"Assessing threats of political violence and rising extremism on the far-right" PBS NewsHour 8/12/2022
Excerpt
SUMMARY: In response to the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, Trump supporters have increased calls for a civil war. Those dangerous threats are being fueled by conspiracy theories, and mistrust of the FBI and Justice Department promoted by many Republican politicians. Barbara Walter, professor at UC San Diego and author of “How Civil Wars Start," joins Laura Barrón-López to discuss.
"Iranian man charged for trying to assassinate former national security adviser John Bolton" PBS NewsHour 8/10/2022
Excerpt
SUMMARY: The U.S. Justice Department charged an Iranian national with plotting to kill John Bolton, who was National Security Adviser to President Trump. Federal officials say the suspect was a member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, who allegedly tried to hire a hitman for $300,000 that was actually an FBI informant. Nick Schifrin joins Judy Woodruff to discuss.
Unclassified Full Report (PDF)
SUMMARY: John Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, sits down with Judy Woodruff to discuss the CIA's upcoming report looking into Russia's alleged election hacking, claims by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the CIA's role in preventing cyberattacks and regrets about the Syrian civil war, in the first of a two-part conversation.
SUMMARY: CIA Director John Brennan joins Judy Woodruff for the second installment of our interview to discuss concerns raised by European intelligence officials regarding possible Russian intrusion in upcoming elections, whether the U.S. is on the verge of a new Cold War with Russia, and the nuclear weapon capabilities of North Korea.
SUMMARY: President-elect Donald Trump has routinely taken a skeptical stance toward the U.S. intelligence community. As the release nears of a report on alleged Russian hacking in the U.S. election, Judy Woodruff gets views from James Woolsey, senior advisor to the Trump Transition and a former CIA director; and Jeffrey Smith, former General Counsel to the CIA.
SUMMARY: The Justice Department and FBI formally acknowledged that FBI forensic investigators routinely gave flawed testimony overstating evidence against criminal defendants during the 1980s and 1990s. In more than a dozen cases, defendants were later executed or died in prison. Spencer Hsu of The Washington Post joins Hari Sreenivasan from Washington to discuss.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): News from Washington tonight that, for nearly two decades, during the 1980s and ’90s, top FBI forensic investigators routinely gave flawed testimony, overstating the evidence they had against criminal defendants.
In more than a dozen cases, the defendants were later executed or died in prison.
Spencer Hsu broke the story in today’s Washington Post. He joins us now.
So, you said that this is a watershed moment in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals. Break this down for us.
SPENCER HSU, The Washington Post: What has been found has been, as you say, that, for more than two decades, nearly every examiner and nearly every criminal trial in which FBI experts gave testimony against criminal defendants, they overstated the strength or the significance of a match.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, you said that about a quarter of all the wrongful convictions, the people who have been exonerated later on, the testimony of hair examiners or bite mark comparisons have actually helped sway juries or judges.
SPENCER HSU: That’s right.
Out of about 329 DNA exonerations, a quarter, more than a quarter have involved invalid forensic science. One of the issues here is that, unlike DNA, which has a — was developed, you know, by scientists for scientists, a lot of the earlier pattern-based techniques, comparing hair, fiber, bite marks, even tracing bullets to — being fired from specific weapons, were developed in the lab by law enforcement.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Next, a look back at a different era of government surveillance, well before e-mail or Edward Snowden.
Jeffrey Brown has our book conversation.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): On March 8, 1971, a group of burglars entered a small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. In the files they took away, they found evidence of wide-scale surveillance of U.S. citizens, particularly of anti-war and black civil rights activists.
It opened a window on the FBI that eventually led to the downfall of its leader, J. Edgar Hoover, and to major reforms of the bureau. The perpetrators were never caught, but their identities and story are now told in the new book “The Burglary.”
Author Betty Medsger was one of the original journalists to receive and publish the information that came from the stolen files and she joins us now.
And welcome to you.
Documents related to Microsoft's successful challenge of a governmental request for information about one of the company's customers have been unsealed.
The order, a Federal Bureau of Investigation National Security Letter, sought "basic subscriber information" about one of Microsoft's enterprise customers, according to according to a post by Microsoft’s general counsel and executive VP of Legal and Corporate Affairs, Brad Smith on the company's TechNet blog.
