The Obama administration on Friday expanded the FBI’s more than eight-decade-old definition of rape to count men as victims for the first time and to drop the requirement that victims must have physically resisted their attackers.

The new definition will increase the number of people counted as rape victims in FBI statistics, but it will not change federal or state laws or alter charges or prosecutions. It’s an important shift because lawmakers and policymakers use crime statistics to allocate money and other resources for prevention and victim assistance.

The White House said the change was not motivated by the recent Penn State child sex-abuse scandal. Indeed, the expanded definition has been long awaited as many states and research groups made similar changes in their definitions of rape over recent decades.

Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett called the change a “very, very important step.” The issue got top-level White House attention starting last July, when Vice President Joe Biden raised it at a Cabinet meeting.

Biden, author of the Violence Against Women Act when he was in the Senate, said the new definition is a victory for women and men “whose suffering has gone unaccounted for over 80 years.” Calling rape a “devastating crime,” the vice president said, “We can’t solve it unless we know the full extent of it.”…

Nearly 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men in the U.S. have been raped at some time in their lives, according to a 2010 survey by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which used a broader definition.

Those figures were what framed much of the discussion, said Lynn Rosenthal, the White House adviser on violence against women.

1 in 71?  Somehow I suspect that’s inaccurate.  Read more here.

The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has recommended for many years that animal activists who carry out undercover investigations on farms could be prosecuted as domestic terrorists. New documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by activist Ryan Shapiro show the FBI advising that activists – including Shapiro – who walked onto a farm, videotaped animals there and “rescued” an animal had violated terrorism statutes.

The documents, which were first published on Will Potter’s website, Green Is the New Red, were issued by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in 2003 in response to an article in an animal rights publication in which Shapiro and two other activists (whose names were redacted from the document), openly claimed responsibility for shooting video and taking animals from a farm.

The FBI notes discuss the videotaping, illegal entry and the removal of animals, then concludes with “there is a reasonable indication that [Subject 1] and other members of the [redacted] have violated the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, 18 USC Section 43 (a).”

Curiously, the name of the act seems to be an error; the act was called the Animal Enterprise Protection Act until 2006, when it was largely superseded by an act called the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The crime named in the original 1992 act, however, was always called terrorism. The penalties for such a conviction can include terrorism enhancements which can add decades to a sentence.

Later, in 2004, Shapiro and a colleague, Sarahjane Blum, working as a group called Gourmet Cruelty, were prosecuted for a different but similar act in which they walked onto a fois gras farm, videotaped the operation and took a few ducks. They were prosecuted for felony burglary and pleaded to misdemeanor trespassing.

“Sarahjane and I and everyone with Gourmet Cruelty – the undercover investigation and especially the open rescue were acts of civil disobedience,” said Shapiro by phone. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at MIT. “We openly took credit for the things that we were doing in order to expose the horrific cruelty on factory farms and to educate the public about it. So a trespassing charge seemed like a perfectly reasonable price to pay.”

“However, it’s simply outrageous to consider civil disobedience as terrorism,” Shapiro adds. “Civil disobedience is not terrorism. It has a long and proud place in our nation’s history, from Martin Luther King to Occupy Wall Street, and the AETA takes that kind of advocacy that we celebrate from the civil rights movement and turns it into a terrorist event.”

Read more here.

It started out as a crimefighting tool. But over the years, an FBI effort known as “geo-mapping” evolved into something more expansive — a method to track Muslim communities, without any suspicion of a crime being committed.

Last month, Danger Room revealed that the FBI was training its agents that religious Muslims tended to be “violent” and that Islamic charity is merely a “funding mechanism for combat.” In response, both the FBI and the Justice Department promised full reviews of their training materials. But the geo-mapping effort indicates that the FBI may have more than just a training problem: The suspicion of ordinary Muslims promoted in those lectures may be spilling over into its counterterrorism tactics.

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union acquired some of the FBI geo-maps (.pdf), like the one pictured after the jump, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Although many of the maps are heavily redacted, they represent the first public confirmation that the FBI compiles maps of businesses, community centers and religious institutions in ethnic enclaves around the United States…

More: WIRED’s Danger Room

Prof. Martin E. Hugh-Jones

The FBI’s story about Bruce Ivins being the sole perpetrator of the 2001 post-9/11 Anthrax attacks was never very convincing, to say the least. Now three brave scientists are contradicting the FBI’s all-too-convenient version of events publicly. The cynic in me worries for their health… Report from the New York Times:

A decade after wisps of anthrax sent through the mail killed 5 people, sickened 17 others and terrorized the nation, biologists and chemists still disagree on whether federal investigators got the right man and whether the F.B.I.’s long inquiry brushed aside important clues.

Now, three scientists argue that distinctive chemicals found in the dried anthrax spores — including the unexpected presence of tin — point to a high degree of manufacturing skill, contrary to federal reassurances that the attack germs were unsophisticated. The scientists make their case in a coming issue of the Journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefense.

F.B.I. documents reviewed by The New York Times show that bureau scientists focused on tin early in their eight-year investigation, calling it an “element of interest” and a potentially critical clue to the criminal case. They later dropped their lengthy inquiry, never mentioned tin publicly and never offered any detailed account of how they thought the powder had been made.

