Don’t Panic, But Mexico’s Zetas Cartel Wants to Recruit Your Kids

April 18, 2013 by

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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When, And Why, to Call a Bombing ‘Terrorism’

April 16, 2013 by

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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U.S. government to fight for warrantless GPS tracking

March 19, 2013 by

The Obama Administration is headed to court today to argue that warrantless GPS tracking is just fine.

The administration will present its arguments before a federal appeals court today, despite the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruling that a warrant was needed to attach a GPS device to a suspected criminal’s vehicle. According to Wired, which first reported on the story, the government believes that the high court’s ruling does not account for all scenarios, and wants to see where its ruling should and shouldn’t be held up.

The Supreme Court’s ruling last year was not exhaustive, the government argues. And in many cases, exemptions exist in which a judge would not need to sign a warrant to monitor someone, including issues at the border and with people on probation and students, according to Wired.

The Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous decision last year that the Fourth Amendment protection of “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” would be violated if law enforcement agencies were allowed to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s vehicle without obtaining a warrant. The decision involved a case in which District of Columbia police placed a GPS tracking device on the car of suspected cocaine dealer Antoine Jones. Following a conviction, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 2010 threw it out, saying a warrant was required to track Jones and fellow defendant Lawrence Maynard.

For the government, warrantless GPS tracking could prove to be an important law-enforcement tool, its attorneys have argued. In papers filed with the court, the government has said that because of the high court’s ruling, “law enforcement officers could not use GPS devices to gather information to establish probable cause, which is often the most productive use of such devices.”

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10 arrested in international cybercrime ring

December 19, 2012 by

Ten people have been arrested as part of an investigation into international cybercrime rings that steal millions of computer users’ credit card, bank account and other personal information, the FBI said.

Individuals from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, New Zealand, Peru, Britain and the U.S. were arrested in an operation carried out with the assistance of the Facebook social network and numerous international law enforcement agencies, the FBI said.

The FBI said the operation identified international cybercrime rings that are linked to multiple variants of the Yahos malware, which is linked to more than 11 million compromised computer systems and over $850 million in losses through the so-called Butterfly botnet.

Botnets, short for robot network, are made up of compromised computer systems and can be used by cybercriminals to execute denial of service attacks, send spam emails and conduct underground organized criminal activity, to include malware distribution, the FBI said.

Facebook’s security team assisted law enforcement by helping to identify the root cause, the perpetrators and those affected by the malware. Yahos targeted Facebook users from 2010 to October 2012, and security systems were able to detect affected accounts and provide tools to remove these threats, the FBI said in a news release Tuesday.

The FBI recommended that computer users update their applications and operating system on a regular basis to reduce the risk of compromise and perform regular anti-virus scanning of their computer system. The agency said it also is helpful to disconnect personal computers from the Internet when the machines are not in use.

Computer users who believe they have been victimized can file a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov.

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TEXT-TO-911 SERVICE TO BE AVAILABLE NATIONWIDE IN 2014

December 16, 2012 by

Citizens in danger across the country will be able to text distress calls to 911 by May 2014, following an agreement with the nation’s four largest wireless carriers, the Federal Communications Commission has announced.

Major deployments of the text-to-911 service should be available through AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile during 2013, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Thursday in a statement.

The carriers have also agreed to offer an automated “bounce back” message by June 2013 alerting people who text 911 if their message wasn’t received, Genachowski said. Those people will be instructed to call 911 instead, he said.

The growing prevalence of texting has led many people to presume they can text emergency requests to 911, but only a fraction of local emergency officials are prepared to accept texts now. Surveys have found more than half of Americans also presume help will arrive if they post a request to an emergency management agencies’ Facebook page.

“Access to 911 must catch up with how consumers communicate in the 21st century — and today, we are one step closer towards that vital goal,” Genachowski said.

The texting service will also benefit people with hearing and speech disabilities who are unable to communicate with 911 operators by phone, he said.

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Cops to Congress: We need logs of Americans’ text messages

December 9, 2012 by

AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and other wireless providers would be required to record and store information about Americans’ private text messages for at least two years, according to a proposal that police have submitted to the U.S. Congress.

CNET has learned a constellation of law enforcement groups has asked the U.S. Senate to require that wireless companies retain that information, warning that the lack of a current federal requirement “can hinder law enforcement investigations.”

