Category Archives: Insurgency

Arab Spring: Business Over Diplomacy

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Courtesy of Sharyl Atkisson’s FullMeasure show and hard investigative work, matters come to the surface of where the White House misplayed countless missions in foreign policy especially as it relates to the Middle East, Syria, Libya and Yemen to mention a few.

When it comes to Libya, was the Hillary Clinton State Department more focused on business opportunities than equalizing countries? The answer appears to be yes and the hearing on Tuesday will be structured to prove that over security and diplomatic objectives.

Bloomberg: By

When Hillary Clinton testifies this week before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, expect Republicans to focus on her old friend, Sidney Blumenthal.

The chairman of the Benghazi committee, Trey Gowdy, alleges that in the run-up to President Obama’s intervention in Libya in 2011, Blumenthal was encouraging Clinton to support the war that he might personally profit from.

Recently released e-mails do show that Blumenthal was advocating in this period for a U.S. military contractor that sought business with the government that replaced the dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. But that contract was never signed. The contractor even lost money trying to win that business.

Blumenthal himself may have overstated his connections to the Libyan officials who would take power after Qaddafi fell. A lawyer who represented Libya’s transitional government in Washington at the time, David Tafuri, told me he didn’t recall running into Blumenthal in this period.

If Gowdy’s portrait is accurate and Blumenthal was trying to be a war profiteer, it appears he wasn’t a very good one.

Blumenthal did not respond to an e-mail request for an interview.

Gowdy’s allegations stem from Blumenthal’s connection to Osprey Global Solutions, a military contractor that sought to build field hospitals in Libya during the 2011 revolution and train the country’s national police after the fall of Libya’s dictator. According to e-mails received by the committee in late September, Blumenthal promoted Osprey to Clinton in a July 14, 2011, memo to prep her for an upcoming meeting with the transitional Libyan government’s ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.

The memo touts Osprey’s founder and chief executive, retired General David Grange, as the man who can help whip Libya’s opposition — the Transitional National Council, or TNC — into shape so it can take Tripoli. Blumenthal wrote that Grange’s company would provide direct training for Libyan fighters without the U.S. military having to be on the ground. “This is a private contract. It does not involve NATO. It puts Americans in a central role without being direct battle combatants,” Blumenthal wrote. “The TNC wants to demonstrate they are pro-US. They see this as a significant way to do that.”

Grange told me last week that he met Blumenthal only once, after being approached by Bill White, the chief executive of the consulting firm Constellations Group, to gauge his interest in doing business with the post-Qaddafi government in Libya. Constellations Group specializes in connecting people. In a 2013 interview, White said he helped put together the sale of Blackwater — the military contractor that became a target of Democrats during the George W. Bush presidency — to Academi. Grange said his understanding was that if he won any contracts in Libya, Constellations Group would get a percentage of the revenue as a finder’s fee. He did not know what Blumenthal’s relationship was with Constellations Group. “At that time I didn’t know if Blumenthal was doing this as a favor for Bill or if he was getting paid,” Grange told me. “I had no idea.”

Grange said Blumenthal in the meeting indicated that he could help expedite matters of licensing with the State Department. Mainly though, Blumenthal was promising to connect Grange to the Libyan opposition leaders who stood to take power after the fall of Qaddafi. “I knew that he was going to try to set up some meetings for us,” he said. Grange also said Blumenthal did not specifically talk about his relationship with Clinton.

Osprey never won any contracts in Libya. Grange said he spent $60,000 overall in pursuing the business in Libya. “We met with lots of people in positions of power, but they could never write a check,” Grange told me.

Blumenthal’s memo to Clinton also misstated Grange’s experience. Blumenthal wrote that Grange had helped devise the plan for U.S. Special Forces to take Baghdad in 2003. Grange told me that he was already retired from the Army by then and had nothing to do with the operation.

Democrats on the Benghazi committee say all of this strays far from the initial mandate, which was to learn more about what happened before, during and after the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on U.S. diplomatic and intelligence facilities in Benghazi. On Monday, the committee’s Democrats released a report on the investigation that said the transcript of Blumenthal’s deposition in June before the committee would show that Republicans asked him about things that had “nothing to do with Benghazi.”

The probe’s new focus on Blumenthal is nonetheless a serious matter. Gowdy’s letter earlier this month said nearly half the personal e-mails Clinton received about Libya prior to the Benghazi attack were from Blumenthal. This includes the period when the Obama administration was deciding whether to intervene against Qaddafi in 2011.