The new paper raises the prospect — for the first time in a serious scientific forum — that the Army biodefense expert identified by the F.B.I. as the perpetrator, Bruce E. Ivins, had help in obtaining his germ weapons or conceivably was innocent of the crime…

[continues in the New York Times]

The FBI by mid-January will activate a nationwide facial recognition service in select states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos, bureau officials told Nextgov.

The federal government is embarking on a multiyear, $1 billion dollar overhaul of the FBI’s existing fingerprint database to more quickly and accurately identify suspects, partly through applying other biometric markers, such as iris scans and voice recordings.

Often law enforcement authorities will “have a photo of a person and for whatever reason they just don’t know who it is [but they know] this is clearly the missing link to our case,” said Nick Megna, a unit chief at the FBI’s criminal justice information services division. The new facial recognition service can help provide that missing link by retrieving a list of mug shots ranked in order of similarity to the features of the subject in the photo.

Today, an agent would have to already know the name of an individual to pull up the suspect’s mug shot from among the 10 million shots stored in the bureau’s existing Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Using the new Next-Generation Identification system that is under development, law enforcement analysts will be able to upload a photo of an unknown person; choose a desired number of results from two to 50 mug shots; and, within 15 minutes, receive identified mugs to inspect for potential matches…

[continues at Nextgov]

For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply “the Hacker.” Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device — a stingray — were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest.

Stingrays are designed to locate a mobile phone even when it’s not being used to make a call. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities, an FBI official told the Wall Street Journal in response to inquiries.

A stingray’s role in nabbing the alleged “Hacker” — Daniel David Rigmaiden — is shaping up as a possible test of the legal standards for using these devices in investigations. The FBI says it obtains appropriate court approval to use the device.

Stingrays are one of several new technologies used by law enforcement to track people’s locations, often without a search warrant. These techniques are driving a constitutional debate about whether the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but which was written before the digital age, is keeping pace with the times.

Read more: Wall Street Journal

Most people believe that COINTELPRO, the FBI program to infiltrate and neutralize domestic dissident groups, is a thing of the past; however, newly leaked documents by the hacker collective Anonymous have revealed a nearly ten year program in which the FBI colluded with school superintendents throughout the US to obtain recruits for it’s Peter Pan Project.

The Peter Pan Project was a series of mind manipulation experiments performed on unwitting children of the 1980s in the hopes of engineering sleeper agents who could be activated to quell future civil disorder in America. Documents reveal that the Peter Pan Project was the brainchild of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had outlined plans for the covert program shortly before his death in May 1972. The project was instituted in 1981 under then director, William H. Webster, and had been kept secret for decades until “hacktivists” infiltrated the network and web sites of the FBI and passed the information to news agencies.

As revealed in one FBI document, the stated goal of the Peter Pan Project was in effect to create a legion of “boys who wouldn’t grow up,” dubbed “Manchildren,” in preparation for the total financial collapse of the United States, which Hoover believed would occur within 40 years of Nixon’s having taken the dollar off of the gold standard in 1971. Manchildren, who would be in their 30s and 40s when the American economy reached its nadir, would at that time be activated by a series of post-hypnotic triggers, causing them to regress to a child-like frame of mind and thus mitigating the possibility of widespread domestic unrest. Manchildren would be too preoccupied with activities they loved in their youth, such as playing with G.I. Joe figurines or watching Transformers’ movies, to have even a remote awareness of current events.

In cooperation with the FBI throughout the 1980s, elementary schools across the US administered personality tests to students ages 7-10, which were used to assess the suitability of candidates for the treatment. Records indicate that ideal recruits were male children of above average intelligence, who had the potential to be fairly successful – yet for one reason or another were lacking in motivation: in other words, the classic underachievers. The FBI enlisted the expertise of Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, a chemist and former head of the CIA’s clandestine mind control program Project MKUltra, to develop a fluoride solution that would render recipients docile and open to suggestion. Under Dr. Gottlieb’s instructions fluoride mouthrinses were administered by unsuspecting teachers who were told students must swish daily to prevent cavities. The plastic dose cups in which the solution was served were specially designed by Dr. Gottlieb to leach oestrogenic compounds that reduced testosterone levels in males, causing a long-term reduction of muscle mass and an increase in body fat. Recruits were fastened into cubicles equipped with a monitor and headphones and made to spend as many as six hours a day watching a prescribed program of contemporary cartoons, sitcoms and movies as their brainwaves and eye movements were monitored by electrosensors and special cameras. The treatment culminated in anchoring a euphoric childhood state to key phrases, called “triggers,” embedded within 1980s classics. When the Manchildren perceived the triggers at a future date they would become activated, slipping back into their childhood frame of mind and dissolving their adult problems. Crucial to the program’s success was that recruits forgot they’d ever undergone the treatment; the only remaining traces being an encyclopedic knowledge of 1980s pop culture, a low muscle mass index and the emotional maturity of an 8-year-old.

