On Q Professional Investigations

Let’s just say the novelty has worn off.

A section of Miami International Airport was shut down early Thursday morning after a male passenger attempted to go through a security checkpoint with what appeared to be a grenade, but turned out to be a novelty cigarette lighter.

The Miami Dade police bomb squad was called shortly before dawn to Concourse D and determined that the camouflage-painted item was indeed a lighter.

“People do things sometimes without thinking,” Alvararo Zabaleta, spokesperson for the Miami Dade Police Dept. “This guy didn’t use much common sense.”
Miami International Airport spokesman Marc Henderson was a tad less charitable.

“I would like to know, 12 years after 9/11, why some people in the public still don’t seem to have gotten the memo that you don’t bring prohibited items or novelty items in the shape of weapons to the airport and expect to get them through TSA checkpoints?” Henderson told the Orlando Sentinel. “Even if the Boston marathon bombings had not happened, we’re vigilant at all times.”

The passenger, who police declined to identify, was not charged with any crime, but he did have his lighter confiscated.

While the incident disrupted activity at the terminal for approximately one hour, Zabaleta said that passengers should take some comfort in knowing that the system worked as it was intended.

“The security measures are working, and all the protocols were followed properly in this case,” Zabaleta told the News.

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Fashion is something that goes beyond simply looking good, but more with how you present yourself to the world, and how that world responds to you in a social and cultural context. In many ways, what we wear defines us. But with such power and definition comes the opportunity to reinvent ourselves with new looks and new clothes. Being able to change clothes allows us to become chameleons, in a way. So what if we didn’t have to change clothes to change our appearance so dramatically?

Karma Chameleon is the wonderfully retro name given to a project currently being carried out by a group of researchers at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. The team is investigating ways to weave electronic fabric into clothes to allow the clothes to become “smart garments” – clothes that could change the way they look.

“We propose to develop a collection of interactive electronic garments constructed out of a new generation of composite fibers that are able to harness power directly from the human body, store that energy, and then use it to change their own visual properties,” the team explains on its website. “These animated garments will change color and illuminate on the body in response to physical movement.”

The theoretical clothes wouldn’t need to be plugged in at night to charge, like current personal devices; instead, they’d take their energy from the wearer. “Parasitic power involves harnessing energy directly from the body or generating power by the user to alleviate design restrictions and enable new functionality,” the team explains, pointing out that because society’s power consumption is “constantly increasing, particularly in the design of mobile and wearable electronic devices [they] need to consider the development of energy sources that are independent from our power grids and reside on the body.”

At first, the plans to make a garment that changes appearance are starting relatively small; instead of aiming to create something that will completely change dependent on the wearer’s mood or taste, the changes will be limited to illumination and color that responds to the wearer’s movement and the power that is produced as a result. Of course, once that is achieved, the sky may be the limit – if you’re willing to wait long enough.

“We won’t see such garments in stores for another 20 or 30 years, but the practical and creative possibilities are exciting,” said Professor Joanna Berzowska, of Concordia University’s Department of Design and Computation Arts. “Our goal is to create garments that can transform in complex and surprising ways – far beyond reversible jackets, or shirts that change color in response to heat.” In the future, when someone says you look hot in an outfit, then, it must just take a literal meaning.

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As if bombs at the Boston Marathon weren’t enough, the money-hungry Zetas drug cartel in Mexico is making a big push to recruit Americans, the FBI warns. Only the bureau isn’t exactly sure the Zetas’ apple-pie recruitment drive is a real threat.

That’s the conclusion of a 2011 intelligence bulletin from the bureau’s San Antonio Field Office, recently obtained by Public Intelligence (.pdf). From 2010 to 2011, according to the FBI’s contacts, the Zetas “attempted to recruit U.S.-based members in Houston, Texas, to join Los Zetas’ war against the Gulf Cartel on both sides of the border.”

That includes running and distributing drugs, and diversifying the cartel’s criminal portfolio in the U.S. by running guns and targeting rivals. The cartel has also found a supplier of AK-47 variant rifles from Texas-based Tango Blast street gangs. It’s no wonder the Zetas use these guys. Tango Blast, like the Zetas, have a relatively decentralized structure, with no formal colors or strict hierarchy. This has allowed them to flourish into becoming the state’s largest gang and made them resilient against law enforcement efforts to break them apart.

