clinton said (PDF), “We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders. The ‘three-strikes-and-you’re-out’ for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets.”

As a senator running for the presidency, she opposed making shorter sentences for crack cocaine-related offenses retroactive for previously-convicted inmates, even though many advocates had called the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences unjust.

Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have backed away from the tough-on-crime reforms they championed in the mid-’90s. But, advocates say, since Hillary Clinton was involved in creating a climate of mass incarceration that disproportionately targets black Americans, she has a greater responsibility to address why and how her stances about the criminal justice system have changed.

In their private meeting with Hillary Clinton, members of the Black Lives Matter movement challenged her to reflect on “her personal involvement in the war on drugs and the anti-black policies that were enacted by her family and throughout her career,” Yancey says.

“That’s not what we heard. We didn’t hear the reaction that we wanted,” Yancey adds.

What they heard was talk about policy and legislation. Clinton told them that her previous positions on sentencing were due to a “different climate and a different set of problems” in the ’90s.

With the criminal justice reform that was passed in the ’90s, Jones argues, the “undercurrent of it is anti-blackness. What in her heart has changed… that will actually change the tide? And how can she use her change to be an example for the United States?”

“She has acknowledged the failure of some of her work. It’s just the next step: the acknowledgement of what’s behind that,” Yancey adds. “Hillary Clinton’s feelings about anti-blackness in our government are very important. She wasn’t willing to go there with us, but it’s a crucial conversation. If you’re looking for solutions to the problem… [and] there’s a form of white supremacy in your solutions, that’s going to continue.”

The Clinton campaign contends that their candidate has been reaching out to the Black Lives Matter movement and was paying attention to criminal justice reform and social inequality.

“[O]n an ongoing basis our team has also been reaching out and talking to different parts of the BLM movement as well as a wide range of organizations, activists, stakeholders, etc. so that policy proposals are informed by many voices and experiences,” a Clinton spokesperson tells The Daily Beast. “Hillary has been speaking out about Black Lives Matter and criminal justice reform for some time… it was the subject of her first policy speech of the campaign in April… in which she laid out specific policy proposals. In addition to criminal justice reform she has also broadened to talk about the opportunity gap and systemic inequities.”

Tyrone Brown, a Seattle-based activist who says he “speaks with Black Lives Matter, but not for Black Lives Matter,” says Bernie Sanders was disrupted at his event on Saturday in part “because it was on the eve of the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death.”

“Whether it had been Clinton, Perry, or whoever—if anybody had come to Seattle, something would have happened that day,” he says. “Something would’ve had to have happened to highlight it—that tragedy. In this case, it was Bernie Sanders.”

Brown runs an initiative at Seattle University, where he’s an administrator, called Moral Mondays at SU, which organizes events like talks, discussions, and movie nights as part of a “#BlackLivesMatter initiative.”

Brown met Mara Willaford on the way back to Seattle after the Movement for Black Lives event in Cleveland. He says he now recognizes Willaford and Johnson as the leaders of Black Lives Matter Seattle.

“There’s the slight issue with some semantics around timing: How can they take an action before they become an official chapter for the movement? It doesn’t matter,” he says. “If no one had taken advantage of the fact that the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination was speaking in Seattle on that day, somebody was going to take some type of action. They just happened to be the ones that did it.”

***

Although she had to hand over the name to her Facebook group, Stephens says she now believes that the protest was ultimately good for the visibility of Bernie Sanders—and that, days after the event, she sees where Willaford and Johnson were coming from.

“Watching social media after it happened, I came to realize what they were doing. A lot of people wrote in saying that it made them want to learn about Bernie Sanders,” she says. “They inadvertently had done their job—even if that wasn’t their aim.”

Stephens hasn’t heard from Johnson or Willaford since she relinquished the name of the page. She said she’d like to continue her activism, but was discouraged by her experience on Saturday night.

“This really brought out the worst in people,” she says.

“We have waited and waited and waited. Two more people dead in Ferguson. We can’t take a back seat anymore. I want people to clear their minds of what happened, to stop making it about the women [who interrupted Sanders’ speech]. What did you do? You went looking for more information.”

