USA Trade Deal with China Pivots on Huawei

Could it be that the Trump administration has the ace-in-the-hole when it comes to forcing the hand of China? Could it be that China is finally caught due to Huawei?

How Meng Wanzhou’s ‘P’ passport works | The Star

There is a 13-count indictment against the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies, alleging the company took part in a long-running scheme in which it deceived the U.S. government about its business dealings with Iran.

Could it be that European countries that are pressing to stay in the JCPOA deal with Iran could eventually be implicated as well?

Huawei-et-al.-Press-Release-(1)

BROOKLYN, N.Y. – A 13-count indictment was unsealed earlier today in federal
court in Brooklyn, New York, charging four defendants, all of whom are affiliated with
Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. (Huawei), the world’s largest telecommunications equipment
manufacturer, with headquarters in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and operations
around the world. The indicted defendants include Huawei and two Huawei subsidiaries
Huawei Device USA Inc. (Huawei USA) and Skycom Tech Co. Ltd. (Skycom) —
as well as Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Wanzhou Meng (Meng).
The defendants Huawei and Skycom are charged with bank fraud and conspiracy
to commit bank fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to
defraud the United States, conspiracy to violate and substantive violations of the
International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and conspiracy to commit
money laundering. Huawei and Huawei USA are charged with conspiracy to obstruct
justice related to the Grand Jury investigation in the Eastern District of New York. Meng
is charged with bank fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud.
“As charged in the indictment, Huawei and its subsidiaries, with the direct and
personal involvement of their executives, engaged in serious fraudulent conduct,
including conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud, sanctions violations, money laundering and
the orchestrated obstruction of justice,” stated United States Attorney Donoghue. “For
over a decade, Huawei employed a strategy of lies and deceit to conduct and grow its
business. This Office will continue to hold accountable companies and their executives,
whether here or abroad, that commit fraud against U.S. financial institutions and their
international counterparts and violate U.S. laws designed to maintain our national
security.” Mr. Donoghue thanked the FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Export Enforcement and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service agents who are
investigating this case for their tireless work and dedication.
“These charges lay bare Huawei’s blatant disregard for the laws of our country
and standard global business practices,” stated FBI Director Wray.
“Companies like Huawei pose a dual threat to both our economic and national security, and the magnitude of these charges make clear just how seriously the FBI takes this threat. Today should serve as a warning that we will not tolerate businesses that violate our laws, obstruct justice, or jeopardize national and economic well-being.”
“As charged in the indictment, Huawei and its Chief Financial Officer broke U.S.
law and have engaged in a fraudulent financial scheme that is detrimental to the security
of the United States,” stated U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen.
“They willfully conducted millions of dollars in transactions that were in direct violation
of the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations, and such behavior will not be
tolerated. The Department of Homeland Security is focused on preventing nefarious
actors from accessing or manipulating our financial system, and we will ensure that
legitimate economic activity is not exploited by our adversaries. I would like to thank
ICE Homeland Security Investigations for their exceptional work on this case.”
“For years, Chinese firms have broken our export laws and undermined sanctions,
often using the U.S. financial systems to facilitate their illegal activities,” stated U.S.
Department of Commerce Secretary Ross.
Do you kinda wonder as I do how long this was going on actually and what did the Obama Justice Department do?    NUTTIN  it seems.
***

(Reuters) – Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, who was arrested in Canada and faces possible extradition to the United States, is exploring a defense that claims U.S. charges against her are politically motivated, the Globe and Mail newspaper reported on Monday.

Meng, the chief financial officer of China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, is the central figure in a high-stakes dispute between the United States and China. Canada arrested Meng in December at the request of the United States and last month she was charged with wire fraud that violated U.S. sanctions on Iran.

“The political overlay of this case is remarkable,” Richard Peck, lead counsel for Meng, told the Toronto newspaper in a telephone interview.

“That’s probably the one thing that sets it apart from any other extradition case I’ve ever seen. It’s got this cloud of politicization hanging over it,” Peck added.

More to the Venezuela Revolution, Carnet de la Patria

SOCIAL CONTROL

Let lil miss Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in please on a few of these details:

Sorta president Nicolas Maduro blames the United States for leading the mission to remove him from office. He has cut off diplomatic relations with the United States, while calling for the expulsion of our diplomatic staff. Only non-essential personnel of the United States has been told to leave Venezuela.

Presently, a self declared president is in hiding for his own safety it seems, Juan Guaido. Guaido has been approved and recognized not only by the United States, but Europe and Canada as other countries in the region have done the same.

On January 10, 2019, the Organization of American States, a Latin American council have all agreed to not recognize the legitimacy of Nicolas Maduro’s new term, hence any political action he has taken since the beginning of 2019 has also been deemed as illegitimate.

