"The known facts from this latest case seem to fit well within a now-familiar FBI pattern whereby the agency does not disrupt planned domestic terror attacks but rather creates them, then publicly praises itself for stopping its own plots." - Latest FBI Claim of Disrupted Terror Plot Deserves Much Scrutiny and Skepticism | C.I.A. Officers Are Cleared in Senate Computer Search - NYT
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The Justice Department on Wednesday issued a press release trumpeting its latest success in disrupting a domestic terrorism plot, announcing that “the Joint Terrorism Task Force has arrested a Cincinnati-area man for a plot to attack the U.S. Capitol and kill government officials.” The alleged would-be terrorist is 20-year-old Christopher Cornell (above), who is unemployed, lives at home, spends most of his time playing video games in his bedroom, still addresses his mother as “Mommy” and regards his cat as his best friend; he was described as “a typical student” and “quiet but not overly reserved” by the principal of the local high school he graduated in 2012.
The affidavit filed by an FBI investigative agent alleges Cornell had “posted comments and information supportive of [ISIS] through Twitter accounts.” The FBI learned about Cornell from an unnamed informant who, as the FBI put it, “began cooperating with the FBI in order to obtain favorable treatment with respect to his criminal exposure on an unrelated case.” Acting under the FBI’s direction, the informant arranged two in-person meetings with Cornell where they allegedly discussed an attack on the Capitol, and the FBI says it arrested Cornell to prevent him from carrying out the attack.
Family members say Cornell converted to Islam just six months ago and claimed he began attending a small local mosque. Yet The Cincinnati Enquirer could not find a single person at that mosque who had ever seen him before, and noted that a young, white, recent convert would have been quite conspicuous at a mosque largely populated by “immigrants from West Africa,” many of whom “speak little or no English.”
The DOJ’s press release predictably generated an avalanche of scary media headlines hailing the FBI. CNN: “FBI says plot to attack U.S. Capitol was ready to go.” MSNBC: “US terror plot foiled by FBI arrest of Ohio man.” Wall St. Journal: “Ohio Man Charged With Plotting ISIS-Inspired Attack on U.S. Capitol.”
Just as predictably, political officials instantly exploited the news to justify their powers of domestic surveillance. House Speaker John Boehner claimed yesterday that “the National Security Agency’s snooping powers helped stop a plot to attack the Capitol and that his colleagues need to keep that in mind as they debate whether to renew the law that allows the government to collect bulk information from its citizens.” He warned: “We live in a dangerous country, and we get reminded every week of the dangers that are out there.”
The known facts from this latest case seem to fit well within a now-familiar FBI pattern whereby the agency does not disrupt planned domestic terror attacks but rather creates them, then publicly praises itself for stopping its own plots.
First, they target a Muslim: not due to any evidence of intent or capability to engage in terrorism, but rather for the “radical” political views he expresses. In most cases, the Muslim targeted by the FBI is a very young (late teens, early 20s), adrift, unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering basic life functions, let alone carrying out a serious terror attack, and has no known involvement with actual terrorist groups.
They then find another Muslim who is highly motivated to help disrupt a “terror plot”: either because they’re being paid substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the case here) they are charged with some unrelated crime and are desperate to please the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives the informant a detailed attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry it out, and the informant then shares all of that with the target. Typically, the informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and persuades the target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In some instances where the target refuses to go along, they have their informant offer huge cash inducements to the impoverished target.
Once they finally get the target to agree, the FBI swoops in at the last minute, arrests the target, issues a press release praising themselves for disrupting a dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the DOJ and federal judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S. courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and permissive interpretation of “entrapment” that it could almost never be successfully invoked. As AP noted last night, “defense arguments have repeatedly failed with judges, and the stings have led to many convictions.”
Consider the truly remarkable (yet not aberrational) 2011 prosecution of James Cromitie, an impoverished African-American Muslim convert who had expressed anti-Semitic views but, at the age of 45, had never evinced any inclination to participate in a violent attack. For eight months, the FBI used an informant – one who was on the hook for another crime and whom the FBI was paying - to try to persuade Cromitie to agree to join a terror plot which the FBI had concocted. And for eight months, he adamantly refused. Only when they dangled a payment of $250,000 in front of him right as he lost his job did he finally assent, causing the FBI to arrest him. The DOJ trumpeted the case as a major terrorism arrest, obtained a prosecution and sent him to prison for 25 years.
