A year-in-review email recently circulated to employees at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that leaked online this week (PDF) reveals a series of disciplinary actions taken against agents during 2012. While some of the agents’ transgressions were entertaining for how out-of-line…
What the FBI Doesn’t Want You To Know About Its “Secret” Surveillance Techniques
Since the Supreme Court ruled the government must get a warrant to use its go-to surveillance technique, they’ve decided that it’s easier to keep everything secret. … Read More
Sandy Hook Shooter Adam Lanza Has Left No “Footprint” Since 2009
(TPS) There is zero online fingerprint of him, there is zero video evidence, there is zero car insurance, tax information, phone history. There is zero proof this guy has even been alive for the last 3 years. The neighbors haven’t seen him in years, nobody who lives around the Lanzas seems to have seen him, [...]
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Weapon background checks hit record high in December
Jason Zielinski shows a customer a selection of AR-15 style rifles being offered for sale at Freddie Bear Sports sporting goods store on December 17, 2012 in Tinley Park, Illinois. (Scott Olson/Getty Images/AFP)Last month, the FBI ran a record 2.8 million background checks on those wishing to purchase firearms in the US, with most of those checks occurring after the Dec. 14 massacre in Newtown, Conn.Background check applications for firearm purchases have been on the rise for years, but spiked dramatically after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School last month. Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shows that the agency performed 2.78 million background checks in December, which is up from the 2.01 million conducted during the previous month, which was the first to exceed two million.The states that saw the large
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st background check increases from the previous month were Georgia (66.3 percent), Oregon (63. 1 percent), New Hampshire (60.7 percent), Texas (60.2 percent), and Montana (58.3 percent).While the figures do not indicate the number of new guns sold, they give an approximation of the number of Americans wishing to purchase firearms. Depending on state law, buyers are often allowed to purchase multiple guns under one background check.December’s 2.8 million background checks are up 50 percent from December 2011, when the FBI performed 1.86 million checks. In total, 19.6 million background checks were performed in 2012, which is not an annual record but is an increase of 19 percent from 2011.Even though the background checks cannot predict the firearms sold, gun sales also increased in December. Every US state saw a greater number of gun sales last month than in November, with 48 of 50 states also seeing an increase in total firearm sales in 2012. Washington, DC saw the largest year-to-year increase in gun sales, rising by 49.7 percent.“Handgun sales are up substantially and modern sporting rifles are up astronomically,” Karl Durkheimer, owner of the gun shop Northwest Armory, told The Guardian. “The people you see are twofold. There are first-time buyers who are in fear of what the future will bring. But most of what you saw is people hedging their bets that there might be a political policy put forward by the liberal side of the government.”The FBI did not suggest reasons behind the rise in gun sales and background checks, but some attribute the change to fear of tighter gun control regulations in light of the Dec. 14 shooting in Newtown, Conn. Gun sales and background checks typically also increase during the holiday season.Past data indicates that mass shootings frequently prompt Americans to stock up on weapons in fear of gun control laws. After 24-year-old James Holmes killed 12 and injured 58 in a shooting in Aurora, Colo., applications to buy guns rose by more than 40 percent in a week. After Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot, there was a 60 percent increase in gun sales in a single day in Arizona.While Americans mourned the death of the 20 children and six adults killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School last month, many more headed to their local firearms’ dealer to stock up on handguns and hunting rifles, in the case that Congress passes legislation restricting or limiting eligibility for such purchases.The FBI background investigations are required under the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993, which was signed into law by former President Bill Clinton and went into effect on November 30, 1998. During the program’s first month of operation, 871,644 background checks were performed by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which is about a third of the number performed this year. … Read More
Records show FBI monitored ‘Anarchist’ Occupy Wall Street protests
Newly-released records show the Federal Bureau of Investigations used counter-intelligence measures to monitor several Occupy Wall Street protests, at times labeling their actions as “Anarchist” and investigating them as potential domestic terrorists, the New York Times reported Monday….
Everyone is fair game: Spy agency conducts surveillance on all US citizens
The Obama administration overruled recommendations from within the US Department of Homeland Security and implemented new guidelines earlier this year that allow the government to gather and analyze intelligence on every single US citizen.Since the spring, a little-know intelligence agency outside of Washington, DC has been able to circumvent the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution and conduct dragnet surveillance of the entire country, combing massive datasets using advanced algorithms to search and seize personal info on anyone this wish, reports the Wall Street Journal this week.There’s no safeguard that says only Americans with criminal records are the ones included, and it’s not just suspected terrorists that are considered in the searches either. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has been provided with entire government databases and given nearly endless access to intelligence on everyone in the country, regardless of whether or not they’ve done anything that would have made them a person of interest. As long as data is “reasonably believed” to contain “terrorism information,” the agency can do as they wish. What’s more is the NCTC can retain that information for years, reviewing it whenever they’d like to take a look. The update to the agency’s policies, reported by RT at the time and reexamined this week in the Journal, expose any person in the country to invasive and nearly endless government surveillance.”This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan is reported by the Journal to have said during a Situation Room meeting earlier this year within the walls of the White House. At the time, Callahan was chief privacy officer at DHS as well as one of the only staffers inside the Obama administration concerned with what was about to happen.According to documents obtained by the Journal through Freedom of Information Act requests and conversations between the paper and persons familiar with that Situation Room sound-off, Ms. Callahan unsuccessfully argued against updating a 2008 Justice Department memo about what intel the NCTC can have and how they use it. Just weeks after that meeting, new guidelines were authorized and, within months, Ms. Callahan was working elsewhere. Despite her efforts, a 32-page document, “Guidelines for Access, Retention, Use and Dissemination by the National Counterterrorism Center and other Agencies of Information in Datasets Containing Non-Terrorism Information,” went into effect, and with that the NCTC was no longer restricted to only terrorism-related intelligence and instead “The 2008 memo’s title referred to NCTC’s access to ‘terrorism information’ contained in non-terrorism datasets. The 2012 title simply refers to ‘information’ in those datasets,” reports the Journal. “The removal of the world ‘terrorism’ is an indication of how this memo expands NCTC’s mandate to allow surveillance of US citizens based on more than just the terrorism information.’”Indeed, the changes aren’t just within the name of the document. The 2012 update to the NCTC’s data-mining policies expand the intelligence the agency can comb while at the same time removing safeguards that were in place for privacy’s sake. Under the new rules, data on innocent Americans can be retained for
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five years, and intel on anyone “reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information” can be kept until the end of time.”It’s breathtaking” in its scope, one former senior administration official tells the Journal. According to the paper, “flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others” can be collected indefinitely and searched at will within the NCTC, an agency only nine years old and not nearly as well-known as her sister spy groups: the CIA and FBI.Once the NCTC has the info, though, they can decide who else can be made privy to it. If the US government is so inclined, intelligence on specific citizens can be sent to any foreign nation in the world.“Literally anything the government collects would be fair game, and the original agency in charge of protecting the privacy of those records would have little say over whether this happened, or what the spy agency did with the information afterward,” writes Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s DC branch. Calabrese testified before Congress earlier this year, and in a blog post authored by him in July, he describes just how detrimental the new policies are to personal privacy.“That sharing can happen in relation to national security and safety, drug investigations [or] if it’s evidence of a crime or to evaluate sources or contacts. This boundless sharing is broad enough to encompass disclosures to an employer or landlord about someone who NCTC may think is potentially a criminal, or at the request of local law enforcement for vetting an informant,” he writes.On the blog PrivacySOS, civil liberties advocate Kade Crockford condemns the spy program by saying any safeguard that could be implemented wouldn’t end what appears to be a serious constitutional violation.“And even if it was an effective anti-terrorism technique, widespread, warrantless surveillance of every single living human being – suspicious or not – damn sure isn’t democratic practice. We are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty in this country, not the other way around,” Crockford writes. In his post from earlier this year, the ACLU’s Calabrese says the real dangers could come if the government decides to supplement their statistics with other private information purchased from third-parties.“What if that spy agency could add commercial information, anything it – or any other federal agency – could buy from the huge data aggregators that are monitoring our every move?” he asks.Meanwhile, in-between Calabrese’s original post and the Journal’s article from this week, search giant Google confirmed that the federal government has sent more requests for personal user data in 2012 than ever before. “This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise,” Google explained last month.The latest revelation from the Journal of course is but the most recent installation in what has become a remarkable year in terms of finding out the truth about Uncle Sam’s shocking full-fledged surveillance. Throughout 2012, several former employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) have stepped up and given interviews about the grievances with the office, particularly their disregard for the privacy of Americans.“When you open up the Pandora’s Box of just getting access to incredible amounts of data, for people that have no reason to be put under suspicion, no reason to have done anything wrong, and just collect all that for potential future use or even current use, it opens up a real danger — and to what else what they could use that data for, particularly when it’s all being hidden behind the mantle of national sec
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urity,” NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake told Current TV host Eliot Spitzer earlier this year.Journalist Julia Angwin writes for the Journal that the DHS is currently working out the details on how to provide the NCTC with new lists of data, but acknowledges that every federal agency can come up with their own rules regarding what they want handed over. Earlier this month, former NSA analyst William Binney spoke with RT and said that the FBI — who maintains databases that can be requested by the NCTC under their latest policies — has been storing the emails of every person in America for at least a decade.“So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason – they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they’ve done for the last 10 years at least,” he said.Upon winning a Callaway award for civic courage in DC last month, Mr. Binney explained that he and other former NSA agents “could not be accessories to violations of the US Constitution.” Ms. Callahan has since left her post within the NCTC and is now practicing law in the nation’s capital focusing specifically on privacy. … Read More
Detected via Facebook: FBI arrests International cyber-crime gang
(AFP Photo / Aamir Qureshi)The FBI has managed to bust an international criminal ring with the help of Facebook. The ten suspects allegedly infected 11 million computers around the world with software that defrauded victims of more than $850 million.Facebook’s security team assisted the US authorities in revealing the alleged source of the attacks, as well as identifying which users may have been hit. As a result, arrests were made globally, including from the UK, the US and New Zealand. Other suspects were detained in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Peru.The accused hackers employed the ‘Butterfly Botnet’ (robot + network), a system which steams credit card, bank account and other personal info via a “zombie army” of computers set up to forward transmissions (including spam or viruses) to other computers on the Internet. The users, like all the other victims, have no idea that their computers have been hijacked for criminal purposes. Some 11 million computers designated as “zombie” bots were compromised when their computers were infected with malicious software (malware) that allowed the hackers – bonnet operators – to use their victims’ computers remotely.Facebook users were targeted with the so-called ‘Yahos’ malware over a two year period – between 2010 and October 2012 – the FBI said.The FBI has suggested all users to update their operating systems regularly, use anti-virus software and more importantly, disconnect their computers from the Internet periodically in order not to fall victim to such cyber attacks.It is not the first time when social media, and particularly Facebook monitoring has been shown to be successful in uncovering criminal activity. In September, the NYPD brought charges against 49 gang members from the feuding “Rockstarz” and “Very Crispy Gangsters” in Brooklyn. The charges ended a turf war that had lasted three years, included ten shootings, and taken three lives. The feud was fueled in large part by public Facebook posts of gang members bragging about their exploits and taking photos of themselves on ‘enemy’ turf. With the number of cyber-attacks growing and hackers becoming increasingly sophisticated, New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly launched an anti-gang initiative called Operation Crew Cut in October. Kelly’s plan aims at cutting the emerging gangs down by turning crew members’ rising use of social media against them. The department had previously intended to double the size of its Gang Division from approximately 150 detectives to 300. … Read More
