Tag Archives: FBI

Electrical Grid Remains a Vulnerable Target to Nations and Terrorists

Today, Afghani and Israeli infrastructure were targeted by outside forces. In Afghanistan, the Taliban blew up a major electricity pylon in Dand-e-Shahabuddin area knocking out power to the entire region. In Israel, the Public Utility Authority was the target of one of the country’s largest cyber attacks in history.

Afghanistan and Israel will be able to recover from the recent attacks, but these events illustrate how susceptible a nation’s infrastructure can be. The Taliban were able to easily knock out power to an entire region without any high tech equipment, while the entire nation of Israel would have been effected if the attack was not stopped.

This is not the first, and certainly not the last, time an outside force has attacked a nation’s grid.

  • March 31, 2015, 44 of Turkey’s 81 provinces lost power for twelve hours after their grid was alledgedly hacked by Iran.
  • January 2015, cities and towns across Pakistan lost power after Baluchistani rebels attacked a transmission line.
  • June 9, 2014, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) attacked a transmission tower that blacked out the entire nation of Yemen.
  • In December 2015, Russia was suspected of hacking Ukrainian power stations, causing tens of thousands of Ukrainians to lose power.
  • 2013, the Wall Street Journal and Associated Press reported on several occasions when Iranians infiltrated the U.S. power grid and, on one occasion, a dam in New York.
  • 2010, a North Korean defector spoke with BBC Click about North Korean hackers began using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to target control systems of critical infrastructure.

Whether high tech or low tech, attacks on the grid can be carried out by anyone or any group. In the case of Yemen, AQAP simply fired grenades at a Yemeni transmission tower and blacked out the whole nation. With powerful nations relying heavily on electricity, it is imperative for nations to secure their grids and protect against a possible incursion.

As a well developed nation it is not enough to just prepare against high tech incursions. Securing servers and putting up firewalls will not stop an explosive or gunfire from ruining a system. The United States must prepare for a full spectrum of attacks from its enemies.

John Riggi, a section chief at the FBI’s cyber division, mentioned in a CNN article that IS had been attempting to hack into the U.S. grid, but have been unsuccessful. However, he later mentions that it is possible to gain the technology necessary from the black market. Some companies have been cited selling hacking equipment to oppressive governments.

Hackers have offered hacking training on internet forums for a small fee. The tools to hack into control systems on power plants and dams are easily accessible on the internet. Powerful nations and average people now have access to the knowledge to do critical damage to a nation’s vital infrastructure.

With all of these threats it is important for the U.S. to know who their enemies are. As the CNN article mentioned, while IS has been unsuccessful, they still have the potential and desire to hack our grid. U.S. Defense leaders are well aware of the threats We currently do not have a strategy to deter actors like China and Russia from proliferating hacking capabilities to other hostile actors.

Western Tech Firms Help Authoritarians Crack Down

An Italian company called “Hacking Team” has been caught selling surveillance systems to governments including cyber weapons to Sudan.  Information was stolen from the company, Hacking Team, by hackers.  The firm is Milan based and is listed on Reporters Without Border’s Enemies on the Internet list for its alleged sale of cyber tools to repressive regimes. They have also been stonewalling an investigation from the UN. The firm rejects the statements and says that it has never done business in Sudan. One of the leaked spreadsheets however, marks Russia and Sudan as “not officially” supported.

A July 2012 record shows a 480,000 euro invoice for selling surveillance software to Sudan. The UN arms embargo on Sudan bans the export of “arms and related material” to the country. In 2014, Citizen Lab, identified almost 21 countries that were potential clients of Hacking Team, the list included Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Sudan, Russia, and UAE.

The attack on Hacking Team was carried out by an unknown hackers, who released the 400GB of documents on file sharing website, defaced the company’s twitter account, and replaced the company’s logo to read “Hacked Team.” In the US, agencies using Hacking Team’s tools include the FBI, the DEA, and the Department of Defense.

Earlier in the year, the Obama administration announced the decision to loosen certain sanctions on Sudan’s government. The decision drew criticism, with many stating that the newly allowed sale of communications hardware and software would allow Sudan to gain surveillance on citizens. Following the decision, the State Department released a statement saying that they “believed the tools [would] promote freedom of speech, help Sudanese communicate more easily with each other, and allow them to be more connected digitally to the global community.”

