Group items tagged

New York Police Department detectives and prosecutors working an alleged underage sexting case against former Congressman Anthony Weiner have turned over a newly-found laptop he shared with wife Huma Abedin to the FBI with enough evidence “to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life,” NYPD sources told True Pundit. NYPD sources said Clinton’s “crew” also included several unnamed yet implicated members of Congress in addition to her aides and insiders. The NYPD seized the computer from Weiner during a search warrant and detectives discovered a trove of over 500,000 emails to and from Hillary Clinton, Abedin and other insiders during her tenure as secretary of state. The content of those emails sparked the FBI to reopen its defunct email investigation into Clinton on Friday.

But new revelations on the contents of that laptop, according to law enforcement sources, implicate the Democratic presidential candidate, her subordinates, and even select elected officials in far more alleged serious crimes than mishandling classified and top secret emails, sources said. NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to: Money laundering Child exploitation Sex crimes with minors (children) Perjury Pay to play through Clinton Foundation Obstruction of justice Other felony crimes NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices. “What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,” the NYPD Chief said. “There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.”

The NYPD Chief said once Comey saw the alarming contents of the emails he was forced to reopen a criminal probe against Clinton. “People are going to prison,” he said. Meanwhile, FBI sources said Abedin and Weiner were cooperating with federal agents, who have taken over the non-sexting portions the case from NYPD. The husband-and-wife Clinton insiders  are both shopping for separate immunity deals, sources said. “If they don’t cooperate they are going to see long sentences,” a federal law enforcement source said. NYPD sources said Weiner or Abedin stored all the emails in a massive Microsoft Outlook program on the laptop. The emails implicate other current and former members of Congress and one high-ranking Democratic Senator as having possibly engaged in criminal activity too, sources said. Prosecutors in the office of US Attorney Preet Bharara have issued a subpoena for Weiner’s cell phones and travel records, law enforcement sources confirmed. NYPD said it planned to order the same phone and travel records on Clinton and Abedin, however, the FBI said it was in the process of requesting the identical records. Law enforcement sources are particularly interested in cell phone activity and travel to the Bahamas, U.S. Virgin Islands and other locations that sources would not divulge.

James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) defended the use of an FBI agent posing as an Associated Press journalist in order to install spyware into the computer of a teenager from Lacy, Washington State.

Comey said in an open letter published in mainstream media that the FBI did not “overstep its bounds” while using deceptive tactics during their investigation into the teen who was in communication “online with the” FBI agent.” According to Comey: “An F.B.I. agent communicated online with the anonymous suspect. Relying on an agency behavioral assessment that the anonymous suspect was a narcissist, the online undercover officer portrayed himself as an employee of The Associated Press, and asked if the suspect would be willing to review a draft article about the threats and attacks, to be sure that the anonymous suspect was portrayed fairly.” To entrap the student, the FBI produced a fake news report provided by the FBI agent to the Associated Press regarding a “technology savvy student holds Timberline High School hostage.”

The FBI agent made sure the teen saw the article which facilitated the downloading of spyware into the boy’s computer in order to track the child’s online whereabouts. Kathy Best, executive editor of the Seattle Times commented : “The FBI, in placing the name of The Associated Press on a phony story sent to a criminal suspect, crossed a line and undermined the credibility of journalists everywhere – including at The Times.” The FBI maintains that “the operation was aimed at preventing tragedy. We were fortunate that information provided by the public gave us the opportunity to step into a potentially dangerous situation before it was too late.” Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of AP said : “This latest revelation of how the FBI misappropriated the trusted name of the Associated Press doubles our concern and outrage, expressed earlier to Attorney General Eric Holder, about how the agency’s unacceptable tactics undermine AP and the vital distinction between the government and the press.”

The other shoe just dropped when it comes to how the federal government illegally spies on Americans. Last summer, the details of the NSA's "backdoor searches" were revealed. This involved big collections of content and metadata (so, no, not "just metadata" as meaningless as that phrase is) that were collected under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). This is part of the program that the infamous PRISM effort operates under, and which allows the NSA to collect all sorts of content, including communications to, from or about a "target" -- where a "target" can be incredibly loosely defined (i.e., it can include groups or machines or just about anything). The "backdoor searches" were a special loophole added in 2011 allowing the NSA to make use of "US person names and identifiers as query terms." In the past, it had been limited (as per the NSA's mandate) to only non-US persons.

