RUTHFULLY YOURS

Charles (Chuck) Brooks serves as the Vice President for Government Relations & Marketing for Sutherland Global Services. Chuck is Chairman of CompTIA’s New and Emerging Technology Committee, as a Fellow oat The National Cybersecurity Institute, and serves on Boards to several prominent public and private companies and organizations. Chuck has extensive service in Senior Executive Management, Marketing, Government Relations, and Business Development and worked in those capacities for three large public corporations.In government, he served at the Department of Homeland Security as the first Director of Legislative Affairs for the Science & Technology Directorate.
“Digitalization is the cause of large-scale and sweeping transformations across multiple aspects of business, providing unparalleled opportunities for value creation and capture, as well as being a source of major risk.”* –
Scientific advancement of modern times in high technologies that results in the state-of-the-art engineering technologies, the speed of technological changes all over the globe and in space, are a magnet for ‘white’ and ‘black’ players – ‘Lords of Order’ and ‘Lords of Chaos’- that aim to generate ‘cyber tornados’, ‘cyber thunder-storms’. ‘Cyber–attacks can range from installing spyware on a PC to attempts to destroy the infrastructure of entire nations’, to cause great harm with unprecedented consequences. These ‘players’ have names. Many hide behind the masks. –
We are being showered with reports of escalating impacts and costs that are measured in the billions. –

Cybersecurity. Pushing the frontiers: Prevention and protection strategies in cyber security. What do we need to know about prevention of cyber-attacks and protection of critical infrastructure?

With these and a few more questions I am proud and honoured to again be gifted with time and wisdom of Mr. Chuck Brooks – one of the world’s known experts, the industry guru, your future reference for the most competent and comprehensive quest and analysis on cyber security.

To Chuck Brooks: What do we need to know about prevention of cyber-attacks and protection of critical infrastructure?

Director Comey’s explanation is now clear, though he did not lay it out in his report earlier this week: The statute criminalizing gross negligence in mishandling classified information is invalid because it does not require proof of intent to improperly transmit classified information to places it is not supposed to be or to people not authorized to have it.

The director claims that the statute has only been used once since its enactment in 1917, and therefore its invocation as written in Mrs. Clinton’s case would be suspect. He implies that the only way to save the statute is for the Justice Department to do what prosecutors routinely tell judges that they are not permitted to do: rewrite the statute – in this instance, to add a higher mens rea proof requirement.

With due respect, this argument is very unconvincing, for at least two reasons:

1. It is implausible to claim, as Director Comey does, that a criminal statute is implicitly invalid if the mens rea (state of mind) element merely requires proof of gross negligence rather than intent to cause harm. Let’s consider the causing of death, a consequence similarly grave to compromising our national security by mishandling classified information. I believe every state in our country criminalizes the negligent causing of death. Here, for example, is what judges in Connecticut instruct juries in every such case:

For you to find the defendant guilty of this charge, the state must prove the following elements beyond a reasonable doubt:

Element 1 – Cause of death
The first element is that the defendant caused the death of . This means that the defendant’s conduct was the proximate cause of the decedent’s death. You must find proven beyond a reasonable doubt that died as a result of the actions of the defendant.

Element 2 – Criminal negligence
The second element is that the defendant was criminally negligent in causing the death.

Conclusion
In summary, the state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that 1) the defendant caused the death of , and 2) the defendant was criminally negligent when (he/she) caused the death.

Notice: there is absolutely no requirement that the prosecutor prove that the defendant intended to do harm or cause death. It is merely required that the prosecutor prove that the defendant acted negligently and that this negligence caused death.

It would be shocking were a high official to suggest that such prosecutions are constitutionally suspect. They happen all the time, and have from time immemorial.

2. It would be contradictory to require proof beyond a reasonable doubt of both (a) the intentional causing of harm, and (b) the causing harm by gross negligence. We know in our everyday lives that we do not intend the harm we cause when we act negligently. The driver who texts behind the wheel never intends the harm that comes to the passengers when the highly likely accident happens. If Director Comey is correct, though, that would mean that Congress is powerless to criminalize the extremely careless mishandling of classified information by high public officials despite the catastrophic damage it can do to the United States.

After masterfully marshaling facts that showed Hillary Clinton was grossly negligent in mishandling the nation’s defense secrets – i.e., after demonstrating that she was patently indictable for a felony violation of federal law – Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey recommended against prosecution. His rationale is even more difficult to justify on close examination than it appeared at first blush.

