The sordid story of the Legion of Christ, whose late founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, was a close ally of Pope John Paul II before being forcibly retired by the Vatican in 2006, is a microcosm of the crisis currently enveloping the church.

At stake is whether Pope Benedict XVI will decide to take over the Legion and install new leaders from the outside or allow it to continue with its same hierarchy. Five bishops from five countries are expected to submit their reports about the Legion Monday.

Pope John Paul II gives his blessing to Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ, at the Vatican in a November 2004 file photo. The late pope once called Maciel “an efficacious guide to youth.”
The controversy over the Legion, which is now barred or severely restricted from operating in six U.S. dioceses, is especially awkward for Benedict because he wants to have John Paul, a staunch defender of the order, canonized.

“Maciel was a sexual criminal of epic proportions who gained the trust of John Paul II and created a movement that is as close to a cult as anything we’ve seen in the church,” said author Jason Berry, one of two reporters who broke the Maciel story in 1997 and who directed a 2008 documentary about the priest called “Vows of Silence.”

“But he got away with it for years and still in a sense he’s getting away with it.”

The Vatican ordered a worldwide investigation into the Legion, founded in Mexico in 1941, last year. But its response to decades of allegations involving Maciel has been as slow and often reluctant as its reaction to the long-festering sex abuse scandals now erupting in Ireland, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.

In 1997, nine former high-ranking seminarians accused Maciel, who died in 2008, of sexually abusing them when they were boys training for the priesthood. Last year, it was discovered Maciel had an illegitimate daughter born in 1986 in Spain. Two Mexican men who say they are Maciel’s sons claim he also sexually abused them as children.

With a leader said to be a manipulative monster who built a shadowy but powerful organization for elite, wealthy Catholics with schools in 22 countries – and a tradition of grooming handsome, clean-cut priests who all wear their hair parted on the left and black double-breasted suits — the Legion of Christ sounds straight out of a Dan Brown novel.

But while Opus Dei, the other controversial conservative Catholic order, was made famous in Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” the Legion of Christ is virtually unknown to most Americans – at least on the surface.

Two of the most visible priests in America are Father Thomas Williams, a movie-star-handsome CBS News analyst, and Father Jonathan Morris, who is sometimes referred to as “Father Knows Best” on the Fox News Channel. They belong to the Legion of Christ but rarely identify themselves as such on camera.

“Dan Brown got the wrong group,” said Genevieve Kineke, an orthodox Catholic who was a member of Regnum Christi, the legion’s lay movement, from 1992 to 2000 and writes a blog about her experiences. “The Legion of Christ is the scary cult embedded in the bosom of the mother church. Not Opus Dei.”

Though the Vatican knew of improprieties involving Maciel as far back as 1956, he was praised and protected by John Paul II, who became pope in 1978 and once called Maciel “an efficacious guide to youth.”

Even when the former seminarians went public in 1997 about Maciel’s sexual abuse and filed a formal complaint with the Vatican, the church at first did nothing while the Legion and other high-profile conservative Catholics called them liars.

A book, Vows of Silence, written by Hartford Courant reporter Gerald Renner and writer Jason Berry, was published in 2004 with what one reviewer called “horror stories… of brainwashing, manipulation, pederast seduction rituals, character assassination, bribes, drug abuse, gulag-type threats — you name it.”

Shortly after that, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would succeed John Paul, ordered an investigation that ended with Maciel being consigned to a life of “prayer and penitence” after John Paul’s death in 2005. But the Legion itself was not condemned nor the victims acknowledged.

It wasn’t until the discovery that Maciel had a daughter living in Spain that the Vatican ordered the worldwide investigation, reportedly to find out who in the Legion knew about Maciel’s behavior and how it was covered up.

“Of course we’re shocked and disappointed by all of this,” said Jim Fair, the spokesman for the Legion of Christ in North America. “It’s as if Father Maciel lived in two different universes, like some old science fiction movie. And now it’s all blowing up.”

Fair said the order has “toned down the veneration,” such as often removing the photographs of Maciel that adorned Legion facilities. He added that the Legion welcomed the apostolic visitation, which is what the Vatican investigation is called.

“He was obviously a very flawed man,” said Fair. “It’s hard to reconcile the guy we now know with the man who built hundreds of seminaries. But we will go on. The work of the church is bigger than humans. It’s a little as if we found out Abraham Lincoln was a serial pedophile after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.”

Interviews with former members of the Legion and Regnum Christi paint a chilling picture of Maciel as a sociopathic master salesman who knew how to charm the upper echelon at the Vatican as well as enlist the wealthy and elite to his fast-growing order, all while using cult-like techniques.

