CHICAGO (CBS) — Robert Dekelaita cheated the immigration system like “a well-oiled machine,” the feds say.
When he found a client seeking asylum in the United States, typically from Iraq, the suburban attorney would quickly forge that person’s name on an application and pepper the person’s life story with horrific hardships, including kidnappings, bombings and religious persecution — all false. He drew inspiration from news articles he collected.
Then, prosecutors say he would employ a team of co-conspirators to help him forge documents, even allegedly bribing an immigration prosecutor, to usher the applicant through the asylum process. He fancied himself “a Robin Hood of refugees,” they said.
But Robin Hood was an outlaw. And nearly a year after Dekelaita’s own criminal conviction, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly sentenced him to 15 months in prison Wednesday. The judge noted that, even if Dekelaita chose to break the law out of noble intentions, “you have to be willing to pay the price for it.”
By DANIEL CHAITIN (@DANIELCHAITIN7) • 3/22/17 9:07 PM
The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward warned on Wednesday that there are people from the Obama administration who could be facing criminal charges for unmasking the names of Trump transition team members from surveillance of foreign officials.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said earlier that he had briefed Trump on new information, unrelated to an investigation into Russian activities, that suggested that several members of Trump’s transition team and perhaps Trump himself had their identities “unmasked” after their communications were intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials.
The revelation is notable because identities of Americans are generally supposed to remain “masked” if American communications are swept up during surveillance of foreign individuals.
House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes declared Wednesday that members of Donald Trump’s transition team, possibly including Trump himself, were under inadvertent surveillance following November’s presidential election.
The White House and Trump’s allies immediately seized on the statement as vindication of the president’s much-maligned claim that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phones — even though Nunes himself said that’s not what his new information shows.
Members of the Donald Trump transition team, possibly including Trump himself, were under U.S. government surveillance following November’s presidential election, House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told reporters Wednesday.
Nunes said the surveillance appeared to be legal but that he was concerned because it was not related to the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election and was widely disseminated across the intelligence community.
“I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show that the president-elect and his team were, I guess, at least monitored,” Nunes told reporters. “It looks to me like it was all legally collected, but it was essentially a lot of information on the president-elect and his transition team and what they were doing.”
Nunes said he is heading to the White House later Wednesday to brief Trump on what he has learned, which he said came from “sources who thought that we should know it.” He said he was trying to get more information by Friday from the FBI, CIA and NSA.
FROM MSNBC POLITICS shows to town hall meetings across the country, the overarching issue for the Democratic Party’s base since Trump’s victory has been Russia, often suffocating attention for other issues. This fixation has persisted even though it has no chance to sink the Trump presidency unless it is proven that high levels of the Trump campaign actively colluded with the Kremlin to manipulate the outcome of the U.S. election — a claim for which absolutely no evidence has thus far been presented.
The principal problem for Democrats is that so many media figures and online charlatans are personally benefiting from feeding the base increasingly unhinged, fact-free conspiracies — just as right-wing media polemicists did after both Bill Clinton and Obama were elected — that there are now millions of partisan soldiers absolutely convinced of a Trump/Russia conspiracy for which, at least as of now, there is no evidence. And they are all waiting for the day, which they regard as inevitable and imminent, when this theory will be proven and Trump will be removed.
In case you’re wondering, microwaves can’t take pictures of you. For starters, they don’t have cameras. But—and I can’t believe I’m writing this—Kellyanne Conway earlier this week was right to raise concerns about the security of “smart” devices connected to the Internet, even if it was an attempt to distract from President Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that President Obama had “wiretapped” Trump Tower.
Had Conway said she was worried about her dishwasher instead of her microwave, she might’ve been on to something. Back in 2012, a Wired headline read, “CIA Chief: We’ll Spy On You Through Your Dishwasher,” describing the clandestine agency’s very real plans to hack the “Internet of Things.” And as we now know, the CIA did find a way to turn Samsung “smart” TVs into covert listening devices.
In fact, the proliferation of Internet-connected devices with poor security is a major problem for at least a few reasons. First, they are indeed capable of exposing personal information—which is precisely why the CIA did it. The words we say in front of the TV are, to put it mildly, quite different from the words we would use on TV. And other “smart” home devices, from thermostats to baby monitors to Wi-Fi-enabled light bulbs, are also vulnerable to hacking.
Researchers say cozy clothes are emerging as a source of plastic that’s increasingly ending up in oceans and possibly contaminating seafood.