They want an SMS retention requirement to be “considered” during congressional discussions over updating a 1986 privacy law for the cloud computing era — a move that could complicate debate over the measure and erode support for it among civil libertarians.

As the popularity of text messages has exploded in recent years, so has their use in criminal investigations and civil lawsuits. They have been introduced as evidence in armed robbery, cocaine distribution, and wire fraud prosecutions. In one 2009 case in Michigan, wireless provider SkyTel turned over the contents of 626,638 SMS messages, a figure described by a federal judge as “staggering.”

Chuck DeWitt, a spokesman for the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, which represents the 63 largest U.S. police forces including New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago, said “all such records should be retained for two years.” Some providers, like Verizon, retain the contents of SMS messages for a brief period of time, while others like T-Mobile do not store them at all.

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Use of Advanced Truth Verification Technology Increases Throughout Latin America

December 6, 2012 by

Law enforcement and security professionals from across Latin America continue to travel to South Florida to be trained on the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer CVSA ®). The CVSA has been available to law enforcement agencies in the US since 1988, first as an analog device and since 1997 in a digital version. The CVSA is the only voice stress analyzer in the world with two US Patents, and the only system worldwide incorporating the FACT® scoring system, which uses scientifically validated processes to reliably and precisely evaluate the results of CVSA examinations. The CVSA is now used by close to 2,000 agencies and is the most widely used truth verification system in the US, far surpassing the number of agencies that use older polygraph equipment.

A soon to be published research study will report the accuracy rate of the CVSA is greater than 95%, an assertion long made by the system’s manufacturer. The study’s results are further supported by current US Government funded voice analysis research which has found voice technologies performed well for border security applications. The CVSA has been used by both the US Military and US Customs for such applications since the 1990’s. US military units in Afghanistan and Iraq reported the CVSA’s accuracy exceeded 95% during combat intelligence operations. Both the reliability and accuracy of the CVSA under combat conditions far exceeded that of a handheld polygraph device, which has fallen under scrutiny after being fielded without proper validation for vetting operations and no countermeasures testing. It has been previously reported poor vetting procedures by both the DOD and NATO contributed to insider attacks against US military by Afghan security force members.

Additionally, continuous high profile polygraph failures in Mexico and other Latin American countries have generated renewed interest in the more modern, reliable and precise CVSA system. This is especially true after the CVSA proved to be an effective investigative tool for Mexican anti-kidnapping squads involved in negotiations with kidnapping suspects.

In Mexico, dozens of Federal Police officers were discovered to be working with various criminal organizations after passing federally administered anti-corruption polygraph examinations. Critics of polygraph cite such incidents as proof of the polygraph’s limited capabilities. The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reported in a 2003 congressionally directed assessment that the polygraph has little to no capability to accurately screen individuals for security related issues. The NAS found that the majority of polygraph research was “Unreliable, Unscientific and Biased,” concluding that 57 of the approximately 80 research studies cited by polygraph proponents were significantly flawed. NAS researchers stated such dismal performance by the polygraph is further complicated by the polygraph’s high false positive rate and the numerous countermeasures that can be employed to defeat the polygraph process, many of which are openly published on the internet. The NAS conclusions paralleled those of an earlier United States Congress Office of Technology Assessment report “Scientific Validity of Polygraph Testing: A Research Review and Evaluation” which also found the polygraph was ineffective for security screening applications. Research conducted in both Europe and the US over the past several years supports the superiority of voice stress analysis technology over older polygraph equipment, which explains the rapid adoption of the CVSA for truth verification applications in Latin America.

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Self Defense: Are There Limits to the Amount of Force that May Be Used?

December 5, 2012 by

A Minnesota homeowner named Byron David Smith has stirred up a great deal of controversy for shooting and killing two unarmed intruders in his house. He supposedly shot Nicholas Brady, 17, and Haile Kifer, 18 to death after they allegedly broke into Smith’s home on Thanksgiving. Smith is being charged with two counts of second-degree murder.

Smith apparently told the police that he shot the teenagers numerous times until they were dead. He also told the police that once the two teenagers were clearly wounded on the ground but still alive, he shot Brady in the face. He also shot Kifer from under her chin into her cranium. Moreover, Smith told the police that neither of the intruders had a weapon on them.

According to a source, if Smith had stopped shooting the intruders once they were on the ground, he wouldn’t be facing criminal charges. However, because he shot them to the point of death, he is being charged with two counts of second-degree murder.

