FBI Sock Puppet Alert

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msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7690

FBI Sock Puppet Alert

Post by msfreeh »

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... l-networks

Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media | Technology | The Guardian
The Guardian › Technology › Hacking
Mar 17, 2011 - Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda. ... The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro ...

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7690

Re: FBI Sock Puppet Alert

Post by msfreeh »

https://fightgangstalking.com

COINTELPRO News (2016 – 2017)

“When you talked to people outside the [anti-Vietnam War]
movement about what the FBI was doing, nobody wanted
to believe it.”

– Keith Forsyth, one of the activists who exposed the FBI’s
COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program) crimes

_______________

“COINTELPRO is alive and well.”

– Tom McNamara, CounterPunch magazine,
January 21, 2013

_______________

“Think government surveillance is no big deal?
Talk to these victims of police stalking.”

– Scott Shackford, Reason magazine,
September 28, 2016

__________________________________________________________

“Gang Stalking” is, very likely, a disinformation term created by
U.S. intelligence agencies. It refers to the intense, long-term, unconstitutional surveillance and harassment of a person who has been designated as a target by someone associated with America’s security industry.

Such operations have nothing to do with criminal gangs. Official domestic counterintelligence operations of this type are – apparently – perpetrated by federal agents and intelligence/security contractors, sometimes with the support of state and local law enforcement personnel. Unofficial operations of this type are, apparently, perpetrated by private investigators and vigilantes – including former agents and cops, some of whom are members of the quasi-governmental Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Units (LEIU), sometimes on behalf of corporate clients and others with connections to the public and private elements of America’s security industry.

The goal of such operations – in the parlance of counterintelligence agents – is “disruption” of the life of an individual deemed to be an enemy (or potential enemy) of clients or members of the security state. Arguably, the most accurate term for this form of harassment would be “counterintelligence stalking.” Agents of communist East Germany’s Stasi (state police) referred to the process as Zersetzung (German for “decomposition” or “corrosion” – a reference to the severe psychological, social, and financial effects upon the victim). American and British victims have described the process as “no-touch torture” – a phrase which also captures the nature of the crime: cowardly, unethical (and often illegal), but difficult to prove legally because it generates minimal forensic evidence.

Tactics include – but are not limited to – slander, blacklisting, “mobbing” (intense, organized harassment in the workplace), “black bag jobs” (residential break-ins), abusive phone calls, computer hacking, framing, threats, blackmail, vandalism, “street theater” (staged physical and verbal interactions with minions of the people who orchestrate the stalking), harassment by noises, and other forms of bullying.

Both the facts and the geographical distribution of relevant published news reports – as well as other evidence cited on this website – suggest that such stalking is sanctioned (and in some cases, orchestrated) by federal agencies; however, news reports, credible anecdotal information, and my own experiences, indicate that such stalking is also sometimes used unofficially for personal and corporate vendettas by current and former corrupt employees of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, private investigators, and their clients.

Since counterintelligence stalking goes far beyond surveillance – into the realm of psychological terrorism, it is essentially a form of extrajudicial punishment. As such, the harassment is illegal – even when done by the government. It clearly violates, for example, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unwarranted searches, and the Sixth Amendment – which guarantees the right to a trial. Such operations also violate similar fundamental rights defined by state constitutions. Stalking is also specifically prohibited by the criminal codes of every state in America.

Crimes against Americans at the hands of corrupt government agents and private security thugs have a long history in the U.S. The FBI’s COINTELPRO (“Counterintelligence Program”) scandal in the 1970s was the most notorious high-profile example, but similar abuses of power by “Red Squads” (state and local Law Enforcement Intelligence Units) and private detectives date back to the 19th century.

You can read a full explanation of counterintelligence stalking – including an archive of published news reports on the subject – on the What is “Gang Stalking?” page of this site.

__________________________________________________________

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7690

Re: FBI Sock Puppet Alert

Post by msfreeh »

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/1 ... 37153.html

U.S. Military Launches Spy Operation Using Fake Online Identities

The U.S. Military has purchases software designed to create and control false online personas in an attempt to use social media and other websites to counter anti-U.S. messaging.

According to the contract between US Central Command (Centcom) and California company Ntrepid, the software would let each user control 10 personas, each “replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent.” The software would also be able to let personas “appear to originate in nearly any part of the world” and interact through “conventional online services and social media platforms,” while using a static IP address for each persona to maintain a consistent online identity.

These false online personas, also known as “sock puppets,” would be equipped to seem like real people while entering online discussion through blogs, message boards, chats, and more. With a false persona, a user could discredit opponents, or create the semblance of consensus.

Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Speaks told The Guardian that the software “supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US.”

The technology would not be used in America, or by American owned companies—which include major social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. “We do not target U.S. audiences, and we do not conduct these activities on sites owned by U.S. companies,” Speaks told the Washington Times.

At a senate hearing March 1, Centcom commander James N. Mattis said, “Our enemies operate within cyberspace (and its associated relevant physical infrastructure) to plan, coordinate, recruit, train, equip, execute and garner support for operations against the U.S., its allies and interests. Clearly, in the information age, our military must adapt to this new domain of warfare.”

The online persona project is thought to fall under the domain of Operation Earnest Voice, which oversees Centcom’s Information Operations, and in the words of Mattis, “seeks to disrupt recruitment and training of suicide bombers; deny safe havens for our adversaries; and counter extremist ideology and propaganda.”

The users controlling the personas would be hidden in a variety of ways, including randomizing the IP addresses they accessed the software with, and “traffic mixing,” or blending web traffic with that outside of Centcom to provide “excellent cover and powerful deniability.”

The strategy may sound familiar. Last month, hacker group Anonymous unloaded a batch of 50,000 emails from security firm HBGary, where documents indicated that the firm was in the process of developing their own persona management software. The document outlined some of the proposed strategies for creating verisimilitude:

Using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7690

Re: FBI Sock Puppet Alert

Post by msfreeh »

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pub ... -www17.pdf




In online discussion communities, users can interact and share in- formation and opinions on a wide variety of topics. However, some users may create multiple identities, or sockpuppets, and engage in undesired behavior by deceiving others or manipulating discus- sions. In this work, we study sockpuppetry across nine discussion communities, and show that sockpuppets differ from ordinary users in terms of their posting behavior, linguistic traits, as well as social network structure. Sockpuppets tend to start fewer discussions, write shorter posts, use more personal pronouns such as “I”, and have more clustered ego-networks. Further, pairs of sockpuppets controlled by the same individual are more likely to interact on the same discussion at the same time than pairs of ordinary users. Our analysis suggests a taxonomy of deceptive behavior in discussion communities. Pairs of sockpuppets can vary in their deceptiveness, i.e., whether they pretend to be different users, or their supportive- ness, i.e., if they support arguments of other sockpuppets controlled by the same user. We apply these findings to a series of prediction tasks, notably, to identify whether a pair of accounts belongs to the same underlying user or not. Altogether, this work presents a data-driven view of deception in online discussion communities and paves the way towards the automatic detection of sockpuppets.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7690

Re: FBI Sock Puppet Alert

Post by msfreeh »

Did you ever see Sock Puppets in Action?


Here is a great example

http://talk.baltimoresun.com/topic/1661 ... ds/?page=3

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7690

Re: FBI Sock Puppet Alert

Post by msfreeh »

unable to log out of site

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7690

Re: FBI Sock Puppet Alert

Post by msfreeh »

When I posred this material in the copwatch thread lines suddenly appeared
running through half the material .
Links work material defaced

I have posted this material at another website
and the defacing does not occur


http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/ ... 81890.html

Who shot JFK?
As the world prepares for next month's release of secret files on Kennedy's assassination, the last living link to the crime has finally confirmed what has long been suspected: that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't alone


The long-awaited remaining JFK assassination files are due for release next month. They may or may not confirm the revelations in a book published earlier this year: a first-hand insider's account of the CIA's plots against Kennedy, Castro and Che Guevara. Antonio Veciana is an 88-year-old great-grandfather living out his retirement in Miami. Yet in his prime, he was at the heart of some of the most momentous events in modern US history. These included the CIA's anti-Castro operations and anti-communist covert plans in Latin America, as well as inadvertently witnessing the meeting of a top CIA operative with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination of President John F Kennedy.



Veciana has co-written his memoir Trained to Kill with veteran Pulitzer-winning journalist Carlos Harrison. He went public with his astonishing claims at a conference held in 2014 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Warren Commission report. The commission had been set up by President Johnson, and arrived at the official conclusion that Oswald was the lone assassin in the murder of JFK.

Veciana started out as a bank accountant in Cuba and initially aligned himself with Castro's guerrilla war, participating in the overthrow of despised dictator Batista - who was backed by the US. Batista presided over extensive corruption while keeping his own people in a state of abject poverty.

The direction of the Cuban revolution was not inevitably destined for socialism. However, when Washington refused to deal with Castro following his victory, he was forced to turn to the Soviet Union. Veciana would himself turn against Castro, and was recruited by the CIA in their covert action operations.

According to Richard Helms, who would later become director of the CIA, the Kennedy brothers pushed hard for the overthrow of Castro. However, JFK had been ambivalent about the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and withheld air cover - thereby guaranteeing its miserable failure with scores of fighters killed and over a thousand taken prisoner.

Yet David Talbot argues in The Devil's Chessboard - a biography of legendary CIA spymaster Allen Dulles, which reads more like a Hollywood thriller - that the Bay of Pigs was deliberately designed to fail, in order to force JFK to acquiesce to a US military invasion. This event, early in the Kennedy presidency, earned the undying animosity of diehard anti-Castro exiles such as Veciana, and their virulently anti-communist CIA handlers including future Watergate burglar Howard Hunt and David Sanchez Morales.

Such animosity only intensified within the ranks of the CIA and the Pentagon, with the refusal of JFK to invade Cuba at the height of the 1962 missile crisis. The ensuing agreement with Khrushchev not to invade Cuba, in return for the withdrawal of Russian missiles from the island, was effectively strike three for the young President. As far as hardliners in the military industrial complex were concerned, the prospect of coexistence with communism was untenable.

JFK was cognisant of such dangers and Robert Kennedy would later confess that, at the height of the missile crisis, they sent word to the Russians that they might not be able to control their gung-ho generals.

In 1975 (during the aftermath of Watergate), the Church Committee revealed the FBI's Counter Intelligence Programme of mass surveillance and infiltration of anti-war and civil rights groups, as well as the CIA's Executive Action assassination apparatus, code-named ZR/Rifle. As a result, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was set up, reopening investigations into the murders of JFK and Martin Luther King.

Gaeton Fonzi was one of the Congressional investigators for the HSCA when he managed to track down Veciana. Fonzi did not fully disclose his role, merely stating that he was investigating the links between Cuban exile groups and intelligence agencies. As Fonzi relates in his breathless, page-turning account The Last Investigation, Veciana unburdened himself to Fonzi, revealing that his CIA handler went by the code name of Maurice Bishop. He had even witnessed an extraordinary meeting in Dallas in September 1963, two months before the assassination of President Kennedy.

Veciana had turned up early for the meeting with Bishop at the towering Southland Centre. He saw Bishop with a pale young man, who was introduced as Lee - although this man did not utter a single word. It was only two months later that he recognised the television and newspaper pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald - the alleged assassin - as the man he had met with Bishop.

Veciana realised it would be prudent not to speak of what he had seen. Throughout this revelatory conversation, Fonzi tried hard to act nonchalant - but he later admitted that in his mind he fell off his chair. Veciana was essentially confirming long-held suspicions directly linking the CIA to the JFK assassination.

Fonzi now dedicated his mission to unmasking the true identity of Maurice Bishop, enlisting a professional police artist to sketch a portrait of Bishop based on Veciana's description. By chance, one of Fonzi's committee colleagues, Senator Richard Schweiker, suggested that the picture had an unerring resemblance to CIA operative David Atlee Phillips, who had been running anti-Castro operations and would later rise to the illustrious position of the CIA's head of the Western Hemisphere division. Fonzi eventually arranged a surprise meeting in an attempt to confirm this. He took Veciana along to a meeting of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers - a lobbying group Phillips had founded after retiring in 1975.






http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fbi ... 63fe0f276f

FBI Interns Asked Twitter For Questions, And It Soon Got Out Of Hand
These probably weren’t the type of queries that the Albuquerque branch was expecting.






https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014 ... -profane-4

Annals of Religion
March 31, 2014 Issue
Sacred And Profane
How not to negotiate with believers.

By Malcolm Gladwell


There is a telling moment during the siege when Schneider is talking to an F.B.I. negotiator about an undercover A.T.F. agent who used the name Robert Gonzalez. The A.T.F. believed that the Branch Davidians—who ran a small business selling weapons at gun shows—had converted a batch of firearms from semiautomatic to automatic without the proper permits. Gonzalez’s job was to infiltrate the Davidian community and look for evidence. (He found none, a fact that—along with the A.T.F.’s bizarre decision to serve a warrant on Koresh by force, rather than arresting him on those numerous occasions when he ventured into town—loomed large in the many Waco postmortems.) Here is Schneider and a negotiator talking about what happened after the Davidians realized that Gonzalez was not who he said he was:




http://www.gazettes.com/news/former-fbi ... 9fd80.html

Former FBI Agent Talks Negotiation At Bixby Knolls Mixer




http://kmuw.org/post/new-book-explores- ... trol-press

New Book Explores J. Edgar Hoover's Control Of The Press
MAR 17, 2014

Matthew Cecil, Director of WSU’s Elliott School of Communication, has just published a book about the relationship between former FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau itself and the media. Although it’s been more than 40 years since Hoover’s passing, there are still lessons for journalists and the public to learn by taking a close look at the director’s
Cecil says that he's wanted to write his new book, Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate, for years. Cecil sifted through 5,000 pages of documents in writing the book, all made available to him via the Freedom of Information Act. He was looking for connections Hoover had with the press and for the power he held over journalists and news outlets during his nearly 50 year reign as dire




https://rightsanddissent.org/ag-gag-across-america/

Ag-Gag Across America
Corporate-Backed Attacks on Activists and Whistleblowers
Published by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Defending Rights





https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/201 ... raska-week

On September 13 and 14, ex-FBI agent turned anti-Muslim law enforcement trainer John Guandolo will visit Omaha, Nebraska and Oakland, Iowa for a series of presentations.