This morning, James Clapper finally responded to a request from Senator Ron Wyden concerning the number of such backdoor searches using US identifiers that were done by various government agencies. And, surprisingly, it's redaction free. The big reveal is... that it's not just the NSA doing these searches, but the CIA and FBI as well. This is especially concerning with regards to the FBI. This means that the FBI, who does surveillance on Americans, is spying on Americans communications that were collected by the NSA and that they're doing so without anything resembling a warrant. Oh, and let's make this even worse: the FBI isn't even tracking how often it does this. It's just doing it willy nilly:

Got that? Basically, the FBI often asks the NSA for a big chunk of data that the NSA probably shouldn't have in the first place -- including tons of Americans' communications, and the FBI gets to dump it into the same database that it is free to query. And the FBI tracks none of this, other than to say that it believes that there are a "substantial" number of such queries. This would seem to be a pretty blatant attempt to end run around the 4th Amendment, giving the FBI broad access to searching through the communications of Americans with what appears to be almost no oversight. Yikes! Oh, and it's not just the NSA, but the CIA as well. Remember, the CIA is not supposed to be doing any surveillance on US persons (like the NSA), but that's not what's happening at all. At least the CIA tracks some (but not all) of its abuse of backdoor searches:

Today we’re publishing—for the first time—the FBI’s drone licenses and supporting records for the last several years. Unfortunately, to say that the FBI has been less than forthcoming with these records would be a gross understatement. Just yesterday, Wired broke the story that the FBI has been using drones to surveil Americans. Wired noted that, during an FBI oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller let slip that the FBI flies surveillance drones on American soil. Mueller tried to reassure the senators that FBI’s drone program “is very narrowly focused on particularized cases and particularized leads.” However, there’s no way to check the Director on these statements, given the Bureau’s extreme lack of transparency about its program.

EFF received these records as a result of our Freedom of Information lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the licenses the FAA issues to all public entities wishing to fly drones in the national airspace. As detailed in prior posts and on our drone map, we have already received tens of thousands of pages of valuable information about local, state and federal agencies’ drone flights. However, unlike other federal agencies, including the US Air Force, the Bureau has withheld almost all information within its documents—even including the dates the FAA’s Certificates of Authorization (COAs) were issued. As you can see from the two examples linked below—the first from the Air Force and the second from the FBI—the FBI is withholding information, including something as basic as the city and state of the Bureau’s point of contact, that could in no way be expected to risk circumvention of the law (the applicable test under FOIA, 5 U.S.C. § 552 (b)(7)(E)).

The FBI has even withheld information from standard documents that all agencies file with the FAA to support their COA applications, many of which come directly from the drone manufacturer. (Compare, for example, the Air Force’s “LOST_LINK_MISSION” or “AIRCRAFT_SYSTEM” documents with the FBI’s versions of the same documents.) One interesting fact is that the Bureau has withheld most of the records under several statutes and regulations related to the arms exports and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) (see statutes and regulations here, here, and here.) This is surprising because, although ITAR does apply explicitly to drones, not even the US Military has claimed these statutes in withholding information from its drone records. Given the FBI’s past abuses and the information recently revealed about how the Bureau exploits specious interpretations of federal law to help out the NSA’s spying program, we have good reason to be concerned about the FBI’s lack of transparency here. We hope Senator Feinstein will follow up on her concerns about the FBI’s apparent lack of “strictures” in place to protect Americans’ privacy in connection to FBI drone use and demand a full accounting of how, when, where and why the Bureau has been using drones to monitor the public. Download the zip files of the documents here, here, and here.

The FBI and major media outlets yesterday trumpeted the agency’s latest counterterrorism triumph: the arrest of three Brooklyn men, ages 19 to 30, on charges of conspiring to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS (photo of joint FBI/NYPD press conference, above). As my colleague Murtaza Hussain ably documents, “it appears that none of the three men was in any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help from the FBI informant.” One of the frightening terrorist villains told the FBI informant that, beyond having no money, he had encountered a significant problem in following through on the FBI’s plot: his mom had taken away his passport. Noting the bizarre and unhinged ranting of one of the suspects, Hussain noted on Twitter that this case “sounds like another victory for the FBI over the mentally ill.” In this regard, this latest arrest appears to be quite similar to the overwhelming majority of terrorism arrests the FBI has proudly touted over the last decade. As my colleague Andrew Fishman and I wrote last month — after the FBI manipulated a 20-year-old loner who lived with his parents into allegedly agreeing to join an FBI-created plot to attack the Capitol — these cases follow a very clear pattern

Once again, we should all pause for a moment to thank the brave men and women of the FBI for saving us from their own terror plots.

We’re constantly bombarded with dire warnings about the grave threat of home-grown terrorists, “lone wolf” extremists and ISIS. So intensified are these official warnings that The New York Times earlier this month cited anonymous U.S. intelligence officials to warn of the growing ISIS threat and announce “the prospect of a new global war on terror.” But how serious of a threat can all of this be, at least domestically, if the FBI continually has to resort to manufacturing its own plots by trolling the Internet in search of young drifters and/or the mentally ill whom they target, recruit and then manipulate into joining? Does that not, by itself, demonstrate how over-hyped and insubstantial this “threat” actually is? Shouldn’t there be actual plots, ones that are created and fueled without the help of the FBI, that the agency should devote its massive resources to stopping? This FBI tactic would be akin to having the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) constantly warn of the severe threat posed by drug addiction while it simultaneously uses pushers on its payroll to deliberately get people hooked on drugs so that they can arrest the addicts they’ve created and thus justify their own warnings and budgets (and that kind of threat-creation, just by the way, is not all that far off from what the other federal law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, are actually doing). As we noted the last time we wrote about this, the Justice Department is aggressively pressuring U.S. allies to employ these same entrapment tactics in order to create their own terrorists, who can then be paraded around as proof of the grave threat.

