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May 30, 2015

NSA Spying Did Not Result In a SINGLE Foiled Terrorist Plot Washington's Blog
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:22 AM

Washington's Blog

Tattered Flag With Surveillance Camera (Photographer Unknown)

Debunking Government’s Justification for Mass Surveillance

Preface: The Bush and Obama administrations have claimed for more than a decade that spying on Americans was justified by 9/11.

Senator Diane Feinstein – head of the Senate Intelligence Committee – is now trotting out the same old tired justification.

However – as demonstrated below – that claim is totally false.

No Stopped Terrorist Plots

TechDirt notes:

Feinstein goes on to make … claims that have already been debunked:

Working in combination, the call-records database and other NSA programs have aided efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to disrupt terrorism in the U.S. approximately a dozen times in recent years, according to the NSA. This summer, the agency disclosed that 54 terrorist events have been interrupted—including plots stopped and arrests made for support to terrorism. Thirteen events were in the U.S. homeland and nine involved U.S. persons or facilities overseas. Twenty-five were in Europe, five in Africa and 11 in Asia.

[The NSA chief himself admits the numbers are wildly inflated, and there were only “one or two” terrorist plots foiled. The NSA’s deputy director says that – at the most – one (1)plot might have been disrupted by the bulk phone records collection alone.]

Note the all important “and other NSA programs” language here. Also the use of “terrorist events” not plots. And, remember, those “thirteen events… in the U.S. homeland,” have since been whittled down to only one that actually relied on the call records program that she’s defending — and that wasn’t a terrorist plot but a cab driver in San Diego sending some cash to a Somali group judged to be a terrorist organization.

Specifically, the cab driver and 3 other men raised a total of $8,500 and sent it to Somalia.

While the group the money was sent to was, in fact, designated as a terrorist organization in 2008 by the U.S., the FBI itself admits that the cab driver’s donation was more in the nature of a political – or even tribal – affiliation, rather than a terrorist one.

Yochai Benkler explained at the Guardian:

This single successful prosecution, under a vague criminal statute, which stopped a few thousand dollars from reaching one side in a local conflict in the Horn of Africa, is thesole success story for the NSA bulk domestic surveillance program.

The Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez writes that Feinstein’s argument:

Is simply an attempt to exploit the tragedy of 9/11 to deflect criticism of massive domestic surveillance that would not have been any use in preventing that attack.”

So there’s not a single terrorist attack proven to have been thwarted by the NSA. Instead, the entireOrwellian surveillance program is being justified by one San Diego cabbie sending his loose change ($8,500 divided by 4 is $2,125) to the other side of the world as a political/tribal contribution?

The Government Actually DID Spy On the Bad Guys Before 9/11

ProPublica notes:

In defending the NSA’s sweeping collection of Americans’ phone call records, Obama administration officials have repeatedly pointed out how it could have helped thwart the 9/11 attacks: If only the surveillance program been in place before Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. authorities would have been able to identify one of the future hijackers who was living in San Diego [named Khalid al Mihdhar].

Last weekend, former Vice President Dick Cheney invoked the same argument.

***

Indeed, the Obama administration’s invocation of the Mihdhar case echoes a nearly identical argument made by the Bush administration eight years ago when it defended the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.

The reality is different.

Initially, an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to Mihdhar and another 9/11 hijacker in 2000.

Investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House.

As the New York Times notes:

Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence ….The accusation stems from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s refusal to allow investigators for a Congressional inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers.

So mass surveillance of Americans isn’t necessary, when the FBI informant should have apprehended the hijackers.

Moreover, the NSA actually did intercept Mihdhar’s phone calls before 9/11.

We reported in 2008:

The U.S. government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers’ own mouth. Most of what we wrote about involved the NSA and other intelligence services tapping top Al Qaeda operatives’ phone calls outside the U.S.

However, as leading NSA expert James Bamford – the Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings for almost a decade, winner of a number of journalism awards for coverage national security issues, whose articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and the only author to write any books (he wrote 3) on the NSA – reports, the NSA was also tapping the hijackers’ phone calls inside the U.S.

Specifically, hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi lived in San Diego, California, for 2 years before 9/11. Numerous phone calls between al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego and a high-level Al Qaeda operations base in Yemen were made in those 2 years.

The NSA had been tapping and eavesdropping on all calls made from that Yemen phone for years. So NSA recorded all of these phone calls.

Indeed, the CIA knew as far back as 1999 that al-Mihdhar was coming to the U.S. Specifically, in 1999, CIA operatives tailing al-Mihdhar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, obtained a copy of his passport. It contained visas for both Malaysia and the U.S., so they knew it was likely he would go from Kuala Lumpur to America.

We asked top NSA whistleblower William Binney – a highly-credible 32-year NSA veteran with the title of senior technical director, who headed the agency’s digital data gathering program (featured in aNew York Times documentary, and the source for much of what we know about NSA spying) – what he thought of the government’s claim that mass surveillance of Americans would have caught Mihdhar and prevented 9/11.

Binney responded:

Of course they could have and did have data on hijackers before 9/11. And, Prism did not start until 2007. But they could get the data from the “Upstream” collection. This is the Mark Klein documentation of Narus equipment in the NSA room in San Francisco and probably other places in the lower 48. They did not need Prism to discover that. Prism only suplemented the “Upstream” material starting in 2007 according to the slide.

Details here and here.

Another high-level NSA whistleblower – Thomas Drake – testified in a declaration last year that an NSA pilot program he and Binney directed:

Revealed the extent of the connections that the NSA had within its data prior to the [9/11] attacks. The NSA found the array of potential connections among the data that it already possessed to be potentially embarrassing. To avoid that embarrassment, the NSA suppressed the results of the pilot program. I had been told that the NSA had chosen not to pursue [the program] as one of its methods for combatting terrorism. Instead, the NSA had previously chosen to delegate the development of a new program, named “Trailblazer” to a group of outside contractors.

Moreover, widespread spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here, here, here, hereand here.

And U.S. and allied intelligence heard the 9/11 hijackers plans from their own mouths:

The National Security Agency and the FBI were each independently listening in on the phone calls between the supposed mastermind of the attacks and the lead hijacker. Indeed, the FBI built its own antenna in Madagascar specifically to listen in on the mastermind’s phone calls

According to various sources, on the day before 9/11, the mastermind told the lead hijacker “tomorrow is zero hour” and gave final approval for the attacks. The NSA intercepted the message that day and the FBI was likely also monitoring the mastermind’s phone calls

According to the Sunday Herald, two days before 9/11, Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her “In two days, you’re going to hear big news and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.” U.S. officials later told CNN that “in recent years they’ve been able to monitor some of bin Laden’s telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and sometimes recorded.” Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking to his stepmother.

And according to CBS News, at 9:53 a.m on 9/11, just 15 minutes after the hijacked plane had hit the Pentagon, “the National Security Agency, which monitors communications worldwide, intercepted a phone call from one of Osama bin Laden’s operatives in Afghanistan to a phone number in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia”, and secretary of Defense Rumsfeld learned about the intercepted phone call in real-time (if the NSA monitored and transcribed phone calls in real-time on9/11, that implies that it did so in the months leading up to 9/11 as well)

But even with all of that spying, the government didn’t stop the hijackers … even though 9/11 wasentirely foreseeable.

ProPublica notes:

“There were plenty of opportunities without having to rely on this metadata system for the FBI and intelligence agencies to have located Mihdhar,” says former Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who extensively investigated 9/11 as chairman of the Senate’s intelligence committee.

These missed opportunities are described in detail in the joint congressional reportproduced by Graham and his colleagues as well as in the 9/11 Commission report.

***

Mihdhar was on the intelligence community’s radar at least as early as 1999. That’s when the NSA had picked up communications from a “terrorist facility” in the Mideast suggesting that members of an “operational cadre” were planning to travel to Kuala Lumpur in January 2000, according to the commission report. The NSA picked up the first names of the members, including a “Khalid.” The CIA identified him as Khalid al Mihdhar.

The U.S. got photos of those attending the January 2000 meeting in Malaysia, including of Mihdhar, and the CIA also learned that his passport had a visa for travel to the U.S.

***

Using their true names, Mihdhar and Hazmi for a time beginning in May 2000 even lived with an active FBI informant in San Diego.

***

Let’s turn to the comments of FBI Director Robert Mueller before the House Judiciary Committee last week.

Mueller noted that intelligence agencies lost track of Mihdhar following the January 2000 Kuala Lumpur meeting but at the same time had identified an “Al Qaida safe house in Yemen.”