Beyond that, the Zetas have moved beyond its earlier practice of recruiting from Mexican ex-cops and ex-soldiers, something that has given the cartel a coherent, structured organization. Now the Zetas are seeking out U.S. citizens, American gang members, and “non-military trained, non-traditional associates to maintain drug trafficking and support operations.”

If you were a Mexican drug lord, you’d want to hire Americans, too. American nationals give the cartels’ illicit networks depth. They’re less likely to draw suspicion from federal law enforcement agents stationed along the border and at 32 permanent vehicle checkpoints inside the United States. In March, the Center for Investigative Reporting found that most drug traffickers arrested by the Border Patrol are U.S. citizens. In addition to sending drugs north, the cartels need guns and money to come south — a tempting source of extra income for U.S. citizens with cartel connections and the ability to help launder cash.

But the FBI bulletin equivocated about how dangerous the Zetas’ northern recruitment drive is. On the one hand, the bureau judges “with moderate confidence that Los Zetas will likely pose a higher national security threat to the United States.” But it concedes it lacks enough information to “adequately assess the threat.” And the information the FBI collected indicates the Zetas may actually be hindered by recruiting so many new goons.

Plus, it’s an open question whether the American Zeta affiliates know how to evade law enforcement. “With the recruitment of new members, Los Zetas have lost part of their disciplined command and control structure needed to maintain order within the organization, which is likely to hinder their ability to carry out complex attacks and could increase the likelihood that [Mexican] officials may learn of planned attacks or operations,” the bulletin states. Among their losses: kingpin Heriberto Lazcano, killed by Mexican marines in October 2012.

On the other hand, cartel agents are appearing in more U.S. citizens, and further across the border, than before. Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported the cartels have moved some of “their most trusted agents” to work inside the United States and take direct command of drug distribution networks, which have traditionally been under the thumb of domestic gangs. Anything to chase that paper.

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One industry group is hoping to educate youngsters on how the technology and devices nearly all of them use actually work, in hopes of inspiring the next generation of IT professionals.

Todd Thibodeaux, CEO of CompTIA, said last week that the trade association is launching a new effort in hopes of filling the gaps that STEM programs in grades 9 through 12 are lacking: a better understanding of how IT works — from smartphones to Facebook.

“We’ve come into a period when use of the product and adoption of the product is the new geek, instead of understanding how the product and components of it work,” Thibodeaux said. “We have this generation of kids who aren’t quite as geeky as the ones who came before them.”

A recent CompTIA survey of 1,002 teens and young adults found that nearly all respondents (97 percent) said they either love or like technology. Many teens also are more than just technology consumers, with 58 percent reporting that they help family members or friends with questions or troubleshooting computers, software and mobile devices.

Still, while most teens have a love affair with technology, most aren’t interested in translating that love into a career, the study found. Only 18 percent of teens and young adults reported a definitive interest in an IT career, while 43 percent identified their interest in an IT career as a “maybe.” Many respondents (47 percent) said they did not know enough about IT occupations, according to the report.

As a result, Thibodeaux said CompTIA will be going to kids in grades 9 through 12 to educate them on the processes that underlie technology, such as how much infrastructure underpins Facebook, how a text message works and how online gaming is developed.

“Teens think they have to be massive science geniuses to work in IT and that there’s no real upward career path mobility,” Thibodeaux said. “All of those things are completely false.”

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Not every bombing, no matter how many civilians are killed or how terrifying it is, is terrorism. The Boston Marathon atrocity on Monday afternoon may qualify or it may not. Since the discourse around terrorism in the U.S. is an exceptionally fraught one, here’s how to think through the issue.

Terrorism is not just violence aimed at civilians. Terrorism is violence aimed at civilians with a political objective — most often, designed to cause a spectacle.

The Boston Marathon attack brought violence against civilians: three are dead and over 150 injured, several critically. The bombs were placed near the marathon’s finish line at Copley Square, where banks of video cameras and spectator smartphone caught the race’s end, so it’s safe to say it caused a spectacle. We don’t yet know whether it carried a political objective, and that’s the crucial criterion.

