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FBI defends handling of Boston bombing, admits FBI-CBP miscommunication
FBI director Robert Mueller yesterday defended the way his agency handled the Russian request that the FBI pay attention to Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the months before the 15 April attack on the Boston Marathon. The two key junctures: following the FBI’s March 2011 investigation of Tamerlan, an investigation which found no ties between him and terrorism, the FBI twice, in September and October 2011, asked the Russian security services for more information about why the Russians suspected Tameraln, so the FBI could dig more deeply, but the Russians never responded. Still, the FBI went ahead and placed Tameraln’s name on a low-level watch list, which meant that his travel was tracked. The CBP Boston office, however, took no action in response to two FBI’s electronic messages – from January and June 2012 — about Tsarnaev’s travel to Russia.
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FAA gave bonuses to employees while flights were delayed or canceled
Internal FAA documents show that in early February, while passengers got stranded at airports across the country because sequester-mandated cuts in the FAA budget which led the agency to furlough air-traffic controllers, FAA employees received bonuses for their performance on the job.
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Mathematical models can be used to detect, disrupt terror networks
Can math models of gaming strategies be used to detect terrorism networks? Researchers say that the answer is yes. The researchers describe a mathematical model to disrupt flow of information in a complex real-world network, such as a terrorist organization, using minimal resources.
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Canadian government finally deports terrorist
After a 26-year long legal battle, Canada two weeks ago deported a Palestinian terrorist who attacked an El Al plane in Athens in 1968. He entered Canada with a false passport, but his identity was quickly discovered. The main point of contention was where should Issa Mohammad, the terrorist, be deported to: he was a Palestinian, but there is no Palestinian state to accept him. The Lebanese government finally agreed to take him, and he was deported
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Israel warns Assad: if you attack Israel, you “risk forfeiting [your] regime”
Israel has issued a highly unusual public warning to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The warning, couched in no uncertain terms, consists of two parts: First, if Syria and Iran again try to ship game-changing weapon system to Hezbollah, Israel will destroy these shipments, as it has already done three times, on 30 January, 3 May, and 5 May. Second, if Syria retaliated against Israel in the wake of such attacks, Israel would inflict crippling blows on the Assad regime and force Assad from power.
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Nigeria launches “massive” military campaign against Islamists
One day after the president of Nigeria said that Islamist terrorists, who now control parts of northeast Nigeria, have declared war on Nigeria, the Nigerian military has deployed thousands of troops to three states in the country’s northeast to reassert the government control over the area.
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DHS refuses FOIA requests for the Tsarnaev brothers’ immigration papers
DHS has rejected repeated FOIA requests for the federal immigration records of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s records on Tamerlan Tsarnaev, saying they are still conducting an investigation.
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Obama administration shifting cybersecurity legislative strategy
The Obama administration’s has shifted its cybersecurity legislative strategy. Rather than emphasize DHS-monitored regulations – an approach which stalled in Congress last summer because of Republican opposition — the administration is focusing on getting Congress to help promote the voluntary adoption by industry of standards being developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) following a February 2013 executive order signed by President Obama.
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Federal budget deficit falling fast – perhaps too fast, some economists say
In each of the last four years the federal budget has exceeded $1 trillion dollars every year. This year, however, the government’s annual deficit is falling faster than anyone thought it would. Some economists say it may be falling too fast. In FY2009-10, the deficit was more than 10 percent of GDP. On present trends, by 2015 the federal budget deficit would be just 2.1 percent of GDP.
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State agency imposes heavy fine on PG&E for San Bruno blast
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) two weeks ago wrapped up its investigation of a 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, California, and recommended that Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) pay $2.25 billion for its negligence, which led to the blast.
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Nigeria’s president: Islamists have “declared war” on Nigeria; state of emergency imposed
Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan yesterday announced a state of emergency in northeast Nigeria. In a speech to the nation, Jonathan said that Islamic militants are now in control of large areas, imposing strict Islamic law in dozens of towns and villages. “What we are facing is not just militancy or criminality, but a rebellion and insurgency by terrorist groups which pose a very serious threat to national unity and territorial integrity,” the president said. “These actions amount to a declaration of war” by groups “whose allegiance [is] to different flags than Nigeria’s.”
