Category Archives: NSA Spying

Secret Service On the Anti-Govt Crowd on the Internet

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The Secret Agents Who Stake Out the Ugliest Corners of the Internet

From the Atlantic:

Josephine Wolff

 

A team tasked with protecting the president of the United States is constantly sifting through hateful online comments to find would-be assassins or terrorists.

When President Obama launched his Twitter account in May, people noticed his rapid accumulation of followers, a silly back-and-forth with President Clinton, but also something more serious: the number of hostile and threatening messages directed at the president.

Sifting through those messages to determine which, if any, need to be taken seriously is the responsibility of the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk, a group of agents tasked with identifying and assessing online threats to the president and his family. The first part of this mission—finding threats—is in many ways made easier by the Internet: all you have to do is search! Pulling up every tweet which uses the words “Obama” and “assassinate” takes mere seconds, and the Secret Service has tried to make it easier for people to draw threats to its attention by setting up its own Twitter handle, @secretservice, for users to report threatening messages to.

But if the Internet makes it easier to find threats directed at the president, it can also make it harder to figure out which ones should be taken seriously. The sheer volume of threatening messages online, the lack of context, and the ease with which users can shield their identities all contribute to the challenges of assessing online threats. One series of tweets addressed to @POTUS that caught the Secret Service’s attention—at least enough to warrant an in-person visit from an agent—came from a user with the handle @jeffgully49 and included a picture showing a doctored version of the president’s campaign posters with his head in a noose and the word “HOPE” changed to “ROPE.” The messages were apparently posted by Jeff Gullickson of Plymouth, Minnesota, who was later visited at his home by a Secret Service agent. “The agent from the secret service was cordial,” Gullickson wrote in an email to MPR News, adding that the agent just wanted to be sure his tweets were not serious threats.

Making sure that Gullickson was not a threat required more than just an analysis of his online comments—it called for offline contact, an in-person visit, an assessment of who he was and what he was like face-to-face, not just on the Internet. Context is crucial for evaluating the seriousness of threats—both digital and analog—but online threats offer a slightly different set of contextual clues than their offline counterparts. And while much of the hate-filled commentary on the Internet is routinely written off as hyperbole and ranting, threats directed at the president are not so easily dismissed. So, every day, the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk is faced with the unenviable task of taking seriously some of the most extreme online rhetoric and trying to identify potential assassins or terrorists in the deluge of venomous messages directed at the president and his family.

Though most of the public cases involving the Internet threat desk have to do with threats made via Twitter or Facebook, the desk actually predates both platforms. Founded in 2000, the desk was reportedly expanded in 2009 around the same time that threats against President Obama spiked in the early months of his first term. Ronald Kessler, author of In the President’s Secret Service, said that when he visited the Internet threat desk several years ago it was “just a small room with a few people,” but added, “I’m sure it’s much bigger now.” Secret Service spokesman Robert Hoback declined to comment.

Since the Internet threat desk’s founding, Kessler said, more of the threats the Secret Service assesses have originated online, but the overall number of threats directed at the first family that require investigation has stayed relatively steady at about 10 per day—except for the period when Obama was first elected, when the Secret Service had to follow up on roughly 50 threats per day. “That includes threats on Twitter,” Kessler said. “It makes no difference to [the Secret Service] how a threat is communicated,” he added. “They can’t take that chance of assuming that because it’s on Twitter it’s less serious.”

The Secret Service categorizes all threats, online and offline alike, into one of three categories, according to Kessler. Class 3 threats are considered the most serious, and require agents to interview the individual who issued the threat and any acquaintances to determine whether that person really has the capability to carry out the threat. Class 2 threats are considered to be serious but issued by people incapable of actually follow up on their intentions, either because they are in jail or located at a great distance from the president. And Class 1 threats are those that may seem serious at first, but are determined not to be.

Classifying threats into these categories is partly a matter of wording and specificity—whether the speaker has developed a detailed plan, whether they state that they will kill the president or just that someone should kill the president—but also depends largely on the background of the people who issue them. “The Secret Service looks at whether this person has expressed similar plans previously, whether this person has a criminal record, or is mentally ill,” Kessler said. Presumably, that’s why an agent showed up at Gullickson’s house—to assess the person who issued the Twitter threat, not just the threat itself.