No one — group or individual, foreign or domestic — has taken responsibility for the attack. If and when someone or some group does, it may not be definitive: as last September’s Benghazi attack showed, claims of responsibility are not always genuine. A press conference on Tuesday morning by the Boston investigative team underscored that law enforcement is just beginning to understand what happened 18 hours ago.

If you watched cable news at all yesterday, you saw that the race was on to outpace the evidence. CNN termed the attack terrorism within two hours of the twin blasts. Its reporters speculated that President Obama would as well when he spoke on the event, to insulate himself from political criticisms — only Obama was more circumspect. “We still do not know who did this or why,” he said, “and people shouldn’t jump to conclusions before we have the facts.”

Yet shortly afterward, a White House official who would not speak for the record blast-emailed reporters with a clarification. “Any event with multiple explosive devices — as this appears to be — is clearly an act of terror, and will be approached as an act of terror,” the official said. That turns out to be a distinction with a subtle difference.

“I’m not even getting this debate right now,” says Juliette Kayyem, the former homeland security adviser to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. “Terrorism is a very, very scary word. If the president decides not to use it, I’ve got to believe it’s to keep people calm… If it’s just some random crazy guy with no political bent, you don’t want to get tripped up.”

That is, Kayyem explains, there’s a legalistic subtlety at work here. Calling something an “act of terror” is a legally neutral term. “Terrorism” is more problematic: a defense attorney could, for instance, say that Obama prejudiced the investigation by pre-stigmatizing a potential suspect as a terrorist. Notably, for the moment, the FBI, which is leading the Boston investigation, says it’s “too early to establish the cause and motivation” behind the bombing. (After this piece went to press, Obama muddled the waters, saying the FBI was “investigating it as an act of terrorism.”)

Lurking behind this definitional debate is a massive amount of subtext. The word terrorism is neutral as to the identity of the terrorist behind the act. But the association in the United States, nearly twelve years after 9/11, is anything but.

The U.S. committed a lexicographical error in calling the series of military reprisals emerging from 9/11 a War on Terrorism. (Or sometimes War on Terror; it’s not even been a consistent euphemism, nor one that bothers with legal exactitude.) Instead of defining the specific entity behind the 9/11 attacks as the enemy — diffuse as al-Qaida actually is — the War on Terrorism construction created the immediate association that “terrorism” is a euphemism for al-Qaida. It also allowed for a darker association: For some, “terrorism” will equate to an act committed by Muslims, no matter how many pre- and post-9/11 acts of terrorism were committed by non-Muslims. It’s not fair. But it is real.

That association can have dire consequences for innocent Muslims and non-Muslims, both from ignorant fanatics and from law enforcement. One of the biggest sources of speculation in journalism and on social media concerned a Saudi national questioned in the bombing. Yet Boston police commissioner Ed Davis said flatly this morning, “There is no one in custody.” The investigation is just beginning to interview Bostonians.

That’s to be expected: law enforcement has to run down what one investigator called the “voluminous” leads emerging in the hours after the explosions. After reports came through social media about police questioning Arabs who among the thousands running away from the Copley disaster area, people grimly joked that “Running While Arab” is the new “Driving While Black.” Suspicion is not the same thing as evidence; questioning is not the same thing as suspicion; and social media-fueled descriptions are not reliable at underscoring these differences.

Terrorism, ultimately, isn’t just a definitional problem of establishing motive. It’s a case where the meme can overshadow the thing-itself. None of this is a reason to avoid calling terrorism what it is. But it is a reason to avoid labeling the Boston Massacre terrorism before that central fact is established.

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Demand for cybersecurity professionals continues to climb, and while overall pay for security staff dipped slightly this year, cyber pros are still earning more than their counterparts in general IT jobs, according to a new survey.

InformationWeek’s 2013 Salary Survey of 682 IT security professionals found the strong market for cyber professionals has nearly erased the gender gap when it comes to pay. The median staff salary declined $2,000, to $95,000, in 2013, while management salaries increased to $120,000, up $5,000 from the previous year.

