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HOMELAND SECURITY

U.S. Charges Contractor With Leaking NSA Document on Russian Hacking Reality Leigh Winner was charged with removing classified information and mailing it to a news organization; U.S. official confirms outlet was The Intercept By Del Quentin Wilber and Lukas I. Alpert

A 25-year-old government contractor was arrested over the weekend and charged with leaking a secret report to a news organization that described some of Russia’s election-related hacking activities, according to court papers and U.S. officials briefed on the case.

Reality Leigh Winner of Augusta, Ga., was charged with removing classified information from her secure workplace and mailing it to the news organization.

The Justice Department didn’t identify the news organization in court papers, but a U.S. official confirmed it was the Intercept, which on Monday afternoon posted online a document that it said was produced by the National Security Agency and which concluded Russian spies hacked computers of a U.S. company “to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions.”

Ms. Winner is being held in federal custody until a detention hearing later this week, according to her attorney, Titus Nichols.

“She has no criminal history,” Mr. Nichols said. “She is holding up very well and trying to remain in good spirits. We are working to resolve this and put it behind her.”

Ms. Winner is a contractor with Pluribus International Corp. and is assigned to a government facility in Georgia, the Justice Department said. Calls to Pluribus weren’t answered.

The U.S. government learned about the alleged leak on May 30 when a news organization provided it with a copy of the secret document in an apparent effort to verify its authenticity, according to an affidavit filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In the court papers, the FBI said government experts examined the copy of the report and concluded it had been folded or creased, suggesting it “had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space.”

The government investigated who had access to the document and determined that six people, including Ms. Winner, had printed copies of it. An audit of her desk computer revealed she had an “e-mail contact with” the news organization, the affidavit says.

Ms. Winner was questioned Saturday by an FBI agent and admitted printing the report and then mailing it to a news organization, the affidavit alleged.

Her lawyer, Mr. Nichols, declined to comment on the allegations.

In an article published Monday, the Intercept said it had received the NSA report anonymously and had authenticated its contents. It said the NSA report details Russian efforts to hack the computers of a U.S. company and steal information about election-related software and hardware, data that was then likely used to launch cyberattacks against local U.S. governments.

U.S. intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials have said that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. election to help the prospects of Donald Trump, then the Republican nominee. CONTINUE AT SITE

Counter-terror Lessons from America’s Civil War By David P. Goldman

The essay below first appeared a year ago in The Asia Times, under the headline, “Why the terrorists are winning the intelligence war.” There’s a tried and true American approach to suppressing terrorism, and it worked quite well during Gen. Sherman’s 1863 Kentucky campaign and Gen. Phil Sheridan’s subsequent reduction of the Shenandoah Valley. We don’t have to be particularly smart; we merely have to do some disgusting things. Sherman and Sheridan suppressed sniping at Union soldiers by Confederate civilians by burning the towns (just the towns, not the townsfolk) that sheltered them. In other words, they forced collective responsibility upon a hostile population, a doctrine that in peacetime is entirely repugnant, but that in wartime becomes unavoidable. By contrast, the peacetime procedure of turning petty criminals into police snitches has backfired terribly. No doubt we will learn that the perpetrators of tonight’s horror at London Bridge were known to police, like the Manchester Arena suicide bomber and most of the perpetrators of large-scale terrorist acts in Europe during the past several years. (Update: “At Least One London Bridge Terrorist Was a ‘Known Wolf'”) The remedy is time-tested and straightforward. We merely require the will to apply it.

Why the terrorists are winning the intelligence war

Yet another criminal known to security services has perpetrated a mass killing, the Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Why did the French police allow a foreign national with a criminal record of violence to reside in France? Apart from utter incompetence, the explanation is that he was a snitch for the French authorities. Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies, as I noted in 2015. Every Muslim in Europe knows this.

The terrorists, though, have succeeded in turning the police agents sent to spy on them and forcing them to commit suicide attacks to expiate their sins. This has become depressingly familiar; as Ryan Gallagher reported recently, perpetrators already known to the authorities committed ten of the highest-profile attacks between 2013 and 2015.
The terrorists, in other words, are adding insult to injury. By deploying police snitches as suicide attackers, terrorists assert their moral superiority and power over western governments. The message may be lost on the western public, whose security agencies and media do their best to obscure it, but it is well understood among the core constituencies of the terrorist groups: the superiority of Islam turns around the depraved criminals whom the western police send to spy on us, and persuades them to become martyrs for the cause of Islam.

