Yes, Secretary Mattis, there IS a Land Bridge

Posted on April 18, 2018April 18, 2018 by Denise Simon

So, all terror roads in the Middle East still lead to Tehran. At the direction of Tehran, Hezbollah, the Iranian militias and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp operations is selection regions across the globe with wild abandon.

January 2018, in a question and answer session: Q: On Iran’s role in Iraq and Syria, do you believe that a land bridge exists between Iran and Syria through Iraq? And, if so, are you concerned about it? Is there anything the United States can do about it?

SEC. MATTIS: No, I don’t — I don’t think there’s a land bridge right now. There’s still enough rough times — you know, rough terrain, rough enemy units that haven’t been cleaned up, and all the usual cleanup going on, and — plus you’ve got the combination of where the people we’re fighting — advising and that sort of thing in Syria are abutting, in some cases, the Russian forces who are helping the regime, abutting the Turkish elements. There’s — I don’t think there’s a land bridge right now.

*** So, while the United States along with France and Britain delivered 105 missiles to take out three chemical weapons locations in Syria, other locations remain in addition to the Assad air assets. Russia, North Korea, and Tehran were all watching for weeks the actions of the West. Russia declares the most recent chemical weapons attack was at the hand of the White Helmets, then it was a ploy by Britain, then it was a CIA operation. Meanwhile, the chemical weapons inspection envoy arriving in Douma, the suburb of Damascus had to find cover after being fired upon.

That brings us back to domestic threats and the strategy as developed by the Trump administration in dealing with Iran and Russia, much less Iraq. Is there one other than the threat of exiting the JCPOA? Not so far it seems. The increasing threat? Satellite land bridges perhaps….from Latin America to covert cells across our homeland.

***

Iranian-backed militants are operating across the United States mostly unfettered, raising concerns in Congress and among regional experts that these “sleeper cell” agents are poised to launch a large-scale attack on the American homeland, according to testimony before lawmakers.

Iranian agents tied to the terror group Hezbollah have already been discovered in the United States plotting attacks, giving rise to fears that Tehran could order a strike inside America should tensions between the Trump administration and Islamic Republic reach a boiling point.

Intelligence officials and former White House officials confirmed to Congress on Tuesday that such an attack is not only plausible, but relatively easy for Iran to carry out at a time when the Trump administration is considering abandoning the landmark nuclear deal and reapplying sanctions on Tehran.

There is mounting evidence that Iran poses “a direct threat to the homeland,” according to Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee and chair of its subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence.

A chief concern is “Iranian support for Hezbollah, which is active in the Middle East, Latin America, and here in the U.S., where Hezbollah operatives have been arrested for activities conducted in our own country,” King said, referring the recent arrest of two individuals plotting terror attacks in New York City and Michigan.

“Both individuals received significant weapons training from Hezbollah,” King said. “It is clear Hezbollah has the will and capability.”

After more than a decade of receiving intelligence briefs, King said he has concluded that “Hezbollah is probably the most experienced and professional terrorist organization in the world,” even more so than ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Asked if Iran could use Hezbollah to conduct strikes on the United States, a panel of experts including intelligence officials and former White House insiders responded in the affirmative.

“They are as good or better at explosive devices than ISIS, they are better at assassinations and developing assassination cells,” said Michael Pregent, a former intelligence officer who worked to counter Iranian influence in the region. “They’re better at targeting, better at looking at things,” and they can outsource attacks to Hezbollah.

“Hezbollah is smart,” Pregent said. “They’re very good at keeping their communications secure, keeping their operational security secure, and, again, from a high profile attack perspective, they’d be good at improvised explosive devices.”

Others testifying before Congress agreed with this assessment.

“The answer is absolutely. We do face a threat,” said Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has long tracked Iran’s militant efforts. “Their networks are present in the Untied States.”

Iran is believed to have an auxiliary fighting force or around 200,000 militants spread across the Middle East, according to Nader Uskowi, a onetime policy adviser to U.S. Central Command and current visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

At least 50 to 60 thousand of these militants are “battle tested” in Syria and elsewhere.