Current and former FBI officials have launched a media counter-offensive to engage head to head with the Clinton media machine and to throw off the shackles the Loretta Lynch Justice Department has used to stymie their multiple investigations into the Clinton pay-to-play network. Over the past weekend, former FBI Assistant Director and current CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst Tom Fuentes told viewers that “the FBI has an intensive investigation ongoing into the Clinton Foundation.” He said he had received this information from “senior officials” at the FBI, “several of them, in and out of the Bureau.” (See video clip from CNN below.) That information was further supported by an in-depth article last evening in the Wall Street Journal by Devlin Barrett. According to Barrett, the “probe of the foundation began more than a year ago to determine whether financial crimes or influence peddling occurred related to the charity.” Barrett’s article suggests that the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, has attempted to circumvent the investigation. The new revelations lead to the appearance of wrongdoing on the part of U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch for secretly meeting with Bill Clinton on her plane on the tarmac of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport on the evening of June 28 of this year. Not only was Bill Clinton’s wife under an FBI investigation at the time over her use of a private email server in the basement of her New York home over which Top Secret material was transmitted while she was Secretary of State but his own charitable foundation was also under investigation, a fact that was unknown at the time to the public and the media.

The reports leaking out of the FBI over the weekend came on the heels of FBI Director James Comey sending a letter to members of Congress on Friday acknowledging that the investigation into the Hillary Clinton email server was not closed as he had previously testified to Congress, but had been reopened as a result of “pertinent” emails turning up. According to multiple media sources, those emails were found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide, Huma Abedin. Weiner was forced to resign from Congress in 2011 over a sexting scandal with more sexting scandals to follow. Early this month, on October 3, the FBI raided Weiner’s apartment in New York with a search warrant in hand and seized multiple electronic devices. At least one of those devices had been used by both Weiner and Abedin to send email messages. The search warrant had been obtained following a detailed report that had appeared in the Daily Mail newspaper in the U.K. in September, showing sordid, sexual emails that Weiner had allegedly sent to a 15-year old girl in North Carolina. According to the content of the published emails, Weiner was aware that the girl was underage. While examining the hard drive of a laptop seized from Weiner, the FBI found metadata showing that thousands of the emails were exchanged between the private server located in Hillary Clinton’s basement in Chappaqua, New York. Since the FBI had only a search warrant to examine emails and documents related to the Weiner matter, it was not able to read the other emails but simply tallied up the metadata linked to the private server in Chappaqua to show how many potentially new emails might be in the trove on the laptop. (It is also possible that the FBI agents could have used a program to compare subject headings against those emails previously turned over by Abedin to make their case that Abedin had perjured herself when she testified to them that she had turned over all of her work-related emails from her time as Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations when Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State.)

The FBI officials briefed FBI Director James Comey last Thursday on the new trove of emails and he went public with his letter to Congress the next day – leading the Clinton camp to immediately launch a media assault on his motives. As if all of this wasn’t enough for the public to digest over the weekend, yesterday morning James Kallstrom, the former Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York Division and 25-year veteran of the FBI, went on the John Catsimatidis radio program to call the Clintons a “crime family.” (You can hear the full program here.) Kallstrom’s comments were further amplified when the New York Daily News reported on his criticisms that the FBI had been hamstrung from conducting a real investigation. The Daily News quoted Kallstrom from the radio program as follows: “ ‘This investigation was never a real investigation, they never had grand jury empaneled…This investigation was without the ability to serve subpoenas, serve search warrants, and obtain evidence … It was just ludicrous.’ ” On Wednesday of last week, just two days before FBI Director Comey issued his public letter to Congress, WikiLeaks released a devastating memo from Douglas Band, at the time a key figure at the Clinton Foundation and President of his own corporate consulting firm, Teneo. The memo was rife with suggestions of pay-to-play and personal enrichment schemes at the Clinton Foundation. The same day, Washington Post reporters Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger reported the story, including the following details:

Man, at some point Congress is going to have to declare the FBI legally contemptuous and throw them in jail. They continue to refuse to cooperate with DOJ’s Inspector General, as they have been for basically 5 years. But in Michael Horowitz’ latest complaint to Congress, he adds a new spin: FBI is not only obstructing his investigation of the FBI’s management impaired surveillance, now FBI is obstructing his investigation of DEA’s management impaired surveillance. I first reported on DOJ IG’s investigation into DEA’s dragnet databases last April. At that point, the only dragnet we knew about was Hemisphere, which DEA uses to obtain years of phone records as well as location data and other details, before it them parallel constructs that data out of a defendant’s reach.