At a 2011 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, then-Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan emphasized the importance of identifying the people who threaten the president for Secret Service investigations. “When I was a new agent, a lot of times if you got a threat, it would come in the mail, and if the person who was making the threat was very courteous, they would put their return address on there. You would know who to go out and talk to,” Sullivan said. “But regardless of whether it is by mail or over the internet, our people are extremely aggressive with [figuring out who issued threats] … when we do identify that individual who has made that threat or that inappropriate interest that they are displaying, whether it is 2 o’clock in the morning or 2 o’clock in the afternoon, our people are out there looking for that individual to interview them.”

But the Secret Service can’t very well interview everyone who directs hostile comments at the president online—there are just too many of them—especially as the government’s embrace of social media platforms creates an increasing number of channels for lashing out at the president. “What you’ve done with the POTUS Twitter account is created a one-stop shopping for people who don’t like the president to blow off steam and convey their view that they don’t like the president,” said University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron. “That could perfectly well be political protest: ‘I hate you and I want to throw you in the river’ could mean ‘I hate your ideas and want to throw them in the river,’ or it could mean ‘I’m a neo-Nazi and I want to kill you because you’re a black president.’ For the president, [the Secret Service] is going to err on the side of over-inclusion and more false positives.”

Paring down those false positives may be even more of a challenge online than off. The Internet threat desk “comb[s] the internet” and has people “working 24 hours a day just going through the Internet looking for any type of buzzwords or any type of threatening or inappropriate activity out there that we may see that involves any of our protectees,” Sullivan said at the 2011 hearing.

In other words, the Secret Service is actively seeking out threats made online, rather than waiting for others to report them, or for the people issuing threats to contact the White House directly. “Online threats are much more findable—I can set up some structured queries and find out who’s making threats in real time,” said Andy Sellars, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “You can essentially have a column on TweetDeck for every time someone says ‘president’ and ‘kill’ in the same tweet. A lot of tools being sold to law enforcement are basically just glorified versions of TweetDeck.”

Finding the threats is the easy part, though. “It’s a lot easier to figure out the context of speech in the physical world than in the online world,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “You need that context in order to see what that speech really means.”

The cases that the Secret Service has pursued in recent years offer some clues as to which types of threats they seem to take most seriously. Repeat offenders, unsurprisingly, seem to come in for particular attention. For instance, Jarvis Britton of Birmingham, Alabama, was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison in 2013 after posting a series of tweets over the course of several months. In a 2012 affidavit, Secret Service Special Agent Phillip Holly described the series of events that led up to Britton’s arrest, beginning with two tweets on June 28, 2012, that read: “Free speech? Really? Let’s test this! Let’s kill the president!” and “I’m going to finish this, if they get me, they get me! #ohwell. I think we could get the president with cyanide. #MakeItSlow.” The next day, Britton tweeted “Barack Obama, I wish you were DEAD!”

Following the June tweets, the Secret Service spoke with Britton and advised him of “the seriousness of the matter,” according to Holly, but “no further action was taken” until Britton resumed tweeting threats several months later. On September 14, 2012, he posted the message “Let’s kill the president. F.E.A.R.” After learning of the September threats from the Internet Threat Desk, Holly concludes: “Based upon the foregoing, I have probable cause to believe that Jarvis M. Britton did knowingly and willfully threaten to take the life of, kidnap, or inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States.”

Donte Jamar Sims of Charlotte, North Carolina, was also sentenced in 2013 to serve jail time for a series of threatening tweets directed at the president. Sims’ tweets, posted during the 2012 Democratic National Convention, included the messages: “Ima Assassinate president Obama this evening!” and “The Secret Service is gonna be defenseless once I aim the Assault Rifle at Barack’s Forehead.”

The Internet Threat Desk’s investigations are not limited to Twitter. One 2012 investigation centered on a Facebook photo of several young men from Arizona posing with guns and a T-shirt with the president’s face on it riddled with bullet holes. A 2008 case focused on a series of pseudonymous comments made by the user californiaradial on the Yahoo Finance website, including “Shoot the nig. Country fkd for another 4 years+, what nig has done ANYTHING right???? Long term???? Never in history, except sambos.” And “Fk the niggar, he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.” In court documents, Special Agent Gregory Becker identified californiaradial as Walter Edward Bagdasarian after the Internet Threat Desk “obtained the IP address from which the messages had been sent, as well as the subscriber information for that account.”

