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FBI Ties Chicago Representatives to Zimbabwe Lobbying

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Two Democratic lawmakers from Illinois worked to help lift economic sanctions against Zimbabwe after being targeted by an illegal $3.4 million lobbying scheme, according to FBI testimony unsealed in federal court.

Reps. Danny K. Davis and Bobby L. Rush, both of the Chicago area, were identified by Chicago media as “U.S. Representative A” and “U.S. Representative B” in the case, given that they were the only Illinois Democrats to have sponsored a failed 2010 resolution to lift sanctions against Zimbabwe cited in court documents.

Two other Chicagoians, Prince Asiel Ben Israel and C. Gregory Turner, are charged with accepting millions in illegal payments from Zimbabwe officials to lobby U.S. lawmakers to remove sanctions against the African nation. Such sanctions have been in place for almost a decade due to long-time President Robert Mugabe’s record of abuses of power.

Davis and Rush were not named in the affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Steven D. Noldin, dated July 16.

According to the affidavit, U.S. Representative A sent a letter on official Congressional letterhead to Mugabe in August 2009 requesting a meeting, saying that he had been briefed by Ben Israel, “who continues to ‘inform and sensitive African American Leadership on not only the plight of the people of Zimbabwe, but on the economic and political direction of the African Continent.’”

Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Can Hack Your Android to Remotely Activate Cell Phone Microphones

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesLaw-enforcement officials in the U.S. are expanding the use of tools routinely used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects, bringing the criminal wiretap into the cyber age.

Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.

People familiar with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s programs say that the use of hacking tools under court orders has grown as agents seek to keep up with suspects who use new communications technology, including some types of online chat and encryption tools. The use of such communications, which can’t be wiretapped like a phone, is called “going dark” among law enforcement.

A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment.

The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.’s GOOG -0.17% Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment.

Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Claims it Couldn’t Have Prevented Boston Marathon Bombing, Needed Even MORE Surveillance Tools

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe F.B.I. has concluded that there was little its agents could have done to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, according to law enforcement officials, rejecting criticism that it could have better monitored one of the suspects before the attack.

That conclusion is based on several internal reviews that examined how the bureau handled a request from a Russian intelligence agency in 2011 to investigate whether one of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had been radicalized during his time in the United States.

Mr. Tsarnaev, who along with his brother, Dzhokhar, came to the United States about a decade ago from the Russian republic of Dagestan, was killed during a shootout with the police four days after he and his brother detonated two bombs at the finish line of the marathon, killing 3 people and injuring more than 200, the authorities say.

Members of Congress have contended that the F.B.I. should have done a more extensive investigation of Mr. Tsarnaev in response to the Russian request. And they have said the bureau should have followed up with Mr. Tsarnaev after he returned from a trip to Russia in 2012.

But F.B.I. officials have concluded that the agents who conducted the investigation and ultimately told the Russians that there was no evidence that Mr. Tsarnaev had become radicalized were constrained from conducting a more extensive investigation because of federal laws and Justice Department protocols. Agents cannot use surveillance tools like wiretapping for the type of investigation they were conducting.

Read more from this story HERE.

105 Children Lured into Prostitution are Rescued by FBI in Biggest Ever Bust of its Type in U.S. History – 150 Pimps in 76 Cities Who ‘Tortured’ Girls as Young as 13 are Arrested (+video)

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Photo Credit: FBI.govThe FBI rescued 105 teenagers over the weekend who were forced into prostitution in the largest child sex trafficking sting in U.S. history, which encompassed 76 cities, the agency said Monday.

The youngest child rescued was 13 years old, the FBI said.

The raids resulted in the arrests of 150 ‘pimps’ involved in the sexual exploitation of both adults and children, said Ronald Hosko, assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigative division.

The FBI said 60 percent of the children rescued were in foster care or group homes when they ran away.

‘With no way to survive on their own they are lured into a life of being trafficked for sex,’ Hosko said.

Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Letter to Rand Paul Reveals Drones Used 10 Times in US (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerBy Alec Hill. The Federal Bureau of Investigations has used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, at least ten times in the United States, a letter from the agency to Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul revealed on Thursday.

“Since late 2006, the FBI has conducted surveillance using UAV’s in eight criminal cases and two nationals security cases,” the letter reads. A footnote at the end of the sentence noted that in three additional cases, drones were authorized, but “not actually used.”