A federal court in Seattle unsealed the documents on May 22 2014.
"This marks an important and successful step to protect Microsoft's enterprise customers regarding government surveillance," Smith wrote.
Microsoft challenged the nondisclosure provision of the Letter in June 2013, arguing that it would violate the First Amendment.
"It did so by hindering our practice of notifying enterprise customers when we receive legal orders related to their data," Smith wrote.
After the petition was filed, the FBI withdrew the Letter. According to Smith, governmental requests for information related to enterprise customers are "extremely rare."
In the previous cases where similar requests for information occurred, Microsoft was able to obtain permission from the customer in question, or to ask directly. In this case, the FBI was able to get the info from the customer, according to the notice of withdrawal.
Microsoft, along with major tech firms like Apple, Facebook and Google, have ramped up their efforts to gain greater abilities to disclose the government's requests for data to their customers.
"As more users migrate from locally installed software and locally stored data to cloud-based computing platforms, Microsoft increasingly is entrusted to store its customers' data safely and securely," the petition states.
In December 2013, Smith wrote a post on the TechNet blog reaffirming Microsoft's commitment to protecting customer data, and promising to inform customers of any legal orders Microsoft receives or to challenge any gag orders prohibiting them from doing so.
Smith also stated the company’s belief that when seeking information, government agencies should go directly to customers except in exceptional circumstances, "just as they did before customers moved to the cloud."
With cloud services, such as Microsoft's Office 365, customer data is stored in Microsoft data centers, rather than on the customer's own systems.
"As more users migrate from locally installed software and locally stored data to cloud-based computing platforms, Microsoft increasingly is entrusted to store its customers' data safely and securely," the petition states.
Earlier this month, Glenn Greenwald, who has been a key part of disclosures related to how the National Security Administration collects information, published documents including details of Microsoft's relationship with the agency.
Greenwald had previously claimed in July 2013 that Microsoft had worked with the NSA to circumvent encryption on Outlook and had also worked with the FBI to help them better collect information from OneDrive. Microsoft responded to the allegations shortly after, with the basic message that the company complies with data requests only when legally necessary.
"This new capability will result in a much more complete and timely collection response [...] for our enterprise customers. This success is the result of the FBI working for many months with Microsoft to get this tasking and collection solution established," the recently revealed document states.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Now to a very different kind of shutdown of a massive anonymous online marketplace for illegal drugs.
Ray Suarez has the story.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Federal authorities closed down a Web site known as Silk Road today and arrested its alleged mastermind, Ross Ulbricht of San Francisco, said to have called himself Dread Pirate Roberts.
Independent Television News investigated the world of online drug sales recently.
We begin with this account from correspondent Cordelia Lynch.
CORDELIA LYNCH: We decided to see just how easy it is to buy drugs on a site called Silk Road.
Well, on here, I can see everything from heroin, crack, ecstasy pills. The heroin here goes from 225 U.S. dollars up to $5,000. You can even rate people. This is a system based on trust. Here, the seller says two grams of the best Afghan brown heroin. Satisfaction guaranteed, it promises.
We bought three-and-a-half grams of MDMA, a key ingredient in ecstasy, and one gram of opium. Well, the envelopes have arrived. It took just three days and now we're going to find out what's inside. We're at a government-licensed laboratory, and they're going to test the contents for us.
John Ramsey is a toxicologist who spent nearly three decades analyzing drugs for the police.
JOHN RAMSEY, toxicologist: So we have gotten an almost perfect match for crystal MDMA.
CORDELIA LYNCH: Next, he tested the opium we ordered.
JOHN RAMSEY: So we have got one small package which could be opium.
CORDELIA LYNCH: It, too, tested positive.
Are you surprised that these things are so readily available on the Internet?
JOHN RAMSEY: Well, yes, I am. We know there's a ready market in legal highs, but these are illegal compounds, and I'm surprised that it's relatively straightforward to buy them across -- over the Internet.
SUMMARY: Unlike other online commerce businesses, Silk Road offered sales of illegal drugs, fake IDs, and even hitmen. How were buyers and sellers able to remain anonymous? Ray Suarez talks to Glenn Chapman of Agence France-Presse about how this widely known online drug market was able to evade law enforcement for so long.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Mueller led the agency for 12 years, starting just one week before the 9/11 attacks. Today, Attorney General Eric Holder said Mueller has transformed the bureau since then, and prevented a number of serious terror plots.