March 15, 2017, at 10:28 a.m.
By JENNIFER KAY, Associated Press
KEY LARGO, Fla. (AP) — Comfortable clothes are emerging as a source of plastic that’s increasingly ending up in the oceans and potentially contaminating seafood, according to Gulf Coast researchers launching a two-year study of microscopic plastics in the waters from south Texas to the Florida Keys.
The project , led by the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, will rely partly on volunteers participating in coastal cleanup events. It also will expand a year’s worth of data collected around the state of Florida that predominantly found microfibers — shreds of plastic even smaller than microbeads flowing down bathroom sinks and shower drains.
Yoga pants, Patagonia’s cozy jackets, sweat-wicking athletic wear and other garments made from synthetic materials shed microscopic plastic fibers — called “microfibers” — when they’re laundered. Wastewater systems flush the microfibers into natural waterways, eventually reaching the sea.
“Anything that’s nylon or polyester, like the fleece-type jackets,” University of Florida researcher Maia McGuire said.
Why do my fellow journalists praise that anti-media prosecutor Donald Trump fired? | Mulshine
Posted on March 14, 2017 at 6:26 AM
BY PAUL MULSHINE
There is one phenomenon that I have never understood in the many years I have been in the news racket: the adulation many of my colleagues have for crusading prosecutors.
Am I the only one who’s noticed that these guys rarely return the favor?
A case in point is outgoing U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara. When his name appeared on the list of U.S. Attorneys who were asked to resign by President Trump last week, a great wave of keening and wailing went up from the press.
Typical was the New York Times, which ran this headline on a supposedly objective news article: “With Bharara’s Dismissal, Storied New York Office Loses Its Top Fighter.”
You can’t judge a book by its cover, especially the No. 1 bestseller on Amazon — 266 blank pages about why Democrats deserve votes.
“Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide,” by Daily Wire managing editor Michael J. Knowles, published Feb. 8, features the image of a donkey covered by the Stars and Stripes.
“You can go cover-to-cover in about 15, 20 seconds,” the conservative journalist told “Fox & Friends” on Thursday about the ultimate in light reading.
“It took a very long time to research this book,” he said. “When I observed their record and reasons to vote for them — on reasons of economics or foreign policy or homeland security or civil rights and so on — I realized it was probably best to just leave all the pages blank.
“When I started researching the book and going through this exhaustive study process, at first I turned to the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and it turned out they were deciding whether or not to include God in their party platform,” he said.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says that, to his knowledge, there is no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. This clip is from Clapper’s interview with Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press on March 5, 2017.
Ridgewood NJ, the Trump jump continues with companies adding more jobs than expected in February. There was also a notable shift away from the service-sector positions that have dominated hiring for years.
President Trump had tweeted on Monday, “There is an incredible spirit of optimism sweeping the country right now—we’re bringing back the JOBS!”
ADP and Moody’s Analytics reported today that the private sector surged by 298,000 for the month, with goods producers adding 106,000, Construction jobs jumping 66,000 and manufacturing added 32,000.
The 298,000 total shattered market expectations of 190,000, according to economists surveyed by ADP.
Trump tweeted this morning, “LinkedIn Workforce Report: January and February were the strongest consecutive months for hiring since August and September 2015”
Ridgewood NJ, Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named “Vault 7” by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.
Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
“Year Zero” introduces the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of “zero day” weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.
Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency’s hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA’s hacking capacities.
By the end of 2016, the CIA’s hacking division, which formally falls under the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other “weaponized” malware. Such is the scale of the CIA’s undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook. The CIA had created, in effect, its “own NSA” with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.
In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.
Once a single cyber ‘weapon’ is ‘loose’ it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor stated that “There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber ‘weapons’. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such ‘weapons’, which results from the inability to contain them combined with their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the significance of “Year Zero” goes well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective.”
Wikileaks has carefully reviewed the “Year Zero” disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of ‘armed’ cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should analyzed, disarmed and published.
Wikileaks has also decided to redact and anonymise some identifying information in “Year Zero” for in depth analysis. These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. While we are aware of the imperfect results of any approach chosen, we remain committed to our publishing model and note that the quantity of published pages in “Vault 7” part one (“Year Zero”) already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.
Donald Trump escalated his war with Barack Obama as a committee in Congress agreed to look into his claims that the former president and his administration abused executive powers in last year’s election.
In his latest high-stakes salvo, and as he prepared to roll out a revised travel ban on Muslim-majority countries, Mr Trump had called for a congressional investigation after alleging that he was the victim of a dirty tricks campaign akin to Watergate.
