Posts by GeorgeMapp:
‘US intelligence needs prosecutions to get more budget dollars’
November 11th, 2014By George Mapp.
The article below is an excerpt from a live interview during a featured program titled, In The Now hosted by Anissa Naouai. I have attached the video of the entire show below the Russia Today article, as well as several of the articles that I referenced during my interview.
A crest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (AFP Photo)
There is competition among 17 US intelligence agencies – they catch people whether it is within the law or not to get part of the multi-billion ‘black budget,’ George Mapp, an investigative journalist, said on RT’s In the Now show.
The FBI has acknowledged it faked an AP story to snare a suspect in a series of school bomb threats in 2007. However, the agency denied earlier allegations that it spoofed a Seattle Times web page as part of the investigation. Both the Associated Press and the Seattle Times objected to the FBI’s actions.
Back in June 2007, police in suburban Lacey, near Olympia, asked the bureau for help after a series of bomb threats that led to several evacuations at Timberline High School. The FBI in Seattle said they lured the 15-year-old suspect into revealing the location and IP of his computer by sending a link that led to a fake AP story about the bomb threats. By clicking on the link, the suspect helped agents to identity him.
Documents obtained by the Electronic Freedom Foundation suggested that the story was posted on a fake Seattle Times site, but Seattle FBI spokeswoman Ayn Dietrich said on Tuesday it was wrong and there was no reference to The Seattle Times.
READ MORE: FBI pretended to be Seattle newspaper in order to hack suspect’s computer
RT: The FBI claims their goals are to catch criminals and terrorists. What can you say on this subject?
George Mapp: When you are operating outside the law, there’s a couple of problems here with that. First of all, the person who was arrested was a minor. If you catch somebody or entrap them in a potential crime using illegal methods then what does it mean to the prosecution? Is it still legal? So there are a lot of problems with that.
The DEA set up a fake Face Book page
RT: The FBI is a secret agency and the line is always fine on what they can do legally and illegally. Do you have any understanding of further tactics that they use here trying to catch suspects?
GM: If there is a line, it is very blurred, if it exists at all. This is not just the FBI. Approximately about a week ago, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) was using a fake Facebook profile to potentially catch a suspect. And Facebook said that the DEA violated their user agreement. I think in 2013, the DEA was using intelligence gathered in wiretaps to catch American citizens. They came under fire because they were accused of gaining that intelligence illegally. There is a huge problem, you have 17 intelligence agencies in the United States and there is a lot of competition. When you think about the black budget, it is in billions, $50 plus billion. There is a lot competition among the agencies to get part of the budget dollars. So they need prosecutions, they need arrest. It seems like the line keeps getting crossed or keeps getting moved out. It seems like there are no boundaries, there is this bravado among some of the agencies. The way they have been behaving lately is this“cowboy” attitude that will catch people by any means necessary, whether it is within the law or not.
Photo credit: Shutterstock
RT: The Seattle Times, of course, got a good amount of PR. Do you think this case should draw attention to violations in terms of these tactics?
GM: I definitely think it will. The story is gaining attention and that is because it’s the media. Where does this end or what will this lead to – next time possibly there will be stories written that might not be true by intelligence agencies to try to catch suspects or smoke them out. When the media is involved like this, without their permission or without their knowledge, it is very scary.
RT: The FBI claims that they didn’t use the logo of The Seattle Times. Is there going to be a case for them? If the FBI says they didn’t do this how can you prove it?
GM: Exactly. There are a lot of legal issues here. And there is a big problem in our society – not just with intelligence agencies but with corporations, its technology and the laws. The legal system in this country hasn’t kept pace with the rapid advance in technology. If you are arrested by police officer – we are seeing now cases in the Supreme Court – can they access your technology, your smart phone without your permission? I think there is going to be a lot more issues about technology and wiretaps intelligence being used and gathered on Americans. See the NSA and Snowden. It just keeps happening again and again. It is not just the FBI, it’s the NSA, the CIA, the DEA special ops division. There is a combination of the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and IRS (Internal Revenue Service)… they were gathering intelligence on Americans. Some people are accusing them of gathering it illegally to build cases. If you are building cases and prosecuting people in a court of law, is that really due process if you are entrapping or catching people illegally?
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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Richard Chichakli Calls His First Witness in USA vs. Viktor Bout Et Al
December 16th, 2013
By George Mapp.
