Category Archives: Russia

FBI’s Comey Stunned about al Qaeda

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So Barack Obama continues to say that al Qaeda leadership has been defeated and the Director of the FBI, James Comey agrees.

Well, we have countless al Qaeda factions all over the globe and they are more bold as we have seen with the kidnapping and killing of young children by Boko Harem in Nigeria. So it defies logic that Comey is stunned to determine that the garden variety attitude in the United States and with the few allies left that is al Qaeda has not been defeated.

Drone strikes abound in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan dropping hellfire missiles on some high value targets yet, al Qaeda factions like al Nusra, al Shabaab and Boko Harem are still out there. Perhaps James Comey’s name is not on the memo distribution list.

 

WASHINGTON — When James B. Comey was nominated last June to be director of the F.B.I., it seemed to herald the beginning of a new era at the bureau.

His predecessor, Robert S. Mueller III, began the job just days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and Mr. Mueller’s years leading the F.B.I. had one overwhelming focus: fighting terrorism. Mr. Comey was appointed a month after President Obama delivered a sweeping speech on the future of the fight against terrorism and said the United States was at a “crossroads” and needed to move off its wartime footing.

As deputy attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Comey had questioned the legality of a National Security Agency surveillance program regarded as a major component of the president’s counterterrorism strategy. And given Mr. Comey’s earlier experience in the Justice Department prosecuting gun cases, the F.B.I. seemed likely to shift resources into more traditional criminal prosecutions.

By Mr. Comey’s own account, he also brought to the job a belief, based on news media reports, that the threat from Al Qaeda was diminished. But nine months into his tenure as director, Mr. Comey acknowledges that he underestimated the threat the United States still faces from terrorism.

“I didn’t have anywhere near the appreciation I got after I came into this job just how virulent those affiliates had become,” Mr. Comey said, referring to offshoots of Al Qaeda in Africa and in the Middle East during an interview in his sprawling office on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “There are both many more than I appreciated, and they are stronger than I appreciated.”

Based on what he now knows, Mr. Comey said, he is convinced that terrorism should remain the main focus of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The agency he inherited from Mr. Mueller had roughly half its 16,000 agents and analysts working on national security issues, and Mr. Comey made it clear that he would not be changing those priorities.

In his speech at the National Defense University a year ago, Mr. Obama could also not have been clearer. He said that the United States was entering “a new phase,” and that “we have to recognize that the scale of the threat resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.”

But for his administration, translating that vision has proved difficult. The National Security Agency has resisted demands that it change after its secret surveillance programs were disclosed in documents released by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor. The C.I.A. has continued to operate a drone program that Mr. Obama said would be transferred to the Pentagon, and it is likely to face renewed criticism when a long-awaited report on its secret prison program is finally released.

Critics say that, at the F.B.I., Mr. Comey has chosen to continue a strategy that is no longer appropriate for the way the terrorist threat has evolved.

“The F.B.I.’s evolution since 9/11 into a domestic intelligence agency is troubling both from a civil liberties standpoint and its effectiveness,” said Mike German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security program at New York University, “and in the face of evidence that it is ineffective, it’s troubling that Comey would embrace it.”

Mr. Comey’s defenders say he has simply accepted the reality that it still is a dangerous world.

“The problem is that as they have wanted to dial back, the threat has persisted in places like Syria, Yemen and East Africa,” said Rick Nelson, a former senior counterterrorism official with the F.B.I. “There’s still a legitimate threat and we can’t stop what we have been doing and change the model, and that has limited what Comey can do at the F.B.I.”

In briefings with senior administration officials, testimony before Congress and interviews with the news media, Mr. Comey has said that while the United States has “dramatically reduced” the “primary tumor” of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “that threat has metastasized” in places like North Africa, Yemen and the United States.

The metaphor has personal meaning for Mr. Comey, who had a malignant tumor removed from his colon eight years ago and whose mother died of cancer. Just as the United States believed it had diminished Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he said, doctors believed they had defeated his mother’s cancer.

For Mr. Comey and the F.B.I., the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 and the scrutiny that followed have illustrated the conundrum the bureau faces 12 and a half years after planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

After the inspectors general who oversee the American intelligence and law enforcement agencies released a report on whether warning signs had been missed before the bombings, a diverse group of critics seized on its findings, but for different reasons.

Local officials and congressional Republicans criticized the F.B.I. as not having done enough, saying that it should have more closely investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the bombing suspects, after he returned to the United States from a 2012 trip to Dagestan. Civil libertarians said that it was the latest example of how the F.B.I.’s traditional approach to terrorism — deploying large numbers of agents to gather information — had failed.

“What we learned in the Boston Marathon bombing is that it wasn’t that the F.B.I. didn’t have enough information — it was drowning in information,” said Carol Rose, the executive director of the Massachusetts A.C.L.U. “If the F.B.I. and the police had done investigative work like they should be doing, they would have looked more closely” at a triple murder in 2011 that the F.B.I. now says Mr. Tsarnaev was involved in, she said.

Critics like Ms. Rose said the bombings exposed a problem that existed before the Sept. 11 attacks: that the F.B.I. needs to better investigate the information it has, not simply collect more of it. They contend that the bureau’s buildup under Mr. Mueller did not solve the problem, but made it worse.