“It doesn’t take many of them to penetrate this country and be a major threat,” Uskowi said. “They can pose a major threat to our homeland.”

While Iran is currently more motivated to use its proxies such as Hezbollah regionally for attacks against Israel or U.S. forces, “those sleeper cells” positioned in the United States could be used to orchestrate an attack, according to Brian Katulis, a former member of the White House National Security Council under President Bill Clinton.

“The potential is there, but the movement’s center of focus is in the region,” said Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Among the most pressing threats to the U.S. homeland is Hezbollah’s deep penetration throughout Latin America, where it finances its terror activities by teaming up with drug cartels and crime syndicates.

“Iran’s proxy terror networks in Latin America are run by Tehran’s wholly owned Lebanese franchise Hezbollah,” according to Ottolenghi. “These networks are equal part crime and terror” and have the ability to provide funding and logistics to militant fighters.

“Their presence in Latin America must be viewed as a forward operating base against America’s interest in the region and the homeland itself,” he said.

These Hezbollah operatives exploit loopholes in the U.S. immigration system to enter America under the guise of legitimate business.

Operatives working for Hezbollah and Iran use the United States “as a staging ground for trade-based and real estate-based money laundering.” They “come in through the front door with a legitimate passport and a credible business cover story,” Ottolenghi said.

The matter is further complicated by Iran’s presence in Syria, where it has established not only operating bases, but also weapons factories that have fueled Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s war on Israel.

Iran’s development of advanced ballistic missile and rocket technology—which has continued virtually unimpeded since the nuclear deal was enacted—has benefitted terror groups such as Hezbollah.

“Iran is increasing Hezbollah’s capability to target Israel with more advanced and precision guided rockets and missiles,” according to Pregent. “These missiles are being developed in Syria under the protection of Syrian and Russian air defense networks.”

In Iraq, Iranian forces “have access to U.S. funds and equipment in the Iraqi Ministry of Defense and Iraq’s Ministry of Interior,” Pregent said.

The Trump administration has offered tough talk on Iran, but failed to take adequate action to dismantle its terror networks across the Middle East, as well as in Latin American and the United States itself, according to CAP’s Katulis.

“The Trump administration has talked a good game and has had strong rhetoric, but I would categorize its approach vis-à-vis Iran as one of passive appeasement,” said Katulis. “We simply have not shown up in a meaningful way.”

Have you Met James Fraser? Students may Know him Soon

Posted on April 16, 2018April 16, 2018 by Denise Simon

This fella took over where Howard Zinn left off…beware parents…

James W. Fraser, Professor of History and Education at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University, holds a joint appointment in the departments of Humanities and Social Sciences and Teaching and Learning. Fraser’s teaching and research is motivated by his concern with the challenges facing future Social Studies and History teachers who must find ways of engaging sometimes bored students with American and world history. His most recent book, By the People: A History of the United States is designed to help make US History courses more lively, with a focus on the agency of everyday Americans of many different communities, times, and places. Fraser’s work also reflects his concern with complex debates about the place of religion in public schools, especially in the United States, but also internationally. He has written, taught, and consulted about the state of teacher education in the United States and elsewhere, and also written and spoken about the future of the History of Education as an academic field of study. Fraser is the president of the History of Education Society for 2013-2014. He has served on the Editorial Board of the History of Education Quarterly, and as the NYU liaison to New Design High School, a public high school in New York’s Lower East Side, and to Facing History and Ourselves. He is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the NYU Department of Teaching and Learning, and serves on the committees responsible for the NYU programs in London, England and Accra, Ghana.

From 2008 to 2012, Fraser was the Senior Vice President for Programs at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, where he coordinated the different Fellowship programs and led the launch of the Foundation’s Fellowships for Teachers. Now back to full-time teaching at NYU, he remains a senior advisor to the Foundation. Fraser was the founding dean of Northeastern University’s School of Education, serving from 1999 to 2004. He was a member and chair of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Education Deans Council, the Boston School Committee Nominating Committee, and other boards. He was also a lecturer in the Program in Religion and Secondary Education at the Harvard University Divinity School from 1997 to 2004. He has taught at Lesley University, the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Boston University, and Public School 76, Manhattan. He is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and was pastor of Grace Church in East Boston, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2006 and is now a member of Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, New York.