Back in February, Sudanese Foreign Minister, Ali Karti, traveled to the US on unofficial business while attending events in Washington. Around the same time, Ibrahim Ghandour also traveled stateside to meet with the US special envoy to Sudan. After noting that Karti traveled to Charlotte, it was assumed that he had gained a multi entry visa and had a broad range to enter the US. That is significant because before Karti was promoted to Prime Minister, he lead the Popular Defense Force, Sudan’s military which directed the genocides in Darfur, Blue Nile, and Nuba Mountains.  The Obama administration has softened toward Sudanese government since lawyer Ben Fisher, who is a campaign donor to both President Obama and Hilary Clinton, was hired to advise the Sudanese government. Many objected to the visits to the United States, stating that Karti’s presence here did not make sense as it was a reward and not a punishment for the ongoing violence.

Threat Watch: ‘Countering Extremism” with extremists

On February 18th, President Obama convened an international “Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Summit” at the White House. While being touted as a “new program,” in fact the Summit is a doubling down on a failed program based on a flawed concept.

Unfortunately, the local partners that have been chosen in each of three “model cities,” have time and time again shown to be groups who themselves are responsible for indoctrinating young Muslims to join terror groups.

A blind eye to homeland threats

Last month, the United Kingdom raised their terrorism threat level from “substantial” to “severe.” The Australian government followed suit by raising their threat level, citing a growing concern over the domestic impacts from the Islamic State, or ISIS.   This week, Australian authorities broke up a massive ISIS plot to behead random people and broadcast the murders.  However, the Obama administration has decided not to raise our terrorism threat level.

After the UK’s decision, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson stated that the United States will not follow suit, saying: “[T]he U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are unaware of any specific, credible threat to the U.S. homeland from ISIL.”

Additionally, in spite of major cities such as New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC receiving direct threats from ISIS, it is being reported that the recent National Threat Assessment for Domestic Extremism intelligence report by the FBI makes absolutely no reference to Islamist terror threats.

Currently, our southern border is awash with droves of people skirting immigration laws. This creates the perfect environment for terrorist groups to penetrate our country. In fact, many experts have already issued warnings about ISIS’s interest in penetrating our border.  A recent report by the group Judicial Watch shows that ISIS is currently operating in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and that an attack on our border is “coming very soon.”

However, ISIS may already be actively recruiting in America. So far, two Americans have died fighting for the terrorist group ISIS. Abdirahmaan Muhumed and Douglas McAurther McCain, both died in the same battle.

In addition to both jihadi fighters dying in the same battle, both were from the same area in Minneapolis. Moreover, McCain attended high school with Troy Kastigar, a jihadi who died in 2009 fighting for the al-Qaeda affiliated group al-Shabab. These two jihadi’s both attended Cooper High School in Robbinsdale, Minnesota together and at one point in time, the two were said to be “inseparable.”

Minnesota has a large Somali-Muslim population and has turned into a hotbed for recruiting fighters for groups such as al-Shabab and ISIS. Dozens of men from the Twin Cities have chosen to fight for ISIS. Fox News has recently reported that there is possibly a third jihadi fighter in Syria who has attended Cooper High.

With so much terrorist recruitment taking place in the Twin Cities region, coupled with the FBI’s failure to cite Islamic terror in their recent terrorist threat report, there appears to be a clear failure from our government in recognizing domestic terror threats in the United States.

This failure should not strike anyone as surprising. The Obama administration has continuously dismissed, discounted, and ignored national security threats. When Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine and threw NATO into a tailspin, President Obama’s response was little more than a light slap on the wrist; placing negligible economic sanctions on Russia. After Syria violated the ‘Red Line’ set by Mr. Obama regarding to use of chemical weapons, Obama dithered and denied even setting a red line.

Reports show that President Obama received notifications regarding the growing threat from ISIS in the President’s Daily Brief for over a year; yet, when ISIS came into the public view President Obama Obama dismissed them as the “jayvee team’.