“You had all this information coming in, and nearly all of it wasn’t helpful,” said Mr. German, a former F.B.I. agent, “so agents became accustomed to leads going nowhere and everything they opened became an exercise in how quickly you can close it.”

In the case of the Boston bombing, Russian officials had previously told the F.B.I. that Mr. Tsarnaev had become radicalized and planned to travel to Russia to join underground groups. In their report last month, the inspectors general found that the agent who investigated that lead never questioned Mr. Tsarnaev or his family about his travels, and did not reopen an investigation of him after he returned to the United States.

“The year the F.B.I. investigated the older brother, it said it did 1,000 assessments,” Mr. German said. “There weren’t 1,000 terrorists in Boston that year, and a vast majority of resources were obviously going to things that didn’t matter.”

The F.B.I. has said that it did all it could, given the information it had from the Russian government and the legal restrictions on how it conducts its investigations.

But the bureau’s focus on counterterrorism has led to criticism that a generation of agents have spent their entire careers doing nothing else. Mr. German and other critics say they never learned the basic policing skills needed for a criminal investigation. Mr. Comey hasacknowledged the problem, ordering that the F.B.I.’s newest class of recruits, scheduled to start training in June, spend significant time on criminal investigation squads. And he has given his field offices more power to devote resources to helping local authorities.

He has also spent time studying the cybersecurity issue — which Mr. Mueller has said would be one of his most significant challenges —  in an effort to determine how the bureau can be more effective in policing it.

And Mr. Comey said he also wanted to apply the lessons learned in fighting terrorism to fighting other crimes. If Congress approves, he plans to move the bureau’s head of intelligence out of the national security division and create a new intelligence branch that will amass information on crimes like fraud in an effort to more quickly identify trends and perpetrators.

Using another metaphor — this time a football one — Mr. Comey said that he envisioned the F.B.I. as a free safety who has some primary responsibilities but is often called on to help other defenders on the field.

“We have certain assigned defensive responsibilities, those are the national securities ones, but beyond that I want to look to the line of scrimmage, which is the primary line of defense, which is state and local law enforcement and say, ‘O.K. where do you need us to make a tackle?’ ” Mr. Comey said. “ ‘Do you need us to stay deep, do you need us to cover over the middle, do you need us to come up and play run support?’ And that’s very different in each game with each opponent.”

If Mr. Comey has not changed Mr. Mueller’s policies, he has brought a distinctly different style to the bureau, devoting much of his time to raising morale, which had sagged because of Mr. Mueller’s demanding approach to management as well as budget cuts ordered by Congress.

While both had a background as federal prosecutors, Mr. Mueller was a prep school and Princeton graduate who wore a white shirt nearly every day as director and stipulated that agents keep their coats on at meetings. Mr. Comey, a less intimidating figure despite being 6-foot-8, struck a more casual note with a blue shirt on his first day as director and has gone out of his way to personally connect with his agents.

He has vowed to visit every one of the 56 field offices in his first year as director, and on a recent visit to the Buffalo office explained his theory that a more informal F.B.I. might be a more effective one.

“My first day everyone showed up and everyone was dressed up looking beautiful,” he said “And I said, ‘Listen, I don’t want people for their regular staff meetings with me wearing jackets because I worry that physical buttoning-up leads to a metaphysical buttoning-up.’ ”

Shhhhh, Two Other Government Secrets

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Do you ever wonder who your neighbor really is? Do you ever wonder how people actually are allowed into the United States? Do you ever wonder who approves visas for foreigners and what they are doing when they get here?

 

Sheesh:

Item one —>>

WASHINGTON — To those who lost loved ones in the suicide bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, in April 1983, it is often called “the forgotten bombing” — overshadowed by an even deadlier attack on a Marine barracks at the Beirut airport six months later.

Now, a new book shines a spotlight on the embassy bombing, which killed 63 people, 17 of them American, including eight Central Intelligence Agency officers. One of those was Robert C. Ames, a C.I.A. operative who is the hero of the book, “The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames,” by Kai Bird.

Mr. Bird explores Mr. Ames’s shadowy path in the Middle East, where he formed an unlikely friendship with the intelligence chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization and used it to try to draw the Israelis and Palestinians together in peace negotiations.

But in sifting through the long-dead embers from the embassy bombing, Mr. Bird makes a startling assertion: that an Iranian intelligence officer who defected to the United States in 2007 and is still living here under C.I.A. protection, oversaw the 1983 bombing, as well as other terrorist attacks against Americans in Lebanon.

“When it comes out that at least one of the intelligence officers associated with planning these truck bombings is living in the U.S., the relatives of these victims are going to go ballistic,” Mr. Bird said in an interview last week.

“This is a classic intelligence dilemma,” he continued. “When do you deal with bad guys? When do you agree to give them asylum? In my opinion, this goes over the line.”

Mr. Bird, who shared a Pulitzer Prize with Martin J. Sherwin for their book, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” spoke to more than 40 current and retired C.I.A. officers, though the agency declined to cooperate with him. He also consulted numerous sources in the Israeli Mossad and in Lebanon, including a Lebanese businessman with ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

A spokesman for the C.I.A., Todd Ebitz, declined to comment on Sunday about Mr. Bird’s assertion. “As a general rule, the C.I.A. does not comment on allegations that someone may or may not have worked as a source for the agency,” Mr. Ebitz said.