These attacks, in other words, are designed to impress the Muslim public as much as they are intended to horrify the western public. In so many words, the terrorists tell Muslims that western police agencies cannot protect them. If they cooperate with the police they will be found out and punished. The West fears the power of Islam: it evinces such fear by praising Islam as a religion of peace, by squelching dissent in the name of fighting supposed Islamophobia, and by offering concessions and apologies to Muslims. Ordinary Muslims live in fear of the terror networks, which have infiltrated their communities and proven their ability to turn the efforts of western security services against them. They are less likely to inform on prospective terrorists and more likely to aid them by inaction.

The terrorists, in short, are winning the intelligence war, because they have shaped the environment in which intelligence is gathered and traded. But that is how intelligence wars always proceed: spies switch sides and tell their stories because they want to be with the winner. ISIS and al-Qaeda look like winners in the eyes of western Muslim populations after humiliating the security services of the West.

As a result, western European Muslims fear the terrorists more than they fear the police. The West will remain vulnerable to mass terror attacks until the balance of fear shifts in the other direction.

Report: Global Terrorism Has Tripled Since 2011, Now at an All-Time High By Patrick Poole

The Institute for Economics and Peace has released its annual “Global Peace Index” for 2017, reporting some shocking findings:According to the report, global terrorism has nearly tripled since 2011, and terrorism is now at an all-time high:

The Voice of America reports:

Worldwide terrorism is at an all-time high, and violence cost the global economy $14.3 trillion last year, with a $2.5 trillion impact in the United States alone.

These new figures from the latest Global Peace Index, a report on conflict and security, indicate that world peace has been deteriorating for the past decade, largely driven by terrorism and conflicts in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

The study says the decline interrupts long-term improvements the world had been making since the end of World War II.

According to the report, the annual number of terrorism incidents has almost tripled since 2011.

Deaths from terrorism have risen more than 900% since 2007 in the 35 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Of those members, 23 nations experienced terrorism related deaths over the past year.

Those countries include Denmark, Sweden, France and Turkey.

One eye-popping graphic from the report (p. 36):

This is quite a turnaround from this time last year during the presidential campaign — when the media was trumpeting supposed major declines in terrorism:Only a few were willing to acknowledge the growing terrorism problem developing in the West:After last month’s suicide bombing in Manchester, among other recent attacks, it appears that another “Summer of Terror” may be in the offing:

Piling on Sheriff Clarke Plagiarism allegations the latest attack on the would-be DHS official. Matthew Vadum

Allegations of academic plagiarism are the latest weapon the left-wingers of the mainstream media are using in an effort to take down Milwaukee County, Wisc., Sheriff David Clarke.

The Left’s politics of personal destruction played no small role in the defeat at the polls last November of Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio (R). More recently, the Left played a role in the departure of top-rated Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, and now that they smell conservative blood in the water, the character assassins at the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America are stepping up their efforts to force Sean Hannity off the airwaves.

These people are going after Clarke, a high-profile conservative and outspoken champion of law and order, because they view him as a threat to Democratic Party interests. Democrats, of course, think they hold a monopoly on black support and are threatened by strong black conservatives, so they attack and smear them at every opportunity.

Hitting Clarke, a longtime supporter of President Trump, became especially urgent for the Left after he announced a little over a week ago that he would be taking a position at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in June. The position, assistant secretary of DHS for partnership and engagement, does not require confirmation by the Senate.

Clarke, a strong Second Amendment advocate, was one of three black speakers to appear at the Republican National Convention last summer. He is also eminently quotable. He has told Black Lives Matter activists to “stop trying to fix the police, fix the ghetto,” and described Ferguson protesters as “vultures on a roadside carcass.”

Days after Clarke made the DHS appointment public, a team of CNN researchers led by serial exaggerator Andrew Kaczynski conveniently accused him of plagiarism with respect to his 2013 master’s thesis on U.S. security studies for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. (The thesis may be viewed here.)

How Sharia Supremacism and Judicial Imperialism Threaten National Security Having failed to define the real threat — sharia supremacism — Trump walked into a trap of his own making. By Andrew C. McCarthy

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal’s ruling against President Trump’s so-called travel ban empowers both radical Islam and judicial imperialism. The combination portends lasting damage to the United States.