Richard Chichakli
On Wednesday December 4th, 2013 at approximately 2pm the defendant Richard Chichakli, defending himself pro se called his first witness to the stand. Chichakli’s first witness was OFAC [Office of Foreign Asset Control] specialist attorney Hal Eren. This was one witness more than was called during the entire Viktor Bout trial. Chichakli will call several more witness’ including Tami Loehrs an expert computer forensic analyst, FBI special agent Dennis Brady who is currently a Legal Attache in Nairobi, Kenya and possibly DEA agent William Brown pending judge Pauley’s approval. Richard Chichakli submitted a proffer yesterday afternoon to the judge in regards to special agent Brown whom also testified in the Viktor Bout trial.
Mr. Eren was already introduced to us by name via previous exhibits entered into evidence by the prosecution. Despite several protests and objections to the the judge by the prosecutor’s, Eren’s testimony interrupted the prosecutions case as well as their 16th witness, Christine Siedsma. Ironically Siedsma works as a digital forensic examiner in the DEA labs in Lorton, VA. The prosecutor was not as upset over Eren’s testimony as compared to to the upcoming testimony this morning by the defense’s expert witness Tami Loehrs. The prosecution argued that it was not fair to interrupt their case with their expert witness testifying with an expert witness for the defense. They added that it may be interpreted as being prejudicial. Prosecutor Christian Everdell asked if Loehrs could testify on Monday which would also allow prosecutors more time to prepare their cross-examination. Judge Pauley reminded the prosecutor’s that Chichakli is not the U.S. government with unlimited resources as well as pointing out that Ms. Loehrs only anticipated being in New York for a day plus she had scheduling concerns with another trial.
Richard Ammar Chichakli
Hal Eren previously worked for OFAC for approximately seven and a half years and has been in private practice for twenty years with his partner Mr. Pinter. Pinter worked at OFAC for seventeen and a half years, according to Eren making them the most experienced private law firm specializing in OFAC related issues. Eren testified that in his legal opinion that Chichakli did not violate OFAC sanctions because he was acting solely as a broker in an airplane deal that exceeded $1.7 million which funds were frozen by OFAC on April 26 2005 and remained frozen to this day. This airplane transaction is at the heart of the government’s case, alleging that Chichakli violated OFAC sanctions specifically IEEPA laws. Chichakli’s defense is that no other parties nor individuals involved in the airplane transaction were on the OFAC sanction list and since Chichakli alleges that he acted only as a broker between the two parties when he was outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. that he did not violate the law. Eren did testify that in addition to contacting OFAC in defense of Chichakli and the companies involved [Aventura Aviation and Samar Air] that the funds that were frozen in 2005 were not tied to Chichakli in anyway. Eren testified that Chichakli was to be paid a $50,000 brokers fee or finders fee directly by Samar Air and that those monies were separate and segregated from the monies involved in the frozen airplane transaction.
During cross-examination Eren seemed to be an entirely different witness and appeared to completely flip. At one point Ian McGinley one of the prosecutor’s asked Eren did we speak previously about this case and he answered yes, then the McGinley asked him did you in fact tell me that you thought Aventura Aviation was conned by Chichakli. Eren stumbled and bumbled and put it in a more diplomatic phrase saying that he felt that he “wasn’t provided with all the available information.”
During cross-examination Eren was asked do you feel that you were misled, and answered that since being provided with the indictment from the government he felt that he was misled. During Eren’s re-direct by Chichakli he was asked if he thought that the documents and evidence that the government provided was authentic? Eren answered that since it came from the government that he assumed it to be true. The judge took notably exception to this comment. In fact shortly after this temper and emotions were escalating on both sides and the judge called for the mid-afternoon break and dismissed the jury for a short recess. About twenty-five minutes later, a slighter longer break to allow all parties to collect their thoughts and to clam down, the jury re-entered. The judge told the court directing his comments to the jury in a very firm tone that what he heard was “an astonishing statement especially coming from an attorney” referring to Erens comment that he presumed the governments evidence to be true. Judge Pauley told the jury that an indictment is not evidence and is only a legal charge to bring the defendant to trial. Judge Pauley emphasized that “the only assumption is that the defendant Mr. Chichakli is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” The judge then made a comment as to Eren’s bias to the prosecutor’s despite the fact that the defense called the witness.
Please stay tuned for more updates!
The Invisible Line Between Social Media Data Mining and OSINT
July 28th, 2013
By George Mapp.
The recent exponential growth in social media has made it an absolute necessity to use for anyone and everyone competing for any type of business worldwide. When watching CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera and other major news networks you are likely to see displayed on the bottom of the telivision screen: as reported by Twitter. Almost on a daily basis the local news will use Face Book photos of a suspect or people of interest if their profile is public.