Guandolo visits the Heartland on the invitation of the Omaha-based anti-Muslim Global Faith Institute (GFI) and Tactical 88, an “elite training organization” with firearm range sand readiness training centers in both Nebraska and Ohio. Guandolo and his partner Chris Gaubatz head the anti-Muslim group Understanding the Threat (UTT) and will be presenting on the Muslim Brotherhood’s “secret strategies for the USA.”

Guandolo promotes himself as a former FBI agent and an expert on terrorism who can help law enforcement and others uncover the “secret” terrorist cells in their area, but in reality Guandolo’s trainings are little more than anti-Muslim witch-hunts. What he doesn’t tell you is that he left the Bureau in disgrace for a number of ethical breaches and bizarre conduct which included admitting to having affairs with female FBI agents and a confidential source he was assigned to protect during the corruption case of former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.); he also solicited that witness for a $75,000 donation for an anti-terrorism group. Since his departure, Guandolo has devoted himself to a rabid brand of anti-Muslim activism, working closely with some of the most powerful and influential anti-Muslim groups in the U.S., on a flurry of accusations against government officials Guandolo says have ties to terrori







https://medium.com/@LoriHandrahan2/law- ... e48164430f

Law Enforcement Arrested for Trading in Child Rape




https://www.bellevuereporter.com/news/m ... s-top-cop/


Making sense of the rape allegation against King County’s top cop



Sep 30th, 2017 6:00amNEWS





When the King County Ombudsman’s Office released a critical review of Sheriff John Urquhart’s handling of a sexual-assault charge made against him in 2016, it came with a recommendation. The office had concluded that the sheriff mishandled the case and recommended, among other things, that the sheriff’s office require “the appointment of an external, independent official to investigate serious complaints against the Sheriff or other senior command staff.”

The review included Urquhart’s extensive rebuttal to the report. In it, Urquhart questions the practicality of an outside entity investigating him. Since he is an elected official, he reasoned, it’s up to voters, not an investigator, to determine whether to “discipline” him. “Specifically, even if there would be ‘finding’ that the Sheriff committed misconduct by an internal or external entity, it would ultimately be the voter’s decision whether to retain that Sheriff,” he wrote.

As it happens, voters will make that very decision on Nov. 7, when Urquhart faces off against Mitzi Johanknecht, a precinct captain within the sheriff’s office, in the general election. Urquhart, a Mercer Island resident and sheriff’s office veteran, was first elected in a special election in 2012, defeating Steve Strachan, who had been appointed to the position after Sheriff Sue Rohr stepped down. The next year Urquhart faced no challenger, handing him a full four-year term. Thus, this fall will be the first time since 2012 that voters will be allowed to determine whether Urquhart should be retained.

Given the determinations by the Ombudsman, as well as by a Seattle police oversight body, that the rape allegation against Urquhart was not properly handled by law enforcement, it’s important for voters to understand to the fullest extent possible what has been accused and how it’s been handled—or mishandled—over the past 18 months, and what these facts say about Urquhart and the office he has managed for five years.

THE ACCUSATION

The accusation dates back to Nov. 7, 2002.

The alleged victim was a 28-year-old sheriff’s deputy working in SeaTac, where Urquhart was her commanding officer. On the night of the 7th, the alleged victim says, she was drinking with co-workers at McCoy’s Firehouse, a Pioneer Square bar. Amid the festivities, Urquhart arrived and began buying her drinks.


“John was feeding me a bunch of Cosmos,” says the alleged victim, who is not being named per Sound Publishing policy regarding crime victims.

She says she does not remember how she and Urquhart got back to her Belltown apartment that night, but says she does remember having sex with him. She says she was too intoxicated to give consent, and the next morning went to the hospital because she was vomiting and had diarrhea; she says she told Urquhart she was going to the hospital, and he dissuaded her from doing so. She says she did not report the rape to anyone at the hospital and did not ask for a rape kit.

Prior to that night, she says, she liked working for Urquhart and “trusted his bullsh**.” Afterward, she says, she tried to forget what happened. “I just deteriorated from there,” she says.

Prior to the alleged assault, she says, she suffered from bipolar disorder. Shortly after, she transferred up to Shoreline, she says, and began suffering from more acute symptoms that she believes stemmed from the trauma of that night. She says she sought the help of a psychiatrist and was managing her mental health, but began receiving “random complaints” and started getting written up by her supervisors. In 2004, she says, she was fired.


After being fired, the woman says she left Seattle, moving to Southern California, then Mexico and Massachusetts. She says Urquhart stayed in touch with her, asking her for a campaign contribution in 2012, when he first ran for office. She agreed to contribute. Campaign paperwork shows she gave Urquhart $100 in 2012; the paperwork lists her employer as a nonprofit whose mission is “ending sexual and domestic violence.”

THE REPORTS

The woman first contacted law enforcement about the alleged rape in mid-June 2016. By that time, she was living in Seattle again, and says that she was motivated to contact law enforcement for fear that Urquhart wanted to harm her to keep her from telling anyone about the rape. The details of these perceived threats presented several law-enforcement agents with serious questions about the woman’s credibility.

The first agency she contacted was the FBI. As detailed in the subsequent King County Ombudsman report about the allegations and the response to them, an FBI agent contacted the sheriff’s office in mid-June 2016 about the woman’s claims.

Sgt. Michael Mullinax with the sheriff’s office’s Internal Investigations Unit would later tell the Ombudsman that the FBI agent — identified in the report only as Agent “Ryan”—was calling to confirm the woman had indeed been a sheriff’s deputy; according to Mullinax, Ryan expressed doubt about the veracity of the woman’s claims. “The FBI believed that the complainant’s motivations and credibility were suspect, and something was not right about her accusation,” according to the Ombudsman report, which was released on Aug. 8 of this year. “Ryan indicated that he was completing a report about the complaint, and thought that would be the end of it.”

The FBI did not approach Urquhart directly about the allegation, and indeed did not want him to know about their inquiries. During the conversation with the Ombudsman, Mullinax told Agent Ryan that he felt compelled to tell Urquhart about the allegation against him. “Ryan asked Sergeant Mullinax not to tell Sheriff Urquhart until Sergeant Mullinax spoke with Ryan’s supervisor, who then called Sergeant Mullinax,” the report reads. “The FBI supervisor asked Sergeant Mullinax not to tell Sheriff Urquhart, but Sergeant Mullinax said he felt he had to. Ultimately, the supervisor and Sergeant Mullinax came to an understanding that Sergeant Mullinax could tell Sheriff Urquhart, but the supervisor warned that the FBI might open formal investigation if Sheriff Urquhart were to contact the complainant.”

On June 21, 2016, Mullinax and his supervisor Captain Jesse Anderson met with Urquhart to tell him about the allegation. Anderson would later say they were uncomfortable bringing the information to Urquhart, but “felt they had no choice,” according to the report. During the meeting, Anderson told Urquhart “he thought maybe someone put the complainant up to making the accusation.”



In an interview with Sound Publishing’s the Seattle Weekly, Urquhart says he was baffled by the accusation. He says he and the woman were friends when she was a deputy, and had stayed on friendly terms after she left the department. He says he was at McCoy’s on the night in question, and had given the woman a ride to her apartment. But they did not have sex, he says. “No sex, no affair, no rape,” he says.

Urquhart campaigned on a platform of police accountability, and has made high-profile disciplining of sheriff’s office staff a hallmark of his management. However, in this case, he and Anderson agreed that no investigation was necessary, according to the Ombudsman report, and he told Anderson to not document the accusation in an internal database used for tracking complaints.

Five months later, in November, the woman again called law enforcement to report the rape — this time reaching out to the Seattle Police Department. Two officers, both men, were sent to her Capitol Hill apartment to take a statement.

According to police records, she told the officers that she and Urquhart had sex and that she was “too intoxicated and never gave consent.” However, like the FBI agents, the police officers were skeptical of the woman’s claims.

The woman “explained she was almost ran [sic] over by Urquart [sic] while running in the middle of the street while living in Massachusetts and had surveillance place on her by Urquart [sic] as she moved to various locations across Seattle and the United States. [The woman] also described various emails and texts exchanges she had with Urquart [sic] over the years that were deleted from her accounts. [The woman] believes Urquart [sic] ‘hacked’ into her computer and deleted the message,” the report reads.


At one point, she told the officers, “she returned home to her gas stove running. [She] believed Urquart sent ‘a lackey’ to turn on her stove possibly to create an explosion,” the report reads. “When Officers attempted to speak about crisis resources [she] would get upset and state to Officers ‘I’m not crazy.’ ”

In an interview with Seattle Weekly, the woman stands by these assertions. “100 percent true,” she says.

Following the interview with officers, the woman’s complaint was filed as a “crisis,” not a “sexual assault,” which meant she would not be contacted by a member of the sexual-assault investigation unit.

That may have been the end of the case, but for a lawsuit filed by several former sheriff’s office employees accusing Urquhart of discrimination based on gender, which was working its way through the courts in 2016. Lawyers for the employees deposed Mullinax and Anderson for the suit, during which time the rape allegation was mentioned. (As it happened, lawyers representing the former employees, Lincoln Beauregard and Julie Kays, are the same lawyers representing Delvonn Heckard, the man whose rape allegation against former Mayor Ed Murray ultimately led to Murray’s resignation.)

In December, The Seattle Times reported on the rape allegation, based on paperwork filed in the unrelated lawsuit; shortly afterward, Seattle Police Department Detective Susanna Monroe, with the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Unit, contacted the woman to conduct a follow-up interview. According to emails obtained through a public disclosure request, the woman was circumspect. “I just read the case report and I am sick,” she wrote Monroe in an email, referring to the report prepared by the two officers who met with her at her apartment. “I remember this from when I was a Deputy, the facts being misconstrued and misrepresented to make victims look ‘crazy’ and not credible. This is the exact reason I initially went to the FBI.”

The woman ultimately did sit down with Monroe and King County Prosecuting Attorney Corinn Bohn in early January. According to a memo later prepared by Monroe, the woman reiterated claims that Urquhart had hired people to follow her, hired someone to turn on her apartment stove to cause an explosion, and that someone tried to run her down in Massachusetts. Monroe wrote that the woman “could not produce any evidence of her allegations.”


Regarding the rape, Bohn told the woman at the end of the interview that the statute of limitations on a rape allegation had expired. Bohn added that even if she “had reported this incident in 2002, it would not have resulted in charges being filed for rape, because [she] recalled all aspects of the sex, which indicates she was not incapacitated at the time of the event,” according to Monroe’s memo; as we’ve previously reported, this is a common response given to women who say they were too intoxicated to give consent (“The Double Bind,” Dec. 7, 2016).

The memo does lend credence to the contention that something happened that night, though. The woman gave Monroe the name of two sheriff’s office employees who had been out drinking with her at the Firehouse. One of the employees said the woman “informed him the day after the incident that she had sex with Urquhart. This deputy was of the opinion the sex was consensual because [she] described the sex in great detail to him and she never stated it was rape.” (Again, Urquhart denies the two had sex.) The witness went on to tell Monroe that the woman’s “mental state has deteriorated in the last year. He stated [she] has been increasingly paranoid and only mentioned the incident as rape approximately a year ago.”

The other sheriff’s office employee declined to be interviewed for Monroe’s investigation.

On May 1 of this year, Monroe closed the case.

CRITICAL REVIEWS

In the past couple of months, two oversight reports have been issued that are highly critical of the way both the sheriff’s office and Seattle PD handled the case.

The King County Ombudsman’s Office review, released on Aug. 8, found that the sheriff’s office did not follow written policy regarding complaints against sheriff’s office staff when the FBI informed them of the rape allegation. According to Anderson, the captain in charge of internal investigations, “the nature of the allegation would normally be … investigated, because if true, it would be conduct that is criminal in nature.” However, according to Anderson, he asked Urquhart whether the accusation should be documented in the database used for complaints against sheriff’s office personal; Urquhart said it wouldn’t be necessary.

In his response to the findings, Urquhart argues that on account of the FBI’s own doubts about the allegation, and the fact that the complaint was not made directly to the sheriff’s office, it did not qualify as a complaint that should be catalogued; for instance, were the office to open files on every complaint they caught wind of, they would have to start opening files on comments made online, he argues. He also argues that, once in the internal computer system, the complaint could have been accessed by people who would use the accusation against him unfairly.

The Ombudsman disagreed and stated that Urquhart’s handling of the complaint was marred by conflict of interest. “Because Sheriff Urquhart was the accused, he could not impartially decide whether the need to follow Sheriff’s Office rules was outweighed by his accuser’s possible credibility problems, and by any hypothetical harm that disclosure might to do to the Sheriff’s Office,” the report says.

In an interview, Urquhart emphasizes that he and Anderson agreed that the incident would not need to be investigated; they disagreed on whether it should be entered into the computer. Urquhart says due to the salacious nature of the claim, he didn’t want it put into a database where others could see it. “With an election coming up, I didn’t want anyone using that,” he says. He says now that he understands why that decision gave the wrong impression, and is working on policies to address it in the office.

“I see that now,” he says.

On Aug. 24, the Office of Professional Accountability at the Seattle Police Department, which investigates police conduct, also determined that officers had mishandled the case. Specifically, by labeling the report a “crisis” and not a “sexual assault,” “the [sexual-assault unit] investigation of this report was delayed. In addition, the complainant/victim experienced distress at not having her report taken seriously and lost trust in the Seattle Police Department,” the OPA report says. Later it adds: “It is critically important that officers not dismiss reported crimes merely because the person reporting the crime happens to be in crisis or has a mental-health challenge. In fact, with certain crimes, including sexual assault, the vulnerability sometimes attendant to being in crisis can increase the probability a perpetrator will target a person as his or her victim.”

A written reprimand was issued to the officers.

ELECTION SEASON

To Urquhart’s critics, the allegation and its fallout are indicative of his so-called leadership style: dismissive, sexist and self-serving.

His office’s handling of the complaint, and his response to the Ombudsman’s report, played a central role in the Times’ recent endorsement of his opponent Johanknecht. “Urquhart’s handling of the case smacks of entitlement, especially because Urquhart champions himself as a tough internal policer of misconduct,” the paper wrote.

In an interview, Johanknecht agrees that the sheriff’s decision not to document the complaint shows that he thinks he plays by a different set of rules than everyone else. That, she says, undercuts Urquhart’s self-styled reputation as a leader who’s tough on bad cops. “He’s an emotional, vindictive guy. He talks under the guise of holding people accountable but then doesn’t follow the rules himself,” she says.