Dismissing ISIS’s threat to our homeland security is on par for the Obama administration’s national security plan as a whole. Despite ISIS threats to at least three major U.S. cities and what seems to be a burgeoning recruitment hub in Minnesota, the FBI seems to be taking a blind eye to Islamic terror.

Additionally, President Obama, in his recent address regarding an ISIS strategy, felt that it was important to state that the Islamic State terrorists are apparently “not Islamic.”

One has to question the motives regarding the administration’s unwillingness to label radical Islam as a threat. Is it denial, negligence, or fear over the idea that an administration official might be labeled “Islamophobic?”

Following such recent events as the Boston Marathon bombing and the Fort Hood massacre, it is important that we question Homeland Security and the FBI’s decision not to raise the terrorist threat level. Additionally, we must demand that those in charge of ensuring our domestic security properly recognize and label the threats that we face.

Ramping Down the War on Terror? The Enemy Gets a Vote

National security officials are making known that they do not concur with the Obama Administration’s assessment that the “War on Terror” is ramping down.

First was FBI Director James Comey, who admitted to the New York Times that,

“I didn’t have anywhere near the appreciation I got after I came into this job just how virulent those affiliates had become,” Mr. Comey said, referring to offshoots of Al Qaeda in Africa and in the Middle East during an interview in his sprawling office on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “There are both many more than I appreciated, and they are stronger than I appreciated.”

That sentiment has been echoed by NSA director Keith Alexander, who warned the New Yorker, “But I do think people need to know that we’re at greater risk, and there’s a lot more coming my way.”

Likewise The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake speaks to senior intelligence officials, who paint a picture of an Intelligence Community in metaphorical open revolt against an Administration that they insist is downplaying and dismissing vital threats:

One senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast the frustration was that there is pressure from the White House to downplay the threat from some al Qaeda affiliates. “It comes from the top, it’s the message that al Qaeda is all these small franchise groups and they are not coordinated and threatening,” this official said. “It’s the whole idea of getting us out to place resources against something that they don’t think is a problem. It’s not their war, it’s not our conflict.”

Unfortunately the hundred or so American passport-holding jihadists who have flocked to battlefields like Syria  do not agree. For the enemy it will never be “just a local conflict.”

Likewise, in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Terrorism, Al Qaeda’s “Shadow Army” waits in the wings for our withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Washington Times notes:

Several lawmakers and former senior intelligence officials have raised concerns that the al Qaeda movement today controls more territory around the world than it did when it was based in Afghanistan under bin Laden before Sept. 11. Concern that Afghanistan may again become a haven for the terrorist network has added another twist to the debate over the extent of the al Qaeda threat facing the United States.

That we are fighting a battle over the nature and size of the threat, so long after 9/11 is a sad indictment of the fact that this country never established clear knowledge of the enemy threat doctrine. Instead we’ve allowed socioeconomic theories to drive our response, as seen most notably in the State Department’s refrain of “economic deprivation” when referring to Boko Haram’s jihad against Christian Nigerians and those they consider apostates.

The reality is that our enemies are self-declared mujahideen, fighting jihad fisabilillah (Jihad in the cause of Allah), in order to establish shariah everywhere, whether it is in Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, or in America. We have failed to understand the goal of the jihadists is not to establish territory under their rule in order to facilitate attacks on America, but to attack America in order to weaken us enough that they can safely establish territory where they can apply shariah. Using that standard, the spread of so-called “affiliates” across the global is not a dispersion of Al Qaeda, but the unchecked growth of jihad, regardless of whether a particular group is in direct communication with senior leaders of Al Qaeda or not.

Only by studying the enemy threat doctrine can we draw an accurate determination of whether the enemy is stronger or weaker, achieving his objectives or falling short.

As the Senate considers revoking or scaling down the authorization for use of military force (AUMF) against Al Qaeda, they should recall the military maxim that “the enemy gets a vote.”

Whose side is he on?

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, the investigation into its perpetrators has been marred by a series of bizarre and even alarming actions by President Obama and his administration. Unfortunately, these increasingly suggest a pattern that is at odds with our national and homeland security. The question must be occurring to many Americans: Whose side is he on?