“He created a structure that allowed sexual abuse, financial fraud and spiritual improprieties to go completely unchecked,” said Kineke. “Believe me, the best and the brightest got sucked into this scam. I was one. I was an elite bully for Christ.”

Kineke said part of Maciel’s allure was that he represented an old-school alternative in a modern, post-Vatican II world.

“But these recent incest claims have rattled even the sturdiest of cages,” she said.

Paul Lennon, 66, was a member of the order from 1961 to 1984 and directs ReGAIN, an organization founded by ex-Legionaries.

“It was nothing short of mind control,” said Lennon, who wrote a 2008 book about Maciel called Our Father Who Art in Bed. “He conned everybody.”

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, 70, who was named the world’s richest man by Forbes last week, has long been a supporter of the Legion. His children attended Legion schools in Mexico.

Harvard professor and former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Mary Anne Glendon has also been a staunch supporter of the Legion.

But the man whom all Legionaries venerated as a near-saint and called “Nuestro Padre” (Our Father) allegedly led a double life as a pedophile and had at least two mistresses and three children.

“He destroyed my life,” said Juan Vaca, 73, a former superior of the Legion of Christ who said he was molested by Maciel for ten years beginning when he was 12. “I dreamt of being a good priest. He killed all my dreams.”

Vaca, like many interviewed by AOL News, doubts that the Vatican will make any lasting changes to the Legion of Christ, despite the investigation.

“The Vatican may distance itself a bit but the Legion is too powerful to shut down,” Vaca said.

Vaca who left the order in 1978, is an adjunct professor of psychology and sociology at Mercy College. He remembers the first night he was summoned to Maciel’s room. He said he found the man who was “a holy man, my mother and my father, everything to me,” masturbating in front of him.

“I turned into a block of ice,” said Vaca, who had left his family behind in Mexico to move to the order in Spain. “I was petrified.”

Vaca said 28 other young seminarians were sexually abused by Maciel at the same time he was, and adds that some of them “went on to abuse others as they grew up.”

That misuse of sex and power was an undercurrent that helped fuel the growth of the order, according to several former members of the Legion and Regnum Christi.

“Maciel always told me to recruit the most handsome boys from the best families,” said Vaca. “They were trained to approach rich women. I’m not saying they had sexual relationships with these women but they did know how to charm them.”

Kineke and others also said Legion priests are notoriously successful in winning over women to the church.

“They are spiritual seducers,” said another former Regnum Christi member. “They are the only priests I’ve seen who have swept people off their feet. These men woo women because they want access to our children and our husbands’ wallets.”

In an interview not long before his death in 2007, “Vows of Silence” author Gerald Renner said Maciel was not the only priest in the Legion who led a double life. Renner referred to one priest who he said was known as “the horndog of Rome” for his many affairs with women.

“The Legion by its very nature spawns people who lead double lives,” said Lennon. “Maciel was certainly not the only hypocrite in the Legion but he was definitely the worst one.”
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WASHINGTON — Suspected drug cartel “hit teams” gunned down an American consular employee and her husband in a Mexican border city and killed a co-worker’s Mexican husband in a separate attack, a US official said Sunday.

Killed: Arthur Redelfs, 34, was killed along with his wife Lesley Enriquez, who worked at the U.S. consulate. Their one-year-old baby was unharmed

The victims — two Americans and a Mexican — came under fire in separate locations as they were driving Saturday through Ciudad Juarez after earlier attending the same social event, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The killings marked an ominous turn in the drug violence wracking northern Mexico, and prompted the State Department to announce that Americans working at six US consulates in the border area could send their families away.

President Barack Obama said he was “deeply saddened and outraged by the news of the brutal murders,” said National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer.

The victims came under fire in separate locations after attending the same social event earlier in the day, the US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Suspected drug cartel hit teams fired on locally employed staff, Consulate General Juarez, in their privately owned vehicles,” the official said.

“The attacks resulted in three fatalities — two American citizens and one Mexican citizen,” he said.

The victims included a US woman employed by the consulate’s American citizens services section who was with her American husband and infant daughter when they came under fire, the official said.

The infant, who was in the back seat, survived the attack unharmed, but the woman and her husband were killed, he said.

In the second attack, a Mexican employee of the consulate was following her husband and two children in a separate car, when her husband’s vehicle came under fire, killing him and wounding the two children, the official said.

“Both families had attended the same social event earlier in the afternoon off-post away from the consulate,” the US official said. “It has not been determined if the victims were specifically targeted.”

Shortly after the killings were disclosed by the White House, the State Department issued a travel warning for Mexico.