These e-mails show that Blumenthal was often a cheerleader for the intervention, even suggesting that Qaddafi’s ouster would benefit Obama in the polls. His messages often contained freelance intelligence about the situation in Libya, some of it wrong.

Blumenthal has said he never profited from his work for Osprey. In June following his closed testimony to the committee, he said the Osprey venture was one “in which I had little involvement, [that] [n]ever got off the ground, in which no money was ever exchanged, no favor sought and which had nothing to do with my sending these emails.”

But the July 14 memo from Blumenthal to Clinton says that he and two associates “acted as honest brokers, putting this arrangement together through a series of connections, linking the Libyans to Osprey and keeping it moving.”

Republicans on the committee tell me that they will be calling Blumenthal back soon to clarify answers he provided to the committee in June.

The irony is that Republicans are sounding a lot like the Democrats of 10 years ago, who accused some Republicans of seeking to profit from the war President Bush waged in Iraq.

But there is an important difference. In Iraq, the U.S. invested hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild the country after the dictator fell, and many American companies like Halliburton profited from this nation building. In the case of Libya, Obama lost interest after Qaddafi’s regime fell and never committed the resources to keep the country together after the dictator was gone.

That decision was likely one reason Osprey never won the contract that Blumenthal tried to set up. That decision also lies at the heart of the Benghazi committee’s mandate: President Obama allowed Libya to descend into a state so chaotic that terrorists could murder a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans only a year after the nation’s liberation.

Ground Conditions in Benghazi Before 9/11 Attack

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Check out hour 2 in this podcast with Col. Andy Wood on Benghazi slim security platform.

Memos recovered from Benghazi compound detail staff security worries

Lease disputes, pleas for additional security preceded deadly 2012 attack

WashingtonTimes: In the final weeks before the deadly Benghazi attack in September 2012, State Department officials serving in the tumultuous Libyan city had increasing worries about safety, reaching out repeatedly to the CIA and Libyan government for extra security and dealing with landlord and guard issues that raised additional red flags, according to documents recovered from the burned-out compound.

The documents, given to The Washington Times by a U.S. official, provide contemporaneous accounts of career State Department officials coping with an increasingly unstable foreign city and grasping for security help from outsiders in the absence of more action from their own department.

“In response to threats of a planned attack posted on the Internet, U.S. Mission Benghazi is requesting assistance from the Supreme Security Council,” Jennifer Larson, the State Department’s principal officer for Benghazi, wrote in a May 29, 2012, letter to a top Libyan official.

“U.S. Mission Benghazi is requesting a mobile patrol outside the vicinity of the Mission during hours of darkness, from 2000 to 0700,” she added in the letter to Fawzi Wanis, the then-head of the Libyan Supreme Security Council.

Ms. Larson repeated the request in an urgent follow-up on June 6, 2012, the same day the Benghazi mission suffered a small bomb attack that became a prelude to the much bigger attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans just three months later.

With just a few diplomatic security officers on scene at the State Department compound in Benghazi, Ms. Larson sought a perimeter patrol by Libyan forces to “remain in place until further notice,” the memo shows.

‘They gave us nothing’

The need to seek security help from the Libyans was necessary because the State Department in Washington repeatedly turned down requests for more safety resources, according to the former head of the U.S. site security team in Libya at the time.

“They gave us nothing to work with. We had to resource everything we could with what we had in front of us, contracting with the locals, seeking the agency’s help and working with meager internal resources,” said Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, a special forces reserve officer who tried several times to fortify the weak security at Benghazi in 2012.

State Department officials in Washington “had their minds made up. They were not going to provide additional security there, period,” he said in an interview Monday with The Times.

State Department officials declined to discuss the memos, deferring to multiple investigations that have concluded there was inadequate security at the compound when it was attacked on Sept. 11, 2012.

Officials said, however, they have made numerous improvements at high-risk diplomatic compounds worldwide since.

“We cannot guarantee that attacks won’t happen again, but we can take steps to try to prevent them and mitigate risk. And that’s what we’re doing,” the State Department said in a statement to The Times.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is slated to testify Thursday before a special House committee chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy empaneled to look at the security lapses that preceded Benghazi.

Landlords get nervous

The memos show that the deteriorating security at Benghazi not only concerned State Department officials working there, but also the Libyan landlords who rented the two villas comprising a large portion of the compound.