He continued: “They understood that that Al Qaida safe house had a telephone number but they could not know who was calling into that particular safe house. We came to find out afterwards that the person who had called into that safe house was al Mihdhar, who was in the United States in San Diego. If we had had this [metadata] program in place at the time we would have been able to identify that particular telephone number in San Diego.”

In turn, the number would have led to Mihdhar and potentially disrupted the plot, Mueller argued.

(Media accounts indicate that the “safe house” was actually the home of Mihdhar’s father-in-law, himself a longtime al Qaida figure, and that the NSA had been intercepting calls to the home for several years.)

The congressional 9/11 report sheds some further light on this episode, though in highly redacted form.

The NSA had in early 2000 analyzed communications between a person named “Khaled” and “a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East,” according to this account. But, crucially, the intelligence community “did not determine the location from which they had been made.”

In other words, the report suggests, the NSA actually picked up the content of the communications between Mihdhar and the “Yemen safe house” but was not able to figure out who was calling or even the phone number he was calling from.

***

Theories about the metadata program aside, it’s not clear why the NSA couldn’t or didn’t track the originating number of calls to Yemen it was already listening to.

Intelligence historian Matthew Aid, who wrote the 2009 NSA history Secret Sentry, says that the agency would have had both the technical ability and legal authority to determine the San Diego number that Mihdhar was calling from.

“Back in 2001 NSA was routinely tracking the identity of both sides of a telephone call,” [9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow] told ProPublica.

***

There’s another wrinkle in the Mihdhar case: In the years after 9/11, media reports also suggested that there were multiple calls that went in the other direction: from the house in Yemen to Mihdhar in San Diego. But the NSA apparently also failed to track where those calls were going.

In 2005, the Los Angeles Times quoted unnamed officials saying the NSA had well-established legal authority before 9/11 to track calls made from the Yemen number to the U.S. In that more targeted scenario, a metadata program vacumming the phone records of all Americans would appear to be unnecessary.

And see this PBS special, and this ACLU comment.

In other words, the NSA had the technical ability and legal authority to intercept calls between Midhar and Yemen before 9/11 … and it actually did so.

In addition, Gawker notes that Feinstein’s own statement is illogical on its face, since the CIA had issued urgent alerts:

Feinstein includes this paragraph right up front:

In the summer of 2001, the CIA’s then-director, George Tenet, painted a dire picture for members of the Senate Intelligence Committee when he testified about the terrorist threat posed by al Qaeda. As Mr. Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, “the system was blinking red” and by late July of that year, it could not “get any worse.”

Huh. So… the CIA did issue dire warnings prior to 9/11…. This directly contradicts Feinstein’s point about the necessity of the NSA’s phone spying.

Moreover, Wikipedia notes:

Mihdhar was placed on a CIA watchlist on August 21, 2001, and a note was sent on August 23 to the Department of State and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) suggesting that Mihdhar and Hazmi be added to their watchlists.

***

On August 23, the CIA informed the FBI that Mihdhar had obtained a U.S. visa in Jeddah. The FBI headquarters received a copy of the Visa Express application from the Jeddah embassy on August 24, showing the New York Marriott as Mihdhar’s destination.

On August 28, the FBI New York field office requested that a criminal case be opened to determine whether Mihdhar was still in the United States, but the request was refused. The FBI ended up treating Mihdhar as an intelligence case, which meant that the FBI’s criminal investigators could not work on the case, due to the barrier separating intelligence and criminal case operations. An agent in the New York office sent an e-mail to FBI headquarters saying, “Whatever has happened to this, someday someone will die, and the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’” The reply from headquarters was, “we [at headquarters] are all frustrated with this issue … [t]hese are the rules. NSLU does not make them up.”

The FBI contacted Marriott on August 30, requesting that they check guest records, and on September 5, they reported that no Marriott hotels had any record of Mihdhar checking in. The day before the attacks, the New York office requested that the Los Angeles FBI office check all local Sheraton Hotels, as well as Lufthansa and United Airlines bookings, because those were the two airlines Mihdhar had used to enter the country. Neither the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network nor the FBI’s Financial Review Group, which have access to credit card and other private financial records, were notified about Mihdhar prior to September 11.

***

Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Congressman Curt Weldon alleged in 2005 that the Defense Department data mining project Able Danger identified Mihdhar and 3 other 9/11 hijackers as members of an al-Qaeda cell in early 2000.

Similarly, even though the alleged Boston bombers’ phones were tapped – and NBC News reports, “under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the U.S.” – mass surveillance did not stop the other terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.

In reality – despite the government continually grasping at strawsto justify its massive spying program – top security experts say that mass surveillance of Americans doesn’t keep us safe. Indeed, they say that mass spying actually hurts U.S. counter-terror efforts (more here and here).

As one amusing example, the NSA’s databases are getting clogged with spam emails from accounts they’re snooping on.

Veteran FBI agent Colleen Rowley (the one in the middle) – the one who tried to warn her superiors about hijakckers taking flying lessons – pointed out in June:

Think about how Bush administration officials defended themselves from not following up on the incredibly specific intelligence warnings urgently going to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and National Counterterrorism Director Richard Clark in the months leading up to 9/11. Their common response back then was something along the line of: intelligence is like a fire hose, and you can’t get a sip from a fire hose. There was apparently too much for top officials to even read the key memos addressed to them.

But if intelligence was a fire hose before 9/11, it quickly became Niagara Falls.

And now, with so much data (almost all of it irrelevant) that has been sucked into government databases and computers, one might liken the “intelligence flow” to a tsunami, with analysts asked to find just the right drop of water. Good luck.

In fact, The Washington Post’s well-researched series in 2010 on “Top Secret America” reported that the NSA was collecting and storing around 1.7 billion pieces of information every 24 hours, even back then.

To switch metaphors, it does not make it easier to find a needle in a haystack if you continue to add hay. No one has ever explained why it was left to fellow passengers or alert street vendors, not the “intelligence” agencies, to stop the last four major terrorist attacks or attempted attacks on U.S. soil.

Read the whole story

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

FBI Probing Power Morcellators, WSJ Reports
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:20 AM

The FBI is investigating power morcellators, the surgical tool in widespread disfavor because it can spread occult uterine cancers during gynecologic procedures, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported today.

The WSJ quoted three individuals who said they had been questioned by the FBI over the past several months about morcellators, which are used to shred uterine tissue for easy removal through laparascopic incisions. One of the sources was Amy Reed, MD, an anesthesiologist who underwent a hysterectomy for fibroid removal in 2013 only to discover that morcellation had upstaged an occult uterine cancer. Dr Reed and her husband Hooman Noorchashm, MD, have campaigned to ban the use of the devices to save women's lives.

In an interview with Medscape Medical News, Dr Noorchashm said that he began asking the FBI in late 2013 to investigate the failure of morcellator manufacturers and healthcare providers to report adverse events such as his wife's upstaged cancer — and the deaths of other women who had been treated with a morcellator — to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a requirement of federal law. The investigation commenced, he said, once the FBI office in Newark, New Jersey, started to take the case seriously last fall.

Another person interviewed by the FBI, the WSJ said, was a pathologist who said he warned one manufacturer of power morcellators, the Ethicon division of Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J), in 2006 about the danger of dispersing occult cancer. A J&J spokesperson told the WSJ that it revised the instructions for its power morcellators to include a statement about this risk.

J&J announced in July 2014 that it was voluntarily withdrawing its power morcellators from the worldwide market after the FDA warned 3 months earlier that the devices could upstage occult cancer. The agency said at the time that one in 350 women undergoing hysterectomy or myomectomy for fibroid removal has an unsuspected uterine sarcoma. Other morcellator manufacturers have kept their products on the market.

The third person contacted by the FBI was a physician assistant in California who had a cancer upstaged after power morcellation, according to the WSJ. She gave the agency a list of names of other women and families of women who experienced what she did. Many women on the list died as a result.

Dr Noorchashm told Medscape Medical News that he introduced the FBI to the pathologist and physician assistant.

A spokesperson for the FBI Newark's office said she could not confirm or deny whether it was conducting an investigation or not. A spokesperson for J&J's Ethicon division said the company had not been contacted by the FBI regarding the morcellators it once marketed.

Since Dr Reed's medical case first made headlines in early 2014, the healthcare industry has been retreating from the use of power morcellators, which now bear an FDA-mandated boxed warning about the risk of dispersing occult cancer. Several major health insurers have withdrawn or restricted coverage of morcellation, and fewer surgeons are using the device, according to America's Health Insurance Plans.

