The DoJ Hacked, DHS Files Compromised

Hackers leaked DHS staff records, 200GB of files are in their hands

A hacker accessed an employee’s email account at the Department of Justice and stole 200GB of files including records of 9,000 DHS staffers and 20,000 FBI employees.

SecurityAffairs: Yesterday, the data related a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staff directory were leaked online, a Twitter account shared the link to an archive containing 9,355 names.

The responsible for the data leakage first contacted Motherboard to share the precious archive.

Each record of the DHS Staff Directory includes name, title, email address, and phone number.

Going deep in the archive it is possible to note that it includes information of DHS security specialists, program analysts, InfoSec and IT and also 100 employees with a title “Intelligence”.

The same Twitter account has announced later the imminent release of an additional data dump containing 20,000 FBI employees.

DHS firewall

Are the records authentic?

Motherboard that obtained the archive reached the operations center of the FBI, and in one case the individual who pick up the phone presented himself with the same name associated with that number in the archive. A similar circumstance occurred with a DHS employee, Motherboard so confirmed that the information is legit.

Which is the source of data?

According to Motherboard, a hacker accessed an employee’s email account at the Department of Justice. As proof, the hacker sent the email message to Motherboard’s contributor Joseph Cox directly from the compromised account.

“A hacker, who wishes to remain anonymous, plans to dump the apparent names, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers of over 20,000 supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) employees, as well as over 9,000 alleged Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, Motherboard has learned.” wrote Cox in a blog post.

“The hacker also claims to have downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of data from a Department of Justice (DOJ) computer, although that data has not been published.”

The hacker first tried to use the compromised credentials to access a DOJ staff portal, but without success, then he called the department directly and obtained the access through social engineering techniques.

The hacker accessed the DoJ intranet where the database is hosted, then he downloaded around the, out of 1TB that he had access to.

“I HAD access to it, I couldn’t take all of the 1TB,” the hacker told to MotherBoard.

The hackers confirmed his intention to release the rest of the data in the near future.Which is the motivation behind the attack?

It is not clear at the moment why the hacker released the archive, surely it’s not financially motivated. The hacker only left the following message when has leaked the data-

“This is for Palestine, Ramallah, West Bank, Gaza, This is for the child that is searching for an answer…” which are the verses of “Long Live Palestine”

The only certainty right now is that similar incidents are becoming too frequent, apparently the government staff is not properly trained on the main cyber threats or the hacking technique. Similar incidents show the lack of knowledge on the most basic security measures.
Whenever a hacker leaks so sensitive data, I think the number of his peers who had access to the same information with the intent to use them in other attacks or resell them, perhaps to a foreign government.

Pierluigi Paganini

*** As a reminder, in 2014 a much more dangerous hack intrusion happened at the DHS:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alerted critical infrastructure operators to recent breaches within the sector – including the hack of a U.S. public utility that was vulnerable to brute-force attacks.

This week, the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT), a subgroup of DHS, revealed information about the incidents in a newsletter (PDF).

According to ICS-CERT, industrial control systems were compromised in two, new incidents: one, involving the hack of an unnamed public utility, and another scenario where a control system server was remotely accessed by a “sophisticated threat actor.”

After investigating the public utility hack, ICS-CERT found that the system’s authentication mechanism was susceptible to brute-force attacks – where saboteurs routinely run through a list of passwords or characters to gain access to targeted systems. The control system used a simple password mechanism, the newsletter revealed.

In

Hey Janet and Jeh, How do you Square This?

May 2015, speech in part: DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, “The FBI continues to identify, investigate, interdict and help the Department of Justice prosecute attempted terrorist plots to the homeland. With the help of DHS, the FBI has also made a number of arrests of those who attempt to become foreign fighters, before they can get on an airplane and leave the country.

In reaction to terrorist groups’ public calls for attacks on government installations in the West, and following the attack last fall in Ottawa, I directed that our Federal Protective Service enhance its security and presence at federal office buildings around the country. This enhanced security remains in place.