But since then, we’ve learned of what the government claims to be another database — that used to identify Shantia Hassanshahi in an Iranian sanctions case. After some delay, the government revealed that this was another dragnet, including just international calls. It claims that this database was suspended in September 2013 (around the time Hemisphere became public) and that it is no longer obtaining bulk records for it. According to the latest installment of Michael Horowitz’ complaints about FBI obstruction, he tried to obtain records on the DEA databases on November 20, 2014 (of note, during the period when the government was still refusing to tell even Judge Rudolph Contreras what the database implicating Hassanshahi was). FBI slow-walked production, but promised to provide everything to Horowitz by February 13, 2015. FBI has decided it has to keep reviewing the emails in question to see if there is grand jury, Title III electronic surveillance, and Fair Credit Reporting Act materials, which are the same categories of stuff FBI has refused in the past. So Horowitz is pointing to the language tied to DOJ’s appropriations for FY 2015 which (basically) defunded FBI obstruction. Only FBI continues to obstruct.

There’s one more question about this. As noted, this investigation is supposed to be about DEA’s databases. We’ve already seen that FBI uses Hemisphere (when I asked FBI for comment in advance of this February 4, 2014 article on FBI obstinance, Hemisphere was the one thing they refused all comment on). And obviously, FBI access another DEA database to go after Hassanshahi. So that may be the only reason why Horowitz needs the FBI’s cooperation to investigate the DEA’s dragnets. Plus, assuming FBI is parallel constructing these dragnets just like DEA is, I can understand why they’d want to withhold grand jury information, which would make that clear. Still, I can’t help but wonder — as I have in the past — whether these dragnets are all connected, a constantly moving shell game. That might explain why FBI is so intent on obstructing Horowitz again.

The Justice Department on Wednesday issued a press release trumpeting its latest success in disrupting a domestic terrorism plot, announcing that “the Joint Terrorism Task Force has arrested a Cincinnati-area man for a plot to attack the U.S. Capitol and kill government officials.” The alleged would-be terrorist is 20-year-old Christopher Cornell (above), who is unemployed, lives at home, spends most of his time playing video games in his bedroom, still addresses his mother as “Mommy” and regards his cat as his best friend; he was described as “a typical student” and “quiet but not overly reserved” by the principal of the local high school he graduated in 2012.

The DOJ’s press release predictably generated an avalanche of scary media headlines hailing the FBI. CNN: “FBI says plot to attack U.S. Capitol was ready to go.” MSNBC: “US terror plot foiled by FBI arrest of Ohio man.” Wall St. Journal: “Ohio Man Charged With Plotting ISIS-Inspired Attack on U.S. Capitol.”

Just as predictably, political officials instantly exploited the news to justify their powers of domestic surveillance. House Speaker John Boehner claimed yesterday that “the National Security Agency’s snooping powers helped stop a plot to attack the Capitol and that his colleagues need to keep that in mind as they debate whether to renew the law that allows the government to collect bulk information from its citizens.” He warned: “We live in a dangerous country, and we get reminded every week of the dangers that are out there.”  The known facts from this latest case seem to fit well within a now-familiar FBI pattern whereby the agency does not disrupt planned domestic terror attacks but rather creates them, then publicly praises itself for stopping its own plots.

A sophisticated FBI-produced spyware program has played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in federal investigations into extortion plots, terrorist threats and hacker attacks in cases stretching back at least seven years, newly declassified documents show. As first reported by Wired.com, the software, called a "computer and internet protocol address verifier," or CIPAV, is designed to infiltrate a target’s computer and gather a wide range of information, which it secretly sends to an FBI server in eastern Virginia. The FBI’s use of the spyware surfaced in 2007 when the bureau used it to track e-mailed bomb threats against a Washington state high school to a 15-year-old student. But the documents released Thursday under the Freedom of Information Act show the FBI has quietly obtained court authorization to deploy the CIPAV in a wide variety of cases, ranging from major hacker investigations, to someone posing as an FBI agent online. Shortly after its launch, the program became so popular with federal law enforcement that Justice Department lawyers in Washington warned that overuse of the novel technique could result in its electronic evidence being thrown out of court in some cases. "While the technique is of indisputable value in certain kinds of cases, we are seeing indications that it is being used needlessly by some agencies, unnecessarily raising difficult legal questions (and a risk of suppression) without any countervailing benefit," reads a formerly-classified March 7, 2002 memo from the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.

The documents, which are heavily redacted, do not detail the CIPAV’s capabilities, but an FBI affidavit in the 2007 case indicate it gathers and reports a computer’s IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer’s registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL. After sending the information to the FBI, the CIPAV settles into a silent "pen register" mode, in which it lurks on the target computer and monitors its internet use, logging the IP address of every server to which the machine connects. The documents shed some light on how the FBI sneaks the CIPAV onto a target’s machine, hinting that the bureau may be using one or more web browser vulnerabilities. In several of the cases outlined, the FBI hosted the CIPAV on a website, and tricked the target into clicking on a link. That’s what happened in the Washington case, according to a formerly-secret planning document for the 2007 operation. "The CIPAV will be deployed via a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address posted to the subject’s private chat room on MySpace.com."