Read the whole story

· ·

FBI investigating Johnson & Johnson's power morcellator device that may be spreading uterine cancer
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:19 AM

Abc7news.Com RSS Feed

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) --

Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson is being investigated by the FBI over a controversial surgical tool that may be putting women's lives at risk.

The device is the

power morcellator

, which is meant to remove things like tumors from the uterus. It is also the device used most in hysterectomies. It breaks up fibroids or benign tumors in the uterus. But they're suspected of spreading cancer cells in some women.

Now some hospitals, including some here in the Bay Area, are pulling the devices for safety reasons.

Doctor Amy Reed from Boston has only gotten more sick since her hysterectomy last year.

Doctors cleared her for cancer before the procedure. But after, they found a rare form of cancer. She blames the device and she wants it banned.

"At no point in time did anyone ever say, well you know because you had it morcellated, that worsens your prognosis, that's something we discovered on our own," said Reed.

"If you disrupt the mass it's like a bee's hive. If you start chopping it up the bees spread and you're in trouble," said Hooman Noorchashm, Reed's husband.

But the FBI probe finds in up to one in 350 cases where there's a hidden cancer, the spinning blades spray cancer cells, causing them to spread.

"The FDA has no idea how many women had cancer spread by being treated with this device. But the idea that anyone was harmed is very concerning," said Richard Besser, ABC News Chief Health and Medical Editor.

Johnson & Johnson is the largest manufacturer of the product. Johnson and Johnson was first alerted to the risks back in 2006, but voluntarily pulled the device just last year.

But the FBI wants to know exactly what they knew about the risks and for how long.

Last year the FDA issued its

most serious black box warning

about the morcellator.

FBI investigating Johnson & Johnson device's potential link to uterine cancer — RT USA
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:17 AM

RT - Daily News

Published time: May 29, 2015 00:16

Reuters / Lucy Nicholson

The FBI has opened a probe into a surgical gynecological tool after reports have linked its use to the spread of uterine cancer in women during a procedure, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The investigation suggests the largest manufacturer of the power morcellator, Johnson & Johnson, might have known about the severe risk of the device before warning physicians and the public. It was pulled off the market last year, according to WSJ, though devices from other morcellator manufacturers remain on sale.

A spokesperson for the FBI Newark, New Jersey office said she could not confirm or deny whether it was conducting an investigation or not. A spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson's Ethicon division said the company had not been contacted by the FBI regarding the morcellators it once marketed.

The WSJ spoke to three people who had been questioned by the FBI office in Newark over the past several months about the surgical device. One of those people was Dr. Amy Reed, an anesthesiologist who underwent a hysterectomy for fibroid removal in 2013 only to discover the morcellator had made her cancer worse. Reed, along with her husband, are campaigning to ban the use of the device to save women’s lives.

Another woman spoken to by the FBI was Sarah Robinson, a physician assistant in Los Altos, California who told the WSJ she was contacted by the agency two months ago. Robinson had testified at a Food and Drug Administration hearing on the device, and created a list of women and families who blame the morcellator for making their cancer worse. Robinson had sent the FBI a list of 386 names, including herself.

The probe follows a warning issued in November 2014 by the FDA that said the device shouldn’t be used on the vast majority of women. The agency said one in 350 who underwent the procedure had an unsuspected cancer sarcoma. The agency called for a “black-box” warning on the tool, which is the strongest warning at its disposal.

Since then, many hospitals and several of the nation’s largest health plans either have limited use of morcellators or are considering limits.

The device has been used in tens of thousands of minimally invasive laparoscopic procedures a year, where the morcellator cuts up benign uterine growths, or fibroids, into small fragments so the tissue can be vacuumed through tiny incisions in the body. The device is also used in hysterectomy removal when a woman’s uterus is enlarged. These procedures lead to quicker patient recoveries, less post-operative pain and fewer wound complications.

Recent medical evidence, however, suggest that the removal of the tissue may not be 100 percent effective. If any of those tissues contain cancer cells and do not get removed, they spread to other areas, leading to the development of cancerous tumors.

The decision by Johnson & Johnson to pull the device was driven in part by the concern of a former Pennsylvania pathologist Robert Lamparter, who wrote about the issue at the J&J subsidiary, Ethicon, in 2006, after he began noticing more morcellated specimens in his lab.

Among other concerns, he noted the potential for an undetected cancer to be inadvertently spread by the surgical instrument. He said that at his small hospital, which had done 292 hysterectomies the previous year, gynecologists found an unexpected malignancy at least once annually.

J&J spokesman Matthew Johnson confirmed the 2006 correspondence with Dr. Lamparter to the WSJ and said the doctor’s concerns led the company to revise the instructions for use of the device.

Read the whole story

· · ·

Aurora theater gunman says he hoped FBI would stop him, lock him up
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:12 AM

Posted: 05/29/2015 08:45:12 AM MDT

Video of Dr. William Reid's psychiatric evaluation, which started in July 2014, of Aurora theater shooting gunman James Holmes is played in court Thursday afternoon, May 28, 2015. (Photo via Arapahoe County)

CENTENNIAL — First he said he bought a knife and a stun gun because, amid the depression of a breakup, he began to worry about being attacked on the street.

Next he bought a canister of tear gas, in case he needed to make people run from him. Then he bought a handgun so he could shoot someone. Then he bought a shotgun so he could shoot many people.

By the time he was at a gun range in the mountains practicing with an assault-style rifle and saw an FBI vehicle drive by, the "mission," as he would later describe it, had consumed his life.

"Did you hope they had you under surveillance?" psychiatrist Dr. William Reid asked James Holmes about the vehicle, during one of their many interview sessions.

"Yeah, a little bit," Holmes replied.

Reid asked why.

"So they could do the right thing."

"Do the right thing, meaning?" Reid asked again.

"Lock me away before I did it," Holmes replied.

WATCH: Jordan Steffen breaks down Day 21 and Week 5 of the Aurora theater shooting trial

On the second day of Reid's testimony in the Aurora movie theater shooting trial Friday, jurors heard the most complete explanation yet from Holmes of why he decided to commit a mass killing.

They also heard words that could prove devastating to his insanity plea for the attack he ultimately committed in July 2012, in which he killed 12 people and wounded 70 more at the Century Aurora 16 movie theater. Reid, who concluded Holmes was sane at the time of the attack, pointed to the surveillance detail as shaping his opinion.

"It suggests that he knew he was doing something wrong or planning something wrong," Reid said.

Over the roughly four hours of video-recorded interviews that Reid conducted with Holmes as part of a state-ordered sanity evaluation and that were played in court Friday, jurors heard Holmes describe how a bout with mononucleosis and a breakup with the only girlfriend he ever had plunged him into the worst depression of his life in the spring of 2012. They heard Holmes talk about how fantasies of killing that he had had since at least high school grew more vivid.

LIVE BLOG: Live updates from The Denver Post staff and others inside the courtroom

"I transferred my suicidal thoughts into homicidal," is how Holmes described it to Reid.

And they heard how what began as paranoid fears for his own safety escalated into an unstoppable desire to kill many others — even if Holmes, speaking slowly with a blank stare and no inflection in his voice, couldn't explain why.

"There's no anger," he told Reid. Then, later: "It was just something I had to do. ... It's like I was obligated to do it."

At one point, he told Reid that he avoided forming new relationships with people once the plan took shape. He had gone on a hike with a student from his neuroscience graduate program at the University of Colorado, and she later asked if he wanted to do something else together. But, by then, he had already dyed his hair red and assembled an arsenal of weapons in preparation for the attack. He cut off contact with her.

"I didn't want to hurt her by putting her in jeopardy," Holmes told Reid, who persisted: What kind of jeopardy?

"Like, being a girlfriend to a murderer."

In the interviews, Holmes sat motionless like a wax figure, his lips the only thing moving. He breathed through his mouth. Reid sometimes seemed to grow frustrated that Holmes either lacked in or held back insight.

When Reid asked Holmes why he was drawn to TV sitcoms like "The Big Bang Theory," Holmes responded that they were humorous. When asked why his fantasies changed from protecting himself to harming others, Holmes said he didn't know.

"C'mon, smart guy," Reid urged Holmes after another blank answer to a question.

Later, when Reid asked Holmes why he took on such a serious "mission," Holmes replied, "I didn't think it was all that serious."

"I didn't think the consequences through."

But he later seemed to contradict that.

He told Reid he picked the Batman premiere for his attack because there would be a lot of people there. He said he dyed his hair red because he wanted to stand out. When Reid showed Holmes a photo that he took of himself in his body armor, Holmes told Reid he took the photo hoping he would be remembered.

What would someone looking at the photo infer? Reid asked.

