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HOMELAND SECURITY

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The spy in your wallet: Credit cards have a privacy problem By Geoffrey A. Fowler

By on August 28th, 2019

https://www.washingtonpost.com
In a privacy experiment, we bought one banana with the new Apple Card — and another with the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa from Chase. Here’s who tracked, mined and shared our data.

You might think my 29-cent swipe at Target would be just between me and my bank. Heavens, no. My banana generated data that’s probably worth more than the banana itself. It ended up with marketers, Target, Amazon, Google and hedge funds, to name a few.

Oh, the places a banana will go in the sprawling card-data economy. Despite a federal privacy law covering cards, I found that six types of businesses could mine and share elements of my purchase, multiplied untold times by other companies they might have passed it to. Credit cards are a spy in your wallet — and it’s time that we add privacy, alongside rewards and rates, to how we evaluate them.

Tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler tracked the same purchase at Target with two kinds of credit cards: the Chase Amazon Prime Rewards Visa and the Apple Card. (James Pace-Cornsilk/The Washington Post)

Apple, branching out from gadgets, just began offering a needed alternative. The new Apple Card’s best attribute is privacy (though the fashion faux pas of its white titanium has gotten more attention). Apple restrains bank partner Goldman Sachs from selling or sharing your data with marketers. But the Apple Card, which runs on the Mastercard network, doesn’t introduce much new technology to protect you from a lot of other hands grabbing at the till.

With my banana test — two bananas, one purchased with the popular Chase Amazon Prime Rewards Visa and the other with Apple’s Mastercard — I hoped to uncover the secret life of my credit card data. But in this murky industry, I was only partly successful. Unlike my other recent technology experiments, such as watching what my iPhone does while I sleep, I couldn’t hack into my cards to follow the data.

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China’s Spies in U.S. Universities Who will take notice? John Glynn

By on August 7th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274504/chinas-spies-us-universities-john-glynn

In May of this year, in a commentary titled “United States, don’t underestimate China’s ability to strike back,” Wu Yuehe, a journalist at the People’s Daily, had this to say:

We advise the U.S. side not to underestimate the Chinese side’s ability to safeguard its development rights and interests. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

A few weeks later, two Chinese professors at Emory university lost their jobs. Li Xiaojiang and Li Shishua, who were conducting research in the field of genetics, failed to disclose grants they received from nebulous institutions in China. 

Two questions:

[1] Why were two scientists employed by an American university receiving grants from China?

[2] Why were the pair so reluctant to disclose the grants?

The answers to both questions are as simple as they are worrying. FBI Director Christopher Wray recently told senators that China is engaging in a concerted effort to steal its way to economic dominance. As I write, there are more than 1,000 investigations underway on intellectual property theft. Every single one of these investigations leads back to China.

The Chinese have been engaged in this sort of nefarious activity for years, and American institutes of education appear to be their prime focus. In August 2015, an electrical engineering student based in Chicago sent an email to a Chinese national titled “Midterm test questions.” Two years later, the email was the subject of an FBI probe in the Southern District of Ohio. Law enforcement agents suspected the student was actually a plant, an intelligence officer who was sent to the United States for one reason only: to acquire technical information and share it with defense contractors in China.

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Hamas-Allied Hate Group- The foreign election interference the Democrats don’t want to talk about. Daniel Greenfield

By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274417/hamas-allied-hate-group-influencing-2020-dem-daniel-greenfield

After disrupting a Holocaust Remembrance Day event at U.C. Berkeley, Hatem Bazian told supporters to look at all the Jewish names on the buildings, “take a look at the type of names on the building around campus — Haas, Zellerbach — and decide who controls this university.”

In 2017, Bazian, the founder of hate groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, retweeted anti-Semitic memes from a Holocaust denial Twitter account.

After the backlash, the Islamist hate group leader claimed that he had Jewish friends.

Next year, Bazian’s Jewish friends came out of the closet when he boasted through a megaphone outside Senator Kamala Harris’ office, while protesting in support of Hamas attacks on Israel, that, “AMP and IfNotNow are coming together.”

AMP was Bazian’s own hate group, whose board members had been accused of supporting Hamas. The organization has been sued by the parents of David Boim, an American teen murdered by Hamas.

IfNotNow is an anti-Israel hate group notorious for targeting Jewish charities and organizations. A member of the hate group had just recited a mock Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, for what the two hate groups falsely claimed was a massacre of civilian protesters in Gaza. In fact, Hamas had admitted that 50 of the 62 killed in the attacks on Israel were members of the terrorist organization.