It said Americans working in consulates in the northern cities of Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and Matamoros were authorized to send family members home until April 12 because of security concerns.

The departure authorization only affect relatives of US government personnel in those cities, the statement said.

The travel warning said that due to the “recent violent attacks,” US citizens were urged to “delay unnecessary travel to parts of Durango, Coahuila and Chihuahua states.”

“While millions of US citizens safely visit Mexico each year … violence in the country has increased,” the State Department said.

“Drug cartels and associated criminal elements have retaliated violently against individuals who speak out against them or whom they otherwise view as a threat to their organizations,” it read.

The State Department travel warning was issued “coupled with the increase of violence in that northern area,” said Department spokesman Fred Lash.

“It’s not an ordered departure, it’s up to them if they want to come out or not,” said Lash told AFP.

Ciudad Juarez, population 1.3 million, is a major hub for smuggling illegal drugs into the United States. It is directly across the border from El Paso, Texas.

More than 2,600 people were murdered in Ciudad Juarez in 2009 in drug-related violence.

The war between rival drug cartels to control major border crossing points, as well as the government’s attempt to crackdown on the cartels, has killed more than 15,000 people across Mexico over the last three years, according to government figures.

The State Department warning said that some of the recent clashes “have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades.”

“Large firefights have taken place in towns and cities across Mexico, but occur mostly in northern Mexico,” the statement read. “During some of these incidents, US citizens have been trapped and temporarily prevented from leaving the area.”

More than 60 people were killed over the weekend in Mexico, including 38 in the southern state of Guerrero, Mexican officials said.

Drug violence: Staff at the U.S. consulate gather outside the building in Ciudad Juarez after two fatal drive-by shootings

The State Department issued this Travel warning.
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The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.

While it has been widely reported that the C.I.A. and the military are attacking operatives of Al Qaeda and others through unmanned, remote-controlled drone strikes, some American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.

It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.

Moreover, in Pakistan, where Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, the secret use of private contractors may be seen as an attempt to get around the Pakistani government’s prohibition of American military personnel’s operating in the country.

Officials say Mr. Furlong’s operation seems to have been shut down, and he is now is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Defense Department for a number of possible offenses, including contract fraud.

Even in a region of the world known for intrigue, Mr. Furlong’s story stands out. At times, his operation featured a mysterious American company run by retired Special Operations officers and an iconic C.I.A. figure who had a role in some of the agency’s most famous episodes, including the Iran-Contra affair.

The allegations that he ran this network come as the American intelligence community confronts other instances in which private contractors may have been improperly used on delicate and questionable operations, including secret raids in Iraq and an assassinations program that was halted before it got off the ground.

“While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond,” one American government official said. But it is still murky whether Mr. Furlong had approval from top commanders or whether he might have been running a rogue operation.

This account of his activities is based on interviews with American military and intelligence officials and businessmen in the region. They insisted on anonymity in discussing a delicate case that is under investigation.

Col. Kathleen Cook, a spokeswoman for United States Strategic Command, which oversees Mr. Furlong’s work, declined to make him available for an interview. Military officials said Mr. Furlong, a retired Air Force officer, is now a senior civilian employee in the military, a full-time Defense Department employee based at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Network of Informants

Mr. Furlong has extensive experience in “psychological operations” — the military term for the use of information in warfare — and he plied his trade in a number of places, including Iraq and the Balkans. It is unclear exactly when Mr. Furlong’s operations began. But officials said they seemed to accelerate in the summer of 2009, and by the time they ended, he and his colleagues had established a network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan whose job it was to help locate people believed to be insurgents.

Government officials said they believed that Mr. Furlong might have channeled money away from a program intended to provide American commanders with information about Afghanistan’s social and tribal landscape, and toward secret efforts to hunt militants on both sides of the country’s porous border with Pakistan.

Some officials said it was unclear whether these operations actually resulted in the deaths of militants, though others involved in the operation said that they did.

Military officials said that Mr. Furlong would often boast about his network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan to senior military officers, and in one instance said a group of suspected militants carrying rockets by mule over the border had been singled out and killed as a result of his efforts.

In addition, at least one government contractor who worked with Mr. Furlong in Afghanistan last year maintains that he saw evidence that the information was used for attacking militants.

The contractor, Robert Young Pelton, an author who writes extensively about war zones, said that the government hired him to gather information about Afghanistan and that Mr. Furlong improperly used his work. “We were providing information so they could better understand the situation in Afghanistan, and it was being used to kill people,” Mr. Pelton said.

