Quote a Insurance.com

Posts Tagged ‘fbi’

FBI investigates 2 men arrested in Amsterdam but does not suspect terror activity A U.S. government official says the FBI’s investigation of two men detained in Amsterdam is finding that it’s unlikely they were on a test run for a future terror attack, even as Dutch authorities continued to hold the pair on suspicion of

Read the original:

Rights group sues CIA, FBI over American citizen’s detention in United Arab Emirates American Civil Liberties Union lawyers filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the FBI, CIA and other federal intelligence agencies, accusing them of detaining and torturing an American citizen later convicted on terrorism charges in the United Arab Emirates. The lawsuit filed by the

Continued here:

A recent push by the White House to expand the ability of the FBI to obtain customer information from internet service providers has focused attention on the threat to privacy and free speech posed by so-called “national security letters” (NSL). These letters not only require that information be handed over without a warrant but also

Read the original:

Last 2 foreign dead identified in murders of medical team in north Afghanistan A Christian charity said Monday it had no plans to leave Afghanistan despite the murders of 10 members of its medical aid team and repeated that the organization does not attempt to convert Muslims to Christianity. The 10 members — six Americans, two Afghans, one Briton and a German — were gunned down Thursday after they were accosted by gunmen after finishing a two-week mission providing medical care to impoverished villagers in Nuristan province. The Taliban have claimed responsibility and alleged the group were spies and tried to convert Muslims. During a press conference Monday, the International Assistance Mission, a Kabul-based charity that organized the trip, released the names of the last two victims. They were Brian Carderelli of Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Daniela Beyer of Chemnitz, Germany. German media say she was a 35-year-old translator. “We want to pay tribute to each of our colleagues who died, to their commitment to serve the Afghan people,” said IAM director Dirk Frans. “Those who have known them and seen them at work can do nothing but pay the highest tribute to them.” Story continues below… Frans displayed an Afghan government document granting the team permission to treat people in the remote Parun valley for eye diseases and insisted there was no attempt to preach Christianity. “Our faith motivates and inspires us — but we do not proselytize,” he said. Frans said it was likely that members of the group were carrying personal Bibles in English and German but not in Afghan languages as alleged by the Taliban. Frans said the organization had worked in Afghanistan for four decades and had no plans to leave. Of the eight foreigners, families of five have requested burials in Afghanistan, Frans said. The bodies are being flown back to the U.S. for FBI autopsies and returned to Kabul later for burial. But Frans acknowledged that the losses left the organization “devastated.” Team leader Tom Little of Delmar, New York, had worked in Afghanistan since the late 1970s and was the “driving force” in the group’s efforts to expand vision care in the country. Fluent in the Afghan language Dari, Little and his wife raised three daughters in Kabul despite political turmoil and a bloody civil war. “He is irreplaceable,” Frans said. The bodies were flown from northern Afghanistan back to Kabul by helicopter Sunday along with the lone survivor of the attack, an Afghan driver who said he was spared because he was a Muslim and recited Islamic holy verses as he begged for his life. The IAM said the driver had been a trusted employee with four years of service. Police said they don’t know if he is a witness or an accomplice in the killings. “We are heartbroken by the loss of these heroic, generous people,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Washington. She condemned the Taliban for the deaths and what she called a “transparent attempt to justify the unjustifiable by making false accusations about their activities.” Among the victims was Dan Terry, 64, who had lived in Afghanistan since 1980 with his wife, rearing three daughters while working with impoverished ethnic groups. Others had made financial sacrifices to come here. Dr. Thomas Grams, 51, quit his dental practice in Durango, Colorado, four years ago to work full-time giving poor children free dental care in Afghanistan and Nepal. His twin brother, Tim, said Grams wasn’t trying to spread religious views. “He knew the laws, he knew the religion. He respected them. He was not trying to convert anybody,” Tim Grams said, holding back tears in a telephone call from Anchorage, Alaska. “His goal was to provide dental care and help people.” Khris Nedam, head of a charity called Kids 4 Afghan Kids that builds schools and wells, said Grams and the others were “serving the least for all the right reasons.” “The kids had never seen toothbrushes, and Tom brought thousands of them,” Nedam said Sunday. “He trained them how to brush their teeth, and you should’ve seen the way they smiled after they learned to brush their teeth.” Nedam said the medical group had never talked of religion with Afghans. “Their mission was humanitarian, and they went there to help people,” said Nedam, a third-grade teacher from Livonia, Michigan. Dr. Karen Woo, 36, the lone Briton among the dead, gave up her job with a private clinic in London to work in Afghanistan. She was planning to leave in a few weeks to get married, friends said. “Her motivation was purely humanitarian. She was a humanist and had no religious or political agenda,” her family said in a statement. Another victim, Glen Lapp, 40, a trained nurse from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had come to Afghanistan in 2008 for a limited assignment but decided to stay, serving as an executive assistant at IAM and manager of its provincial eye care program, according to the Mennonite Central Committee, a relief group based in Akron, Pennsylvania. “Where I was, the main thing that expats can do is to be a presence in the country,” Lapp wrote in a recent report to the Mennonite group. “… Treating people with respect and with love.” Cheryl Beckett, the 32-year-old daughter of a Knoxville, Tennessee, pastor, had spent six years in Afghanistan and specialized in nutritional gardening and mother-child health, her family said. Beckett, who was her high school valedictorian at a Cincinnati-area high school and held a biology degree, had also spent time doing work in Honduras, Mexico, Kenya and Zimbabwe. “Cheryl … denied herself many freedoms in order to abide by Afghan law and custom,” her family said. The group’s attackers, her family said, “should feel the utter shame and disgust that humanity feels for them.” Elsewhere, an American service member was killed Monday in a bomb attack in southern Afghanistan, and an Afghan child was shot dead the day before during a gunbattle between NATO forces and insurgents in Kunar province in the east, the alliance said. NATO did not provide further details on the death of the American. Sunday’s fighting in Kunar started when militants attacked a small U.S. base in Watahpur district, according to Maj. Michael Johnson, a spokesman for the coalition. Insurgents fired on the outpost and soldiers saw the rounds hit two children nearby, killing one and wounding the other, Johnson said. NATO also announced that a German unmanned surveillance aircraft crashed Monday in Kunduz province. The statement said the aircraft lost altitude due to technical problems and was destroyed on impact. The drone can provide battlefield imagery as well as target data. Over the weekend, two U.S. Marines were killed Saturday when they tried to subdue a prisoner who was trying to escape from an undisclosed prison in southern Afghanistan, NATO said Monday. The prisoner escaped a room where he was observing prayers, acquired a rifle and started fighting Afghan and coalition forces. The inmate was shot and killed. NATO said the incident is being investigated. In eastern Afghanistan, a suicide bomber approached an Afghan army base about 4 a.m. Monday in Gayan district of Paktika province. An Afghan soldier opened fire and the bomber detonated his suicide vest and died, said provincial governor spokesman Mokhlis Afghan. At the same time, six militants attacked the Gayan district compound near the base. All six were killed by Afghan soldiers, he said. No one else was hurt in the assaults. Source: AP News Mochila insert follows… Powered by Mochila