The outgoing director, in turn, gave much of the credit to those he's worked with.
ROBERT MUELLER, FBI Director: It has been my privilege to work with so many talented and dedicated public servants, men and women who give everything in their power to keep the American people safe, men and women for whom the rule of law is the guiding principle.
RAY SUAREZ: For an examination of the Mueller era at the Bureau, we turn to former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who worked closely with Mueller during George W. Bush's administration, and Julian Zelizer. He's a Princeton University professor of history and public affairs, and is the author of a book on the politics of national security.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): A major look at the FBI's handling of forensic evidence is under way.
Yesterday, the Justice Department announced that it will conduct a review of thousands of criminal cases, dating back to 1985, where hair and fiber analysis led to convictions. The examinations were detailed in a front-page article in today's Washington Post.
Included were the stories of two men wrongfully convicted on flawed hair analysis. They have since been exonerated by DNA testing, one just yesterday.
The Justice Department review comes after The Washington Post identified those two men and others as part of a report on forensic errors by FBI labs.
National reporter Spencer Hsu wrote today's piece. And he joins us now from the Post newsroom.
SUMMARY: At an annual shareholders meeting in Florida Tuesday, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon apologized for the company's recent losses and survived a pair of shareholder votes on his pay and job responsibilities. Judy Woodruff discusses the turmoil -- including news of an FBI inquiry of the company -- with Dawn Kopecki of Bloomberg News.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.
The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (opens in new page), according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.
The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing.
“Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse,” Mr. German said, pointing to complaints about the bureau’s surveillance of domestic political advocacy groups and mosques and to an inspector general’s findings in 2007 that the F.B.I. had frequently misused “national security letters,” which allow agents to obtain information like phone records without a court order.
Valerie E. Caproni, the F.B.I. general counsel, said the bureau had fixed the problems with the national security letters and had taken steps to make sure they would not recur. She also said the bureau, which does not need permission to alter its manual so long as the rules fit within broad guidelines issued by the attorney general, had carefully weighed the risks and the benefits of each change.
“Every one of these has been carefully looked at and considered against the backdrop of why do the employees need to be able to do it, what are the possible risks and what are the controls,” she said, portraying the modifications to the rules as “more like fine-tuning than major changes.”
Some of the most notable changes apply to the lowest category of investigations, called an “assessment.” The category, created in December 2008, allows agents to look into people and organizations “proactively” and without firm evidence for suspecting criminal or terrorist activity.
Under current rules, agents must open such an inquiry before they can search for information about a person in a commercial or law enforcement database. Under the new rules, agents will be allowed to search such databases without making a record about their decision.
The FBI has drafted sweeping legislation that would require Internet service providers to create wiretapping hubs for police surveillance and force makers of networking gear to build in backdoors for eavesdropping.
FBI Agent Barry Smith distributed the proposal at a private meeting last Friday with industry representatives and indicated it would be introduced by Sen. Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.
The draft bill would place the FBI's Net-surveillance push on solid legal footing. At the moment, it's ensnared in a legal challenge from universities and some technology companies that claim the Federal Communications Commission's broadband surveillance directives exceed what Congress has authorized.
The FBI claims that expanding the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act is necessary to thwart criminals and terrorists who have turned to technologies like voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.
Breaking the legislation down
The 27-page proposed CALEA amendments seen by CNET News.com would:
- Require any manufacturer of "routing" and "addressing" hardware to offer upgrades or other "modifications" that are needed to support Internet wiretapping. Current law does require that of telephone switch manufacturers--but not makers of routers and network address translation hardware like Cisco Systems and 2Wire.
- Authorize the expansion of wiretapping requirements to "commercial" Internet services including instant messaging if the FCC deems it to be in the "public interest." That would likely sweep in services such as in-game chats offered by Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming system as well.
- Force Internet service providers to sift through their customers' communications to identify, for instance, only VoIP calls. (The language requires companies to adhere to "processing or filtering methods or procedures applied by a law enforcement agency.") That means police could simply ask broadband providers like AT&T, Comcast or Verizon for wiretap info--instead of having to figure out what VoIP service was being used.