One of the landlords demanded more money for rent, while the other asked to be released from the rental agreement in the summer preceding the attacks, the memos show.

“The owner has requested to write to you to consider the termination of the lease contract on the end of the first term July 31, 2012,” a representative for one of the landlords wrote on June 18, 2012. “Regrettable due to family and personal reasons.”

That landlord owned the part of the complex known as Villa C, which constituted the main working place for the complex and the location where Stevens died in a blaze. The landlord expressed increased concerns for his family’s safety and the safety of his villa if Americans continued to occupy it, a U.S. official told The Times.

The owner of the second complex, Villa B, also began raising concerns around the same time. In a letter contained in the Benghazi compound staff files, the landlord demanded higher rent after discovering the other landlord was getting paid more for his complex.

“In addition to extra works of which we bear all expenses as you already know, and whereas the price of this property differs from that of the neighboring property and that this amount of rent does not cover the agreed upon charges, we look forward for good cooperation by suggesting to you either increasing the amount of rent or regretfully terminate the contract,” the landlord wrote in an April 7, 2012, letter.

Officials said that rent dispute carried through the summer unresolved and had become more intense shortly before the attack occurred. The amount of money in dispute reached $100,000 by late summer, and the landlord’s representatives warned State officials that they would “be sorry if you don’t pay rent and pay more,” according to a U.S. official directly familiar with the situation.

State Department officials confirmed the rental dispute and said it was going through a mitigation process aimed at settling the issues when the attack occurred.

Mothers’ doubts

Col. Wood, the security expert, said he became aware of the landlords’ concerns and considered them a red flag indicating local Libyans were worried about being affiliated with the U.S. He became even more alarmed when local Libyan security guards began expressing concerns about showing up for work for fear of their safety.

“It did come up that they (the landlord and his representatives) were asking for more money,” he recalled. “There were several other indicators that went on that suggested an attack was imminent. The contract security guards were saying their moms are telling them ‘Don’t go to work, it is too dangerous. That was a huge indicator.”

Col. Wood said he brought the concerns to Stevens in late summer.

“I told this to Mr. Stevens himself, in front of a big meeting. I said ‘You are going to get attacked and you are going to get attacked in Benghazi,’” he said.

The run-of-the-mill memos provide an unusually personal window into the pressures and concerns of the everyday U.S. staff in Benghazi before the deadly attack. They paint a poignant picture of an American team seeking the help of Libyan locals and CIA counterparts to ensure their safety in the absence of more resources from Washington.

Those missing resources included more heavy-duty armaments, more American security personnel and U.S. air support for evacuation in case of an attack.

You’re on your own

The resource concerns are further laid bare in a CIA memo sent to the field in Benghazi shortly before the attack, which made clear the strategy for U.S. personnel was essentially a fend-for-yourself edict from Washington.

“The primary course of action for officers operating in Libya during a personnel recovery scenario should be to move away from the enemy activity as there is no mechanism/authorities in place for the field to leverage Emergency Close Air Support,” the memo warned. “The base should be prepared to recover its officers with local resources within its capabilities and limitations.”

CIA security officers told the House Intelligence Committee during an after-action report that the State Department compound was far less secure than the agency’s own buildings and that diplomatic security agents feared they were ill equipped to respond to an armed attack against the mission. The local State Department employees repeatedly sought help from CIA to try to fortify a compound with clear security weaknesses.

The lack of preparation and resources persisted, even as CIA produced more than four dozen pieces of confirmed intelligence that reported on increasing threats against Americans and Westerners in Benghazi and documented more than 20 attempted attacks in the area just before the fiery assault on the compound on Sept. 11.

“CIA security personnel testified that State Department DS (diplomatic security) agents repeatedly stated they felt ill-equipped and ill-trained to contend with the threat environment in Benghazi,” the report said.

“The DS agents knew well before the attacks that they could not defend the TMF against an armed assault. The DS agents also told CIA about their requests for additional resources that were pending,” it said.

Stevens, a respected career diplomat, was aware before he left Tripoli to visit Benghazi for a ceremony that the city was in worsening security shape.

The morning before he died, his final cable to Mrs. Clinton described an increasingly violent city and his own fears that the local Libyan forces guarding the complex might not adequately ensure the safety of State Department personnel.