In reaction to terrorists’ public calls for attacks on U.S. military installations and personnel, the Department of Defense has enhanced its security at bases in the U.S.

Given the new reality of the global terrorist threat — which involves the potential for small-scale homegrown attacks by those who could strike with little or no notice, we are working in closer collaboration with state and local law enforcement. Given the nature of the evolving threat, the local cop on the beat may actually be the first to detect a terrorist attack on the homeland.

So, as often as several times a week, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI share terrorist threat information and intelligence with Joint Terrorism Task Forces, state fusion centers, and local police chiefs and sheriffs.” Full speech here and note the some of the attendees.

Maybe we should be seeking a subpoena of Janet Napolitano and Jeh Johnson.

***

Enter Philip Haney, again:

DHS Official: I Was Ordered to Purge Records of Islamic Terror Ties
A veteran official with the Department of Homeland Security claims he and other staff were ordered to destroy records on a federal database that showed links between possible jihadists and Islamic terrorist groups.

“After leaving my 15-year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack,” the former employee, Patrick Haney, wrote in an explosive column that was published late Friday on The Hill website.

Haney alleges that the Obama administration has been “engaged in a bureaucratic effort” to destroy the raw material and intelligence the Department of Homeland Security has been collecting for years, leaving the United States open to mass-casualty attacks.

His story starts in 2009, when during the holiday travel season, a 23-year-old Nigerian Muslim,  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253, with explosives packed in his underwear and the hopes of slaughtering 290 travelers flying on Christmas Day from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan. Passengers subdued the jihadist and he was arrested, thwarting the plot.

After the attempt, Haney writes, President Barack Obama “threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to ‘connect the dots,’ saying that it was not a failure to collect the intelligence that could have stopped the attack, but rather “‘a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.'”

But most Americans were not aware that the Department of Homeland Security’s employees suffered enormous damage to their morale from Obama’s words, Haney said.

Further, many were infuriated “because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material — the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away.”

Just one month before the attempted attack, Haney said, his DHS supervisors ordered him to either delete or modify the records for several hundred people tied to Islamist terror organizations, including Hamas, from the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, the federal database.

Those records give DHS the ability to “connect dots,” explained Haney, and every day, the agency’s Custom and Border Protection officials use the database while watching people who are associated with known terrorist affiliations seeking patterns that could indicate a pending attack.

“Enforcing a political scrubbing of records of Muslims greatly affected our ability to do that,” said Haney.

“Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database,” he wrote.

And even weeks after the attempted Christmas Day attack, Haney said, he was still being ordered to delete and scrub terrorists’ records, making it more difficult to connect dots in the future.

The number of attempted and successful Islamic terrorist attacks kept increasing, notes Haney, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, conducted by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev; Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez’ shooting of two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee last year; the attack conducted by Faisal Shahzad in May 2010; Detroit “honor” killer Rahim Alfatlawi in 2011; Amine El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol in 2012; and Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen in 2014.

He believes it is “very plausible” that one or more of those homeland incidents could have been prevented, if DHS subject matter experts had been allowed to keep doing their jobs.

“It is demoralizing — and infuriating — that today, those elusive dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009,” Haney concluded.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beatles and London Boys and Militant Islamists

Unmasked: The Second Member Of ISIS’s “Beatles” Execution Cell

BuzzFeed-Exclusive: Alexanda Kotey is the second member of the notorious ISIS cell led by “Jihadi John” to be identified.

A second member of the notorious ISIS execution cell once headed by “Jihadi John” has been unmasked as a “quiet and humble” football fan from west London, BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post can reveal.

Thirty-two-year-old Alexanda Kotey has been identified by British and American intelligence services as one of four ISIS guards, collectively known as the “Beatles”, who are responsible for beheading 27 hostages. The guards were given their nickname by hostages because of their British accents.

It can be revealed that Kotey travelled to the Middle East alongside three other known extremists on a controversial aid convoy to Gaza organised by the London mayoral candidate George Galloway in 2009 – and friends in west London have not heard from him since.