"That I'm a killer, I guess," Holmes replied.

Noelle Phillips: 303-954-1661, <a href="mailto:nphillips@denverpost.com">nphillips@denverpost.com</a> or twitter.com/Noelle_Phillips

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· · · · ·

Rollback of U.S. spy powers would mark post-9/11 watershed
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:11 AM

WASHINGTON At 3:59 p.m. EDT on Sunday, the National Security Agency and telecommunications companies will begin mothballing a once-secret system that collected Americans' bulk telephone records, shutting down computers and sealing off warehouses of digital data.

If the U.S. Congress fails to act, key provisions of the USA Patriot Act will lapse in a watershed moment in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era. Intrusive government powers, created and wielded in the name of preventing another mass-casualty terrorist attack, would be at least partly scaled back, proponents and critics of the surveillance say.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, for instance, will no longer be able to employ "roving wiretaps" aimed at terrorism suspects who use multiple disposable cell phones, and will have more difficulty seizing such suspects' and their associates' personal and business records.

"We're past the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack. And we can look at these issues more calmly," said Peter Swire, who served on a review panel appointed by President Barack Obama after former contractor Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations of vast NSA surveillance.

With the clock ticking, a coalition of Senate Republican libertarians and security hawks has blocked action on new legislation known as the USA Freedom Act that would reform the bulk telephone data programme but not kill it.

Libertarians want the programme ended altogether, whilst the hawks argue it should be maintained as it is now.

Currently, telecom providers are legally required to send phone records to the government. The USA Freedom Act would require private firms to hold the data, which the NSA could search with court authorization.

The U.S. Senate is scheduled to hold a special session to consider the legislation at 4 p.m. on Sunday - just as security officials say they have to begin shutting the NSA programme down to meet a midnight deadline. The USA Freedom Act already has passed the House of Representatives and has Obama's strong support.

It is unclear if supporters of the Freedom Act can get the 60 votes needed in the Senate to move forward. A previous attempt on May 23 fell short, 57-42, but the bill's backers have been pushing hard to win over three more senators.

How badly U.S. counter-terrorism efforts would be disrupted by even a temporary suspension of the telephone data collection and other legal authorities is disputed.

The Obama administration is issuing increasingly dire warnings, sometimes citing Islamic State's calls on its supporters to conduct attacks wherever they live.

"The intelligence community will lose important capabilities," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement. "At this late date, prompt passage of the USA Freedom Act by the Senate is the best way to minimise any possible disruption of our ability to protect the American people."

But many experts and civil liberties advocates say that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement authorities have other powerful - and less objectionable - tools to investigate and prosecute militant plots. Those include court orders, subpoenas and other forms of electronic surveillance.

"The government still has expansive ... law enforcement tools that will remain in place," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Groups as diverse as the left-leaning ACLU and the conservative Tea Party Patriots argue the telephone data programme in particular is unconstitutionally broad, targeting the communications of millions of innocent Americans.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court ruled the programme was illegal, going beyond what the Patriot Act authorised. The court declined to halt the programme, saying it would give Congress a chance to act.

"COLLECTING THE DOTS"

The bulk telephone records programme, first exposed to journalists by Snowden, collects metadata - data that provides information about other data - about U.S. citizens' phone calls. This includes the number dialled and time and length of the call but not the content of the conversation.

Senior U.S. officials have said the surveillance fills a critical gap, determining whether a militant overseas is communicating with someone inside the United States.

Swire, a privacy and cyber security expert and a professor of law and ethics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said the 2013 presidential panel he served on "looked at the classified file and concluded that telephone metadata had not been essential to preventing any attack."

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials say that is the wrong yardstick to use.

"Very seldom do we have one (single) piece of information" that prevents a terrorist attack, said Richard Schaeffer, a former top NSA official. "It is literally collecting the dots" and piecing them together, he said.

Current U.S. officials seem even more chagrined about losing other powers that could expire at midnight Sunday. Those, they argue, were never controversial but have been caught up in the backlash against government intrusion.

One, known as the "lone wolf" provision, allows the FBI to seek a wiretap on an individual if that person is suspected of terrorist activity, even if the individual cannot be linked to a specific group. Law enforcement officials have never used that power.

But, a senior U.S. official said, "this is not a tool that we want to see go away."

The provision giving the FBI expanded powers to seek a terrorism suspect's records such as hotel stays and car rentals is used about 200 times per year, officials said.

The roving wiretap provision, in which a court authorises tapping an individual's communications regardless of the device used, rather than a specific phone number, has been used most commonly in law enforcement rather than terrorism cases, said Stewart Baker, a former top Homeland Security official.

"But it's not an authority we would want to lose," he said.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Richard Cowan; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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Page 2

FORMER CIA OPERATIONS OFFICER VALERIE PLAME JOINS ADVISORY BOARD OF GLOBAL DATA SENTINEL
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:10 AM

Dark Reading:

NEW YORK, NY, MAY 28, 2015 -- Former career covert CIA operations officer, Valerie Plame joins the advisory board of Global Data Sentinel (GDS), the cyber defense platform that secures, encrypts and protects data across all domains, networks and devices. The GDS Solution provides a new type of architecture which is ready to rise to the enormous challenges of cyber security for enterprises and governments in this technologically hostile world. During her tenure as a CIA operations officer, Ms. Plame worked to protect America’s national security and prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, in particular nuclear weapons. She is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.

“Data theft – with all its serious consequences to personal, corporate and national security – is at an all-time high, as business and government centers are compromised on a daily basis” said Valerie Plame. “Not only are data breaches becoming more commonplace, they are costing businesses billions of dollars a year in damages as well as destroying reputations and brands. Joining GDS enables me to become part of the team working effectively in the battle against cybercrime.”

Welcoming Valerie to the GDS team, joint founders of GDS John-Philip Galinski and Nigel Walker said that the appointment was further evidence of the company’s commitment to delivering the highest possible levels of security solutions.

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GDS provides sophisticated hierarchical encryption of all digital data specifically for the enterprise environment. It is designed to be easily deployed on any network and simply integrates with existing applications to provide proactive cyber defense against both external and internal threats. The inclusion of tamperproof audit and reporting, multi-factor identity management, and the ability to rigorously apply data and corporate governance policies provides a unified and seamless end-to-end solution. In addition, GDS has a proprietary hardware solution fully integrated with its software to provide secure data streaming to and from any device.

“Global Data Sentinel provides a unique cyber defense platform designed as an operating system, allowing clients to retain control of their data, wherever that data resides. It is clear that current methods of data security all simply provide an illusion of protection and false sense of security,” concludes Steven Fadem, GDS Chairman. “What we provide is no illusion – it is a one-stop secure platform making unprecedented levels of data protection available, affordable, and easy to implement for businesses across the world.”

The GDS solution encrypts all digital information and allows that level of security to travel with the data between networks and devices, only releasing the information when requested by authorized personnel using secure enhanced access systems. The simple to use and highly intuitive interface masks a degree of complexity and security for business data that is unprecedented and more than meets all current regulatory guidelines and practices. It also allows clients to track where files have been, who has accessed them, for how long and where they were forwarded – with the ability to revoke access to files even after they have left a company’s own network.

###

About Global Data Sentinel

Global Data Sentinel was founded in 2014 with the single purpose of improving corporate and government proactive cyber defense capabilities. GDS utilizes a number of proprietary tools to provide an integrated, centrally-managed solution designed to maintain data security, integrity and confidentiality. It is a total cybersecurity platform for all security needs for cloud, network, device, intra-company and intercompany collaboration, and client data sharing and retrieving. The GDS technology is currently in early adoption for a major television network, gaming company, consumer electronics hardware manufacturer, cloud host, pharmaceutical company, and media/entertainment enterprise. For more information regarding Global Data Sentinel, visit www.globaldatasentinel.com.

Media Information contact:Cathy Callegari – 212-579-1370
email: cathy@callprinc.com

Investor Relations contact:

Steven Fadem - 917-653-1951

email: sfadem@globaldatasentinel.com

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Days After Obama Admin Asked Networks to Not Show ‘Inaccurate’ B-Roll of its Advances, Islamic State Seized Two Cities
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:09 AM

Washington Free Beacon

BY: David Rutz

Merely days after reports of the Obama administration asking networks to stop airing “inaccurate” B-roll of the Islamic State because it portrayed them advancing in Iraq and Syria, the terrorist group took down the cities of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria.

Islamic State took the occasion to film more propaganda footage of itself marching through the empty cities, with horrific images of its enemies’ corpses and destroyed buildings in its wake.

