FBI chief Robert Mueller told a U.S. Senate committee he hasn’t bothered calling New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly about the latest terror threat, reports the New York Daily News. If Kelly wanted to know more about the foiled Yemeni underwear bomb plot, he could have picked up the phone and called, Mueller said. “As I told Ray, he’s always welcome to call,” he said, repeatedly referring to the commissioner as “Ray.”
Mueller found himself being grilled by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) about his secret-hoarding after Kelly fumed that the NYPD had been left in the dark on the details of the plot. “That’s the type of information, quite frankly, that we need, deserve,” Kelly vented. The FBI got around to briefing NYPD brass Monday. Schumer asked Mueller to call Kelly, suggesting that his failure to brief Kelly underscored a growing rift between the FBI and NYPD. “No, no, no, no,” Mueller insisted. “There are always bumps in the road. And every six months or so, Ray Kelly and I get together and discuss those bumps in the road and move on.” Mueller may say the FBI and the NYPD work well together, but an FBI source said that’s far from true.
Read full entry »A preliminary FBI count shows that 72 U.S. law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty last year, up 16 from 2010. Of last year's...
Read full entry »
By Graham Kates
Romance scams and other online frauds swindled Americans out of nearly $500 million in 2011.
Read full entry »Jamal Tarhuni spent more than 100 hours on trains an cars traveling from Portland to Washington, D.C., and back because he is one of about 500 U.S. citizens on a no-fly list because they are believed to be air-terrorism threats, says the Oregonian. Like many others on the list, the 55-year-old businessman says he has no idea why he is on it.
The FBI won't comment on its reasons for blocking Tarhuni -- even to him. Tarhuni is at a loss for how to defend himself against accusations that no one will divulge. A civil liberties group representing 16 U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents on the no-fly list will argue next month that its lawsuit against the FBI should be heard in federal court. Director Timothy Healy of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center said that people who land on no-fly lists are those whom the government has a "reasonable suspicion" are associated with terrorism, Healy said. That standard falls below the "probable cause" threshold for arresting suspects and was established by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1968 decision in Terry vs. Ohio.
Read full entry »After Osama bin Laden was killed in May, the FBI started seeking fugitives who could fill his place on the bureau’s 10 Most Wanted list. The New York Times says it's more complicated than finding any old criminal who has committed a high-profile crime. The bureau has been trying to highlight dangerous fugitives who may have been hiding in plain sight but could be recognized by distinctive features.
Now bin Laden's place has been filled by Eric Toth, a Washington, D.C.-area tacher accused of possessing child porn. It was the first time since 2009 that the FBI has added a fugitive to the list. Using most-wanted posters to enlist the public’s help in catching criminals dates to J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure in the early 1930s, when the face of the notorious bank robber John Dillinger was on a “public enemies list.”
An FBI intelligence analyst in Chicago who allegedly missed becoming an agent by a single pushup has filed a gender-discrimination lawsuit alleging that the FBI's fitness test is flawed and biased against men, reports the Chicago Tribune. Jay Bauer, a Northwestern University doctoral graduate, joined the FBI in 2009. He passed a fitness test before entering new-agent training at Quantico, Va., where he scored at or near the top of his class in everything from firearms training to academics, he says.
Trainees must pass another fitness exam at the FBI Academy. Men must complete at least 38 situps in a minute and do 30 untimed pushups. Male candidates also must sprint 300 meters in 52.4 seconds and run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes and 24 seconds. Bauer allegedly fulfilled all the other requirements, but after managing to do only 29 pushups, he was forced to resign from agent training. He took an FBI analyst's job in Chicago, where he'd already relocated his wife and two young children. His attorneys argued that a female trainee who scored near the bottom of the class in firearms proficiency was given another attempt at the fitness test, but Bauer wasn't. They also argued that the FBI's fitness standards — which before 2003 required men to do 25 pushups — are comparatively harder for males.
Read full entry »Andrew Arena, 49, will retire next month as the top FBI official in Detroit to run the Detroit Crime Commission, a new nonprofit that says it is dedicated to dismantling criminal enterprises in metro Detroit, reports the Detroit Free Press. During his five years heading the FBI Detroit office, FBI investigations resulted in more than a dozen convictions of people involved in pay-to-play scandals. Former City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, who admitted she took bribes, is in prison. Former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is to go on trial in September.
Arena also oversaw the investigation of the so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who pleaded guilty last year to trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009. He had some setbacks, too, including the acquittal last month of seven members of the Hutaree militia, who were accused of plotting a violent revolt against the U.S. government using weapons of mass destruction. Three members have pleaded guilty to weapons charges. Arena spoke passionately about fighting public corruption and said he plans to continue to do so at the Detroit Crime Commission. Since joining the FBI in 1988 in Albany, N.Y., Arena has fought organized crime in New York, Youngstown, Ohio, and Detroit.
Read full entry »
By Lisa Riordan Seville
The Crime Report and the Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice launch a collaboration examining the history of crime and punishment.
Read full entry »The FBI once taught its agents that they can "bend or suspend the law" as they wiretap suspects, reports Wired in its Danger Room national security blog. But the bureau says it didn’t really mean it, and has now removed the document from its counterterrorism training curriculum, calling it an “imprecise” instruction. That is good, national security attorneys say, because the FBI’s contention that it can twist the law in pursuit of suspected terrorists is just wrong. The passage was included in 876 pages of training materials about Muslims and Arab-Americans.