Because of the vast numbers of people using social media, it has caught the attention of advertisers, venture capitalists, recruiters, the IRS and yes many other U.S. government agencies including the Intelligence Community. Twitter had over a half-billion users as of July 2012 according an article by Tech Crunch titled, Analyst: Twitter Passed 500M Users In June 2012, 140M Of Them In US; Jakarta ‘Biggest Tweeting’ City. What I find provocative about Twitter is that you can follow the journalists’ directly that are stationed worldwide reporting instantly what they are seeing, what is happening and additionally they are sometimes adding photos and video links instantly before any media outlet has reported on the story.
Last October Face Book hit 1 billion users as reported by Digital Life of the Today Show. That’s ‘almost’ an inconceivable amount of data and information to comprehend. Imagine how many photo’s, wall posts, likes, comments etc. that each user has and then multiple that by a billion! Fortunately due to the advances in technology all of that information can be gathered, stored and can even be used to predict the future. And some even say effect politics and go so far as to say that social media and data mining effected the outcome of the U.S. Presidential elections. I will provide several examples throughout the this post to clarify the above statements.
Data Mining VS. OSINT
The title of this post mentions an ‘invisible line’ between Social Media Data Mining and OSINT because the definitions as well as the uses often overlap with each other. Most of my readers know what both mean as well as the fine distinctions, however, I will define the two for the novice readers.
Data Mining: The process of collecting, searching through, and analyzing a large amount of data in a database, as to discover patterns or relationships: the use of data mining to detect fraud. The gathering of information from pre-existing data stored in a database, such as one held by a supermarket about customers’ shopping habits.
OSINT: Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence. In the intelligence community (IC), the term “open” refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or classified sources); it is not related to open-source software or public intelligence… continue reading on Wikipedia
Others definitions from the community via Recorded Future
Any unclassified information, in any medium, that is generally available to the public, even if its distribution is limited or only available upon payment.
Intelligence is a process by which information is treated to answer and provide analysis which is used by a body. That information comes from open source or not does not makes it Open Source Intelligence. Stricto senso Open Source Intelligence would mean that it would be open, available, to all.
After reading the definition it becomes evident why OSINT and data mining have become so crucial in today’s environment. Here is an example by at Recorded Future of how much intelligence is considered open source:
With an estimated 90% of required intelligence available in open source, it is imperative that intelligence analysts become adept at mining open sources. Recorded Future can help reduce research time, identify new sources, build timelines, chart networks, perform link analysis and more.
Due to the sheer volume of available data and the continued rise of technology in our daily lives, data mining is a necessity for many business’ to compete and to stay in business. The term open source intelligence has risen to a new level because of the internet and the vast amounts of data on the web. Also, with the advances in technology hackers and / or hacktivist’s. The definition of what is open source and what is private or considered classified by business’ and governments has become increasing blurry. In fact, many members of the U.S. intelligence community see hacking, cyber security, infosec and cyber threats as the number one national security threat in our country.
Data Mining and OSINT in Use Today
Here are a few examples of how both data mining and OSINT — in some instances combined — current uses in our world today. To give you an understanding of just how much data there is in use, I have used the NSA as an example.
The U.S. super secret code crackers better known as the The National Security Agency are building a $2 billion spy center in Utah to keep up with explosive growth of social media and the tremendous amount of data it produces daily. In a Forbe’s article last year titled, NSA’s New Data Center And Supercomputer Aim To Crack World’s Strongest Encryption, here are a few highlights about the agency and the vast amount of data that it collects:
The $2 billion data center being built in Utah would have four 25,000 square-foot halls filled with servers, as well as another 900,000 square feet for administration.
It will use 65 megawatts of electricity, with an annual bill of $40 million, and incorporates a $10 million security system.
Since 2001, the NSA has intercepted and stored between 15 and 20 trillion messages, according to the estimate of ex-NSA scientist Bill Binney. It now aims to store yottabytes of data. A yottabyte is a million billions of gigabytes. According to one storage firm’s estimate in 2009, a yottabyte would cover the entire states of Rhode Island and Delaware with data centers.
When the Department of Energy began a supercomputing project in 2004 that took the title of the world’s fastest known computer from IBM in 2009 with its “Jaguar” system, it simultaneously created a secret track for the same program focused on cracking codes. The project took place in a $41 million, 214,000 square foot building at Oak Ridge National Lab with 318 scientists and other staff. The supercomputer produced there was faster than the so-called “world’s fastest” Jaguar.
The NSA project now aims to break the “exaflop barrier” by building a supercomputer a hundred times faster than the fastest existing today, the Japanese “K Computer.” That code-breaking system is projected to use 200 megawatts of power, about as much as would power 200,000 homes.