 

 

Lives and Crimes DONT Matter in Baltimore

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Violent Racketeering Conspiracy: A Maryland gang member was sentenced to 188 months in prison today for conspiring to participate in a racketeering enterprise known as La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

The sentence was announced by Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein of the District of Maryland; Special Agent in Charge Andre Watson of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (ICE-HSI); Chief Mark A. Magaw of the Prince George’s County, Maryland Police Department; Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Angela D. Alsobrooks; Chief J. Thomas Manger of the Montgomery County, Maryland, Police Department; Chief Alan Goldberg of the Takoma Park, Maryland, Police Department; and Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy.

Wilmer Argueta, aka Chengo, 23, of Hyattsville, Maryland, pleaded guilty on April 20, 2015, before U.S. District Judge Roger W. Titus of the District of Maryland to one count of Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) conspiracy.

According to the stipulated facts agreed to in connection with Argueta’s guilty plea, MS-13 is an international criminal organization and one of the largest street gangs in the United States with branches or “cliques” operating throughout Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties in Maryland. Both to maintain membership in the gang and to enforce internal discipline, members are required to engage in acts of intimidation and violence, including against members of rival gangs.

In connection with his plea, Argueta admitted that from 2009 until at least 2012, he was a member and leader of the Peajes Locos Salvatrucha clique of MS-13, and that he and members of the Peajes and other MS-13 cliques committed crimes to further the interests of the gang, including murder, assault, robbery, extortion by threat of violence, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and witness retaliation.

Argueta admitted that on Jan. 3, 2010, he and other MS-13 members attempted to kidnap and assault two individuals with various weapons because Argueta and his co-conspirators believed one of the individuals was associating with a rival gang. After the individuals fled in different directions, several MS-13 members caught one of the victims and sexually assaulted her as retribution for associating with a rival gang.

In addition, according to the plea agreement, on Jan. 13, 2011, Argueta attended a Peajes clique meeting during which another MS-13 member criticized members of the clique for not committing enough violent crimes and encouraging clique members to target rival gang members with acts of violence. After the meeting, Argueta and other MS-13 members strangled and stabbed an individual whom the clique members believed to be a member of a rival gang. Although the MS-13 members left the victim for dead, he survived.

Argueta also admitted that between March and November 2011, he and other members of the Peajes clique extorted a former MS-13 associate under the threat of a “greenlight” (an order to kill). Argueta admitted that he ordered other MS-13 associates to relay the death threats to the victim, and he contacted the victim himself on multiple occasions to arrange extortion payments.

According to admissions made in connection with his plea, between September and November 2011, Argueta conspired to kill an individual who had been assaulted by Argueta and other MS-13 members and who had agreed to testify as a witness against Argueta in state court. Specifically, Argueta admitted that, while incarcerated in the Prince George’s County Corrections Facility, he ordered the “greenlight” by contacting a co-conspirator who then relayed the instruction to other MS-13 members. On Nov. 15, 2011, three MS-13 members drove to the victim/witness’ home, and one of the co-conspirators shot at the victim from a moving vehicle, striking the victim in the chest. The victim survived.

To date, five of the 14 defendants charged in this case have pleaded guilty to participating in the racketeering conspiracy.

The case is being investigated by HSI Baltimore, the Prince George’s County and Montgomery County Police Departments, the Prince George’s County State’s Attorney’s Office, the Takoma Park Police Department and the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office. The Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Office, HSI Baltimore’s Operation Community Shield Task Force and the Maryland Department of Corrections Intelligence Unit also provided assistance.

The case is being prosecuted by Trial Attorney Kevin L. Rosenberg of the Criminal Division’s Organized Crime and Gang Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys William D. Moomau and Lindsay Eyler Kaplan of the District of Maryland. ***

Yes, there is more.

Former Baltimore prosecutor: Marilyn Mosby has a role in city’s violence increase 
It is only August, and Baltimore is staring at 200 dead men, women and children. Having been a prosecutor in this city for 12 years, four in the Homicide Division, I can no longer stand idly by and watch State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby avoid taking responsibility for her role in the increase in violence.