To rehash, the executive order (EO) proclaimed temporary restrictions (the main one, for 90 days) on travel to the United States by the nationals of six countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Those countries, along with Iraq (cited in Trump’s original executive order, but not the revised EO at issue), had previously been singled out by Congress and President Obama — not because they are Muslim-majority countries, but because a) the presence or promotion of terrorism in their territories makes their nationals suspect and b) their anti-Americanism and/or dysfunctional governments render it impossible to conduct background checks on visa applicants.

This Fourth Circuit’s en banc review of prior invalidations of the EO by “progressive” activists masquerading as jurists produced 205 pages of opinions. The outcome was about as uncertain as Secretariat at Belmont, with ten of the tribunal’s 13 judges joining Chief Judge Roger Gregory’s majority ruling to one degree or another.

Three judges filed compelling dissents that will prove quite useful when, as Trump promises, the case proceeds to the Supreme Court. The continuation of the litigation is an unfortunate outcome, even if conservatives and other rule-of-law types, buoyed by Justice Neil Gorsuch’s appointment, may be right that the EO has a better shot in the High Court.

That’s because the EO doesn’t matter. You may not have noticed, but sharia supremacism has already won, regardless of what the Supreme Court does.

See, the EO was never an end in and of itself. It is a means — a fatally flawed one — to a vital end. That end is a vetting system that enables our security services to distinguish pro-Western Muslims from sharia supremacists. That’s the goal. The EO was conceived as a temporary pause while the vetting system took shape.

From a security perspective, though, the EO was utterly ineffective: applicable to a negligible slice of the global anti-American threat. More significantly, as a strategy, starting with the EO rather than getting to vetting has been a catastrophe.

As we have previously observed, in order to install the vetting system we need, the challenge of Islam must be confronted head-on and without apology. That is unavoidable. You can’t flinch. It is a certainty that the Democrat-media complex — of which Islamist organizations are members in good standing — is going to smear you as a racist “Islamophobe.” (Yes, this is another race-obsessed “progressive” narrative, so Islam gets to be the “race,” so that defenders of the Constitution and Western culture can be cast as “the oppressor.”) You have to be content with knowing that you are not a racist, with knowing that you are defending religious liberty, including the religious liberty of pro-Western Muslims.

There is a single battle that must be won. American culture must be convinced that Islam, while it has plenty of diversity, has a mainstream strain — sharia supremacism — that is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology hiding under a religious veneer.

Muslim Brothers Arrested in MN After Arsenal of Guns, Ammo, Bomb-Making Materials, and DRONE Found in Car By Debra Heine

Earlier this month, Minneapolis police stumbled across an arsenal of guns, ammunition, and bomb-making materials — including a drone — inside the car of two brothers with ties to the Middle East. The pair were arrested, but now a concerned citizen is “outraged” because one of the men is already out of jail.

The police discovered the arsenal after the man reported 27-year-old Abdullah Alrifahe and 26-year-old Majid Alrifahe to law enforcement on May 11 following an incident outside a federally subsidized senior housing project. When the Good Samaritan confronted the brothers about littering from their car, they jumped out and “moved aggressively toward him,” WCCO reports.

Abdullah is being held in the Hennepin County Jail. His brother, Majid, has been released and is facing minor charges.

WCCO-TV has confirmed that both Homeland Security and the FBI are involved in the investigation, which started outside a federally-subsidized senior housing project. A good Samaritan confronted the men about littering from their car.

The man, who asked that his name not be used for fear of his safety, said the brothers jumped out of their car, moved aggressively toward him and used the N-word. He then called police.

Inside the brothers’ car, police found a loaded AK-47, another rifle, a handgun, a grenade, large amounts of ammunition, and what would later be identified as bomb-making materials, including a drone.

Abdullah Alrifahe had recently been released from jail after serving time for a weapons conviction. He is now facing a single felony weapons charge.

His brother, Majid, has been released from jail and is facing a low-level misdemeanor charges, including disorderly conduct.

The good Samaritan is outraged the charges aren’t more serious.

“For what they found in their car, that is way too light,” he said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Drive them out: Time to deport known American jihadis By Karin McQuillan

The children of Manchester were killed by a Jihadi known to authorities. So were the victims of 12 out of the 14 Islamic terror attacks in America under Obama’s watchful eye. That must end. Our terror watch list must become a terror deportation list.