“With the Peter Pan Project, the FBI capitalized on the explosion of children’s entertainment in the ’80s to engrave their ‘Manchild’ agenda in the hearts and minds of America’s future.” said Dr. Emmitt Fitzhume, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas, Austin who currently serves as Assistant councilman on the Congressional Commission formed to prepare a complete account of the FBI’s activities under The Peter Pan Project. A heavily redacted Peter Pan memo dated June 11, 1982 referred to the FBI’s use of ‘entertainment liaisons’ working in an ‘advisory capacity’ with filmmakers to ‘doctor’ scripts. In 1985 the bureau purchased the rights to the screenplay Big and subsequently financed the production of the film. Rumors that had long been circulating about FBI involvement in the Tom Hanks vehicle have been substantiated by the Congressional Commission’s findings. Upon the repeal of the Glass-Steigel Act in 1999, the bureau officially established it’s Entertainment Liaisons Office and exerted its influence to foment an “’80s nostalgia craze,” halting production on original material in favor of revisiting the greatest hits of the seminal decade. This agenda served the dual purpose of insuring investors a return on their money through the material’s “built-in” audience and activating the latent Manchildren.

In October 2008, millions of Peter Pan operatives were installed in companies throughout the nation determined to be most vulnerable to collapse as part of a backdoor TARP deal made between then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the FBI and business leaders to minimize the collateral damage of potential economic fallout. The operatives’ enthusiasm and attention-seeking antics brought levity to their host companies during times of economic duress, and their presence was an insurance policy in the event of bankruptcy or massive job cuts. “We’re taking about an elite team of the most highly trained slackers our government has ever produced,” said Gerald Strickland, a distinguished lawyer who serves as special counsel on the Congressional Commission. Corporate America began to take note of the Manchildren. Their child-like behavior was seen as the harbinger of a brave, new post-industrial economy of ideas, playfulness and creativity, which would soon be under way. Major companies like Google “got into the groove” by introducing atypical office decor, such as vintage arcade games, giant Rubik’s cubes and large metal slides down which employees could descend to have lunch in the cafeteria, all in an effort to foster the carefree impulses of the Manchildren. In sworn testimony before the Congressional Commission, Clay Stork, a 32-year-old man who moonwalked off his job as an office assistant in Trenton, NJ, described the Manchildren’s gradual infiltration of corporate office space thusly, “It’s basically like in Gremlins when the water spills on Gizmo and he spazzes out and there are like five more of him.”

By the summer of 2011, the outlook for the American economy was grim. Though his ethics and reasoning were often questionable at best, it appeared as though Hoover’s dark prophecy for the nation’s future might be coming to pass. The United States of America had gone from the world’s lone super power with a balanced budget to a debtor nation that had lost its sterling Triple AAA credit rating. Bank accounts were negative, entire communities of family homes had been foreclosed, record numbers of people were on food stamps and public assistance, millions more were unemployed. Signs of a double dip recession in the third quarter meant that social unrest was likely to ensue. Fearing that the revolutionary wave sweeping through the Arab world might soon reach America, the FBI decided to activate The Peter Pan Project and with that a roster of revamped ’80s classics were slated for summer release.

“The plan was to rally the Manchildren just as the economy began to hemorrhage, so rather than Bank of America announcing it had to cut 185,000 jobs, the ‘activated’ Manchildren would skip home like kids after a school cancellation or be too engrossed in trading comic books to show up for work at all,” said Everette H. Hunt, an FBI defector and Peter Pan whistleblower. Each Manchild believed he was acting upon his own free will, when in fact his behavior was the planned result of one of the largest, most carefully coordinated efforts ever undertaken by a federal agency.

On July 29, 2011, under a directive of current FBI chief Robert Mueller, a mass activation was launched in the form of the national release of The Smurfs 3D family film, which mobilized over 500,000 Peter Pan operatives throughout the country. “No shows” were reported at companies across the nation as the debt ceiling disputes raged in the legislature. “The phrase ‘Oh my Smurf’ catalyzed an apparent psychogenic fugue within the Manchildren, causing them to permanently regress to a dreamy state of indifference to civic responsibility, paying bills or professional commitments,” said Dr. Fitzhume. In Greeley, CO, 523 employees of State Farm Insurance gleefully surrendered their jobs without making any demands of management, after which a large portion of the newly unemployed immediately proceeded to go roller skating at a local rink. 93 construction laborers in Odessa, TX submitted their resignations hand-written with Crayola crayons, citing as reasons for leaving everything from a need to practice their BMX freestyle to an sudden burning desire for Jello Pudding Pops. The common factors in all cases were that each of the suspected operatives had seen the newly released Smurfs movie at a local 3D IMAX, and they’d all wandered off the job to pursue highly impractical whims.

Rumors involving the smurfs in crypto-communist/fascist subversion are nothing new; the internet abounds with allegations that such themes have been intentionally encoded within the beloved cartoon. That the tiny blue creatures would be used to trigger an FBI plot intended to passively ease us into corporate feudal serfdom comes as no surprise to some. “Look at the Smurfs; they all wear the same outfit, eat communal meals, persecute their Jewish neighbor and kneel before a red-capped patriarch. Tell me that’s not propaganda,” said Theodore Logan, a motel desk clerk in Ozark, MO.

FBI whistleblowers warn that many more Peter Pan operatives are nestled in among us. They are potentially our neighbors, coworkers and family members, quite possibly the teller at the bank or the very teachers in our children’s schools. They may even be posing as mature adults with varying degrees of success, awaiting further triggers that have yet to be released.

Phil Weaver is a NYC-based filmmaker with Imperium Pictures, currently completing The Gent (a feature starring Genesis P-Orridge, Douglas Rushkoff et al), and a short in which British director Ken Russell portrays Aleister Crowley.