When people who issue online threats are identified, they sometimes try to provide context for those threats that might excuse their behavior. Sims, for instance, claimed he was high on marijuana when he threatened the president. Britton’s lawyer similarly insisted his client had no intentions to actually harm the president. Other times, the real world context of online threats makes them seems more concerning—when the Secret Service searched Bagdasarian’s house, they found a .50 caliber rifle among his possessions, which appeared to lend credence to the prediction “he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.”

Ultimately, however, it is the content of the threat itself—not the context—that seems to matter most in court. Sims, Britton, and Bagdasarian all allegedly issued multiple violent threats at the president in online forums. But Sims and Britton were sent to jail, regardless of the claims both made about their respective mental states when they issued the threats—while Bagdasarian’s conviction was ultimately reversed by a federal appeals court in California because he had not specifically said that he himself would kill the president but, rather, suggested more generally that someone should do so.

Making these distinctions between the people who really intended harm—the people who, in legal language, issued threats that they should have reasonably foreseen would be interpreted as “serious expressions of intent to inflict bodily harm upon that person”—and the people who were merely venting political frustrations or indulging in some hyperbolic anger is a very murky area of law, particularly when it comes to online threats. “It is harder to separate the wheat from the chaff online,” said Fakhoury, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, of distinguishing “true threats” from speech that is protected by the First Amendment. “Part of that is the speed with which people can communicate online, part of it is that people are somewhat removed from what they say online, part of it is the breadth of the audience that exists online,” he explained.

The ease with which anyone can fire off a threat to the president’s Twitter account does not necessarily make such threats less concerning, Citron noted. “Sometimes people say online threats are never to be taken seriously because we’re behind a screen and we tend to just kind of mouth off without thinking, but on the other hand when someone writes something down then there’s the perception that its thoughtful—someone took the time to write this down,” she said.

“The anonymous part doesn’t make it less threatening, but it makes it harder for us to gauge whether it’s a joke or not.”

Many online threats are not even anonymous, Sellars pointed out. “People are making a shocking number of these threats posting on Facebook using their real names,” he said, calling to mind Sullivan’s comment about the letter writers who included their return addresses.

In a recent decision for the case Elonis v. United States, about a man accused of threatening his wife on Facebook, the Supreme Court avoided establishing any clear test for how to identify true threats online. Their decision to dodge the issue leaves not just the Secret Service but everyone who is the victim of online harassment to figure out how to draw the line between true threats and free speech on the Internet.

When it comes to protecting the president, however, that distinction may not be so vital, either online or offline. Kessler noted, “Actual assassinations are usually not preceded by threats.”

ISIS IS a Functioning State, Admitted by New York Times

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NYT Istanbul:  The Islamic State uses terror to force obedience and frighten enemies. It has seized territory, destroyed antiquities, slaughtered minorities, forced women into sexual slavery and turned children into killers.

But its officials are apparently resistant to bribes, and in that way, at least, it has outdone the corrupt Syrian and Iraqi governments it routed, residents and experts say.

“You can travel from Raqqa to Mosul and no one will dare to stop you even if you carry $1 million,” said Bilal, who lives in Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, and insisted out of fear on being identified only by his first name. “No one would dare to take even one dollar.”
The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, initially functioned solely as a terrorist organization, if one more coldblooded even than Al Qaeda. Then it went on to seize land. But increasingly, as it holds that territory and builds capacity to govern, the group is transforming into a functioning state that uses extreme violence — terror — as a tool. That distinction is proving to be more than a matter of perspective for those who live under the Islamic State, which has provided relative stability in a region troubled by war and chaos while filling a vacuum left by failing and corrupt governments that also employed violence — arrest, torture and detention.

While no one is predicting that the Islamic State will become steward of an accountable, functioning state anytime soon, the group is putting in place the kinds of measures associated with governance: issuing identification cards for residents, promulgating fishing guidelines to preserve stocks, requiring that cars carry tool kits for emergencies.

That transition may demand that the West rethink its military-first approach to combating the group.

“I think that there is no question that the way to look at it is as a revolutionary state-building organization,” said Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is one of a small but growing group of experts who are challenging the conventional wisdom about the Islamic State: that its evil ensures its eventual destruction.

