WORLDWIDE
Cybersecurity: FBI goes global on threats
By Ben Bain
Jan 12, 2009 - Federal Computer Week
Law enforcement officials continue to face in the age of global
interconnectedness and criminal behavior that operates without
regard to national borders. Last May, the Justice Department
announced charges against 38 people for their alleged involvement in
a computer and credit card fraud scheme that spanned the globe. It
was a case the FBI could not have solved without close coordination
with officials in Romania, because the international crime ring had
a significant base in Bucharest. The defendants were charged with
crimes related to phishing, tricking people into revealing personal
information and passwords that allowed the criminals to defraud them
of millions of dollars. Several of the defendants have pleaded
guilty. Romanian authorities, coordinating with the FBI, conducted
several searches of homes that uncovered crucial evidence necessary
to prosecute the defendants, said Mark Filip, Justice’s deputy
attorney general. Indeed, the Romanian authorities’ active
cooperation with the FBI now serves a model when U.S. law
enforcement officials discuss international cooperation on cyber
crime. "The Romania prosecution is a good example of our ability to
deal with cyber criminal activity cutting across national borders,"
Filip said…
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Barack Obama's other war on terror
By Philip Sherwell:
The Daily Telegraph (London)
13 Jan 2009
The note left next to the severed heads of the eight soldiers and
state police chief was chillingly direct. "For each of mine that you
kill, I will kill 10 soldiers," it read.
It sounds like the sort of gruesome tactic deployed by Islamic
terrorists in Iraq. But this horrific scene occurred last month near
the main road from Mexico City to the popular tourist destination of
Acapulco on the Pacific coast. The soldiers were kidnapped as they
left a nearby military barracks and then decapitated in apparent
revenge for an army firefight with a narcotics gang in a nearby town
that left three drug smugglers dead. Mexico's rapidly escalating
drug wars claimed nearly 6,000 lives last year in a country more
commonly associated with sun, sand and ancient ruins than narco-terrorism.
Much of the bloodshed is concentrated along the US-Mexican border,
where the violence is spilling across the 2,000 miles of shared
frontier. Beheaded and mutilated corpses and mass graves turn up on
a near-daily basis, often in the heart of cities such as Cuidad
Juarez and Tijuana, once-thriving border communities that are now
the terrifying fiefdoms of the cartels. In a report last month that
sent shock waves through Washington, General Barry McCaffrey, US
drug tsar under President Bill Clinton, called for the new Barack
Obama administration to focus on the security threat along America's
southern border…
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NATIONAL
Torture Acknowledgment Highlights Detainee Issue
by William Glaberson: New York Times
When the senior official for the Pentagon’s military commissions
said this week that interrogators tortured a detainee at Guantánamo
Bay and that therefore he could not be prosecuted, she highlighted
the hard question at the center of the incoming Obama
administration’s effort to form a new detention policy.
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Casey Signs 7,000 Letters Of Apology To Families Of Fallen
By Jeff Schogol: Stars and Stripes
ARLINGTON, Va. — Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey has
personally signed letters apologizing to about 7,000 families of
fallen soldiers who received letters last month that all began "Dear
John Doe."
"There’s some things that you just have to personalize, and that was
too personal," Casey said Wednesday.
Printed by a contractor, the letters were intended to inform
families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan about private
organizations that can help them, but the names of the families did
not transfer when the contractor combined the letters with a list of
families’ addresses.
The Army announced the mistake and issued an apology on Jan. 6.
Calling the incident a "terrible mistake," Casey said the Army has
since suspended all mass mailings and e-mails pending a quality
control check.
"We are working on what’s the appropriate action against the
contractor right now," Casey told reporters after speaking at an
Association of the United States Army event Wednesday.
Casey said he did not know the name of the contractor that printed
the "John Doe" letters.
The Army has refused to release the name of the contractor,
prompting some Stars and Stripes readers to ask why.
"The decision not to release the contractor’s name is because,
ultimately, it’s the Army’s responsibility, sir, not the
contractor’s, to maintain quality control," explained Army spokesman
Paul Boyce on Monday.
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Spokesman: Obama Will Lift Ban On Gays
Washington Times
(Pg. 2)
January 15, 2009
The incoming White House press secretary reiterated Wednesday in
unusually blunt terms his boss' vow to allow openly homosexual
persons to serve in the U.S. military.
Robert Gibbs made the statement in a video during which he answered
members of the public who sent him questions via YouTube.com.
"Thadeus of Lansing, Mich., asks, 'Is the new administration going
to get rid of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy?'" Mr. Gibbs said.
"Thadeus, you don't hear a politician give a one-word answer much.
But it's 'Yes.'"
President-elect Barack Obama has long opposed the "don't ask, don't
tell" policy, which President Bill Clinton established as a
compromise after a public furor in the opening days of his
administration led him to back off his campaign promise to repeal
outright the military's ban on gays.
The Washington Times reported in November that the Obama team did
not expect to move against "don't ask don't tell" for months and,
perhaps not until 2010.
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Immigration prosecutions surge under Bush's watch
By Dianne Solis: The Dallas
Morning News
Tuesday, January
13, 2009
Immigration prosecutions in the federal courts more than quadrupled
during the eight years of the Bush administration and Texas' two
border districts led the nation in the surge, according to a new
report by a Syracuse University research center. Even the
Dallas-based Northern Judicial District of Texas was part of the
increase, though the number of prosecutions – 357 in the 2008 fiscal
year – was a fraction of the 25,061 prosecutions in the Southern
district of Texas. The report by the Syracuse group known as the
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, also showed a
decline in certain types of prosecutions such as white-collar crime
and narcotics filings. The Justice Department defended its record on
Monday and questioned the Syracuse's group analysis of federal
data...
REGIONAL
UPDATE:
BORDC-Tacoma Opposition to the Northwest Detention Center
Expansion
Meanwhile, snow run off and heavy rains
caused flooding in the Pacific Northwest quite near where this
facility is located. Tacoma came very close to a
serious situation this month when water came within inches of topping the decayed levees near
the detention center. Still, no emergency plans are known of yet:
there is no rehearsed evacuation for over 1,000 people and no
identified shelter to take them to. The flooding did flush a host of
waste products into the nearby bay. We alerted the City of Tacoma,
Dept of Ecology, and EPA to look at this before the flood but little
was done.
SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE
Russia's gas war
Ariel Cohen COMMENTARY: Washington Times
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Ariel Cohen is senior research fellow in Russian and Eurasian
Studies and International Energy Security at the Katherine and
Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at the
Heritage Foundation...
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The Secret Patents of the Atomic Bomb
During WWII the United States attempted to keep create a monopoly on
nuclear technologies in the Post-War period.
Here are some of the "secret" patents. Don't build this at home.
http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~wellerst/atomic_patents/
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SPECIAL CATEGORY (SPECAT)
Vitual Trace Route Tool
The visual trace route tool displays the path Internet packets
traverse to reach a specified destination. The tool works by
identifying the IP addresses of each hop along the way to the
destination network address. The estimated geophysical location of
each hop is identified using MaxMind's GeoIP database. After all of
the hops locations' are identified, the path to the destination is
plotted on a Google Map. More about this tool.
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