The software’s primary utility appears to be in tracking down suspects that use proxy servers or anonymizing websites to cover their tracks.

Informant-led sting operations are central to the FBI’s counterterrorism program. Of 508 defendants prosecuted in federal terrorism-related cases in the decade after 9/11, 243 were involved with an FBI informant, while 158 were the targets of sting operations. Of those cases, an informant or FBI undercover operative led 49 defendants in their terrorism plots, similar to the way Osmakac was led in his. In these cases, the FBI says paid informants and undercover agents are foiling attacks before they occur. But the evidence suggests — and a recent Human Rights Watch report on the subject illustrates — that the FBI isn’t always nabbing would-be terrorists so much as setting up mentally ill or economically desperate people to commit crimes they could never have accomplished on their own.

At least in Osmakac’s case, FBI agents seem to agree with that criticism, though they never intended for that admission to become public. In the Osmakac sting, the undercover FBI agent went by the pseudonym “Amir Jones.” He’s the guy behind the camera in Osmakac’s martyrdom video. Amir, posing as a dealer who could provide weapons, wore a hidden recording device throughout the sting. The device picked up conversations, including, apparently, back at the FBI’s Tampa Field Office, a gated compound beneath the flight path of Tampa International Airport, among agents and employees who assumed their words were private and protected. These unintentional recordings offer an exclusive look inside an FBI counterterrorism sting, and suggest that, even in the eyes of the FBI agents involved, these sting targets aren’t always the threatening figures they are made out to be.

OW OSMAKAC CAME to the attention of law enforcement in the first place is still unclear. In a December 2012 Senate floor speech, Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, cited Osmakac’s case as one of nine that demonstrated the effectiveness of surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act. Senate legal counsel later walked back those comments, saying they were misconstrued. Osmakac is among terrorism defendants who were subjected to some sort of FISA surveillance, according to court records, but whether he was under individual surveillance or identified through bulk collection is unknown. Discovery material referenced in a defense motion included a surveillance log coversheet with the description, “CT-GLOBAL EXTREMIST INSPIRED.” If he first came onto the FBI’s radar as a result of eavesdropping, then it’s plausible that as part of the sting, the FBI manufactured another explanation for his targeting. This is a long-running, if controversial process known as “parallel construction,” which has also been used by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration when drug offenders are identified through bulk collection and then prosecuted for drug crimes. In court records, the FBI maintained that Osmakac came to agents’ attention through Dabus. The informant reached out to the FBI after meeting Osmakac, and soon offered him a job at Java Village.

The FBI was right to withhold records about an alleged murder plot targeting the leaders of Occupy Houston, to protect its informants, a federal judge ruled. Plaintiff Ryan Noah Shapiro is a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research includes “the policing of dissent … especially in the name of national security” and “examining FBI and other intelligence agency efforts to preserve domestic surveillance capabilities while simultaneously subverting the Freedom of Information Act,” according to his MIT profile. Shapiro sent the FBI three Freedom of Information Act requests in early 2013, asking for records about “a potential plan to gather intelligence against the leaders of [Occupy Wall Street-related protests in Houston] and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership [of the protests] via suppressed sniper rifles.” Shapiro told Courthouse News he learned of the alleged plot from FBI documents obtained by investigative reporter Jason Leopold.

The FBI had refused to give Shapiro any documents until he filed an April 2013 federal complaint in Washington, D.C., after which the agency gave him 17 pages. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer found last year that the FBI had properly withheld some records, but took issue with its use of Exemption 7 under the FOIA, which protects from disclosure “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes.” Collyer dismissed the lawsuit this week after reviewing the documents in her chambers. Shapiro challenged the FBI’s withholding of the names of its murder plot sources, claiming there is no privacy expectation for people who could be called to testify as trial witnesses. But Collyer found Monday that the FBI correctly invoked FOIA exemption 7(c), which shields law enforcement records from disclosure if they could constitute an invasion of personal privacy. The judge also agreed with the FBI that exemption 7(d) applied to the case. It allows records to be withheld if they “could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source.”

Citing a declaration from FBI agent David Hardy that said the confidential sources are “individuals who are members of organized violent groups,” Collyer said the likelihood of retaliation justified keeping the sources’ identities under wraps. Shapiro vowed to keep fighting for the records. “I’m of course disappointed in, and disagree with, the judge’s ruling. I’m now conferring with my attorney to determine next steps,” Shapiro said in an email. He said he is concerned that the FBI collected dossiers on Occupy protestors while publicly denying it. “The FBI even flatly asserted in a separate FOIA lawsuit of mine that, ‘(T)he FBI determined that it had never opened an investigation on the Occupy movement,'” Shapiro wrote. “Yet, in the course of my FOIA lawsuit against the FBI for records about the sniper plot against Occupy Houston, the FBI contradicted its own position.” Shapiro said that with recently released FBI documents about Occupy Chicago, “We are coming ever closer to finally forcing the FBI to concede it actually possesses a large volume of documents about this FBI-coordinated nationwide investigation of political protesters as supposed terroristic threats to national security.”