In a recent essay in Foreign Policy magazine — “What Should We Do If the Islamic State Wins?” — Mr. Walt argued that the Islamic State could indeed prevail in the face of a modest, American-led military campaign that has been going on for almost a year and still leaves the group in control of large areas of Syria and Iraq, including Mosul, its second-largest city.

He wrote, “An Islamic State victory would mean that the group retained power in the areas it now controls and successfully defied outside efforts to ‘degrade and destroy’ it.”

He added that now, after almost a year of American airstrikes on the group, it is becoming clear that “only a large-scale foreign intervention is likely to roll back and ultimately eliminate the Islamic State.”

Mr. Walt is not the only expert thinking along these lines. It is an argument buttressed by a widespread belief that a military strategy alone, without political reconciliation to offer alienated Sunnis an alternative authority, is not sufficient to defeat the Islamic State. More on the story here.

**** NATO via the Atlantic Council:

ISIS Takes on the Gulf States

Another suicide bombing has shaken the Gulf region, as young Saudi Abdallah Fahd Abdallah Rashid blew himself up at a checkpoint in the Saudi capital of Riyadh on July 16. Rashid conducted the bombing just after killing his uncle, a colonel with the Saudi Ministry of Interior. The Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) claimed responsibility for the dual operation. This attack comes only a week after authorities in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait arrested several Saudi nationals related to an of ISIS member in Syria. Police claimed that the men played a part in the attack on a Shia mosque in Kuwait city on June 26. The bombing in Kuwait took place only three days after the ISIS media company Al-Furqan released an audio recording by ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-‘Adnani in which he congratulated Muslims on the commencement of Ramadan and called upon Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, to join the jihad against Shia. The Saudi and Kuwait attacks fall within the broader ISIS strategy of stoking the Gulf Sunni-Shia sectarian divide. In the polarized regional context driven by the Saudi-Iranian rivalry, this sectarian game plan threatens to tear the fabric of Gulf society apart.


In the attack on June 26, a Saudi suicide bomber blew himself up in a Shia mosque during Friday prayers in Kuwait city, killing twenty-seven people and injuring another 200. On May 29, a car bomb exploded at the entrance to the al-Anoud mosque in Damam, Saudi Arabia, killing three. Exactly a week prior, twenty-one worshippers died and 120 injured when a bomb exploded inside a mosque in the eastern Saudi province. ISIS claimed responsibility for both attacks. Another attack last November 2014 on the al-Ahsa mosque in the Eastern Province also killed seven and injured dozens. An ISIS affiliate calling itself Wilayat Najd (Najd Province) claimed the attack. Each attack specifically targeted the Shia minority in the Gulf against the backdrop of growing enmity and sectarian tensions between the Saudi Arabia and Iran, which ISIS has used to justify its brutal confessional narrative.

These attacks are Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s legacy to ISIS. The Jordanian al-Qaeda leader believed that a religious war in Iraq would bring more Sunnis to his side and allow for the expansion of his organization. Shortly after Zarqawi sent a letter in 2004 to the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan on his intentions to attack Shia in Iraq to spark sectarian conflict, members of his organization killed at least 185 Shia celebrating the Ashura holiday in a series of coordinated attacks in Baghdad and Karbala. This began a long string of attacks targeting Shia under his leadership until he died in a US air strike in 2006.

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, like Zarqawi before him, sees a window of opportunity in the current upheaval shaking the region. The Arab Spring fractured countries from the Levant to North Africa, where civil war and resurgent authoritarianism has led to a crisis of legitimacy. The rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia on issues such as Syria, Iraq, and Yemen only adds fuel to the sectarian fire. In countries such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, riots broke out in mainly Shia areas. Although Shia only make up a minority of Kuwaitis, they still account for an estimated 25 to 30 percent of the population. In Saudi Arabia, the Shia population, located mostly in the oil rich Eastern Province, amounts to about 15 percent of the total population.

Marginalized Shia communities, the rise of Salafi jihadist movement, and the ongoing war in Yemen—a conflict seen as the Sunni response to Iran’s expansion plan in the region—have left both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia vulnerable to the growing regional sectarian strife. Kuwait may have the most inclusive policies toward their Shia community among the Gulf countries (Shia representatives hold ten of the fifty seats in its parliament), the war in Yemen in particular has raised sectarian tensions. Kuwait’s Shia denounced the Saudi-led operation, resulting in a brawl inside parliament in May. Seven of the ten Shia parliamentarians also criticized the Kuwaiti Air Force’s participation.