Johanknecht is running on a platform of improving morale within the sheriff’s office—morale she says has been strained by Urquhart’s management, as evidenced by a series of wrongful-termination and discrimination lawsuits that have led to million-dollar settlements in recent years, including the suit that led to the rape allegation coming to light.

Johanknecht also argues that Urquhart has been too aggressive in highlighting his accusers’ mental-health issues when defending himself against the charges. Urquhart, conversely, has argued that Johanknecht and others are taking advantage of the woman’s situation for their own gains. “I feel very sorry for this woman, because she’s been exploited by The Seattle Times, by Lincoln Beauregard, and by my opponent, and I’m very disappointed that this route my opponent has taken because it’s not true and it shouldn’t be here at all,” he told the 45th Legislative District Democrats during their endorsement meeting earlier this year, after reciting the litany of accusations she’s made, including his trying to run her over and blow up her apartment. The group ultimately gave Urquhart their endorsement.

Indeed, beyond the Times endorsement, there are few signs that the saga has damaged Urquhart’s re-election efforts. He enjoys a sizable fundraising lead over Johanknecht and an impressive slate of endorsements, including all nine King County Councilmembers and most major Democratic organizations in the county.

His accuser today still lives in Seattle, working well outside of law enforcement. She says that, despite her frustrations with the investigation, she’s glad she’s speaking out about what she says happened.

“It’s astounding to me how just telling the truth is freeing,” she says.

that Urquhart’s handling of the complaint was marred by conflict of interest. “Because Sheriff Urquhart was the accused, he could not impartially decide whether the need to follow Sheriff’s Office rules was outweighed by his accuser’s possible credibility problems, and by any hypothetical harm that disclosure might to do to the Sheriff’s Office,” the report says.

In an interview, Urquhart emphasizes that he and Anderson agreed that the incident would not need to be investigated; they disagreed on whether it should be entered into the computer. Urquhart says due to the salacious nature of the claim, he didn’t want it put into a database where others could see it. “With an election coming up, I didn’t want anyone using that,” he says. He says now that he understands why that decision gave the wrong impression, and is working on policies to address it in the office.

“I see that now,” he says.

On Aug. 24, the Office of Professional Accountability at the Seattle Police Department, which investigates police conduct, also determined that officers had mishandled the case. Specifically, by labeling the report a “crisis” and not a “sexual assault,” “the [sexual-assault unit] investigation of this report was delayed. In addition, the complainant/victim experienced distress at not having her report taken seriously and lost trust in the Seattle Police Department,” the OPA report says. Later it adds: “It is critically important that officers not dismiss reported crimes merely because the person reporting the crime happens to be in crisis or has a mental-health challenge. In fact, with certain crimes, including sexual assault, the vulnerability sometimes attendant to being in crisis can increase the probability a perpetrator will target a person as his or her victim.”

A written reprimand was issued to the officers.

ELECTION SEASON

To Urquhart’s critics, the allegation and its fallout are indicative of his so-called leadership style: dismissive, sexist and self-serving.

His office’s handling of the complaint, and his response to the Ombudsman’s report, played a central role in the Times’ recent endorsement of his opponent Johanknecht. “Urquhart’s handling of the case smacks of entitlement, especially because Urquhart champions himself as a tough internal policer of misconduct,” the paper wrote.

In an interview, Johanknecht agrees that the sheriff’s decision not to document the complaint shows that he thinks he plays by a different set of rules than everyone else. That, she says, undercuts Urquhart’s self-styled reputation as a leader who’s tough on bad cops. “He’s an emotional, vindictive guy. He talks under the guise of holding people accountable but then doesn’t follow the rules himself,” she says.

Johanknecht is running on a platform of improving morale within the sheriff’s office—morale she says has been strained by Urquhart’s management, as evidenced by a series of wrongful-termination and discrimination lawsuits that have led to million-dollar settlements in recent years, including the suit that led to the rape allegation coming to light.


Indeed, beyond the Times endorsement, there are few signs that the saga has damaged Urquhart’s re-election efforts. He enjoys a sizable fundraising lead over Johanknecht and an impressive slate of endorsements, including all nine King County Councilmembers and most major Democratic organizations in the county.

His accuser today still lives in Seattle, working well outside of law enforcement. She says that, despite her frustrations with the investigation, she’s glad she’s speaking out about what she says happened.

“It’s astounding to me how just telling the truth is freeing,” she says.




AP: Hundreds of officers lose licenses over sex misconduct

Nov. 01, 2015
https://apnews.com/fd1d4d05e561462a85abe50e7eaed4ec


OKLAHOMA CITY Flashing lights pierced the black of night, and the big white letters made clear it was the police. The woman pulled over was a daycare worker in her 50s headed home after playing dominoes with friends. She felt she had nothing to hide, so when the Oklahoma City officer accused her of erratic driving, she did as directed.

She would later tell a judge she was splayed outside the patrol car for a pat-down, made to lift her shirt to prove she wasn’t hiding anything, then to pull down her pants when the officer still wasn’t convinced. He shined his flashlight between her legs, she said, then ordered her to sit in the squad car and face him as he towered above. His gun in sight, she said she pleaded “No, sir” as he unzipped his fly and exposed himself with a hurried directive.


“Come on,” the woman, identified in police reports as J.L., said she was told before she began giving him oral sex. “I don’t have all night.”

The accusations are undoubtedly jolting, and yet they reflect a betrayal of the badge that has been repeated time and again across the country.

In a yearlong investigation of sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement, The Associated Press uncovered about 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child pornography; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse.

The number is unquestionably an undercount because it represents only those officers whose licenses to work in law enforcement were revoked, and not all states take such action. California and New York — with several of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies — offered no records because they have no statewide system to decertify officers for misconduct. And even among states that provided records, some reported no officers removed for sexual misdeeds even though cases were identified via news stories or court records.

“It’s happening probably in every law enforcement agency across the country,” said Chief Bernadette DiPino of the Sarasota Police Department in Florida, who helped study the problem for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “It’s so underreported and people are scared that if they call and complain about a police officer, they think every other police officer is going to be then out to get them.”


Even as cases around the country have sparked a national conversation about excessive force by police, sexual misconduct by officers has largely escaped widespread notice due to a patchwork of laws, piecemeal reporting and victims frequently reluctant to come forward because of their vulnerabilities — they often are young, poor, struggling with addiction or plagued by their own checkered pasts.

In interviews, lawyers and even police chiefs told the AP that some departments also stay quiet about improprieties to limit liability, allowing bad officers to quietly resign, keep their certification and sometimes jump to other jobs.

The officers involved in such wrongdoing represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands whose jobs are to serve and protect. But their actions have an outsized impact — miring departments in litigation that leads to costly settlements, crippling relationships with an already wary public and scarring victims with a special brand of fear.

“My God,” J.L. said she thought as she eyed the officer’s holstered gun, “he’s going to kill me.”

The AP does not name alleged victims of sexual assault without their consent, and J.L. declined to be interviewed. She was let go after the traffic stop without any charges. She reported her accusations immediately, but it was months before the investigation was done and the breadth of the allegations known.

She is one of 13 women who say they were victimized by the officer, a former college football standout named Daniel Holtzclaw. The fired cop, 28, has pleaded not guilty to a host of charges, and his family posted online that “the truth of his innocence will be shown in court.” Each of his accusers is expected to testify in the trial that begins Monday, including one who was 17 when she said the officer pulled down her pink cotton shorts and raped her on her mother’s front porch.

But on a June night last year, it was J.L.’s story that unleashed a larger search for clues.

A nurse swabbed her mouth. A captain made a report. And a detective got to work.

___

On a checkerboard of sessions on everything from electronic surveillance to speed enforcement, police chiefs who gathered for an annual meeting in 2007 saw a discussion on sex offenses by officers added to the agenda. More than 70 chiefs packed into a room, and when asked if they had dealt with an officer accused of sexual misdeeds, nearly every attendee raised a hand. A task force was formed and federal dollars were pumped into training.

Eight years later, a simple question — how many law enforcement officers are accused of sexual misconduct — has no definitive answer. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, which collects police data from around the country, doesn’t track officer arrests, and states aren’t required to collect or share that information.

To measure the problem, the AP obtained records from 41 states on police decertification, an administrative process in which an officer’s law enforcement license is revoked. Cases from 2009 through 2014 were then reviewed to determine whether they stemmed from misconduct meeting the Department of Justice standard for sexual assault — sexual contact that happens without consent, including intercourse, sodomy, child molestation, incest, fondling and attempted rape.

Nine states and the District of Columbia said they either did not decertify officers for misconduct or declined to provide information.

Of those that did release records, the AP determined that some 550 officers were decertified for sexual assault, including rape and sodomy, sexual shakedowns in which citizens were extorted into performing favors to avoid arrest, or gratuitous pat-downs. Some 440 officers lost their badges for other sex offenses, such as possessing child pornography, or for sexual misconduct that included being a peeping Tom, sexting juveniles or having on-duty intercourse.

The law enforcement officials in these records included state and local police, sheriff’s deputies, prison guards and school resource officers; no federal officers were included because the records reviewed came from state police standards commissions. About one-third of the officers decertified were accused of incidents involving juveniles. Because of gaps in the information provided by the states, it was impossible to discern any other distinct patterns, other than a propensity for officers to use the power of their badge to prey on the vulnerable. Some but not all of the decertified officers faced criminal charges; some offenders were able to avoid prosecution by agreeing to surrender their certifications.

Victims included unsuspecting motorists, schoolchildren ordered to raise their shirts in a supposed search for drugs, police interns taken advantage of, women with legal troubles who succumbed to performing sex acts for promised help, and prison inmates forced to have sex with guards.

The AP’s findings, coupled with other research and interviews with experts, suggest that sexual misconduct is among the most prevalent type of complaint against law officers. Phil Stinson, a researcher at Bowling Green State University, analyzed news articles between 2005 and 2011 and found 6,724 arrests involving more than 5,500 officers. Sex-related cases were the third-most common, behind violence and profit-motivated crimes. Cato Institute reports released in 2009 and 2010 found sex misconduct the No. 2 complaint against officers, behind excessive force.

Cases from across the country in just the past year demonstrate how such incidents can occur, and the devastation they leave behind.

In Connecticut, William Ruscoe of the Trumbull Police began a 30-month prison term in January after pleading guilty to the sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl he met through a program for teens interested in law enforcement. Case records detailed advances that began with explicit texts and attempts to kiss and grope the girl. Then one night Ruscoe brought her back to his home, put his gun on the kitchen counter and asked her to go upstairs to his bedroom. The victim told investigators that despite telling him no “what felt like 1,000 times,” he removed her clothes, fondled her and forced her to touch him — at one point cuffing her hands.

In Florida, Jonathan Bleiweiss of the Broward Sheriff’s Office was sentenced to a five-year prison term in February for bullying about 20 immigrant men into sex acts. Because the victims wouldn’t testify, Bleiwess’ plea deal revolved around false imprisonment charges, allowing him to escape sex offender status. Prosecutors said he used implied threats of deportation to intimidate the men.

And in New Mexico, Michael Garcia of the Las Cruces Police was sentenced last November to nine years in federal prison for sexually assaulting a high school police intern. At the time, he was in a unit investigating child abuse and sex crimes. The victim, Diana Guerrero, said in court that the assault left her feeling “like a piece of trash,” dashed her dreams of becoming an officer, and triggered depression, nightmares and flashbacks.

“It had never occurred to me that a person who had earned a badge would do this to me or anybody else,” said Guerrero, who is now 21 and agreed to her name being published. “I lost my faith in everything, everyone, even in myself.”

A 2011 International Association of Chiefs of Police report on sex misconduct questioned whether some conditions of the job may create opportunities for such incidents. Officers’ power, independence, off-hours and engagement with those perceived as less credible combine to give cover to predators, it said, and otherwise admirable bonds of loyalty can lead colleagues to shield offenders.

“You see officers throughout your career that deal with that power really well, and you see officers over your career that don’t,” said Oklahoma City Police Chief Bill Citty, who fired Holtzclaw just months after the allegations surfaced and called the case a troubling reminder that police chiefs need to be careful about how they hire and train officers.

The best chance at preventing such incidents is to robustly screen applicants, said Sheriff Russell Martin in Delaware County, Ohio, who served on an IACP committee on sex misconduct. Those seeking to join Martin’s agency are questioned about everything from pornography use to public sex acts. Investigators run background checks, administer polygraph exams and interview former employers and neighbors. Social media activity is reviewed for clues about what a candidate deems appropriate, or red flags such as objectification of women.

Still, screening procedures vary among departments, and even the most stringent standards only go so far.

“We’re hiring from the human race,” Martin said, “and once in a while, the human race is going to let us down.”

___

In the predawn hours of June 18, 2014, J.L.’s report made its way to Oklahoma City sex crimes detective Kim Davis. By that afternoon, Miranda rights were being read to the suspect, an officer who had arrived out of the academy nearly three years earlier, a seemingly natural move for the son of a career policeman but one borne of deep disappointment.

Holtzclaw was a high school football star in Enid, Oklahoma, and a standout on a middling squad at Eastern Michigan University. He was a 6-foot-1, 246-pound leader to teammates who called him “Claw,” and constantly focused on his ultimate goal of the NFL.

“He trained that way. He talked that way,” said fellow linebacker Cortland Selman.

But the collegiate record for tackles Holtzclaw chased went unbroken, and the draft came and went.

He found traces of life on the field in his life on the beat, telling a reporter for his hometown paper that he enjoyed high-speed chases and once charged through two fences while pursuing a suspect on foot on a snow-slicked winter day. He hoped to eventually join the police gang squad.

The Oklahoma City Police Department said Holtzclaw had not received any prior discipline that resulted in a demotion or docked paycheck, but both the department and the state declined to release his full personnel record, citing state law making it confidential.

J.L.’s accusations made Davis and a fellow detective curious about an unsolved report filed five weeks earlier in which an unidentified officer was accused of stopping a woman and coercing her into oral sex.

According to pretrial testimony, the detectives reviewed the names of women Holtzclaw had come into contact with on his 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift and interviewed each one, saying they had a tip she may have been assaulted by an officer. Most said they had not been victimized but, among those who said they were, other links to Holtzclaw were found, Davis said in court. The GPS device on his patrol car put him at the scene of the alleged incidents, and department records showed he called in to check all but one of the women for warrants, the detective testified.

By the time the investigation concluded, the detectives had assembled a six-month narrative of alleged sex crimes they said started Dec. 20, 2013, with a woman taken into custody and hospitalized while high on angel dust. Dressed in a hospital gown, her right wrist handcuffed to the bedrail, the woman said Holtzclaw coerced her into performing oral sex, suggesting her cooperation would lead to dropped charges.