Director Comey contends that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case due to the former Secretary of State’s purportedly benign intent. In point of fact, her intent – besides being very far from benign – is largely irrelevant: the criminal statute at issue, Section 793(f) of the federal penal code, merely requires proof that the defendant was grossly negligent – or, as Comey put it “extremely careless.” But more importantly, a reasonable prosecutor considering charges would not myopically obsess over Clinton’s state of mind. Far more weighty in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion would be two factors Comey did not cite at all in his presentation: (a) Congress’s purpose in criminalizing the grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, and (b) the harm actually done to the United States which, viewed from the perspective of the intelligence community underwritten by 50 billion American taxpayer dollars annually, was surely immense.

Let’s dispense with the matter of Mrs. Clinton’s intent – a side issue that Director Comey magnified into the dispositive issue. Unlike most criminal statutes, the felony of grossly negligent mishandling of classified information does not call for prosecutors to prove that a defendant intended the harm done. It merely requires proof of gross negligence – which is no different from what Comey compellingly demonstrated was Clinton’s “extreme carelessness” in mishandling national defense secrets.

Consider an analogy: a car passenger tragically dies because the driver is texting behind the wheel. There is no need in the negligent homicide case to prove (and indeed, no possibility of proving) that the driver intended to cause harm to the passenger. The driver is guilty because she purposely engaged in the reckless conduct – texting while driving – that risked the grave and easily foreseeable danger.

Similarly, Mrs. Clinton’s may not have intended to cause harm. In fact, let’s for argument’s sake concede Comey’s premise that she did not intend to make classified information vulnerable to hostile hackers when she purposely caused its transfer from the government’s secure server system to her own woefully non-secure system. Still, the felony statute at issue does not call for proof that she intended the harm done to the United States. Prosecutors need only prove what Comey so ably outlined: Clinton purposely engaged in the reckless behavior – the installation and use of an impermissible and amateurishly non-secure, non-government server system – that made harm to the United States virtually inevitable.

Still, I want to move beyond the lawyerly parsing of mens rea to a more curious aspect of Director Comey’s reasoning. The director implausibly claimed that no reasonable prosecutor would charge Clinton based on the facts uncovered by the FBI. This, as he acknowledged, was not his call to make – prosecutorial discretion is ultimately exercised by the Justice Department lawyers, not the FBI. Yet, as a highly accomplished former prosecutor, Comey offered what he intimated was an exhaustive list of factors any “reasonable” prosecutor would weigh; then, upon weighing them, he determined that they decisively militated against indictment. CONTINUE AT SITE

A core tenet of the American republic is chiseled into marble above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court. Since 1935, it has read:

Equal Justice Under Law

It now should be edited, as follows:

Equal Justice Under Law

These words, on which this nation was built, helped make America exceptional. But FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday morning turned this principle into a punchline.

If Hillary Smith had conducted all of her diplomatic duties via an unauthorized computer server in her home basement, she would be prosecuted.

If Hillary Jones had hundreds of classified e-mails swirling like electrons among her lawless server, her Blackberry, and her tablet computer, she would be indicted.

But Hillary’s surname is Clinton. So, she gets away with this — and more. As Richard Manning of Ameiricans for Limited Government put it, Hillary Clinton is too big to jail.

It would have been one thing if Comey had said about Hillary’s e-mails:

Secretary Clinton did nothing wrong. We spent thousands of hours looking very carefully through her e-mails. She had one server and one phone, and both were as solid as the Hoover Dam. We found an e-mail in which she got official permission to maintain that server in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. The missing e-mails that she deleted all turned out to be about yoga positions and Chelsea’s wedding dress. The work e-mails that Secretary Clinton delivered to the State Department contained no classified material. Believe it or not, folks, the lady has been telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth for 16 months. So, help me God.

Instead, Comey’s 15-minute speech could be summarized as:

Here, in detail, is how Hillary Clinton spilled state secrets and lied about it non-stop since March 2015. Regardless, she should walk away scot-free.

In yesterday’s statement, Comey confirmed that Clinton is an unreconstructed, certified, pathological liar. He exposed at least eight bald-faced lies that Clinton told the American people — again and again and again — throughout this high-profile controversy.

Lie No. 1: Clinton: “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal e-mails, instead of two.” (March 10, 2015)

Comey: “Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and she also used numerous mobile devices to send and to read e-mail on that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various ways.”

Lie No. 2: Clinton: “I have absolute confidence that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in the possession of the State Department.” (March 10, 2015)

The double standards are painful. I served ten years as an Army lawyer, and one of my responsibilities was advising the command on matters of military justice, including incidents where soldiers mishandled classified information. And if Hillary Clinton was a soldier, she would lose her security clearance, face administrative action, and face the specter of criminal prosecution. I’ve not only seen the pattern, I’ve also participated in the process. Here’s how it would work.