He said that he and Eason Jordan, a former television news executive, had been hired by the military to run a public Web site to help the government gain a better understanding of a region that bedeviled them. Recently, the top military intelligence official in Afghanistan publicly said that intelligence collection was skewed too heavily toward hunting terrorists, at the expense of gaining a deeper understanding of the country.

Instead, Mr. Pelton said, millions of dollars that were supposed to go to the Web site were redirected by Mr. Furlong toward intelligence gathering for the purpose of attacking militants.

In one example, Mr. Pelton said he had been told by Afghan colleagues that video images that he posted on the Web site had been used for an American strike in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan.

Among the contractors Mr. Furlong appears to have used to conduct intelligence gathering was International Media Ventures, a private “strategic communication” firm run by several former Special Operations officers. Another was American International Security Corporation, a Boston-based company run by Mike Taylor, a former Green Beret. In a phone interview, Mr. Taylor said that at one point he had employed Duane Clarridge, known as Dewey, a former top C.I.A. official who has been linked to a generation of C.I.A. adventures, including the Iran-Contra scandal.

In an interview, Mr. Clarridge denied that he had worked with Mr. Furlong in any operation in Afghanistan or Pakistan. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

Mr. Taylor, who is chief executive of A.I.S.C., said his company gathered information on both sides of the border to give military officials information about possible threats to American forces. He said his company was not specifically hired to provide information to kill insurgents.

Some American officials contend that Mr. Furlong’s efforts amounted to little. Nevertheless, they provoked the ire of the C.I.A.

Last fall, the spy agency’s station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, wrote a memorandum to the Defense Department’s top intelligence official detailing what officials said were serious offenses by Mr. Furlong. The officials would not specify the offenses, but the officer’s cable helped set off the Pentagon investigation.

Afghan Intelligence

In mid-2008, the military put Mr. Furlong in charge of a program to use private companies to gather information about the political and tribal culture of Afghanistan. Some of the approximately $22 million in government money allotted to this effort went to International Media Ventures, with offices in St. Petersburg, Fla., San Antonio and elsewhere. On its Web site, the company describes itself as a public relations company, “an industry leader in creating potent messaging content and interactive communications.”

The Web site also shows that several of its senior executives are former members of the military’s Special Operations forces, including former commandos from Delta Force, which has been used extensively since the Sept. 11 attacks to track and kill suspected terrorists.

Until recently, one of the members of International Media’s board of directors was Gen. Dell L. Dailey, former head of Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the military’s covert units.

In an e-mail message, General Dailey said that he had resigned his post on the company’s board, but he did not say when. He did not give details about the company’s work with the American military, and other company executives declined to comment.

In an interview, Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, the top military spokesman in Afghanistan, said that the United States military was currently employing nine International Media Ventures civilian employees on routine jobs in guard work and information processing and analysis. Whatever else other International Media employees might be doing in Afghanistan, he said, he did not know and had no responsibility for their actions.

By Mr. Pelton’s account, Mr. Furlong, in conversations with him and his colleagues, referred to his stable of contractors as “my Jason Bournes,” a reference to the fictional American assassin created by the novelist Robert Ludlum and played in movies by the actor Matt Damon.

Military officials said that Mr. Furlong would occasionally brag to his superiors about having Mr. Clarridge’s services at his disposal. Last summer, Mr. Furlong told colleagues that he was working with Mr. Clarridge to secure the release of Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl, a kidnapped soldier who American officials believe is being held by militants in Pakistan.

From December 2008 to mid-June 2009, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Clarridge were hired to assist The New York Times in the case of David Rohde, the Times reporter who was kidnapped by militants in Afghanistan and held for seven months in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The reporter ultimately escaped on his own.

The idea for the government information program was thought up sometime in 2008 by Mr. Jordan, a former CNN news chief, and his partner Mr. Pelton, whose books include “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” and “Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror.”

Top General Approached

They approached Gen. David D. McKiernan, soon to become the top American commander in Afghanistan. Their proposal was to set up a reporting and research network in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the American military and private clients who were trying to understand a complex region that had become vital to Western interests. They already had a similar operation in Iraq — called “Iraq Slogger,” which employed local Iraqis to report and write news stories for their Web site. Mr. Jordan proposed setting up a similar Web site in Afghanistan and Pakistan — except that the operation would be largely financed by the American military. The name of the Web site was Afpax.

Mr. Jordan said that he had gone to the United States military because the business in Iraq was not profitable relying solely on private clients. He described his proposal as essentially a news gathering operation, involving only unclassified materials gathered openly by his employees. “It was all open-source,” he said.