Consider just a few of the recent examples suggesting the ominous answer is “Not ours”:

  • Team Obama decided precipitously to charge the alleged surviving bomber, Dzokhar Tsarnaev, in civilian court. This action resulted inevitably in his being read Miranda rights and obtaining a lawyer, prompting Tsarnaev to refuse further to answer investigators’ questions. Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy observed (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346785/obama%E2%80%99s-national-security-fraud), “Obama was determined to end the public debate over whether the jihadist is a wartime enemy combatant or a mere criminal defendant.”  Mr. McCarthy theorizes that what is going on here is that: “[We] are being softened up. Steered by its Gitmo Bar veterans and Lawyer Left compass, the Obama administration is executing a massive national-security fraud: the farce that the jihad against America can be judicialized, that civilian-court processes are a better answer to enemy warfare than are combat protocols.”
  • Then there is the peculiar case of the Saudi “student,” Abdul Rahman al-Harbi. Glenn Beck and syndicated columnist Diana West have done yeoman’s work connecting the proverbial dots on this young man starting with his detention at the scene of the bombing (where he was wounded) and initial designation as a “person of interest” in the investigation. The FBI reportedly spent seven hours searching his apartment but, following an in-person and unscheduled intervention with Mr. Obama by the Saudi Foreign Minister, al-Harbi ceased to be classified as even a witness to the jihadist attack.  Still more bizarre is what happened next. The Saudi press reported that First Lady Michelle Obama paid a visit to al-Harbi in the Boston hospital where he was recuperating, even as federal agencies sought to deport him on the grounds that he was a national security threat. That would, needless to say, put him safely beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. At this writing, Team Obama seems to be resisting congressional efforts to establish al-Harbi’s whereabouts and true status. Neither has there been any explanation to date for why a man who, according to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement records made public by Mr. Beck, is ineligible on terrorist-ties grounds to be in the United States was admitted to the White House on numerous occasions.
  • Meanwhile, the evidence continues to accumulate that the FBI failed to appreciate the nature of the threat posed by Dzokhar’s Islamist elder brother, Tamerlan, because it has had to operate for years under guidance that obscures the direct connection between the supremacist Islamic doctrine he practiced, known as shariah, and the terrifying form of jihad it compels its adherents to wage. The Center for Security Policy is helping Americans who believe we cannot afford such shackling of our first line of defense against domestic threats to express their concerns directly to President Obama with a web-based campaign at www.FreetheFBI.com.
  • A corollary to this insanity has been the administration’s effort to portray other communities as equivalent threats to that posed by Islamists. This notion is inherent in Team Obama’s adoption of the euphemism “violent extremism.” and in an Army Reserve unit’s equal opportunity training materials that identified evangelical Christians, Catholics and Islamophobes as on a par with al Qaeda and similar shariah-adherent terrorist organizations in terms of readiness to engage in such extremism.
  • One of the chief architects of the Obama administration’s efforts to pander to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists and to use selective enforcement of the law to promote divisiveness among Americans is the President’s choice to become the next Secretary of Labor, Thomas Perez. Perez’s recent confirmation hearing barely scratched the surface of the unsuitability for such a post of a man whose views and conduct align him with such other radical post-American Friends of Obama as Van Jones, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. We know whose side they are on.
  • No less worrying is the President’s commitment to so-called “comprehensive immigration reform” that clearly will perpetuate the unsecured borders that have contributed to the present crisis of millions of illegal aliens in our country. He seems indifferent to the fact that millions more are headed our way, confident that he will get them amnesty and a “path to citizenship,” too.
  • Last but hardly least, we have the wrecking operation Mr. Obama is engaged in with respect to the U.S. military. While furloughs of air traffic controllers and meat inspectors are prompting measures to mitigate the damage, the hollowing out of our armed forces and the industrial base is going forward apace. Ditto the President’s efforts to denuclearize this country and to negotiate new restrictions on our ability to defend it against missile attack.

Unfortunately, we are likely to learn just how harmful sequestration and the other Obama-induced rounds of cuts have been on the only military we have only after the myriad international crises of the moment – including, notably, Syria, the Senkakus, the Iranian nuclear program and Korean peninsula – rocket out of control in ways that threaten our vital interests.

At that point, the question of whose side the President is on will be self-evident. By then, we may even regard his malfeasance as constituting high crimes and misdemeanors.