Following a series of similar widely ridiculed so-called “sting” operations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced last week that it had foiled yet another “terror plot” that, like virtually every supposed “terrorist” case in recent years, was created and managed from start to finish by the FBI itself. This time, the dupe was a 28-year-old California man, Matthew Aaron Llaneza, with a documented history of mental illness, who apparently believed his government handlers were helping him wage “jihad.” Critics, however, say the whole scheme smacks of entrapment and a waste of taxpayer money. Llaneza was arrested by federal agents on February 7 in Oakland after he supposedly tried to blow up a bogus bomb the FBI helped him create. According to authorities, the mentally ill San Jose suspect planned to detonate the fake explosives outside a Bank of America branch. The alleged plan, officials said, was to start a “civil war” by making it appear as if the attack had been carried out by “anti-government militias,” sparking a crackdown by the government on right-of-center dissidents.       “Unbeknownst to Llaneza, the explosive device that he allegedly attempted to use had been rendered inoperable by law enforcement and posed no threat to the public,” the FBI admitted in a press release celebrating the arrest of its mentally unstable stooge. The man was charged in a criminal complaint with “attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction against property used in an activity that affects interstate or foreign commerce.” If convicted, he could face life in prison.

According to the government’s court filings, the mentally ill man met with an undercover FBI agent late last year under mysterious circumstances. The federal official somehow managed to convince the naïve dupe that he was connected to the “Taliban and the mujahidin in Afghanistan” — Islamist forces that were originally armed and trained by the U.S. government before becoming official enemies. From there, federal handlers worked with the man to develop the half-baked plot and the fake bomb to blow something up.  

Wednesday’s criminal referral by 11 House Republicans of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as several former and serving top FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials is a giant step toward a Constitutional crisis. Named in the referral to the DOJ for possible violations of federal law are: Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey; former Attorney General Loretta Lynch; former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe; FBI Agent Peter Strzok; FBI Counsel Lisa Page; and those DOJ and FBI personnel “connected to” work on the “Steele Dossier,” including former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and former Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente. With no attention from corporate media, the referral was sent to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah John Huber.  Sessions appointed Huber months ago to assist DOJ Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz.

This is no law-school case-study exercise, no arcane disputation over the fine points of this or that law. Rather, as we say in the inner-city, “It has now hit the fan.”  Criminal referrals can lead to serious jail time.  Granted, the upper-crust luminaries criminally “referred” enjoy very powerful support.  And that will come especially from the mainstream media, which will find it hard to retool and switch from Russia-gate to the much more delicate and much less welcome “FBI-gate.” As of this writing, a full day has gone by since the

letter/referral was reported, with total silence so far from The New York Times and The Washington Post and other big media as they grapple with how to spin this major development. News of the criminal referral also slipped by Amy Goodman’s non-mainstream DemocracyNow!, as well as many alternative websites. The 11 House members chose to include the following egalitarian observation in the first paragraph of the letter conveying the criminal referral: “Because we believe that those in positions of high authority should be treated the same as every other American, we want to be sure that the potential violations of law outlined below are vetted appropriately.” If this uncommon attitude is allowed to prevail at DOJ, it would, in effect, revoke the de facto “David Petraeus exemption” for the be-riboned, be-medaled, and well-heeled.

It wasn’t ever seriously in doubt, but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting’s operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas. It’s not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale. He was denied bail today for the second time since his arrest in July. Freedom Hosting was a provider of turnkey “Tor hidden service” sites — special sites, with addresses ending in .onion, that hide their geographic location behind layers of routing, and can be reached only over the Tor anonymity network. Tor hidden services are used by sites that need to evade surveillance or protect users’ privacy to an extraordinary degree – including human rights groups and journalists. But they also appeal to serious criminal elements, child-pornography traders among them.

The apparent FBI-malware attack was first noticed on August 4, when all of the hidden service sites hosted by Freedom Hosting began displaying a “Down for Maintenance” message. That included at least some lawful websites, such as the secure email provider TorMail. Some visitors looking at the source code of the maintenance page realized that it included a hidden iframe tag that loaded a mysterious clump of Javascript code from a Verizon Business internet address. By midday, the code was being circulated and dissected all over the net. Mozilla confirmed the code exploited a critical memory management vulnerability in Firefox that was publicly reported on June 25, and is fixed in the latest version of the browser. Though many older revisions of Firefox were vulnerable to that bug, the malware only targeted Firefox 17 ESR, the version of Firefox that forms the basis of the Tor Browser Bundle – the easiest, most user-friendly package for using the Tor anonymity network. That made it clear early on that the attack was focused specifically on de-anonymizing Tor users. Tor Browser Bundle users who installed or manually updated after June 26 were safe from the exploit, according to the Tor Project’s security advisory on the hack.