In May 2009 David Williams was keeping watch at the corner of 246th Street and Independence Avenue in the Bronx, New York — the look out for a terror group aiming to blow up a building nearby. The target was the Riverdale Jewish Center where the terror cell’s leader, James Cromitie, was planting what he believed to be two devices containing C-4 plastic explosive.

Having completed their task, the four man team planned to then head back to their hometown of Newburgh, a run-down town 60 miles (97km) north of New York City, where they intended to use a surface-to-air missile to take down a military plane at the Stewart Air National Guard Base.

The weapons had been provided by a Pakistani man. A few weeks earlier he had met the four men to discuss the attacks. He had accompanied them as they selected a site from which to fire the missile and he was also with them when they bought mobile phones for the plot, and travelled to a Connecticut warehouse to obtain the missile and explosives.

Before the team could return to Newburgh and attack their second target a Swat team moved in and arrested the cell — all except the Pakistani. He was in fact an undercover informant working for the FBI, and the weapons he provided were an inactive missile and inert explosives. The four others were subsequently found guilty of terrorism offences and each sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Read More: BBC

The hacker collective Anonymous has released a fresh batch of data taken from Vanguard Defense Industries, a Pentagon and FBI contractor.

The data release was revealed via a post on tor2web.org and later publicised on the group’s AnonymousIRC Twitter account. In it the group claimed to have released “1GB of private emails and documents belonging to Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI).”

Anonymous later said the e-mails belong to the contractor’s senior vice president, Richard T. Garcia, and contained information regarding “internal meeting notes and contracts, schematics, non-disclosure agreements, personal information about other VDI employees, and several dozen ‘counter-terrorism’ documents classified as ‘law enforcement sensitive’ and ‘for official use only.’”

A key bit of information highlighted in its release pertained to Vanguard Defense Industries’ ShadowHawk drones, which are used by military, law enforcement and private companies across the world and are loaded with grenade launchers and shotguns. Despite highlighting the ShadowHawk unmanned aerial vehicle, the group offered no clear reason for the attack on Vanguard Defense Industries besides its association with military and law enforcement agencies.

Read More: International Business Times

The phone hacking scandal that has ignited a political firestorm in Britain jumped the Atlantic on Thursday as the FBI opened an investigation into whether British reporters tried to access cellphone messages and records of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in violation of U.S. law.

The preliminary probe further rattled the New York-based global media empire of Rupert Murdoch, who was forced this week to withdraw his $12-billion bid to take over Britain’s largest satellite broadcaster, and raises new questions about the future of News Corp.

U.S. officials said the FBI is trying to determine if a full investigation is warranted, and no evidence has yet emerged to confirm that News Corp. employees sought to hack phones in the United States. But the unfolding scandal sent the company’s battered stock down another 3% in trading.

Read More: LA Times

Hemingway’s depression and instability has been well-documented, but what is interesting is that the FBI’s monitoring of his phones, correspondence and activities contributed to his sense of fear and paranoia.

This could be the rare case of someone who’s paranoia about “being watched” is actually due to the fact that he/she is actually being monitored. A. E. Hotchner writes:

EARLY one morning, [on July 1st], while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life.

There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that it was an accident, that he’d quarreled with Mary. None were true. As his friends knew, he’d been suffering from depression and paranoia for the last year of his life.

Ernest and I were friends for 14 years. I dramatized many of his stories and novels for television specials and film, and we shared adventures in France, Italy, Cuba and Spain, where, as a pretend matador with Ernest as my manager, I participated in a Ciudad Real bullfight. Ernest’s zest for life was infectious.

Read More: NY Times

Illustration: RadioKirk (CC)

Very startling observations from Sam Biddle on Gizmodo:

The easiest way to change the rules that apply to you is to just rewrite them yourself. So the FBI’s done exactly that, the NYT reports, self-releasing a new edition of its rulebook. Let’s dig through some garbage, Fed bros!

The “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide” is the FBI’s big fat guide to investigative dos and don’ts. Formerly under the don’t category: administer lie detector tests, go through private residential garbage, and send out “surveillance squads” without any firm evidence that the person in question might possibly be a criminal. Not anymore! This is a new, chill, laid back FBI. Who needs evidence?

Now the Feds can do all of the above as an “assessment”—basically an entirely informal version of an official investigation, allowable without any proof that anyone’s up to anything illegal. So, if the FBI cares to, it can now “assess” you. By following you and going through your trashcans.

Read More from Sam Biddle on Gizmodo

Photo: J.Smith831 (CC)

Via Russia Today:

In 2008 the FBI managed to track down a stolen Ferrari — much to the owners delight — but not for long. An agent decided to take the car for a spin before it was returned to the owner. He crashed it and no one is willing to pay-up.

The owner is suing the US Justice Department because the FBI refuses to pay the estimate $750,000 in damages to the vehicle.

The Ferrari F50 was initially stolen in 2003 from a dealer in Rosemont, Pennsylvania. After it was reported stolen the ownership was transferred to Motors Insurance. The vehicle is only one of 50 1995 Ferrari F50 sports cars in the United States.

After the sports car was found it was taken to an FBI facility in Lexington, Kentucky for the duration of the investigation. While in Kentucky however it met its demise.

FBI agent Fred Kingston was instructed to move the car from the FBI garage and decided to invite Assistant US Attorney J. Hamilton Thompson along for the ride.