Shia in Saudi Arabia enjoy far less influence and have begun to agitate in the oil-rich Eastern Province. Carnegie Senior Associate, Fred Wehrey, reported in a 2013 paper “an unending cycle of detentions, shootings, and demonstrations,” many linked to the marginalization of and discrimination against Shia in the kingdom. Gulf clerics have often resorted to hate propaganda against Shia and the Saudi campaign to oust the Houthi Zaydi Shia rebels from Sana’a has clearly taken on a sectarian dimension. Wealthy Saudi and Kuwaiti nationals have also reportedly contributed to funding ISIS and even joined the groups to fight the Assad regime in Syria. An estimated 5,500 Gulf nationals—4,000 of them coming from Saudi Arabia alone—currently fight with ISIS.

These factors make for an explosive cocktail, one that ISIS will utilize to instigate sectarian violence and destabilize the Gulf countries that host significant Shia populations. By targeting the minority community, ISIS hopes to provoke a Shia backlash, gambling on an aggressive Gulf response that would create further instability on which ISIS could capitalize. For the extremist group, the success or failure of a resulting crackdown provides a win-win situation: a successful crackdown would vindicate ISIS’s sectarian narrative; a failure would undermine faith in the Gulf authorities and expand support for the extremist group.

ISIS will likely widen its sectarian war into other parts of the Gulf, beyond Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Given its large Shia population (estimated at approximately 70 percent), Bahrain shares similar traits with Iraq over Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Bahrain’s Shia have faced a massive crackdown since it engaged in protests in 2011 demanding inclusive policies. Prominent ISIS members, such as Shaikh Turki Al Ban’ali who is believed to be serving as a religious leader in the organization, also hail from Bahrain. The United Arab Emirates—home to a Shia population of about 10 percent—might be less at risk than Bahrain, but remains vulnerable to possible lone wolf operations.

While the recent attacks in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait may have shaken these countries sense of security, Gulf governments still maintain a strong security apparatus with which ISIS must contend. Nonetheless, ISIS operations in these countries will create instability in the short term and exacerbate tensions between Sunnis and Shia. To prevent ISIS from establishing a more permanent presence in these countries, Gulf countries should complement counterterrorism campaigns with dialogue between citizens of different religious beliefs and promoting conciliatory measures toward Shia minorities. The ongoing rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the proxy competition in countries like Syria, Iraq, and Yemen will also continue to buttress ISIS’s regional ambitions. Until Iran and the Gulf countries reach an understanding on their own regional ambitions, their enmity will fuel ISIS’s sectarian narrative and support the destabilization of divided Muslim countries.

Impeach Jeh Johnson and Then Dis-Bar the Man

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And the 20 others including the lawyers !!!

There is even a Federal employee handbook, this matter begins on page 74. Let the Freedom of Information requests begin and call Judicial Watch, as the Inspector General refuses to comment.

Homeland Security Leaders Bent Rules on Private E-Mail

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Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, and 28 of his senior staffers have been using private Web-based e-mail from their work computers for over a year, a practice criticized by cyber security experts and advocates of government transparency.

The department banned such private e-mail on DHS computers in April 2014. Top DHS officials were granted informal waivers, according to a top DHS official who said that he saw the practice as a national security risk. The official said the exempt staffers included Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, chief of staff Christian Marrone and general counsel Stevan Bunnell.

Asked about the exceptions on Monday, the DHS press secretary, Marsha Catron, confirmed that some officials had been exempted. “Going forward,” she said, “all access to personal webmail accounts has been suspended.”

Future exceptions are to be granted only by the chief of staff. Catron said that a “recent internal review” had found the chief of staff and some others were unaware that they had had access to webmail.

The DHS rule, articulated last year after hackers first breached the Office of Personnel Management, states: “The use of Internet Webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL) or other personal email accounts is not authorized over DHS furnished equipment or network connections.” Johnson and the 28 other senior officials sought and received informal waivers at different times over the past year, the official said. Catron said exceptions were decided on a case-by-case basis by the chief information officer, Luke McCormack. DHS employees are permitted to use their government e-mail accounts for limited personal use.