On August 4, all the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting — some with no connection to child porn — began serving an error message with hidden code embedded in the page. Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn’t respond to inquiries from WIRED today. But FBI Supervisory Special Agent J. Brooke Donahue was more forthcoming when he appeared in the Irish court yesterday to bolster the case for keeping Marques behind bars, according to local press reports. Among the many arguments Donahue and an Irish police inspector offered was that Marques might reestablish contact with co-conspirators, and further complicate the FBI probe. In addition to the wrestling match over Freedom Hosting’s servers, Marques allegedly dove for his laptop when the police raided him, in an effort to shut it down.

Newly declassified documents from the FBI reveal how the US federal agency under J Edgar Hoover monitored the activities of dozens of prominent African American writers for decades, devoting thousands of pages to detailing their activities and critiquing their work. Academic William Maxwell first stumbled upon the extent of the surveillance when he submitted a freedom of information request for the FBI file of Claude McKay. The Jamaican-born writer was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, author of the sonnet If We Must Die, supposedly recited by Winston Churchill, and Maxwell was preparing an edition of his complete poems. When the file came through from the FBI, it stretched to 193 pages and, said Maxwell, revealed “that the bureau had closely read and aggressively chased McKay” – describing him as a “notorious negro revolutionary” – “all across the Atlantic world, and into Moscow”.

Maxwell, associate professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St Louis, decided to investigate further, knowing that other scholars had already found files on well-known black writers such as Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. He made 106 freedom of information requests about what he describes as “noteworthy Afro-modernists” to the FBI; 51 of those writers had files, ranging from three to 1,884 pages each. “I suspected there would be more than a few,” said Maxwell. “I knew Hoover was especially impressed and worried by the busy crossroads of black protest, leftwing politics, and literary potential. But I was surprised to learn that the FBI had read, monitored, and ‘filed’ nearly half of the nationally prominent African American authors working from 1919 (Hoover’s first year at the Bureau, and the first year of the Harlem Renaissance) to 1972 (the year of Hoover’s death and the peak of the nationalist Black Arts movement). In this, I realised, the FBI had outdone most every other major institution of US literary study, only fitfully concerned with black writing.”

Maxwell’s book about his discovery, FB Eyes: How J Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, is out on 18 February from Princeton University Press. It argues that the FBI’s attention was fuelled by Hoover’s “personal fascination with black culture”, that “the FBI is perhaps the most dedicated and influential forgotten critic of African American literature”, and that “African American literature is characterised by a deep awareness of FBI ghostreading”.

Comey is lionised in DC for one challenge over liberties. Yet he backed waterboarding, wire-tapping and indefinite detention

It had the air of Hollywood. On the night of 10 March 2004, James Comey, the nominee to lead the FBI for the next ten years, rushed to the hospital bedside of his terribly ill boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft.There, he eventually confronted White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who were trying to get the pancreatitis-stricken Ashcroft to renew a still secret and illegal surveillance program on Americans' electronic communications. Neither Ashcroft nor Comey, then acting attorney general because of Ashcroft's condition, would reauthorize the program. When Gonzales authorized the program to go forward without a Justice Department certification, Comey threatened to resign, along with his staff and FBI Director Robert Mueller.The threats worked: President Bush blinked, and Comey won modifications to the secret surveillance program that he felt brought it into compliance with the law. This event, now the stuff of DC legend, has solidified Comey's reputation as a "civil liberties superhero", in the words of CNN's Jake Tapper, and may be one of the reasons President Obama nominated him Friday to be the next director of the FBI.

There's one very big problem with describing Comey as some sort of civil libertarian: some facts suggest otherwise. While Comey deserves credit for stopping an illegal spying program in dramatic fashion, he also approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration during his time as deputy attorney general. Those included torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention.On 30 December 2004, a memo addressed to James Comey was issued that superseded the infamous memo that defined torture as pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure". The memo to Comey seemed to renounce torture but did nothing of the sort. The key sentence in the opinion is tucked away in footnote 8. It concludes that the new Comey memo did not change the authorizations of interrogation tactics in any earlier memos.In short, the memo Comey that approved gave a thumbs-up on waterboarding, wall slams, and other forms of torture – all violations of domestic and international law.

Having detailed Clinton-appointee Loretta Lynch’s DoJ push-back against the FBI’s Clinton Foundation probe, it seems Director Comey has decided to flex his own muscles and save face as DailyCaller reports, multiple FBI investigations are underway involving potential corruption charges against the Clinton Foundation, according to a former senior law enforcement official.