“I didn’t think that no one would believe me,” she testified at a pretrial hearing. “I feel like all police will work together.”

All told, Holtzclaw faces 36 counts including rape, sexual battery and forcible oral sodomy.

One additional accuser who came forward after Holtzclaw’s arrest later was charged with making a false report. Supporters of the former officer who congregate on social media express hope that others’ claims will be proven false, too, and friends wear T-shirts that say “Free the Claw.”

Earlier this year, while out on bond, Holtzclaw answered the door of his parents’ Enid home, saying of the allegations: “I’m not going to make any comment about it.” His attorney, Scott Adams, canceled an interview and did not respond to calls, emails and a letter.

Adams’ line of questioning at the pretrial hearing suggests he will raise doubts about the accusers’ credibility and portray investigators as having coaxed the women into saying they were attacked. Many of the women had struggled with drugs. Some had been prostitutes or have criminal records. Most lived in the same rundown swath of the city in sight of the state Capitol dome, and they all are women of color.

Many of their allegations are similar, with the women saying they were accused of hiding drugs, then told to lift their shirts or pull down their pants. Some claim to have been groped; others said they were forced into intercourse or oral sex.

The youngest accuser said Holtzclaw first approached her when she was with two friends who were arguing and he learned she had an outstanding warrant for trespassing. He let her go but found her again later that day, walking to her mother’s house. She said he offered her a ride and then followed her to the front porch, reminding her of her warrant, accusing her of hiding drugs and warning her not to make things more difficult than they needed to be. She claims he touched her breasts and slid his hand into her panties before pulling off her shorts and raping her.

When it was over, the teen said he told her he might be back to see her again.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she testified at the pretrial hearing. “Like, what am I going to do? Call the cops? He was a cop.”

___

Victims of sexual violence at the hands of officers know the power their attackers have, and so the trauma can carry an especially crippling fear.

Jackie Simmons said she found it too daunting to bring her accusation to another police officer after being raped by a cop in 1998 while visiting Kansas for a wedding. So, like most victims of rape, she never filed a report. Her notions of good and evil challenged, she became enraged whenever she saw patrol cars marked “Protect and Serve.”

“You feel really powerless,” said Simmons, an elementary school principal in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who works with Pandora’s Project, a support group for rape survivors.

Diane Wetendorf, a retired counselor who started a support group in Chicago for victims of officers, said most of the women she counseled never reported their crimes — and many who did regretted it. She saw women whose homes came under surveillance and whose children were intimidated by police. Fellow officers, she said, refused to turn on one another when questioned.

“It starts with the officer denying the allegations — ‘she’s crazy,’ ’she’s lying,’” Wetendorf said. “And the other officers say they didn’t see anything, they didn’t hear anything.”

In its 2011 report, the IACP recommended that agencies institute policies specifically addressing sexual misconduct, saying “tolerance at any level will invite more of the same conduct.” The report also urged stringent screening of hires. But the agency does not know how widely such recommendations have been implemented.

John Firman, the IACP’s research director, said the organization also is encouraging its chiefs to hire more women and minorities as a way to improve the environment inside departments.

“What you want is a culture that’s dominated by a bunch of people that reflect the community,” he said.

Experts said it isn’t just threats of retaliation that deter victims from reporting the crimes, but also skepticism about the ability of officers and prosecutors to investigate their colleagues.

Milwaukee Police Officer Ladmarald Cates was sentenced to 24 years in prison in 2012 for raping a woman he was dispatched to help. Despite screaming “He raped me!” repeatedly to other officers present, she was accused of assaulting an officer and jailed for four days, her lawyer said. The district attorney, citing a lack of evidence, declined to prosecute Cates. Only after a federal investigation was he tried and convicted.

It’s a story that doesn’t surprise Penny Harrington, a former police chief in Portland, Oregon, who co-founded the National Center for Women in Policing and has served as an expert witness in officer misconduct cases. She said officers sometimes avoid charges or can beat a conviction because they are so steeped in the system.

“They knew the DAs. They knew the judges. They knew the safe houses. They knew how to testify in court. They knew how to make her look like a nut,” she said. “How are you going to get anything to happen when he’s part of the system and when he threatens you and when you know he has a gun and ... you know he can find you wherever you go?”

___






https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/sep/3 ... essive-fo/


Police release footage detailing 2015 excessive force incident that led to officer’s indictment



https://drfigtree.carto.com/tables/csv_ ... v_1/public

Map of Police Misconduct

https://drfigtree.carto.com/viz/11b5b01 ... public_map



https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ump-voters


British courts may unlock secrets of how Trump campaign profiled ...
The Guardian
But although the FBI obtained a court order against Facebook to make it disclose evidence, the exact way in which US citizens were profiled and targeted ...






https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/ ... ca-protes/

Cambridge Police release full list of professors arrested at Harvard’s DACA protest yesterday
Two dozen affiliates of the University and area schools were arrested in a shutdown of Massachusetts Ave in Cambridge yesterday
Written by Beryl Lipton
Edited by JPat Brown
In a protest against the removal of protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), over two dozen professors and affiliates of Harvard - as well as Babson College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Boston College - were arrested in Harvard Square yesterday after creating a human chain across Massachusetts Avenue that blocked traffic through the busy Cambridge junction.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Tuesday the Trump administration decision to rescind the policy, which provides a legal avenue for undocumented residents that have lived in the United States despite illegal entries by their guardians.

A list of individuals provided by the Cambridge Police Department includes among those arrested were the Minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church Jonathan L. Walton, 80-year-old Professor Emeritus of Latin American History and Economics John Womack Jr., and members of the school’s history and humanities departments. Arrest logs and reports are among those records that become public record during protests and demonstrations.

According to student newspaper The Harvard Crimson, dozens of students at the University are DACA beneficiaries. The arrested parties will appear before a judge on Friday morning.



https://www.heraldandnews.com/members/f ... 2ad40.html


Just why is the FBI doing the NCAA's dirty work? What are they guilty of?

When exactly did the FBI decide that NCAA regulations were the law of the land? When did it conclude that, in addition to hunting down terrorists and investigating insider trading, its mandate also included protecting amateurism in college sports?

For years, athletic shoe companies like Nike and Adidas paid coaches to have their team wear their brand of sneaker. Were coaches like Rick Pitino, John Thompson and Jim Valvano being bribed by the shoe company representatives? You certainly could frame it that way. But nobody did. Neither law enforcement nor the NCAA ever protested.

In 2006 — to pick just one among the many, many NCAA scandals over the years — two less-than-reputable agents gave the family of the University of Southern California’s star running back, Reggie Bush, gifts and benefits, including the free use of a house, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.


They did so in the expectation that Bush would sign with them when he decided to turn pro. (He didn’t.) Although the university was severely punished by the NCAA, the FBI chose not to look into the matter. Why would it? Giving a star athlete’s family the use of a house may be unseemly, and it may violate NCAA’s rules regarding amateurism, but it doesn’t violate the laws on the United States. Not even close.

Why this?

And yet on Tuesday, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York — that’s Preet Bharara’s old jurisdiction, before the president fired him — announced with great fanfare that it had cracked a college basketball bribery scandal. According to the complaints, four assistant basketball coaches from big-time sports schools — Auburn, the University of South Carolina, the University of Arizona and the University of Southern California — accepted bribes to steer top prospects to certain agents and financial advisers. (An agent was also indicted.)

In addition, James Gatto, the director of global marketing for Adidas Basketball, was charged with bribing top high school players and their families to go to schools like the University of Louisville with which Adidas has a contract to supply shoes and uniforms. In one case he is said to have paid a high schooler $100,000.

I ask again: What law is being violated? The Gatto indictment is particularly perplexing. Last month, Adidas agreed to pay $160 million over 10 years for the University of Louisville to wear its apparel. That’s called a “deal.” But if the company then pays a high school athlete to attend the school, that’s called a “bribe”?

Just another bribe?

If that’s really the criteria, why isn’t a college scholarship a bribe? The college is trying to lure a student by offering money. Is it all that much different from what Adidas’s executive is charged with doing? The only “wrongdoing,” if you can call it that, is that the athlete has violated the NCAA’s amateurism rules.

As for what the assistant coaches have been charged with doing, there is also another word for it: “finder’s fee.” Agents paying assistant coaches to steer top athletes to them is hardly a new phenomenon. Coaches who are caught doing it are invariably punished by the NCAA, and lose their livelihood. But never before has it been considered a criminal matter. Because it’s not.

It is true that the actions for which the coaches and others have been indicted take place in the shadows. And one would hardly call it an example of “best practices” in college coaching. But that’s an issue for the NCAA, not law enforcement.

The NCAA has real power to enforce its rules, because it can destroy the careers of both players and coaches who cross it. And despite the obvious fact that college basketball and football are multi-billion-dollar businesses, with coaches and others being paid millions of dollars, the NCAA remains adamant that no money ever touch a player’s hand. That’s really the crux of the issue here.

What’s a deal?

But imagine if players had, say, the rights to their own likeness and image, or the right to sign autographs, or the right to be paid by a university or an agent directly. Imagine, that is, that the money was finally out of the shadows. If that were to happen, then “bribes” would suddenly be transformed into “deals.” The absurd conflating of NCAA rules and federal law would end. The FBI really shouldn’t be doing the NCAA’s dirty work.

The bureau on Tuesday made the exchange of money that took place between the coaches and other sound truly nefarious. But its incentive is to make those involved appear as guilty as possible.

As this case makes its way through the courts, keep in mind one question: Guilty of what?

Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg View columnist. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. He is the co-author of “Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA.”







http://www.tahlequahdailypress.com/news ... e-nav-next

Some say EPA breaking Trump's ethanol pledge
By Kery Murakami CNHI Washington Reporter

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7690

Re: FBI Sock Puppet Alert

Post by msfreeh »

In reviewing my recent post in FBI Watch Making Cruelty Visible someone has drawn lines through
the content on the last 3 or 4 stories

see below


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3626197

Bodycam footage allegedly shows LAPD officer planting drugs during traffic stop
BY JESSICA SCHLADEBECK
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Saturday, November 11, 2017, 2:59 PM




YAWN

Organization that helped assassinate President Kennedy receives tip



http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3624451


CIA received tip of JFK's assassination more than a year before his death, declassified documents reveal
BY CHRIS SOMMERFELDT
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Friday, November 10, 2017, 5:16 PM








https://www.ksat.com/news/fbi-seeks-to- ... ong-agents


FBI seeks to increase diversity among agents
www.ksat.com-
SAN ANTONIO - FBI special agent Sandra Torres never gave any thought to joining the bureau until she was well into what she thought was her future career.







http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10. ... lCode=jbsa


The federal government and the harassment of black leaders: a case study of Mayor Richard Arrington Jr. of Birmingham
M Wilson, J Lynxwiler - Journal of Black Studies, 1998 - journals.sagepub.com
... Among the types of false accusations delineated by Klemke and Tiedman (1990) are &dquo;pure ...
to &dquo;avoid protecting civil rights and to spy on blacks&dquo; (p. 9). Under J ... more complex
motives that might underlie federal policy of 198Us and 1990s, when compared to ...
Cited by 2 Related articles All 6 versions


First Published May 1, 1998 Research Article


The Federal Government and the Harassment of Black Leaders


Arrington, R.J.r. (1989). Affidavit of Richard Arrington, Jr., April, 1989 . In Alabama Elected and Appointed Officials Legal Defense Fund (Ed.), The FBI investigation of Black elected officials: Atlanta and Birmingham. Montgomery: Alabama Elected and Appointed Officials Legal Defense Fund. Google Scholar
Becker, H.S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance . New York: Free Press. Google Scholar
Donaldson, F.W. (1989). Letter to Robert Mousallem, November 23, 1988 . In Alabama Elected and Appointed Officials Legal Defense Fund (Ed.), The FBI investigation of Black elected officials: Atlanta and Birmingham. Montgomery: Alabama Elected and Appointed Officials Legal Defense Fund. Google Scholar







http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/05/us/fb ... wanted=all


F.B.I. AGENT ADMITS HARASSING BLACK FBI AGENT MARRIED TO WHITE WOMAN
WASHINGTON,

A Chicago-based agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has acknowledged that he and other white colleagues planned a campaign of ''retribution'' against a black agent, Donald Rochon, whose case has prompted a national debate over racism in the bureau.

Newly released F.B.I. documents also show that the white agent, Gary W. Miller, has conceded that in 1985 he forged Mr. Rochon's signature on an application for death and dismemberment insurance for the Rochon family.

Mr. Rochon has described the unsolicited insurance policy as a death threat. Mr. Miller, who was suspended without pay for two weeks as a result of that incident and others aimed at Mr. Rochon, has denied that he was trying to harass the black agent. Agents Admit Harassment

The disclosures, contained in court papers filed here Friday, amount to the first public acknowledgment by the bureau that white agents may have participated in harassment of Mr. Rochon in Chicago, where he was assigned from 1984 to 1986.

The newly released documents are bound to cause further embarrassment for the bureau, which has been criticized by Congress over the Rochon case and over other discrimination claims involving black and Hispanic employees. More than half of the F.B.I.'s Hispanic agents have joined in a separate lawsuit against the bureau, charging that they faced discrimination in hiring and promotion.

Mr. Rochon has said that while he and his family were living in Chicago, their safety was repeatedly threatened in anonymous telephone calls and obscene, racist letters from white F.B.I. agents.

The Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have found that Mr. Rochon was the victim of ''blatant racial harassment'' in the F.B.I.'s Omaha office in 1983 and 1984. In one incident, someone in the Omaha office taped a picture of an ape's head over a photograph of Mr. Rochon's son.

Mr. Rochon has long contended that the later incidents in Chicago, which are the subject of an investigation by a Federal grand jury, were more serious than the harassment in Omaha. Charges Rights Violations

The newly released documents were made available to Mr. Rochon's lawyer, David Kairys of Philadelphia, in preparation for trial on a civil lawsuit filed by Mr. Rochon in Federal District Court in Washington. The suit charges the bureau and several white F.B.I. officials in Chicago and Omaha with violations of Federal civil rights laws.

''It's quite significant,'' Mr. Kairys said of the F.B.I. documents. ''This corroborates what Don Rochon has been saying all along. It corroborates that there was a conspiracy among F.B.I. agents to racially harass Donald and his family.''