Erica Paulson, a spokeswoman for the DHS Office of the Inspector General, said that the office does not confirm or deny the existence of any open investigations.

It remains unclear whether Johnson and the other officials conducted DHS business on their private webmail accounts. (The DHS spokeswoman said “the use of personal email for official purposes is strictly prohibited.”) If even one work-related e-mail was sent or received, they could be in violation of regulations and laws governing the preservation of federal records, said Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

“I suppose it is remotely conceivable that in seeking a waiver, 20 or more government officials could all be wishing to talk to each other through a Web-based e-mail service about such matters as baseball games or retirement luncheons they might be attending,” he said. “But it is simply not reasonable to assume that in seeking a waiver that the officials involved were only contemplating using a commercial network for personal (that is, non-official) communications.”

In March, the New York Times reported that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton had used a private e-mail server exclusively to conduct her State Department business. Clinton said she had not violated any transparency laws because the Federal Records Act states that officials are permitted to use private e-mail, so long as they forward on any government-related communications to their government accounts so they can be archived and used to respond to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

In November 2014, the Federal Records Act was amended to impose a 20-day limit on the time an official has to transfer records from private e-mail to government systems. Clinton transferred over 30,000 e-mails from her private server to the State Department in early 2015. She deleted another 30,000 e-mails on her private server, claiming they were all strictly personal.

It is unclear how Johnson and the other officials used their webmail accounts, and whether they forwarded any messages about government business to their official accounts.

Johnson has used his personal Gmail for government business at least once, before he was head of DHS; that was disclosed during the scandal that led to David Petraeus’s resignation as CIA director. The Justice Department is fighting to keep Johnson from having to give a video deposition in that case.

Anne Weismann, executive director of the Campaign for Accountability and a former Justice Department official dealing with FOIA litigation, said that even by seeking the waivers at DHS, Johnson and the other officials created at least an appearance and opportunity for impropriety.

“How could they possibly justify exempting the secretary and the most senior people from the policy? You are allowing the people who are most likely to create e-mails that are most worthy of preservation to bypass the system that would ensure their preservation,” she said.

The issue of top government officials using private e-mail is widespread and the rules barring such practices are rarely enforced, said Weismann. “What they really want is to have the ability to have off-the-record discussions,” she said. “It creates problems for record keeping and it puts it out of the reach of FOIA.”

Cyber security experts said that allowing the use of commercial webmail on otherwise secure computers increases the risk that those computers could be penetrated by hackers, foreign intelligence services or malware. Webmail messages are often stored without encryption, leaving them vulnerable to theft by anyone who gains access to the webmail server.

“The fundamental issue is that these commercial webmail systems were not designed with the threat in mind that is present when government officials are using consumer tools,” said Johannes B. Ullrich, dean of research for the SANS Technology Institute.

The threat is not just theoretical. In 2008, Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account was hacked by someone who used a password reset function to gain access, he said.

There’s also a moral hazard.

“If there are just certain individuals being exempted here, it’s setting a bad precedent for the rest of the department. If you say, ‘Hey, it doesn’t apply to everybody over a certain pay grade,’ the idea of these controls gets diminished and people look for workarounds,” said Ullrich.

Aside from the legal risk and the national security risk, exceptions to the department’s policies reinforce the narrative that the Obama administration lets senior officials skirt the rules, including by keeping their communications secret.  The pattern was present in the previous administration as well, but after the OPM hacks and the deletion of Clinton’s e-mails, it is widely criticized and hard to defend.

UN Voted FOR the Iran Deal Before Congress

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Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter is on a 3 country tour in the Middle East, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. War gaming on some plan?

This cannot end well.

Israeli Defense Force:

The IDF is seeking government commitment to a multi-year defense spending plan – a commitment that has been absent for the past several years – as it prepares to deal with the possibility of a covert Iranian attempt to break through to nuclear weapons production, a senior defense source said on Sunday.

The source said the IDF needs to assume that its most severe “reference scenarios” regarding Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and ISIS will come true, in order to correctly use the coming years to reshape the military, improve training, and make cost cutting reforms that include the shedding of 100,000 reservists and 5000 career soldiers.

The multi-year budget commitment from the government –  absent for the past several years – will be necessary to reshape the military and improve training to meet those challenges while at the same time, implementing cutting reforms that include the shedding of 100,000 reservists and 5000 career soldiers.