When Mr. Jordan made the pitch to General McKiernan, Mr. Furlong was also present, according to Mr. Jordan. General McKiernan endorsed the proposal, and Mr. Furlong said that he could find financing for Afpax, both Mr. Jordan and Mr. Pelton said. “On that day, they told us to get to work,” Mr. Pelton said.

But Mr. Jordan said that the help from Mr. Furlong ended up being extremely limited. He said he was paid twice — once to help the company with start-up costs and another time for a report his group had written. Mr. Jordan declined to talk about exact figures, but said the amount of money was a “small fraction” of what he had proposed — and what it took to run his news gathering operation.

Whenever he asked for financing, Mr. Jordan said, Mr. Furlong told him that the money was being used for other things, and that the appetite for Mr. Jordan’s services was diminishing.

“He told us that there was less and less money for what we were doing, and less of an appreciation for what we were doing,” he said.

Admiral Smith, the military’s director for strategic communications, said that when he arrived in Kabul a year later, in June 2009, he opposed financing Afpax. He said that he did not need what Mr. Pelton and Mr. Jordan were offering and that the service seemed uncomfortably close to crossing into intelligence gathering — which could have meant making targets of individuals.

“I took the air out of the balloon,” he said.

Admiral Smith said that the C.I.A. was against the proposal for the same reasons. Mr. Furlong persisted in pushing the project, he said.

“I finally had to tell him, ‘Read my lips,’ we’re not interested,’ ” Admiral Smith said.

What happened next is unclear.

Admiral Smith said that when he turned down the Afpax proposal, Mr. Furlong wanted to spend the leftover money elsewhere. That is when Mr. Furlong agreed to provide some of International Media Ventures’ employees to the strategic communications command, which Admiral Smith oversees.

But that still left roughly $15 million unaccounted for, he said.

“I have no idea where the rest of the money is going,” Admiral Smith said.

Dexter Filkins reported from Kabul, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.
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The Federal Reserve says household net worth rose 1.3 percent in the fourth quarter to $54.2 trillion. It marked the third straight quarter of gains. Net worth had risen 4.5 percent in the second quarter of 2009 and an even stronger 5.5 percent in the third quarter.

Net worth is the value of assets such as homes, checking accounts and investments minus debts like mortgages and credit cards.

Even with the gain, Americans’ net worth would have to rise an additional 21 percent to get back to its pre-recession peak of $65.9 trillion. That shows the vast loss of wealth people have suffered from the worst downturn since the 1930s.
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The malicious code, a logic bomb installed last October, was designed to cause damage and disrupt data on servers on an undisclosed date but was caught by other workers before it delivered its payload.

denver airport security

Douglas James Duchak, 46, had worked as a data analyst at the TSA’s Colorado Springs Operations Center, or CSOC, since 2004. The CSOC is used to vet people who have “access to sensitive information and secure areas of the nation’s transportation network,” according to the indictment. A source involved in the case said this involved screening of both passengers and workers at airports and other transportation facilities.

He pleaded not guilty in a Denver federal court on Wednesday and was released on a $25,000 unsecured bond. The indictment did not say whether the malware was crafted to erase or alter data, or simply disable servers.

The CSOC network stores updated information from the government’s terrorist watchlist as well as criminal histories from the U.S. Marshal’s Service Warrant Information Network.

Duchak’s job was to update the CSOC database as new information arrived from these two sources. But on Oct. 15, he was given two weeks’ notice that his job would be terminated.

About a week later, on Oct. 22, Duchak allegedly transmitted the malicious code onto a CSOC server that stored data from the U.S. Marshal’s Service, according to the indictment (.pdf). The next day, he allegedly loaded malicious code to a server containing the Terrorist Screening Database. The source involved in the case said the servers “are part of the system that contains the no-fly list” and added that the code, if it had gone undetected, could have traveled to a facility in another state that uses a similar computer system.

Duchak has been charged in the U.S. District of Colorado with two counts of attempting to cause damage to a protected computer. If convicted, he faces a possible prison sentence of 10 years and a $250,000 fine for each count.

Duchak’s attorney, David Lindsey, disputes the government’s charges and says that the system Duchak worked on was a beta system used for testing statistical analyses.

“It wasn’t connected to anything that had to do with security,” Lindsey said. “Before anything he had his hands on left, it went to another system before it got into any live system that did screening. As I understand it, it is a system that does statistical analyses on the systems that are up and running. And when the tests are run, those are done at one level and then [go to] a second level and then at a final level before the analyses are verified and passed onto anything you would call a live system.”

Lindsey said the CSOC servers that were allegedly targeted for sabotage were used for screening workers primarily and were only “remotely, remotely” related to passenger screening, though he could not elaborate.