Follow this link:

WASHINGTON — Fourteen US citizens have been arrested for seeking to join or provide aid to the Al-Qaeda-linked Somalia group Shebab, media reported Thursday, citing law enforcement officials. NBC News reported that the arrested included at least one person seeking to leave the United States for Somalia to join Shebab. Fox News said an indictment accuses some individuals of providing material support to a terrorist group, saying the defendants tried to raise funds using a bogus charity as a front. A news conference was scheduled later Thursday at the Justice Department. The Shebab, an Islamist extremist group that controls most of central and western Somalia, claimed responsibility for the attacks in Uganda’s capital on July 11 that killed 76 people gathered to watch the World Cup final. Story continues below… US officials say the group may pose a broader global threat. The 14 people arrested include 12 from Minnesota, one from Alabama and one from California, NBC said. Fox said prosecutors allege the suspects raised funds by soliciting door-to-door in Minnesota’s Somali communities, telling potential donors that the funds were for the “poor and needy” but that the money was funneled to Shebab, which has been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the US government. Similar efforts took place in other parts of the United States, officials said in the latest in a series of arrests of Americans linked to alleged terrorist organizations. The news comes a day after the announcement of the arrest of a US man hours before he was scheduled to travel to Somalia to purportedly join Shebab. Shaker Masri, 26, who was born in Alabama and now lives in Chicago, was charged with attempting to provide material support to two US-designated terror organizations, Al-Qaeda and Shebab. He also was charged with one count of trying to provide material support, and cover it up, to someone attempting or conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against the United States. An FBI informant told authorities that Masri had begun to “openly express a desire to participate in a ‘jihad’ and to fight” against what he characterized as “infidels,” according to the Justice Department. According to the indictment, “Masri has advocated an extremist and violent interpretation of Islam.”