He is the second member of the cell to be identified, after “Jihadi John” was exposed as west Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, who was killed by US a drone strike in November. The other members of the cell, nicknamed “Ringo”, “George”, and “Paul”, remain among the world’s most wanted men and are being hunted by intelligence and security services on both sides of the Atlantic.

A US intelligence official confirmed that Kotey had travelled to Syria and said his role in the taking of Western hostages was being investigated. A UK security official declined to comment.

It is not clear whether Kotey is the guard nicknamed “Ringo”, who has previously posted online about growing up in west London’s Shepherd’s Bush area, or “George”, identified by some hostages as a senior figure in the group. There are understood to be discrepancies in the accounts of freed hostages as to which guard had which nickname.

BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post have spoken to people familiar with the investigation into the identities of the “Beatles”, obtained identity documents, and interviewed neighbours, relatives, and friends to build a picture of the unassuming young man believed to have become one of ISIS’s most feared terrorists.

Kotey, who is half Ghanaian, half Greek Cypriot, grew up in a family of dress cutters in Shepherd’s Bush – just under two miles away from Emwazi – and was an avid supporter of Queens Park Rangers Football Club.

He is said to have converted to Islam, grown a beard, and begun dressing in robes in his early twenties, after falling in love with a Muslim woman. He left two young children in Britain.

Investigators believe Kotey was radicalised while attending the Al-Manaar mosque in Ladbroke Grove alongside Emwazi. Friends have confirmed that he was a regular at the mosque and advocated suicide bombing from a street stall outside.

The mosque leaders said they have clamped down on radicalisation and work closely with the police and the council to combat extremism.

Kotey is also connected to the “London Boys” – a network of extremists who fomented radical Islam while playing five-a-side football in west London and have been linked to the 7/7 London bombings and the subsequent failed 21/7 plot.

Kotey, who is half Ghanaian, half Greek Cypriot, grew up in a family of dress cutters in Shepherd’s Bush and was an avid supporter of Queens Park Rangers Football Club.

Documents obtained by BuzzFeed News have confirmed that Kotey travelled to Gaza alongside Reza Afsharzadegan, a London Boys leader who was close to Emwazi, and two other extremists on the £1 million aid convoy led by Galloway in 2009.

A friend who travelled in the same group says he lost track of Kotey after reaching Gaza and does not know whether he ever returned to Britain – but has since heard that he is in Syria.

A spokesman for Galloway said: “There was, of course, a vetting procedure on those who applied to join the convoy,” and that “the names you have given are unknown to us”.

Investigators believe Kotey travelled to Raqqa, ISIS’s de facto capital, where he is suspected of joining the group of Britons who systematically beheaded and tortured hostages placed under their watch and would become known as the “Beatles”.

The four members of the “Beatles” cell gained a reputation as the cruellest of all ISIS guards, using electric shocks, waterboarding, and mock executions – including a staged crucifixion – to terrorise their hostages. They have beheaded seven British, American, and Japanese hostages and 18 members of the Syrian army.

A group of men look on as a jihadi flag is raised on a building in Raqqa, which would go on to become the de facto ISIS capital. AFP / Getty Images

A Danish hostage, Daniel Rye, who was released in June 2014, recalled in a memoir how “Ringo” had kicked him 25 times in his ribs on his 25th birthday, telling him it was a gift. Rye wrote that “George” dominated the group of jailers and was the most violent and unpredictable.

Rye also recalled being taken to an open grave where a suspected spy was shot by Emwazi on “George”’s instructions while “Ringo” filmed. Rye said the Britons forced him and other hostages to climb into the grave and photographed them.

“Ringo” has stated online that he is “As British as they come”. He also described himself as “born and raised in Shepherd’s Bush, was a big QPR fan, love a good old fry up in the mornings”.