“The government has been very misleading in the indictment and press release as to any potential harm [this might have caused] to the public,” he said, adding that the alleged malware was not a virus and will ultimately be shown to have been “nothing.”

Lindsey said that his client was not given a clear answer about why he was let go from his job.
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Rajib Karim, who was born in Bangladesh but now lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, faced three charges under counter-terrorism legislation.

The 30-year-old is accused of planning his own martyrdom. One of the charges involves the UK and another alleges that he conspired with contacts in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Yemen.

The prosecutor, Colin Gibbs, told City of Westminster magistrates court that the charge sheet alleged Karim shared information about his work – including security measures – and offered to take advantage of planned strikes by BA staff to join the airline’s cabin crew.

It is claimed that he deliberately stayed in Britain, obtaining a passport and getting a job at the airline in order to further the conspiracy.

The software expert also faced a third charge, alleging that he collected money and transferred it through intermediaries and wire services to terrorist associates overseas.

The three offences are alleged to have taken place over a four-year period between April 2006 and February this year.

Karim was arrested by officers from Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command and local detectives in the north-east of England on 25 February.

They targeted the Newcastle office complex where he worked as an IT developer and searched his home in the city. Hundreds of computer files seized from the workplace and home are being examined.

Karim spoke only to confirm his name and date of birth during the 15-minute hearing.

District Judge Timothy Workman remanded him in custody and adjourned the case until 26 March at the Old Bailey.

Scotland Yard arrested three men in Slough, Berkshire, during the inquiry. They were released without charge on Tuesday.
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McConnell

McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know.

When he was head of the country’s national intelligence, he scared President Bush with visions of e-doom, prompting the president to sign a comprehensive secret order that unleashed tens of billions of dollars into the military’s black budget so they could start making firewalls and building malware into military equipment.

And now McConnell is back in civilian life as a vice president at the secretive defense contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton. He’s out in front of Congress and the media, peddling the same Cybaremaggedon! gloom.

And now he says we need to re-engineer the internet.

We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.

Re-read that sentence. He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded. Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.

The Washington Post gave McConnell free space to declare that we are losing some sort of cyberwar. He argues that the country needs to get a Cold War strategy, one complete with the online equivalent of ICBMs and Eisenhower-era, secret-codenamed projects. Google’s allegation that Chinese hackers infiltrated its Gmail servers and targeted Chinese dissidents proves the United States is “losing” the cyberwar, according to McConnell.

But that’s not warfare. That’s espionage.

McConnell’s op-ed then pointed to breathless stories in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal about thousands of malware infections from the well-known Zeus virus. He intimated that the nation’s citizens and corporations were under unstoppable attack by this so-called new breed of hacker malware.

despite the masterful PR about the Zeus infections from security company NetWitness (run by a former Bush Administration cyberczar Amit Yoran), the world’s largest security companies McAfee and Symantec downplayed the story. But the message had already gotten out — the net was under attack.

Brian Krebs, one of the country’s most respected cybercrime journalists and occasional Threat Level contributor, described that report: “Sadly, this botnet documented by NetWitness is neither unusual nor new.”

Those enamored with the idea of “cyberwar” aren’t dissuaded by fact-checking.

They like to point to Estonia, where a number of the government’s websites were rendered temporarily inaccessible by angry Russian citizens. They used a crude, remediable denial-of-service attack to temporarily keep users from viewing government websites. (This attack is akin to sending an army of robots to board a bus, so regular riders can’t get on. A website fixes this the same way a bus company would — by keeping the robots off by identifying the difference between them and humans.) Some like to say this was an act of cyberwar, but if that was cyberwar, it’s pretty clear the net will be just fine.

In fact, none of these examples demonstrate the existence of a cyberwar, let alone that we are losing it.

But this battle isn’t about truth. It’s about power.

For years, McConnell has wanted the NSA (the ultra-secretive government spy agency responsible for listening in on other countries and for defending classified government computer systems) to take the lead in guarding all government and private networks. Not surprisingly, the contractor he works for has massive, secret contracts with the NSA in that very area. In fact, the company, owned by the shadowy Carlyle Group, is reported to pull in $5 billion a year in government contracts, many of them Top Secret.

Now the problem with developing cyberweapons — say a virus, or a massive botnet for denial-of-service attacks, is that you need to know where to point them. In the Cold War, it wasn’t that hard. In theory, you’d use radar to figure out where a nuclear attack was coming from and then you’d shoot your missiles in that general direction. But online, it’s extremely difficult to tell if an attack traced to a server in China was launched by someone Chinese, or whether it was actually a teenager in Iowa who used a proxy.