- Eliminate the current legal requirement saying the Justice Department must publish a public "notice of the actual number of communications interceptions" every year. That notice currently also must disclose the "maximum capacity" required to accommodate all of the legally authorized taps that government agencies will "conduct and use simultaneously."
Jim Harper, a policy analyst at the free-market Cato Institute and member of a Homeland Security advisory board, said the proposal would "have a negative impact on Internet users' privacy."
"People expect their information to be private unless the government meets certain legal standards," Harper said. "Right now the Department of Justice is pushing the wrong way on all this."
George Christian is the executive director of Library Connection, Inc., a nonprofit cooperative of more than two dozen public and academic libraries in Connecticut.
Last summer, his office got an odd call. It wasn’t from a co-op member.
And it wasn’t from a library patron. It was from the FBI.
One of Christian’s staff answered the phone and then brought him the news.
“We got a call from the FBI, they want to send us something called a National Security Letter, and they asked who to address it to, and I told them you,” the staffer informed Christian, he recalls.
“I thought, National Security what? What’s a National Security Letter?
Until that moment, I’d never heard those three words, National Security Letter. I never knew there was such a thing. I had no inkling whatsoever,” Christian says.
These letters are an extraordinarily powerful tool in the hands of the FBI. Basically, they amount to subpoenas the Justice Department issues by itself, without having to go to a judge for approval. When they were first authorized in the 1970s, the FBI was required to have “ ‘specific and articulable’ reasons to believe the records it gathered in secret belonged to a terrorist or spy,” Barton Gellman reported for The Washington Post on November 6, 2005. But thanks to the Patriot Act, the FBI can slap these letters not only on terrorist suspects but on anyone who is “relevant” to a national security investigation, even those “who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies,” Gellman wrote. The Patriot Act authorizes the FBI to use these National Security Letters to obtain “transactional records” from financial institutions. And the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act expanded the scope of these letters beyond financial institutions to include car dealers, travel agents, real estate agents, pawnbrokers, and others. The FBI is churning these National Security Letters out at the rate of 30,000 a year, Gellman discovered.
That specific letter (delivered by FBI Agents), according to Gellman, sought “all subscriber information, billing information, and access logs of any person” who used a specific computer at a nearby library.
“The first intimidating thing was the fact that this letter made really clear that I could discuss receipt of this letter with no one,” he says. “And the second thing was the good cop, bad cop routine. One FBI agent was professionally dressed, in a coat and tie, and was mild-mannered, and the other one was casually dressed and muscular and didn’t speak much at all.”
The Republican Senator tossed General Michael Hayden a big, fat softball of a question: "Do you think that if you had this program ...." of wiretaps without warrants, "... in place before September 11th you might have prevented it?"
General Hayden jumped right on it. He said that yes, if he had his secret powers then, that he has today, he could have stopped al Qaeda's plot.
Then he said, there were two guys in San Diego ...
He was referring to Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar. George Bush also talks about them when he wants to justify wiretaps without warrants. The truth is that Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar are the poster boys for missed opportunities. If the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and the White House had not screwed up so royally, mostly by cherishing their secrets, they would have had al Hasmi and al Mihdhar several times over.
Here are the facts.
Both of them were in the NSA and CIA files. They'd fought in Bosnia. They'd been to Afghanistan. They had friends and relatives who were jihadists and who were in Al Qaeda and they had associations with bin Laden.
In December, 1999 the NSA picked up several names in relation to an upcoming meeting in Kuala Lumpur, the capitol of Malaysia. They got al Mihdhar's full name but only al Hazmi's first name, Nawaf. They could have figured out who he was if they had checked in their own data base. But they didn't.
The CIA tracked al Mihdhar when he traveled from Yemen to the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, arriving on January 5th, 2000. The CIA had the event under surveillance. Al Mihdhar was photographed there. The team noted that some of the terrorists, including al Mihdhar and al Hazmi, flew to Bangkok on January 8th, where they lost track of them. Also in January, the CIA found out that al Mihdhar had a US passport.
The top people in the CIA and the FBI, including it's director, Louis Freeh, were briefed by the Counterterrorism Center (CTC) on the meeting.
In March, the CIA's Bangkok office reported that al Hazmi had left Thailand on January 15th and flown to Los Angeles. He was accompanied by al Mihdhar, though that did not show up on the flight report.