When BuzzFeed News traced Kotey to his family address in Shepherd’s Bush, two garden gnomes wearing Queens Park Rangers football strips outside the front door were the first clue that he might indeed be “Ringo”.

The deeply divided pocket of west London where Kotey grew up has an uncomfortable history as a breeding ground for violent extremism. At least nine jihadis, including Emwazi and the failed 21/7 bombers, were radicalised in the notoriously unequal area, where some of London’s most deprived families live on sprawling estates alongside multimillion-pound mansions, home to super-rich models, footballers, and minor royals.

Alexanda Amon Kotey – known as Alexe to his friends – was born on 13 December 1983 to a Greek Cypriot mother who worked as a printing machinist and a father who hailed from a long line of Ghanaian dress cutters.

Kotey’s mother was just 17 when the couple married, and gave birth to his older brother two months later. Alexe followed four years after that, but the family was struck by tragedy just before his third birthday when his 28-year-old father died of multiple injuries. A relative told BuzzFeed News he had jumped in front of a train.

Kotey’s mother said her son had converted and adopted an Islamic name after falling in love with a Muslim woman.

Neighbours recall Kotey as a “reserved, polite boy” who was a keen supporter of Queens Park Rangers. Kim Everett, who has lived next door to the family for 25 years, remembers Kotey and his brother playing football with her sons in the building’s back garden, and teasing them for supporting Chelsea FC. “I knew him since he was this big,” she said, gesturing downwards. “He grew up with my sons. He was lovely and a really quiet boy.”

Everett said she saw Kotey less often after he moved out of his family home and that she was taken by surprise when she encountered him again when he was about 20 and found he had converted to Islam.

“The next time I saw him he was bearded, full garments,” she said. “I did say to [his mother]: ‘Alexe’s changed his faith?’, and she said yes. She wasn’t too happy.”

Kotey’s mother told Everett her son had converted and adopted an Islamic name after falling in love with a Muslim woman. Everett told BuzzFeed News he went on to marry and then split up with the woman after having two daughters with her, and the relationship was confirmed by his friends.

The children continue to visit their grandmother at the Kotey family home today. Kotey’s mother and brother, who are not being named, refused to talk to reporters from BuzzFeed News and asked that their privacy be respected.

Kotey’s conversion surprised those who knew the family. A man who worked with Kotey’s older brother at a Puma store remembered him visiting the shop.

“I know that Alexe converted to Islam,” he said. “I remember being surprised because [his brother] wasn’t very religious.”

Kotey with his British passport on the “Viva Palestina” aid mission. Supplied to BuzzFeed News

According to friends, Kotey’s faith became more extreme after he began visiting the Al-Manaar mosque, where intelligence agencies believe he and Emwazi were radicalised.

A former friend who also attended the mosque recalls becoming concerned about Kotey’s increasingly radical views. “The guy used to have this stall outside the mosque,” he said, “and those guys used to openly preach and argue about what they thought was their cause or ideology.”

He remembered Kotey debating with a more moderate friend of his outside the mosque: “My friend, now, he would say, ‘You can’t kill yourself, you can’t commit suicide, it’s forbidden in the Qur’an,’ and he [Kotey] would try to justify it, for suicide bombing.”

Adam Nazar, an advisory board member at Al-Manaar, said there had been few controls in place until 2014 when the new leadership at the mosque had “really put a clamp down on everything”. He continued: “The thing with mosques are people can have public conversations in the corner of a mosque and no one would know, that’s the same with a church, that’s the same with a bus station, that’s the same with a college.” He said that under the new leadership, Al-Manaar now ​“has a great relationship with the council, with the police in terms of working around extremism, working with youths, and so forth”.

Dr Abdulkarim Khalil, ​the ​previous leader of the mosque, ​spoke of his difficulties in preventing the radicalisation of young men in the community in a 2014 interview. “We try our best to control what goes on in our premises,” he said. “We don’t allow people to address the congregation; we don’t allow people to distribute literature.

“Unfortunately these things happen on the big occasions, like on Fridays. And then you find people on the street outside the mosque, lobbying people, giving out literature — some of it for good causes, some of it for others.”