Maduro put simply is a killer, criminal and globally corrupt.

It is also important to note Maduro’s #2 man in country, Tareck Zaidan El Aissami Maddah. He was born in Venezuela to a Lebanese mother and Syrian father. He is just as corrupt as noted by the United States.

According to PanAm Post, US prosecutors have alleged that El Aissami was Venezuela’s “liaison” with Hezbollah and has provided passports to “terrorist organizations.” A report by the Center for a Secure Free Society released in 2014 alleged that El Aissami has “developed a sophisticated financial network and multi-level networks as a criminal-terrorist pipeline to bring Islamic militants to Venezuela and neighboring countries, and to send illicit funds from Latin America to the Middle East.” The alleged “pipeline” consists of 40 shell companies which have bank accounts in Venezuela, Panama, Curacao, St. Lucia, Miami and Lebanon and is also involved in drug smuggling.

Most all of the El Aissami family worked for Saddam Hussein and the Baathist Party including in Iraq and in Venezuela.

Meanwhile, with the previous Venezuelan president Chavez and through Maduro, Venezuela has been under the multi track influence of China, Russia, Syria, Cuba and Iran.

While much political and national security debate in the United States has included Huawei, other other telecom threat is ZTE. ZTE along with Huawei have both been banned from any government use by legislation signed by President Trump.

ZTE is important to understand as millions of U.S. cell phones in use are manufactured by ZTE. There is spy intrusion technology inside these phones. But there is something much more nefarious about China, ZTE and Venezuela and that is the ‘carnet de la patria’ otherwise known as the ‘fatherland card’.

This application was created and is in use today in China so Venezuela is doing the same. Read on for the nastiness and here is what lil Ms. Ocasio-Cortez along with the rest of the socialists in Congress are subscribing to.

***  Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro wins reelection, officials say ...

Caracas (Reuters) – In April 2008, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez dispatched Justice Ministry officials to visit counterparts in the Chinese technology hub of Shenzhen. Their mission, according to a member of the Venezuela delegation, was to learn the workings of China’s national identity card program.

Chavez, a decade into his self-styled socialist revolution, wanted help to provide ID credentials to the millions of Venezuelans who still lacked basic documentation needed for tasks like voting or opening a bank account. Once in Shenzhen, though, the Venezuelans realized a card could do far more than just identify the recipient.

There, at the headquarters of Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp, they learned how China, using smart cards, was developing a system that would help Beijing track social, political and economic behavior. Using vast databases to store information gathered with the card’s use, a government could monitor everything from a citizen’s personal finances to medical history and voting activity.

“What we saw in China changed everything,” said the member of the Venezuelan delegation, technical advisor Anthony Daquin. His initial amazement, he said, gradually turned to fear that such a system could lead to abuses of privacy by Venezuela’s government. “They were looking to have citizen control.”

The following year, when he raised concerns with Venezuelan officials, Daquin told Reuters, he was detained, beaten and extorted by intelligence agents. They knocked several teeth out with a handgun and accused him of treasonous behavior, Daquin said, prompting him to flee the country.

Government spokespeople had no comment on Daquin’s account.

The project languished.

But 10 years after the Shenzhen trip, Venezuela is rolling out a new, smart-card ID known as the “carnet de la patria,” or “fatherland card.” The ID transmits data about cardholders to computer servers. The card is increasingly linked by the government to subsidized food, health and other social programs most Venezuelans rely on to survive.

And ZTE, whose role in the fatherland project is detailed here for the first time, is at the heart of the program.

As part of a $70 million government effort to bolster “national security,” Venezuela last year hired ZTE to build a fatherland database and create a mobile payment system for use with the card, according to contracts reviewed by Reuters.

A team of ZTE employees is now embedded in a special unit within Cantv, the Venezuelan state telecommunications company that manages the database, according to four current and former Cantv employees.

The fatherland card is troubling some citizens and human-rights groups who believe it is a tool for Chavez’s successor, President Nicolas Maduro, to monitor the populace and allocate scarce resources to his loyalists.

Opposition and drivers reject vehicle census in Venezuela ...

“It’s blackmail,” Hector Navarro, one of the founders of the ruling Socialist Party and a former minister under Chavez, said of the fatherland program. “Venezuelans with the cards now have more rights than those without.”

In a phone interview, Su Qingfeng, the head of ZTE’s Venezuela unit, confirmed ZTE sold Caracas servers for the database and is developing the mobile payment application. The company, he said, violated no Chinese or local laws and has no role in how Venezuela collects or uses cardholder data.

“We don’t support the government,” he said. “We are just developing our market.”