Officially, If Not Now claims to be a Jewish protest movement against the “occupation”. In July, Max Berger, its radical co-founder, faced his own backlash over a tweet declaring that he, “would totally be friends with Hamas”. Berger had praised the violent Hamas riots and claimed that, “the biggest obstacle to peace in Israel-Palestine is the bigotry of American Jews.” The most politically prominent member of IfNotNow was New York State Senator Julia Salazar, the leader of a Christian campus organization, born into a Catholic family, who joined the anti-Israel hate group while falsely claiming to be Jewish.

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House Democrats’ Missile Mess They want to block weapons the U.S. needs to deter China.

By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-democrats-missile-mess-11564701864

The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty officially passes into the annals of Cold War history on Friday, dumped by the Trump Administration after more than a decade of Russian violations. Congressional arms-controllers can’t revive the treaty, but they are aiming to deny the U.S. any defense advantages from its demise.

The INF treaty name is misleading, because it bans all ground-based missiles, nuclear or conventional, with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. As a result of the treaty, the U.S. has the ability to launch mid-range missiles (like the Tomahawks used to strike Syria in 2017 and 2018) from the air and sea, but not from ground bases.

With the treaty defunct, the Pentagon now seeks to develop and test such weapons as part of its strategy to maintain an advantage over Russia and China. Yet House Democrats are trying to block this. A National Defense Authorization Act amendment, passed on a party-line vote, essentially forces the U.S. to continue to abide unilaterally by the INF. An appropriations bill eliminates funding even for research and development of mid-range weapons, though that was not prohibited under the treaty.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Middle Eastern Terrorism Coming to the US through Its Mexican Border by Raymond Ibrahim

By on August 1st, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14632/terrorism-mexico-border

In May, Abu Henricki, a Canadian citizen of Trinidadian origin, told researchers with the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism that ISIS sought to recruit him and others to penetrate the US-Mexican border through routes originating in various Central American locations…. Other Trinidadians, he said, were also being approached to “do the same thing.”

The idea that Islamic terror groups are operating in Mexico and eyeing—and exploiting—the porous US-Mexico border is not a hypothetical; unfortunately, it appears to be a fact. At least 15—though likely many more—suspected terrorists have already been apprehended crossing the border since 2001. One suspected terrorist who crossed the border, an ISIS supporter, already launched a terrorist attack in Canada that nearly killed five people.

The only question left is how much more evidence, and how many more attacks—and with what greater severity—are needed before this problem is addressed?

A captured Islamic State fighter recently related how, in an effort to terrorize America on its own soil, the Islamic terror group is committed to exploiting the porous US-Mexico border, including through the aid of ISIS-sympathizers living in the United States.

“Whatever one thinks of President Donald Trump’s heightened rhetoric about the US-Mexico border and his many claims that it is vulnerable to terrorists, ISIS apparently also thought so,” according to the Government Technology and Services Coalition.

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Trump tweets arrests of Somali ISIS sympathizers in Arizona

By on July 30th, 2019

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/07/30/trump-tweets-arrests-of-somali-isis-sympathizers-in-arizona/23782684/
DYLAN STABLEFORD

President Trump on Tuesday used the megaphone that is his Twitter feed to draw attention to the arrest of two Somalia refugees in Arizona who authorities say were planning to travel from Tucson, Ariz., to Egypt to join the Islamic State.

Ahmed Mahad Mohamed, 21, and Abdi Yemani Hussein, 20, were charged with providing support to a terror group. They were arrested Friday at Tucson International Airport.

According to federal authorities, Mohamed had told an undercover FBI agent during social-media exchanges that he was “thirsty” for the blood of disbelievers and that “the best wake up call is [for the] Islamic State to get victory or another 911.”

“Somali refugees arresed in Tucson on way to Egypt,” Trump tweeted. “They were in touch with an agent posing as a terrorist. One of them stated, ‘The best wake up call is Islamic State to get victory or another 9/11.’ Get smart people! #MAGA #KAG”

“#KAG” refers to Trump’s reelection slogan, “Keep America Great.”

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Muslim Federation Features Taliban Imam for Its New Town Hall Meetings Terror umbrella refers to Imam Izhar Khan as ‘backbone of community.’ July 26, 2019 Joe Kaufman

By on July 26th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274370/muslim-federation-features-taliban-imam-its-new-joe-kaufman

The South Florida Muslim Federation (SFMF), an umbrella group representing most if not all of South Florida’s radical Muslim organizations and mosques, has reported on its website (SoFlo Muslims) that it will be conducting town hall meetings featuring local imams. On the promotional piece the group put out concerning this project is a photo of Izhar Khan, an imam that was charged by the US government with participating in a conspiracy to provide funds to the Taliban for the purpose of murdering American troops overseas. For this reason and more, any town hall event put on by this group should be considered a threat to the community.