*** That church by the way is an activist ‘justice’ church. And that activism is pervasive in Mr. Fraser as he is pushing a new high school advanced class history textbook, full of indoctrination.

*** In part:

The final section of the book, titled “The Angry Election of 2016,” is highly critical of Trump.

“Most thought that Trump was too extreme a candidate to win the nomination, but his extremism, his anti-establishment rhetoric, and, some said, his not-very-hidden racism connected with a significant number of primary voters,” Fraser wrote.

A new AP history textbook that covers the 2016 election is coming under fire for being “blatantly biased” against Trump and his supporters. (Courtesy of Terra Snyder)

Trump voters are described as “mostly older, often rural or suburban, and overwhelmingly white” while the book uses the viewpoint of Clinton voters to describe Trump’s supporters as fearful, backwards, sexist people who supported a mentally ill candidate.

“Clinton’s supporters feared that the election had been determined by people who were afraid of a rapidly developing ethnic diversity of the country, discomfort with their candidate’s gender, and nostalgia for an earlier time in the nation’s history,” the textbook says. “They also worried about the mental stability of the president-elect and the anger that he and his supporters brought to the nation.”

The book also bashes police for its handling of the Ferguson riots.

In a section titled “Black Lives Matter,” Fraser wrote that after the shooting of Michael Brown, Brown’s “parents were kept away at gunpoint.” He paints a negative view of police while glossing over violent tactics carried out by some rioters, critics say.

“The nearly all-white police force was seen as an occupying army in the mostly African American town…the police increased the tensions, defacing memorials set up for Brown and using rubber bullets on demonstrators,” he wrote.

According to his bio, Fraser wrote the book to “help make U.S. History courses more lively, with a focus on the agency of everyday Americans or many different communities, times, and places.” More of the story here.

What is the Syria Strategy from the West?

Posted on April 16, 2018April 16, 2018 by Denise Simon

In the days ahead, it appears that Russia and the rogue friends they keep will respond to the West likely by a obscure cyber war. Take personal caution with your financial activity.

The other warning is news reports for are specific assassination attempts covered to look as suicide. While we heard about the poison assassination attempt in Salisbury, England of Skripal and his daughter, the United States had it’s own successful assassination in 2015 of Mikhail Lesin in Washington DC. Additionally, the UK had two another successful wet jobs as it is called going back to 20o6 and 2010. Those victims were Alexander Litvinenko and Gareth Williams who worked for GCHQ

There are many other hit operations that happened in Russia including the recent death of Maxim Borodin.

photo

There are an estimated 250+ journalists that have been killed since the fall of the Soviet Union.

So, it is now declared that the United Nations quit counting the dead from the Syria civil war since the number has officially exceeded 500,000. What is disgusting however is, we sorta care about the dead but the methods no longer matter unless chemical weapons are used. How nuts is that? So, France, Britain and the United States respond to the most recent attack –> Russia says Syria 'gas attack' caused by terrorist weapons ... photo

check – round one of airstrikes

check – round two of airstrikes

Let’s give credit where credit is due. By John Hannah

First, U.S. President Donald Trump set a red line and enforced it. He warned that the large-scale use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime would trigger a U.S. attack. When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad crossed that red line a year ago, Trump responded with 59 cruise missiles that took out about 20 percent of Syria’s operational aircraft. A year later, Trump has acted again after Assad chose to challenge him a second time. This attack was twice as big and hit multiple targets, including what U.S. defense officials called the “heart” of Syria’s chemical weapons program, substantially degrading Assad’s ability to produce the deadly agents.