The Fox News talk show OutNumbered discussed Politico‘s report on the U.S. government’s efforts to quash what it deemed misleading footage May 15, and three days later, the fall of Ramadi, capital of the Anbar Province, was one of the lead stories on every network broadcast.

Politico reported May 13:

Senior State Department and Pentagon officials have begun contacting television network reporters to ask them to stop using “B-roll” — stock footage that appears on screen while reporters and commentators talk — showing ISIL at the peak of its strength last summer.

“We are urging broadcasters to avoid using the familiar B-roll that we’ve all seen before, file footage of ISIL convoys operating in broad daylight, moving in large formations with guns out, looking to wreak havoc,” said Emily Horne, spokeswoman for retired Gen. John Allen, the State Department’s special envoy leading the international coalition against ISIL.

“It’s inaccurate — that’s no longer how ISIL moves,” Horne said. “A lot of that footage is from last summer before we began tactical strikes.”

New Survey Shows Lack of Confidence in Organizations' Cyber Security
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:08 AM

Dark Reading:

New Lieberman Software survey reveals that today's complicated IT security solutions are not being properly deployed and, for most organizations, compliance trumps security

Los Angeles, CA – May 28, 2015 - Companies are putting their customers’ data at risk because IT teams do not have the expertise or time to deploy today’s complicated IT security products, a new survey from Lieberman Software Corporation revealed.

The survey, which was carried out at RSA Conference 2015 and measured the attitudes of nearly 170 IT security professionals, revealed 69 percent of respondents do not feel they are using their IT security products to their full potential. As a result, a staggering 71 percent of IT professionals believe this is putting their company, and possibly customers, at risk.

When survey respondents were asked why they don’t use their IT security products to their full potential, 62 percent revealed they either found the products too complicated to deploy, too time consuming to deploy, or didn’t think they had the expertise to properly deploy them.

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“As zero-day attacks and other cyber threats evolve at a steady pace, many organizations are searching for new IT security solutions to defend against the latest wave of attacks,” said Philip Lieberman, President of Lieberman Software. “Unfortunately, these organizations often discover too late that the products they purchase cannot scale to large enterprise environments, or be deployed quickly enough to provide real defense. That creates a significant security deficit that leaves organizations at risk, as the findings in this survey indicate. To be effective in today’s cyber warfare environment, a security solution must have enterprise scalability, be rapidly deployed without requiring expensive or time-consuming professional services, and operate automatically and continuously – without involving direct human interaction.”

Additionally, 61 percent of survey respondents admitted that their organization has deployed a security product purely to meet regulatory compliance regulations, rather than to increase security.

“Regulatory compliance requirements drive most implementations of IT security products. However, compliance does not equal security. Despite the regulatory initiatives that most organizations are subject to, data breaches are now happening more frequently and becoming increasingly severe. There’s more to achieving real IT security than completing an auditor survey and marking a few check boxes. True security requires continuous measurement and correction in the face of the unrelenting cyber threats that compliance mandates simply fail to anticipate,” continued Lieberman.

For more information on the survey, visit http://go.liebsoft.com/2015-information-security-survey.

About Lieberman Software Corporation

Lieberman Software proactively stops cyber attacks that bypass conventional enterprise defenses and penetrate the network perimeter. The company provides award-winning privilege management and security management products to more than 1,400 customers worldwide, including nearly half of the US Fortune 50. By automatically locating, securing and auditing privileged accounts - both on-premises and in the cloud - Lieberman Software controls access to systems with sensitive data, and defends against malicious insiders, zero day attacks and other advanced cyber threats. Lieberman Software is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, with offices and channel partners located around the world. For more information, visit www.liebsoft.com

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Russia concerned over upcoming missile defense drills involving US
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:07 AM

TASS

May 29, 11:24 UTC+3

The drills will also involve Norway, the UK, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands and France and will simulate interception of Russian ballistic missiles

MOSCOW, May 29. /TASS/. Russia's Defense Ministry has voiced concerns over the At Sea Demonstration-2015 exercises planned for this autumn that will involve the US and will simulate interception of Russian ballistic missiles.

'The drills will be conducted in the north-eastern part

of the Atlantic and this can signal only that there are plans to practice intercepting Russian ballistic missiles. Such drills cannot but concern us,' Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov told reporters.

The official commented on media reports

that in October Norway's Fridtjof Nansen-class frigate was due to take part for the first time in the maneuvers of the countries of the Maritime Theater Missile Defense (MTMD) Forum.

The key goals

of the drills, which besides the US will also involve Norway, the UK, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands and France, are to practise joint actions in air defence and antiballistic missile defense, and also the tests of the US SM-3 missile interceptor, he stressed.

According to Antonov, the enhancing capabilities

of marine systems of intercepting ballistic missiles comes in parallel with the creation of stationary missile defense facilities in Europe.

At the same time NATO continues fulfilling its plans

in the sphere of antimissile defense despite recent progress in resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, the Russian deputy defense minister stressed.

'Statements of politicians and military chiefs of NATO countries on the adaptability of this project

have been forgotten, and the Russian concerns continue being ignored,' he said.

'Upon the alliance's initiative, the dialogue on the military and political

issues, including the missile shield, has been scrapped,' Antonov reminded. 'This allows actions without explaining the reasons and without reacting to Russia's concerns,' he said.

Meanwhile, Moscow's repeated concerns about the anti-Russian potential of the missile defence system in Europe, also before the suspension

of contacts, have not been refuted yet, he said.

Amid the unlimited development of the missile defence system

that is capable of intercepting Russia's ballistic missiles, Moscow has stated many times that it will be forced to 'take retaliatory measures,' he added.

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Russia Will Respond to NATO's Missile Defense Buildup in Europe – General
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:07 AM

Sputnik News

12:24 29.05.2015(updated 12:33 29.05.2015)

Russia will adequately respond to what it sees as an "unrestrained expansion" of NATO's missile defenses, a top defense ministry official said on Friday.

"In a situation of an unrestrained expansion

of NATO's missile defense shield, capable of intercepting the Russian ICBMs, Russia will, as we have repeatedly warned, find it necessary to adequately respond to this expansion," General Anatoly Ivanov told a news briefing in Moscow.

In April, Russia's military chief of staff General Valery Gerasimov warned European countries planning to host installations

for a US-led missile defense shield that Russia would be forced to target them.

"Non-nuclear powers

where missile-defense installations are being installed have become the objects of priority response," he said, referring to Poland and Romania.

General Gerasimov's comments came at a defense conference

in Moscow where Russian representatives warned of perceived threats that the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization posed to Russia.

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UN 'deeply concerned' by desperate situation facing thousands of Iraqis fleeing Ramadi
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:06 AM

29 May 2015 – Some 85,000 Iraqis have fled fighting in the central city of Ramadi but as temperatures in the region soar, thousands more still on the move are facing obstacles in reaching safety such as lack of proper shelter and "onerous requirements" for documentation, the United Nations refugee agency warned today.

"With thousands on the move and competition for transport, journeys that would normally take a few hours are taking days," William Spindler, spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told reporters in Geneva.

Even when they reach a camp for the displaced, "conditions are tough," continued Mr. Spindler, with temperatures reaching 47 degrees [Celsius]." UNHCR is giving out fans as well as sleeping mats, jerry cans and plastic sheets to help reinforce the shade, he said.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that some 85,000 people have fled Ramadi, in Anbar governorate, and surrounding areas, since fresh fighting between militants and pro-Government troops erupted in mid-May, and in total, more than 180,000 people are estimated to have been displaced from the Ramadi area since hostilities began in early April.

"Many people are still on the move and UNHCR, alongside others in the humanitarian community, is striving to locate them and provide life-saving assistance," Mr. Spindler said.

"Displaced civilians still face serious obstacles at various checkpoints out of Anbar into neighbouring provinces, as local authorities impose restrictions," he said, adding that Babylon and Kerbala governorates were closed to displaced people from Anbar.

Mr. Spindler said the Bzebiz bridge, the main entry point from Anbar into Baghdad, was closed for four days at the start of this latest exodus from Ramadi, leaving many people stranded in soaring temperatures as they waited to have sponsorship arrangements processed.

"While the bottleneck at the bridge has now eased, our monitoring teams report that the requirement for displaced people to have a local sponsor in Baghdad remains a concern," he said.

According to UNHCR, this requirement "hampers swift access to safety, leaves people waiting in searing heat without proper shelter and makes the displaced vulnerable to exploitation."

UNHCR said it is urging the authorities to address this problem and more broadly to ensure freedom of movement and swift access to safety of all displaced Iraqis citizens.