Militia leaders told U.S. officials just two days before the attack that they were angered by U.S. support of a particular candidate for Libyan prime minister and warned “they would not continue to guarantee security in Benghazi, a critical function they asserted they were currently providing,” Stevens wrote the morning of the attack.

State resists IG recommendation

The various investigations of Benghazi have concluded that the local Libyan forces at the compound did not effectively deter the attack and that the State Department’s heavy reliance on foreign security forces for such a high-risk location was a flawed strategy.

The State Department’s own accountability review board made 29 recommendations for improving security, including that the agency “implement a plan to strengthen security beyond reliance on host government security support” for high-risk, high-threat (HRHT) posts.

Though more than two years old, that recommendation has not been fully implemented by the Diplomatic Security office, the State Department’s inspector general recently warned.

“Although DS has not developed a plan for strengthening security at HRHT posts as Recommendation 12 recommends, it has undertaken several initiatives directed at the recommendation’s intent, including enhanced personnel training, increased use of the Deliberate Planning Process, expansion of the Marine security guard (MSG) program and revision of its mission, and closer coordination and cooperation with DOD,” the inspector general reported in a little-noticed memo released in late August when most of official Washington was on vacation.

The IG, the agency’s internal watchdog, also noted that State had outright rejected one of its recommendations for improved security: to develop mandatory minimum security standards for high-risk outposts.

“Recommendation 17 of the ARB process review report recommended that the Department develop minimum security standards that must be met prior to occupying facilities in HRHT locations,” the IG noted. “The Department rejected this recommendation, stating that existing Overseas Security Policy Board standards apply to all posts and that separate security standards for HRHT posts would not provide better or more secure operating environments.”

The IG said it disagrees with that assessment and “the department’s response does not meet the recommendation’s requirement for standards that must be met prior to occupancy.” As a result, the watchdog has reissued that recommendation and urged State to take action.

State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach told The Times that State has taken all the security recommendations seriously and “implemented new procedures to address high-threat posts, procured critical security assets and engaged Congress to secure increased funding for embassy security.”

But he acknowledged some of the recommendations have not been fully implemented yet.

“We adopted all the ARB’s 29 recommendations and are committed to implementing each,” he said. “We have closed 26 of 29 recommendations, some of which require long-term technical upgrades. The remaining three are in progress.”

Never Before in History Now the Doomsday Supply

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It boils down to Syria, the failed policy to control Bashir al Assad or remove him when the 5 year civil war has caused a global crisis. A country that once had a population of more than 20 million, today, an estimated 11 million Syrians are no longer in their home country. The crisis? The United Nations and member countries are out of money and resources to aid and provide humanitarian support for refugees any where they are located.

The United States as the historic world’s equalizer, failed to act in Syria for up to now 5 years….shameful as the consequences are worldwide and deaths are reported to be approaching 300,000 if not more.

The decision was made last month with no fanfare to break into the Doomsday inventory.

Arctic ‘Doomsday Vault’ opens to retrieve vital seeds for Syria

Svalbard, Norway (CNN)Humanity has had to cash in on its insurance policy earlier than expected.

Deep in the side of a mountain in the Arctic archipelago is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

 

Known as the “Doomsday Vault,” this seed bank — operated by the Norwegian government and containing a seed of just about every known crop in the world — is meant to be humanity’s backup in the event of a catastrophe that devastates crops.

But it was not a natural disaster that has caused scientists to have to dip in and make the first significant withdrawal from the vault. Rather, it was the most preventable of man-made disasters — war.

The bloody conflict in Syria has left scientists at an important gene bank in Aleppo — where new strains of drought- and heat-resistant wheat have been developed over time — unable to continue their work in recent years.

Now, with no sign of conditions in Syria improving, scientists have begun recovering their critical inventory of seeds, sourced from around the Fertile Crescent and beyond, that have been in safekeeping beneath the Arctic ice.

The seeds are being planted at new facilities in Lebanon and Morocco, allowing scientists to resume the important research they’ve been doing for decades, away from the barrel bombs of Aleppo.

READ: Syrian war forces first ‘Doomsday Vault’ withdrawal

An important storehouse in the Fertile Crescent

The gene bank in Aleppo, run by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, is one of the most important in the world and includes more than 135,000 varieties of wheat, fava bean, lentil and chickpea crops, as well as the world’s most valuable barley collection.