Imagine for a moment that an officer downrange in Afghanistan comes across timely drone footage of suspected insurgents — information that would be clearly Secret (if not Top Secret) at the moment of inception. Unfortunately, however, she doesn’t have immediate access to SIPRNet (for Secret) or JWICS (for Top Secret), so she grabs her iPhone — which is on the base’s civilian WiFi system — and bangs out a text message to a superior officer. She doesn’t describe exactly what she’s seeing, but from context, the message is plain. Shoot or don’t shoot? She needs a decision.

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine such a moment. It’s so counter to military training and the military ethos that actions like this are few and far between. But Hillary is nothing if not special, and it’s clear from FBI Director Comey’s press conference yesterday that she sent and received e-mails concerning “matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level” on her homebrew system, a system less secure than Gmail.

If Hillary were Captain Clinton instead of the presumptive Democratic nominee and wife of a disbarred former president, the following things would occur, more or less simultaneously.

First, the command would immediately suspend her security clearance. As a practical matter, this would mean that she would be unable to do her job. Absent extraordinary circumstances, she would become essentially useless to the command, a glorified manual laborer fit to fill sandbags or clean latrines but little else. Unless the officer is cleared, the loss of a security clearance means the loss of her career.

yed Shafeeq Ur Rahman, imam of the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce (ICFP), claims that his mosque – the same mosque where Orlando terrorist shooter Omar Mateen regularly prayed at – condemns radical Islam. But if that is so, then why, following the shooting, would the mosque retain a spokesman who is a leader from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group that has numerous associations with the terrorist organization Hamas?

The Islamic Center of Fort Pierce or Masjid Subul-as-Salam was incorporated in September 2003. Its founder was Shafeeq Rahman. Today, Rahman is the mosque’s imam and president. The mosque is a converted church, located at 1104 West Midway Road and owned by Azaan, Inc., a Florida business run by the mosque’s Secretary and Treasurer, Imtiaz Jehan Khan.

Weeks ago, the mosque made the news, following the murders of 49 innocent people at Orlando’s Pulse LGBT nightclub by one of the mosque’s congregants. This had been the second large scale terrorist attack linked to the mosque in as many years.

The first was a suicide attack carried out in Syria by then 22-year-old Palestinian-American Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, aka Abu Hurayra al-Amriki. Abu-Salha was a follower of deceased Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaeda leader who died via a US drone strike in September 2011. Abu-Salha had flown from the US to Turkey and made his way over the border into Syria, soon to join up with al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front.

In May 2014, Abu-Salha, as a member of al-Nusra, drove a massive truck bomb into a restaurant in Jabal al-Arbaeen filled with Syrian government soldiers. This was said to be the first suicide bombing performed by an American within Syria.

The second attack associated with ICFP took place on June 12th, when Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, also an admirer of al-Awlaki, entered the Pulse in Orlando and shot and killed 49 people and injured 53 more. During the attack, Mateen placed a call to 911 to claim responsibility for the attack and pledge his allegiance to the leader of ISIS. He stated, “I pledge… allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State.” He, as well, expressed his solidarity with those who carried out the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and Abu-Salha, who perpetrated the Syria suicide attack.

The Obama administration has played politics with virtually every issue, including issues that endanger national security and the safety and well-being of Americans.

Through the issuance of executive orders on immigration that make a mockery of our nation’s borders and immigration laws and that contradict commonsense and the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission millions of illegal aliens whose true identities cannot be determined now live in towns and cities across the United States.

Nearly every terror attack carried out in the United States has a connection to a failure of the immigration system. Most of the terrorists who have been identified were admitted into the United States, proving that our immigration system lacks integrity. But failures of the immigration system also include failures to physically secure our nation’s northern and southern borders.

Our borders have become little more than “speed bumps” to smugglers with record quantities of narcotics, including heroin, flowing freely into the United States, along with transnational criminals and gang members.

The immigration policy of “Catch and Release” that has turned hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who have been convicted of committing serious crimes loose on towns and cities across the United States has been the focus of a series of Congressional hearings, yet nothing has convinced the administration to stop this lunacy.

Catch and Release is not, however, limited to the way that illegal aliens are apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents are released, with the vast majority failing to appear for immigration hearings. In order to keep his promise to close the U.S. facility at Guantanamo, Mr. Obama has ordered ordered terror suspects to be released from custody at Guantanamo. Some have returned to the battlefield where they threaten innocent civilians as well as members of the armed forces of a number of nations including the United States.

It has been reported that 80 radical Islamist terrorists remain in custody in Guantanamo. They must not be released from that important U.S. facility.