SFMF was founded in April 2017. The group’s member organizations include entities linked to international terrorism. The Executive Director of SFMF, Nezar Hamze, who also holds the position of Sheriff’s Deputy at the Broward County Sheriff’s Office (BSO), previously worked for the Hamas-related group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR is a member of SFMF. The SFMF Public Relations Director, Wilfredo Ruiz, is also from CAIR. Recently, SFMF parted ways with its Facebook Manager, Abdurahman al-Ghani, who had used social media to refer to Jews as “demonic” and to proclaim that Islam “will over-take the World in numbers.”

On July 6th, SFMF put out a message that read, in part: “The South Florida Muslim Federation gathered the Council Of Imams at the Islamic Center of South Florida to discuss important community projects and challenges the community is facing. During the meeting, the Imams unanimously agreed to hold unified Town Hall meetings where the community can interact with the Imams and ask questions.”

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Florida Islamist Group Promotes Exclusionary #BuyMuslim Campaign Community empowerment or an extremist agenda? Rebecca Witonsky

By on July 25th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274396/florida-islamist-group-promotes-exclusionary-rebecca-witonsky

A South Florida Muslim group is urging members of its community to buy from fellow Muslims. But is this an example of community empowerment, or an effort at exclusion and self-segregation?

The #BuyMuslim campaign is the brainchild of the South Florida Muslim Federation (SFMF), an organization which describes itself as the “unified platform” of over three dozen Muslim organizations in the South Florida area. On January 2, 2019, the new executive director Nezar Hamze announced that the #BuyMuslim campaign was a key priority of the organization. The campaign is facilitated by a business portal which allows Muslim-owned businesses to list their companies on the website.

The #BuyMuslim Campaign is multi-faceted. Business owners are encouraged to participate in the campaign by listing their company and their job postings on the South Florida Muslim Federation business portal. Consumers are encouraged to participate in the campaign by purchasing from Muslim-owned businesses listed on the business portal and job seekers are encouraged to post their resumes on the portal and seek jobs and internships.  

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Feds Bust 22 MS-13 Gang Members California Democrats silent over murders, mutilations by savage criminal illegals. Lloyd Billingsley

By on July 18th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274339/feds-bust-22-ms-13-gang-members-lloyd-billingsley

“The victim was dismembered, and his body parts were thrown into a canyon after one of the defendants allegedly cut the heart out of the victim’s body.”

That is from a July 16 statement from the U.S. Attorney in Central California, announcing charges against “22 people linked to the MS-13 transnational gang, most of whom allegedly participated in a series of murders, including several slayings in which victims were hacked to death with machetes in the Angeles National Forest.”

U.S. Attorney spokesman Thom Mrozek told reporters that 19 of the 22 gang members were illegally present in the United States. Four of the killings took place in Angeles National Forest and the gang members used machetes, bats and knives on the victims. As U.S. officials explained, new MS-13 members are required to murder a rival or enemy of the group. In one case, a member of a rival gang who defaced MS-13 graffiti had his heart cut out of his chest.

The charges against the 22 MS-13 members prompted no statement from California governor Gavin Newsom, whose first trip as governor outside the state was to El Salvador. As he said, the trip was to “counter Trump,” who often speaks out against illegal immigration in general and MS-13 in particular. State attorney general Xavier Becerra, once on Hillary Clinton’s short list as a running mate, was also silent after the MS-13 bust, hardly the only such action in recent times.

In Mendota, according to a Fresno Bee story by Yesenia Amaro, “MS-13 carved out a reign of terror resulting in at least 14 brutal murders in and around Mendota from 2015 to 2017.”

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Warner Video: Why Won’t Muslims Assimilate? What Islamic doctrine teaches about migration, domination and annihilation. The Glazov Gang

By on July 12th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274275/warner-video-why-wont-muslims-assimilate-frontpagemagcom

This new edition of the Glazov Gang presents the Dr. Bill Warner Moment with Dr. Bill Warner, the president of politicalislam.com.

Dr. Warner asks: Why Won’t Muslims Assimilate? and he unveils what Islamic doctrine teaches about migration, domination and annihilation.

Don’t miss it!

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