“These are land races that were inherited from our grand-grandparents, most of them are unfortunately extinct now,” ICARDA Director General Mahmoud El-Solh said. “And this is where the cradle of agriculture (was)10,000 years ago. In this part of the world, many of the important crops were domesticated from the wild to cultivation.”

ICARDA representative Thanos Tsivelikas, who is overseeing the withdrawal from the vault, describes the operation as “a rescue mission; these seeds cannot be replaced.”

The ICARDA Aleppo center had sent nearly 80% of the seeds and samples to the Global Seed Vault as a backup by 2012, with its last deposit being in 2014.

And now, Solh and his ICARDA team have the challenge of keeping and reproducing one of humanity’s most important collections of food crop genetic lines.

Moved to neighboring Lebanon

Relocated to Lebanon, Solh opens the door to a vault on the Agricultural Research and Educational Center of the American University of Beirut campus in the Bekaa Valley. This is where the seeds ICARDA received back from Svalbard are housed.

Solh carefully shakes out a few wisps of what looks like wheat from a brown envelope. It is the plant from which the wheat we eat today originated 10 millennia ago.

“This is a source of desirable traits including drought tolerance, including heat tolerance, including resistance to disease and so forth. So this had lived through natural selection for over hundreds of years,” he said.

A 10-minute drive away and just across the mountain range from Syria, a new vault is being built by ICARDA.

To begin replenishing the stock, there are greenhouses nearby where the seeds will be planted, grown and reproduced. Once restocked, the seeds will once again become available for researchers and other seed vaults.

A parallel project is being set up in Morocco to ensure that humanity always has access to this irreplaceable cache of genetic material.

“Two-thirds of material is coming from dry areas which … are adapted to very harsh environments and have desirable traits” for drought, heat, cold, salinity and pests, Solh said.

Researchers are looking at ways to improve food crops with existing and extinct-in-nature genetic lines that are more adapted to the challenges that may lie ahead with global warming.

The answers could very well be in these specific seeds harvested from a specific moment in time. “This variety could help us adapt to climate change,” Solh said, holding up a small fava bean.

“You know that climate change is a reality and climate change is changing the whole environment in terms of more drought, hotter environments and even new diseases.”

ICARDA and others know that the past could very well contain the key to our future, though no one thought they would see such a mass withdrawal in their lifetime.

Obama Teams with Silicon on Syrian Refugees

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In part from HuffPo:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has responded to a petition calling on the U.S. to resettle tens of thousands of Syrian refugees within its borders, inviting the man who started the petition to the White House for a meeting.

George Batah, 23, came from Syria in 2013 and now lives in Chicago. He said he started the petition in late August because he felt the United States has a moral obligation to continue being “the leader in refugee resettlement.”

His petition asked the White House to accept at least 65,000 Syrian refugees by 2016. The administration did not commit to that number in its response Thursday, instead reiterating that it intends to bring at least 10,000.

“Under President Obama, the U.S. is the world’s largest donor of humanitarian aid, having contributed $4 billion in aid to date to help meet urgent needs in the most effective way,” the administration wrote. “The President has also directed his Administration to scale up the number of Syrian refugees we will bring to the U.S. next year to at least 10,000.”

How the White House Got Silicon Valley to Take On the Refugee Crisis
After the president’s request, Silicon Valley code writers went to work at record pace.
White House and Silicon Valley Take On Syria Crisis

Bloomberg: Even Jason Goldman, a former senior technology executive at

companies including Twitter, Medium, and Google, was surprised by how quickly some of his former Silicon Valley colleagues were able to answer the call.
Goldman, now sitting in Washington as the first-ever White House chief digital officer, and his colleague Joshua Miller, a former Facebook employee overseeing the Obama administration’s digital products, had gone to work lining up allies for a push to aid the waves of Syrian refugees flooding out of the country a little over a week prior. Now they were staring at donation platforms, crafted from scratch, that were ready to roll out.
“That’s a pretty fast turnaround time to actually build and ship code out into the wild,” Goldman says.
“That’s a pretty fast turnaround time to actually build and ship code out into the wild.”
Jason Goldman, White House chief digital officer
The response—and the equivalent of millions of dollars in donations that resulted—from Kickstarter, Twitter, Airbnb, and Instacart marked a new approach to address what many in the U.S. government view as an intractable crisis. Nearly 12 million Syrians have been displaced by the civil war raging in their country, according to the UN Refugee Agency. Thousands per day are flooding into European nations unequipped to handle the surge.
The White House has directed more than $4.5 billion to aid refugees, and pledged last month to allow and additional 10,000 into the U.S. next year. Still, the metastasizing crisis has up to this point far outweighed the global response. The U.N. Refugee Agency estimates the awareness level in the U.S. sits at 4 percent.