The federal judge presiding over his case, Colleen McMahon, repeatedly lambasted the government for wholly manufacturing the plot. When sentencing him to decades in prison, she said Cromitie “was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own,” and that it was the FBI which “created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true.” She added: “only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.”
In her written ruling upholding the conviction, Judge McMahon noted that Cromitie “had successfully resisted going too far for eight months,” and agreed only after “the Government dangled what had to be almost irresistible temptation in front of an impoverished man from what I have come (after literally dozens of cases) to view as the saddest and most dysfunctional community in the Southern District of New York.” It was the FBI’s own informant, she wrote, who “was the prime mover and instigator of all the criminal activity that occurred.” She then wrote (emphasis added):
As it turns out, the Government did absolutely everything that the defense predicted in its previous motion to dismiss the indictment. The Government indisputably “manufactured” the crimes of which defendants stand convicted. The Government invented all of the details of the scheme - many of them, such as the trip to Connecticut and the inclusion of Stewart AFB as a target, for specific legal purposes of which the defendants could not possibly have been aware (the former gave rise to federal jurisdiction and the latter mandated a twenty-five year minimum sentence). The Government selected the targets. The Government designed and built the phony ordnance that the defendants planted (or planned to plant) at Government-selected targets. The Government provided every item used in the plot: cameras, cell phones, cars, maps and even a gun. The Government did all the driving (as none of the defendants had a car or a driver’s license). The Government funded the entire project. And the Government, through its agent, offered the defendants large sums of money, contingent on their participation in the heinous scheme.
Additionally, before deciding that the defendants (particularly Cromitie, who was in their sights for nine months) presented any real danger, the Government appears to have done minimal due diligence, relying instead on reports from its Confidential Informant, who passed on information about Cromitie information that could easily have been verified (or not verified, since much of it was untrue), but that no one thought it necessary to check before offering a jihadist opportunity to a man who had no contact with any extremist groups and no history of anything other than drug crimes.
On another occasion, Judge McMahon wrote: “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that James Cromitie could never have dreamed up the scenario in which he actually became involved. And if by some chance he had, he would not have had the slightest idea how to make it happen.” She added that while “Cromitie, who was desperately poor, accepted meals and rent money from [the informant], he repeatedly backed away from his violent statements when it came time to act on them,” and that “only when the offers became outrageously high–and when Cromitie was particularly vulnerable to them, because he had lost his job–did he finally succumb.”
This is pre-emptory prosecution: targeting citizens not for their criminal behavior but for their political views. It’s an attempt by the U.S. Government to anticipate who will become a criminal at some point in the future based on their expressed political opinions – not unlike the dystopian premise of Minority Report – and then exploiting the FBI’s vast financial, orgnaizational, and even psychological resources, along with the individuals’ vulnerabilities, to make it happen.
In 2005, federal appellate judge A. Wallace Tashima – the first Japanese-American appointed to the federal bench, who was imprisoned in an U.S. internment camp - vehemently dissented from one of the worst such prosecutions and condemned these FBI cases as “the unsettling and untoward consequences of the government’s use of anticipatory prosecution as a weapon in the ‘war on terrorism.’”
There are countless similar cases where the FBI triumphantly disrupts its own plots, causing people to be imprisoned as terrorists who would not and could not have acted on their own. Trevor Aaronson has comprehensively covered what amounts to the FBI’s own domestic terror network, and has reported that “nearly half [of all DOJ terrorism] prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by money (operatives can be paid as much as $100,000 per assignment) or the need to work off criminal or immigration violation.” He documents “49 [terrorism] defendants [who] participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.” In 2012, Peter Bartosiewicz in The Nation reviewed the post-9/11 body of terrorism cases and concluded:
Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants — who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own — have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.
The U.S. Government has been aggressively pressuring its allies to adopt the same “sting” tactics against their own Muslim citizens (and like most War on Terror abuses, this practice is now fully seeping into non-terrorism domestic law: in a drug smuggling prosecution last year, a federal judge condemned the Drug Enforcement Agency for luring someone into smuggling cocaine, saying that “the government’s investigation deployed techniques that generated a wholly new crime for the sake of pressing criminal charges against” the defendant).