That ain’t peanuts. No, there’s no guarantee it will end Assad’s use of chemical weapons — in which case Trump and his military have made clear that they’ll strike again, almost certainly harder than the time before. And no, nothing that happened Friday night will, in isolation, alter the trajectory of Syria’s bloody civil war. But the effective deployment of U.S. power in defense of a universal norm barring the use of some of the world’s worst weapons against innocent men, women, and children is nevertheless to be applauded — limited an objective as it may be. Also to be praised is the possible emergence of a commander in chief whose threats to use force need to be taken seriously by U.S. adversaries. Once established, this kind of credibility (while no panacea) can be a powerful instrument in the U.S. foreign-policy arsenal. Once lost, it is hard to recover, and the consequences can be severe. For evidence, just see the post-2013 results, from Crimea to Syria.

A second important virtue of Friday night’s attack was its multilateral character. With barely a week’s notice, Britain, France, and the United States, the three most powerful militaries of the trans-Atlantic alliance, all permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, seamlessly operated on the seas and in the skies of the Middle East to defend their common interests and values against a murderous Russian and Iranian client. What’s the worth of that kind of unity, coordination, and seriousness of purpose? It’s hard to quantify precisely. But anyone who’s ever toiled as a practitioner in the national security space knows, deep in their bones, that it matters — a lot. And it especially matters in the case of a U.S. president who has too often unfairly — and, to my mind, dangerously — discounted the value of Europe, the West, and the post-World War II system of institutions and alliances that his predecessors built. In that power and righteousness of the world’s leading liberal democracies acting in concert, there’s a significant value-added that no mere counting of ships, planes, and missiles can adequately capture. Kudos to the president and his team for their skill in mounting this posse. It’s an important framework that they hopefully will continue to invest in to confront the multitude of urgent international challenges now staring us in the face.

A few other related observations: Say what you will about the wisdom of some of the president’s public messaging last week, but once he made clear that he again would act to enforce his red line, U.S. adversaries took him deadly seriously. Russian ships dispersed from port. Syria abandoned its own air bases and rushed to co-locate its aircraft near Russian military assets. And Iranian-backed fighters, including Hezbollah forces, allegedly vacated certain positions and went to ground for fear of a possible U.S. strike. Again, the fact that the United States’ worst adversaries appear to take Trump’s threats with the seriousness they deserve is a very good thing, a genuine national security asset that needs to be husbanded, reinforced, and carefully but systematically exploited going forward. But hopefully last week’s experience also serves as a reminder to the president of the deep wisdom inherent in the criticism that he’s long leveled at his predecessors: Don’t telegraph your military punch.

Another observation: There was much nervous hand-wringing before the strike about a possible U.S.-Russia confrontation. Rightly so. No one wants World War III to break out over Syria. All prudent and appropriate measures should be taken to mitigate those risks. But in some circles, the hyping of the concern threatened to become absolutely paralyzing, a justification (or excuse) for doing nothing in the face of Assad’s abominable use of weapons of mass destruction.

In the end, of course, for all their chest thumping, the Russians did next to nothing as Western planes and missiles flew under their noses to strike a client that they’ve expended significant resources to save.

Just as the Israelis, for their part, have conducted nearly 100 strikes against Russia’s Iranian, Hezbollah, and Syrian allies with barely more than a clenched fist from Moscow. The fact is that for all the firepower they may have assembled in Syria, and for all the success they’ve enjoyed carpet-bombing defenseless civilian populations and poorly equipped Islamist radicals, Russian forces are severely overmatched — both in terms of quality and quantity — by what the United States and its allies can bring to bear in any head-to-head confrontation in the eastern Mediterranean. Putin knows it. So does his military. That reality of the actual balance of power — not only militarily, but economically and diplomatically as well — is always worth keeping in mind.

On their own, the Syrians and their Iranian allies were virtually defenseless against the U.S.-led strike. The best they had was a flurry of unguided missiles haphazardly fired after the mission’s designated targets had been turned to smoldering ruins. Of course, it was only a few years ago (well before the Russians intervened with their advanced S-400 surface-to-air batteries) that senior U.S. officials were pointing to the dangers of Assad’s air defenses as an excuse for not acting to protect Syrian civilians from being systematically terrorized by barrel bombs, indiscriminate artillery fire, and Scud missiles. Let’s hope that the overwhelming success of this attack puts the reality of that threat into somewhat better perspective for U.S. military planners — while also serving as a powerful reminder not just to Assad, but to Iran and other adversaries as well, of the extreme vulnerability they potentially face at the hands of U.S. air power and weaponry.