"Onerous requirements for other documentation have also been a concern," the spokesperson said. "UNHCR's partners have spent days helping 600 vulnerable people – many with serious medical conditions or living with disability – get access to Baghdad governorate."

Unable to move to other provinces, thousands of displaced people congregated around the city of Al-Khalidiya, which is east of Ramadi and also the scene of fighting in recent weeks. Some people are moving north towards the cities of Kalar and Kirkuk.

Adequate shelter is one of the key needs for thousands of displaced people, who are out in the heat for long periods, the refugee agency noted, and said it is focusing on providing shelter for the displaced.

"The United Nations advocates for the respect of the fundamental human rights of freedom of movement and access to safety for all Iraqis in flight," Mr. Spindler said. "Being able to reach a place of safety makes the difference between life and death for desperate displaced people on the move."

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Page 3

Iraq's latest gains over ISIL herald more: Cmdr.
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:05 AM

Iran Press TV

Fri May 29, 2015 9:49AM

The secretary general of Iraq's Asaib Ahl al-Haq volunteer forces says the recent army victories against the ISIL in the northern province of Salahuddin herald the liberation of more neighboring areas from the Takfiri terrorists, Press TV reports.

"After breaking the siege of Baiji refinery, we began pushing for the liberation of regions which lay north of Tikrit and west of Salahuddin province," Qais al-Khazali told Press TV on Thursday, adding, "Our next operation will be in the northeast of Anbar."

The commander hailed the remarkable contributions of the volunteer forces, also known as Popular Mobilization Units, to the anti-ISIL operations.

"We have said it before and I repeat that victory is inevitable if the resistance forces of the Popular Mobilization Units take part in the fighting, especially with support of the Iraqi army and air force," he went on to say.

Khazali also lashed out at the United States and its allies for their "lack of seriousness" in the anti-ISIL campaign, saying they have no credit in the eyes of the Iraqi people.

"Our main condition to take part in military operations was the exclusion of the US-led coalition from the battle. We reject the US-led airstrikes because the Iraqi people are well aware of the lack of seriousness and use of these airstrikes especially as they have not backed the advance of the Iraqi resistance forces on the ground," he stated.

The remarks came a day after Iraqi forces brought under their full control the strategic village of Sayed Gharib in the Dujail district of Salahuddin, flushing Takfiri elements out of their stronghold.

On May 21, the Iraqi army, backed by volunteer forces, also managed to break the siege on the embattled Baiji refinery some 40 kilometers north of the city of Tikrit, the provincial capital of Salahuddin.

The ISIL terrorist group launched its campaign of terror in the north and west of the Arab country in June 2014. Since then, the Iraqi armed forces, joined by Shia, Sunni and Kurdish volunteers, have tried to retake the occupied areas from the Takfiri militants.

FNR/GHN/HMV

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UN says 85,000 Iraqis have fled ISIL violence in Ramadi
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:05 AM

Iran Press TV

Fri May 29, 2015 3:25PM

About 85,000 people have fled the Iraqi city of Ramadi since mid-May, when Takfiri ISIL terrorists seized the capital of the western province of Anbar, the UN says.

William Spindler, the spokesman for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), announced the figure in the Swiss city of Geneva on Friday.

Spindler also said that, overall, acts of violence perpetrated by the ISIL militants have resulted in the displacement of over 180,000 from Ramadi and surrounding areas since early April.

Thousands of the displaced have remained stuck for days at the bridge of Bzeibez, which connects Anbar to the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad, the official said, adding that although the bottleneck at the bridge had eased, "the requirements for displaced people to have a local sponsor in Baghdad (to cross) remains a concern."

In a separate development, Iraq's Popular Mobilization surrounded terrorists in an area of about 40 square kilometers near al-Nibaie district, al-Mosana installations, and al-Thirthar dam in Anbar, Iraq's al-Sumaria news network reported on Friday.

Meanwhile, other media reports said that the ISIL militants have planted bombs on all the entrances of Ramadi, located about 110 kilometers (68 miles) west of Baghdad.

The ISIL militants managed to bring parts of Ramadi under their control on May 17. The Iraqi army, backed by volunteer fighters, formally launched an operation on May 26 to drive the terrorists out of Anbar and retake full control of the provincial capital.

Ahmed al-Assadi, a spokesman for the Popular Mobilization forces, also a lawmaker, has said the offensive would "not last for a long time" and that new weapons would be used in the battle that would "surprise the enemy."

The Takfiri ISIL terrorists started a campaign of terror in the northern and western parts of Iraq in early June last year. The Iraqi army and volunteer forces have been fighting them since then.

SSM/HSN/HJL

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This Is Why The Army Sent Anthrax To South Korea, Australia, and 11 States
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:04 AM

Defense One - All Content

The Army accidentally sent live anthrax samples to labs in nine states plus South Korea. Update: After we posted this on Friday, DoD officials issued a new statement saying that they had discovered that the anthrax had actually gone to 24 labs in 11 U.S. states plus facilities in South Korea and Australia. Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work ordered a “comprehensive review of DoD laboratory procedures, processes, and protocols,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said in a statement. Work has also ordered all DoD labs to cease work with these samples until further notice. A full report is due within 30 days.

Is it possible that CDC procedures, rather than human error, caused the mistakes? Does this reveal gaps in the way packages are screened for harmful agents in shipment? And why was DoD mailing itself anthrax, anyway?

Background: on Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that between March 2014 and March 2015, it sent live anthrax from Dugway Proving Ground in Utah to research sites in up to nine states and the Threat Recognition Program at Osan Air Base, South Korea. (“There is no known risk to the general public, and no personnel have shown any signs of possible exposure. The sample was destroyed in accordance with appropriate protocols,” a DoD statement said.)

The next day, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno told reporters, “The best I can tell, there was not human error.” Instead, he tentatively blamed faulty procedures for rendering anthrax safe to ship, which is done by exposing the anthrax to high amounts of gamma radiation. The investigation is being done by the Centers for Disease Control, or CDC, which issued the handling protocol.

Which is it? CDC procedures or human error? “It could easily be a combination of both,” said Justin Taylor, a fellow with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative.

Stephen Goldstein, a doctoral candidate in microbiology, virology, and parasitology at the University of Pennsylvania medical school, also said it’s “definitely possible” the procedures are to blame. “They probably use … irradiation to render the anthrax safe, since this should inactivate it without destroying the organism,” Goldstein said. “It’s possible that the protocol simply doesn’t call for a long enough exposure to [radiation] to guarantee killing 100 percent of a large number of particles. It’s also possible the individual used a shorter … exposure than called for in the protocol. I hope the investigation answers this question. I’m sure the protocol is being re-tested now.”

Still, Goldstein said the irradiation protocol has presumably been used and tested before. “A critical question will be if this was done adequately,” he said. “If it has been and re-testing the protocol further validates it, that would definitely point to human error…Right now it’s impossible to say, and frankly, it doesn’t sound like Gen. Odierno really knows yet either.”

U.S. mail is supposed to be checked for biological hazards like anthrax spores. A year after the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people, Northrop Grumman and Smiths Detection modified some 20 biological warfare detection systems to create a single system for the Post Office to use. Does the Utah incident suggest that those screeners are ineffective and, thus, that the U.S. mail system is no more safe than it was in 2001? Not necessarily.

“Comparing the recent shipments by the U.S. Army to the anthrax attack is comparing apples to oranges,” said Taylor. “The anthrax mailed during the attacks was only contained in an envelope and was prepared so that the spores were easily spread. The recent shipments would have been packaged to contain the spores to prevent unintentional release. Even if the packages were to go through the U.S. mail, the anthrax would most likely not be detected since the anthrax was packaged in a sealed container rather than an envelope.”

Taylor also noted that researchers normally ship biological samples through FedEx, not the U.S.postal service. Still, he said, “Unfortunately, the attitude towards biological threats has been reactive rather than proactive, so I don’t think that the United States is much safer now that it was in 2001, whether the threat is from mailed anthrax or a novel influenza.”

Why was the Army sending anthrax to South Korea? To help test new detection gear. In April, DoD officials began a series of key tests of their Joint U.S. Forces Korea Portal and Integrated Threat Recognition program. Abbreviated JUPITR, the program combines large and small devices to help soldiers detect biological agents sooner and at a greater distance. It goes beyond traditional amino acid-based chemical assays to use acoustic, seismic and even laser sensors. But they don’t all work at the same time.

Last August, Defense One saw one of JUPITR’s detection machines at the Army’s Chemical Materials Activity in Edgewood, Md. When a laser device spotted a chemical agent by its UVsignature, it signaled the rest of the system to collect air samples for further testing.

“Recently, at one of [Dugway Proving Ground’s] massive outdoor test grids, JUPITR’s sensors were set in an array identical to the South Korea configuration. Benign microbes with characteristics similar to biological agents were released in varying scenarios, simulating biological attacks. Each scenario was electronically recorded, for playback at the South Korea operations demonstration,” a DoD press release said.

Bottom line: in an effort to better detect dangerous chemical agents, DoD accidentally put researchers at risk. The fact that the mailings took place over an entire year also suggests departmental errors, on top of a disturbing inability to detect anthrax.

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· · · ·

North Korea plans city cyberwar
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:04 AM

Max 6C

Welcome to your preview of The Times

Professor Kim estimated that up to 20 per cent of North Korea’s military budget was spent on hacking

Andrew Brookes/Corbis

1 of 1
Professor Kim estimated that up to 20 per cent of North Korea’s military budget was spent on hackingAndrew Brookes/Corbis

Published at 12:01AM, May 30 2015

North Korea’s military hacking unit is capable of launching cyberattacks that could kill people and destroy cities, according to a professor who defected from the regime.

Kim Heung Kwang said that Bureau 121 had created malicious software that posed a “feasible threat” to a city.

Professor Kim taught computer science at Hamheung Computer Technology University until he escaped the country in 2004. Some of the best students he taught were later handpicked by the regime and taught to “terrorise other people using the internet”, he said.

He told the BBC that he was in regular contact with North Korean officials

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The IRS Is Still Using Windows XP, Has A Cybersecurity Staff Of 363 People – Consumerist
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:03 AM

Consumerist

In the last few years, tax return fraud has become a serious problem at the state and federal levels, thanks to the growth of e-filing and security holes in IRS and third-party tax software systems. Is the IRS to blame for this trend? There are really only two options: the IRS is either broke or incompetent.

CNN puts it in slightly different terms, asking whether the agency is broke or unable to allocate the budget that it has to protect all of the data that it collects about us. The agency has 10% fewer employees than it did five years ago, but processes more tax returns and also has even more work since the Affordable Care Act was implemented, processing health insurance information and assessing penalties when needed.

While maybe better technology could help the IRS finish more work quickly, there’s a catch: they still have computers running 13-year-old Windows XP, and even their fraud-catching software is two decades old. The agency employs fewer cybersecurity staff than it used to, even as one would think the demand would go up as e-filing has become more popular.

At the same time, the “incompetent” thing might also apply: a new anti-fraud program was supposed to be finished three years ago, and is late and over-budget. Congress is still punishing the agency forwhat some members of Congress consider “lavish” spending in recent years on things like conferences and training videos. However, when it’s innocent taxpayers who end up with their identities stolen and their tax refund sent to the other side of the world, that punishment is affecting the wrong people.

Is the IRS too broke to protect your info? [CNN Money]

Army End Strength Issue Still Unsettled
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:01 AM

By C. Todd Lopez
Army News Service

WASHINGTON, May 29, 2015 – When the Army's chief of staff retires

this August, one thing he'll be leaving for his successor is the unfinished business of how big the Army will be and how it will be appropriated, he told the Defense Writers Group yesterday.

'I thought by now we would have had that resolved,' Army Gen. Raymond T. Odierno said, adding that uncertainty about the final size of the Army has brought 'angst to our soldiers.'

The final end strength of the Army -- the total number of soldiers that will be allowed to serve -- is still 'up in the air,' Odierno said. It is 'based on what happens with the Congress and the president as they continue to wrestle what the budget

would be.'

He predicts the issue will still be a concern for the next chief of staff for two to three years to come.

The general said that while popular consensus might hold that the Army is now at rest because it is largely out of Iraq and Afghanistan, in fact, the opposite is true. The Army has 143,000 soldiers forward-stationed and deployed around the world today, he said.

Odierno told journalists that continued cuts

to defense must stop, 'with the world the way it is today ... this is not the right time. We've taken enough out of defense. Let's stop and move forward.'

Continued cuts will damage the Army's modernization efforts and readiness into the next decade, the general said.

'If we don't get the dollars and continue down the road

of sequestration, it's going to affect readiness. It's going to put us in a readiness hole for five years. It's going to put us in a modernization hole for 10 years. And our ability to continue to meet the current mission is going to be challenged.'

The Return of Violence in Iraq

Security issues, such as the city of Ramadi being taken last week by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant -- and Iraqi security forces fleeing instead of fighting -- persist in Iraq. Just five years ago, the general had been optimistic about the future of the country.

'The violence in Iraq was at the lowest levels it had ever been. We saw the economics were starting to grow. Oil

was being exported at a higher rate. I felt very good. I thought we were on the right track," Odierno said. "But then again, the political piece of it has not taken. They have not been able to overcome the mistrust they have between sects.'

The general said that mistrust and conflict between Sunni and Shia, for instance, represents the kind of fractures in Iraqi society that demand a leader strong

enough to pull them together to create a stable country.

That continued mistrust, he said, continues to degrade the success

that had been achieved in Iraq early on.

'It is incredibly disappointing to me personally what I have watched happen,' he said. 'I felt in September 2010 when I left that we were on the right track. And I really believed at that time, that in five years, that Iraq would be doing very well. But frankly they have fallen apart.'

The general said he does not support sending combat formations to provide security to the country -- a task he said the Iraqis themselves are best suited for. He did say additional advisors would be okay, if those on the ground

who are observing the mission of those advisors were to say that additional advisors are needed.

'Right now they feel we are okay with the numbers we have,' he said. 'If they felt we need to increase that, I'd be supportive.'

Odierno also said that he believes that 'embedded advisors,' which means U.S. soldiers embedded with Iraqi combat units, could increase the effectiveness of those units -- and make the U.S. effort there more successful.

'That puts us at much more risk. We have not made that decision yet," Odierno said, nor does he think that U.S. Central Command Commander Army Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III has asked for that capability.

Joint Light Tactical Vehicle

The Army has said it plans to purchase 49,099 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles

, and Odierno said the Army has 'not walked away' from that commitment.

He said the JLTV is a vehicle

the Army absolutely needs, that it includes enough space for soldiers and communications gear, and that it provides adequate protection for occupants.

'I feel really good about what we've done with the JLTV,' he said. 'I think the way we've developed the requirements, the way it is moving forward, is a really important step for us. I think as we move forward it will be a central piece of the Army.'

Odierno also said the Army might be looking for an 'ultralight' vehicle that will help move airborne soldiers who land as part of forcible entry operations. Such a vehicle is being evaluated now at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Army might also be looking for a light reconnaissance vehicle, as well as 'mobile protected fire power' in light, medium and heavy versions. He also mentioned vertical lift, an infantry fighting vehicle, and 'a lighter, tank-like vehicle.'

Using the Army Operating Concept as a guide, the general said, the Army has been reviewing 20 'warfighting challenges' and has identified 'where the gaps and seams are' in terms of capability.

The effort is more holistic than it has been in the past, he said. The Army is looking across all branches and centers of excellence, rather than at functional 'stovepipes.'

'I think we are coming up with much better solutions. I think what you are going to see here, one of the things I am proud of is, we have established this AOC, we've looked at these 20 warfighting challenges, and I think now we can ease the way forward on how we start identifying near-team, mid-term and long-term gaps that we can now invest

in.

In terms of future modernization and acquisition, Odierno criticized the Army's previous concepts of acquisition, saying that the service

had always looked for the best right up front.

'I think one of the problems we've had in the past is that we tried to build a perfect vehicle,' he said. 'The requirements are so high, and they were difficult to meet, and it ended up being over budget and sometimes we found we couldn't meet them.'

Now, he said, he believes that program development might 'leave room for improvement' in new systems and that the Army tries to 'become iterative in development of a program.'

He suggested a new system where the first iteration of a new system might meet 80 percent of what the Army wants. Later iterations would reach a goal of 90 percent, and then 100 percent.

'That 80 percent is much better than what we have today,' he said. 'And it's easier to attain.'

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Page 4

IS Skilled at Gathering Intelligence, Adjusting Tactics
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:01 AM

by Sharon Behn May 29, 2015

While U.S. and coalition partners pluck intelligence on Islamic State extremists from the militants' communications or movements and then bomb them from the air, the militant group is gathering its own intelligence from city streets and preparing the ground for its next battlefield moves.

The result, according to experts, is that Washington is consistently lagging behind in its effort to destroy the Islamic State group.

"We are about 60 to 90 days behind ISIS," former intelligence officer and military adviser Michael Pregent told VOA, referring to the Islamic State by one of its acronyms.