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A “cauldron of events” has brought the nuclear industry to a halt
Until two years ago, people talked of a nuclear energy renaissance. Now the talk is about nuclear malaise. The Fukushima scare, the emergence of alternative energy sources as a result of fracking, and the lack of action on climate change – which means that limits on fossil fuels are not coming any time soon – have, in the words of one experts, brought the nuclear industry to a halt.
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Oakland wants to write its own gun control laws
The leaders of Oakland, California, say that state gun laws are not suitable for their crime-infested city. They want to write their own gun law, saying it would not ban guns, but would allow the city to have tighter controls on who owns and who is selling them and buying them.
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U.S. secretly obtains AP phone records to identify source of story
In what the AP calls a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into the news organization’s news work, the U.S. Justice Department secretly gathered two-months-worth of telephone records of the agency’s reporters and editors. The AP says the records listed incoming and outgoing calls to the offices and homes of reporters and editors. The Justice Department began collecting the phone records in order to identify the source or sources of a 7 May 2012 AP story which detailed a secret CIA operation in Yemen to intercept an al Qaeda-sponsored attempt to load an IED onto a U.S.-bound airplane.
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The administration's struggle to define Benghazi attack as “terrorism”
Administration critics on the Hill now focus more of their attention on the changing explanations administration officials have offered in public as to the nature of the attack and the identity of the perpetrators. Yesterday, President Obama said the he used the term “terrorism” early on, and that he dispatched a senior official to brief lawmakers in the issue. He is right – up to a point: On 12 September Obama did describe the attack as an “act of terror,” and on 19 September counterterrorism director Matt Olsen used the term in response to a senator’s question, but otherwise, until 20 September, all high-level administration officials, including Obama, declined to attribute the attack to terrorists.
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More headlines
The long view
How Quickly Could Iran Make Nuclear Weapons Today?
For Iran, two of the three poles in the tent of building nuclear weapons – fissile material and delivery vehicles — are essentially complete. It will take them one week to enrich enough uranium to 90 percent for one bomb (and one month to enrich enough uranium for six bombs). Iran also has a variety of delivery systems, including nuclear-capable missiles: the delivery pole is ready. Weaponization is the pole that needs more work. The accelerated weaponization program can be accomplished in a matter of six months.
Fifty-Five Hours of Risk: The Dangerous Implications of Slow Attack Attribution
Assuming that its foreign adversaries’ recent violent threats are to be taken seriously, and that the likelihood of a direct attack against the United States is, if not on the rise, at least significant enough to warrant serious attention, the United States has an urgent mandate to prepare effective cognitive defenses. Foremost among these is the ability to quickly and accurately attribute attacks to their originators, and to deliver that information to the public through a trustworthy vehicle.
Is Left-Wing Terrorism Making a Comeback in Germany? Analyzing the “Engel – Guntermann Network”
For Germany, the reemergence of more violence orientated left-wing extremist actors has diversified the threat posed by non-state actors even further. Violent left-wing extremism is also of growing concern across Europe. While left-wing violent extremism does not currently represent as acute a threat as currently manifested by jihadist and right-wing terrorist attacks, the recent concerning trend among German left-wing extremists is toward greater violence and transnationalism.
The True Dangers of Long Trains
Trains are getting longer. Rail companies had recently adopted a moneymaking strategy to move cargo faster than ever, with fewer workers, on trains that are consistently longer than at any time in history. Railroads are getting richer, but these “monster trains” are jumping off of tracks across America and regulators are doing little to curb the risk.
New Report Card to Assess, Rank Campus Responses to Antisemitism
In the face of growing antisemitism across U.S. college campuses, ADL announced that it is developing a new tool to evaluate the climate of antisemitism on individual campuses. The ADL will create comparative evaluation of how leading colleges and universities are responding to the surge of antisemitism and protecting their Jewish students.
Truth Decay and National Security
The line between fact and opinion in public discourse has been eroding, and with it the public’s ability to have arguments and find common ground based in fact. Two core drivers of Truth Decay are political polarization and the spread of misinformation—and these are particularly intertwined in the national security arena. Exposure to misinformation leads to increased polarization, and increased polarization decreases the impact of factual information. Individuals, institutions, and the nation as a whole are vulnerable to this vicious cycle.