That’s why McConnell and others want to change the internet. The military needs targets.

But McConnell isn’t the only threat to the open internet.

Just last week the National Telecommunications and Information Administration — the portion of the Commerce Department that has long overseen the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — said it was time for it to revoke its hands-off-the-internet policy.

That’s according to a February 24 speech by Assistant Commerce Secretary Lawrence E. Strickling.

In fact, “leaving the Internet alone” has been the nation’s internet policy since the internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s. The primary government imperative then was just to get out of the way to encourage its growth. And the policy set forth in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was: “to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation.”

This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now.

Now the NTIA needs to start being active to prevent cyberattacks, privacy intrusions and copyright violations, according to Strickling. And since NTIA serves as one of the top advisers to the president on the internet, that stance should not be underestimated.

Add to that — a bill looming in the Senate would hand the president emergency powers over the internet — and you can see where all this is headed. And let the past be our guide.

Following years of the NSA illegally spying on Americans’ e-mails and phone calls as part of a secret anti-terrorism project, Congress voted to legalize the program in July 2008. That vote allowed the NSA to legally turn America’s portion of the internet into a giant listening device for the nation’s intelligence services. The new law also gave legal immunity to the telecoms like AT&T that helped the government illegally spy on American’s e-mails and internet use. Then-Senator Barack Obama voted for this legislation, despite earlier campaign promises to oppose it.

As anyone slightly versed in the internet knows, the net has flourished because no government has control over it.

But there are creeping signs of danger.

Where can this lead? Well, consider England, where a new bill targeting online file sharing will outlaw open internet connections at cafes or at home, in a bid to track piracy.

To be sure, we could see more demands by the government for surveillance capabilities and backdoors in routers and operating systems. Already, the feds successfully turned the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (a law mandating surveillance capabilities in telephone switches) into a tool requiring ISPs to build similar government-specified eavesdropping capabilities into their networks.

The NSA dreams of “living in the network,” and that’s what McConnell is calling for in his editorial/advertisement for his company. The NSA lost any credibility it had when it secretly violated American law and its most central tenet: “We don’t spy on Americans.”

Unfortunately, the private sector is ignoring that tenet and is helping the NSA and contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton worm their way into the innards of the net. Security companies make no fuss, since a scared populace and fear-induced federal spending means big bucks in bloated contracts. Google is no help either, recently turning to the NSA for help with its rather routine infiltration by hackers.

Make no mistake, the military industrial complex now has its eye on the internet. Generals want to train crack squads of hackers and have wet dreams of cyberwarfare. Never shy of extending its power, the military industrial complex wants to turn the internet into yet another venue for an arms race.

And it’s waging a psychological warfare campaign on the American people to make that so. The military industrial complex is backed by sensationalism, and a gullible and pageview-hungry media. Notable examples include the New York Times’s John “We Need a New Internet” Markoff, 60 Minutes’ “Hackers Took Down Brazilian Power Grid,” and the WSJ’s Siobhan Gorman, who ominously warned in an a piece lacking any verifiable evidence, that Chinese and Russian hackers are already hiding inside the U.S. electrical grid.

Now the question is: Which of these events can be turned into a Gulf of Tonkin-like fakery that can create enough fear to let the military and the government turn the open internet into a controlled, surveillance-friendly net.

What do they dream of? Think of the internet turning into a tightly monitored AOL circa the early ’90s, run by CEO Big Brother and COO Dr. Strangelove.

That’s what McConnell has in mind, and shame on The Washington Post and the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee for giving McConnell venues to try to make that happen — without highlighting that McConnell has a serious financial stake in the outcome of this debate.

Of course, the net has security problems, and there are pirated movies and spam and botnets trying to steal credit card information.

But the online world mimics real life. Just as I know where online to buy a replica of a Coach handbag or watch a new release, I know exactly where I can go to find the same things in the city I live in. There are cons and rip-offs in the real world, just as there are online. I’m more likely to get ripped off by a restaurant server copying down the information on my credit card than I am having my card stolen and used for fraud while shopping online. “Top Secret” information is more likely to end up in the hands of a foreign government through an employee-turned-spy than from a hacker.

But cyber-anything is much scarier than the real world.

The NSA can help private companies and networks tighten up their security systems, as McConnell argues. In fact, they already do, and they should continue passing along advice and creating guides to locking down servers and releasing their own secure version of Linux. But companies like Google and AT&T have no business letting the NSA into their networks or giving the NSA information that they won’t share with the American people.