My criticisms of the U.S. strike? It was clearly at the lowest end of the options presented the president. As suggested by some of what I’ve said above, Trump was too risk-averse. Even with the president telegraphing that a strike was coming, the universe of targets that the United States could have attacked — while still minimizing collateral damage and the threat of great-power escalation — was far larger than what it ended up hitting. Trump could have done much more to degrade the Assad regime’s overall capability to wage war against its own people. The United States could have sent far more powerful messages to the Syrian government’s key military and intelligence power nodes of the risks they run to their own survival through mindless obedience to Assad’s genocidal criminality. Ditto the Russians and Iranians, and the realization that their failure to reign in the most psychotic tendencies of their client could substantially raise the costs and burdens of their Syrian venture if they’re not careful.

In short, everything the United States wanted to do with the strike — hold Assad accountable, re-establish deterrence against the use of chemical weapons, send a message to the Russians and Iranians about the price to be paid for failing to control their client, and move toward a credible political settlement — could have been done more effectively, at acceptable risk, with a significantly larger strike.

More fundamentally, I have deep concerns about what appears to be the president’s emerging strategy in Syria. It amounts to defeating the Islamic State, deterring the use of chemical weapons, and then withdrawing U.S. forces as quickly as possible from eastern Syria. As for the more strategically significant menace posed to vital U.S. interests by an aspiring Iranian hegemon seeking to dominate the Middle East’s northern tier, drive the United States out of the region, and destroy Israel, the administration’s strategy is not particularly compelling. As best as one can tell from the president’s recent statements — including the one he made on Friday night announcing the Syria strike — it amounts to encouraging some combination of regional allies (and perhaps Russia) to fill the vacuum the United States leaves behind.

That kind of abdication of U.S. leadership rarely works out well. Leveraging U.S. power to demand greater burden-sharing from partners who have even more at stake than the United States does? Definitely. Less effective: When the United States washes its hands of a problem with deep implications for U.S. national security in vague hope that other parties — smaller, weaker, more deeply conflicted and strategically myopic than the United States is — will organically rise to the occasion and mobilize a virtuous coalition that takes care of business and keeps at bay the country’s most vicious adversaries.

The president is right, of course: The Middle East is a deeply troubled place. There are no great victories to be won there. There is no glory to be gained. Just worst disasters to be avoided, threats contained, and important national interests preserved. Yes it is imperative that the United States does so smartly, prudently, by, with and, through local partners and multilateral coalitions, using all instruments of national power, and in a way that sustains the understanding and support of the American people. But do so the country must. Packing its bags and vacating the playing field to the likes of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah is escapism masquerading as strategy. Trump’s important response to the Syrian chemical weapons attack last week is evidence that he may still be capable of grasping that unforgiving reality. He should be encouraged to build on it.

John Hannah

Hey Android Users, How about that Bundled Permission Thing

Posted on April 16, 2018April 16, 2018 by Denise Simon

A few members of congress did ask Mark Zuckerberg about bundled permissions and Zuckerberg played dumb on the question. Remember that thing when your phone asks for permission to post to Facebook? Well it goes across all your synchronized devices. What? uh huh…read on.

This screen in the Messenger application offers to conveniently track all your calls and messages. But Facebook was already doing this surreptitiously on some Android devices until October 2017, exploiting the way an older Android API handled permissions.

Better check and ask some harder questions…..

[Update, March 25, 2018, 20:24 Eastern Time]: Facebook has responded to this and other reports regarding the collection of call and SMS data with a blog post that denies Facebook collected call data surreptitiously. The company also writes that it never sells the data and that users are in control of the data uploaded to Facebook. This “fact check” contradicts several details Ars found in analysis of Facebook data downloads and testimony from users who provided the data. More on the Facebook response is appended to the end of the original article below.