Other proposed changes include military restructuring to create specialized war fighting and border security divisions that do not overlap one another.

 

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. Security Council on Monday unanimously endorsed the landmark nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers and authorized a series of measures leading to the end of U.N. sanctions that have hurt Iran’s economy.

But the measure also provides a mechanism for U.N. sanctions to “snap back” in place if Iran fails to meet its obligations.

The resolution had been agreed to by the five veto-wielding council members, who along with Germany negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran. It was co-sponsored by all 15 members of the Security Council.

Under the agreement, Iran’s nuclear program will be curbed for a decade in exchange for potentially hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of relief from international sanctions. Many key penalties on the Iranian economy, such as those related to the energy and financial sectors, could be lifted by the end of the year.

The document specifies that seven resolutions related to U.N. sanctions will be terminated when Iran has completed a series of major steps to curb its nuclear program and the International Atomic Energy Agency has concluded that “all nuclear material in Iran remains in peaceful activities.”

All provisions of the U.N. resolution will terminate in 10 years, including the snap back provision.

But last week the six major powers — the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — and the European Union sent a letter, seen by The Associated Press, informing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that they have agreed to extend the snap back mechanism for an additional five years. They asked Ban to send the letter to the Security Council.

U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said the nuclear deal doesn’t change the United States’ “profound concern about human rights violations committed by the Iranian government or about the instability Iran fuels beyond its nuclear program, from its support for terrorist proxies to repeated threats against Israel to its other destabilizing activities in the region.”

She urged Iran to release three “unjustly imprisoned” Americans and to determine the whereabouts of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who vanished in 2007.

“But denying Iran a nuclear weapon is important not in spite of these other destabilizing actions but rather because of them,” Power said.

She quoted President Barack Obama saying the United States agreed to the deal because “an Iran with a nuclear weapon would be far more destabilizing and far more dangerous to our friends and to the world.”

Embassies Open Today, the Cuban Flag Flies in DC

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A cop killer who fled to Cuba is not part of the deal that the White House or the State Department with the normalized relations with Cuba.

Despite New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s aggravated pleas to President Obama to have Assata Shakur extradited back to the United States, Cuba’s head of North American affairs, Josefina Vidal, has denied that request.

Shakur, formerly known as Joanne Chesimard, was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army (BLA).  She became the first woman to ever be placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list for her involvement in a 1973 shootout in which New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster was killed. Shakur was eventually sentenced to life in prison in 1977; however, she managed to flee the cement walls of the penitentiary in 1979, and later fled to Cuba where she was granted political asylum.

Shakur currently remains on the FBI’s most-wanted list and has a bounty of $2 million offered for her capture.  Since President Obama has been attempting to normalize relations with Cuba, NJ Governor Chris Christie has adamantly requested that Obama demand Shakur be extradited to America as a part of Cuba and the United States’ new beginning.  However, Josefina Vidal has denied Cuba’s agreement to hand over Shakur.

“We’ve explained to the U.S. government in the past that there are some people living in Cuba to whom Cuba has legitimately granted political asylum,” Vidal stated.  “There’s no extradition treaty in effect between Cuba and the U.S.  We’ve reminded the U.S. government that in its country they’ve given shelter to dozens and dozens of Cuban citizens.  Some of them accused of horrible crimes, some accused of terrorism, murder and kidnapping, and in every case the U.S. government has decided to welcome them.”

After 54 Years From Stars and Stripes:

The last time the United States and Cuba had diplomatic relations, Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” topped the charts and a new dance craze, the Twist, was sweeping the country.

The past half-century of U.S.-Cuba relations has been a roller-coaster ride of high hopes for improvement at times, but low points that included mutual acts of terrorism, separation of Cuban families, CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro, the most dangerous days of the Cold War during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a U.S.-sponsored invasion, Cuba’s alignment with the old Soviet bloc, confiscation of U.S. property, the 1996 shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue planes by Cuban MiGs, and countless human tragedies on a smaller scale.

The US and Cuba will re-establish diplomatic relations Monday and their embassies will reopen for the first time in 54 years.