The disclosures in “The Good Spy” are timely, given that the United States is in a critical phase of negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran. The decision to grant asylum to the Iranian intelligence officer, Ali Reza Asgari, was made by the George W. Bush administration in 2007, Mr. Bird writes, because he had valuable information about Iran’s nuclear program, including that it had built a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz.

Mr. Asgari’s information has since been superseded by new disclosures, including that a second enrichment facility had been built in a mountain near the holy city of Qum. But even now, a critical negotiating issue is how many centrifuges Iran will be allowed to operate at these facilities.

On paper, Ali Reza Asgari would be a treasure trove for the C.I.A. He joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps soon after the 1979 revolution, and was sent to Lebanon in 1982, when Iran was bankrolling a wave of terrorism against Americans, through its proxy, the Islamic militant group Hezbollah. Later, he returned to Iran and rose to a senior post in the Revolutionary Guards, which oversees the nuclear program.

“He would have the crown jewels,” said Robert Baer, a retired C.I.A. agent who had his own career in the Middle East and spoke to Mr. Bird for his book.

But while Mr. Baer said Mr. Bird’s reporting is persuasive — he said he knows some of the sources the author consulted in the region — he noted that the book contains no smoking gun establishing Mr. Asgari’s whereabouts. Indeed, Mr. Asgari may no longer be in the United States.

Mr. Bird said that when he asked a former senior Bush official about the decision to grant Mr. Asgari asylum, he received a cryptic reply: “At the unclassified level, I cannot elaborate on this issue.” He cited a report in Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, that Mr. Asgari twice called a fellow Iranian defector — from Washington, where he had been held in a C.I.A. safe house, and from “somewhere in Texas.”

Stuart H. Newberger, a Washington lawyer who represents victims of the 1983 attack, said he believed the book was accurate, though he could not corroborate the Asgari disclosure himself. He said he had supplied Mr. Bird with trial transcripts and internal government documents he had obtained for his litigation.

“Asgari got a get-out-of-jail-free card because of the Iran nuclear issue,” Mr. Newberger said.

For the Obama administration, Mr. Bird’s revelations could be awkward. Mr. Newberger said it should make terrorism an issue in any negotiation about relaxing sanctions against Iran. But the White House has tried to keep the nuclear negotiations tightly focused on technical questions of Iran’s enrichment capability and international inspections.

“The Good Spy” is a vivid reminder of Iran’s prolific sponsorship of terrorism against the United States — a not-so-distant legacy. In January, Iran’s foreign minister and the leader of its nuclear negotiating team, Mohammad Javad Zarif, laid a wreath at the grave of Imad Mugniyeh, a lethal Hezbollah operative who the C.I.A. believes had an operational role in the embassy and barracks bombings. Mr. Mugniyeh was assassinated in 2008, probably by the Mossad, on information supplied by Mr. Asgari, who acted as his control officer during the 1980s, according to Mr. Bird.

None of this history is helpful to a White House eager to conclude a landmark nuclear deal. “People just don’t want to hear about Iranian terrorism,” Mr. Baer said. “Nobody has the appetite to dig this up. You focus on the battle you can win, which is nuclear.”

For Anne Dammarell, a retired American aid officer gravely injured in the Beirut bombing, Mr. Bird’s book solved a mystery of who masterminded the attack that nearly killed her.

But she said she was not outraged by the disclosure about Mr. Asgari. In the murky world of spying, she said, such trade-offs were sometimes necessary. “Most people understand that deals get cut,” she said. “You can be a very corrupt person and still die in your sleep.”

Item two –>

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org
Some of our longtime readers will recall the case of Dongfan “Greg” Chung, a Chinese-born American engineer for Boeing, who was convicted in 2009 of passing US space program secrets to China. The case is arguably far more important than it might have seemed at the time, as Chung was technically the first American to be jailed for economic espionage. Many at the Federal Bureau of Investigation view the Chung conviction as a landmark case for providing clear legal proof of Chinese espionage in the US. Little is known, however, about how the FBI managed to uncover Chung’s espionage activities, which are believed to have gone on for nearly three decades. In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Yudhijit Bhattachargjee reveals for the first time the fascinating background of how the Bureau got to Chung. It did so through another American engineer of Chinese origin, named Chi Mak. Unlike Chung, who was ideologically committed to Maoism and was recruited by Chinese intelligence after immigrating to the US, Mak was an accredited intelligence operative who was allegedly specifically planted in the US by the Chinese. He came to America from Hong Kong in 1979 and worked for California-based defense contractor Power Paragon. He almost immediately began stealing secrets relating to US Navy systems. The FBI first started monitoring Mak and his wife, Rebecca, in 2004, following a tip. The effort evolved in one of the Bureau’s biggest counterintelligence cases, involving elaborate physical and electronic surveillance that lasted for nearly 18 months. During that time, FBI and Naval Criminal Investigation Service agents installed surveillance cameras outside the Maks’ residence, followed the suspects around, and monitored their telephone calls. Eventually, the surveillance team managed to acquire a warrant allowing them to clandestinely enter the Maks’ home and conduct a secret search. The nondestructive entry team discovered numerous stacks of secret documents “some two or three feet high” all around the suspects’ house. Among the findings was an address book containing the names of other engineers of Chinese origin living in the state of California. That, says Bhattachargjee, was the first time the FBI came across Chung’s name. During a subsequent covert entry into Mak’s house, the surveillance team installed a surveillance camera. The information collected from the camera led the FBI to Mak’s younger brother, Tai Mak, who had been living in the US since 2001, along with his wife, Fuk Li, and their two children. It turned out that Tai was acting as a courier, transporting to China various pieces of intelligence collected by his brother. The FBI eventually managed to arrest Tai and his wife at the Los Angeles International Airport as he was preparing to leave the US, carrying an encrypted CD with secret documents stolen by his brother. In 2007, Chi Mak was sentenced to 24.5 years in prison, Tai Mak to 10 years, and Chi’s wife, Rebecca, to three years. The remaining members of the two families were deported to China.