Security companies have long relied on creating fear in internet users by hyping the latest threat, whether that be Conficker or the latest PDF flaw. And now they are reaping billions of dollars in security contracts from the federal government for their PR efforts. But the industry and its most influential voices need to take a hard look at the consequences of that strategy and start talking truth to power’s claims that we are losing some non-existent cyberwar.

The internet is a hack that seems forever on the edge of falling apart. For awhile, spam looked like it was going to kill e-mail, the net’s first killer app. But smart filters have reduced the problem to a minor nuisance as anyone with a Gmail account can tell you. That’s how the internet survives. The apocalypse looks like it’s coming and it never does, but meanwhile, it becomes more and more useful to our everyday lives, spreading innovation, weird culture, news, commerce and healthy dissent.

But one thing it hasn’t spread is “cyberwar.” There is no cyberwar and we are not losing it. The only war going on is one for the soul of the internet. But if journalists, bloggers and the security industry continue to let self-interested exaggerators dominate our nation’s discourse about online security, we will lose that war — and the open internet will be its biggest casualty.
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Police have now cast their net wider in their investigation of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s killing, which officials in the Gulf state are now certain was carried out by Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that one of the suspects carrying a British passport entered the US on February 14, while a second arrived on American soil on January 21, two days after the murder, using an Irish passport.

There are no records of either man leaving the US, but Dubai’s police chief, Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan told a press conference today that he believed all the suspects named in the case are currently in Israel.

“All of them [are in Israel] … These are agents for the Mossad, we know this,” Khalfan told reporters in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. “They travelled to European countries and to the US using the same documents they used to enter here.”

Speaking to The Times yesterday, insiders close to the case confirmed that at least two of the 26 named suspects had been tracked through the US. One of these was Roy Cannon, a British man living in Israel whose identity was apparently stolen by the team behind the killing.

Dubai police have named 12 British passport holders among the suspects. All are now believed to be UK citizens resident in Israel and victims of identity theft.

Dubai police have already traced 13 credit cards issued by the Meta Bank in Iowa and its New York-based distributor. The cards were used to book flights and hotel rooms. The FBI is believed to be investigating.

Al-Mabhouh was killed in his Dubai hotel room on January 19, with his killers fleeing the country within hours of the murder. Police tracked them back to Europe, with several flying via South Africa and Hong Kong. Their movements after this are not clear.

Mr al-Mabhouh’s body was not found by hotel staff until January 20. Results of a toxicology report released by police show that he was injected with a fast-acting sedative before being suffocated.

Khalfan said today that while the agents remained in Israel, they could not be extradited, but that they would be seized if they left the country. Dubai has issued international arrest warrants for the 26 named suspects through Interpol.

The police chief called upon European countries whose citizens have had their identities stolen to continue their full cooperation in the case and stressed that the UAE’s relationship with these nations would not be affected.

“If israel and Mossad mistreated Europeans, we will not. If the Mossad dipped their hand in blood and wiped it on European passports, our treatment of Europeans will not be affected,” he said.

British agents from the SOCA (Serious Organized Crime Agency) are now in Israel to interview the 12 British citizens living in Israel whose passports have been linked with the Dubai assassination.
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“This study shows just how widespread mercury pollution has become in our air, watersheds and many of our fish in freshwater streams,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that builds up in the food chain at ever higher concentrations in predators such as large fish and humans. It is especially damaging to the developing nervous systems of fetuses and children, but can have severe effects on adults, as well. The pollutant enters the environment almost wholly as atmospheric emissions from industrial processes, primarily the burning of coal for electricity. It then spreads across the plant and settles back to the surface, eventually concentrating in rivers, lakes and oceans, where it enters the aquatic food chain.

The number one cause of human mercury poisoning in the United States is the consumption of fish and shellfish.

Researchers tested the water, sediment and fish of the 291 streams between 1998 and 2005. Fish tested were mostly larger species near the top of the food chain, such as largemouth bass.

All fish were contaminated with mercury, more than 66 percent of them at levels higher than those set by the Environmental Protection agency as a “level of concern for fish-eating mammals,” according to Reuters. More than 25 percent of the fish were contaminated at levels higher than those set as the threshold for human consumption.

The study is the first to focus on mercury contamination of streams, rather than lakes, reservoirs, wetlands or oceans. The researchers found the highest mercury concentrations in fish from the coastal blackwater streams of the Southeast. Apparently the combination of pine forests and wooded wetlands found in these regions transforms mercury very effectively into its more toxic organic form (methylmercury). Mercury concentrations were also high in streams fed from areas with a history of mining.
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