“Just a few seconds after we left the parking lot, we went around a curve and the rear of the car began sliding,” Thompson said in an email to Motors Insurance Company. “The agent tried to regain control but the car fishtailed and slid sideways up onto the curb. The vehicle came to rest against a row of bushes and a small tree.” The car suffered multiple large dents, and according to Motors Insurance, is a “total loss.”

For more information, see original article.

AUSTIN, Tex. — A fat sheaf of F.B.I. reports meticulously details the surveillance that counterterrorism agents directed at the one-story house in East Austin. For at least three years, they traced the license plates of cars parked out front, recorded the comings and goings of residents and guests and, in one case, speculated about a suspicious flat object spread out across the driveway.

“The content could not be determined from the street,” an agent observing from his car reported one day in 2005. “It had a large number of multi-colored blocks, with figures and/or lettering,” the report said, and “may be a sign that is to be used in an upcoming protest.”

Actually, the item in question was more mundane.

“It was a quilt,” said Scott Crow, marveling over the papers at the dining table of his ramshackle home, where he lives with his wife, a housemate and a backyard menagerie that includes two goats, a dozen chickens and a turkey. “For a kids’ after-school program.”

Mr. Crow, 44, a self-described anarchist and veteran organizer of anticorporate demonstrations, is among dozens of political activists across the country known to have come under scrutiny from the F.B.I.’s increased counterterrorism operations since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Other targets of bureau surveillance, which has been criticized by civil liberties groups and mildly faulted by the Justice Department’s inspector general, have included antiwar activists in Pittsburgh, animal rights advocates in Virginia and liberal Roman Catholics in Nebraska. When such investigations produce no criminal charges, their methods rarely come to light publicly.

But Mr. Crow, a lanky Texas native who works at a recycling center, is one of several Austin activists who asked the F.B.I. for their files, citing the Freedom of Information Act. The 440 heavily-redacted pages he received, many bearing the rubric “Domestic Terrorism,” provide a revealing window on the efforts of the bureau, backed by other federal, state and local police agencies, to keep an eye on people it deems dangerous…

[continues in the New York Times]

Kathy Thomas knew she was under surveillance. The animal rights and environmental activist had been trailed daily by cops over several months, and had even been stopped on occasion by police and FBI agents.

But when the surveillance seemed to halt suddenly in mid-2005 after she confronted one of the agents, she thought it was all over. Months went by without a peep from the FBI surveillance teams that had been tracking her in undercover vehicles and helicopters. That’s when it occurred to her to check her car.

Rumors had been swirling among activists that the FBI might be using GPS to track them — two activists in Colorado discovered mysterious devices attached to their car bumpers in 2003 — so Thomas (a pseudonym) went out to the vehicle in a frenzy and ran her hands beneath the rear bumper. She was only half-surprised to find a small electronic device and foot-long battery wand secured to her metal fender with industrial-strength magnets.

Read More: WIRED’s Threat Level

One of the many air sampling locations set up around the site of the World Trade Center.

This is really just the cherry on top of the icing on the cake in terms of how ailing 9/11 heroes have been treated. Michael McAuliff writes in the Huffington Post:

A provision in the new 9/11 health bill may be adding insult to injury for people who fell sick after their service in the aftermath of the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks, The Huffington Post has learned.

The tens of thousands of cops, firefighters, construction workers and others who survived the worst terrorist assault in U.S. history and risked their lives in its wake will soon be informed that their names must be run through the FBI’s terrorism watch list, according to a letter obtained by HuffPost.

Any of the responders who are not compared to the database of suspected terrorists would be barred from getting treatment for the numerous, worsening ailments that the James Zadroga 9/11 Health And Compensation Law was passed to address.

It’s a requirement that was tacked onto the law during the bitter debates over it last year.

The letter from Dr. John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, informs medical providers and administrators that they should begin letting patients know before the new program kicks in this July.

“This is absurd,” said Glen Kline, a former NYPD emergency services officer. “It’s silly. It’s stupid. It’s asinine.”

“It’s comical at best, and I think it’s an insult to everyone who worked on The Pile and is sick and suffering from 9/11,” said John Feal, a former construction worker who lost half a foot at Ground Zero and runs the advocacy group Fealgood Foundation…

[continues at Huffington Post]

Composite sketch of the suspect in the Christopher Wallace shooting.

View the documents in the FBI’s Vault, a new website for records never before released to the public. Via CNN:

The 1997 murder of Christopher Wallace, the rapper also known as The Notorious B.I.G. and Biggie Smalls, remains an unsolved crime despite Los Angeles police and FBI investigations that lasted for years.

The FBI, which joined the case five years after the shooting, opened up its files this week by publishing hundreds of pages of investigation reports and notes from its probe on the agencies website.

Readers get a behind-the-scenes look at the FBI and LAPD’s work, but the documents are heavily redacted, hiding the names of sources, investigators and suspects.

The drive-by shooting, in front of dozens of witnesses who were leaving a music industry party in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997, spurred several conspiracy theories, but no arrests.

Smalls, 24, was killed six months after his former friend and rap rival Tupac Shakur was gunned down on a Las Vegas street, causing suspicion that both shootings were part of an “East Coast versus West Coast” hip hop war. Shakur recorded for Marion “Suge” Knight’s Los Angeles-based Death Row Records, while Smalls was signed with New York-based Bad Boy Entertainment, founded by Sean “Puffy” Combs.