Those figures are significantly higher than those for general IT staff and management, each which increased $2,000 in 2013, to $87,000 and $110,000, respectively, the survey found.

In addition, the survey showed very little disparity when it comes to comparing salaries for men and women in IT security jobs. While male security staffers still make $2,000 more per year than the average female IT security pro, those in management positions held the same average salary ($120,000), regardless of gender.

Cybersecurity professionals also tend to be very satisfied with their jobs, with 63 percent of respondents saying they are satisfied or very satisfied with all aspects of their jobs.

But despite high job satisfaction among cybersecurity professionals, many indicate that they will likely leave their jobs soon. The opportunity for higher pay was the top reason for leaving among 68 percent of staff and 73 percent of managers, the study found.

“George, for example, loves working for his federal agency but will likely leave soon – the competitive pay and benefits offered by the private sector make it hard for the government to compete,” the report states.

Surprisingly, however, security professionals have some reservations about their job security. Eighty-nine percent of IT security staffers said they feel at least somewhat secure in their jobs, down from 92 percent in 2012, and 92 percent of security managers feel secure, down from 93 percent last year. This is largely due to the uncertainty about government funding and the sequester, and/or because of the high expectations to prevent attacks and keep skills up to date, the survey found.

Finally, certifications also continue to be an asset for cybersecurity professionals, with staff members holding certifications making $12,000 more and managers making $10,000 more in base salary than their noncertified counterparts, the study found.

But while certifications were an asset, education may be a barrier to getting a cybersecurity job, an expectation some organizations may have to overcome if it is meet the demand for cyber professionals, the survey states. The Homeland Security Department’s Task Force on CyberSkills is looking to use junior and community colleges in combination with 2,000 hours of on-the-job training to bring potential workers without a definitive degree up to the levels where they can defend a network from attack, according to the report.

“While certifications are needed to get past the HR filters, hiring professionals who continue to educate themselves is important,” the report states. “After all, attackers don’t care about that piece of paper.”

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If every gun tells a story, the FBI’s reference firearms collection could fill a very, very large book. The inventory of more than 7,000 firearms—curated over 80 years—contains just about every make and model, from John Dillinger’s Prohibition-era revolver to the modern battlefield’s M16 and almost everything in between.

Housed at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, the racks of weapons are not a musty exhibit of museum pieces, though some rare items would certainly qualify. Rather, the ever-expanding collection is a hands-on reference catalog for the Lab’s firearms examiners to study, take apart, reassemble, and test fire to support investigations. By maintaining a working library of virtually every handgun and rifle—along with a database of their unique toolmarks—examiners are able to identify and substantiate for investigators what weapons may have been used in criminal acts.

“Oftentimes this collection is used in active cases in comparing known samples from our collection with question samples from the field,” said John Webb, a firearms examiner in the Lab’s Firearms/Toolmarks Unit. “Often, an investigator will receive a part of a firearm or a firearm that isn’t functional. We can take that and compare it with our reference collection, determine what isn’t functioning, and repair it so we can obtain the test fires we need to conduct examinations with bullets and cartridge cases.”

Most of the firearms come from closed investigations, though some are purchased and still others arrive as donations. In most closed cases, guns that were held as evidence in court are sent back to the Lab, where examiners can add them to the reference collection (whole or in parts) or have them destroyed. By continuously adding new pieces to the collection, the FBI aims to have a duplicate of every firearm. Sometimes a case could hinge on linking a firearm component to a similar part on a reference gun.

“The collection has been extremely useful in criminal cases, not only for an examiner’s experience and education in handling nearly every firearm case that comes into the Laboratory,” said Webb, “but it has been directly responsible for assisting to solve crimes.”

The collection goes beyond firearms and includes accessories like suppressors, magazines, and muzzle attachments, as well as grenade and rocket launchers. Another reference collection, the standard ammunition file, catalogs more than 15,000 types of commercial and military ammunition.

While the breadth of the firearms collection is noteworthy, the historic provenance of some of the weapons shows it’s a truly unique cache. Here you will find John Dillinger’s .45-caliber revolver, Ma Barker and her gang’s arsenal, and “Pretty Boy” Floyd’s Colt 1911. There’s an old Thompson submachine gun hidden in a guitar case, and a pistol hidden in the cut pages of a rare first edition of Gone with the Wind.