Many of the key facts in this latest case are still unknown, but there are ample reasons to treat this case with substantial skepticism. Though he had brushes with the law as a minor arguably indicative of anger issues, the 20-year-old Cornell had no history of engaging in politically-motivated violence (he disrupted a local 9/11 memorial ceremony last year by yelling a 9/11 Truth slogan, but was not arrested). There is no evidence he had any contact with any oversees or domestic terrorist operatives (the informant vaguely claims that Cornell claims he “had been in contact with persons overseas” but ultimately told the informant that “he did not think he would receive specific authorization to conduct a terrorist attack in the United States”).
Cornell’s father accused the FBI of responsibility for the plot, saying of his son: “He’s a mommy’s boy. His best friend is his cat Mikey. He still calls his mother ‘Mommy.’” His father said that “he might be 20, but he was more like a 16-year-old kid who never left the house.” He added that his son had only $1,200 in his bank account, and that the money to purchase guns could only have come from the FBI. It was the FBI, he said, who were “taking him somewhere, and they were filling his head with a lot of this garbage.”
The mosque with which Cornell was supposedly associated is itself tiny, a non-profit that reported a meager $115,000 in revenue last year. It has no history of producing terrorism suspects or violent radicals.
Whatever else is true, a huge dose of scrutiny and skepticism should be applied to the FBI’s claims. Media organizations certainly should not be trumpeting this as some dangerous terror plot from which the FBI heroically saved us all, nor telling their viewers that the FBI “uncovered” a plot that it actually created, nor trying to depict it (as MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki did in
the pictured segment
) as part of some larger plot of international terror groups, at least not without further evidence (and, just by the way, Mr. Kornacki: Anwar Awlaki
was not “the leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen
,” no matter how much repeating
that false claim
might help President Obama, who ordered that U.S. citizen killed with no due process). Nor should politicians like John Boehner be permitted without challenge to claim that this scary plot shows how crucial is the Patriot Act and the NSA domestic spying program in keeping us safe.
Having crazed loners get guns and seek to shoot people is, of course, a threat. But so is allowing the FBI to manufacture terror plots: in the process keeping fear levels about terrorism completely inflated, along with its own surveillance powers and budget. Ohio is a major recipient of homeland security spending: it “has four fusion centers, more than any other state except California, New York and Texas. Ohio also ranks fourth in the nation (tying New York) with four FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs).”
Something has to be done to justify all that terrorism spending. For all those law enforcement agents with little to do, why not sit around and manufacture plots to justify those expenditures, giving a boost to their pro-surveillance ideology to boot? Media outlets have a responsibility to investigate the FBI’s claims, not mindlessly repeat them while parading their alarmed faces and scary graphics.
Photo: Associated Press
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A man in Sweden says he will pay up to $2,000 to anyone who can break into his landlord’s website. A woman in California says she will pay $500 for someone to hack into her boyfriend’s Facebook and Gmail accounts to see if he is cheating on her.
The business of hacking is no longer just the domain of intelligence agencies, international criminal gangs, shadowy political operatives and disgruntled “hacktivists” taking aim at big targets. Rather, it is an increasingly personal enterprise.
At a time when huge stealth attacks on companies like Sony Pictures, JPMorgan Chase and Home Depot attract attention, less noticed is a growing cottage industry of ordinary people hiring hackers for much smaller acts of espionage.
A new website, called Hacker’s List, seeks to match hackers with people looking to gain access to email accounts, take down unflattering photos from a website or gain access to a company’s database. In less than three months of operation, over 500 hacking jobs have been put out to bid on the site, with hackers vying for the right to do the dirty work.
It is done anonymously, with the website’s operator collecting a fee on each completed assignment. The site offers to hold a customer’s payment in escrow until the task is completed.
In just the last few days, offers to hire hackers at prices ranging from $100 to $5,000 have come in from around the globe on Hacker’s List, which opened for business in early November.
For instance, a bidder who claimed to be living in Australia would be willing to pay up to $2,000 to get a list of clients from a competitor’s database, according to a recent post by the bidder.
“I want the client lists from a competitors database. I want to know who their customers are, and how much they are charging them,” the bidder wrote.
Others posting job offers on the website were looking for hackers to scrub the Internet of embarrassing photos and stories, retrieve a lost password or change a school grade.
The rather matter-of-fact nature of the job postings on Hacker’s List shows just how commonplace low-profile hacking has become and the challenge such activity presents for law enforcement at a time when federal and state authorities are concerned about data security.