President Trump went to the very heart of Islam, Saudi Arabia, and told the assembled leaders of the Muslem world they must drive the Jihadis out of their mosques, out of their communities, out of their country and out of this earth.

The Saudis are responsible for their country. We are responsible for America. Let us start right here and right now. We need to drive all those who preach Jihad out of our American mosques, community, and country.

Preachers in America are not allowed to encourage murder or the overthrow of our government. It is immoral and illegal to allow the preaching of Jihad in our mosques. Yet time after time, whenever we have an Islamic atrocity in our country, we discover the killer attended a radical mosque. One estimate is that half of the mosques in our country were founded by radical Muslim Brotherhood members.

In 2012, then-President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, banned radical imams from entering France; in 2016, France closed down a handful of radical mosques where they found terrorist weapons caches. We should do that and more. We should close all radical mosques. Especially for those who believe Islam is a religion of peace, it is clear these are not true religious institutions, but centers promoting Muslim supremacy, violence, and the suppression of other religions.

Make no mistake. Islamism in America reaches far beyond mosque walls. We have a pro-Jihadi curriculum in our schools, Jihadi preachers and speakers in our mosques and prisons, Jihadi bureaucrats and support staff in our government, Jihadi judges in our courts (one appointed by New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie), and Jihadis serving on oversight committees of police departments, the FBI and Homeland Security.

President Trump is asking the Muslim leaders across the globe to step up. We have to step up at home. We have to step up at every level. We need to support courageous citizen activists like Pamela Geller and Brigitte Gabrielle, the remarkable Charles Jacobs and Steven Emerson. These heroic Americans have been carrying the burden to fight Jihad. They have been doing it almost alone for years. We need an all-out effort by city and state governments, Congress and every federal department, and yes, the president, who has to get moving. They are supposed to protect us from organized killers.

Security to Tighten in U.S. Cities After Manchester Bombing Local police around the country are increasing patrols around venues and arena operators and college officials are planning extra precautions By Scott Calvert, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Melissa Korn

Sports fans, college graduates and others can expect heightened security at U.S. arenas in the coming days after Monday night’s bomb attack in Manchester, England that killed 22 and injured 59.

Officials at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland said they are implementing “additional appropriate” security measures for Tuesday evening’s NBA playoff game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Boston Celtics. The officials declined to elaborate.

The series will head to Boston’s TD Garden arena on Thursday, and fans are being asked to arrive early because of increased security.

College administrators and security personnel are taking additional precautions ahead of graduation activities that will bring thousands of visitors to campuses or nearby arenas.

Police in several cities stepped up patrols Tuesday, including in New York, where police rolled out counterterrorism units to music venues, transit hubs, sports arenas and other locations, as the Monday night attack renewed concerns about the vulnerability of public gatherings.

The Boston Police Department said it has increased patrols at concert venues as a precautionary measure. Among the events scheduled this weekend is the Boston Calling Music Festival, a three-day affair at Harvard University’s athletic complex in Boston’s Allston neighborhood.

Organizers said they are working with law enforcement and will “take all appropriate steps to ensure our event will be executed in a safe and secure manner for everyone this weekend,” said co-founders Brian Appel and Mike Snow.

In Baltimore, fans will see a greater security presence outside Oriole Park at Camden Yards before and after Tuesday evening’s baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and Minnesota Twins, said Vernon Conaway Jr., who oversees security at the ballpark and the neighboring football stadium where the Ravens play.

Uniformed police officers, police dogs and security staff already operate outside the downtown ballpark, particularly around a nearby light-rail stop and other pedestrian choke points, he said, and that will increase starting Tuesday.

Mr. Conaway said that anyone entering the stadium must go through a metal detector and submit to a bag check, and that bomb-sniffing dogs patrol the facility.

“Everything inside of the stadium walls we feel very good about,” he said. “It’s the exterior that we have to be vigilant and present to make sure that people coming to our event, and people leaving our event, are as protected and safe as they are when they are inside.”

The suicide bombing outside a pop concert in Manchester highlighted the challenge of guarding against such an attack near a facility’s exits, said Mitch Silber, the New York Police Department’s former director of intelligence analysis.