However, as DailyCaller reports, The FBI is undertaking multiple investigations involving potential corruption changes against The Clinton Foundation… The investigation centers on New York City where the Clinton Foundation has its main offices, according to the former official who has direct knowledge of the activities. Prosecutorial support will come from various U.S. Attorneys Offices — a major departure from other centralized FBI investigations. The New York-based probe is being led by Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.  The official said involvement of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York “would be seen by agents as a positive development as prosecutors there are generally thought to be more aggressive than the career lawyers within the DOJ.” … The former official said the investigation is being coordinated between bureau field offices and FBI managers at headquarters in Washington, D.C. The unusual process would ensure senior FBI supervisors, including Director James Comey, would be kept abreast of case progress and of significant developments. The reliance on U.S. attorneys would be a significant departure from the centralized manner in which the FBI managed the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server and email addresses. That investigation was conducted with agents at FBI headquarters, who coordinated with the Department of Justice’s National Security Division (NSD).

Under new guidelines, the FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies and “western corruption” as potential future terrorists, warning that “anarchist extremists” are in the same category as ISIS and young people who are poor, immigrants or travel to “suspicious” countries are more likely to commit horrific violence.Based on the widely unpopular British “anti-terror” mass surveillance program, the FBI’s "Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools" guidelines, released in January, are almost certainly designed to single out and target Muslim-American communities. However, in its caution to avoid the appearance of discrimination, the agency identifies risk factors that are so broad and vague that virtually any young person could be deemed dangerous and worthy of surveillance, especially if she is socio-economically marginalized or politically outspoken.

This overwhelming threat is then used to justify a massive surveillance apparatus, wherein educators and pupils function as extensions of the FBI by watching and informing on each other.The FBI’s justification for such surveillance is based on McCarthy-era theories of radicalization, in which authorities monitor thoughts and behaviors that they claim to lead to acts of violent subversion, even if those people being watched have not committed any wrongdoing. This model has been widely discredited as a violence prevention method, including by the U.S. government, but it is now being imported to schools nationwide as official federal policy.

Under the category of domestic terrorists, the educational materials warn of the threat posed by “anarchist extremists.” The FBI states, “Anarchist extremists believe that society should have no government, laws, or police, and they are loosely organized, with no central leadership… Violent anarchist extremists usually target symbols of capitalism they believe to be the cause of all problems in society—such as large corporations, government organizations, and police agencies.”Similarly, “Animal Rights Extremists and Environmental Extremists” are placed alongside “white supremacy extremists”, ISIS and Al Qaeda as terrorists out to recruit high school students. The materials also instruct students to watch out for  extremist propaganda messages that communicate criticisms of "corrupt western nations" and express "government mistrust.”If you "see suspicious behavior that might lead to violent extremism," the resource states, consider reporting it to "someone you trust," including local law enforcement officials like police officers and FBI agents.

Just months after the FBI launched an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, Democratic Party operatives made a generous donation to the political campaign of the wife of the FBI official who would eventually oversee that investigation. The FBI ultimately cleared Clinton of any criminal wrongdoing, creating the impression that the Democrats may have bribed the Bureau to keep their nominee out of trouble. According to a report published Monday by The Wall Street Journal, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a long-time associate of the Clintons, helped funnel over $675,000 of donations into the 2015 Virginia state Senate campaign of Jill McCabe, the wife of Andrew McCabe, who is now the deputy director of the FBI. Of the total, $467,500 came directly from Common Good VA, McAuliffe’s PAC, while an additional $207,788 came out of the coffers of the Virginia Democratic Party, over which McAuliffe exerts almost total control. Devlin Barrett, a Wall Street Journal reporter who covers the Justice Department, noted that Andrew McCabe was promoted as deputy director after the donations were made. He added: “Mr. McAuliffe and other state party leaders recruited Dr. McCabe to run, according to party officials. She lost the election to incumbent Republican Dick Black.” According to Barrett, the donations represented about one-third of Jill McCabe’s total campaign war chest.

Crushing the hope-filled “it’s just a backup of what they have already seen” narrative of a campaign clutching at straws to defend their candidate, and confirming Fox News Bret Baier’s earlier reporting, CBS News reports that the FBI has found new, non-duplicate emails related to Hilary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Sources earlier described to Fox News’ Bret Baier as an “avalanche of evidence…” And tonight we are getting further clarification, from US Officials, as to what that evidence consists of (via CBS News)  These emails, CBS News’ Andres Triay reports, are not duplicates of emails found on Secretary Clinton’s private server. At this point, however, it remains to be seen whether these emails are significant to the FBI’s investigation into Clinton. It is also not known how many relevant emails there are. This is a major problem for the surrogates, lawyers, life-long friends, and defenders of the status quo as it destroys the narrative that has been painted suggesting these emails found on Weiner’s laptop are merely backups of what law enforcement officials have already seen (and found no intent in).

But what is most intriguing is the question of whether the missing 33,000 ‘personal’ emails ‘deleted’ by Bryan Pagliano in the full knowledge of Hillary Clinton (according to Wikileaks emails), are also on the estranged husband of Clinton right-hand-lady Huma Abedin’s laptop. s Federal law enforcement officials concluded to CBS News tonight:  “These emails have never been seen before” Fox’s Bret Baier summed up what happens next…  “I pressed again and again on this very issue… The investigations will continue, there is a lot of evidence. And barring some obstruction in some way, they believe they will continue to likely an indictment.”