These aren’t the most important weapons in the collection, however. Examiners will tell you the single most important piece—in a collection that spans more than a century of firearms history and ingenuity—is the one that helps investigators close a case on any given day. The same philosophy has informed the Lab’s meticulous stewardship of the collection for eight decades.

“We are only a small part of this collection,” Webb said. “It was here long before I was, and it will be here long after I’m gone.”

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A legal fight over the government’s use of a secret surveillance tool has provided new insight into how the controversial tool works and the extent to which Verizon Wireless aided federal agents in using it to track a suspect.

Court documents in a case involving accused identity thief Daniel David Rigmaiden describe how the wireless provider reached out remotely to reprogram an air card the suspect was using in order to make it communicate with the government’s surveillance tool so that he could be located.

Rigmaiden, who is accused of being the ringleader of a $4 million tax fraud operation, asserts in court documents that in July 2008 Verizon surreptitiously reprogrammed his air card to make it respond to incoming voice calls from the FBI and also reconfigured it so that it would connect to a fake cell site, or stingray, that the FBI was using to track his location.

Air cards are devices that plug into a computer and use the wireless cellular networks of phone providers to connect the computer to the internet. The devices are not phones and therefore don’t have the ability to receive incoming calls, but in this case Rigmaiden asserts that Verizon reconfigured his air card to respond to surreptitious voice calls from a landline controlled by the FBI.

The FBI calls, which contacted the air card silently in the background, operated as pings to force the air card into revealing its location.

In order to do this, Verizon reprogrammed the device so that when an incoming voice call arrived, the card would disconnect from any legitimate cell tower to which it was already connected, and send real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI. This allowed the FBI to position its stingray in the neighborhood where Rigmaiden resided. The stingray then “broadcast a very strong signal” to force the air card into connecting to it, instead of reconnecting to a legitimate cell tower, so that agents could then triangulate signals coming from the air card and zoom-in on Rigmaiden’s location.

To make sure the air card connected to the FBI’s simulator, Rigmaiden says that Verizon altered his air card’s Preferred Roaming List so that it would accept the FBI’s stingray as a legitimate cell site and not a rogue site, and also changed a data table on the air card designating the priority of cell sites so that the FBI’s fake site was at the top of the list.

Rigmaiden makes the assertions in a 369-page document he filed in support of a motion to suppress evidence gathered through the stingray. Rigmaiden collected information about how the stingray worked from documents obtained from the government, as well as from records obtained through FOIA requests filed by civil liberties groups and from open-source literature.

During a hearing in a U.S. District Court in Arizona on March 28 to discuss the motion, the government did not dispute Rigmaiden’s assertions about Verizon’s activities.

The actions described by Rigmaiden are much more intrusive than previously known information about how the government uses stingrays, which are generally employed for tracking cell phones and are widely used in drug and other criminal investigations.

The government has long asserted that it doesn’t need to obtain a probable-cause warrant to use the devices because they don’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages and operate like pen-registers and trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information.

The government has conceded, however, that it needed a warrant in his case alone — because the stingray reached into his apartment remotely to locate the air card — and that the activities performed by Verizon and the FBI to locate Rigmaiden were all authorized by a court order signed by a magistrate.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, who have filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden’s motion, maintain that the order does not qualify as a warrant and that the government withheld crucial information from the magistrate — such as identifying that the tracking device they planned to use was a stingray and that its use involved intrusive measures — thus preventing the court from properly fulfilling its oversight function.

“It shows you just how crazy the technology is, and [supports] all the more the need to explain to the court what they are doing,” says EFF Staff Attorney Hanni Fakhoury. “This is more than just [saying to Verizon] give us some records that you have sitting on your server. This is reconfiguring and changing the characteristics of the [suspect's] property, without informing the judge what’s going on.”

The secretive technology, generically known as a stingray or IMSI catcher, allows law enforcement agents to spoof a legitimate cell tower in order to trick nearby mobile phones and other wireless communication devices like air cards into connecting to the stingray instead of a phone carrier’s legitimate tower.