Read more from the original source:

The Pentagon on Wednesday said it had not received any request from the WikiLeaks group to help delete the names of Afghan informants in the 15,000 leaked documents still awaiting publication. A WikiLeaks spokesman in Germany, Daniel Schmitt, earlier told US news website The Daily Beast that the group had sought Pentagon help to erase the names of civilians in the documents still to be released. Schmitt said he wanted to open a line of communication with the Pentagon to review the 15,000 classified reports in order to “make redactions so they can be safely published.” “We have not been contacted by Wikileaks,” said Pentagon spokesman Colonel David Lapan however. The first batch of documents WikiLeaks released on July 25 contain a string of damaging claims, including allegations that Pakistani spies met directly with the Taliban and that the deaths of innocent civilians at the hands of international forces have been covered up. Story continues below… The documents also included some names of Afghan informants. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the US military’s top officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, said that the publication endangers locals providing information to US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan. The White House and Afghan President Hamid Karzai have also fiercely criticized the document publication. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, 39, an Australian former hacker and computer programmer, said he believed publication would help focus public debate on the war in Afghanistan and on possible atrocities by US-led forces. WikiLeaks, which styles itself “the first intelligence agency of the people”, was founded in December 2006 and invited would-be whistleblowers from around the world to make anonymous contributions. WikiLeaks has never identified the source of the Afghan files, but suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst under arrest for allegedly leaking video of a 2007 US Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad in which civilians died. Manning is in a US military prison after being held in a military jail in Kuwait. The Pentagon and the FBI have launched an investigation into the case.

Read the original here:

Pepsi, Coca Cola, Shell, BP, Ford, Proctor & Gamble, Apple and Google just some of the corporations tricked into revealing too much information Hackers at an infamous DefCon gathering are proving that old-fashioned smooth talk rivals slick software skills when it comes to pulling off attacks on computer networks. A first-ever “social engineering” contest here challenges hackers to call workers at 10 companies including technology titans Google, Apple, Cisco, and Microsoft and get them to reveal too much information to strangers. “Out of all the companies called today, not one company shut us down,” said Offensive Security operations manager Christopher Hadnagy, part of the social-engineer.org team behind the competition that kicked off on Friday. The team kept hackers within the boundaries of the law, but had them coax out enough information to show that workers would have unintentionally made it easier to attack networks. Story continues below… Workers that unknowingly ended up on calls with hackers ranged from a chief technical officer to IT support personnel and sales people. One employee was conned into opening programs on a company computer to read off specifications regarding types of software being used, details that would let a hacker tailor viruses to launch at the system. “You often have to crack through firewalls and burn the perimeter in order to get into the internal organization,” said Mati Aharoni of Offensive Security, a company that tests company computer defenses. “It is much easier to use social engineering techniques to get to the same place.” Other companies targeted were Pepsi, Coca Cola, Shell, BP, Ford, and Proctor & Gamble. The contest, which continues Saturday at DefCon and promises the winner an Apple iPad tablet computer, is intended to show that hardened computer networks remain vulnerable if people using them are soft touches. “We didn’t want anyone fired or feeling bad at the end of the day,” Aharoni said. “We wanted to show that social engineering is a legitimate attack vector.” A saying that long ago made it onto T-shirts at the annual DefCon event is “There is no patch for human stupidity.” “Companies don’t think their people will fall for something as simple as someone calling and just asking a few questions,” Hadnagy said. “It doesn’t require a very technical level of attacker,” Aharoni added. “It requires someone with an ability to schmooze well.” One worker nearly foiled a hacker by insisting he send his questions in an email that would be reviewed and answered if appropriate. The hacker convinced the worker to change his mind by claiming to be under pressure to finish a report for a boss by that evening. “As humans, we naturally want to help other people,” Hadgagy said. “I’m not advocating not helping people. Just think about what you say before you say it.” Companies that got word of the social engineering contest before DefCon called in the FBI, which was assured by the event organizers that nothing illegal was afoot. Information about “exploiting human vulnerabilities” was available at the social-engineer.org websit.

Read the original here: