Burger van workers and other licensed mobile traders are being offered free counter-terrorism training to help them spot suspects who might be reconnoitring potential targets in the runup to the Olympics and Paralympics.
The on-street presence of people selling food and drink in London – from ice-cream to baguettes, pizzas and hot dogs – means they are well placed to “contribute to effective surveillance”, according to environmental health experts.
The training is being offered by the Metropolitan police and Westminster council and builds on an existing scheme in which business representatives attend courses to get tips on “hostile reconnaissance”, what to do in case of an attack – including the ‘dos and don’ts of bombs’ – and understanding police communications and cordons.
But not all traders will find themselves on the right side of the law. Many will be subject to spot checks to establish that they are operating legally and safely, with those suspected of breaches having their names, dates of birth and nationalities passed to police and the UK Border Agency (UKBA) for investigation of possible criminal links and their immigration status.
Local authority officials are also compiling a register of potentially violent people linked to mobile and temporary food businesses, with inspection staff warned to have police protection when they carry out checks.
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The year has been a rollercoaster ride for the CIA–incredible highs coupled with significant lows. But those dramatic ups and downs also underscored how intelligence is evolving and the agency is changing to keep pace. Keeping secrets is becoming more difficult and what the agency now does is sometimes more visible. And– the enemy is getting better.
On the critical counterterrorism front, 2011 was a momentous year. The crowning moment–maybe of even the last decade–was the CIA finally pinning down the location of enemy number one, Osama bin Laden, and then overseeing the raid by Navy special forces on a safehouse in Pakistan which led to his death, bringing an end to the nearly ten year pursuit of America’s most wanted terrorist.
The raid is a prime example of the new warfare the CIA is engaged in. The counterterrorism battle is frequently being waged by CIA officers and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) forces working side by side. Former CIA Director Mike Hayden said “it’s clear the Agency and JSOC are now in a privileged position in terms of how we want to fight this war.” The retired Air Force general referred to the CIA today as looking more like the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War two-era intelligence service that had a more operational, paramilitary role.
That type of warfare is heavily dependent on the use of unmanned, armed aircraft.
Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist and operator for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was blown apart by a CIA operated drone attack while driving in a remote area of Yemen. Al Awlaki had been tied to the attempt by Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the so called underwear bomber, who unsuccessfully tried to blow up a passenger airliner on its way to Detroit on Christmas day two years ago. And alleged Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan had been in communication with al Awlaki before his shooting spree that left 13 dead at the Texas U.S. Army post.
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The troops have come home, the flag has been been lowered, and the Iraq War is officially in the past for the U.S. military. But the military is holding on to a major souvenir of the war: a massive database packed with retinal scans, thumb prints and other biometric data identifying millions of Iraqis. It will be a tool for counterterrorism long after the Iraq War becomes a fading memory.
U.S. Central Command, the military command responsible for troops in the Mideast and South Asia, confirms to Danger Room that the biometrics database, compiled by U.S. troops over the course of years, will remain U.S. property. “Centcom has the database,” says the command’s chief spokesman, Army Maj. T.G. Taylor, who says it contains files on three million Iraqis. The U.S.-sponsored Iraqi government, in other words, doesn’t control a host of incredibly specific information on its citizens.
For much of the war, U.S. troops carrying viewfinder-like scanning devices kept digital records of the Iraqis they encountered. Some Iraqis got their unique identifiers recorded because they were suspected insurgents on their way to detention centers. Residents of violent cities like Fallujah would only get to return home from travel if they showed U.S. troops an ID card complete with biometric data. Iraqis underwent iris scans when they wanted to join the police. So did Iraqis who worked on U.S. bases.
It was all part of an effort to answer the war’s most vexing challenge: distinguishing insurgents from Iraqi civilians. And that effort isn’t going away, even after the war technically ended. It’ll be part of U.S. counterterrorism missions for a long time to come.
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Addressing a “dearth” in advanced educational opportunities in the security field, the University of Central Florida has created a new Ph.D. program in Security Studies.
The three-year program, scheduled to begin in the fall of 2013, will address a need within the public and private sectors for security professionals with a firm grasp of counterterrorism and international security issues, according to Kerstin Hamann, chair of UCF’s Political Science Department, which is offering the new terminal degree.
Hamann told Security Director News that the country is in need of security professionals who understand the geo-political issues affecting the security of the United States and any U.S. corporation that operates in other countries. “Focusing on security issues was a logical step given the needs of the country at this point and the dearth of security studies at the graduate level in the U.S.,” she said.
There are a few other schools that address security studies–notable ones include Tufts, Georgetown and George Washington universities–but Hamann said many have security as a focus within a broader political science degree or offer it as an interdisciplinary program. “There really aren’t a lot of programs with a distinguished focus on security issues in the country,” she said.
The program was a natural fit for the university because of the strong defense and security-related industry in Florida–UCF’s official program proposal claims the defense and security industries have a $52 billion annual economic impact on the state.