This past week, a New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years’ worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.

This experience has been shared by a number of other Facebook users who spoke with Ars, as well as independently by us—my own Facebook data archive, I found, contained call-log data for a certain Android device I used in 2015 and 2016, along with SMS and MMS message metadata.

In response to an email inquiry by Ars about this data gathering, a Facebook spokesperson replied, “The most important part of apps and services that help you make connections is to make it easy to find the people you want to connect with. So, the first time you sign in on your phone to a messaging or social app, it’s a widely used practice to begin by uploading your phone contacts.”

The spokesperson pointed out that contact uploading is optional and installation of the application explicitly requests permission to access contacts. And users can delete contact data from their profiles using a tool accessible via Web browser.

Facebook uses phone-contact data as part of its friend recommendation algorithm. And in recent versions of the Messenger application for Android and Facebook Lite devices, a more explicit request is made to users for access to call logs and SMS logs on Android and Facebook Lite devices. But even if users didn’t give that permission to Messenger, they may have given it inadvertently for years through Facebook’s mobile apps—because of the way Android has handled permissions for accessing call logs in the past. (For Facebook’s instructions on turning off continuous contact uploading, go here. )

If you granted permission to read contacts during Facebook’s installation on Android a few versions ago—specifically before Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)—that permission also granted Facebook access to call and message logs by default. The permission structure was changed in the Android API in version 16. From Android 4.1 on, a single request from those applications would trigger two separate permission requests.

But until the “Marshmallow” version of Android, even with split permissions, all permissions could still be presented all at once, without users getting the option to decline them individually. So Facebook and other applications could continue to gain access to call and SMS data with a single request by specifying an earlier Android SDK version. Starting with Marshmallow, users could toggle these permissions separately themselves. But as many as half of Android users worldwide remain on older versions of the operating system because of carrier restrictions on updates or other issues.

Apple iOS has never allowed access to call log data by third-party apps, overt or silently, so this sort of data acquisition was never possible.

Facebook provides a way for users to purge collected contact data from their accounts, but it’s not clear if this deletes just contacts or if it also purges call and SMS metadata. After purging my contact data, my contacts and calls were still in the archive I downloaded the next day—likely because the archive was not regenerated for my new request. (Update: The cached archive was generated once and not updated on the second request. However, two days after a request to delete all contact data, the contacts were still listed by the contact management tool.)

As always, if you’re really concerned about privacy, you should not share address book and call-log data with any mobile application. And you may want to examine the rest of what can be found in the downloadable Facebook archive, as it includes all the advertisers that Facebook has shared your contact information with, among other things.

Update, March 25, 2018, continued:

Facebook responded to reports that it collected phone and SMS data without users’ knowledge in a “fact check” blog post on Sunday. In the response, a Facebook spokesperson stated:

Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provide you with a better experience across Facebook. People have to expressly agree to use this feature. If, at any time, they no longer wish to use this feature they can turn it off in settings, or here for Facebook Lite users, and all previously shared call and text history shared via that app is deleted. While we receive certain permissions from Android, uploading this information has always been opt-in only.

This contradicts the experience of several users who shared their data with Ars. Dylan McKay told Ars that he installed Messenger in 2015, but only allowed the app the permissions in the Android manifest that were required for installation. He says he removed and reinistalled the app several times over the course of the next few years, but never explicitly gave the app permission to read his SMS records and call history. McKay’s call and SMS data runs through July of 2017.

In my case, a review of my Google Play data confirms that Messenger was never installed on the Android devices I used. Facebook was installed on a Nexus tablet I used and on the Blackphone 2 in 2015, and there was never an explicit message requesting access to phone call and SMS data. Yet there is call data from the end of 2015 until late 2016, when I reinstalled the operating system on the Blackphone 2 and wiped all applications.

While data collection was technically “opt-in,” in both these cases the opt-in was the default installation mode for Facebook’s application, not a separate notification of data collection. Facebook never explicitly revealed that the data was being collected, and it was only discovered as part of a review of the data associated with the accounts. The users we talked to only performed such reviews after the recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data.