“We don’t have refugees in our backyard, we don’t have camps, we don’t have refugee camps on our soil so a lot of the American public doesn’t have a full understanding of what is going on,” says Jennifer Patterson, USA for UNHCR, the UN non-profit arm tasked with raising money and awareness for refugees. “The scope is really enormous right now.”
That was part of the calculation behind a few lines in President Barack Obama’s September speech to the United Nations General Assembly—a call not just to world leaders to address the crisis, but also private industry. Goldman and his team were looped into the call by National Security Council staff in the lead up to the remarks and went to work.
Within a week of Obama’s speech, Kickstarter had partnered with UNHCR to launch a first-of-its-kind non-profit campaign on the platform. Obama and Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, kicked in videos to help. More than $1 million was raised in less than 24 hours. Instacart linked up with UNHCR to create an option for its online shoppers to also purchase meals for refugee families. Airbnb pledged housing credits to aid workers in the region and matched any donations from its online community. Twitter launched its donation product early to ease the fundraising process on the platform for non-governmental organizations.
White House officials acknowledge that the start-up driven campaigns are far from the, or even a major piece of the, solution to the crisis. But along with driving donations and awareness, there are plans to make the idea a permanent model going forward. Other companies are preparing to launch similar initiatives, Patterson says.
“Really what we were doing here was just using the White House convening power to say, look, this is a real problem out in the world,” Goldman says. “Here’s how to think about it, here’s organizations you can work with, find the right fit for your product and you and your users and really step up and be involved.”

They Are Coming

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Per the FBI website: Good afternoon Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Carper, and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the current threats to the homeland and our efforts to address new challenges, including terrorists’ use of technology to communicate—both to inspire and recruit. The widespread use of technology propagates the persistent terrorist message to attack U.S. interests whether in the homeland or abroad. As the threat to harm Western interests evolves, we must adapt and confront the challenges, relying heavily on the strength of our federal, state, local, and international partnerships. Our successes depend on interagency cooperation. We work closely with our partners within the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center to address current and emerging threats.

Counterterrorism

Counterterrorism remains the FBI’s top priority, however, the threat has changed in two significant ways. First, the core al Qaeda tumor has been reduced, but the cancer has metastasized. The progeny of al Qaeda—including AQAP, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—have become our focus.

Secondly, we are confronting the explosion of terrorist propaganda and training on the Internet. It is no longer necessary to get a terrorist operative into the United States to recruit. Terrorists, in ungoverned spaces, disseminate poisonous propaganda and training materials to attract troubled souls around the world to their cause. They encourage these individuals to travel, but if they can’t travel, they motivate them to act at home. This is a significant change from a decade ago.

We continue to identify individuals who seek to join the ranks of foreign fighters traveling in support of ISIL, and also homegrown violent extremists who may aspire to attack the United States from within. These threats remain among the highest priorities for the FBI and the Intelligence Community as a whole.

Conflicts in Syria and Iraq continue to serve as the most attractive overseas theaters for Western-based extremists who want to engage in violence. We estimate approximately 250 Americans have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria to participate in the conflict. While this number is lower in comparison to many of our international partners, we closely analyze and assess the influence groups like ISIL have on individuals located in the United States who are inspired to commit acts of violence. Whether or not the individuals are affiliated with a foreign terrorist organization and are willing to travel abroad to fight or are inspired by the call to arms to act in their communities, they potentially pose a significant threat to the safety of the United States and U.S. persons.

ISIL has proven relentless in its violent campaign to rule and has aggressively promoted its hateful message, attracting like-minded extremists to include Westerners. To an even greater degree than al Qaeda or other foreign terrorist organizations, ISIL has persistently used the Internet to communicate. From a homeland perspective, it is ISIL’s widespread reach through the Internet and social media which is most concerning as ISIL has aggressively employed this technology for its nefarious strategy. ISIL blends traditional media platforms, glossy photos, in-depth articles, and social media campaigns that can go viral in a matter of seconds. No matter the format, the message of radicalization spreads faster than we imagined just a few years ago.