Cyber: When War Isn’t War

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The most under reported war across the globe is cyber-spying. It has only been this week that Eric Holder and the Department of Justice decided to arrest a handful of Chinese that have been cyber-spying on America for years among other factions.

Cyber threats and hackers is nothing new, but it is rarely reported until it involves citizens like in the matter of Target stores last year. The question that remains officially unanswered is just why has the United States been so soft on cyber-wars against the United States? The answer is in fact foreign policy trumps everything and that should cause some real head-scratching as foreign policy under Barack Obama via Hillary Clinton and John Kerry is decayed.

There is the Syrian Electronic Army, Turkey’s RedHack, Serbia’s TeslaTeam, China has them, Russia has them, Iran has them. Hackers are the 21st century nuclear weapons. In fact nuclear weapons secrets is just what the Chinese hackers were after and are now sought by Eric Holder.

The United States brought first-of-its kind cyber-espionage charges Monday against five Chinese military officials accused of hacking into U.S. companies to gain trade secrets.

According to the indictment, hackers targeted the U.S. nuclear power, metals and solar products industries and are accused of stealing trade secrets and economic espionage. The victims are Alcoa World Alumina, Westinghouse Electric Co., Allegheny Technologies, U.S. Steel Corp., United Steelworkers Union, and SolarWorld, Attorney General Eric Holder said.

The charges underscore a longtime Obama administration goal of prosecuting state-sponsored cyber threats.

“The alleged hacking appears to have been conducted for no other reason than to advantage state-owned companies and other interests in China at the expense of businesses here in the United States,” Holder told a news conference at the Justice Department. “This is a tactic that the United States government categorically denounces.”

Said Bob Anderson Jr., executive assistant director of the FBI’s criminal, cyber response and services division: “This is the new normal. This is what you’re going to see on a recurring basis.”

In a statement, China’s Foreign Ministry said the U.S. charges were based on “fabricated facts” and jeopardize China-U.S. “cooperation and mutual trust.”

US Government: China Cited in Cyber-spying Case

US Government: China Cited in Cyber-spying Case

“China is steadfast in upholding cybersecurity,” said the statement. “The Chinese government, the Chinese military and their relevant personnel have never engaged or participated in cyber theft of trade secrets. The U.S. accusation against Chinese personnel is purely ungrounded and absurd.”

The charges against the Chinese military officials come on the heels of a separate worldwide operation over the weekend that resulted in the arrest of 97 people in 16 countries who are suspected of developing, distributing or using malicious software called BlackShades, Holder said. The software allows criminals to gain surreptitious control of personal computers. An announcement on those arrests was expected for later Monday in New York.

“These two cases show that we are stepping up our cyber enforcement efforts really around the globe,” Holder said, adding that the U.S. will not tolerate these activities.

U.S. officials have previously asserted that China’s army and China-based hackers had launched attacks on American industrial and military targets, often to steal secrets or intellectual property. China has said that it faces a major threat from hackers, and the country’s military is believed to be among the biggest targets of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command.

“It is our hope that the Chinese government will respect our criminal justice system,” Holder said.

Attorney General Eric Holder, accompanied by, from …

In recent months, Washington has been increasingly critical of what it describes as provocative Chinese actions in pursuit of territorial claims in disputed seas in East Asia. For its part, Beijing complains that the Obama administration’s attempt to redirect its foreign policy toward Asia after a decade of war in the Middle East is emboldening China’s neighbors and causing tension.

The hackers allegedly stole emails and other communications that could have helped Chinese firms learn the strategies and weaknesses of American companies involved in litigation with the Chinese government or Chinese firms.

Despite the ominous-sounding allegations, at least one of the firms downplayed the hacking.

“To our knowledge, no material information was compromised during this incident, which occurred several years ago,” said Monica Orbe, Alcoa’s director of corporate affairs. “Safeguarding our data is a top priority for Alcoa, and we continue to invest resources to protect our systems.”

Last September, President Barack Obama discussed cybersecurity issues on the sidelines of a summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“China not only does not support hacking but also opposes it,” Premier Li Keqiang said last year in a news conference when asked if China would stop hacking U.S. websites. “Let’s not point fingers at each other without evidence but do more to safeguard cyber security.”

—————————–

But hacking still does threaten common citizens and yet no one tells us much less provides the tools to protect us.

Computer hacker forums lit up last week as Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and police in 17 countries began knocking on doors, seizing computers and making arrests.

On the popular websites where cyber criminals buy and sell software kits and help each other solve problems, hackers issued warnings about police visits to their homes.

The hackers quickly guessed that a major crackdown was underway on users of the malicious software known as Blackshades.