When devices connect, stingrays can see and record their unique ID numbers and traffic data, as well as information that points to the device’s location.

By moving the stingray around and gathering the wireless device’s signal strength from various locations in a neighborhood, authorities can pinpoint where the device is being used with much more precision than they can get through data obtained from a mobile network provider’s fixed tower location.

Use of the spy technology goes back at least 20 years. In a 2009 Utah case, an FBI agent described using a cell site emulator more than 300 times over a decade and indicated that they were used on a daily basis by U.S, Marshals, the Secret Service and other federal agencies.

The FBI used a similar device to track former hacker Kevin Mitnick in 1994, though the version used in that case was much more primitive and passive.

A 1996 Wired story about the Mitnick case called the device a Triggerfish and described it as “a technician’s device normally used for testing cell phones.” According to the story, the Triggerfish was “a rectangular box of electronics about a half a meter high controlled by a PowerBook” that was essentially “a five-channel receiver, able to monitor both sides of a conversation simultaneously.” The crude technology was hauled around in a station wagon and van. A black coaxial cable was strung out of the vehicle’s window to connect the Triggerfish to a direction-finding antenna on the vehicle’s roof, which had four antenna prongs that reached 30 centimeters into the sky.

The technology has become much sleeker and less obtrusive since then, but still operates under the same principles.

In Rigmaiden’s case, agents apparently used two devices made by a Florida-based company called Harris. One was the company’s StingRay system, which is designed to work from a vehicle driven around a neighborhood to narrow a suspect’s location to a building. Once agents tracked the signals from Rigmaiden’s air card to the Domicilio Apartments complex in Santa Clara, California, they apparently used another device made by Harris called the KingFish — a handheld system that allowed them to walk through the complex and zero-in on Rigmaiden’s air card in apartment 1122.

Although a number of companies make stingrays, including Verint, View Systems, Altron, NeoSoft, MMI, Ability, and Meganet, the Harris line of cell site emulators are the only ones that are compatible with CDMA2000-based devices. Others can track GSM/UMTS-based communications, but the Harris emulators can track CDMA2000, GSM and iDEN devices, as well as UMTS. The Harris StingRay and KingFish devices can also support three different communication standards simultaneously, without having to be reconfigured.

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(CNN) — An Arizona lawman said the suspicious package addressed to controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio “would have caused a major explosion” if someone had opened it.

Jerry Sheridan, chief deputy of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department, told reporters Friday the package was noticed by an alert postal employee in Flagstaff who thought he spotted gunpowder residue. Arpaio was at Sheridan’s side as he spoke.

Police in Flagstaff X-rayed the package, noticed what appeared to be an explosive device, and rendered it safe by blowing it up with a water cannon.

Sheridan said the package was mailed Thursday, a day after the department received a death threat from a major drug cartel.

The department has received other threats in the past, but, Sheridan said, this development is “something that was brought to the height of seriousness.”

“That is a very serious threat. It was labeled to come here, to this building and to be opened by Sheriff Arpaio,” Sheridan said.

He said injuries, burns and maybe death could have resulted. The FBI and deputies were trying to track down “a person of interest.”

Arpaio, well-known for his hardline anti-immigration policies that have led to accusations of civil rights violations, vowed that he would not be brought down by his enemies. He spoke after Sheridan briefed reporters.

He said he’s been besieged by certain groups and people and has been slammed with rhetoric criticizing him. He said he’s resolved to do his job and won’t be intimidated by people who want to force him out of office or kill him.

“My answer is it will not deter me from doing my job,” he said. “I’m not running scared.

“All I know is I’m going to keep being the sheriff,” he added. “I want everybody to know that.”

Earlier, sheriff’s department spokeswoman Lisa Allen said it was her understanding that the package had gun powder, wires, a battery — all the components for an explosion.

U.S. Postal Inspector Andrew Rivas in Flagstaff, who screened the package Thursday, considered it suspicious enough to call a local police bomb squad and the FBI.

“We evacuated the post office, got all our employees to safety,” Rivas told CNN affiliate KTVK.

Rivas said authorities have an idea of where the package may have come from, but declined to specify, citing the ongoing investigation. Allen said the origin of the package is one of the underlying issues in the investigation.