Unlike other groups, ISIL has constructed a narrative that touches on all facets of life—from career opportunities to family life to a sense of community. The message isn’t tailored solely to those who are overtly expressing symptoms of radicalization. It is seen by many who click through the Internet every day, receive social media push notifications, and participate in social networks. Ultimately, many of these individuals are seeking a sense of belonging.

As a communication medium, social media is a critical tool for terror groups to exploit. One recent example occurred when an individual was arrested for providing material support to ISIL by facilitating an associate’s travel to Syria to join ISIL. The arrested individual had multiple connections, via a social media networking site, with other like-minded individuals.

There is no set profile for the susceptible consumer of this propaganda. However, one trend continues to rise—the inspired youth. We’ve seen certain children and young adults drawing deeper into the ISIL narrative. These individuals are often comfortable with virtual communication platforms, specifically social media networks.

ISIL continues to disseminate their terrorist message to all social media users—regardless of age. Following other groups, ISIL has advocated for lone offender attacks. In recent months ISIL released a video, via social media, reiterating the group’s encouragement of lone offender attacks in Western countries, specifically advocating for attacks against soldiers and law enforcement, intelligence community members, and government personnel. Several incidents have occurred in the United States and Europe over the last few months that indicate this “call to arms” has resonated among ISIL supporters and sympathizers.

In one case, a New York-based male was arrested in September after he systematically attempted to travel to the Middle East to join ISIL. The individual, who was inspired by ISIL propaganda, expressed his support for ISIL online and took steps to carry out acts encouraged in the ISIL call to arms.

The targeting of U.S. military personnel is also evident with the release of names of individuals serving in the U.S. military by ISIL supporters. The names continue to be posted to the Internet and quickly spread through social media, depicting ISIL’s capability to produce viral messaging. Threats to U.S. military and coalition forces continue today.

Social media has allowed groups, such as ISIL, to use the Internet to spot and assess potential recruits. With the widespread horizontal distribution of social media, terrorists can identify vulnerable individuals of all ages in the United States—spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize—either to travel or to conduct a homeland attack. The foreign terrorist now has direct access into the United States like never before.

In other examples of arrests, a group of individuals was contacted by a known ISIL supporter who had already successfully traveled to Syria and encouraged them to do the same. Some of these conversations occur in publicly accessed social networking sites, but others take place via private messaging platforms. As a result, it is imperative the FBI and all law enforcement organizations understand the latest communication tools and are positioned to identify and prevent terror attacks in the homeland.

We live in a technologically driven society and just as private industry has adapted to modern forms of communication so too have terrorists. Unfortunately, changing forms of Internet communication and the use of encryption are posing real challenges to the FBI’s ability to fulfill its public safety and national security missions. This real and growing gap, to which the FBI refers as “Going Dark,” is an area of continuing focus for the FBI; we believe it must be addressed given the resulting risks are grave both in both traditional criminal matters as well as in national security matters. The United States government is actively engaged with private companies to ensure they understand the public safety and national security risks that result from malicious actors’ use of their encrypted products and services. However, the administration is not seeking legislation at this time.

The FBI is utilizing all lawful investigative techniques and methods to combat the threat these individuals may pose to the United States. In conjunction with our domestic and foreign partners, we are rigorously collecting and analyzing intelligence information as it pertains to the ongoing threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations and homegrown violent extremists. We continue to encourage robust information sharing; in partnership with our many federal, state, and local agencies assigned to Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country, we remain vigilant to ensure the safety of the American public. Be assured, the FBI continues to pursue increased efficiencies and information sharing processes as well as pursue technological and other methods to help stay ahead of threats to the homeland.

Intelligence

Integrating intelligence and operations is part of the broader intelligence transformation the FBI has undertaken in the last decade. We are making progress, but have more work to do. We have taken two steps to improve this integration. First, we have established an Intelligence Branch within the FBI headed by an executive assistant director (EAD). The EAD looks across the entire enterprise and drives integration. Second, we now have special agents and new intelligence analysts at the FBI Academy engaged in practical training exercises and taking core courses together. As a result, they are better prepared to work well together in the field. Our goal every day is to get better at using, collecting and sharing intelligence to better understand and defeat our adversaries.