The documents, which include the records of an internal investigation of Mr. Rochon's charges, make it clear that Mr. Rochon became the focus of intense anger and suspicion by white agents in Chicago, particularly Mr. Miller and Thomas J. Dillon.

The white agents have said that Mr. Rochon was a troublemaker who brought unfounded charges of racism against other agents in the Omaha and Chicago offices in an attempt to be transferred to Los Angeles, his home town.

Dan Webb, a former United States Attorney in Chicago who is representing Mr. Dillon, one defendant in the lawsuit, said he would prove in the trial that Mr. Rochon had tried to portray innocent office pranks as ''some kind of racial harassment.''

He added, ''The motivation here was really one of Rochon trying to put pressure on the bureau to get his transfer.'' Mr. Webb said he believed that some of the incidents described by Mr. Rochon as racial harassment never occurred.

'Unmerited Harassment'

Mr. Kairys, Mr. Rochon's lawyer, described as ''offensive'' any attempt to label the black agent as a troublemaker. ''This guy withstood unnecessary, unmerited harassment without reacting violently or inappropriately,'' the lawyer said. ''He acted exactly as we would want him to react.''

The director of the F.B.I., William S. Sessions, has described Mr. Rochon's charges as ''very serious'' but has declined to discuss details of the case because of the pending litigation.

In a sworn statement dated July 30, 1985, that was included among the F.B.I. documents, Mr. Miller said he began his campaign against the black agent ''as personal revenge against Donald Rochon for making allegations against my personal friend, Tom Dillon.''

Mr. Dillon, who worked with Mr. Rochon first in Omaha and later in Chicago, has been described by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as Mr. Rochon's ''greatest single antagonist.''

After an investigation of the Omaha incidents, the F.B.I. directed Mr. Dillon and two other employees to undergo racial sensitivity training. It is unclear from the F.B.I. documents whether anyone other than those three and Mr. Miller has been disciplined in any way for actions against Mr. Rochon.

Mr. Miller and Mr. Dillon are still assigned to Chicago. Mr. Rochon now works for the F.B.I. in Philadelphia.

Until now, the bureau has refused to discuss the Chicago incidents or to acknowledge the results of its internal investigation of Mr. Miller. Documents Describe 'Retribution'

However, according to the newly released documents, Mr. Miller has acknowledged that in April 1985 he had a discussion with a number of white agents about ''retribution against Rochon'' for his complaints.

''We discussed having his public utilities turned off and sending coupons soliciting magazine subscriptions and other items,'' the agent said in the sworn statement.

''On that same day someone, I don't recall who, placed on the desk next to mine approximately six reply cards for various types of merchandise,'' Mr. Miller is quoted. ''I completed three at that time under Donald Rochon's name and residence requesting the products. I don't know if anyone else did the same.''

As a result of the mail campaign, Mr. Miller was suspended for two weeks without pay. F.B.I. officials confirmed that other agents in Chicago raised a collection for Mr. Miller to cover his salary for that period.

Mr. Miller, the documents show, has confirmed that he followed Mr. Rochon home one evening in an attempt to learn where Mr. Rochon lived. Mr. Rochon's home address was kept secret from most of his colleagues because of his harassment charges.

The documents also demonstrate Mr. Dillon was aware of Mr. Miller's activities but has denied involvement. Discomfort 'Deserved'

''I told Miller that I did not want to know anything about any activity concerning Mr. Rochon,'' Mr. Dillon said in a sworn statement, adding, ''I will admit that I think Rochon deserves as much anxiety and discomfort as I have experienced.''

F.B.I. polygraph examinations found that Mr. Miller was truthful when he denied writing or mailing two anonymous, obscene letters to Mr. Rochon that contained threats of death and mutilation, according to the documents. Bureau officials say Mr. Dillon also passed lie detector tests regarding the letters.

Mr. Rochon said he received the letters at about the time Mr. Miller was sending out the other unsolicited mail, including the life insurance policy. One of the letters threatened sexual assault of Mr. Rochon's wife, who is white; the couple is now separated.

''You made yourself a nigger and shall pay the price,'' the letter read. ''You are always in our sights and cannot escape.''

A bureau laboratory examination of one of the letters was ''inconclusive'' as to whether it was written on Mr. Miller's typewriter, according to the documents. Mr. Kairys said he hoped that further investigation would show both letters were written by the white agents.

According to lawyers in the Rochon case, Mr. Miller is a focus of the Federal grand jury in Chicago that is reviewing the black agent's charges of death threats and other harassment. Prosecutor Reviewing Incident

Mr. Miller's lawyer, John L. Gubbins of Chicago, said prosecutors are reviewing the incident involving the death and dismembership insurance.

According to the lawyer, the insurance policy was not intended as a threat to Mr. Rochon and his family. Instead, Mr. Gubbins said, Mr. Miller filled out several business reply forms seeking unsolicited merchandise for Mr. Rochon, including the insurance policy, and did not notice the nature of the insurance coverage.

The lawyer said Mr. Miller sent the unsolicited mail to the Rochons not out of any racial animosity but as a sign of ''loyalty to a friend,'' Mr. Dillon, who had been the subject of some of the black agent's charges in Omaha and Chicago.

''He was upset by what Rochon was doing to Dillon's life,'' Mr. Gubbins said of his client.

In a sworn statement to the bureau, Mr. Miller described the mail campaign as ''a foolish and unprofessional attempt to get back at someone.''

''I had no intention of harming Rochon by any of this,'' he said. ''I did not think that there would be any repercussion. I did not think he would get anything but junk mail. I did not think.''





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The FBI’s Racial Discrimination Problem…
BRUCE FALCONERMAY. 14, 2009 3:39 PM




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This article appears in the May 3, 2013 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
FBI PROVOCATIONS:

Does the FBI Stop Terrorism, or
Create It? A Brief History

by Edward Spannaus

[PDF version of this article]

April 28—While the American people are being bombarded every day with news reports about the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombings—most of which reports are based on deliberate FBI and law-enforcement leaks spoon-fed to the news media—important lessons can be drawn from FBI terrorism cases going back 20 years, at least as far as 1993.

Furthermore, the FBI's long history of infiltration, incitement to violence, and entrapment, is little known to Americans today. But what the Bureau has done against labor, radicals, and other perceived adversaries for over nine decades, it is doing still today, particularly against Muslim communities and organizations.

1993: A Cautionary Tale

After the first World Trade Center bombing, on Feb. 26, 1993, the news media breathlessly reported detail after detail of the FBI's painstaking investigation. Sifting through bomb debris, investigators found an axle with a VIN (vehicle identification number). That led them to a truck rental outlet in New Jersey. When one of the alleged bombers, Mohammed Salameh, returned to the rental store to report that the van he had rented had been stolen, and to get his deposit back(!), he was arrested. Good police work led to other conspirators, and eventually the case was cracked through methodical detective work.

The reality was quite different. Three months after the bombing, in May 1993, it was revealed that an FBI informant had taught Salameh how to drive the van, two days before the bombing. In June, it was disclosed that a former Egyptian military officer, Emad Salem, had penetrated the alleged bomb conspiracy for the FBI, and had helped test explosives, and had rented the apartment where explosives were mixed. Even as more reports came out over the Summer, the FBI maintained that its informant Salem did not know in advance about the plans to bomb the World Trade Center.

Eight months after the bombing, on Oct. 28, 1993, the New York Times published a blockbuster story revealing the existence of tapes that Salem had made while talking with FBI agents, which showed that some agents and supervisors had known all along about the bomb-making plans. The Times reported:

"Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

"The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an FBI supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.

"The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City's tallest towers...."

The Bureau's role in the 1993 bombing was raised on April 16, 2013, the day after the Boston Marathon bombings, by Fox TV's Ben Swann, on a "Reality Check" segment. Swann asked directly, whether the Boston bombings were the product of an FBI entrapment operation gone awry. He described the 1993 New York bombing, and then said: "So the question tonight must be asked, did the FBI have any knowledge of this plot before it happened?" and, "Is the practice of the FBI creating terror plots only to break them up before they can actually happen, really making us safer? What happened here?"

As we shall see, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was not the last time that FBI informants played a crucial role in planning terrorist attacks. Indeed, the Bureau has a long history, going back almost 100 years, of using informants and agent provocateurs to incite violence.

But first, let us look at its more recent history.

After 9/11: an American MI5

The day after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, then-President George W. Bush famously told his Attorney General, John Ashcroft: "Don't let this happen again." The "shackles" that had allegedly hindered the FBI from discovering the 9/11 plot came off. The Patriot Act gave the FBI new powers of surveillance and information-gathering, the alleged "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence gathering (always a fiction anyway) was dismantled, and there was a huge escalation in the use of informants and sting operations.

(Never mind that the 9/11 hijackers were "hiding in plain sight," with an extensive Saudi support network in place which was covered up during the official 9/11 investigations. To this day, the 28 pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry which discuss the Saudi role in the 9/11 attacks, are still being suppressed at the insistence of the Bush and now, the Obama administrations.)

The "unleashing" of the FBI in the post-9/11 period meant that the Bureau's mission was now defined as prevention of terrorist attacks, not investigating them after the fact. The Bureau's top priorities were now gathering intelligence and preempting terror.

The FBI's new model was Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5. New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau says that within the 9/11 Commission, there was "close to consensus" among the Commission members and senior staffers, that they should consider the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency modeled after MI5, which would take over anti-terror operations within the United States. The head of MI5 was brought to the U.S. to brief the 9/11 Commission on how to create the new agency. When FBI Director Robert Mueller met with the Commission in 2004, he pleaded the case for keeping counterterrorism within the FBI, and promised that he would reform the Bureau along the lines indicated.[1]

The Commission's final report in 2004 thus pulled back from recommending the creation of a new MI5-type agency, but it warned that the FBI's shift to counterterrorism intelligence collection required "an all-out effort to institutionalize change," and that it had to be done in a manner so that it would survive beyond Mueller's tenure (which was supposed to end on Sept. 4, 2011, at which point Obama extended it for two additional years).

An Army of Informants

The result is that over the past decade, the FBI's force of registered informants is now estimated at over 15,000, according to Trevor Aaronson, author of the new book The Terror Factory. That number itself is ten times the number of informants that the FBI ran in the 1960s during the infamous COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) days. If unofficial informants and other confidential sources are added in, the number is three to four times that, Aaronson says, citing a former top FBI official. These informants are heavily targetted on the Muslim community, and they run the gamut from convicted criminals, to imams and professionals within the Islamic community itself.

(Intelligence community sources tell EIR that the Bureau has informants in virtually every mosque in the country. The idea that somehow Tamerlan Tsarnaev could repeatedly disrupt events in the Boston mosque he attended before being thrown out, and yet not come to the FBI's attention, defies belief.)

Under the FBI's new mission of "prevention, pre-emption, and disruption," the Bureau has carried out numerous entrapment operations, to the extent that most of the major terrorist prosecutions in the U.S. over past ten years actually involved plots created by the FBI. According to a report issued last Summer by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, "there have been 138 terrorism or national security prosecutions involving informants since 2001," and these informants have usually 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."

Aaronson reported in 2011, that under the Obama Administration, sting-related prosecutions are being conducted "at an even faster clip than under the Bush Administration."[2]

'Investigate Crime, Don't Invent It'

Former FBI Special Agent Michael German recently reviewed Aaronson's book for Reason magazine.[3] German writes that many of the terrorist conspiracies reported as being broken up by the Bureau,

"were almost entirely concocted and engineered by the FBI itself, using corrupt agents provocateurs who often posed a far more serious criminal threat than the dimwitted saps the investigations ultimately netted."

The FBI recruits informants with extensive criminal records, pays them tens of thousands of dollars "to ensare dupes in terrorist plots," German points out. Most of these targets posed little if any threat; they rarely had weapons of their own, or the financial resources to carry out violent acts. "Yet the government provided them with military hardware worth thousands of dollars that would be extremely difficult for even sophisticated criminal organizations to obtain, only to bust them in a staged finale."

German says that when he worked undercover investigations for the FBI, prior to 9/11, "if an agent had suggested opening a terrorism case against someone who was not a member of a terrorist group, who had not attempted to acquire weapons, and who didn't have the means to obtain them, he would have been gently encouraged to look for a more serious threat." Moreover, German observes: An agent who suggested giving such a person a stinger missile or a car full of military-grade plastic explosives would have been sent to counseling. Yet in Aaronson's telling, such techniques are now becoming commonplace.

German's conclusion:

"The FBI should be investigating crime, not inventing it."

Incitement and Entrapment

Here are some examples of recent FBI sting operations compiled by EIR; many more can be found in Aaronson's book and in other sources. It should be noted, that every element of the recent Boston case—including incitement to "jihad," and the testing and planting of live explosives which killed people—can be found in these earlier cases, including the 1993 World Trade Center case.

One of the most egregious of these cases is the so-called "Newburgh Four" in New York State, in which an informant in 2008-09 offered the defendants $250,000, as well as weapons, to carry out a terrorist plot. The New York University Center for Human Rights and Justice reviewed this case and two others, and concluded: "The government's informants introduced and aggressively pushed ideas about violent jihad and, moreover, actually encouraged the defendants to believe it was their duty to take action against the United States."

The Federal judge presiding over the Newburgh case, Colleen McMahon, declared that it was "beyond question that the government created the crime here," and criticized the Bureau for sending informants "trolling among the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role—any role—in criminal activity."

In Portland, Ore., it was disclosed during the trial of the "Christmas Tree bomber" earlier this year, that the FBI had actually produced its own terrorist training video, which was shown to the defendant, depicting men with covered faces shooting guns and setting off bombs using a cell phone as a detonator. The FBI operative also traveled with the target to a remote location where they detonated an actual bomb concealed in a backpack as a trial run for the planned attack.

In Brooklyn, N.Y., in 2012, an FBI agent posing as an al-Qaeda operative supplied a target with fake explosives for a 1,000-pound bomb, which the FBI's victim then attempted to detonate outside the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan.

In Irvine, Calif., in 2007, an FBI informant was so blatant in attempting to entrap members of the local Islamic Center into violent jihadi actions, that the mosque went to court and got a restraining order against the informant.

In Pittsburgh, Khalifa Ali al-Akili became so suspicious of two "jihadi" FBI informants who were trying to recruit him to buy a gun and to go to Pakistan for training, that he contacted both the London Guardian and the Washington-based National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, and told them that he feared the FBI was trying to entrap him. The National Coalition scheduled a press conference for March 16, 2012, at which al-Akili was to speak and identify the informants, but the day before the scheduled press conference, the FBI arrested al-Aliki, charging him not with terrorism, but with illegal possession of a firearm.