At present, the department is not opening mail and is checking to see if any suspicious packages have made it through, Allen said. Neither she nor Flagstaff police knew if the box contained a message.

The FBI declined to release details.

“I can confirm the FBI is involved in the investigation,” said FBI spokesman Manuel Johnson in Phoenix. “At this time the FBI is not commenting further due to the matter being ongoing.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also is investigating, ATF spokesman Mike Campbell said.

Flagstaff is about 150 miles north of Phoenix, the seat of Maricopa County.

A lightning rod for controversy

Arpaio has made national headlines for years with his unorthodox — and often controversial — style of justice. And he has been the object of threats before.

Since August 2011, nine threats have been directed at Arpaio that were were credible enough to be investigated. There has been at least one arrest in the past involving threats.

While Arpaio already has reasonable security, Allen said, “we are going to have to augment” it either by getting more personnel or adding electronic security.

Arpaio has housed thousands of inmates in tents and forced all inmates to wear pink underwear. He has boasted about feeding each inmate on less than $1 a day.

His critics say he has a long history of launching bogus criminal investigations against political opponents and anyone else who gets in his way.

He was the subject of a civil lawsuit by the Justice Department alleging civil rights violations. According to the complaint, the sheriff’s office has displayed a pattern of discrimination against Latinos that includes racial profiling, unlawful detention and searches, and unlawful targeting of Latinos during raids.

Arpaio has denied any discrimination, and one of his attorneys called the Justice Department investigation a “witch hunt.”

His office website touts his “get tough” policies and says his chain gangs contribute thousands of dollars of free labor to the community. Male chain gangs, as well as the world’s first-ever female and juvenile chain gangs, clean streets, paint over graffiti and bury the indigent in the county cemetery.

After winning his sixth term last November, the 80-year-old sheriff said he doesn’t plan on leaving office anytime soon.

“For my critics out there, I’m going to say right now: In January, I’m signing up for 2016. So I’m not a lame duck,” he told a crowd of cheering supporters.

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PHILADELPHIA—An indictment was unsealed today charging Penn Choice Ambulance Inc., operating from Philadelphia, Huntington Valley, and Camp Hill, Pennsylvania; its owner Anna Mudrova; and operators Yury Gerasyuk, Mikhail Vasserman, Irina Vasserman, Aleksandr Vasserman, Valeriy Davydchik, and Khusen Akhmedov with conspiracy to commit health care fraud. The alleged scheme involved more than $3.6 million in fraudulent claims submitted to Medicare. The defendants were also charged with related crimes including making false statements in connection with health care matters, aggravated identity theft, paying kickbacks to patients, and money laundering, announced United States Attorney Zane David Memeger.

Valeriy Davydchik, 58, and Khusen Akhmedov, 22, Mikhail and Irina Vasserman, both 50, and Aleksandr Vasserman, 29, all of Philadelphia, were arrested this morning. Mudrova, 40, Gerasyuk, 41, also of Philadelphia, will make a court appearance tomorrow. According to the indictment, the defendants conspired to defraud Medicare by recruiting patients who were able to walk and could travel safely by means other than ambulance and who therefore were not eligible for ambulance transportation under Medicare requirements. It is alleged that the defendants, and others acting on their behalf, falsified reports to make it appear that the patients needed to be transported by ambulance when the defendants knew that the patients could be transported safely by other means and that many of them walked to the ambulance for transport. It is further alleged that the defendants themselves, or through others, paid illegal kickbacks to the patients as part of scheme. The defendants allegedly billed Medicare for these ambulance services as if those services were medically necessary and, as a result of the allegedly fraudulent billing, the Medicare program sustained losses of more than $1.5 million for this medically unnecessary method of transportation.

If convicted, the defendants face substantial terms of imprisonment and fines. If convicted, Penn Choice Ambulance Inc. faces significant financial penalties, including substantial criminal fines, restitution, and forfeiture obligations. All defendants could also be excluded from participating in federal health care programs.

Bank accounts and other assets were seized which are subject to criminal forfeiture proceedings.

The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General. It is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney M. Beth Leahy.

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