On Monday morning, the Cuban government will raise its flag over the its old limestone building on Washington’s 16th Street Northwest, which has been a Cuban Embassy, a Cuban Interests Section in the absence of diplomatic relations, and now again an embassy. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez will be the highest-ranking Cuban diplomat to visit the State Department in decades when he meets with Secretary of State John Kerry in the afternoon.

For the United States, it begins a new chapter of engagement with Cuba. Kerry plans to travel to Havana later this summer to inaugurate the U.S. Embassy. The interests section will be elevated to embassy status Monday, but US flag won’t fly until Kerry’s arrival.

The respective mission chiefs in Havana and Washington will become chargés d’affaires at the new embassies until ambassadors are named, and new rules for operations at the embassies will take effect.

Even as the Cuban flag is hoisted in Washington, a difficult relationship between the United States and Cuba is expected to remain just that — difficult — but with the difference that the two sides are now talking more freely with each other to work through the many issues that still separate them.

“That will include America’s enduring support for universal values, like freedom of speech and assembly, and the ability to access information,” President Barack Obama said on July 1 when he announced the date for restoring diplomatic ties.

“When the United States shuttered our embassy in 1961, I don’t think anyone expected that it would be more than half a century before it reopened,” Obama said. The old policy of isolation, he said, “shuts America out of Cuba’s future, and it only makes life worse for the Cuban people.”

Roberta Jacobson, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs –– who was the lead U.S. negotiator in normalization talks –– said there is an “obvious groundswell of support” among Cubans on the island for the new policy. But during an appearance at the Wilson Center in Washington in June, Jacobson said Cubans’ very high expectations “must be managed. Because let’s face it, things aren’t going to change overnight.”

The United States officially broke relations with Cuba on Jan. 3, 1961, but they had begun to turn sour within six months of New Year’s Day 1959, when the Cuban Revolution triumphed.

By August 1960, Cuba had expropriated all U.S.-owned industrial and agricultural holdings, and nationalized all U.S. banks. That fall, Eisenhower had begun to phase in the U.S. trade embargo, and in December he eliminated Cuba’s sugar quota for the next quarter. In the last months of 1960, as Cuba complained of air raids coming from the United States and, plans to invade the island were already under discussion in Washington.

Months before Eisenhower decided to break with Cuba, personnel at the U.S. Embassy had been instructed to cut down to two suitcases in case a hasty departure was necessary, said Wayne Smith, then a junior officer at the embassy and later the chief of mission in 1977 when the United States established an interests section in the old embassy building.

“Things had been going so badly; it was inevitable,” Smith said. “It was almost a relief. Relations had been so strained and so bitter and we knew it was coming. But I remember thinking, ‘Let’s hope it won’t be for too long.’”

The tipping point came on Jan. 2, 1961, when Cuban Foreign Minister Raul Roa, speaking before the United Nations Security Council, charged that the United States was planning to invade, and Fidel Castro gave a speech in which he denounced the U.S. Embassy as a “nest of spies” and demanded that the staff be reduced to 11 people, including U.S. diplomats, Marine guards and local employees.

The next day the White House broke off relations with Cuba and asked the Swiss government to represent it in dealings with the island. That representation will end on Monday. Since 1977, when the United States once again sent diplomats to Havana, there hasn’t been much of a role for the Swiss. But from 1961 and 1977, the Swiss ambassador was the U.S. man in Havana.

Because the Swiss were overseeing U.S. interests in Cuba, the old U.S. Embassy building never really closed.

There was only that Swiss representation in Havana four months later during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the height of the Cold War. Those 13 days in October would be among the most perilous in the U.S.-Cuban relationship, but for most of the next five decades U.S.-Cuba relations remained rocky.

That is until Dec. 17, when Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced an opening — the fruit of 18 months of secret negotiations — that included re-establishing diplomatic relations and converting the interests sections into full-fledged embassies.

Rodriguez, who will arrive in Washington Sunday, will lead a 30-person delegation that includes former National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon, National Assembly Vice President Ana Maria Mari Machado and Josefina Vidal, Jacobson’s Cuban counterpart in the normalization talks.

Other delegation members will be Havana historian Eusebio Leal, members of the Council of State, Ramon Sanchez Parodi, the first head of the Cuban Interests Section; singer Silvio Rodriguez, artist Alexis Leiva (Kcho) who provides a free public Wi-Fi hotspot at his studio, and other figures from the Cuban art and literary world.