The chief informant trying to entrap al-Aliki turned out to be Shaden Hussain, a longtime FBI informant who had set up two earlier terrorism cases: the above-cited Newburgh, N.Y., case for which he was paid $100,000, and another in Albany, N.Y., for which his payments are not known.

This practice continues to the present day.

On April 19, 2013, the FBI arrested a 19-year old from Aurora, Ill., Abdella Ahmad Tounisi, as he attempted to board a flight from Chicago's O'Hare Airport to Turkey, where he hoped to join the Syrian al-Qaeda-linked opposition group Jabhat al-Nusrah.

How was young Tounisi recruited? By a site that exhorted its viewers: "A Call for Jihad in Syria: Come and join your lion brothers ... fighting under the true banner of Islam." In fact, the website was constructed and entirely controlled by the FBI! When Tounisi sent an e-mail to the website, he was answered by an undercover FBI agent posing as "Brother Abdullah," a recruiter for al-Nusra, who even provided Tounisi with a bus ticket that would take him from Istanbul to the Syrian border.

"They could entrap anybody, they could send anybody anything, and when you're young and impressionable, you're gonna believe it," Tounisi's father said on April 21, according to AP and the Chicago Sun-Times.

"I am just generalizing this issue right now because a lot of kids in the Muslim community have been entrapped just like this; anybody that goes to the mosque five times a day and he's holding onto his religion really good, he is a red flag."

Boston FBI, Too

The Boston FBI office has its own history in this kind of activity. In the 2011 case of Rezwan Ferdaus, an American citizen and Northeastern University graduate, accused of planning to send miniature planes carrying explosives crashing into the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, the Bureau went even further. According to various accounts, the FBI, using a drug-addicted informant posing as an al-Qaeda operative, provided money to Ferdaus to travel to Washington and to buy an F-86 Sabre minature plane for the attack. "The prosecution case also reveals how Ferdaus ordered the plane and rented a storage facility in which to keep it, and then took delivery from the FBI of 25 pounds of C-4 explosives, three grenades, and six AK-47 rifles," the London Guardian reported on Sept. 29, 2011 (emphasis added). The FBI press release, issued on Sept. 29, 2011, acknowledged that the FBI provided Ferdaus with "approximately 1.25 pounds of actual C-4 explosives."[4]

At the time, this operation—which included providing live explosives—was publicly defended by both Richard DesLauriers, the head of the Boston FBI office, and Carmen Ortiz, the United States Attorney, both of whom are still in place, currently overseeing the Marathon bombing case.

Not to be overlooked, is that the Boston FBI office was running this entrapment operation against Ferdaus, at the same time that it supposedly investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev and determined that it could not make any further inquiry, because he did not pose a threat. That bespeaks either absolute incompetence, or that the FBI is lying and covering up what they actually did with Tsarnaev.

A Long History of Provocations

The irony was, that the numbskulls who demanded after 9/11 that the FBI must make intelligence-gathering and prevention its priority, were in fact reviving a corrupt tradition in the FBI, which Congress had tried to shut down after the scandals that emerged during Congressional investigations in the 1970s. The generic name for the FBI's unconstitutional use of its intelligence and investigative powers was COINTELPRO.

The FBI certainly had done intelligence and counter-intelligence before, and these programs were shut down not just once, but twice, for their wholesale violations of the constitutional rights of Americans.

Hoover and the Palmer Raids

The first incarnation of the strategy of "prevention, preemption, and disruption" was the Justice Department's General Intelligence Division (GID)—created at the height of the post-World War I "Red scare," and involving extensive use of undercover agents, informants, and provocateurs.

The GID was created by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer—whose name has gone down in history for the "Palmer Raids"—in 1919, in preparation for series of brutal raids targetting aliens (immigrants), anarchists, and "Bolsheviks," first launched in a dozen cities on Nov. 7, 1919. The then-young and enthusiastic J. Edgar Hoover was put in charge of the GID.

A second series of raids was carried out against what were then the two Communist parties in the U.S., in 33 cities on Jan. 2, 1920. Already at this time, the GID had enough high-level undercover agents in the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party, that they were able to schedule party meetings at the same time across the country, so that raids could be executed simultaneously. There were no constitutional rights for the more than 10,000 persons arrested and detained in these raids.

Hoover and the GID were moved into the (Federal) Bureau of Investigation in 1921—which had been created by that Anglophile President, Teddy Roosevelt, in 1907. In 1924, the GID was shut down by Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, but Hoover and his massive card files remained in place in the FBI.

Division Five

The FBI's counter-intelligence functions were revived in the 1930s, to keep track of the growing fascist and communist movements. With the outbreak of World War II, the FBI was reorganized with the creation of Division Five, responsible for internal security and counter-intelligence.

Collaborating with British Intelligence agents operating in the United States during World War II, the Bureau mastered the arts of warrantless wiretaps, opening of personal mail, and "black bag jobs" (surreptitious entries or burglaries)—which methods were carried seamlessly into peacetime surveillance and disruption of domestic radicals and "subversives" in the 1950s and '60s.

During the investigations known as the Church Committee (Senate) and Pike Commission (House) in the 1970s, the public learned how the FBI had used infilatrators and provocateurs to foment violence within and between targetted organizations, to the point of encouraging suicide (e.g., Martin Luther King), and murders and assassinations (e.g., Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, and Lyndon LaRouche; see below).

One favored FBI technique was to falsely label someone as a police or FBI informant, putting that person at risk of injury or death, while protecting its informants. Another method was blackmail—widely used by Hoover against his actual or potential opponents (but also, according to some accounts, used by British Intelligence against Hoover himself).[5]

Related to this were the "Abscam" and "Brilab" operations of the late 1970s and early 1980s, targetting elected officials and labor leaders, respectively. FBI provocateurs, many of whom were hardened criminals, such as Mel Weinberg (used to frame up Sen. Harrison Williams of New Jersey), would put words in a politician's mouth to give the appearance of bribe-taking, even when there was no such intention or conduct. The conduct of the Bureau's undercover agents in these cases, is eerily similar to its use of provocateurs in the "terrorism" entrapments described in the first section of this article. Similar tactics were used against African-American elected officials in the operations known as "Fruhmenschen" and "Lost Trust."

Provocations Against LaRouche

The political movement organized by Lyndon LaRouche has been repeatedly targetted by the FBI and Justice Department, going back to the late 1960s, when LaRouche first gathered around him a circle of students who had come out of the "New Left." In May 1969, the FBI anonymously mailed a leaflet to student activists at Columbia University, trying to mobilize Mark Rudd's anarchists and proto-terrorists (later the "Weatherman" terrorists) against advocates of LaRouche's pro-labor policies.

In 1973, the Bureau used its well-entrenched assets in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) to launch violent attacks on the LaRouche-organized association, the National Caucus of Labor Committees. FBI documents show that it used the CP and other left-wing groups to label the NCLC as "right-wing terrorists," and "a front either for the local police or the CIA."

Most egregious, was the documented attempt by the FBI to incite the CPUSA to carry out the "elimination" of LaRouche. A Nov. 23, 1973 FBI memo stated:

TO: DIRECTOR, FBI
FROM: SAC, NEW YORK
SUBJECT: LYNDON HERMYLE LAROUCHE, JR.

In reviewing New York case file it is noted that information has been received that the CPUSA is conducting an extensive background investigation on the subject for the purpose of ultimately eliminating him and the threat of the NCLC, on CP operations....

ources have advised that the subject is the controlling force behind the NCLC and all of its activities. A discussion with the New York NCLC case agent indicates that it is felt if the subject was no longer in control of NCLC operations that the NCLC would fall apart with internal strife and conflict.

New York proposes submitting a blind memorandum to the 'Daily World' CP newspaper, in New York City, which has been mailed from outside this area to help facilitate CP investigations of the subject. It is felt that this would be appropriate under the Bureau's counter intelligence program.

Otherwise, unable to find any pretext under which LaRouche and his associates could be prosecuted in Federal courts, the FBI orchestrated hundreds of harassing arrests of LaRouche movement organizers by state and local police. An FBI agent in New Haven, Conn. wrote a memorandum on a June 13, 1975 call from a supervisor "from Division 5 at the Bureau," who asked about cooking up some bogus Federal charges. "He further stated that some [FBI] offices have had considerable success in having local authorities proceed under local statutes against NCLC members...."

Around 1983, at the instigation of British agent Henry Kissinger, and corrupt circles in the Soviet Union, the Justice Departent and FBI launched a new COINTELPRO-type operation against LaRouche. Kissinger had written to FBI Director William Webster in August 1982, complaining about LaRouche; in January 1983, Kissinger's lawyer Edward Bennett Williams got the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) to ask the FBI to investigate the sources of LaRouche's funding. This led to an all-out public/private operation against LaRouche, designed to culminate with armed raids on the LaRouche movement offices; an intended, but averted, Waco-style raid on LaRouche's residence planned to kill him. (FBI documents show that the planning of the 1986 raid involved the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command—little known then, but better known today, for its activities including killer drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan.)

Six months later after the raid, the Justice Department carried out an unprecedented involuntary bankruptcy proceeding against publishing companies operated by LaRouche's associates, which was later determined by a Federal court to have constituted "a constructive fraud on the court." Under conditions of the bankruptcy, the Justice Department then railroaded LaRouche and a number of associates into prison. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark characterized the LaRouche case as having "represented a broader range of deliberate cunning and systematic misconduct over a longer period of time utilizing the power of the federal government than any other prosecution by the U.S. government in my time, or to my knowledge."

Clean-Up Is Long Overdue

Now, in light of this sordid history, look again at the FBI's handling of the Boston Marathon bombings. Is it just incompetence, that the Bureau somehow overlooked the Tsarnaev brothers? Or were there other operations going on—provocations, entrapment, etc., by the FBI or other agencies—which the government is now scrambling to cover up? As EIR pointed out in its editorial in the last issue, it has been decades since the FBI has been subject to any serious scrutiny—but look what came pouring out during the Church Committee and other investigations of the early and mid-1970s.

And now, with the world on the verge of World War III, and the British-Saudi wielding of terror as a detonator for war and dictatorship, it is essential that we find out exactly who is responsible for such terrorism today—in a manner which was never done around the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Such a thorough investigation and housecleaning are long overdue.

[1] Eric Lichtblau, Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), pp. 100-102.

[2] Trevor Aaronson, "The Informants," Mother Jones, July 29, 2011.

[3] Michael German, "Manufacturing Terrorists: How FBI sting operations make jihadists out of hapless malcontents," Reason Magazine, April 2013, reviewing Trevor Aarsonson, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Ig Publishing, 2013).

[4] FBI Boston press release, "Ferdaus Indicted for Allegedly Plotting Attack on Pentagon and U.S. Capitol and Attempting to Provide Material Support to Foreign Terrorist Organization," Sept. 29, 2011.

[5] Curt Gentry, "J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets" (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 296-297.




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Trump judge nominee, 36, who has never tried a case, wins approval of Senate panel





http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... story.html

LAPD drops investigation of Corey Feldman's sexual abuse report
Doug Smith and Christie D'ZurillaContact Reporters
The Los Angeles Police Department has ended its investigation into actor Corey Feldman's allegations of sexual abuse and will not seek charges.

A statement issued by the LAPD on Thursday said the occurrence Feldman reported was too old to be prosecuted.

“Los Angeles Police Department detectives are committed to protecting victims of sexual assault and will thoroughly investigate any report of a sex-related crime,” the statement said. “In the case of Corey Feldman, unfortunately, according to California law, the alleged occurrence is out of statute and robbery-homicide detectives have no other avenues to pursue this case.”

Feldman, who is attempting to raise funds for a movie about alleged pedophiles in Hollywood, posted on his Twitter account earlier in the week that he had filed a report with the LAPD alleging that he was sexually abused as a child in the industry. Feldman has recently appeared on “The Dr. Oz Show” and the “Today” show promoting a campaign to raise $10 million for the movie.


But Feldman has also been criticized for not revealing the names of those he said molested him. In a 2013 memoir, "Coreyography," the "Goonies" actor recounted — without revealing any names — abuse that he and late actor Corey Haim allegedly suffered when they were young performers.

Haim, who struggled with substance abuse, died in 2010 at age 38. In recent years, his mother, Judy Haim, has tried to distance herself from Feldman.

"If he finally decides to release names and tell the world who they are, for the sake of more victims, I will be 100% behind it. But if he's waiting to release the names in the movie, I don't support that. He doesn't need $10 million to do it," she said in a statement to "Today."

Last week on "The Dr. Oz Show" Feldman named one man he claims abused him, touching off a social media attack on a man with a similar name who, Feldman clarified later in the day, was not the man he was accusing.

On the show, Feldman and show host, Dr. Mehmet Oz, called the LAPD to ask whether a report could be taken on an alleged offense from 20 to 25 years ago. A detective said a report would be taken and interviews would be done, then a decision would be made on whether to move forward with the case.

In announcing the close of the investigation Thursday, LAPD spokesman Officer Sal Ramirez added that​​​​​​​: “The LAPD applauds Mr. Feldman for coming forward, as an out-of-statute assault report could potentially bolster any current and forthcoming case as it creates a pattern of behavior.”







https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ge-warning


'We will be toasted, roasted and grilled': IMF chief sounds climate change warning
Christine Lagarde warns of ‘dark future’ if the world fails to take steps to address global warming

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7690

Re: FBI Sock Puppet Alert

Post by msfreeh »

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http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights ... ret-police

Yes, the FBI is America’s secret police
BY JAMES BOVARD, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 12/11/17 08:40 AM EST




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RATs of hell
November 16, 2015 Uncategorized “cyber fires”, “dolphin speak”, attack vectors, Citizens for Social Grace, critical infrastructure, cyber-soldiers, DARPA’s Plan X, defenestration, exercises, Flame, Hegelian games, Law of War manual, lethal cyber weapons, malicious code, malware, Operation Olympic Games, Stuxnet

The RATs of hell

the remote anonymous triggering of destruction

Within recent weeks, we have seen a resugence of articles from within the halls of US military, information technology and intelligence agencies and their various PR firms and contractor agencies about the development of and need to use “lethal cyber weapons” or, in other words, computer code that is capable of causing an “enemy’s” critical infrastructure to self-destruct.