Earlier in my post I mentioned that social media and data mining effected the U.S. Presidential elections. An article written this past November titled, How social media, data mining, and new-fangled technology tipped the 2012 election, solidified how important and influential social media is in our daily lives. Here is an excerpt from the above mentioned article:
While Facebook is still arguably the place that people turn to before and after events, Twitter solidified itself as the go-to for all things real-time last Tuesday night. And better yet: It didn’t break.
“[During election night] Twitter averaged about 9,965 [Tweets per second, TPS] from 8:11pm to 9:11pm PT, with a one-second peak of 15,107 TPS at 8:20pm PT and a one-minute peak of 874,560 TPM,” Twitter announced, via its Engineering Blog. “Seeing a sustained peak over the course of an entire event is a change from the way people have previously turned to Twitter during live events.”
Defense contractor’s are also in on the action. This is significant because the U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s largest employer thus its contractor’s are currently developing products that the DoD might purchase from them. Earlier in February an article tiled Raytheon’s New Social Media Data Mining Software, ampliflies the importance of both social media and data mining. Here are a few excepts from the article:
Defense giant Raytheon’s new RIOT software data mines information from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and image EXIF metadata, and applies predictive analytics to determine users’ physical locations.
“Riot is a big data analytics system design we are working on with industry, national labs and commercial partners to help turn massive amounts of data into useable information to help meet our nation’s rapidly changing security needs,” Raytheon’s Jared Adams told The Guardian by email.
Here is another recent article by Danger Room titled Pentagon Inks Deal for Smartphone Tool That Scans Your Face, Eyes, Thumbs , that illustrates how important social media and data mining are to the U.S. government. The following excerpt is taking from the previously mentioned article:
In a few years, the soldier, marine or special operator out on patrol might be able to record the facial features or iris signature of a suspicious person all from his or her smartphone — and at a distance, too.
The Defense Department has awarded a $3 million research contract to California-based AOptix to examine its “Smart Mobile Identity” biometrics identification package, Danger Room has learned. At the end of two years of research to validate the concepts of what the company built, AOptix will provide the Defense Department with a hardware peripheral and software suite that turns a commercially available smartphone into a device that scans and transmits data from someone’s eyes, face, thumbs and voice.
Think about the amount of ALL the billion plus Face Book users and now imagine how many photos that each user has including many photos of those that chose not to be on Face Book for a variety of reasons, thus you have a huge data base for facial recognition. The FBI recently announced a $1 billion facial recognition software project. Here are a few excerpts from a Business Insider article last September titled, The FBI’s Nationwide Facial Recognition System Ends Anonymity As We Know It:
The FBI has begun installing state-of-the-art facial recognition technology across the country as part of an update to the national fingerprint database, Sara Reardon of the New Scientist reports.
The agency’s $1 billion Next Generation Identification (NGI) program will also include iris scans, DNA analysis and voice identification by 2014.
Now let’s look at a company that analyzes open source intelligence and makes predictions about the future. The company is called Recorded Future. For further information you can go to their website and watch a video called How Recorded Future Works. I will provide the following excerpts from Recorded Future’s website which describes a bit more of what exactly they do:
Collect Public Web Content:
We continually scan tens of thousands of high-quality, online news publications, blogs, public niche sources, trade publications, government web sites, financial databases and more.
Analyze the Text:
From these open web sites, we identify references to entities and events. These are organized in time by extracting publication date and any temporal expressions in the text. Each reference is linked to the original source and measured for online momentum and tone of language: positive or negative sentiment.
Visualize Insights:
You can explore the past, present and predicted future of almost anything in a matter of seconds. Our powerful interactive tools facilitate analysis of temporal patterns and better understanding of complex relationships and issues.
Recorded Future is very cutting edge, so much in fact that it has attracted the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. It is well known both inside and out if the Intelligence Community that the CIA uses In-Q-Tel as its investment banking arm. It so happens that In-Q-Tel has in fact invested in Recorded Future. Given their area of expertise the investment should come as no surprise to many.
Data Mining and OSINT Aren’t Just for Spooks
I must give the credit to the caption above to at Krypt3ia. He recently wrote an interesting blog post titled, No, You’re Not A Spook Just Because You Track Social Media and Do OSINT, this article just reinforces my point of how important data mining and OSINT tools are crucial to any individual, business, government and intelligence agency. In short, social media data mining and / or OSINT is not just for the intelligence community but to anyone who wishes to use it. Both of these tools have become such an important part of our everyday lives, behavior and more so everyday a part of what we will do tomorrow.