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There are about 800,000 people in local and state law enforcement with more 730,000 sworn officers who can make arrests. The FBI has about 12,000 agents who work on counterterrorism operations. A new counterterrorism intelligence report states, “The implications of this disparity are self-evident, federal authorities will never have the number of eyes and ears available to counterterrorism that local police do.” That logic is not flawed, but the statistics in the Counterterrorism Intelligence Research report are. If research suggested the U.S. counterterrorism intelligence machine should be ramped up in favor of more domestic surveillance by local law enforcement, then shouldn’t that research include more than 42 cops?
George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) started a long term Counterterrorism Intelligence Survey Research (CTISR) program that “represents the first attempt to systematically collect data from counterterrorism professionals at all levels of government.” Yet a sample question for ‘local police’ in the report, Counterterrorism Intelligence: Law Enforcement Perspectives [PDF] was: “Would you be willing to ask your sources and informants to fulfill intelligence requests from other agencies or entities?” 93% – which looks very high – said yes to this previously “untapped” source of counter-intelligence to combat terrorism with “increased collection” in order to “provide a richer picture of the threat.” There were 44 such questions, but only 42 people in law enforcement were included in this study. It’s further qualified by saying not all of the 42 answered each question. Even the authors of the study felt compelled to point out, “From a purely statistical standpoint, such a sample raises questions about the generalizability of HSPI’s findings.”
The report states that more data and analysis will be needed before “informed judgments” can be made, but the “findings represent the perceptions of the intelligence commanders of major metropolitan police departments – their perceptions and opinions should be taken seriously.” The authors warn that conclusions from this study and interpreting the data should be done “with care,” but it is especially worrisome that the percentages from this research will be the stats cited in the future, without going over the fact that only 42 of 730,000 law enforcement officers sworn to uphold the law were surveyed in this first study.
Also according to this research, counterterrorism law enforcement officers expect the terror threat to evolve with homegrown extremists / domestic terrorists perceived as the greatest threat, even above Al-Qaeda or international terrorists. This is followed by gangs/organized crime, terror support groups, drug trafficking organizations, with traditional criminals coming in last as a perceived significant danger to local police.
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Police in Northern Ireland and counter-terrorism analysts today voiced fears that a lack of good intelligence is allowing a spate of terror attacks by dissident republicans, including a bombing on Saturday that injured three children in Lurgan, County Armagh.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland is “extremely concerned” about an alleged lack of information from MI5 about increasingly active republican groups, while Margaret Ritchie, leader of the nationalist SDLP, yesterday said it was “very clear that MI5 is not up to the task of leading intelligence-gathering in the north”.
The Police Federation of Northern Ireland has attributed 49 bomb incidents and 32 shooting incidents to dissident republicans since the beginning of the year. There is particular concern at the activities of Oglaigh na Héireann (Volunteers of Ireland), thought to have been formed by members of the Real IRA. The group this month claimed responsibility for a car bomb in Derry, and is thought to work with the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA.
Ritchie said there was “no evidence that MI5 puts a high priority on the dissident threat beyond providing some signals and background intelligence”, and called for an urgent meeting with Brian Cowen, the Irish Taoiseach and Owen Paterson, secretary of state for Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland office insisted the police and MI5 are working closely and David Ford, the Northern Ireland justice minister, last night said he had been assured by the PSNI’s chief constable, Matt Baggott, “that he continues to receive the fullest possible cooperation from MI5, the Garda Síochána and increasingly from the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland”.
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![]( "Smartphone, Blackberry, Cell, Phone")
WHEN the United Arab Emirates announced last week that it would suspend BlackBerry service within its borders starting this fall, business travelers who rely on the handheld devices reacted with understandable dismay. But the decision was greeted quite differently by the men and women who make a living hunting terrorists, smugglers, human traffickers, foreign agents and the occasional team of clumsy assassins. Among law enforcement investigators and intelligence officers, the Emirates’ decision met with approval, admiration and perhaps even a touch of envy.
Why? Because just as professionals depend on mobile devices to do their jobs, law enforcement and intelligence officers depend on electronic surveillance to do theirs. The Emirates made their decision principally because Research in Motion, the Canadian company that provides BlackBerry services, refused to modify its information architecture in a way that would enable authorities to intercept the communications of select subscribers.
Monitoring electronic communications in real time and retrieving stored electronic data are the most important counterterrorism techniques available to governments today. Electronic surveillance is particularly vital in combating global terrorism, where the stakes are highest, but it is a part of virtually all investigations of serious transnational threats.
The ways in which individual governments perform electronic surveillance are highly idiosyncratic, controlled by a bewildering patchwork of laws and technical capabilities that vary from country to country, agency to agency, service provider to provider, application to application. Intercepting a land-line phone call, for example, is entirely different from intercepting a voice-over-Internet call, and retrieving an e-mail is different from retrieving a text message. For obvious reasons, governments (and former officials) do not openly explain how their electronic surveillance powers vary from one communications method to another.