The most recent example of her questionable leadership is her decision to restrict the Homicide Review Commission to closed cases that occurred before she became state’s attorney. She claims the program is a waste of money, places witnesses in jeopardy and is pointless because she knows the reason for the increase in violence is drugs.

When I was involved in the commission in its early stages, organizers asked us to send one prosecutor, for one afternoon, once a month. It did not cost the state’s attorney’s office anything except time. Coming off the deadliest month in decades –— deadliest in our history per capita — is now really the time to be turning down free help? More to the story here.

Russia’s Silent Effective War Against the United States

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There is no country that is better with propaganda tactics than Russia and they are in use today. The measure of the costs related to Russia’s tactics especially when it comes to the internet is not measurable.

This silent war is noticed even by Secretary of State John Kerry when he declared he was certain that both China and Russia have access or have read his emails. So why no declaration of war or prosecution of espionage?

***

A Russian crime ring has amassed the largest known collection of stolen Internet credentials, including 1.2 billion user name and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses, security researchers say.

The records, discovered by Hold Security, a firm in Milwaukee, include confidential material gathered from 420,000 websites, including household names, and small Internet sites. Hold Security has a history of uncovering significant hacks, including the theft last year of tens of millions of records from Adobe Systems. More details here.

***

Exclusive: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals – Ex-employees

Reuters: Beginning more than a decade ago, one of the largest security companies in the world, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, tried to damage rivals in the marketplace by tricking their antivirus software programs into classifying benign files as malicious, according to two former employees.

They said the secret campaign targeted Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), AVG Technologies NV (AVG.N), Avast Software and other rivals, fooling some of them into deleting or disabling important files on their customers’ PCs.

Some of the attacks were ordered by Kaspersky Lab’s co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, in part to retaliate against smaller rivals that he felt were aping his software instead of developing their own technology, they said.

“Eugene considered this stealing,” said one of the former employees. Both sources requested anonymity and said they were among a small group of people who knew about the operation.

Kaspersky Lab strongly denied that it had tricked competitors into categorizing clean files as malicious, so-called false positives.

“Our company has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing,” Kaspersky said in a statement to Reuters. “Such actions are unethical, dishonest and their legality is at least questionable.”

Executives at Microsoft, AVG and Avast previously told Reuters that unknown parties had tried to induce false positives in recent years. When contacted this week, they had no comment on the allegation that Kaspersky Lab had targeted them.

The Russian company is one of the most popular antivirus software makers, boasting 400 million users and 270,000 corporate clients. Kaspersky has won wide respect in the industry for its research on sophisticated Western spying programs and the Stuxnet computer worm that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear program in 2009 and 2010.

The two former Kaspersky Lab employees said the desire to build market share also factored into Kaspersky’s selection of competitors to sabotage.

“It was decided to provide some problems” for rivals, said one ex-employee. “It is not only damaging for a competing company but also damaging for users’ computers.”

The former Kaspersky employees said company researchers were assigned to work for weeks or months at a time on the sabotage projects.

Their chief task was to reverse-engineer competitors’ virus detection software to figure out how to fool them into flagging good files as malicious, the former employees said.

The opportunity for such trickery has increased over the past decade and a half as the soaring number of harmful computer programs have prompted security companies to share more information with each other, industry experts said. They licensed each other’s virus-detection engines, swapped samples of malware, and sent suspicious files to third-party aggregators such as Google Inc’s (GOOGL.O) VirusTotal.

By sharing all this data, security companies could more quickly identify new viruses and other malicious content. But the collaboration also allowed companies to borrow heavily from each other’s work instead of finding bad files on their own.

Kaspersky Lab in 2010 complained openly about copycats, calling for greater respect for intellectual property as data-sharing became more prevalent.

In an effort to prove that other companies were ripping off its work, Kaspersky said it ran an experiment: It created 10 harmless files and told VirusTotal that it regarded them as malicious. VirusTotal aggregates information on suspicious files and shares them with security companies.

Within a week and a half, all 10 files were declared dangerous by as many as 14 security companies that had blindly followed Kaspersky’s lead, according to a media presentation given by senior Kaspersky analyst Magnus Kalkuhl in Moscow in January 2010.