The reference to law-bending was noted in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller from Sen. Richard Durbin obtained by Wired. A spokesman provided a copy of the document this week but refused to say who prepared it, how long it was in circulation, and how many FBI agents, analysts and officials received its instruction. The document notes that “under certain circumstances, the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” Those circumstances include “the ability to gather information on individuals which would normally be protected under the U.S. Constitution through the use of FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], Title 3 monitoring [general law enforcement surveillance], NSL [National Security Letter] reports, etc.”
Read full entry »The Los Angeles Times reports that federal agents routinely profiled Muslims in Northern California for at least four years, using community outreach efforts as a guise for compiling intelligence on local mosques, according to documents released by the ACLU. From 2004 to 2008, FBI agents from San Francisco regularly attended meetings and services, particularly in the Silicon Valley area, "collected and illegally stored intelligence" about Muslims beliefs and practices and shared the information with other government agencies, the ACLU said.
The ACLU, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2010 and a lawsuit in 2011 after the groups received repeated complaints from the Muslim community about intrusive FBI activity, ACLU attorney Julia Harumi Mass said. "The FBI's targeting of Muslim Americans for intelligence gathering was not connected to any evidence of criminality, but instead targeted an entire group based on religion," Mass said. The pattern of surveillance shown in the documents "is an affront to religious liberty and equal protection of the law." In a brief written statement, FBI Assistant Director Michael Kortan defended the agents' activities, but said that the agency has adjusted its community outreach efforts.
Read full entry »Police investigators, prosecutors, and mayors nationwide say the New York Police Department is putting its chances of getting good tips from Muslim sources at risk by conducting clandestine surveillance of Muslims in the city and across the Northeast, the Associated Press reports. The AP's sources cite their experience in serving communities that are home to large Muslim communities and other minority populations that have become isolated by events.
"It only takes one perceived mistake, whether it's a mistake or not, where the confidence of the community will be temporarily shattered or damaged," said former FBI agent Ted Wasky. Others said the New York police secret spying and its defense against suggestions it might be a mistake is a misguided approach that will hinder the department's efforts to uncover potential attacks for years, if not decades. That critique has been forcefully rejected by the police department and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has praised the department's tactics as ones that have kept the city safe in the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks.
FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress Wednesday that terrorists may seek to train their own recruits or hire outsiders with an eye toward pursuing cyber attacks on the United States. “Terrorists have not used the Internet to launch a full-scale cyber attack, but we cannot underestimate their intent,” Mueller said in prepared testimony to a House appropriations subcommittee.
He said terrorists have shown interest in developing hacking skills, and that the evolving nature of the problem makes the FBI’s counterterrorism mission more difficult. Mueller said there are FBI cyber squads in each of the bureau’s 56 field offices. The FBI has more than 1,000 specially trained agents, analysts, and digital forensic examiners who run complex undercover operations and examine digital evidence. The hacking group Anonymous embarrassed the F.B.I. in February when it posted a 16-minute recording of a conference between the bureau and law enforcement officials in Europe about their joint investigation into the hackers.
Read full entry »Michael Douglas, who played financier Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie "Wall Street" and a sequel, is now starring in a television video for the FBI meant to root out insider trading — the same crime that brought down the high-flying Gekko, the New York Times reports. The one-minute spot that points out that illicit trading is, in fact, illegal, now showing on CNBC and Bloomberg Television, is part of the government’s broader initiative aimed at drawing cooperating witnesses and tipsters from Wall Street.
For years, insider trading was not a top FBI focus, so would-be informants might not have known where to turn. Now that the crime is front-and-center for securities investigators, the video is part reminder, part plea for those who have seen something illegal to say something. “The movie was fiction, but the problem is real,” Douglas says in the announcement. “If a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is.” FBI agent David Chaves said, "It's important for us to have the FBI brand out on Wall Street." The focus on insider trading has drawn criticism from some who call it a distraction from more important crackdowns. On the heels of the financial crisis, which crippled the global economy, the government has filed few cases tied to wrongdoing at the major banks and lenders that prompted the upheaval.
Read full entry »Federal officials have increased their attention on the "sovereign citizen" movement, a group that has attracted little national media attention but which...
Read full entry »An increasingly active informant pool is helping the FBI identify suspects involved in alleged plots against the U.S. from within, says USA Today. Since the 9/11 attacks, when virtually no anti-terror intelligence network existed, federal authorities have tapped into a vast network of informants — many in the Muslim community — who have assisted in the arrests of suspects. Civil rights advocates and defense lawyers have complained that the tactics smack of a disproportionate focus on Muslims.
"We are getting regular calls from people across the country who are being approached by the (federal government) to act as informants," said Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American Islamic Relations. "And we are concerned about what kind of pressure is being used to get that cooperation." FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said, "We do not investigate people based solely [ ] on their race, ethnicity, national origin or religious affiliation," In the complaint last week in a plot to bomb the U.S. Capitol, FBI agent Steven Hersem noted that the informant not only brought the suspect to the FBI but accompanied the suspect and the undercover agent Friday on the drive toward the Capitol where the suspect was arrested.
Read full entry »