How much force is too much force when defending yourself?

If faced with a situation where you need to defend yourself from unlawful force, you may either use deadly force or non-deadly force. Of course, the type of force that may be used depends on the situation.

You may use non-deadly force when it is reasonably necessary to protect yourself from unlawful force. You may use deadly force in self-defense if you are “confronted with unlawful force and are threatened with imminent death or great bodily harm.”

Can you use deadly force when defending your property?

You may never use to deadly force while defending your property.

Self-defense laws vary by state. For example, in Minnesota, homeowners are permitted to defend themselves and their property if they believe they are in danger. To learn more about self-defense laws in your state, contact a criminal law attorney today.

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Ex-prison guard charged with workers’ comp fraud

December 2, 2012 by

A lengthy investigation and surveillance videos led to a 47-year-old former prison guard being charged with fraudulently collecting more than $2.7 million in workers’ compensation payments. David Brownell was arrested Wednesday in Tampa and freed from the Hillsborough County Jail on $50,000 bail.

As a state of Florida employee, Brownell’s claim was paid by the state Division of Risk Management, which reported he received more than $563,000 for alleged lost income.

Brownell filed a workers’ compensation claim in 1995 claiming that his work had exposed him to rats and rat feces that resulted in respiratory problems and 24-hour-a-day dependency on oxygen. However, investigators for the Department of Financial Services said extensive video surveillance over several years show that not only was Brownell not oxygen-dependent but was able to play guitar in a band, drive vehicles and smoke cigarettes.

“It is very disheartening to think that someone sworn to uphold the law may have violated it, and to such a costly degree,” CFO Jeff Atwater said in a prepared statement announcing Brownell’s arrest.

Brownell was arrested while wearing an oxygen mask. If convicted, he faces up to 30 years in prison.

Officials estimate such forms of fraud raise premiums for businesses and take an estimated billion dollars a year out of Florida’s economy. The Bureau of Workers’ Compensation Fraud reports that this year through the end of September its fraud unit has built cases leading to 121 arrests and 78 convictions resulting in $1.5 million in court-ordered restitution.

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Cell Phone Surveillance: Tracking Your Every Move

November 23, 2012 by

Cell phones long ago ceased to be a luxury and became something we can’t leave home without. But even when your device is idle or turned off, it’s sending information about your location to a cell phone tower every seven seconds. One thing most of us don’t consider is access to that information isn’t limited to your cell phone carrier.

“Police and the government can use that ping to track your whereabouts. There is no expectation of privacy in carrying that cell phone,” said Savannah attorney Bates Lovett of Hunter Maclean. Lovett said carriers can give out this information without your knowledge or permission, and in some cases without a court order.

“They can pull your text messages. They can pull your search history. Those are the types of data and information that they’re being able to pull off now that they don’t always need a warrant for,” said Lovett.

Cell phone companies are now answering more demands for your data than ever before. Nine U.S. carriers responded to questions from U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D – Massachusetts) earlier this year. According to Markey, the group reported receiving more than 1.3 million requests for information from law enforcement in 2011.

There is no denying that cell phone data is useful and often essential for investigators working to solve crimes. Privacy advocates question whether law enforcement is being allowed too much leeway with what should be protected information.

“They’re going after one person but get information on anyone who was around a cell phone tower at a certain time. Even though they’re investigating one person, they have information on hundreds or thousands of people,” said Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Experts say the problem is the law hasn’t kept up with technology.

“That’s certainly an issue that legislatures are taking into consideration now is what level of requirement must the government go through to get that type of information,” said Lovett.

A bill called the GPS Act that would require warrants for the data has stalled in the U.S. Senate. U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston said he believes it is time for Congress to act.

“There should be a very high firewall in terms of personal information and what can be done with that information, who gathers that information, who sells, who buys that information,” Kingston told News 3.

Until regulations are in place, remember that what you do with your cell phone is more public than you think.

“Your expectation of privacy and what you and I would think of as private is just not the same thing as what the government thinks of as privacy,” cautioned Lovett.

Many of the cell phone carriers that responded to Markey’s inquiry said they don’t keep track of the law enforcement requests they reject, so the number of requests for data is actually more than estimated.

A study by the American Civil Liberties Union found that some cell phone carriers have manuals for police that explain what data the companies store, how investigators can obtain the data, and how much it would cost.

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