The malware sells for as little as $40. It can be used to hijack computers remotely and turn on computer webcams, access hard drives and capture keystrokes to steal passwords — without victims ever knowing it.

Criminals have used Blackshades to commit everything from extortion to bank fraud, the FBI said.

Last week, watching it all play out were about two dozen FBI cybercrime investigators holed up in the New York FBI’s special operations center, high above lower Manhattan.

Rows of computer screens flickered with updates from police in Germany, Denmark, Canada, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Investigators followed along in real time as hundreds of search warrants were executed and suspects were interviewed.

One of the largest global cybercrime crackdowns has yielded the arrests of over 100 people linked to the Blackshades malware.

The sweep, capping a two-year operation, was coordinated so suspects didn’t have time to destroy evidence. It included the arrest in Moldova of a Swedish hacker who was a co-creator of Blackshades. Prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office are expected to announce the results of the probe later Monday.

700,000 victims around the world: Inside the FBI special operations center, six large computer monitors displayed key parts of the probe. Agents kept an eye on one screen showing a popular website where Blackshades was sold. The site was taken down by the FBI.

Another monitor showed a heatmap of the world displaying the locations of the 700,000 estimated victims, whose computers have been hijacked by criminals using the Blackshades software. Splotches of green on the map indicated concentrations of infected computers in highly populated parts of the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia.

The FBI said that in just a few years Blackshades has become one of the world’s most popular remote-administration tools, or RATs, used for cybercrime.

Leo Taddeo, chief of the FBI’s cybercrime investigations in New York, said the unprecedented coordination with so many police agencies came about because of concern about the fast growth of cybercrime businesses.

“These cyber criminals have paid employees, they have feedback from customers — other cyber criminals — to continually update and improve their product,” Taddeo said recently. While he spoke, agents took calls from counterparts working the case in more than 40 U.S. cities.

Blackshades had grown rapidly because it was marketed as off-the-shelf, easy to use software, much like legitimate consumer tax-preparation software.

“It’s very sophisticated software in that it is not very easy to detect,” Taddeo said. “It can be installed by somebody with very little skills.”

Hack victim: ‘I felt completely violated’: For victims whose personal computers were turned into weapons against them, the arrests bring reassurance.

Cassidy Wolf, the reigning Miss Teen USA, received an ominous email message in March 2013.

The email, from an unidentified sender, included nude photos of herself, obviously taken in her bedroom from her laptop. “Either you do one of the things listed below or I upload these pics and a lot more … on all your accounts for everybody to see and your dream of being a model will be transformed into a porn star,” the email said.

And so began what Wolf describes as three months of torture.

The email sender demanded better quality photos and video, and a five-minute sex show via Skype, according to FBI documents filed in court. He told her she must respond to his emails immediately — software he had installed told him when she opened his messages.

“I felt completely violated,” Wolf said in an interview. “I felt scared because I didn’t know if this person was a physical threat. My whole sense of security and trust was gone.”

A former classmate she knew, Jared Abrahams, had installed Blackshades malware on Wolf’s laptop. In March, the 20-year-old computer science student was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to extortion and unauthorized access of a computer.

Abrahams had been watching her from her laptop camera for a year, Wolf later learned. The laptop always sat open in her bedroom, as she played music or communicated with her friends.

Abrahams had used Blackshades to target victims from California to Maryland, and from Russia to Ireland. He used the handle “cutefuzzypuppy” to get tips on how to use malware, according to FBI documents. In all, he told the FBI, he had controlled as many as 150 computers.

Cybercriminals like Abrahams often rely on weak links in computer security, and mistakes by victims, to infect computers.

Many computer users don’t update anti-virus software. Many click on links sent in messages on social media sites such as Facebook, or in email, without knowing what they’re clicking on. In seconds, malware is downloaded. Often computer users have no idea infection has taken place.

“A hacker is going to go for the low-hanging fruit,” said Tyler Cohen Wood, a cybersecurity expert at the Defense Intelligence Agency and author of the book “Catching the Catfishers.”

Victims often don’t realize how easy they make themselves to be targeted and can better protect themselves by being careful about what they reveal online, Wood said.

Taddeo, the FBI cyber chief, said the most common way criminals have used Blackshades to target victims is by sending emails that seem legitimate, perhaps with a marketing offer, and with a link to click. “Anyone who signs on to the internet is potentially a victim of this tool,” he said.

In Wolf’s case, she received a Facebook message related to teen pageants. When her computer was infected it sent messages to other friends, whose computers also became infected.

The episode has made Wolf into a campaigner to urge young people to be better educated about online safety. She said her passwords are now more complicated and unique for each account, and she changes them often. She uses updated security software.

“I really didn’t think that everything I worked for could be lost because of this,” she said. “This can happen to anybody.” To top of page

 

Hillary and Kerry, Stewards of Soros Policy

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Money buys influence and Soros has both. While much has been written and exposed on George Soros, at the very top U.S. leadership follows the Soros edict, follow my playbook and you will be rewarded.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Kerry have all left a wake of destruction globally as they have been bought by George Soros. Most recently, matters relating to Israel, Russia and the European Union appear to defy logic, when upon a closer look, Soros is at the core of policy.

Quietly, last week, John Kerry welcomed and introduced George Soros at a conference held at the George C. Marshall Center to discuss matters on civil society. When Soros speaks, leadership listens and on the subject of civil society, Soros is dictating society according to his own objectives. None of those objectives are in keeping with America’s best interests. Obama, Hillary and Kerry are complete acolytes of Soros and obey his commands.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will introduce liberal megadonor George Soros at an open forum on Tuesday, the latest evidence of the billionaire using his political connections to benefit his investments and foreign policy goals, critics say.

Kerry will introduce Soros at the 1:30 p.m. forum on May 13 at the George C. Marshall Center in Washington, D.C., according to a State Department event notice.

Soros will discuss “strengthening civil society, democracy and the world economy” with Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Douglas Frantz following Kerry’s introduction.

Soros, a New York City hedge fund manager who amassed great wealth through his company Soros Fund Management, has used his foundation network—known as the Open Society Foundations (OSF)—to dispense more than $11 billion to groups abroad as well as numerous left-leaning U.S. groups in the last three decades.

He is perhaps the Democratic Party’s most famous donor, contributing almost $24 million to advocacy groups that supported Kerry’s failed presidential bid in 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He also donated $1 million to the Priorities USA Action Super PAC that helped reelect President Barack Obama in 2012.

Critics say Soros leverages his political connections to increase the returns on his investments.

While Soros has increased his multi-million dollar investments in both U.S. and foreign companies that extract shale oil and gas, the Obama administration has championed natural gas as a less carbon-intensive bridge fuel toward a “clean-energy future.” The administration’s proposal to offer incentives to companies that use trucks powered by natural gas would benefit Westport Innovations, a company that converts diesel engines for natural gas use and is partially owned by Soros’ hedge fund.

Soros’ political advocacy also tends to blend with his investments. He proposed in 2009 that developed countries create a “green fund” to combat climate change in developing countries by directing billions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) toward forestry, land-use, and agricultural projects. Soros’ fund controls more than a $200 million stake in Adecoagro, a Luxembourg-based company that owns hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland in South America and would benefit from the IMF cash infusion.

Soros told the New Yorker in a 2004 interview that “there are occasionally symbiotic moments between political and business interests” that occur during his efforts to influence American policy.

Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and former Pentagon adviser in the George W. Bush administration, said in an email that he hopes “Kerry will take a long shower after the event” because hosting Soros is the “diplomatic equivalent of prostitution.”

Rubin said the optics of the event are “horrible” given Soros’ longstanding ties to the administration and his past record of marrying policy advocacy with business.

“If Kerry wants to sponsor a well-deserving guest at a State Department ‘open forum,’ why not someone like Malala Yousefzai, the young school girl whom the Taliban tried to murder?” he said. “Our diplomats could learn a thing or two about moral clarity from her; they certainly won’t from Soros.”

State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf told the Washington Free Beacon that criticisms of Soros’ appearance at the event are “wholly ridiculous and have no basis in fact whatsoever.”

“This is a regular secretary’s open forum event intended to inform and educate department employees,” Harf said in an email. “George Soros was invited to discuss his views on support of civil society.”

Harf noted that the forum has hosted “guests from diverse points of view” in the past, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, and Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson.

Soros’ actions abroad have also conflicted with traditional U.S. foreign policy stances, raising questions about his appearance at a State Department-sponsored forum.

The OSF have financially supported groups that support boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israel and called it an “apartheid state,” according to a report last May by NGO Monitor.

The OSF network finances groups such as the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a Gaza-based organization that regularly accuses Israel of being an “apartheid state” and refers to terror attacks on Israeli civilians as “resistance.”

Kerry was widely criticized last month after warning that Israel could become “an apartheid state” if it failed to reach a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

Additionally, Soros has financed opposition groups and media in countries such as Azerbaijan and Armenia, two countries that are still locked in a violent and decades-old territorial dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Soros’ involvement there prompted leaders to express concerns that he could further stoke tensions and contribute to another outbreak of war.

“He pursues his own vision, undisturbed by his effect on other nations or the interests of his own,” wrote Richard Miniter, a contributor to Forbes, in 2011. “It is hard for foreign governments to hold him accountable, and his goals and methods are usually kept secret.”

 

Soros wrote in his 2006 book, The Age of Fallibility: The Consequences of the War on Terror, that “the main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.”

Soros has an estimated net worth of $20 billion—much of it made through his controversial investment philosophy of making massive, highly leveraged bets on the direction of global financial markets. His involvement in the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s drew sharp rebukes from leaders in the region.

He is a major donor to the liberal Center for American Progress and an architect of the Democracy Alliance, a shadowy organization that disburses millions to left-leaning groups but does not disclose its donors.

Additionally, Soros has staked out controversial positions on social issues, calling in 2010 for the full legalization of marijuana in the United States.

Soros’ office did not respond to a request for comment.

 

George Soros

When it comes to Russia and Putin’s aggressive missions towards Crimea, Ukraine, the Baltic states, George Soros has his hands all over the policy of the United States and the European Union where the International Monetary Fund plays in the background.

The billionaire financier says in its tepid response to Russia’s Crimea land grab, the EU flubbed a key chance to breathe new life into the stale union.
George Soros, one of the world’s leading investors, has warned that the European Union is in danger of falling apart if it fails to confront Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression in Ukraine.

The billionaire financier told The Daily Beast that European governments should have seized on Russia’s land grab in Crimea to breathe new life into a union that is disintegrating and stumbling towards oblivion. Instead, he argued, squabbling European nations have failed to meet the challenge and continued to act in their own narrow self-interest. “Europe was totally unprepared for this crisis and Putin outmaneuvered Europe with no difficulty,” he said.

Soros, who became known as the Man Who Broke the Bank of England after making $1 billion by betting against Europe’s previous financial union, has long insisted that the Euro was being fatally mismanaged. His latest book, published this week, is entitled The Tragedy of the European Union. A loud supporter at the launch of the Euro currency and a cheerleader for a united Europe, Soros has been confounded by what he calls the “nightmare” reality 15 years after its introduction.

Speaking in London, he said it was heart-breaking to see European governments shrug their shoulders at the precise moment the continent was finally witnessing an unprecedented popular uprising in the name of the European Union. “Ukrainians have effectively proved that they are willing to sacrifice their lives to get closer to a Europe that is, at the same time, in the process of disintegration,” he said.

With Putin’s troops in Crimea and a referendum on joining Russia due to be held over the weekend, Soros said there was still time for Europe to act, and reinvigorate the European Union’s withering soul.

“I would argue passionately that [the European Union] should not be a failed experiment and events in Ukraine are a wake-up call to face that issue,” he said. “It’s a challenge, and I hope that Europe will respond to it and actually really rediscover its original mission because that’s what got lost in this distortion that has occurred.”

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, indicated that Europe was willing to increase pressure on the Kremlin on Thursday during her most emotional and strident speech since the start of the Ukrainian crisis. She said a referendum orchestrated by Crimea’s pro-Russia parliament would be a “catastrophe,” and indicated that the EU was willing to impose travel bans and asset freezes on people and firms accused of helping to violate Ukraine’s territorial integrity as soon as Monday.

Soros argued that it was more important for Europe to offer positive assistance to the struggling Ukrainian government. “It’s very important to respond and respond the right way, which is not necessarily to impose sanctions on Russia, but to actually help Ukraine financially, and also with technical assistance—something  like a European Marshall Plan for Ukraine—that would be the right response,” he said.

In his new book, which asks “Is it too late to save the European Union?” Soros argues that Putin’s attempt to build a new Eastern bloc in Ukraine and beyond could eventually jolt Europe back to life. “We have just witnessed a dramatic test of strength between Russia and the European Union. Russia came out ahead,” he said. “Russia has benefited from the fact that Europe is disunited. But now that Russia is emerging as a threat to Europe, it may once again become a force that brings Europe closer together. I pin my hopes on Chancellor Merkel … one must never give up hope.”

He is hardly holding his breath, however. Soros blames the Germans for eroding Europe’s fragile union by enforcing policies of austerity and allowing southern European nations to build up debts they will never be able to repay. He accused Berlin of doing “just enough” to keep the Euro afloat: “This confirms my worst fears. It’s the nightmare I’ve been talking about and there is little chance we’ll wake up soon.”

Germany’s economic strength makes it the Eurozone’s driving force—Britain is not part of the currency union—but the nation’s history has turned it into a reluctant leader. “Germany has emerged as the imperial power, the hegemon of Europe, but the German public does not want to be in that position exactly because of the painful memory of Hitler. It is in denial and is unwilling to live up to the responsibilities,” he said.

Despite its unwillingness to assume a strong leadership role, Soros argues that Berlin’s fiscal rigidity has created a two-tier Europe where debtor countries are at a permanent disadvantage. If that does not change, he said: “We will have a Europe in which Germany is seen not as a leader but as an oppressor and exploiter. It will not be loved and admired by the rest of Europe it will be hated and resisted.”

That resistance has already begun in a swathe of countries where popular anti-European sentiment has been seen on the street and at the ballot box. Europe-wide elections in May are expected to send a record number of politicians to Brussels who are hostile to the very institutions they will be populating. In Britain, the governing Conservative Party has promised a referendum on leaving the European Union altogether. “That would be a big step forward in the disintegration of the European Union,” Soros said. “Britain’s absence would greatly diminish the weight of the EU in the world … The world badly needs Europe’s soft power.”

Black Flag tops the Eiffel Tower

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Out of every crisis, more lessons are learned and side debates begin. Sadly, due to the Boko Harem kidnapping of hundreds of Christian girl is one event that is causing another look at a topic few have wanted to investigate and reveal, that is Islam and the flight of Christians worldwide to safer destinations.

While we know that Europe is in real trouble with regard to the infiltration of Islam into the every day culture, Britain is on a path that is following France and France is toast.

 

black flag france

For America, there is a lesson to be learned and then eventual action to be taken. Read up here people and pay close attention to the details.

Polls show that more than 70% of the French… expect that France will become a country under submission to Islam.

Last month, between April 18-21, the Union of Islamic Organizations of France [UOIF], the French branch of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (presided over by Yusuf al Qaradawi) held its thirty-first annual conference in Le Bourget, north of Paris. As usual, jihadist and anti-Semitic books, which are banned in French bookstores but tolerated there, were offered in several booths.

As usual also, speakers were invited to deliver fiery speeches. In 2012, the keynote speaker was supposed to be Qaradawi himself, but faced with protests from the Jewish community, France denied Qaradawi a visa to enter French territory, and he was replaced by Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim Brotherhood operative who works with Qaradawi in Doha, Qatar, at the Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics.

Tariq Ramadan was again the keynote speaker in 2013. This year, Tariq gave way to his brother, Hani, Director of the Islamic Center of Geneva, founded in 1961 by their father, Said Ramadan, son-in-law and senior disciple of Hassan al Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood.

If Tariq Ramadan knows how to hide his extremism, his brother is more explicit and direct. His speech was devoted to “global threats” facing Islam; he described them as having a single source: “the Jews and Zionist barbarism,” an octopus “hiding in the shadows,” a “power that holds the global finance and the media.” He called on young French Muslims to “fight for Islam” and to go to Syria, where several hundred French youths have already joined jihadist groups.

If UOIF had only a marginal influence, such statements would be already worrying. But UOIF is the leading French Muslim organization, and Hani Ramadan’s speech, like Tariq Ramadan’s speeches in 2012 and 2013, was listened to by an audience of 150,000 enthusiastic people, and viewed by hundred of thousands of others on UOIF-TV, the digital television channel established by the UOIF.

More than 8,000,000 Muslims live in France, most of whom are French citizens, and the Muslim population in France continues to grow. France is now the main Muslim country in Europe. Successive French governments can decide to expel a Muslim preacher or a recruiter of jihadist fighters; they can deny visas, but they seem unable to do more.

Although the French government denies it, it seems clear that substantial ransoms were paid to Islamist groups for the release of French hostages: $28,000,000 to al Qaeda in Niger in October 2013 and $18,000,000 to Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant in Syria, on April 19.

The creation, on April 25, by French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, of a counseling center, website and telephone hotline to “advise” parents whose children are in the process of radicalization seems almost ridiculous. Entire neighborhoods are controlled by Islamist preachers and Bernard Cazeneuve knows it: officially, administrative authorities call these neighborhoods “Sensitive Urban Zones,” presumably because at any time they can explode. Unofficially, the police call them “Sharia Zones”, and have been ordered by the Department of the Interior to keep out.

Political leaders of all parties know that most elections cannot be won if the Muslim vote is neglected, and the leaders of the National Front are no exception: Marine Le Pen has long ceased to incriminate Islam and now attacks “crime” and “immigration” without providing details. Sometimes she may denounce “calls to jihad” and “fundamentalism”, but takes care not to go beyond that. Although she criticizes Qatar or Saudi Arabia, she says that France should become an “ally” of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and asks her “fellow Muslims” to join her fight against “American globalism and its Islamist allies“.

A “Collective Against Islamophobia in France” is gaining ground: it handles complaints against any critical remarks about Islam, and it can rely on the courts to punish offenders. A “League of Judicial Defense of Muslims” was also created in 2013 by Karim Achoui, a lawyer disbarred because of his links with organized crime. No anti-racist organization dares denounce Muslim anti-Semitism, and none of them criticizes speeches such as the one given by Hani Ramadan in Le Bourget.

Jewish institutions do not denounce Muslim anti-Semitism, either: they speak of an “unhealthy climate”. When, on April 28, during a tribute ceremony to the Jews deported from France to Auschwitz, Arno Klarsfeld, a member of the Council of State and son of Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, said that “some of the suburban youth are anti-Semitic,” he was immediately summoned to appear before a judge.

NGOs fighting the Islamization of France are now marginalized. Their leaders are persecuted by the justice system and severely punished. The mainstream media demonize them. The main one, Riposte Laique, organized a demonstration on March 9. About four hundred people came. Three or four years ago, Riposte Laique could gather several thousand people.

The anti-Semitic and pro-Islamic standup comedian Dieudonné continues to give performances to packed theaters. On June 21, he will host a ceremony to honor people who posed with the best “quenelles” — the inverted Nazi salute he invented. More than ten thousand tickets have already been sold. On his website, Dieudosphere.com, pictures of “quenelles” are still present. Dieudosphere.com sells a comic book called Yacht People. The cover shows a fat rich man with a hooked nose rubbing his hands together and flashing a greedy smile. The resemblance to the caricatures of Jews published during the Nazi era is evident. Manuel Valls fought Dieudonné when he was Interior minister. Since he became Prime Minister, fighting Dieudonné is no longer one of his priorities.

During an interview with Alexandre Arcady, the director of Twenty Four Days, a film about the assassination seven years ago of Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew who was taken hostage and killed by young Muslims from Paris suburbs, TV journalist Aymeric Caron tried to explain that the growth of anti-Jewish hatred in France was logical because “Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian children.” These remarks did not offend anyone except a few Jewish journalists, so they were cut from the edited version of the show. Aymeric Caron explained that he was not an anti-Semite, but only “anti-Zionist.” He has recently published a book called, Incorrect: in which almost all his targets have one thing in common: They are Jews. He is invited onto many talk shows to speak about his book. Whoever looks for books about Israel will easily find books called Israel, the New Apartheid or The Invention of the Land of Israel, by Shlomo Sand. Books offering less-biased viewpoints are unavailable. Dozens of books by Tariq Ramadan are on the shelves of all main bookstores.

The number of Jews leaving France is steadily increasing. French people who have the financial means also leave the country. Most others expect the worst. Polls show that the French are now the most pessimistic people in Europe. They also show that more than 70% of the French are afraid of the rise of Islam in France: they expect that France will become a country under submission to Islam.