In addition to their public response, the FBI also sent Paul’s office a different, classified version of their letter containing more details.

The FBI sent the letter to Paul’s office after Paul’s insistent and much-publicized stand against drone use on American citizens both at home and abroad, which dates back to a filibuster Paul conducted on March 6. On that date, Paul, assisted by a bipartisan group of senators, protested the Obama administration’s use of drones by holding up John Brennan’s nomination for CIA director for almost 13 hours. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APRand Paul maintains hold on FBI nominee

By Burgess Everett. The FBI has used domestic drones for surveillance in eight criminal and two national security cases since 2006, an FBI official wrote in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul, who is maintaining his hold of the nominee to lead the agency.

The letter came in response to a list of questions Paul sent to the director about domestic drone use. Paul had said he would delay the nomination of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s potential successor, James Comey, until he received specifics on the domestic drone program.

Now, Paul says the answers are “insufficient” and he sent a follow-up with additional questions, meaning the hold remains in place. Paul’s been known to get drone answers before, filibustering the nomination of CIA Director John Brennan for 12 hours over the question of whether the government could kill Americans not engaged in combat on U.S. soil.

Stephen Kelly from the FBI’s Office of Congressional Affairs said drones — or unmanned aerial vehicles — have been used in the United States in “very limited circumstances,” such as locating a missing 5-year-old child held in an underground Alabama bunker earlier this year. Kelley also said the FBI does not arm its drones, nor does it have plans to do so, and does not conduct “bulk surveillance.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: telegraph.co.ukEU planning to ‘own and operate’ spy drones and an air force

By Bruno Waterfield. The European Union is planning to “own and operate” spy drones, surveillance satellites and aircraft as part of a new intelligence and security agency under the control of Baroness Ashton.

The controversial proposals are a major move towards creating an independent EU military body with its own equipment and operations, and will be strongly opposed by Britain.

Officials told the Daily Telegraph that the European Commission and Lady Ashton’s European External Action Service want to create military command and communication systems to be used by the EU for internal security and defence purposes. Under the proposals, purchasing plans will be drawn up by autumn.

The use of the new spy drones and satellites for “internal and external security policies”, which will include police intelligence, the internet, protection of external borders and maritime surveillance, will raise concerns that the EU is creating its own version of the US National Security Agency.

Senior European officials regard the plan as an urgent response to the recent scandal over American and British communications surveillance by creating EU’s own security and spying agency. Read more from this story HERE.

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Why Do Women Disapprove of Drone Strikes So Much More Than Men Do?

Photo Credit: the atlantic

By Alexis C. Madrigal. Pew’s out with an international poll that shows, across countries and overall levels of support, a striking gender gap exists on support for American drone strikes.

Women were much less likely to approve of “the United States conducting missile strikes from pilotless aircraft called drones to target extremists in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.”

In Japan, for example, support for drone strikes was 30 percentage points lower than their male counterparts. The smallest gaps — in France, South Korea, and Uganda — were 14, 14, and 13 percentage points, respectively. On average, there was a 22-point gap between male and female support for drone strikes, and it didn’t matter if there was considerable overall support for strikes or not.

“Gender gaps are also often seen in global surveys over the use of military force, with women far less likely than men to say that force is sometimes necessary in the pursuit of justice,” wrote Bruce Stokes, Director of Global Economic Attitudes at the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, in introducing the data. “But the gender difference over drone strikes is unusually large.” Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Ignored Warnings About Boston Bombers’ Radical Mosque

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Photo Credit: The Daily CallerFederal Bureau of Investigation officials ignored warnings about the radical origins and nature of the mosque frequented by the Tsarnaev brothers for years before this April’s deadly Boston Marathon bombings.

Outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller has also said that although the FBI visited the mosque in the past — as part of its “outreach” to the Muslim community — he was unaware of the Islamist leanings of the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), which runs the Boston bombers’ house of worship.

But the FBI was warned nearly four years prior to the bombings that the ISB was a nest of Islamic radicalism.

On May 1, 2009 our organization, Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), briefed representatives of the Boston FBI office on the ISB mosques’ affiliation with Islamic extremism. Nevertheless, the FBI continues to claim it was surprised by the background of the ISB.

