Entries Tagged "FBI"

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Allocating Resources: Financial Fraud vs. Terrorism

Interesting trade-off:

The FBI has been forced to transfer agents from its counter-terrorism divisions to work on Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion fraud scheme as victims of the biggest scam in the world continue to emerge.

The Freakonomics blog discusses this:

This might lead you to ask an obvious counter-question: Has the anti-terror enforcement since 9/11 in the U.S. helped fuel the financial meltdown? That is, has the diversion of resources, personnel, and mindshare toward preventing future terrorist attacks—including, you’d have to say, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—contributed to a sloppy stewardship of the financial industry?

It quotes a New York Times article:

Federal officials are bringing far fewer prosecutions as a result of fraudulent stock schemes than they did eight years ago, according to new data, raising further questions about whether the Bush administration has been too lax in policing Wall Street.

Legal and financial experts say that a loosening of enforcement measures, cutbacks in staffing at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a shift in resources toward terrorism at the F.B.I. have combined to make the federal government something of a paper tiger in investigating securities crimes.

We’ve seen this problem over and over again when it comes to counterterrorism: in an effort to defend against the rare threats, we make ourselves more vulnerable to the common threats.

Posted on January 9, 2009 at 6:54 AM • View Comments

FBI Stoking Fear

Another unsubstantiated terrorist plot:

An internal memo obtained by The Associated Press says the FBI has received a “plausible but unsubstantiated” report that al-Qaida terrorists in late September may have discussed attacking the subway system.

[…]

The internal bulletin says al-Qaida terrorists “in late September may have discussed targeting transit systems in and around New York City. These discussions reportedly involved the use of suicide bombers or explosives placed on subway/passenger rail systems,” according to the document.

“We have no specific details to confirm that this plot has developed beyond aspirational planning, but we are issuing this warning out of concern that such an attack could possibly be conducted during the forthcoming holiday season,” according to the warning dated Tuesday.

[…]

Rep. Peter King, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said authorities “have very real specifics as to who it is and where the conversation took place and who conducted it.”

“It certainly involves suicide bombing attacks on the mass transit system in and around New York and it’s plausible, but there’s no evidence yet that it’s in the process of being carried out,” King said.

Knocke, the DHS spokesman, said the warning was issued “out of an abundance of caution going into this holiday season.”

Got that: “plausible but unsubstantiated,” “may have discussed attacking the subway system,” “specific details to confirm that this plot has developed beyond aspirational planning,” “attack could possibly be conducted,” “it’s plausible, but there’s no evidence yet that it’s in the process of being carried out.”

I have no specific details, but I want to warn everybody today that fiery rain might fall from the sky. Terrorists may have discussed this sort of tactic, possibly at one of their tequila-fueled aspirational planning sessions. While there is no evidence yet that the plan is in the process of being carried out, I want to be extra-cautious this holiday season. Ho ho ho.

Posted on November 27, 2008 at 12:27 PM • View Comments

Government Can Determine Location of Cell Phones without Telco Help

Interesting:

Triggerfish, also known as cell-site simulators or digital analyzers, are nothing new: the technology was used in the 1990s to hunt down renowned hacker Kevin Mitnick. By posing as a cell tower, triggerfish trick nearby cell phones into transmitting their serial numbers, phone numbers, and other data to law enforcement. Most previous descriptions of the technology, however, suggested that because of range limitations, triggerfish were only useful for zeroing in on a phone's precise location once cooperative cell providers had given a general location.

This summer, however, the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Justice Department, seeking documents related to the FBI's cell-phone tracking practices. Since August, they've received a stream of documents—the most recent batch on November 6—that were posted on the Internet last week. In a post on the progressive blog Daily Kos, ACLU spokesperson Rachel Myers drew attention to language in several of those documents implying that triggerfish have broader application than previously believed.

Posted on November 26, 2008 at 6:06 AM • View Comments

DNA Matching and the Birthday Paradox

Nice essay:

Is it possible that the F.B.I. is right about the statistics it cites, and that there could be 122 nine-out-of-13 matches in Arizona’s database?

Perhaps surprisingly, the answer turns out to be yes. Let’s say that the chance of any two individuals matching at any one locus is 7.5 percent. In reality, the frequency of a match varies from locus to locus, but I think 7.5 percent is pretty reasonable. For instance, with a 7.5 percent chance of matching at each locus, the chance that any 2 random people would match at all 13 loci is about 1 in 400 trillion. If you choose exactly 9 loci for 2 random people, the chance that they will match all 9 is 1 in 13 billion. Those are the sorts of numbers the F.B.I. tosses around, I think.

So under these same assumptions, how many pairs would we expect to find matching on at least 9 of 13 loci in the Arizona database? Remarkably, about 100. If you start with 65,000 people and do a pairwise match of all of them, you are actually making over 2 billion separate comparisons (65,000 * 64,999/2). And if you aren’t just looking for a match on 9 specific loci, but rather on any 9 of 13 loci, then for each of those pairs of people there are over 700 different combinations that are being searched.