An economic meltdown in Venezuela is causing hyperinflation, widespread shortages of food and medicines, and a growing exodus of desperate citizens. Maduro has been sanctioned by the United States and is criticized by governments from France to Canada as increasingly autocratic.

In that, critics say, Maduro has an ally. The fatherland card, they argue, illustrates how China, through state-linked companies like ZTE, exports technological know-how that can help like-minded governments track, reward and punish citizens.

The database, according to employees of the card system and screenshots of user data reviewed by Reuters, stores such details as birthdays, family information, employment and income, property owned, medical history, state benefits received, presence on social media, membership of a political party and whether a person voted.

So far, the government’s disclosure of ZTE’s involvement in the fatherland project has been limited to a passing reference in a February 2017 press release that credited the company with helping to “fortify” the underlying database.

Venezuela’s government didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article. Nadia Perez, a spokeswoman for Cantv, the state-run telecoms firm, declined to comment and Manuel Fernandez, the company’s president, didn’t respond to emails or text messages from Reuters. China’s Justice Ministry and its embassy in Caracas didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Although ZTE is publicly traded, a Chinese state company is its largest shareholder and the government is a key client. ZTE has run afoul of Washington before for dealings with authoritarian governments.

The company this year paid $1 billion to settle with the U.S. Commerce Department, one of various penalties after ZTE shipped telecommunications equipment to Iran and North Korea, violating U.S. sanctions and export laws. The Commerce action was sparked by a 2012 Reuters report that ZTE sold Iran a surveillance system, which included U.S. components, to spy on telecommunications by its citizens.

Legal experts in the United States said it is unclear whether ZTE and other companies that supply the fatherland system are violating U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan leaders by providing tools that critics believe strengthen the government’s grip on power.

Fernandez, the Cantv president, is one of the targets of those sanctions because of the telecom company’s censorship of the internet in Venezuela, according to a U.S. Treasury Department statement. But the prohibitions thus far are meant primarily to thwart business with Maduro and other top officials themselves, not regular commerce in Venezuela.

Still, U.S. lawmakers and other critics of Maduro’s rule are concerned about ZTE’s role in Venezuela. “China is in the business of exporting its authoritarianism,” U.S. Senator Marco Rubio told Reuters in an email. “The Maduro regime’s increasing reliance on ZTE in Venezuela is just the latest example of the threat that Chinese state-directed firms pose to U.S. national security interests.”

To understand how the fatherland card works and how it came to be, Reuters reviewed confidential contracts and internal government documents related to its development. Reporters also interviewed dozens of current and former employees of ZTE, Venezuela’s government and Cantv, or Compania Anonima Nacional Telefonos de Venezuela, as the company is formally known.

They confirmed details of the project and the outlines of Daquin’s account of its origins.

“AN ATTEMPT TO CONTROL ME”

Maduro for the past year has urged citizens to sign up for the new card, calling it essential to “build the new Venezuela.” As many as 18 million people, over half the population, already have, according to government figures.

“With this card, we are going to do everything from now on,” Maduro said on state television last December.

To encourage its adoption, the government has granted cash prizes to cardholders for performing civic duties, like rallying voters. It has also given one-time payouts, such as awarding moms enrolled in the card a Mother’s Day bonus of about $2. The payment, last May, was nearly a monthly minimum wage – enough to buy a carton of eggs, given the current pace of inflation.

Maduro is also taking steps to force the card’s adoption. The government now says Venezuelans need it to receive public benefits including medicine, pensions, food baskets and subsidized fuel. In August, retirees protested outside social security offices and complained the fatherland rule limits access to hard-won pensions.

Benito Urrea, a 76-year-old diabetic, told Reuters a state doctor recently denied him an insulin prescription and called him “right wing” because he hasn’t enrolled. Like some other Venezuelan citizens, especially those who oppose the Maduro administration, Urrea sees the card with suspicion.

“It was an attempt to control me via my needs,” Urrea said in his Caracas apartment. Reuters was unable to contact the doctor.

Using the servers purchased from ZTE, the government is creating a database some citizens fear is identifying Venezuelans who support the government and those who don’t.

Some of the information, such as health data, is gathered with card usage. Some is obtained when citizens enroll. Cardholders and local human rights groups told Reuters that administrators ask questions about income, political activities and social media profiles before issuing the card.

Civil servants are facing particular pressure to enroll, according to more than a dozen state workers.

When scanning their cards during a presidential election last May, employees at several government offices were told by bosses to message photos of themselves at polls back to managers, they said. A Justice Ministry document reviewed by Reuters featured a list of state employees who didn’t vote.

After Chavez became president in 1999, he sought to empower “invisible” Venezuelans who couldn’t access basic services. In the following years, more citizens received documentation, but the cards were fragile and easily forged, according to a 2007 Justice Ministry report.

The report, reviewed by Reuters, recommended a new, microchip-enabled card that would be harder to counterfeit. No such effort got underway.

That December, after nearly a decade of soaring popularity, Chavez suffered his first electoral defeat, losing a referendum to scrap term limits. Oil prices plummeted shortly thereafter, hammering the economy.

Chavez worked to appease his working-class base, including throngs still lacking identity credentials. He sent Daquin, the top information security advisor at the Justice Ministry, to China.

The technology Daquin and colleagues learned about in Shenzhen underpinned what would become China’s “Social Credit System.”

The still-evolving system, part of which uses “smart citizen cards” developed by ZTE, grades citizens based on behavior including financial solvency and political activity. Good behavior can earn citizens discounts on utilities or loans. Bad marks can get them banned from public transport or their kids blocked from top schools.

ZTE executives showed the Venezuelans smart cards embedded with radio-frequency identification, or RFID, a technology that enables monitors through radio waves to track location and data. Other cards used so-called Quick Response, or QR, codes, the matrix barcodes now commonly used to store and process information.

After the trip, Venezuela turned to Cuba, its closest ally, and asked for help creating its own version of RFID cards. “The new goal was Big Data,” Daquin said.

In June 2008, Venezuela agreed to pay a Cuban state company $172 million to develop six million of the cards, according to a copy of the contract. Cuban government officials didn’t respond to questions about the agreement.

By 2009, Daquin grew uneasy about the potential for abuses of citizens’ privacy.

He expressed those concerns to officials including Vladimir Padrino, a general at the time and now Venezuela’s defense minister. The Defense Ministry didn’t respond to phone calls, emails or a letter presented by Reuters for comment.

On the morning of Nov. 12, at his local Caracas bakery, six armed officials in uniforms of Venezuela’s national intelligence agency awaited Daquin, he told Reuters.

They showed him photos of his daughter and forced him to drive east toward the town of Guatire. Off a back road, Daquin said, they beat him with pistols, forced a handgun into his mouth and dislodged several teeth, still missing.

“Why are you betraying the revolution?” one asked.

They demanded $100,000 for his release, Daquin said.

Daquin, who says he had been saving for years to buy property, went home, pulled cash from a safe and delivered it to the men. That evening, he booked a flight for himself, his wife and their three children to the United States, where he has lived since, working as an information security consultant.

His brother, Guy, who also lives in the United States, confirmed Daquin’s account. Documentation reviewed by Reuters corroborates his role at the ministry, and people familiar with Daquin’s work confirmed his involvement in the card project.

After Daquin fled, the Cuban contract went nowhere, according to another former advisor.

In March 2013, Chavez died. Maduro, his heir as Socialist Party candidate, was elected president the next month. The lingering oil crash dragged Venezuela into recession.

“WE’LL FIND OUT”

With hunger increasing, the government in 2016 launched a program to distribute subsidized food packages. It hired Soltein SA de CV, a company based in Mexico, to design an online platform to track them, according to documents reviewed by Reuters. The platform was the beginning of the database now used for the fatherland system.

Soltein’s directors, according to LinkedIn profiles, are mostly former Cuban state employees. A person who answered a telephone listed for Soltein denied the firm worked on the fatherland system. A woman at the company’s registered address in the resort city of Cancun told Reuters she had never heard of Soltein.

The system worked. Nearly 90 percent of the country’s residents now receive the food packages, according to a study published in February by Andres Bello Catholic University and two other universities.

Now more satisfied with its ability to track handouts, the government sought to know more about the recipients, according to people involved in the project. So it turned back to ZTE.

The Chinese company, now in Venezuela for about a decade, has over 100 employees working in two floors of a Caracas skyscraper. It first worked with Cantv, the telecommunications company, to enable television programming online.

Like many state enterprises in Venezuela, Cantv has grown starved for investment. ZTE became a key partner, taking on many projects that once would have fallen to Cantv itself, people familiar with both companies said.

ZTE is helping the government build six emergency response centers monitoring Venezuela’s major cities, according to a 2015 press release. In 2016, ZTE began centralizing video surveillance for the government around the country, according to current and former employees.

In its final push for the fatherland cards, the government no longer considered RFID, according to people familiar with the effort. The location-tracking technology was too costly.

Instead, it asked ZTE for help with QR codes, the black-and-white squares smartphone users can scan to get directed to web sites. ZTE developed the codes, at a cost of less than $3 per account, and the government printed the cards, linking them to the Soltein database, these people said.

In a phone call with Reuters in September, Su, the head of ZTE’s Venezuela business, confirmed the company’s card deal with Cantv. He declined to answer follow-up questions.

Maduro introduced the cards in December 2016. In a televised address, he held one up, thanked China for lending unspecified support and said “everybody must get one.”