His move came a day after he claimed his predecessor ordered a wiretap of the phones at Trump Tower in New York, Mr Trump’s campaign headquarters.
Establishment furor over the six-week-old Trump administration is growing.
Outraged New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently compared Trump’s victory to disasters in American history that killed and wounded thousands such as the Pearl Harbor surprise bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The New Republic — based on no evidence — theorized that Trump could well be mentally unstable due to the effects of neurosyphilis.
Talk of removing the new president through impeachment, or opposing everything he does (the progressive “Resistance”), is commonplace. Some op-ed writers and pundits abroad have openly hoped for his violent death.
Trump is in a virtual war with the mainstream global media, the entrenched so-called “deep state,” the Democratic Party establishment, progressive activists, and many in the Republican Party as well.
The sometimes undisciplined and loud Trump is certainly not a member of the familiar ruling cadre, which dismisses him as a crude and know-nothing upstart who should never have been elected president. (Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and served a full term, a member of either the Bush or Clinton families would have president for 24 years of a 32-year span.)
But who, exactly, makes up these disgruntled elite classes?
Ridgewood NJ, yesterday, President Donald Trump claimed on twitter that former President Obama had his phones tapped during the 2016 presidential election. This revelation released a firestorm of accusations including the claim that if the wire tapping is true this will be a bigger scandal than Watergate.
After months of Democrat run media attacks on the President claiming Russian involvement in the 2016 election, no hard evidence has as of yet come to light to prove the accusations.
But the Obama wire taps on Trump are a totally different matter and this is what we know so far :
1, The Intelligence Community -at the direction of President Obama- made a request to a FISA court for the NSA to spy on Donald Trump in June 2016. It was denied.
2, In October the Intelligence Community (NSA) -at the direction of President Obama- made a second request to the FISA court for the NSA to spy on Donald Trump. It was approved.
3. At around the same time (October), as the second request to FISA, (Def Sec) Ash Carter and (DNI) James Clapper tell President Obama to dump NSA Director Mike Rogers.
4. A week after the election, Mike Rogers makes a trip to Trump Tower without telling his superior, James Clapper; which brings about new calls (November media leaks to WaPo) for President Obama to dump Mike Rogers.
5, According to the Executive Order rule changes DNI James Clapper signed off on December 15th.
6. General Michael Flynn spoke to the Russian Ambassador on December 29th
Dec 29th 2016 – Obama announces sanctions on Russia
7, VERY IMPORTANT January: Obama expands NSA sharing. As Michael Walsh later notes, and as the New York Times reports, the outgoing Obama administration “expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.” The new powers, and reduced protections, could make it easier for intelligence on private citizens to be circulated improperly or leaked.
8. Jan 3rd 2017 – Loretta Lynch signs off on rule changes for phone taps.
9. Jan 12th 2017 – WaPo reports On Phone Calls Anonymous Intel Sources
10. Jan 15th 2017 – VP Pence appears on Face the nation.
11. Jan 20th 2017 – Inauguration
12. Jan 23rd 2017 – FBI reports nothing unlawful in content of Flynn call
13. Jan 26th 2017 – Sally Yates (acting DOJ) informs President Trump there might be a conflict between VP Pence’s stated TV version (was told by Flynn), and what Intel community communicate to Yates that Flynn actually expressed to Russia.
14, Jan 27th 2017 – White House counsel begins investigation to discrepancy.
15 January: Times report. The New York Times reports, on the eve of Inauguration Day, that several agencies — the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Treasury Department are monitoring several associates of the Trump campaign suspected of Russian ties.
Occam’s Razor. NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers didn’t want to participate in the spying scheme (Clapper, Brennan, Etc.), which was the baseline for President Obama’s post presidency efforts to undermine Donald Trump and keep Trump from digging into the Obama labyrinth underlying his remaining loyalists. After the October spying operation went into effect, Rogers unknown loyalty was a risk to the Obama objective. 10 Days after the election Rogers travels to President-Elect Trump without notifying those who were involved in the intel scheme.
Did NSA Director Mike Rogers wait for a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) to be set up in Trump Tower, and then notify the President-elect he was being monitored by President Obama?
Here is my personal favorite, President Obama found his private moment of political candor caught by a live microphone on Monday as he told President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia that he would have “more flexibility” to negotiate on the delicate issue of missile defense after the November election. So what is really going on with the Democrats?