The FBI opened its case in December 2002 because of “multiple source information” that Smalls was killed “in retaliation for the murder of Tupac Shakur” and that a rogue LAPD officer was involved, an FBI report said. The FBI’s case was closed in January 2005 when the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles decided there was enough evidence for indictments in the case, according to one letter in the files.

For more information, see the FBI documents here or see original CNN article.

On April 4, 1949, FBI agents in Utah sent a cable marked “urgent” to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. It said an Army guard at the Ogden Supply Depot, a Logan policeman and a Utah Highway Patrol officer in Mantua each saw from miles apart a UFO — which they said exploded over Utah.

Under the title “Flying Discs,” the cable said they “saw a silver colored object high up approaching the mountains at Sardine Canyon” that “appeared to explode in a rash of fire. Several residents at Trenton … [reported] seeing what appeared to be two aerial explosions followed by falling object.”

That and other documents show the FBI was investigating whether UFOs were real, and it figured they could be. Such documents are now available in “The Vault,” vault.fbi.gov, a revamped FBI website for documents that have been released through the Freedom of Information Act and have been recently or often requested.

Besides talking about Utah UFOs, other Utah-related documents on the website look at such things as FBI snooping into whether the Salt Lake City NAACP had been infiltrated by communists; a death threat in Utah against Lady Bird Johnson; and Hoover lambasting W. Cleon Skousen — a Utahn who has become an icon of the tea party movement.

“The new website significantly increases the number of available FBI files, enhances the speed at which the files can be accessed, and contains a robust search capability,” David Hardy, chief of the FBI’s Record/Information Dissemination Section, said in a statement…

[continues at the Salt Lake Tribune]

On June 30, 1999, sheriff’s officers in St. Louis, Missouri discovered the body of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick. He had been murdered and dumped in a field. The only clues regarding the homicide were two encrypted notes found in the victim’s pants pockets.

Despite extensive work by our Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU), as well as help from the American Cryptogram Association, the meanings of those two coded notes remain a mystery to this day, and Ricky McCormick’s murderer has yet to face justice.

“We are really good at what we do,” said CRRU chief Dan Olson, “but we could use some help with this one.”

In fact, Ricky McCormick’s encrypted notes are one of CRRU’s top unsolved cases. “Breaking the code,” said Olson, “could reveal the victim’s whereabouts before his death and could lead to the solution of a homicide. Not every cipher we get arrives at our door under those circumstances.”

Read More: FBI’s official website

Driven by advances in technology, customer requirements, and growing demand for Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) services, the FBI has initiated the Next Generation Identification (NGI) program. This program will further advance the FBI’s biometric identification services, providing an incremental replacement of current IAFIS technical capabilities, while introducing new functionality. NGI improvements and new capabilities will be introduced across a multi-year timeframe within a phased approach. The NGI system will offer state-of-the-art biometric identification services and provide a flexible framework of core capabilities that will serve as a platform for multimodal functionality. A full and open competition was used to award the NGI contract to Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions. This multi-million dollar contract will consist of a base year and the potential for up to nine option years.

NGI will be the cornerstone that enables CJIS to meet its growing and evolving mission and continue to build its reputation as a global biometrics leader…

1. Quality Check Automation
   The Quality Check function of IAFIS is one of the first steps in IAFIS ten-print processing in which textual information is reviewed. At one point in time 98% of all transactions required a manual review. As of July 1, 2007, Auto QC was implemented. The QC Automation capability has eliminated the manual review of the majority of fingerprint transactions. Approximately 15% still require a manual review. This automation has provided our customers with faster response times and more consistent processing decisions. Just to give you an idea of how QC affects response times, the average processing time with QC automation is approximately .7 seconds, as opposed to a manual QC processing time of 16.1 seconds.
2. Interstate Photo System Enhancements
   Currently, the IAFIS can accept photographs (mugshots) with criminal ten-print submissions. The Interstate Photo System (IPS) will allow customers to add photographs to previously submitted arrest data, submit photos with civil submissions, and submit photos in bulk formats. The IPS will also allow for easier retrieval of photos, and include the ability to accept and search for photographs of scars, marks, and tattoos. In addition, this initiative will also explore the capability of facial recognition technology.
3. Disposition Reporting Improvements
   The NGI Program will provide a variety of options to increase the submission of disposition data. These options will include the electronic submission of disposition data via the Interstate Identification Index, the CJIS Wide Area Network, CD-ROM and other standard media, and potentially through a direct connection to federal courts. A portion of this modernization began on September 2, 2007.
4. Advanced Fingerprint Identification Technology
   Advanced Fingerprint Identification Technology will provide faster, more efficient IAFIS identification processing, increased search accuracy, improved latent processing services, and allow for seamless searches of ten-flat fingerprint impressions for noncriminal justice purposes. (See below tables for IAFIS and NGI response times.)
   The Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC) provides law enforcement and partnering agencies with rapid/mobile identification services to quickly assess the level of threat that an encountered individual poses. Using a minimum of two or a maximum of ten fingerprint images-flat or rolled-RISC currently conducts an automated search against a limited population of approximately 2 million records. Currently the records include:

   Electronic Ten-Print Response Times – IAFIS
   	Criminal	Civil
   Response Time	2 hours	24 hours
   Completion Rate	97.6%	98.8%

   Electronic Ten-Print Response Times – NGI
   	Criminal	Civil
   High	10 minutes	15 minutes
   Routine	30 minutes	2 hours
   Low	24 hours	24 hours
   Non-Urgent	15 days	15 days

   - Wanted Persons
   - Sex Offender Registry Subjects
   - Known or Suspected Terrorists

   Current RISC responses include the Red/Yellow/Green flag, the category of hit, the FBI number, the master name and the response caveats. The RISC Rapid Search supports multi-tiered enrollment and dissemination policies and maintains unique identities for the individuals enrolled in the repository…

Go to on the FBI’s site for much more information.