Last year when Washington finally paid attention to Mosul, Pregent said, the extremists were already planning their next move. And this pattern has repeated itself as IS has moved across Iraq: "We are now looking at Ramadi, and ISIS is looking ahead at pushing into Baghdad," he said.

Pentagon's CENTCOM spokesman, Colonel Patrick Ryder, defended U.S. airstrikes. "We've demonstrated the ability to put ordinance on a target within minutes," he said.

Sleeper cells

But Iraqi President Fuad Masum, in an exclusive interview with VOA, said that the Islamic State's intelligence sources make them hard to defeat.

"Eliminating Daesh is not easy, because they have many types of sleeping cells, not only in Iraq, but in other countries, too," Masum said, using the acronym for Islamic State's Arabic name.

Many Iraqi cities have mixed Sunni-Shi'ite populations. Pregent said IS sleeper cells are in traditionally Sunni neighborhoods. These "cells" could be groups or individuals not necessarily affiliated with the Islamic State, but willing to provide the extremists with information.

"They would provide information on whom ISIS could likely work with, whom they need to intimidate, whom they need to kidnap, whom they need to coerce and whom they need to curry favor with, and what Iraqi security forces are willing to do, what their disposition and presence is," Pregent explained.

Harleen Gambhir, a counterterrorism analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, agreed that IS has a robust internal and external intelligence apparatus, part of which is used to gauge the strength of the Iraqi military and other security forces.

"We do know that they have tried to gather as much intelligence as they can about the Iraqi security forces, and frequently try to kidnap, interrogate and execute members of those militaries," Gambhir said. Islamic State extremists then use that information to plan their assaults.

Misleading tactics

In addition, according to Jennifer Cafarella, a fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, the extremist group has become adept at misinformation and diversionary tactics. "ISIS can mold, and shape, and mislead its followers if it needs to do that as a tactic to draw attention elsewhere," said Cafarella.

"We do see these kinds of shaping operations across both Iraq and Syria in ways that don't necessarily directly portray the image of what ISIS will go for next, because it does have that initiative to set conditions somewhere and then conduct a surprise attack on an additional front," she said.

Pregent said the United States simply does not have enough assets on the ground to get valuable intelligence on the Sunni extremists.

Syria has become a morass of various competing government, rebel and extremist groups. And the Iraqi intelligence services that conduct raids, round up Sunni males, torture and interrogate them are mainly Shi'ite, Pregent said. "It's pretty much a blunt instrument."

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DoD Announces Comprehensive Review of DoD Laboratory Procedures, Processes, and Protocols Associated With Inactivating Spore-Forming Anthrax
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 9:00 AM

		No. NR-203-15
IMMEDIATE RELEASE		May 29, 2015

DoD Announces Comprehensive Review of DoD Laboratory Procedures, Processes, and Protocols Associated With Inactivating Spore-Forming Anthrax

After consulting with Secretary Carter, Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work ordered today a comprehensive review of DoD laboratory procedures, processes, and protocols associated with inactivating spore-forming anthrax.

There is no known risk to the general public and an extremely low risk to lab workers from the department's inadvertent shipments of inactivated samples containing small numbers of live anthrax to several laboratories.

As of now, 24 laboratories in 11 states and two foreign countries are believed to have received suspect samples. We continue to work closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who is leading the ongoing investigation pursuit to its statutory authorities. The Department will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates to the public.

In addition to the CDC review, Work ordered all DoD laboratories that have these materials to test all previously inactivated spore-forming anthrax in the inventory. Furthermore, DoD is advising labs that received inactive anthrax from the department, to stop working with those samples until further instruction from the DoD and CDC.

Work directed the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L) Frank Kendall to lead a comprehensive review of DoD laboratory procedures, processes, and protocols associated with inactivating anthrax.

The DoD review will consist of:
1. Root cause analysis for the incomplete inactivation of anthrax
2. DoD laboratory biohazard safety procedures and protocols
3. Laboratory adherence to established procedures and protocols
4. Identification of systemic problems and the steps necessary to fix those problems.

After the CDC investigation is complete, the department will conduct its own investigation with respect to any apparent lapses in performance and ensure appropriate accountability.

The department takes this matter very seriously and is acting with urgency to address this matter and Work expects review findings within 30 days.

<a href="http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=17305" rel="nofollow">http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=17305</a>

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NATO Is Lost In Cyberspace
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:59 AM

StrategyPage.Com

May 30, 2015: Tiny Estonia (population 1.3 million) has formed a Cyber War militia because Russia keeps threatening another major Cyber War offensive. Despite its small size Estonia is the most technically advanced (on a per-capita basis) nation in East Europe and was able to recruit several hundred skilled volunteers who are hard at work pooling their knowledge and skills to better handle more Cyber War aggression from Russia.

Estonia borders Russia and is a member of NATO. That last bit makes Russia reluctant to come in with tanks to take over like they did twice in the 1940s. Russia made a major effort to crush Estonia via major Internet based attacks in 2007. Estonia survived that “invasion” but admitted that this sort of Russian aggression caused great financial harm to Estonia. In the wake of these Russian Cyber War attacks Estonia demanded that the UN and NATO declare this sort of thing terrorism and dealt with accordingly. NATO tried to be helpful, but that wasn’t enough. The UN was even less helpful as the UN has a hard time getting anything done when Russia is involved because Russia is one of the handful of founding members that has a veto.

NATO did make an effort and in 2008 established a Cyber Defense Center in Estonia. This was the most tangible NATO response to Estonian calls for NATO to declare Cyber War on Russia. NATO agreed to discuss the issue but never took any action against Russia. The Cyber Defense Center was a consolation prize and studies Cyber War techniques and incidents and attempts to coordinate efforts by other NATO members to create Cyber War defenses and offensive weapons. NATO say that this appears to have deterred Russia from making another Cyber War attack. The Estonians are not so sure as Russia went ahead and invaded Georgia (a nation of four million in the Caucasus) in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and still makes very public threats against Estonia.

Cyber Wars have actually been going on since the late 1990s and they are getting worse. It started in the 1990s as individuals attacked the web sites in other nations because of diplomatic disputes. This was usually stirred up by some international incident. India and Pakistan went at it several times, and Arabs and Israelis have been trashing each other’s web sites for years. The Arabs backed off at first, mainly because the Israeli hackers are much more effective. But in the last few years the Arabs have acquired more skills and are back at it. Chinese and Taiwanese hackers go at each other periodically, and in 2001, Chinese and American hackers clashed because of a collision off the Chinese coast between an American reconnaissance aircraft and a Chinese fighter. That was just the beginning for China, which now regularly makes major hacking attacks on the U.S. and other NATO members.

Since 2005 these Cyber Wars have escalated from web site defacing and shutting down sites with massive amounts of junk traffic (DDOS attacks), to elaborate espionage efforts against American military networks. The attackers are believed to be Chinese, and some American military commanders are calling for a more active defense (namely, a counterattack) to deal with the matter.

The Russian attacks against Estonia were the result of Estonia moving a statue, honoring Russian World War II soldiers, from the center of the capital, to a military cemetery in the countryside. The Estonians always saw the statue as a reminder of half a century of Russian occupation and oppression. Russia saw the statue move as an insult to the efforts of Russian soldiers to liberate Estonia and enable the Russians to occupy the place for half a century. The basic problem here is that most Russians don't see their Soviet era ancestors as evil people, despite the millions of Russians and non-Russians killed by the Soviet secret police. The Russians are very proud of their defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, ignoring the fact that the Soviet government was just biding its time before it launched its own invasion of Germany and Europe in general.

While many Russians would have backed a military attack on Estonia to retaliate for the insult by an ungrateful neighbor, this approach was seen as imprudent. Estonia is part of NATO and an attack on one NATO member is considered an attack on all. It's because of this Russian threat that Estonia was so eager to get into NATO. The Russians, however, believe that massive Cyber War attacks will not trigger a NATO response. They were so sure of this, that some of the early DDOS attacks were easily traced back to computers owned by the Russian government. When that got out, the attacks stopped for a few days, and then resumed from what appear to be illegal botnets. Maybe some legal botnets as well. Russian language message boards were full of useful information on how to join the holy war against evil Estonia. There's no indication that any Russians are afraid of a visit from the Russian cyber-police for any damage they might do to Estonia. And the damage has been significant, amounting to millions of dollars. While no one has been injured, Estonia is insisting that this attack, by Russia, should trigger the mutual defense provisions of the NATO treaty. It didn't, but it was a reminder to all that Cyber War is very real except when it comes time to fight back.

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