The United Arab Emirates is in no way unique in wanting a back door into the telecommunications services used inside its borders to allow officials to eavesdrop on users. In the United States, telecommunications providers are generally required to provide a mechanism for such access by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and related regulations issued by the Federal Communications Commission. As a general principle, information-service providers here must provide a means for federal agencies, usually the F.B.I., to view the ostensibly private data of their subscribers when lawfully ordered to do so.
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Mubin Shaikh likes to refer to himself in the third person. He shifts tidily between grandiose metaphor and simple sincerity. He says, only half-jokingly, that authorities have been keeping subtle tabs on him in a Cessna that often skims over his west-end Toronto neighbourhood.
Mr. Shaikh, a police agent who infiltrated the Toronto 18 and almost single-handedly broke the country’s biggest terror plot, alternates between sweeping, self-congratulatory proclamations about his role in the high-profile case — “There is nobody in the world that can say they’ve done what I’ve done” — and bitter lamentations on a life thrown into chaos for five straight years.
Today, Mr. Shaikh, 34, believes he will never fully close the Toronto 18 chapter, even as the final scraps of the lengthy prosecution grind through the court system. He cannot pick up the pieces of his old life, he explains. As he pursues a degree in counterterrorism, pens a book on homegrown extremism and preps to deliver a speech next month at a security intelligence conference in Ottawa, it is clear the Toronto 18 has crafted the path forward, for better or for worse.
“I didn’t do this so I could have a parade or anything, because I ain’t getting a parade. I didn’t do this for a medal, because I ain’t getting a medal,” Mr. Shaikh says. “If you want to get a medal, go save some old lady’s poodle from drowning.”
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In June, a stone carver chiseled another star into a marble wall at CIA headquarters, one of 22 for agency workers killed in the global war initiated by the Sept. 11 attacks.
The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers. They were private contractors.
To ensure that the country’s most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation’s interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called “inherently government functions.” But they do all the time, in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation.
What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal work force includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta last week said they agreed with such concerns.
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This morning, The Washington Post began publishing it’s three-part investigation into “Top Secret America”—the massive homeland security-intelligence complex that has arisen since September 11, 2001.
The investigation is the culmination of two years of work by reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin in an attempt to shed light on the massive intelligence and security spending initiated by the federal government in response to al Qaeda’s three-pronged attack on 9-11.
“We’re all aware there are three branches of government in the United States,” a video introduction to the investigation intones. “But in response to 9-11, a fourth branch has emerged. It is protected from public scrutiny by extraordinary secrecy.”
According to the Post investigation, nearly 1,300 government organizations use about 2,000 private contracting companies to perform work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence. To do this work, it takes security clearances, lots of them—even down to lowly janitors. The Post estimates that 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances, a population that’s 1.5 times greater than Washington, D.C.
The bureaucracy that has arisen is described as enormously unwieldy, expensive, and secretive.
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“Know your enemy”: It’s been an axiom of war since Sun Tzu.
Approximately 2,500 years later, a group of counterterrorism and national security experts have tweaked that maxim for a White House they fear is too politically correct for its own good as it fights al Qaeda and its fellow jihadist terrorists. This derivative is better expressed as “Define your enemy.”
In a 30-page strategic report for The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, report authors J. Scott Carpenter, Matthew Levitt, Steven Simon, and Juan Zarate argue that while the Obama administration has had some successes in addressing violent extremism, it too often fails to call out the specific ideology that spawns terrorist violence.
“Unless government recognizes and articulates clearly the threat posed by the ideology of radical Islamist extremism, its broader whole-of-government efforts will lack strategic focus and will fail to address the varied root causes of domestic and foreign radicalization. It is indeed possible to do this without denigrating the Islamic religion in any way,” the study group writes in “Fighting the Ideological Battle: The Missing Link in U.S. Strategy to Counter Violent Extremism” (.pdf).
The White House has complicated matters even more, the report says, by banning words like “jihadist,” “Islamist,” and “Islamist extremism” from the government’s lexicon that accurately describe the ideology the United States fights to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities.
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A half-dozen former and current federal employees have turned to the big screen to raise concerns with the nation’s airport security.
“Please Remove Your Shoes” uses the experiences of mostly former employees of the Federal Air Marshals, Federal Aviation Administration and Transportation Security Administration to argue that FAA officials frequently turned a blind eye to significant security threats in the years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The workers say lawmakers compounded problems by reflexively establishing the TSA.
“We took the same organizational template and same counterterrorist template verbatim and reapplied it under a new label and new people and threw some more money at it,” said Fred Gevalt, the film’s producer and a longtime aviation industry observer. “But there are still some fundamental errors.”
Gevalt said he and his team spent almost two years exploring the topic. He would say only that the film cost “six figures.” It debuts Wednesday at the Landmark E Street Cinema in Washington, less than a week after the Senate confirmed FBI Deputy Director John Pistole as TSA administrator.
Brian Sullivan, a retired FAA special agent who narrates the film, said the documentary — although it has a heavily critical slant — could help balance Pistole’s early perceptions of the TSA.
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