Facebook began explicitly asking permission from users of Messenger and Facebook Lite to access SMS and call data to “help friends find each other” after being publicly shamed in 2016 over the way it handled the “opt-in” for SMS services. That message mentioned nothing about retaining SMS and call data, but instead it offered an “OK” button to approve “keeping all of your SMS messages in one place.”

Facebook says that the company keeps the data secure and does not sell it to third parties. But the post doesn’t address why it would be necessary to retain not just the numbers of contacts from phone calls and SMS messages, but the date, time, and length of those calls for years. Sean Gallagher Sean is Ars Technica’s IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.

Russia’s Response to the West, Cyber War

Posted on April 16, 2018April 16, 2018 by Denise Simon

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the United Kingdom’s (UK) National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) released a joint Technical Alert (TA) about malicious cyber activity carried out by the Russian Government. The U.S. Government refers to malicious cyber activity by the Russian government as GRIZZLY STEPPE.

NCCIC encourages users and administrators to review the GRIZZLY STEPPE – Russian Malicious Cyber Activity page, which links to TA18-106A – Russian State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Targeting Network Infrastructure Devices, for more information.

*** photo

Senator Tom Cotton: Our nation’s communications networks benefit us in ways unimaginable at the start of the digital age. But a potential danger lurks: hidden “backdoors” in network equipment. A hostile foreign power could use these backdoors to spy on Americans or attack our critical infrastructure by injecting viruses or launching denial-of-service attacks. These backdoors can be designed into routers, switches, and virtually any other type of telecommunications equipment that, together, make up our networks.

This highlights the importance of our networks’ supply chain—that is, the process by which telecommunications equipment is manufactured, sold, distributed, and installed. Whether the threat involves hacking into our nation’s communications networks or conducting industrial or political espionage at the behest of a foreign government, the integrity of the supply chain has worried U.S. government officials for years.

In 2012, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a bipartisan report on the national security threats posed by certain foreign manufacturers. This past year, Congress barred the Department of Defense from buying certain equipment and services from Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE on account of concerns about those companies’ connections to that country’s government. And Congress recently banned all federal agencies from using products or services made by Kaspersky Lab, a company with alleged ties to the Russian government.

We’re committed to protecting our national security, and this proposal is a prudent step to accomplish that goal.

But the supply-chain threat persists. Just this February, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified about “the risks of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks.” These risks include the ability to “maliciously modify or steal information” and “conduct undetected espionage.” As the supply chain for our networks increasingly stretches beyond U.S. borders, this danger has become all too real.

Given the national security risks, we believe it’s time for more concerted federal action. Among other things, that means making sure that our government doesn’t make the problem worse by spending the American people’s money on products and services from any company that poses a national security threat to our communications networks.

The Federal Communications Commission is a good place to start. It regulates America’s communications networks. And it administers the Universal Service Fund, an almost $9 billion-per-year program designed to ensure that all Americans have access to phone and broadband services. The money in the Fund comes from fees paid by the American people on their phone bills. About $4.7 billion annually is spent expanding high-speed Internet access in rural communities; $2.7 billion helps connect schools and libraries to the Internet; $1.3 billion assists in making phone and broadband services more affordable to low-income Americans; and about $300 million supports communications services for rural health-care facilities. These are important programs. But there’s no reason one dime of this funding should go to suppliers that raise national security concerns. There are plenty of other providers we can use to help bridge the digital divide.

That’s why the FCC will vote on April 17 on Chairman Pai’s recent proposal to bar the use of universal service funding to buy equipment or services from any company that poses a national security threat to the integrity of our communications networks or the communications supply chain. If approved, the proposal would also seek public input on how we should identify suspect firms and which types of telecommunications equipment or services should fall within the prohibition. Everyone concerned about this issue will have a chance to weigh in.

Bottom line: We’re committed to protecting our national security, and this proposal is a prudent step to accomplish that goal. The FCC, Congress, and all government agencies must work together to safeguard the integrity of our communications supply chain. We strongly urge the full Commission to approve this proposal and for other agencies to follow the lead.