In a June appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Mueller described how it took four days after the Boston Marathon bombings for his agency to canvass the Tsarnaev brothers’ controversial mosque.

Read more from this story HERE.

Your Place in the Database

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Photo Credit: American ThinkerRegarding the American surveillance state, it seems that the truth comes out a little at a time. We learned about the FBI’s Carnivore in the 1990s, which the copied internet data of people whom the agency deemed “reasonably suspicious.” In September 2001, we saw the worst attacks on America since Pearl Harbor. September 11 left a unified country in its wake, but unfortunately, it was also a country more acquiescent than ever to big government. The PATRIOT Act was quickly shuttled through the lawmaking process, and life went on. We found out about NSA domestic wiretapping from a brave AT&T whistleblower in 2006. The program was given the formality of legality (though not constitutionality) in 2007. Would it have been had no one blown the whistle?

The surveillance state became even more unsettling with the Change of 2009, no less after political campaigning by the victor against domestic spying. We found out in 2009 that returning veterans were being targeted as possible extremists by the “Vigilant Eagle” program, a name positively Orwellian in its irony. The floodgates opened in 2013 once Obama’s re-election was secured. We found out that our government scans all domestic cell phone metadata (phone numbers, recipients, times), all letter and package labels are scanned and saved, and the NSA has agreements with every major internet provider to provide backdoor access to customers’ information (see PRISM). Even our credit card activity is analyzed. Of course, those are just high points. The entire last decade we have heard warnings from whistleblowers such as William Binney, as well as periodic admissions from U.S. officials of intelligence oversteps, which they falsely claim are immediately corrected.

One must wonder how the people of this nation would have reacted had all of this come out at once. Perhaps it is wishful thinking to hope that we would have shown a tenth the gumption of the Egyptians, who in July 2013 unceremoniously flung their Islamist government to the side. They took to the streets in outrage against tyrants at just the time we learned of the sickening scope of our national government’s spying. We meekly sat by. As each little bit of this diabolical system is leaked, it is palatable enough to warrant only a minor outrage, and then life goes on, albeit with a new normal. Tiny violations of our 4th-Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure, and our 5th-Amendment right against self-incrimination, keep piling up, until it seems that those rights have bled to death from a thousand cuts. If Americans are the proverbial frog in the pot of water, the temperature has been ratcheted to a near-boil.

The Relational Database

For me, the most stomach-churning signpost on our nation’s road to tyranny has been the completion of the Utah Data Center. The center holds data on the scale of yottabytes. One yottabyte could account for 30 million gigabytes per U.S. man, woman, and child. It’s a staggering capacity. Now, for Americans, the camera is always rolling, creating a record of our every digital move. It reminds one of The Truman Show, a movie in which Jim Carrey’s entire life was filmed and broadcast as entertainment without him knowing it.

Because of the power of relational databases, and the laws governing internet service provider record-keeping, anything stored in the data centers (there are many across the nation, the Utah Center being the largest and most recent) can be tied to us directly. When tied to other sources of government data, it’s a more complete picture of our life than most of us could even provide about ourselves. The websites we browse, the comments we make, the e-mails we send, the phone calls to friends, the internet purchases, the Facebook associations, and most everything else you can think of are easily tied together.

Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Orders the State of Florida Medical Examiner to Keep Boston Bombing Friend’s Autopsy Secret

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Photo Credit: APA Florida medical examiner’s office said Tuesday that the FBI has ordered the office not to release its autopsy report of a Chechen man fatally shot by a Boston FBI agent in May because of the federal agency’s active internal investigation into his death.

The medical examiner’s office said it completed the autopsy report on Ibragim Todashev, a friend of suspected Boston Marathon bomber c, on July 8 and that the report was “ready for release.” The agent shot and killed Todashev on May 22 in his Orlando apartment during an interrogation related to the Boston Marathon bombings.

“The FBI has informed this office that the case is still under active investigation and thus not to release the document,” Tony Miranda, forensic records coordinator for Orange and Osceola counties in Orlando, said in a letter to the media today. Miranda said state law bars his office from releasing the report if an criminal investigation is ongoing.

The FBI and the Justice Department are conducting an internal inquiry into the shooting, but critics have called for an independent inquiry, questioning the blanket of secrecy surrounding the case.