This establishes the same kinds of arms races (and arguments about them) about numerous other forms of weaponry, mass destruction, etc., including nuclear weapons, biological and chemical weapons, information warfare, etc.

It is ripe for Hegelian games: we discovered they are working on it, so we must begin to do so ourselves so we can understand how the weaponry works at a technical level and so we can defend ourselves, and force the imposition of controls. Such games soon lead, particularly wirth the application of gaming theory and other advanced pathological hegemonic madness, to:

a “first strike” mentality;

a “let’s do a trial run on some hapless corner of the world” to make sure it works” event;

the development of covert labs and production facilities”;

an “accident”;

and more.

Two years ago, World Affairs Journal noted the swing to the offensive with DARPA’s Plan X whose goal was “to create revolutionary technologies for understanding, planning, and managing cyberwarfare.”

Like their military counterparts, cybersecurity experts in the private sector have become increasingly frustrated by their inability to stop intruders from penetrating critical computer networks to steal valuable data or even sabotage network operations. The new idea is to pursue the perpetrators back into their own networks. “We’re following a failed security strategy in cyber,” says Steven Chabinsky, formerly the head of the FBI’s cyber intelligence section and now chief risk officer at CrowdStrike, a startup company that promotes aggressive action against its clients’ cyber adversaries. “There’s no way that we are going to win the cybersecurity effort on defense. We have to go on offense.”

Nearly half-a-billion dollars have been set aside for the first wave of funding. The buzz phrases include “cyber fires”, “cyberspace joint munitions”, and other similaly-hybrid terms of warfare.

“‘Cyber joint munitions effectiveness’ describes that a particular cyber capability has been evaluated and its effectiveness is known against a particular target,” she said. The target is a person, place or object a commander is eyeing to neutralize, according to the associated Joint Chiefs of Staff policy.

“Cyber fires” has a broader meaning and “can be used for offensive or defensive objectives, and can be designed to create effects in and through cyberspace,” she said.



https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/73 ... dd0128.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

“… Yes, I’ve become quite a student of your operations in this region.

Thirty-four mansions, I think it was, pillaged and burned…under Colonel Montgomery’s expedition of the Combahee….”









“First squad, second platoon.

Fall out to set torches.

Prepare to fire the town.”





The discussion surrounding the firing of cyber arms hearkens back to before the days of Manhattan Project, some former military leaders say.

“It reminds me of the run-up to the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II,” said Cedric Leighton, a retired National Security Agency and Air Force intelligence director. “Just like then, the consequences of an attack using cyber munitions will not be completely foreseeable.”

http://image.slidesharecdn.com/dresden- ... 1418593947" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

“… In the past, some military academics have voiced concerns about the unintended outcomes of such maneuvers. Malicious code released into networks could backfire and harm U.S. individuals or allies, they warned.

“Due to the ‘system of systems’ nature” of cyberspace, it is very difficult to know exactly what effect” defensive or offensive actions will have on U.S. and ally assets “since we can’t be sure exactly how far out the cyber action might spread,” Dee Andrews and Kamal Jabbour wrote in a 2011 article for Air Force Space Command’s Journal for Space & Missile Professionals. “The difficulty in doing a damage estimate before cyber action is taken makes cyber friendly fire difficult to identify and mitigate.”

There are dozens of bullet points on training support work in the contracting documents.

For example, the hired contractor will run exercises on “USCYBERCOM Fires processes” with the Joint Advanced Cyber Warfare Course, the Army Cyberspace Operations Course, the Air Force Weapons School, the Joint Targeting School and other outside groups, the documents state.

[Ed.: I’ll leave it to the reader to do their own research and riff on the recent history of exercises as “cover” for covert ops.]

Certain contract personnel supporting these so-called cyber fires will be subjected to additional background reviews and will have to comply with “need-to-know” classification rules, according to officials.

Beyond unleashing malware, the chosen contract employees will help repel attacks on Defense Department smartphones housing sensitive data, according to the government. This assignment involves analyzing forensics reports on hacked mobile devices and conducting security assessments of mobile apps, among other things…..”

21stcenturywire.com reminds us about “the Stuxnet super virus, one of the most pernicious and reckless military cyber operations to date.

According to US firm Symantec’s research, Stuxnet and its sister virus, Flame, was part of ‘Operation Olympic Games’, a joint venture between the United States and Israel designed to penetrate Iranian (and Russian too) civilian infrastructure networks – including civilian nuclear power facilities.

According to the Washington Post, “The brilliance of Stuxnet lay in [the attackers] being under the radar of the target entity,” Thakur said. Both variants of Stuxnet “tried to do damage in a manner that would seem random” to the targeted party.

Despite being caught red-handed, the US ‘defense’ industrial complex has simply upped its offensive operations and are now talking about how cyber warfare can be used to inflicted “collateral damage”…. Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin are some of the defense firms competing for an upcoming $460 million US Cyber Command project to give the American military the power to turn an enemy’s critical infrastructure against them with weaponized code, according to Defense One. A 114-page draft of a 5-year contract released on September 30 details a plan to get private companies to support military operations with cyberwarfare…. [T]his kind of offensive cyberwarfare isn’t esoteric stuff relegated to one strange corner of the US military. In fact, digital arms designed to kill are now explicitly sanctioned under the Pentagon’s newly-published Law of War manual, with an entire chapter devoted to cyber warfare.

Cyber strikes are allowed even if “it is certain that civilians would be killed or injured — so long as the reasonably anticipated collateral damage isn’t excessive in relation to what you expect to gain militarily,” said retired Major General Charles J. Dunlap, executive director of Duke University’s Center on Law, Ethics and National Security. “These are essentially the same rules as for attacks employing traditional bombs or bullets”…

Watch this well-done four-minute video on Stuxnet (Direction and Motion Graphics: Patrick Clair; Written by: Scott Mitchell):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSMOs7CF1Eo" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[I’ve left autoplay on: note especially the one-hour talk by the Stuxnet “decoder” and the half-hour documentary on military training in cyber defense.]

According to an RT article on cyber-weapons safeguards:

“… A US Defense Department directive [pdf] signed last week sets the stage for safeguards that would limit any collateral damage from dangerous robotic instruments of war, ideally to “minimize the probability and consequences of failures” in drones and other autonomous or semi-autonomous weapons “that could lead to unintended engagements.”

The document, signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, outlines rules stating that those weapons must “be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force” by way of “rigorous hardware and software verification and validation.” When those weapons are attacking the cyber-grid, though, the Defense Department doesn’t necessarily seem to think the same precautions need to be put in place.

While the directive is written to explicitly set up safeguards for autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems, one subsection of the document acknowledges that it ‘Does not apply to autonomous or semi-autonomous cyberspace systems for cyberspace operations.’ ….”

See the 20-page pdf “Moral Cyber Weapons”:

Moral Cyber Weapons – Part-II-CH-6 – 24Oct2013 (3)





Here is an article on lethal autonomous-weapon systems and cyber-security that says:

“… It is the combination of weapons, ICS and remote control and monitoring technologies which introduces not just more determined threat actors, but also attack vectors via well-known wireless and satellite communication technologies, where a lot of security research has been done.

There have been several examples of attacks. The Iranian Military claimed to have used GPS jamming attacks to force a UAV into an autonomous mode and caused a denial of service, while some researchers, such as Samy Kamkar, have demonstrated command and control over UAVs via wireless protocols.

Researchers have even conducted attacks against tele-operated surgical robots over the Internet and over the last decade there have been many examples of Advanced Persistent Threats using malware such as ‘BlackEnergy’ to target ICS.

The main problem in this arena is the fact that there are zero international laws or treaties on cyber warfare. This is a serious issue given that the strongest cyber weapons, attacks on infrastructure, disproportionally target the weak. These attacks on infrastructure could take out power to hospitals, elderly homes and could render the digital communication, transportation and businesses useless, leaving innocent civilians as the victims. For more see The Tallinn Manual. Improving the accuracy of current systems. This is where computing in warfare has gone the furthest. Drones, Tomahawk missiles and laser guidance systems have allowed for a more humane asymmetrical war. The flip side is that this gives the countries who can afford it an excuse to go to war for less egregious reasons.

More here: http://slideplayer.com/slide/4381887/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



http://i1.wp.com/hackmageddon.com/wp-co ... =397%2C423" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



According to Stefano’s definition: a cyber weapon is:

A device or any set of computer instructions intended to unlawfully damage a system acting as a critical infrastructure, its information, the data or programs therein contained or thereto relevant, or even intended to facilitate the interruption, total or partial, or alteration of its operation.

http://www.hackmageddon.com/2012/04/22/ ... er-weapon/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



On logic bombs, trojan horses and trap doors:

http://www.sans.edu/research/security-l ... b-trp-door" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.cknow.com/cms/vtutor/logic-bombs.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



“… ‘Unlike traditional espionage malware or even the Stuxnet virus that sabotaged Iranian nuclear centrifuges, cyber fires would impact human life, according to former Defense officials and a recently released Defense Department ‘Law of War Manual’ … The manual lays out three sample actions the Pentagon deems uses of force in cyberspace: ‘trigger a nuclear plant meltdown; open a dam above a populated area, causing destruction * ; or disable air traffic control services , resulting in airplane crashes.’ …”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pow ... -military/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

* Reminiscent of the Johnstown, PA flood book by David McCullough and the PBS documentary based on it

[I could not find a reference online or in my own archives to the pronouncement by McCullough narrating the film, but it is relevant here.]



# # # # # #

What happens when a logic bomb escapes the lab?

What happens when one of the people comes to deeply understand the ramifications of the work going on inside one of these secretive offices or schools and gets a conscience? WIll be or she be defenestrated?

Who will write the new novels about the new Dresden and the new Hiroshimae?

Wasn’t Fukushima one of these?

Will we see oligarchs hiring computer hackers to create chaos out of which they can create future wealth, like the hurricane in New Orleans or the actions of some driving cultural chaos in Europe?

Will we see bloggers writing satirical pieces about waking up in a world of moral midgets?

Will we see position papers developed by groups of medical care responders, teachers, and others from under the umbrella of “Citizens for Social Grace”?

Will the people who write those position papers be fired from, and blacklisted away from, meaningful employment?

Is there a Malthusian, Luciferian angle to this?



# # # # # #



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pCFY33LD4c" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7690

Re: FBI Sock Puppet Alert

Post by msfreeh »

My posts appear with lines drawn through them.
Don' know how they go there?






http://flagpole.com/news/news-features/ ... kill-jfk-1

Did J. Edgar Hoover Kill JFK?
By Donald E. Wilkes, Jr.







http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... FFICE.html


Sex misconduct shame of the Justice Department laid bare: Top U.S. Marshal slept with NINE women in his office and senior lawyer groped two – but the accused got promotions and bonuses
The Justice Department has covered up years of sexual misconduct, according to a blockbuster Inspector General report
Number-two official in the U.S. Marshals Service in Massachusetts engaged in sex with 'approximately' nine different women – in his office
A DOJ Civil Division lawyer groped the breasts and buttocks of two female trial attorneys
An FBI supervisor asked female employees if they 'wanted to see his balls' – his baseball collection – and told one that he admired her 'come-f***-me boots'
Most offenders were reassigned without suspensions or reduction in pay
The Washington Post got the bombshell DOJ inspector general report through the Freedom Of Information Act
By Dailymail.com Reporter
PUBLISHED: 16:27 EST, 27 December 2017 | UPDATED: 18:32 EST, 27 December 2017





http://bangordailynews.com/2017/12/26/o ... -to-close/

Long Creek is failing to keep Maine kids safe. It’s time for its doors to close.




http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc ... -1.3721659

New York City to endure abnormal-freezing temperatures for next six days
BY RICH SCHAPIRO
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Tuesday, December 26, 2017, 12:27 PM




Link du jour

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https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/12/26/bosto ... know-zero/


DECEMBER 26, 2017 | JAMES HENRY
ON BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING, RIGHT TO KNOW IS ZERO


It has been nearly five years since two bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and nearly three years since the conclusion of the trial of the sole surviving Tsarnaev brother, Dzhokhar. And yet, the government continues to maintain radio silence over many crucial questions related to the bombing.

Since the 2013 bombing, WhoWhatWhy has made dozens and dozens of records requests through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other records request laws, from multiple government agencies, in an effort to fill in some of the many holes in the story that remain after a secretive federal investigation and trial. The results have been mixed, to say the least.

Most of the ongoing secrecy relates to the deceased mastermind and main bombing perpetrator: the older brother Tamerlan.

The lead prosecutor who secured the conviction against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, William Weinreb, even admitted that “it is fair to say that there are still a number of questions unanswered about that case.”

And a surprising number of Boston’s local law enforcement question whether the FBI is coming clean about what it knows about the now-deceased Tsarnaev brother.

As we wrote back in July, some of these enduring questions are:

* How was Tamerlan able to travel back and forth to the country from which he sought asylum in 2012, despite being on multiple terror watchlists?

* Why was he not questioned about the 2011 murder of three of his friends?

* Was Tamerlan working for the US government in some capacity?

* Was the FBI or some other federal agency using Tamerlan’s desire to become a US citizen as leverage?

* Did the Tsarnaevs have help constructing the bombs?

* Was anyone else involved in planning or inspiring the plot?

Besides the big questions, our ongoing efforts to track down and verify even mundane details about the bombing reveal a flawed and seemingly arbitrary system for making government documents public. Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s travel records, for instance.

In September, we wrote about our attempts through FOIA to ascertain details of the confinement conditions of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. We also detailed our multiple requests to the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to interview Tsarnaev. The process was nothing short of a Kafkaesque wilderness of mirrors.

Obtaining “public” records through FOIA has always been imperfect. And although improvements have been made, requesters are largely in the dark about what agencies might be holding back; most agencies’ search practices and criteria are like an impenetrable black box.

WhoWhatWhy’s efforts at obtaining Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s 2012 travel records are a case in point. First off, the elder Tsarnaev brother is deceased. His records are ostensibly public information — and the public has a right to know more about him.

Back in July, we sent Customs and Border Protection (CBP) a request for “arrival” and “departure” records produced when Tsarnaev traveled to Dagestan by way of Moscow in 2012. According to official accounts, Tsarnaev flew out of JFK International January 21, 2012, and returned to JFK July 19, 2012.

The apparent ease with which Tsarnaev flew in and out of the US to a known hotbed of terroristic activity (Dagestan), despite being on multiple watch lists, is one of the enduring mysteries about the elder brother.

Consider also that the Russians, who had flagged him as a dangerous radical well before US officials watch-listed him, also allowed him to fly in and out of their country unimpeded.