Undoubtedly many of these former detainees would love nothing better than make their way to the United States to launch deadly terror attacks inside our borders. ISIS has made it clear that the United States is their prime target.

On July 5, 2016, Fox News reported, “Mystery surrounds whereabouts of former Gitmo detainee in South America.”

In 1994, Hillary Clinton took questions under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Wearing a pink pantsuit, she offered what would become her customary mix of lies and defensiveness, admitting to something and then trying to shift the blame, denying that she had broken the law and then claiming ignorance.

It was an act that we would see over and over again for the next few decades, but back then it was still new when Hillary Clinton claimed that she couldn’t remember anything, that the whole Whitewater affair was an invasion of her privacy and that she had never meant to do anything wrong.

Some twenty years later, we have spent the past few months witnessing the same performance.

She blamed sexism for Whitewater. “It’s a little difficult for us as a country, maybe, to make the transition of having a woman like many of the women in this room, sitting in this house.” Her supporters claim that her email scandal is caused by sexism rather than her blatant violation of the law.

“I do feel like I’ve always been a fairly private person leading a public life,” Hillary Clinton whined about the examination of her shady investments. This time around she claimed that her whole rogue email server filled with classified documents was an attempt at protecting her classified yoga routines.

The truth, then and now, is that Hillary Clinton is a public figure who claims that her private life is being invaded whenever she gets caught violating the law.

Then there are the vague statements that almost sound like apologies, but aren’t. “I’m not in any way excusing any confusion that we have created,” she said of Whitewater. But the only confusion was Hillary’s efforts to make her critics appear to be confused. On her emails, she said that she was “sorry that it has raised all these questions.” Which is another way of saying that she was sorry she got caught.

Finally there is the politician who would be president playing dumb. Hillary Clinton didn’t understand how investments worked back then. She doesn’t understand how emails work now. When all else fails, Hillary Clinton will plead incompetence and then claim that she wants to focus on fixing health care.

Investments are confusing. Email accounts are confusing. Someone please put her in charge of something simple. Like health care for the entire country. Or maybe just the entire country.

No one trusts her and no one believes that she will ever be held accountable.

The investigation into the Clinton Foundation didn’t come up at all during FBI Director James Comey’s press conference Tuesday, prompting pundits like Fox News national security analyst K.T. McFarland to ask why.

“Isn’t there a second FBI investigation? A criminal FBI investigation into the Clinton foundation? What is status of that?”

Fox News reported Tuesday evening that despite the FBI’s ruling on her emails, “Hillary Clinton may not be completely in the clear. ”

“The Clinton Foundation may still be the subject of its own investigation,” Megyn Kelly reported Tuesday evening on The Kelly File. “Director Comey made no mention of the foundation today or whether the FBI is investigating it, at all.”

According to Chief Intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge, Republican Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Jason Chaffetz pressed Comey after his statement at FBI headquarters about whether there would be charges against Clinton’s aides, and whether the entire investigation was closed.

“I specifically asked him what about the other people — what about the IT guy, what about the inner circle, what about the other things. And he quickly said, ‘I can’t tell you about that yet.'” Chaffetz explained on Special Report.

As Fox News reported back in January, the FBI expanded its investigation into Clinton’s emails to include the possible intersection of State Department business and the Clinton Foundation and whether public corruption laws were violated (as chronicled in Peter Schweizer’s book “Clinton Cash”).

Herridge noted that it wasn’t typical for Comey to not take questions after making a statement. “He seemed to anticipate the backlash,” she said.

Republicans in Congress have called for Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey to answer questions regarding the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Comey will appear before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday to defend his decision not to recommend criminal charges against Clinton for her use of a private email server while secretary of State. Lynch, who recently faced heavy criticism over her secret meeting with former President Bill Clinton in Phoenix, was called by Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) to appear before the House Judiciary Committee next week.

Via the Wall Street Journal:

On Tuesday, Mr. Comey said Mrs. Clinton had been “extremely careless” in her handling of emails containing classified material, but that the FBI was not recommending pressing charges against her. Many Republicans were critical of the decision and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) had called for a hearing on the issue.

“The FBI’s recommendation is surprising and confusing. The fact pattern presented by Director Comey makes clear Secretary Clinton violated the law,” Mr. Chaffetz said in a statement Wednesday. “Congress and the American people have a right to understand the depth and breadth of the FBI’s investigation.”

Mr. Ryan has also said Mrs. Clinton should not receive classified information in briefings given to her as the Democratic presidential nominee.

Ms. Lynch is also set to testify before Congress regarding the Clinton email investigation, said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) in a Wednesday statement. A Justice Department spokesman affirmed Ms. Lynch plans to testify next week but said that the appearance had been confirmed since May. CONTINUE AT SITE