The ID system, still running on the Soltein platform, hadn’t yet migrated to ZTE servers. Disaster soon struck. In May 2017, hackers broke into the fatherland database.

The hack was carried out by anonymous anti-Maduro activists known as TeamHDP. The group’s leader, Twitter handle @YoSoyJustincito, said the hack was “extremely simple” and motivated by TeamHDP’s mission to expose Maduro secrets.

The hacker, who spoke to Reuters by text message, declined to be identified and said he is no longer in Venezuela. A Cantv manager who later helped migrate the database to ZTE servers confirmed details of the breach.

During the hack, TeamHDP took screenshots of user data and deleted the accounts of government officials, including Maduro. The president later appeared on television scanning his card and receiving an error message: “This person doesn’t exist.”

Screenshots of the information embedded in various card accounts, shared by TeamHDP with Reuters, included phone numbers, emails, home addresses, participation at Socialist Party events and even whether a person owns a pet. People familiar with the database said the screenshots appear authentic.

Shortly after the hack, Maduro signed a $70 million contract with Cantv and a state bank for “national security” projects. These included development of a “centralized fatherland database” and a mobile app to process payments, such as the discounted cost of a subsidized food box, associated with the card.

“Imperialist and unpatriotic factions have tried to harm the nation’s security,” the contract reads.

It says an undisclosed portion of the funding would come from the Venezuela China Joint Fund, a bilateral financing program. A related contract, also reviewed by Reuters, assigns the database and payment app projects to ZTE. The document doesn’t disclose how much of the $70 million would go to the Chinese company.

ZTE declined to comment on financial details of its business in Venezuela. Neither the Venezuelan nor the Chinese government responded to Reuters queries about the contracts.

In July 2017, Soltein transferred ownership of fatherland data to Cantv, project documents show. A team of a dozen ZTE developers began bolstering the database’s capacity and security, current and former Cantv employees said.

Among other measures, ZTE installed data storage units built by U.S.-based Dell Technologies Inc, according to one ZTE document. Dell spokeswoman Lauren Lee said ZTE is a client in China but that Dell doesn’t sell equipment to ZTE in Venezuela. She said Dell reviewed its transactions in Venezuela and wasn’t aware of any sale to Cantv, either.

“Dell is committed to compliance with all applicable laws where we do business,” Lee said in an email. “We expect our customers, partners and suppliers to follow these same laws.”

In May, Venezuela held elections that were widely discredited by foreign governments after Maduro banned several opposition parties.

Ahead of the vote, ruling party officials urged voters to be “grateful” for government largesse dispensed via the fatherland cards. They set up “red point” kiosks near voting booths, where voters could scan their cards and register, Maduro himself promised, for a “fatherland prize.”

Those who scanned their cards later received a text message thanking them for supporting Maduro, according to several cardholders and one text message reviewed by Reuters. The prizes for voting, however, were never issued, cardholders and people familiar with the system said.

Current and former Cantv employees say the database registers if, but not how, a person voted. Still, some voters were led to believe the government would know. The belief is having a chilling effect.

One organizer of a food handout committee in the west-central city of Barinas said government managers had instructed her and colleagues to tell recipients their votes could be tracked. “We’ll find out if you voted for or against,” she said she told them.

State workers say they are a target.

An internal Cantv presentation from last year said the system can feed information from the database to ministries to help “generate statistics and take decisions.” After the vote, government offices including Banco Bicentenario del Pueblo, a state bank, sent Cantv lists with employees’ names to determine whether they had voted, according to the manager who helped set up the servers.

Banco Bicentenario didn’t respond to a request for comment. Officials at the Economy Ministry, which the bank reports to, didn’t respond to requests, either.

With personal data now so available, some citizens fear they can lose more than just their jobs, said Mariela Magallanes, an opposition lawmaker who headed a commission that last year investigated how the fatherland card was being linked to the subsidized food program.

The government, the commission said in a report, is depriving some citizens of the food boxes because they don’t possess the card. “The government knows exactly who is most vulnerable to pressure,” she said.

PG&E Heads to Bankruptcy Due to Wildfire Liabilities

PG&E is the largest power company in the United States and is giving employees a 15 day notice of intent to file Chapter 11.

California Wildfires Force Hollywood Stars, Sets, Studio ...

The catastrophic fires of 2017 and 2018 in California could reach upwards of $30 billion in damages and liability. The CEO has announced his exit and has been replaced on a temporary basis by the corporate lawyer, John Simon. PG&E serves 16 million customers and this legal process is not supposed to impact services for electric power or natural gas.

California fires: Death toll rises to 17 - CNN

The November Camp fire that swept through a mountain community in California, killed 86 people and the property and business damage has yet to be estimated. It is estimated that PG&E has $1.5 billion in liquidity and could take as much as two years to recover from Chapter 11.