“That’s a much more nefarious and harder to detect phenomenon,” said Mr. Silber, a security risk consultant for FTI Consulting. “Some type of adjustments are going to have to be made in the way the perimeter of stadiums are covered as events come to a close.”CONTINUE AT SITE

They want to kill us all By Silvio Canto, Jr.

What more do we need to know about these people? Can their intentions be more clear? What else do they have to do? Blow up teen girls at a pop concert?

As Roger Simon wrote:

If you think what happened in Blighty can’t happen here — 19 killed, 59 injured — you’ll have to excuse me if I say “You’re out of your bloomin’ mind.” Did you already forget 9/11/2001? Or the Boston Marathon? Or San Bernardino? Or the Orlando gay bar attack less than a year ago that killed 49?

Oh, yeah. Seems so long ago, doesn’t it, even that last one? The “new normal.” We put these things out of our minds the week after to deal with the next trivial Washington scandal or go about our petty lives.

Our culture lives in a self-destructive willful blindness, refusing to see the obvious even though it happens again and again across the globe.

Radical Islam, Islamism, or whatever you want to call it has been at war with us since the Twin Towers came down and even well before. And they have no intention whatsoever of stopping.

Nevertheless we respond in the most perfunctory manner, nattering on about how Islam is a”religion of peace,” criticizing ourselves and others for “Islamophbia,” or dismissing it all as a police matter.

My guess is that we will react decisively in the US. We’ve had a much more realistic view of terrorism over here. As a last resort, we believe in self defense and allow some citizens to carry guns and serve as a line of protection.

However, I’m not very optimistic about Europe. For example, Salman Abedi, the alleged terrorist, was known to British authorities prior to the attack. Wonder how that makes any parent feel about the next concert that their teens want to go to? Or the next time that there is a big soccer event? In other words, would you attend a concert in the UK any time soon knowing that people under the eye of the police will join you for the proceedings?

Most of all, it makes President Trump’s realism about terrorism and uncontrolled immigration really stand out.

ISIS urges jihadis to imitate Times Square car ramming incident By Lisa Daftari

Opportunistic jihadis have posted messages urging supporters to carry out vehicular attacks similar to Thursday’s Times Square car crash even as law enforcement officials confirmed that the incident had no connection to terrorism. http://www.foreigndesknews.com/world/middle-east/isis-urges-jihadis-imitate-times-square-car-ramming-incident/

Pro-Islamic State jihadis shared images and messages such as, “Soon, the vehicle attacks will be witnessed on your streets, by Allah’s permission,” in an attempt to lure so-called ‘lone wolf’ attackers to carry out same-style attacks but in the name of the Islamic State.

Richard Rojas,26, from Bronx, NY, was arraigned Friday on charges of second-degree murder, 20 counts of attempted murder and five counts of aggravated vehicular homicide following Thursday’s car crash, which killed an 18-year-old woman.

The terror group has even been using relevant hashtags such as #NewYork #Times_Square and #USA in their propaganda posts.

Jihadis posted an image of a large truck with “We will continue to terrorize you and ruin your lives,” on the Telegram messaging app, urging ‘believers’ to give up this ‘temporary life’ and earn everlasting reward in paradise.

“O Muwahhid (believer), Indeed it is a single soul and a single paradise, so sell it to Allah and purchase Jannah (afterlife). Sell what is temporary for what is lasting, for how blessed a transaction is that transaction! Blessed would be the seller and blessed be the buyer!”

After finding challenges in asking would-be jihadis to travel from around the world, particularly the West, to the Caliphate, the Islamic State began a campaign of encouraging Western sympathizers to launch local attacks in their hometowns by using everyday objects as weapons, such as kitchen knives, axes and cars, to ram into large crowds.

ISIS has claimed car ramming attacks in Nice, Berlin, London and Ohio State University, when Somali student Abdul Razak Ali Artan drove his car into a group of pedestrians on a sidewalk and subsequently exited his car and started stabbing those nearby with a knife.

Earlier this week, ISIS released a video featuring an American jihadi calling for ‘lone-wolf’ attacks in the U.S.

“Liberate yourself from hellfire by killing a kafir (non-believer),” a jihadi identified by his pseudonym, Abu Hamza al-Amriki, said.

The group has also published several articles and infographics in recent months urging supporters to carry out vehicular attacks, advising them to target places with heavy pedestrian traffic such as New York, to maximize the impact of attacks.