The FBI cannot be content to just work what is directly in front of us. We must also be able to understand the threats we face at home and abroad and how those threats may be connected. Towards that end, intelligence is gathered, consistent with our authorities, to help us understand and prioritize identified threats and to determine where there are gaps in what we know about these threats. We then seek to fill those gaps and learn as much as we can about the threats we are addressing and others on the threat landscape. We do this for national security and criminal threats, on both a national and local field office level. We then compare the national and local perspectives to organize threats into priority for each of the FBI’s 56 field offices. By categorizing threats in this way, we strive to place the greatest focus on the gravest threats we face. This gives us a better assessment of what the dangers are, what’s being done about them, and where we should prioritize our resources.

Cyber

An element of virtually every national security threat and crime problem the FBI faces is cyber-based or facilitated. We face sophisticated cyber threats from state-sponsored hackers, hackers for hire, organized cyber syndicates, and terrorists. On a daily basis, cyber-based actors seek our state secrets, our trade secrets, our technology, and our ideas—things of incredible value to all of us and of great importance to the conduct of our government business and our national security. They seek to strike our critical infrastructure and to harm our economy.

We continue to see an increase in the scale and scope of reporting on malicious cyber activity that can be measured by the amount of corporate data stolen or deleted, personally identifiable information compromised, or remediation costs incurred by U.S. victims. For example, as the committee is aware, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) discovered earlier this year that a number of its systems were compromised. These systems included those that contain information related to the background investigations of current, former, and prospective Federal government employees, as well as other individuals for whom a federal background investigation was conducted. The FBI is working with our interagency partners to investigate this matter.

FBI agents, analysts, and computer scientists are using technical capabilities and traditional investigative techniques—such as sources, court-authorized electronic surveillance, physical surveillance, and forensics—to fight cyber threats. We are working side-by-side with our federal, state, and local partners on Cyber Task Forces in each of our 56 field offices and through the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force (NCIJTF), which serves as a coordination, integration, and information sharing center for 19 U.S. agencies and several key international allies for cyber threat investigations. Through CyWatch, our 24-hour cyber command center, we combine the resources of the FBI and NCIJTF, allowing us to provide connectivity to federal cyber centers, government agencies, FBI field offices and legal attachés, and the private sector in the event of a cyber intrusion.

We take all potential threats to public and private sector systems seriously and will continue to investigate and hold accountable those who pose a threat in cyberspace.

* * *

Finally, the strength of any organization is its people. The threats we face as a nation have never been greater or more diverse and the expectations placed on the Bureau have never been higher. Our fellow citizens look to us to protect the United States from all of those threats and the men and women of the Bureau continue to meet—and exceed—those expectations, every day. I want to thank them for their dedication and their service.

Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Carper, and committee members, I thank you for the opportunity to testify concerning the threats to the homeland and terrorists’ use of the Internet and social media as a platform for spreading ISIL propaganda and inspiring individuals to target the homeland, and the impact of the Going Dark problem on mitigating their efforts. I am happy to answer any questions you might have.
Recent Testimonies
10.08.15

Threats to the Homeland James B. Comey, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Statement Before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Washington, D.C.
08.05.15

Inspector General Access Kevin L. Perkins, Associate Deputy Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Joint Statement with Department of Justice Associate Deputy Attorney General Carlos Uriarte Before the Senate Judiciary Committee , Washington, D.C.
07.08.15

Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and the Challenges of Going Dark James B. Comey, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Statement Before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, D.C.
07.08.15

Going Dark: Encryption, Technology, and the Balances Between Public Safety … James B. Comey, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Joint Statement with Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates Before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Washington, D.C.
06.18.15

FBI’s Plans for the Use of Rapid DNA Technology in CODIS Amy S. Hess, Executive Assistant Director, Science and Technology Branch, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Statement Before the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations, Washington, D.C.
06.03.15

Terrorism Gone Viral: The Attack in Garland, Texas and Beyond Michael B. Steinbach, Assistant Director, Counterterrorism Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Statement Before the House Homeland Security Committee, Washington, D.C.
04.29.15

Encryption and Cyber Security for Mobile Electronic Communication Devices Amy Hess, Executive Assistant Director, Science and Technology Branch, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Statement Before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Subcommittee on Information Technology, Washington, D.C.
04.14.15

FBI’s Handling of Sexual Harassment and Misconduct Allegations Kevin L. Perkins, Associate Deputy Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Statement Before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Washington, D.C.
03.25.15

FBI Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2016 James B. Comey, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Statement Before the House Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, Washington, D.C.
03.12.15

FBI Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2016 James B. Comey, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Statement Before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, Washington, D.C.
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