When Kaspersky’s complaints did not lead to significant change, the former employees said, it stepped up the sabotage.

INJECTING BAD CODE

In one technique, Kaspersky’s engineers would take an important piece of software commonly found in PCs and inject bad code into it so that the file looked like it was infected, the ex-employees said. They would send the doctored file anonymously to VirusTotal.

Then, when competitors ran this doctored file through their virus detection engines, the file would be flagged as potentially malicious. If the doctored file looked close enough to the original, Kaspersky could fool rival companies into thinking the clean file was problematic as well.

VirusTotal had no immediate comment.

In its response to written questions from Reuters, Kaspersky denied using this technique. It said it too had been a victim of such an attack in November 2012, when an “unknown third party” manipulated Kaspersky into misclassifying files from Tencent (0700.HK), Mail.ru (MAILRq.L) and the Steam gaming platform as malicious.

The extent of the damage from such attacks is hard to assess because antivirus software can throw off false positives for a variety of reasons, and many incidents get caught after a small number of customers are affected, security executives said.

The former Kaspersky employees said Microsoft was one of the rivals that were targeted because many smaller security companies followed the Redmond, Washington-based company’s lead in detecting malicious files. They declined to give a detailed account of any specific attack.

Microsoft’s antimalware research director, Dennis Batchelder, told Reuters in April that he recalled a time in March 2013 when many customers called to complain that a printer code had been deemed dangerous by its antivirus program and placed in “quarantine.”

Batchelder said it took him roughly six hours to figure out that the printer code looked a lot like another piece of code that Microsoft had previously ruled malicious. Someone had taken a legitimate file and jammed a wad of bad code into it, he said. Because the normal printer code looked so much like the altered code, the antivirus program quarantined that as well.

Over the next few months, Batchelder’s team found hundreds, and eventually thousands, of good files that had been altered to look bad. Batchelder told his staff not to try to identify the culprit.

“It doesn’t really matter who it was,” he said. “All of us in the industry had a vulnerability, in that our systems were based on trust. We wanted to get that fixed.”

In a subsequent interview on Wednesday, Batchelder declined to comment on any role Kaspersky may have played in the 2013 printer code problems or any other attacks. Reuters has no evidence linking Kaspersky to the printer code attack.

As word spread in the security industry about the induced false positives found by Microsoft, other companies said they tried to figure out what went wrong in their own systems and what to do differently, but no one identified those responsible.

At Avast, a largely free antivirus software maker with the biggest market share in many European and South American countries, employees found a large range of doctored network drivers, duplicated for different language versions.

Avast Chief Operating Officer Ondrej Vlcek told Reuters in April that he suspected the offenders were well-equipped malware writers and “wanted to have some fun” at the industry’s expense. He did not respond to a request on Thursday for comment on the allegation that Kaspersky had induced false positives.

WAVES OF ATTACKS

The former employees said Kaspersky Lab manipulated false positives off and on for more than 10 years, with the peak period between 2009 and 2013.

It is not clear if the attacks have ended, though security executives say false positives are much less of a problem today.

That is in part because security companies have grown less likely to accept a competitor’s determinations as gospel and are spending more to weed out false positives.

AVG’s former chief technology officer, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, said the company suffered from troves of bad samples that stopped after it set up special filters to screen for them and improved its detection engine.

“There were several waves of these samples, usually four times per year. This crippled-sample generation lasted for about four years. The last wave was received at the beginning of the year 2013,” he told Reuters in April.

AVG’s chief strategy officer, Todd Simpson, declined to comment on Wednesday.

Kaspersky said it had also improved its algorithms to defend against false virus samples. It added that it believed no antivirus company conducted the attacks “as it would have a very bad effect on the whole industry.”

“Although the security market is very competitive, trusted threat-data exchange is definitely part of the overall security of the entire IT ecosystem, and this exchange must not be compromised or corrupted,” Kaspersky said.

Another Illegal and an Unimaginable Triple Murder

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Ft. Myers, Florida: Family member charged in ‘extremely violent’ triple homicide

The Lee County Sheriff’s Office announced Thursday that Brian Omar Hyde has been charged in the deaths of Dorla Pitts, 37, her daughter Starlette Pitts, 17, and Michael Kelly, Jr., 19.

Deputies were called to the home in the 3507 21st Street SW shortly before noon Tuesday. It all started when Dorla Pitts walked in on the scene while she was on the phone with her husband. Her scream was the last thing Dorrien Pitts heard. He then called a family friend who went to the home and discovered the bodies.

– VIDEO: Watch the full LCSO press conference

The 18-month-old daughter of Starlette and Michael was found unharmed. Detectives are not sharing details on whether the child was near the bodies.

Hyde, 19, is charged with three counts of second-degree murder and faces a charge in the death of Starlette Pitts’ unborn child. He was arrested Tuesday for driving without a license. At the time of his arrest, he had blood on his body and clothes, according to LCSO.

– DOWNLOAD: Brian Omar Hyde arrest report

Michael’s mother, Sherri Flemming, said Hyde is Starlette’s cousin and Dorla’s nephew who had been staying at the home after recently moving here from Belize. According to LCSO, Hyde is in the country illegally and is awaiting a court hearing as an illegal immigrant, having crossed the Texas border earlier this year.

Lt. Matt Sands said it was an “extremely violent scene, even for us. All homicide scenes are normally violent, but this scene was what we considered unimaginable.”

He said there is evidence all the victims tried to defend themselves.

At the same time deputies were working the Lehigh scene, Fort Myers Police received a call for a reckless driver. Hyde was pulled over in a white Range Rover for driving on the opposite side of the road, at which time he was arrested for driving with no license. The Range Rover was registered to the Lehigh address, as were two other sets of keys Hyde had with him. Detectives say a bloody palm print found at the scene matched Hyde’s.

LCSO is still investigating a motive.

Investigators are not releasing specific details on the murder weapon, only stating that the victims were hit several times with a sharp object.

FAMILY LEFT TO PICK UP THE PIECES

Michael’s mother, Sherri Flemming, said Thursday that when she met Brian Hyde, she felt something was off, but accepted him because he is Starlette’s cousin. She said the young couple took him in because they were good, caring people.

“This could happen to anybody, so be careful who you bring into your house. It could be your own family member,” Flemming said.

She said Hyde was made to feel like family by Starlette and Michael, who invited him to his family’s gatherings, but Flemming said she felt uncomfortable when Hyde came around.

While it helps to know how they died, it’s the why that leaves Flemming emotional. “They was innocent people, how could you do this?”

Michael’s sister, Derquiasha Henderson, said they were just picking out baby names for the new baby. “We were just doing all of that, we were supposed to hang out.”

She said now they’ll have to show the surviving 18-month-old, found unharmed in a bedroom, how much her parents loved her.

“I can picture her trying to go to her mom and my brother and wake them up, because that’s the type of baby she is. She love her parents, she loved them and they loved her,” Henderson said.

The surviving grandparents from both families are in the process of figuring out how to care for the little girl, and say what they need most right now is time to heal.

WHO IS BRIAN HYDE?

Authorities in Brian Hyde’s native country of Belize say he is no stranger to them.

Hyde was recently wanted in connection to a recent robbery of a cell phone store there before fleeing the country.

Hyde first came to the U.S. in January, illegally entering through Texas, according to investigators.

– VIDEO: Who is Brian Hyde?

Since then, Hyde had been staying with his relatives, the Pitts, in Lehigh Acres.

According to Belize media outlets, Hyde was also arrested in November of last year for assaulting a police officer, a charge he later disputed.

Other reports show Hyde and two other men were suspects in a double murder case dating back to October 2013. He was only charged with a lesser crime of “handling stolen goods.”

A newspaper reporter said Hyde comes from a known “criminal” family.

His uncle, Russell Hyde, was considered a suspect in the brutal murders of two Belize nationals in May. Both men were found decapitated and dismembered.

To date, Russell Hyde has not been charged with their murders.

According to sources in Belize, police do not have the technology to analyze DNA and other forensic evidence like the U.S. does, which may be one reason they had such a hard time connecting Russell Hyde to those deaths.

As for Brian Hyde, he remains in Lee County Jail and faces trial here.

Attorney Michael Raheb said if Hyde is found not guilty, he’ll face an immigration judge and most likely be deported.

But if found guilty, “then he may be serving life in prison, in which case the whole point of deportation becomes moot because he won’t be released from Florida state prison,” Raheb said.

Officials at the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have not yet responded to NBC2’s requests for comment.

Obama’s Summer Reading List

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CBS reported: You can’t golf all day.

President Obama packed plenty to read for his two weeks vacationing with his family in Martha’s Vineyard.

Here are Obama’s six summer reads, a mix of critically acclaimed fiction and nonfiction, obtained first by ABC News:

  • All That Is, by James Salter
  • All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
  • The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert
  • The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Between The World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow

Let’s examine one of them:

Between the World and Me and reviewed by the Christian Science Monitor has some interesting facts and demonstrates volumes of envy, blame and plight.

In his 1978 biography of James Baldwin, Louis H. Pratt called the eminent 20th-century African-American writer a man “concerned with the destruction of the fantasies and delusions of a contented audience … determined to avoid reality.” Baldwin was born poor in New York City and personally knew racial intolerance. With regard to race, Pratt’s Baldwin was a “disturber of the peace” – one who revealed uncomfortable truths to a society mired in complacency. Thirty-five years later, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison now invokes Baldwin’s legacy in praising Ta-Nehisi Coates’s powerful new memoir Between the World and Me: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

Coates, a national correspondent at The Atlantic, has, in “Between the World and Me,” crafted a highly provocative, thoughtfully presented, and beautifully written narrative concerning his own misgivings about the ongoing racial struggle in America. In this slender (176 pages) volume Coates is also, like Baldwin before him, set on revealing similar “uncomfortable truths” to 21st-century America. Coates’s prose is addressed to his 15-year-old son Samori. In the wake of all the recent tragedies involving black men and boys at the hands of police – Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri in particular – Coates says he cannot help but fear for Samori’s life.

Writing ruefully and with a hint of resignation, Coates writes to Samori about the way that “those who believe they are white” have been essentially “pilfering” the bodies of African Americans throughout the course of American history. In the wake of these many recent and lethal confrontations between law enforcement and black Americans, Coates expresses little hope that there will be meaningful change any time soon. The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, slain with eight parishioners in a church in Charleston, S. C.; the alleged “suicide” of Sandra Bland in Waller County, Texas; and the death of Samuel DuBose at the hands of a University of Cincinnati police officer, are all just more grist for what Coates sees as a mill of misery, mistrust, and hopelessness.

Coates refers to the greater white American population as “Dreamers” – living in a “Dream” festooned with sentimental mythology such as “perfect houses with nice lawns,” “ice cream socials,” “the Cub Scouts,” “block associations,” and “Memorial Day cookouts.” In Coates’s mind, this mythology has clouded any real appreciation or empathy for those for whom the “Dream” is unattainable. As Coates writes to his son, “even your relatively privileged security can never match a sustained assault launched in the name of the Dream.” In Coates’s telling, there are just too many who have become victims of it: Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Jordan Davis, and Kajieme Powell, are just a few.

In one powerful passage, and in a direct appeal to those who would look away from the numerous black fatalities in recent years, Coates asserts: “America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist.… One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.”

Having grown up in West Baltimore, the son of William Paul Coates, a former Black Panther and Vietnam War veteran, Ta-Nehisi Coates (his hyphenated first name is the Egyptian translation for ancient Nubia, from which his family originated), was prodigious at reading and writing in his youth and subsequently attended Howard University – “The Mecca” – in Washington, D.C. As a teenager, Coates eagerly consumed the writings of historian and Howard professor Chancellor Williams, whose book, “Destruction of Black Civilization” became a revelation to him. This introduced Coates to the excesses of European colonialism and its disastrous effects in plundering the cultures and economies as well as the bodies of Africans and their countries.

Once at Howard, Coates was drawn to the vast African-American holdings of the Moorland Spingarn Research Center, where Coates’s father once worked. He would “draw out my pen, and one of my black-and-white composition books. I would open the books and read, while filling my composition books with notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences of my own invention.”

But while Coates was discovering himself, he also became disillusioned by the realization that those black thinkers and writers whose works he devoured at the library often were antagonistic to, and worked against, one another. The one intellectual Coates found close identity with at that time was Malcolm X.

“He was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard,” Coates writes. “He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, as natural as Prometheus for hating the birds.”

Coates then does a slow burn over another touchy subject – a quote attributed to the Nobel prize-winning writer Saul Bellow: “When the Zulus produce a Tolstoy, we will read him.” Coates found satisfaction in a quote by author Paul Wiley, who replied in kind, “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.… Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” As a result, Coates, who admitted error in having originally accepted Bellow’s remark as valid, at last repudiated it as “racecraft,” where, in effect, racism becomes race.

“The Struggle,” as Coates wrote to Samori, named for Samori Toure, who fought against French colonizers in Guinea during the 19th century, often “escapes our grasp.” He quotes Harvard law professor Derrick Bell, who called blacks “faces at the bottom of the well.” But Coates optimistically adds “But there really is wisdom down here, and that wisdom accounts for much of the good in my life. And my life down here accounts for you.”

Coates emphasizes that although blacks in America have endured the hardships of slavery – having been relentlessly “carried off and divided up into policies and stocks” – he has taught his son to “respect every human being as singular,” though that respect must also extend into the past. He writes eloquently about how “You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.”

One moving event Coates relates involves the day he took his young son to see the film “Howl’s Moving Castle” in Manhattan. While exiting the theater, Coates’s dawdling son was angrily pushed on an escalator by a white woman. Coates became enraged and responded accordingly. He expresses personal shame for his loss of temper, noticing to his horror that Samori was intensely frightened by his reaction. Coates was enraged that someone had “invoked their right over the body of my son,” but also expressed regret that in seeking to defend his son, he had actually “endangered” him.

Perhaps the most emotionally wrought episode in the book involves the death of a young man with whom Coates had studied at “The Mecca” – Prince C. Jones, Jr., who Coates learns was killed in an altercation with a Prince George’s County, Virginia policeman who happened to be black, and who had a dismal record in his tenure on the force. Hearing that the unarmed Jones was struck with five bullets (of 16 shots aimed at his Jeep), Coates felt a need to seek out Jones’s mother, about whom he wondered, “How did she live?” Coates found her on the outskirts of Philadelphia in an affluent gated community.

Dr. Mabel Jones made a pact with a friend as a young girl that she would become a doctor and escape the difficult childhood she had lived under her sharecropper father. She subsequently matriculated at Louisiana State University on full scholarship and later served in the Navy.

Earning her medical degree, she specialized in radiology (she said she knew no other black radiologists) and rose to the head of radiology of her hospital. She told Coates that Prince (who she called “Rocky” in tribute to her grandfather, who went by “Rock”), was part of that “one third” of Howard students who were “tired of having to represent.” They were the ones who managed to break away to the suburbs, only to find that they “carried the mark with them and could not escape” – being patronized as “parables of diversity.”

Coates can hardly believe Dr. Jones’s remarkable stoicism in telling him about the night her son died and her control in the face of his having been “plundered.” Driving back after their talk, Coates found himself thinking of his son, of the Dreamers, and of the importance of continuing to struggle. “I do not believe we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves.… Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved.” It is an appeal to empathy and understanding that has fallen on the deaf ears of so much of America throughout its history.

Coates finishes powerfully, expressing the urgent need of this understanding, together with corrective action, in one stirring passage: “The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.”

The message here is clear: Our national conscience must acknowledge, as difficult as that may be, that there remains a steel-hardened distance between black and white in this country, forged by past and present transgressions. But at the same time, there is the hope that it can be tempered by an appeal to an America that sees itself as “exceptional,” but has failed to extend that belief in exceptionalism to many of its citizens.

“Between the World and Me” follows other important writings by Coates, including his 2008 memoir “The Beautiful Struggle” and his 2014 Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.”

Much of what Coates writes may be difficult for a majority of Americans to process, but that’s the incisive wisdom of it. Read it, think about it, take a deep breath and read it again. The spirit of James Baldwin lives within its pages.