A former FBI informant who infiltrated a California mosque violated the constitutional rights of Muslims by conducting “indiscriminate surveillance” because of their religion, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles was filed by the ACLU of Southern California and the Los Angeles office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. It named the FBI and seven of its agents and supervisors, the Washington Post reported.

The lawsuit alleges ex-FBI informant Craig Monteilh was ordered by his supervisors to target Muslims for surveillance, violating their First Amendment right to freedom of religion. The lawsuit seeks class-action status, unspecified damages and a court order instructing the FBI to destroy or return the information Monteilh collected.

Monteilh infiltrated an Orange County mosque and helped build a case against an Afghan-born man who was arrested on terrorism-related charges in 2009.

The lawsuit claims that Monteilh’s handlers, FBI agents Kevin Armstrong and Paul Allen, instructed him to collect e-mail addresses, phone numbers and other detailed information about Muslims and “explicitly told Monteilh that Islam was a threat to America’s national security,” according to the Post…

For more information, see original article.

Bruce Ivins. Photo: U.S. Army

Vindication of sorts for critics who said that the FBI falsely pinned blame for the mailed anthrax attacks shortly after 9/11 on the conveniently dead Bruce Ivins. Carol Cratty reports for CNN:

Using the available scientific evidence “it is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion” about the source of the anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax letter attacks which killed five people, according to a report issued Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings come two and a half years after the FBI said Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins was allegedly behind the anthrax mailings, and the spores could be genetically traced to a flask labeled RMR-1029 in his lab.

The scientific panel said the anthrax used in mailings to news organizations and members of Congress was the Ames strain Bacillus anthracis, and spores from those letters shared “a number of genetic similarities” with spores in Ivins’ flask. But the findings say the FBI did not fully explore other possible explanations for those similarities.

Ivins knew he was under suspicion by the FBI and committed suicide in July 2008 before any charges were filed against him. Ivins was involved in anthrax vaccine research at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.

Paul Kemp, a lawyer who represented Ivins, said that since August 2008, the Justice Department has maintained it had a “smoking gun” in the case against Ivins, citing the flask.

“Their smoking gun just turned into smoke and mirrors,” Kemp said of the report. “They said they had a smoking gun that would have convicted him (Ivins) in court and this report shows they didn’t.”
Kemp later added: “Over 200 people had access to the anthrax that came out of that flask.”

In response to the report, the FBI said, while the scientific investigation could not pinpoint the source of the anthrax, it helped its agents and the Justice Department to focus resources and conclude that Ivins was behind the attacks…

[continues at CNN]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a report over the weekend detailing an alarming amount of violations from FBI intelligence investigations between 2001 and 2008. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI released 2,500 documents detailing violations made to the Intelligence Oversight board. The documents highlight nearly 800 specific violations stemming from FBI monitoring of American citizens, resident aliens and non-residents alike.

According to the report, violations include “submitting false or inaccurate declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain federal grand jury subpoenas and accessing password protected documents without a warrant.” Of those violations, “over 1/3^rd involved rules governing internal oversight of intelligence investigations, 1/3^rd involved abuse, misuse or careless use of the Bureau’s National Security Letter authority and almost one fifth involved a violation of the Constitution or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.” The EFF report states that could be just the tip of the iceberg, noting that tens of thousands of intelligence abuse violations could have occurred.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

An FBI employee shared confidential information with his girlfriend, who was a news reporter, then later threatened to release a sex tape the two had made.

A supervisor watched pornographic videos in his office during work hours while “satisfying himself.”

And an employee in a “leadership position” misused a government database to check on two friends who were exotic dancers and allowed them into an FBI office after hours.

These are among confidential summaries of FBI disciplinary reports obtained by CNN, which describe misconduct by agency supervisors, agents and other employees over the last three years.

The reports, compiled by the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, are e-mailed quarterly to FBI employees, but are not released to the public.

And despite the bureau’s very strict screening procedure for all prospective employees, the FBI confirms that about 325 to 350 employees a year receive some kind of discipline, ranging from a reprimand to suspension.

About 30 employees each year are fired.

“We do have a no-tolerance policy,” FBI Assistant Director Candice Will told CNN. “We don’t tolerate our employees engaging in misconduct. We expect them to behave pursuant to the standards of conduct imposed on all FBI employees.”

However, she said, “It doesn’t mean that we fire everybody. You know, our employees are human, as we all are. We all make mistakes. So, our discipline is intended to reflect that…

For more information, see original article.