Hacking into individual email or social media accounts occurs on a fairly regular basis, according to computer security experts and law enforcement officials. In September, the Internet was abuzz when hackers posted nude photos of female celebrities online.
It is not clear just how successful Hacker’s List will prove to be. A review of job postings found many that had yet to receive a bid from a hacker. Roughly 40 hackers have registered with the website, and there are 844 registered job posters. From the postings, it is hard to tell how many of the job offers are legitimate.
The site did get a favorable review recently on <a href="http://hackerforhirereview.com" rel="nofollow">hackerforhirereview.com</a>, which specializes in assessing the legitimacy of such services. The reviewer and owner of that site, who would identify himself only as “Eric” in emails, said he gave his top rating to Hacker’s List because it’s a “really cool concept” that limits the ability of customers and hackers to take advantage of one another.
In light of the novelty of the site, it’s hard to say whether it violates any laws.
Arguably some of the jobs being sought on Hacker’s List — breaking into another person’s email account — are not legal.
The founders of Hacker’s List, however, contend that they are insulated from any legal liability because they neither endorse nor condone illegal activities.
The website includes a 10-page terms and conditions section to which all users must agree. It specifically forbids using “the service for any illegal purposes.”
Some experts say it is not clear whether Hacker’s List is doing anything wrong in serving as a meeting ground for hackers and those seeking to employ them.
Yalkin Demirkaya, president of the private investigation company Cyber Diligence, and a former commanding officer of the New York Police Department’s computer crimes group, said a crackdown would depend on whether law enforcement officials saw it as a priority. He said Hacker’s List may skate by because many of the “people posting the ads are probably overseas.”
But Thomas G. A. Brown, a senior managing director with FTI Consulting and former chief of the computer and intellectual property crime unit of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, said hacker-for-hire websites posed problems.
“Hackers for hire can permit nontechnical individuals to launch cyberattacks with a degree of deniability, lowering the barriers to entry for online crime,” Mr. Brown said.
The website, which is registered in New Zealand, is modeled after several online businesses in which companies seeking freelancers can put projects out to bid. Some have compared the service to a hacker’s version of the classified advertising website Craigslist. Hacker’s List even has a Twitter account (@hackerslist), where it announces the posting of new hacking assignments.
Still, the three founders of Hacker’s List are not willing to go public with their own identities — at least not yet.
After registering with the website and beginning an email conversation, a reporter contacted one of the founders. Over a period of weeks, the founder, who identified himself only as “Jack,” said in a series of emails that he and two friends had founded Hacker’s List and that it was based in Colorado. Jack described himself as a longtime hacker and said that his partners included a person with master’s degree in business administration and a lawyer.
He said that the three were advised by legal counsel on how to structure the website to avoid liability for any wrongdoing by people either seeking to hire a hacker, or by hackers agreeing to do a job. The company, he said, tries to do a small background check on the hackers bidding on jobs to make sure they are legitimate, and not swindlers.
“We all have been friends for a while,” Jack said in an email, adding that Hacker’s List “was kind of a fluke occurrence over drinks one night.”
“We talked about a niche and I built it right there,” he said. “It kind of exploded on us, which was never expected.”
Hacker’s List began its website several months after federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents in Los Angeles completed a two-year crackdown on the hacker-for-hire industry. The investigation, called Operation Firehacker by the F.B.I., led to the filing of criminal charges against more than a dozen people across the country involved in either breaking into a person’s email account or soliciting a hacker for the job.
In New York, information uncovered during the investigation in Los Angeles led to the arrest in 2013 of Edwin Vargas, a New York Police Department detective at the time, who was charged with paying $4,000 for the hacking of the email accounts of 43 people, including current and former New York police officers. Mr. Vargas, who pleaded guilty in November 2013 and was sentenced to four months in prison, said he had been motivated by jealousy and wanted to see whether any of his colleagues were dating an ex-girlfriend who is the mother of his son.
The F.B.I. investigation also involved the cooperation of the authorities in China, India and Romania, because a number of the websites where the hackers advertised their expertise were based overseas.
Still, the market for hackers, many of whom comply with the law and act more like online investigators, shows no signs of slowing. Many companies are hiring so-called ethical hackers to look for weaknesses in their networks.
David Larwson, a director of operations with <a href="http://NeighborhoodHacker.com" rel="nofollow">NeighborhoodHacker.com</a>, which is incorporated in Colorado, said he had seen increased demand from companies looking to make sure their employees are not obtaining sensitive information through hacking. He said in an email that companies were increasingly focused on an “insider threat” leading to a breach or unauthorized release of information.
On its website, NeighborhoodHacker describes itself as a company of “certified ethical hackers” that works with customers to “secure your data, passwords and children’s safety.”
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WASHINGTON — The panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that five agency officers had acted in good faith during an episode marked by confusion and poor communication, and should not be punished.
The accountability board, whose findings were made public on Wednesday, overturned the conclusions of the C.I.A. inspector general, who had determined last year that the five officers acted improperly when they searched files used by the Intelligence Committee during its investigation of C.I.A. torture.
The computer search raised questions about the separation of powers and fractured relations between the C.I.A. and the Senate oversight panel, which last year released its scathing report about the agency’s detention and interrogation program during the George W. Bush administration.
In its decision to clear the five officers of wrongdoing, a finding first reported last month by The New York Times, the accountability board said there had been no concrete understanding about the rules governing the computer network, which was housed at a C.I.A. facility but included a firewall to allow Senate staff members to do their work without agency monitoring.
As a result, the accountability board said that the five officers had acted reasonably in carrying out a search in response to what they considered to be a security breach.
“The board noted the difficulty of identifying the most appropriate, reasonable, proper course of action for this security incident because nearly every such course is open to objection or question,” the panel’s report concluded.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who was the Intelligence Committee’s chairwoman until this month, immediately challenged the report’s conclusions.
“I’m disappointed that no one at the C.I.A. will be held accountable,” she said in a statement Wednesday evening. “The decision was made to search committee computers, and someone should be found responsible for those actions.”
The board was led by Evan Bayh, the former Democratic senator from Indiana. The other members of the panel were Robert F. Bauer, who was White House counsel during President Obama’s first term, and three C.I.A. officials.
The conflict erupted last January when C.I.A. officials sought to determine how the committee had gained access to an internal agency review about the detention program. Senate Democrats believe the review bolstered the committee’s findings that the C.I.A. had repeatedly misled Congress on the value of its detention and interrogation program.
The internal review was ordered in 2009 by Leon E. Panetta, then the C.I.A. director, and has come to be known as the Panetta Review. It was not one of the millions of digital files that the C.I.A. meant the committee to have, and agency officials suspected that Senate staff members had improperly gained access to parts of the agency’s computer network that they had been prohibited from using.
The inspector general’s report, a declassified version of which was also released on Wednesday, included a lengthy memo from one of the C.I.A. officers under investigation, who said that John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, had insisted that agency investigators get to the bottom of the security breach.
The officer, a C.I.A. lawyer, wrote that Mr. Brennan had called him at home and “emphasized that I was to use whatever means necessary” to determine how committee investigators had gotten access to the review.
The accountability board concluded that while agency officials believed they were operating at the director’s behest, Mr. Brennan was unaware that his investigators would use such intrusive tactics to answer his questions. The board labeled this a misunderstanding.
The board said the entire matter had been beset by confusion, fueled partly by the fact that nobody involved understood the precise rules governing a computer network used by both the C.I.A. and its Senate overseers.
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Snowden leak: Slow cyber defenses letting Russia, China hack US
The Hill But according to the newly released document, the absence of those technologies has made it easier for countries like China and Russia as well as ill-intentioned hackers to break into people's networks and do billions of dollars worth of damage ... and more » |
The agency tweets the line from the Doctor Zhivago author to highlight its role in disseminating the banned book throughout the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s
The CIA on Thursday baffled many of its watchers with a tweet written in Cyrillic, mystifying readers unlucky enough to never have taken a year of Russian in college and raising fears the account had been hacked, as a US military account was on Monday.
But Russophones quickly corrected the worried masses by pointing out that the agency had simply quoted the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, whose 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago the agency had a hand in disseminating throughout the Soviet bloc in the 1960s.
Я писал роман для того, чтобы он был издан и прочитан и это остаётся единственным моим желанием -Пастернак
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The United States has welcomed news that Pakistani authorities plan to outlaw the Haqqani terrorist network and more than 10 other organizations connected to militant groups
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