So all told, you end up doing about 1.4 trillion searches! If 1 in 13 billion searches yields a positive match as noted above, this leads to roughly 100 expected matches on 9 of 13 loci in a database the size of Arizona’s. (The way I did the calculations, I am allowing for 2 individuals to match on different sets of loci; so to get 100 different pairs of people who match, I need a match rate of slightly higher than 7.5 percent per locus.)

EDITED TO ADD (9/14): The FBI is trying to suppress the analysis.

Posted on September 11, 2008 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

Automatic Profiling Is Useless

No surprise:

Automated passenger profiling is rubbish, the Home Office has conceded in an amusing—and we presume inadvertent—blurt. “Attempts at automated profiling have been used in trial operations [at UK ports of entry] and has proved [sic] that the systems and technology available are of limited use,” says home secretary Jacqui Smith in her response to Lord Carlile’s latest terror legislation review.

The U.S. wants to do it anyway:

The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial or ethnic groups.

I’ve written about profiling before.

Posted on July 7, 2008 at 1:37 PM • View Comments

Terrorists Attacking via Air Conditioners

From the DHS and the FBI, a great movie-plot threat:

It is possible to introduce chemical or biological agents directly into external air-intakes or internal air-circulation systems. Unless the building has carbon filters (or the equivalent), volatile chemical agents would not be stopped and would enter the building untenanted.

[…]

Other scenarios involve the use of helicopters equipped with agricultural spraying equipment to discharge large chemical or biological contaminant clouds near external or roof-mounted air intakes or ventilators.

[…]

Terrorists have considered producing a radiological dispersal device (RDD) by burning or exploding a source or sources containing radioactive material. If large quantities of easily dispersed radioactive material were released or exploded near an HVAC intake or circulation system, it is possible that targeted individuals could suffer some adverse health effects.

I’m sure glad my government is working on this stuff.

Posted on May 16, 2008 at 12:03 PM • View Comments

Tourists, Not Terrorists

Remember the two men who were exhibiting “unusual behavior” on a Washington-state ferry last summer?

The agency’s Seattle field office, along with the Washington Joint Analytical Center, was still seeking the men’s identities and whereabouts Wednesday as ferry service was temporarily shutdown when a suspicious package was found in a ferry bathroom and taken away by authorities.

“We had various independent reports from passengers and ferry employees that these two guys were engaging in what they described as unusual activities on the ferries,” Special Agent Robbie Burroughs, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Washington state, told FOXNews.com.

“They felt that these guys were showing an undue interest in the boat itself, in the layout, the workers and the terminal, and it caused them enough concern that they contacted law enforcement about it,” she told FOXNews.com.

The two were photographed by a ferry employee about a month ago, and those photographs were distributed to ferry employees three weeks ago by local law enforcement.

Turns out they were tourists, not terrorists:

Turns out the men, both citizens of a European Union nation, were captivated by the car-carrying capacity of local ferries.

“Where these gentlemen live, they don’t have vehicle ferries. They were fascinated that a ferry could hold that many cars and wanted to show folks back home,” FBI Special Agent Robbie Burroughs said Monday.

[…]

Two weeks ago, the men appeared at a U.S. Embassy and identified themselves as the men in the photo released to the media in August, a couple of weeks after they took a ferry from Seattle to Vashon Island during a business trip, Burroughs said.

They came forward because they worried they’d be arrested if they traveled to the U.S. and so provided proof of their identities, employment and the reason for their July trip to Seattle, according to the FBI.

Posted on May 8, 2008 at 7:32 AM • View Comments

N-DEx National Intelligence System

An article from The Washington Post:

Federal authorities hope N-DEx will become what one called a “one-stop shop” enabling federal law enforcement, counterterrorism and intelligence analysts to automatically examine the enormous caches of local and state records for the first time.

[…]

The expanding police systems illustrate the prominent roles that private companies play in homeland security and counterterrorism efforts. They also underscore how the use of new data—and data surveillance—technology to fight crime and terrorism is evolving faster than the public’s understanding or the laws intended to check government power and protect civil liberties, authorities said.

Three decades ago, Congress imposed limits on domestic intelligence activity after revelations that the FBI, Army, local police and others had misused their authority for years to build troves of personal dossiers and monitor political activists and other law-abiding Americans.

Since those reforms, police and federal authorities have observed a wall between law enforcement information-gathering, relating to crimes and prosecutions, and more open-ended intelligence that relates to national security and counterterrorism. That wall is fast eroding following the passage of laws expanding surveillance authorities, the push for information-sharing networks, and the expectation that local and state police will play larger roles as national security sentinels.

Law enforcement and federal security authorities said these developments, along with a new willingness by police to share information, hold out the promise of fulfilling post-Sept. 11, 2001, mandates to connect the dots and root out signs of threats before attacks can occur.

Posted on March 31, 2008 at 6:13 AM • View Comments

Web Entrapment

Frightening sting operation by the FBI. They posted links to supposed child porn videos on boards frequented by those types, and obtained search warrants based on access attempts.

This seems like incredibly flimsy evidence. Someone could post the link as an embedded image, or send out e-mail with the link embedded, and completely mess with the FBI’s data—and the poor innocents’ lives. Such are the problems when the mere clicking on a link is justification for a warrant.

See also this Slashdot thread and this article.

Posted on March 27, 2008 at 2:46 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.