Kotey is also said to have fallen in with the London Boys network of extremists in west London, through which intelligence agencies suspect he came into contact with Emwazi’s associate Afsharzadegan. “He’s been known to hang out with that crowd since 2008, maybe even before that,” the friend said.

Despite Kotey’s extremist views, the friend remembers him as being “humble, quiet and reserved”, well-versed in religious literature and shy of being photographed. The man who is suspected of going on to film ISIS executions was in fact so camera-shy that it took his friend hours of searching through his old computer hard drives before two photographs of him were eventually found.

The pictures, which have been verified independently by another friend of Kotey’s, were taken in February 2009 on the controversial “Viva Palestina” aid mission to Gaza, organised by Galloway. The friend who spoke to BuzzFeed News travelled with Kotey on the 5,000-mile journey, along with hundreds of British volunteers carrying a reported £1 million worth of aid to the Palestinian territory in a convoy of 110 vehicles.

The “Viva Palestina” aid convoy of ambulances leaving central London for Gaza in December 2009. AFP / Getty Images

Viva Palestina was beset with controversy when, the day before its departure, nine of the volunteers were arrested under the Terrorism Act by Lancashire police. All were later released without charge, and Galloway branded the move an attempt to “smear and intimidate the Muslim community”.

However, a list of the convoy volunteers obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals that three of the men who travelled alongside Kotey are now known as extremists. Among them was Afsharzadegan, who was in the same sub-group of 25 volunteers. The British-Iranian terror suspect travelled to Somalia in 2006 to be trained by a top al-Qaeda operative, and intelligence agencies believe he was sent back to Britain with instructions to recruit members for al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab.

Despite Kotey’s extremist views, the friend remembers him as being “humble, quiet and reserved”, well-versed in religious literature and shy of being photographed.

Afsharzadegan was a leader of the London Boys network, through which Emwazi is believed to have been radicalised.

Another member of Kotey’s group on the convoy, Amin Addala, has also been named in court as a member of the network. And a third volunteer, Manchester-based Munir Farooqi, was convicted of terror offences in 2011 after attempting to recruit two undercover police officers to join the Taliban in Afghanistan. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The friend who travelled in the same group told BuzzFeed News the convoy “changed” Kotey, and he was unsure if he had ever returned to Britain.

Whatever happened on the way to Gaza, the friend said, the true roots of Kotey’s radicalisation lay in the deeply divided area where he grew up. “You grow up with the backdrop and you’ve got a contrast of very rich people like in Chelsea,” he said. “It can make you angry. You feel like it’s an injustice, and so you already feel like an outcast.”

Kotey was connected to the “Beatles” terror cell by the British and American investigators who have been tasked with hunting down the four guards.

Freed hostages have described how the “Beatles” were the the most hated and feared of all the ISIS guards they encountered. Didier François, a French journalist who escaped after being held captive for a year by the terror cell, said they tormented hostages by staging mock executions and telling them every day that they would be beheaded. He also questioned their devotion to Islam, saying they spoke English rather than Arabic and didn’t even have a copy of the Qur’an.

“Jihadi John” was the group’s executioner and staged his killings on video with chilling showmanship while the other members of the cell stood guard. He was responsible for the beheadings of the American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, the British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, the American aid worker Peter Kassig, and 18 members of the Syrian armed forces in a period of extraordinary brutality from August 2014 until his death in November 2015. He had previously beheaded two other Syrian soldiers and two Japanese hostages.

Full citations and credit to investigative journalists are here.

34 Groups Connected to Militant Islam

UN chief: 34 groups now allied to Islamic State extremists

UNITED NATIONS (AP)— Thirty-four militant groups from around the world had reportedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State extremist group as of mid-December — and that number will only grow in 2016, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a report Friday.

Ban said IS poses “an unprecedented threat,” because of its ability to persuade groups from countries like the Philippines, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Libya and Nigeria to pledge their allegiance.

He said U.N. member states should also prepare for an increase in attacks by IS associated groups traveling to other countries to launch attacks and develop networks.

“The recent expansion of the ISIL sphere of influence across west and north Africa, the Middle East and south and southeast Asia demonstrates the speed and scale at which the gravity of the threat has evolved in just 18 months,” Ban said, using another abbreviation for the group.

Adding to the threat, IS is “the world’s wealthiest terrorist organization,” Ban said, citing estimates the group generated $400-$500 million from oil and oil products in 2015, despite an embargo.

According to the U.N. mission in Iraq, cash taken from bank branches located in provinces under IS control totaled $1 billion. The mission also estimates that a tax on trucks entering IS controlled-territory generates nearly $1 billion a year, he said.

The extremist group captured large swathes of Iraq and Syria less than two years ago and despite international efforts to oust them, Ban said IS continues to maintain its presence in both countries and is expanding to other regions.

But the report and vote was in November of 2015:

UnitedNations: The Security Council determined today that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant/Sham (ISIL/ISIS) constituted an “unprecedented” threat to international peace and security, calling upon Member States with the requisite capacity to take “all necessary measures” to prevent and suppress its terrorist acts on territory under its control in Syria and Iraq.

Unanimously adopting resolution 2249 (2015), the Council unequivocally condemned the terrorist attacks perpetrated by ISIL — also known as Da’esh — on 26 June in Sousse, on 10 October in Ankara, on 31 October over the Sinaï Peninsula, on 12 November in Beirut and on 13 November in Paris, among others.  It expressed its deepest condolences to the victims and their families, as well as to the people and Governments of Tunisia, Turkey, Russian Federation, Lebanon and France.

The 15-member body condemned in the strongest terms ISIL’s gross, systematic and widespread abuses of human rights, as well as its destruction and looting of cultural heritage.  Those who committed, or were otherwise responsible for, terrorist acts or human rights violations must be held accountable.  By other terms, the Council urged Member States to intensify their efforts to stem the flow of foreign terrorist fighters into Iraq and Syria, and to prevent and suppress the financing of terrorism.

Following the vote, nearly all Council members took the floor to decry the “barbaric” attacks and hateful world view espoused by ISIL, reaffirming their support in both stemming the threat and bringing perpetrators to justice.  In an echo of the sentiments voiced by many around the table Spain’s representative declared:  “Today, we are all French, Russian, Malian and Arab,” adding:  “It is time to act with a French, Russian, Malian and Arab heart.”  The Council had a duty to guarantee the values and principles of the United Nations, and all must close ranks to vanquish terrorism, he stressed.

France’s representative, recalling that Da’esh had perpetrated an act of war against his country on 13 November, said today’s vote signalled recognition of the threat’s exceptional nature.  The fight against terrorism could only be effective if combined with a political transition that would eliminate Da’esh, he said, adding that France had obtained activation of the European Union’s mutual solidarity clause.

The Russian Federation’s representative said today’s unanimous vote was a step towards the creation of a broad anti-terrorism front aimed at eradicating root causes.  That also had been the aim of a Russian draft presented to the Council on 30 September, he said, describing attempts by some to block his delegation’s efforts as politically short-sighted.

Also speaking today were representatives of China, United States, Nigeria, Lithuania, Jordan, New Zealand, Chile, Angola, Venezuela and the United Kingdom.

Spooky Dude Behind Migrants and Benefits

The Open Society Foundations’ U.S. Programs is committed to building a vibrant, inclusive, and more just society in the United States. Through grant making, the Soros Justice Fellowships, and a special reserve fund used as crises and unexpected opportunities arise, U.S. Programs seeks to promote full participation in the nation’s civic, political, and economic life—particularly for communities that are historically marginalized and vulnerable—and to ensure that the core institutions of civil society are effective and accountable to the public.

The work of U.S. Programs is organized around four central goals: a more inclusive and accountable American democracy; a fair criminal justice system; full political, economic, and civic participation of communities of color and immigrants; and equitable economic growth.

Among its priorities:

Justice

Working to end mass incarceration; making police departments more accountable to the communities they serve; challenging the death penalty; and replacing youth justice policies that stigmatize and suppress with those that safeguard the rights of children.

Drug Policy

Promoting policies that address drug use—and the health, mental health, and social needs it creates—within the context of communities rather than the justice system, and working to ensure access to comprehensive treatment.

Equality

Promoting fairness and equality for all people in the United States by removing barriers to full participation in economic, social, and civic life for marginalized communities; seeking to reduce the racial wealth gap and reform harsh school discipline policies that disproportionately impact children of color; working to improve life outcomes for boys and men of color; and changing the racial narrative in this country.

Democracy

Supporting high-quality journalism to help hold powerful institutions accountable; protecting the free flow of information through an internet accessible to all; reducing the undue influence of money in politics; expanding electoral participation and combat voter suppression; and advancing reforms safeguarding the independence of state courts.

Economic Advancement

Working to promote economic opportunity for all Americans, reduce income equality, and advance fair housing and lending policies.

National Security & Human Rights

Working to promote the rule of law, defend civil liberties and human rights, and combat Islamophobia in the face of overbroad or discriminatory U.S. counterterrorism policies and practices.

Philanthropy of Place

Testing ideas at the state and local level through our sole field office, the Open Society Institute–Baltimore, which focuses on drug addiction, over-reliance on incarceration, and obstacles that prevent youth from succeeding inside and out of the classroom, as well as through the Open Places Initiative, which promotes equality and improved civic participation in Buffalo, San Diego, and Puerto Rico.

***

Countless pages here on who he gives grant money to.

Governance and Accountability
Through empowerment, policy change, and legal action, we target reforms that meaningfully improve the working and living conditions of migrants.

The International Migration Initiative seeks to address exploitation, discrimination and violence against migrants at every stage of their migration journey. Specifically, the initiative aims to increase protections for migrants in the Asia/Middle East and the Central America/Mexico corridors while improving policymaking and the governance of international migration.

Two unique aspects of the initiative’s approach amplify its impact: First, our focus on migration corridors means the initiative is active in both countries of origin and destination, and thus targets every stage of the migration journey. Second, we bridge advocacy and policy by drawing on the experience of grassroots organizations, while engaging with policymaker and political leaders. Through empowerment, policy change, and legal action, we target reforms that can meaningfully improve the working and living conditions of migrants.

The International Migration Initiative’s main areas of work are built around increasing protections for migrants and improving migration policymaking and the governance of international migration. Within these strategic priority areas, the initiative targets three overarching goals:

  • Deterring rights violations and increasing access to justice: The International Migration Initiative aims to demonstrably improve the working and living conditions of migrants by bringing about a measurable decline in acts of violence against them and reducing the incidence of forced labor. This requires the development of a broader, stronger network of organizations and practitioners engaged in advocacy. We are pursuing initiatives to increase access to justice by building capacity among legal practitioners so they can overcome legal and jurisdictional hurdles impeding migrants’ access to redress.
  • Empowering migrants: The initiative seeks to strengthen the ability of migrants to assert and defend their rights, primarily by increasing access to information. This involves improving the quality, coverage, and effectiveness of training and orientation seminars prior to departure and upon arrival in countries of employment. We also aim to create an enabling environment in which migrants can mobilize and make their voices heard through grassroots organizing, the development of associations and informal support networks, and the creation of migrant-run, community-based media.
  • Enhancing regional policymaking and dialogue: The initiative advances policy reform and the promulgation of best practices by enabling dialogue among key stakeholders, including among actors who might not otherwise come together. We also aim to build the evidence base necessary to inform these conversations and to deepen networks among policymakers, as well as between the state and civil society. In the long term, we aim to promote more inclusive, tolerant communities and a better-informed public in order to combat xenophobia and discrimination.

Hat tip to Michael