So it piqued our interest when it came to our attention that there were early news reports, supposedly based on documentary “travel records,” that Tsarnaev had actually flown out of JFK January 12 — not January 21 as was claimed officially. This was based on a story reported by NBC News affiliate New York 4, which makes reference to “documents” that they “obtained.”

The report even describes a photograph of Tsarnaev on one of the documents. The January 12 date was repeated by multiple media outlets and was even cited by then head of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano when she testified before Congress about the bombing investigation.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, JFK, airport
Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Doug Letterman / Wikimedia.

WhoWhatWhy reached out multiple times to the reporters who wrote the article and asked if they would either confirm — or correct — what was written in the article or, at the very least, describe what type of documents they were referencing. They “respectfully declined.”

Spoiler alert: New York 4 screwed up the travel dates. But the fact that they were citing actual documents with contradictory dates was intriguing given that Tsarnaev’s travel to Russia was shady to begin with. So we tried to verify or disprove on our own.

A deep dive through Tsarnaev’s 256 pages of immigration records (or A-file), much of which is redacted, is no help because it only documents his arrival at JFK airport July 19, 2012. His departure, six months earlier, is either not included in the A-file, or it is blacked out under one of the file’s many redactions. (Tsarnaev’s A-file was released to the FBI’s “electronic reading room,” which is what happens when three or more requests are made for the same records. WhoWhatWhy was one of those requesters.)

So the only other option to clear up the mystery was FOIA.

CBP on FOIA: LOL
.
In July of this year, we requested “all arrival/departure records for Tamerlan Tsarnaev” from CBP. By the end of August (which is a pretty quick turnaround as FOIA goes) CBP furnished us the results of its search. There was only one problem, they provided Tsarnaev’s “arrival” records only.

WhoWhatWhy called CBP’s FOIA liaison to ask how it was possible they couldn’t find a corresponding departure record. The liaison indicated that a search was conducted with the information that was provided in the request — that was the result.

So we appealed, pointing out that it was widely reported in the media, and government officials were on the record stating, that Tsarnaev had in fact traveled out of the country in January 2012 and that CBP must, therefore, have records of his departure. We also included — under the assumption that maybe the name search “Tamerlan Tsarnaev” was the problem — a long list of possible name variants we collected from Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s A-file and from an Intelligence Community Inspector General (IGIC) report.

The IGIC report probed some of the “intelligence failures,” like how Tsarnaev’s travels in and out of the country eluded any additional scrutiny despite the fact that he was on multiple watch lists, each of which characterized him as a dangerous individual. Part of IGIC’s determination was that some of the watch list information about Tsarnaev included incorrect transliterations and incorrect birth dates. So we included all of those too.

This time, we received five pages, including a “Person Encounter List,” a “Person Encounter Detail” (the sought-after departure records), and two “Person Encounter Detail” documenting his return to the US July 19, 2012.

The “departure” records indicated that he indeed left JFK January 21, not January 12 as New York 4 had erroneously reported. The name on the additional records: “Tamerlan Tsarnaev.”

It was unclear, then, why the search for documents in the initial request didn’t produce the same records — so we FOIA’d our FOIA request. We asked for “all records, including emails, search slips, index entries, and/or memos” produced as a result of our initial request and subsequent appeal. Surprisingly, CBP’s “final response” came the very next day.

The results: “we were unable to locate or identify any responsive records, based upon the information you provided in your request.”

We appealed, pointing out the absurdity of the proposition that CBP would not be able to find its own FOIA processing records. A month and a half later we finally received 42 pages of FOIA processing records.

Another spoiler alert: It’s not exactly clear in the records why the initial request only came up with Tsarnaev’s arrival records. But Tsarnaev’s Alien Identification Number (A-number) does appear in the subject line of one of the FOIA official’s emails — so maybe they had searched using that. It’s hard to tell. Presumably, CBP officials would know what is the most efficient way to search for records. Why not just search that way to begin with?

Instead, the tertiary initial search for records ends up exhausting one of only two opportunities available — short of suing — forcing requesters to appeal just to get the records they were entitled to in the first place. And if at that point the requester disputes the legitimacy of the redactions in the documents, or what was provided — too bad.

Yes, we ultimately did get the documents we were after. But only after getting the proverbial middle finger and an all-too-common runaround from CBP.

It’s tempting to chalk the terrible state of information requesting up to the usual incompetent government trope. But the responses from all of the federal agencies are so consistently bad, that one has to wonder whether it is terrible by design.





https://bangordailynews.com/2017/04/24/ ... lint-corn/

http://www.pressherald.com/2016/10/02/c ... nerations/

Albie Barden preserves native varieties of flint corn for future generations
His abiding interest in Native American foodways has given him insight into the spiritual significance of growing food.
https://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/mas ... az83ndzale

http://www.pressherald.com/2014/07/20/m ... er-lambke/

https://mainewoodheat.com

Albie Barden owns Maine Wood Heat




https://apnews.com/048d7d6469da456db11d ... -shield-PM



Israel passes law that critics say is meant to shield PM


JERUSALEM

Israel’s parliament has passed legislation ending a police practice of recommending indictments, a bill pushed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party as he faces corruption allegations.

The so-called “recommendations bill” passed early Thursday after days of filibuster. It stops police from recommending to prosecutors whether to indict suspects upon completing their investigations and also aims to stem media leaks.

Supporters say it’s needed to protect citizens who are investigated but never charged. Critics say it muzzles




http://www.startribune.com/after-outcry ... 466687053/

After outcry, relatives of man shot by Minneapolis police demand visitation
Marcus Fischer's family say they've been barred from follow-up visits.



http://www.startribune.com/more-police- ... =n&clmob=y

More Minnesota police departments going to 12-hour work schedules
Once departments see the benefits — more days off — most don't want to go back.
By Erin Adler Star Tribune DECEMBER 27, 2017 — 10:21PM



https://apnews.com/361de7ce896c4da6a4f3 ... ll-in-sick

Thousands of Puerto Rico police owed overtime call in sick





https://www.boston.com/news/business/20 ... the-shrimp



It’s Maine shrimp season, but without the shrimp


PORT CLYDE, Maine — Sitting between Glen Libby’s desk at Port Clyde Fresh Catch and the armchair where his brother’s old dog, Red, likes to nap are two boxes full of “The Original Maine Shrimp Cookbook.” This slim spiral-bound volume includes contributions from various members of the brothers’ immediate family, whose shrimping history dates back nearly four decades in this coastal town about two hours northeast of Portland.



Libby loves the small, delicate Northern shrimp, known fondly here as Maine shrimp, and so do customers at his processing and distribution plant. He bought $700 worth of the books to sell.



“I have sold two,” Libby said.

He is unlikely to sell many more. Not long after the cookbook was published in 2009, its central ingredient began vanishing from Maine’s waters. In 2014, regulators closed the shrimp fishery (the term that encompasses both the fishing grounds and those who work there). The hope was that the struggling species would replenish itself if left undisturbed.

So far, according to scientists who survey the Gulf of Maine annually, it has not. Their most recent data show Northern shrimp numbers at a historic low for the 34 years in which they have been counting the crustacean, Pandalus borealis. Egg production is down. Survival rates for larvae are poor.

Last month, regulators voted to keep the fishery closed again through 2018, the fifth consecutive year without a shrimp harvest. That means no shrimping for the Libbys or the hundreds of other Maine fishermen who have long relied on it as a sweet paycheck (and meal) in the dark of winter.

What makes this an unusual closing is that fishermen are not being blamed for the immediate problem. Cod was overfished. Sea urchins were overfished, as Maine shrimp were in the late 1960s and 1970s. But the most widely accepted theory for the rapid decline of this species, which extends no farther south than the Gulf of Maine, is the same force being blamed for disruption of fisheries around the globe: climate change.



While summer swimmers may still gasp with shock on entering Maine’s chilly waters, the Gulf of Maine is warming, and becoming increasingly inhospitable to the shrimp. Average winter sea-surface temperatures have increased 4.5 degrees in Boothbay Harbor since 1906.

Plenty of shrimpers believe in climate change. Some do not. All feel stymied.

Patrick Keliher, Maine’s commissioner of marine resources, said he had never seen quite as many shrimpers turn out for a meeting as they did on Nov. 29, when a regulatory panel he sits on decided to keep the fishery closed. He raised their hopes, briefly, by arguing unsuccessfully for a “boutique” fishery that would have allowed shrimpers a small but not insignificant catch.

After all, many fishermen reason, if shrimp are going to continue to disappear because of an environmental force unlikely to be stopped, why not just reap what is left? Especially now that unmet demand has sent prices soaring.

Some shrimpers favor backing off on the shrimp to see if they can bounce back. And almost all question the scientific data. Surveys are often run with the help of fishermen, but instead of going where the shrimp typically cluster, the surveys by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration go to mostly random, computer-selected spots to trawl.

“I don’t know if it is as bad as they think,” said Libby, whose brother, Gary, is chairman of the advisory panel to the Northern Shrimp Technical Committee, the voting body of the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission that decides the fate of the fishery each year.


But there is one thing most everyone here agrees on: It would be terrible to see the end of Maine shrimp, a touchstone of local tradition, identity and cuisine.

“Maine shrimp is the only shrimp I’ve ever eaten that has a taste to it,” said Arnie Gammage, a longtime shrimp trapper in South Bristol.

Maine’s relationship with its shrimp is more complex than just love of a flavor.

“We in northern New England love them and have a proprietary relationship with them,” said Sam Hayward, a James Beard Award-winning chef and an owner of the Portland restaurants Fore Street and Scales.

Hayward buys the





http://www.pressherald.com/2017/12/26/s ... -hardship/



Scarborough High wrestler with one leg finds home after years of hardship





Inspector general says mishandling of sexual harassment complaints at Justice Department is a “systemic” problem
By SARI HORWITZ | The Washington Post
December 26, 2017 at 10:15 pm


The cases examined by the IG’s office include a U.S. attorney who had a sexual relationship with a subordinate and sent harassing texts and emails when it ended; a Civil Division lawyer who groped the breasts and buttocks of two female trial attorneys; and a chief deputy U.S. marshal who had sex with “approximately” nine women on multiple occasions in his U.S. Marshals Service office, according to investigative reports obtained by The Washington Post under a Freedom of Information Act request.

While Horowitz’s office investigates the allegations, it is the department that decides on any discipline. In several cases, Horowitz said Justice Department attorneys who were accused of sexual misconduct were not disciplined appropriately and in some cases were later given awards or bonuses.

“We were troubled to learn that subjects of pending sexual misconduct investigations or individuals who had been recently disciplined for sexual misconduct still received performance awards,” Horowitz said.

Some of the most troubling allegations, Horowitz said, have been in the Justice Department’s Civil Division. His office examined the handling of those allegations after receiving a complaint that the Office of Immigration Litigation had not properly disciplined an attorney who had committed sexual misconduct.



http://kosu.org/post/fbi-agents-associa ... -continues

FBI Agents Association Sees Increased Donations As Special Counsel Criticism Continues





http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... -or-resign

Bush ethics chief: FBI director needs to stand up to Trump or resign
BY JACQUELINE THOMSEN - 12/26/17 07:41 PM EST



https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/investi ... 54663.html

NJ State Police Have Paid at Least $850,000 for Secret Cell Phone Surveillance Equipment

The 'Stingray,' which can track nearby cell phone use, is used across the country by law enforcement agencies, who are relucant to discuss the device.

By Mitch Blacher and Brian X. McCrone



http://gkmen.com/2017/12/27/gop-rep-roo ... s-fbi-doj/

GOP Rep Rooney Suggests a 'Purge' at 'Off the Rails' FBI, DOJ



https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2017/12 ... 514429631/

FBI refuses to investigate murder of black Baltimore police officer

By Ray Downs | Dec. 27, 2017 at 10:17 PM

The FBI refused a request from the Baltimore Police Department to investigate the murder of a detective who was killed one day before he was scheduled to speak to federal agents conducting a probe into allegedly corrupt police officers. In a letter obtained by The Baltimore Sun, FBI Assistant Director Stephen E.







http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/ ... 92074.html


Lie detector tests, extortion and a rape accusation: How two NC cops landed in hot water
BY WILL DORAN

DECEMBER 27, 2017 01:48 PM




http://www.wkyc.com/article/news/nation ... f6f7b5b79b

JFK files: House Assassinations Committee was suspicious of defector's claims about KGB and Oswald
JFK files: House panel suspicious of KGB defector
Author: Ray Locker and Ed Brackett, USA TODAY
Published: 11:58 PM EST December 27, 2017



http://elkodaily.com/opinion/columnists ... 757f8.html

Thomas Mitchell: What evidence is pertinent in Bundy trials?
Elko Daily Free Press
... evidence — including information about an FBI surveillance camera, documents citing the presence of snipers, certain maps, FBI logs, threat assessments that showed the Bundys weren't violent and internal affairs documents detailing possible misdeeds by the Bureau of Land Management agent in charge, who was







https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-kgb-p ... aft-part-1

ACTIVE MEASURES
Revealed: The Secret KGB Manual for Recruiting Spies
The document is from the Cold War. But the material it teaches is still being used today by Vladimir Putin’s clandestine cadres.

Michael Weiss
MICHAEL WEISS
12.27.17 5:00 AM ET







http://www.themalaysianinsight.com/s/29700/

Cities sue Pentagon for failing to report criminals to FBI gun database
theday.com-
Devin Kelley, who was convicted of domestic violence while serving in the U.S. Air Force, was never reported by the military for inclusion on an FBI database of individuals blocked from purchasing firearms. Kelley went on to kill more than two dozen churchgoers in Sutherland Springs, Texas, last month in one of the worst ...





https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5221967/r ... y-the-fbi/



PRINTS OF THIEVES Russian hackers may have stolen fingerprints of millions of Americans by hiding a secret code in software later bought by the FBI
The company whose code ended up in the software has connections to the Kremlin, say whistleblowers



https://www.yakimaherald.com/news/crime ... 3aef2.html

Blind man killed after confrontation with Yakima PD
Kaitlin Bain and Donald W. Meyers Dec 26, 2017 Updated Dec 26, 2017






https://apnews.com/f6f5e2f31aa2458ea421 ... r-training



Massachusetts police chief travels to Israel for training






http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/l ... 108959736/

Detroit Police official lied after taking deal, FBI says
Robert Snell, The Detroit News Published 12:03 a.m. ET Dec. 27 2017

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