The FBI and the Massachusetts State Police sought out Todashev after the Marathon bombings, but have refused to release details of the shooting. Media reports have provided conflicting accounts: Some said Todashev attacked the agent with a blade during an interrogation, while others said Todashev was unarmed. Another said he lunged at the agent with a metal pole or a broomstick.

Read more from this story HERE.

Broad Coalition of Gun, Drug, Privacy Groups Sue NSA, FBI Over Surveillance while Snowden Files for Asylum

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Photo Credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPAPrivacy groups led by EFF sue to stop NSA and FBI electronic surveillance

By Associated Press. Rights activists, church leaders and drug and gun rights advocates found common ground and filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the federal government to halt a vast National Security Agency electronic surveillance program.

The lawsuit was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the unusually broad coalition of plaintiffs, and seeks an injunction against the NSA, Justice Department, FBI and directors of the agencies.

Filed in federal court in San Francisco, it challenges what the plaintiffs describe as an “illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet electronic surveillance.”

The suit came after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked details about NSA surveillance programs last month, revealing a broad US intelligence program to monitor Internet and telephone activity to ferret out terror plots.

Snowden, who has been charged with spying and theft of government property, has spent the past three weeks in the Moscow airport transit zone. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AFPSnowden to stay in Moscow airport for now: lawyer

By Maria Antonova. US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden will stay in the transit zone of the Moscow airport where he has been holed up for three weeks while Russian authorities process his asylum request, a lawyer helping him said Tuesday.

Anatoly Kucherena, a Russian lawyer who helped Snowden file an application for asylum in Russia earlier Tuesday, told AFP the fugitive former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor was happy with his treatment at the airport.

“While all procedural questions are being decided, he will remain in the transit zone of the airport,” Kucherena told AFP in central Moscow when asked if Snowden would remain at Sheremetyevo airport until the asylum request was approved.

He confirmed that the asylum procedure could take up to three months, although a shorter period is theoretically possible.

Kucherena said he met Snowden at the airport on Tuesday to file the asylum request, with a translator the only other person present. Read more from this story HERE.

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Sen. Graham suggests US boycott Winter Olympics in Russia over Snowden

By Jeremy Herb, Julian Pecquet and Justin Sink. President Obama should consider boycotting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia if the Cold War-era foe gives asylum to Edward Snowden, Sen. Lindsey Graham told The Hill on Tuesday.

“I would. I would just send the Russians the most unequivocal signal I could send them,” Graham (R-S.C.) said when asked about the possibility of a boycott.

“It might help, because what they’re doing is outrageous,” he said. “We certainly haven’t reset our relationship with Russia in a positive way. At the end of the day, if they grant this guy asylum it’s a breach of the rule of law as we know it and is a slap in the face to the United States.”

nowden, who has been charged with espionage for leaking details about two National Security Agency programs that collected information about U.S. telephone calls and international Internet usage, officially filed a request for temporary asylum in Russia on Tuesday. He pledged to abide by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands that he stop leaking information that could damage the United States.


Graham is the first senator to suggest a link between the Olympics and Snowden, who has been holed up in a Moscow airport for weeks. Read more from this story HERE.

Rand Paul Putting Hold on FBI Director Until FBI Answers Questions About Domestic Drones (+video)

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Tuesday afternoon he will put a hold on James Comey’s nomination as FBI director until the agency answers questions about the use of drones for domestic surveillance.

“I’m placing a hold on it, not because I have the intention of ultimately defeating him, but I’m going to slow it down enough to see if the administration will respond to my questions,” Paul said, speaking to Eric Bolling on Fox News.

Earlier this month, Paul said he would block Comey’s nomination until the FBI answered questions he sent to them over the government’s use of drones to monitor Americans on U.S. soil. He said Tuesday afternoon he has yet to receive a response and will move forward with the formal hold.

Paul also alluded to holding another marathon filibuster, a potential replay of his 13-hour talking filibuster in March, though he didn’t confirm if he planned to do so.

“[A hold] is like the beginning of a filibuster. Should they bring [the hold] to the floor, and I choose to speak like I did on the drone subject earlier, then as long as I can speak I can stop the debate,” Paul said.

Read more from this story HERE.