Charles Schumer

Thanks to Chris W. for sending this along, commenting, “Admit you’ve used illegal drugs? You may be disqualified if Senator Chuck Schumer has his way” (reported by Fox News):

If someone admits to a federal official that he’s used illegal drugs, that information should be sent to the FBI so that person can be disqualified from purchasing a gun, Sen. Chuck Schumer said Sunday.

Noting that the alleged shooter in the Tucson massacre had admitted to military recruiters that he had used drugs on several occasions, Schumer said he is proposing to the Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that the military be required to notify federal officials about such admissions. The New York Democrat said such a process does not require new legislation.

Jared Lee Loughner is charged with five federal counts in the killing of a federal judge and shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The mass shooting January 8 outside a Safeway grocery store resulted in six dead and 13 injured.

A military official told Fox News last week that Loughner was rejected from enlisting in the Army in 2008 because he admitted he had used drugs. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because privacy laws prevent the military from disclosing such information about an individual’s application.

Schumer said if military recruiters or other officials report admissions of drug use to a national database, those individuals could be denied a gun…

[continues at Fox News]

"War 2" by Carlos Latuff

Charles Davis reports:

The FBI on Tuesday added four more names to the list of antiwar activists subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury as part of an investigation into whether members of the peace movement provided “material support” for terrorism. In all, 23 people have been subpoenaed since September 24, when the FBI raided the offices and homes of prominent activists in Chicago and Minneapolis. None has been charged with a crime. Several have also refused to testify in what they say is a witch hunt aimed more at intimidating those who dare speak out against U.S. foreign policy than uncovering actual ties to terrorists.

And they’re probably right.

Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling this past June, the definition of “material support” for terrorism is now so broad as to include any sort of “advice” to a State Department-designated terrorist group, even if that advice is “stop engaging in terrorism and embrace nonviolence.” Former President Jimmy Carter and groups such as the ACLU and Human Rights Watch have spoken out against the ruling.

Because the definition is so broad, though, it provides the perfect legal basis for the government to go after those opposed to its policies abroad. And as the Bush administration ably demonstrated, there are plenty of people in government who would be all too happy to equate opposition to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen – just to name a few – as de facto support for terrorism.

Read more here.

The FBI is warning law agencies that the new Barbie “Video Girl” doll could be used as a tool by pedophiles to make child pornography.

In an alert entitled “Barbie ‘Video Girl’ a Possible Child Pornography Production Method,” the FBI said the doll has a built-in hidden camera in the chest and a small LCD screen for video display in her back. The FBI “cyber crime alert” doesn’t cite any misuse of the doll, which has been on the market since July, but talks about the possibility.

“FBI investigation has revealed instances where an individual convicted of distributing child pornography had given a Barbie doll to a 6 year old girl,” the alert said.

The document went on to cite the findings of another investigation that found “examples where a concealed video camera had recorded child pornography.” That camera didn’t involve a doll, FBI special agent Frederick Gutt in Seattle, Washington, said Friday.

“The possibility of the combination of these two in a single device presents a concern for investigators,” said the alert, dated November 30…

Michael Mukasey

Agence France Presse reports via AlterNet:

In a statement, the department said that after an “exhaustive investigation” an official heading the probe decided that he “will not pursue criminal charges” for the destruction of the interrogation tapes filmed at secret prisons.

In January 2008, then-US attorney general Michael Mukasey opened the inquiry after the revelation that the CIA three years earlier had destroyed tapes showing harsh interrogations of two Al-Qaeda suspects.

Federal prosecutor John Durham was tapped to lead the FBI probe in possible crimes after the CIA acknowledged that it had destroyed 92 interrogation videos.

The probe was launched to examine whether intelligence officials broke the law by destroying the videos of the interrogations, which were conducted in the the months following the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

At the time the probe was launched, then-CIA director Michael Hayden said the tapes had been destroyed to protect the identities of intelligence agents tasked with interrogating the terror suspects.

But some US lawmakers and international rights campaigners dismissed the explanation, charging that the destruction of the tapes was meant to cover up alleged detainee torture.

Read more here.

Anwar Al Awlaki - Terrorist? Pentagon/CIA Employee? Same Thing!

Al-Qaeda terror mastermind Anwar Al-Awlaki, the man who helped plot the aborted Christmas Day bombing, the Fort Hood shooting, the Times Square bombing attempt, and who also preached to the alleged September 11 hijackers, dined at the Pentagon just months after 9/11 documents obtained by Fox News show. Thursday, October 21, 2010

American-born cleric Awlaki’s role as a key figure in almost every recent terror plot targeting the United States and Canada, coupled with his visit to the Pentagon, only confirms our long stated position that Awlaki is a chief terrorist patsy-handler for the CIA: he is the federal government’s premier false flag agent.

“Documents exclusively obtained by Fox News, including an FBI interview conducted after the Fort Hood shooting in November 2009, state that Awlaki was taken to the Pentagon as part of the military’s outreach to the Muslim community in the immediate aftermath of the attacks,” states the report…

Al-Awlaki is a U.S. Citizen, who pursued a Doctorate in Education at George Washington University in Washington D.C.

Al-Awlaki is a U.S. Citizen, who pursued a Doctorate in Education at George Washington University in Washington D.C.

George Washington University is known for having close ties to the intelligence community, the most public of which is that GWU maintains the National Security Archive.

The Washington Post has reported that George Washington University has CIA employees teaching courses on their campus, as part of the CIA’s “Officers in Residence” program….