Meanwhile, there was quite the travel and play junket to Hawaii as those fires burned. What you say?

California lawmakers are no different from those in Congress taking little vacations at really bad times in the worst of bad judgement. (30+ Hispanic lawmakers, part of the BOLD PAC took a multi-lobby paid vacation to Puerto Rico during the government shutdown)

***

FNC: A group of California lawmakers took a trip to Hawaii with utility companies last year as wildfires wreaked havoc in their state.

During the junket, representatives from utility companies discussed with the bipartisan group of lawmakers just how much responsibility they should bear for wildfires – even as Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) could be on the hook for several billions of dollars in damages for fires it caused over the past few years.

The utility companies are pushing for a new state law that would raise electricity prices to offset costs incurred from wildfires, according to The New York Times.

The annual event, hosted by the nonprofit Independent Voter Project, was held in Maui in November. PG&E executives did not attend the conference because of the wildfires, but representatives from San Diego Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison did, KABC-TV reported.

Those in attendance at the Wailea conference included California Assembly members Frank Bigelow, Bill Brough, Ian Calderon, Jim Cooper, Tom Daly, Heath Flora, Jim Frazier, Reggie Jones-Sawyer, Freddie Rodriguez and Blanca Rubio. State Sens. Ben Hueso and Cathleen Galgiani also attended, nonprofit Consumer Watchdog reports.

Bigelow and Brough are Republicans. The rest of the group are Democrats.

Thanks to Consumer Watchdog, a non-profit that is dedicated to being a consumer advocate with regard to protecting taxpayers and taking on special interests regardless of party. Ah but take caution, keep an eye on a possible financial bailout of PG&E. There are some energy billionaires out there that will lobby for financial assistance for PG&E.

It was just last June that a report was published revealing that PG&E has the makings of another Enron. For the highlights of that report, go here.

 

Taxing Texting to Pay Entitlements/Cell Service for Indigents?

Anyone old enough to remember the sin taxes? Well seems California has proposed to take it to a whole new level and to aid the poor…use cell phones…..didn’t the Federal government do that with the Obama-phones?

Anyone remember taxation without representation? Oh, just an archaic notion anymore.

How to Save Messages on Your iPhone | WIRED

SACRAMENTO, CA (NBC NEWS) — California residents may soon have to pay a tax on texting.

According to KNTV, the public utilities commission is floating the idea to help fund programs that give low-income residents access to cell phones.

It’s not clear how much the texting tax would be or how it would be collected.

Several business groups have come out against the proposal.

One business group says the program is flush with cash.

But state regulators say the program is breaking the bank after the budget for the program has been raised 300 million dollars in six years.

The wireless industry says the texting tax would put them at a disadvantage over other free messaging services like Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, Apple’s i-Message and others.

Mobile phone companies along with telecom providers are working to defeat this ridiculous proposal. There is no formal amount of the tax that has been announced but frankly the poor in California actually need places to live and employment rather than cell phones. There is some chatter that just a flat fee added to the mobile service or a surcharge would be proposed versus some tax per text.

The Bay Area and the California Chamber of Commerce are looking to create a fund estimated to be in the $40-50 million range per year. Oh wait….there is also some consideration to make these taxes retroactive going back 5 years. If that is the case, that fund would amount to well over $200 million.

A dense California Public Utilities Commission report laying out the case for the texting surcharge says the Public Purpose Program budget has climbed from $670 million in 2011 to $998 million last year. But the telecommunications industry revenues that fund the program have fallen from $16.5 billion in 2011 to $11.3 billion in 2017, it said.

“This is unsustainable over time,” the report says, arguing that adding surcharges on text messaging will increase the revenue base that funds programs that help low-income Californians afford phone service.

Telecom companies are already arguing that texting is an informational service like email and not a services under the authority of the commission’s authority.

Just imagine how much texting goes on through several platforms including iMessages, WhatApps, Skype or by Facebook. It is estimated that in one year alone, 3 trillion text messages are sent.

Often what begins in one state is later adopted in others. So, if you can stand it, it would be prudent to review the whole proposal by clicking here.

One more item going through the FCC:

The Federal Communications Commission says it is giving cellular carriers added authority to block text messages, saying the action is needed to protect consumers from spam or robotexts. But critics of the plan note that carriers are already allowed to block robotexts and worry that the change will make it easy for carriers to censor political texts or block certain kinds of messages in order to extract more revenue from senders.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s announcement acknowledges that carriers are already allowed to block illegal robotexts. Pai did not promise new consumer-friendly blocking services; instead, he said his plan “allow[s] carriers to continue using robotext-blocking and anti-spoofing measures to protect consumers from unwanted text messages” (emphasis ours).

Despite that, Pai is proposing to classify text messaging as an information service, rather than a telecommunications service. That’s the same legal classification that Pai gave to home and mobile broadband services as part of a December 2017 vote to deregulate the industry and eliminate net neutrality rules. The FCC has not previously ruled on whether text messaging is an information service or a telecommunications service.

An FCC vote on Pai’s plan is scheduled for December 12.

 

 

 

 

US Treasury’s Evidence Iran and Russia Cooperating in Syria

The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned nine targets last week related to an illicit oil network between Iran and Russia.

“We are acting against a complex scheme Iran and Russia have used to bolster the [Bashar] Assad regime and generate funds for Iranian malign activity,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. “Central Bank of Iran officials continue to exploit the international financial system, and in this case even used a company whose name suggests a trade in humanitarian goods as a tool to facilitate financial transfers supporting this oil scheme.

“The United States is committed to imposing a financial toll on Iran, Russia and others for their efforts to solidify Assad’s authoritarian rule, as well as disrupt the Iranian regime’s funding of terrorist organizations,” he added.

Experts said this move was crucial in combating the Iranian threat.

“The scheme uncovered by the Treasury Department shows just how closely Iran and Russia are cooperating to not only help prop up the Assad regime financially, but to help finance the leading players in Iran’s global terrorism,” Boris Zilberman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told JNS. “So when Russia talks about cooperating with the United States to counter-terrorism this is empty rhetoric plain and simple.”

“As this scheme shows, Russia works hand in hand with some of the very terror groups we seek to counter,” he continued. “Russia is not a partner in our counter-terrorism efforts, but is, in fact, an adversary.”

“There are already sanctions on Russian arms exporters, but the United States should continue to uncover and sanction schemes such as this,” added Zilberman. “The administration could also consider, in conjunction with Israel, striking destabilizing arms transfers by Hezbollah.

“It’s an important step, and highlights just how much [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has supported Iran, Hezbollah and Assad, and how committed he is, despite hopes that Putin’s partnership with Iran is skin-deep short-lived,” the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Anna Borshchevskaya told JNS.

“Hard to tell if this pressure will succeed without being incorporated into a broader strategy,” she continued. “It comes as no surprise that the Kremlin said earlier this month it will continue to help Iran trade oil. It’s possible to imagine Moscow setting up another intermediary to continue shipping oil to the Syrian regime, but nonetheless, this is an important step.”

The State Department joined Treasury in sending a message to the Islamic Republic.

Islamic State crisis: US hits IS oil targets in Syria ...

“The sanctions levied today directly target the Iranian regime’s exploitation of the international financial system to hide revenue streams it uses to fund terrorist activity, provide support for sectarian militias responsible for abuses against civilian populations and destabilize the region,” said the department in a statement. “The Iranian regime, Iranian-commanded forces inside Syria and the proxy terrorist groups it supports such as those targeted today continue to foment instability to extend their malign influence. These actions by the Iranian and Assad regimes undermine the legitimate processes to resolve the conflict in Syria.”

This development preceded Secretary of State Pompeo blasting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Monday for calling Israel a “cancerous tumor” and a “fake regime.”

“This is a dangerous and irresponsible step that will further deepen Iran’s isolation,” warned Pompeo.

“The Iranian regime is no friend of America or Israel when they repeatedly call for the death of millions, including Muslims,” he added. “The Iranian people know better and do not agree with their government, which has badly represented them to the world for 39 years. The people have suffered under this tyranny for far too long.”

*** It is quite right that Iran is no friend of the United States or Israel. That Obama/Kerry nuclear deal was supposed to lay the groundwork for Iran to be a good citizen of the world….read on…not so much.

***

Two Iranian Men Indicted for Deploying Ransomware to Extort Hospitals, Municipalities, and Public Institutions, Causing Over $30 Million in Losses

A federal grand jury returned an indictment unsealed today in Newark, New Jersey charging Faramarz Shahi Savandi, 34, and Mohammad Mehdi Shah Mansouri, 27, both of Iran, in a 34-month-long international computer hacking and extortion scheme involving the deployment of sophisticated ransomware, announced Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito for the District of New Jersey and Executive Assistant Director Amy S. Hess of the FBI.

The six-count indictment alleges that Savandi and Mansouri, acting from inside Iran, authored malware, known as “SamSam Ransomware,” capable of forcibly encrypting data on the computers of victims.  According to the indictment, beginning in December 2015, Savandi and Mansouri would then allegedly access the computers of victim entities without authorization through security vulnerabilities, and install and execute the SamSam Ransomware on the computers, resulting in the encryption of data on the victims’ computers.  These more than 200 victims included hospitals, municipalities, and public institutions, according to the indictment, including the City of Atlanta, Georgia; the City of Newark, New Jersey; the Port of San Diego, California; the Colorado Department of Transportation; the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta, Canada; and six health care-related entities: Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, California; Kansas Heart Hospital in Wichita, Kansas; Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, more commonly known as LabCorp, headquartered in Burlington, North Carolina; MedStar Health, headquartered in Columbia, Maryland; Nebraska Orthopedic Hospital now known as OrthoNebraska Hospital, in Omaha, Nebraska and Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc., headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

According to the indictment, Savandi and Mansouri would then extort victim entities by demanding a ransom paid in the virtual currency Bitcoin in exchange for decryption keys for the encrypted data, collecting ransom payments from victim entities that paid the ransom, and exchanging the Bitcoin proceeds into Iranian rial using Iran-based Bitcoin exchangers.  The indictment alleges that, as a result of their conduct, Savandi and Mansouri have collected over $6 million USD in ransom payments to date, and caused over $30 million USD in losses to victims.

“The Iranian defendants allegedly used hacking and malware to cause more than $30 million in losses to more than 200 victims,” said Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein.  “According to the indictment, the hackers infiltrated computer systems in 10 states and Canada and then demanded payment. The criminal activity harmed state agencies, city governments, hospitals, and countless innocent victims.”

“The allegations in the indictment unsealed today—the first of its kind—outline an Iran-based international computer hacking and extortion scheme that engaged in 21st-century digital blackmail,” said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski.  “These defendants allegedly used ransomware to infect the computer networks of municipalities, hospitals, and other key public institutions, locking out the computer owners, and then demanded millions of dollars in payments from them. As today’s charges demonstrate, the Criminal Division and its law enforcement partners will relentlessly pursue cybercriminals who harm American citizens, businesses, and institutions, regardless of where those criminals may reside.”

“The defendants in this case developed and deployed the SamSam Ransomware in order to hold public and private entities hostage and then extort money from them,” said U.S. Attorney Carpenito.  “As the indictment in this case details, they started with a business in Mercer County and then moved on to major public entities, like the City of Newark, and healthcare providers, like the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles and the Kansas Heart Hospital in Wichita—cravenly taking advantage of the fact that these victims depend on their computer networks to serve the public, the sick, and the injured without interruption.  The charges announced today show that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey will continue to act to disrupt such criminal acts, and identify those who are responsible for them, no matter where in the world they may seek to hide.”

“This indictment demonstrates the FBI’s continuous commitment to unmasking malicious actors behind the world’s most egregious cyberattacks,” said Executive Assistant Director Hess.  “By calling out those who threaten American systems, we expose criminals who hide behind their computer and launch attacks that threaten our public safety and national security.  The actions highlighted today, which represent a continuing trend of cyber criminal activity emanating from Iran, were particularly threatening, as they targeted public safety institutions, including U.S. hospital systems and governmental entities.  The FBI, with the assistance of our private sector and U.S. government partners, are sending a strong message that we will work together to investigate and hold all criminals accountable.”

Savandi and Mansouri are charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in connection with computers, two substantive counts of intentional damage to a protected computer and two substantive counts of transmitting a demand in relation to damaging a protected computer.

According to the indictment, Savandi and Mansouri created the first version of the SamSam Ransomware in December 2015, and created further refined versions in June and October 2017.  In addition to employing Iran-based Bitcoin exchangers, the indictment alleges that the defendants also utilized overseas computer infrastructure to commit their attacks.   Savandi and Mansouri would also use sophisticated online reconnaissance techniques (such as scanning for computer network vulnerabilities) and conduct online research in order to select and target potential victims, according to the indictment.  According to the indictment, the defendants would also disguise their attacks to appear like legitimate network activity.

To carry out their scheme, the indictment alleges that the defendants also employed the use of Tor, a computer network designed to facilitate anonymous communication over the internet.  According to the indictment, the defendants maximized the damage caused to victims by launching attacks outside regular business hours, when a victim would find it more difficult to mitigate the attack, and by encrypting backups of the victims’ computers.  This was intended to—and often did—cripple the regular business operations of the victims, according to the indictment.  The most recent ransomware attack against a victim alleged in the indictment took place on Sept. 25, 2018.

This case was investigated by the FBI’s Newark Field Office.  Senior Counsel William A. Hall Jr. of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) and Assistant U.S. Attorney and Chief of the Cybercrimes Unit Justin S. Herring of the District of New Jersey are prosecuting the case.  The Department thanks its law enforcement colleagues at the National Crime Agency (UK), West Yorkshire Police (UK), Calgary Police Service (Canada), and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  Significant assistance was provided by the Justice Department’s National Security Division and the Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs.