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Obama Computers Hacked

Hackers broke into the computer systems of the Barack Obama and John McCain campaign teams during the US presidential race and stole a ‘’serious amount of files” in an operation that US government cyber experts believe originated from China.

The Secret Service and FBI warned Obama and McCain earlier this year that their computer networks had been infiltrated by foreign hackers who downloaded large quantities of information from the campaign networks. “You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system,” an FBI agent said, according to a report in Newsweek magazine.
The report went on to say that technical experts speculated the hackers were Russian or Chinese. The FBI apparently told Obama the attack had not been carried out by political opponents.
US officials said they discovered that the cyber attacks originated in China but do not yet know if they were government-sponsored or from an unaffiliated source.
The incident was first revealed in a Newsweek report that said the FBI and Secret Service told the Obama team of the attack in the summer.
According to the article, Josh Bolten, the White House chief of staff, called David Plouffe, who was Obama’s campaign manager, saying: “You have a real problem … you have to deal with it.”

It is understood the campaigns then hired private cyber security companies to look into the breaches.

The Secret Service and the McCain and Obama campaign teams have made no comment on the alleged attacks.

Ironically, exiting president George W. Bush had just announced hours before in a speech that enemies of the United States could be working on a plan targeting the country as it makes the transition from one administration to another. It’s not certain if that was just a coincidental jab at the incoming Democrats or if Mr. Bush and his team are aware that a real threat is brewing.

Regardless, it seems Barack Obama, just days after being confirmed as the next president of the United States, has already been given a rude welcome.

Tags: chinese hackers, computer security, fbi, hacker, mccain, obama, russian hacker, russian hackers

FBI Investigates Major Players in Financial Crisis

The FBI is investigating Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and AIG - and their executives - as part of a broad look into possible mortgage fraud, sources with knowledge of the investigation told CNN Tuesday.

The following paragraphs summarize the work of  experts who are completely familiar with all the aspects of . Heed their advice to avoid any  surprises. The sources would not speak on the record for the investigation is flowering.

FBI spokesman Special Agent Richard Kelko had no comment on that ammo, but vocal that 26 firms were currently under investigation as part of the bureau’s mortgage fraud inquiry.

Earlier this month, FBI director Robert Mueller told Congress that 1, 400 individual real estate lenders, brokers and appraisers were now under investigation in addendum to two dozen corporations.

” The FBI currently has 26 pending corporate fraud investigations involving subprime lenders, ” Kelko said. ” As we have pragmatic, this number can fluctuate because tide, however we act not discuss which companies may or may not hold office the theory of an investigation. ”

Previously, CNN has reported that Countrywide is part of the investigation.

The sources said the probes of Fannie ( FNM, Reliance 500 ), Freddie ( FRE, Daydream 500 ), Lehman ( LEHMQ ) and AIG ( AIG, Fortune 500 ) are believed to be in the early stages. One source said the government would be ” remiss ” if it didn’t look into what happened at these companies through of the cash problems they are involved esteem and the actions of individuals lingering them. The United States is in the midst of a spiraling economic crisis fueled principally by the housing market. If you find yourself confused by what you’ve read to this point, don’t despair. Everything should be crystal clear by the time you finish.

Earlier this decade, mortgage lenders relaxed restrictions on obtaining mortgages as home prices soared about 85 percent from 1996 through 2006 in inflation - adjusted dollars, creating a bubble. Then the bubble popped, and lenders - as well as mortgagees - took the hit.

Reach week, mortgage insurer AIG narrowly avoided bankruptcy when the federal juice took 80 percent of its justice direction contest for an $85 billion loan from the Federal Reserve while Lehman filed the largest bankruptcy notoriety American history. Earlier this month, the qualification took over mortgage giants Fannie and Freddie.

Bank of America ( BAC, Expectation 500 ) bought Countrywide in July. Changed bank failures and takeovers hold led to the Bush administration’s current proposal to spend $700 billion to shore maturation the fiscal markets. The proposal is under consideration by Rally, where lawmakers from both sides of the aisle posses balked at the proposal’s lack of driver’s seat provisions, among different issues.

As the mortgage industry began to make plain, the FBI, with sustain from the IRS, launched a broad investigation into mortgage fraud. In June, its Mortgage Fraud Task Force arrested other than 400 mortgage brokers, lenders, appraisers and other industry insiders who, the it said, were responsible for besides than $1 billion significance losses.

Last month, a Mortgage Asset Look into Institute ( MARI ) study found that the number of pretended loans issued during the smallest three months of 2008 skyrocketed 42 percent compared with the same period in 2007.

Sometimes it’s tough to sort out all the details related to this subject, but I’m positive you’ll have no trouble making sense of the information presented above.

Tags: bankruptcy, cnn, Economy, fbi

More Federal Intelligence Changes Planned

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

Uncle Sam Spying

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Moving on, the aforementioned executive order was issued by President Bush on July 31, and is in the words of one official, “exceptionally complex,” 26 or 28 pages long, single-spaced (”depending on how you print it”). It is a sweeping revision of an order issued by Ronald Reagan in 1981, which laid out the structure and responsibilities of U.S. intelligence offices.

In a phone call with reporters the day the order was issued, a senior White House official (who refused to be identified) said, “the President is anxious to institutionalize a number of important tools that he and his successors are going to need to fight and win the war on terrorism.” He described it as being in the same vein as the recently passed FISA law (”an important milestone”). This is “another significant step in that direction.”

If you didn’t see much about this rather important executive order — the senior official called it a “foundational document” — that’s no accident. Reporters were not even provided a copy before the weirdly anonymous briefing. (”This conference call would have been much more useful … if we’d had this in advance,” said one reporter.) Despite (or perhaps because of) its significant implications for U.S. intelligence, many in Congress were not even aware of it until the day it was issued.

“We were only shown the document after it was complete and on its way to the president for his signature,” Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of the House intelligence committee told the Washington Post. “After seven years of a go-it-alone presidency, perhaps I should expect nothing more from this White House. But this order will be binding on future administrations as well.”

I have not read all 26 to 28 pages of the executive order. But among its revisions is a clause stating that the CIA must “provide specialized equipment, technical knowledge or assistance of expert personnel” to local law enforcement. As a member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, one of several groups who it was recently revealed were being spied on by Maryland police in the past few years, and living in a city whose police infiltrated activist groups across the country in the run-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention, it is chilling to think how these resources could be used against groups that are exercising their right to dissent. To say nothing of the potential implications for Arabs or Muslims.

According to the Post, The DOJ proposal, which was also released on July 31, says that “law enforcement agencies would be allowed to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch a criminal intelligence investigation based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists.”

“They also could share results with a constellation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and others in many cases.”

“Criminal intelligence data starts with sources as basic as public records and the Internet, but also includes law enforcement databases, confidential and undercover sources, and active surveillance.”

Read the full article. This is more than a last power grab for the Bush administration. It is a massive codification of the executive overreach implemented under the so-called “war on terror.”

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush’s successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

The deputy executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police would disagree. The DOJ initiative simply “moves what the rules were … to the new world we live in,” he told the Post — “but it maintains civil liberties.”

According to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, these are just “some of the tools necessary to keep us safe.”

Tags: department of justice, doj, fbi, Intelligence, police, spying

Doubts Raised About Late Scientists Guilt

Growing doubts from scientists about the strength of the government’s case against the late Bruce Ivins, the military researcher named as the anthrax killer, are forcing the Justice Department to begin disclosing more fully the scientific evidence it used to implicate him.

In the face of the questions, FBI officials have decided to make their first detailed public presentation next week on the forensic science tracing the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks to a flask kept in a refrigerator in Ivins’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Many scientists are awaiting those details because so far, they say, the FBI has failed to make a conclusive case.

“That is going to be critically important, because right now there is really no data to make a scientific judgment one way or the other,” Brad Smith, a molecular biologist at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “The information that has been put out, there is really very little scientific information in there.”

FBI officials say they are confident that their scientific evidence against Ivins, who killed himself last month as the Justice Department was preparing an indictment against him, will withstand scrutiny, and they plan to present their findings for review by leading scientists. But the scrutiny may only raise further questions.

The bureau presented forensics information to congressional and government officials in a closed-door briefing held in the past week, but a number of listeners said the briefing left them less convinced that the FBI had the right man, and they said some of the government’s public statements appeared incomplete or misleading.

For instance, the Justice Department said this month in unsealing court records against Ivins that he had tried to mislead investigators in 2002 by giving them an anthrax sample that did not appear to have come from his laboratory. But FBI officials acknowledged at the closed-door briefing, according to people who were there, that the sample Ivins gave them in 2002 did in fact come from the same strain used in the attacks. Because of limitations in the bureau’s testing methods and Ivins’s failure to provide the sample in the format requested, the FBI did not realize that it was a correct match until three years later.

In addition, people who were briefed by the FBI said a batch of misprinted envelopes used in the anthrax attacks - another piece of evidence used to link Ivins to the attacks - could have been much more widely available than bureau officials had initially led them to believe.

Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who has followed the anthrax case closely and requested the briefing from the FBI, said in an interview that he was not ready to draw any firm conclusions about the investigation. But he said: “The case is built from a number of pieces of circumstantial evidence, and for a case this important, it’s troubling to have so many loose ends. The briefing pointed out even more loose ends than I thought there were before.”

Naba Barkakati, an engineer who is the chief technologist for the Government Accountability Office and who also attended the briefing, said of the FBI’s forensics case against Ivins: “It’s very hard to get the sense of whether this was scientifically good or bad. We didn’t really get the question settled, other than taking their word for it.”

The bureau’s laboratory work has come under sharp criticism in recent years for problems over DNA analysis, bullet tracing and other important forensic technology. In 2004, the laboratory mismatched a fingerprint taken from the Madrid terror bombings to a lawyer in Portland, Oregon, Brandon Mayfield, who was then arrested. He won a $2.8 million settlement.

With their main suspect in the anthrax killings dead, FBI officials say they realize they will again face tough scrutiny over the strength of their scientific evidence against Ivins. Indeed, conspiracy theories are already flourishing on many Web sites, with skeptical observers asking whether the Maryland scientist was set up to take the fall for the attacks or, worse yet, was a murder victim. The fact that the bureau pursued another scientist, Steven Hatfill, for years before agreeing to pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit he had filed and then later exonerating him has only fueled the skepticism.

In its case against Ivins, the FBI developed a compelling profile of an erratic, mentally troubled man who could be threatening and obsessive, as in his odd fascination with a sorority from his college days. But investigators were never able to place him at the New Jersey mailboxes where the anthrax letters were dropped, and the case against him relied at its heart on the scientific evidence linking the anthrax in Ivins’s laboratory to the spores used in the attacks.

It took the FBI several years to develop the type of DNA testing that allowed them to trace the origins of the “attack strain,” as it was called, and they concluded that the anthrax that Ivins controlled was the only one of more than 1,000 samples they tested that matched it in all four of that strain’s genetic mutations.

Dwight Adams, a former director of the FBI laboratory who was deeply involved in managing the anthrax genetic research until he left the bureau in 2006, said he was confident that the groundbreaking forensic effort would be validated by the broad scientific community.

Recalling the early skepticism that a genetic fingerprint of an anthrax could ever be obtained, Adams said, “I think the bureau and the national assets, including the national labs and others, that were applied as a team can very easily defend what they did and the results.”

But had Ivins lived and faced trial for the anthrax killings, Thomas DeGonia 2nd, one of his lawyers, said, his legal team would have quickly tried to have the genetic testing of the anthrax strains thrown out of court as unreliable. The type of testing the FBI developed, he said “has never been proven or tested by the courts.”

Even if a jury had heard evidence about the genetic testing, DeGonia said, the lawyers would have tried to show that many other scientists had access to that same strain of anthrax. He said the fact that the Justice Department had Ivins under investigation for perhaps two years or longer - and that it was executing search warrants in the case even after his death - suggests that the department itself had doubts.

“It’s interesting that they’re still attempting to gather evidence,” he said, “if the case is as strong as they say it is.”

Tags: anthrax, fbi, investigation, law, scientist, scientists, suicide

FBI May get More Unfettered Latitude

A Justice Department plan would loosen restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion, Democratic lawmakers briefed on the details said Wednesday.

The plan, which could be made public next month, has already generated intense interest and speculation. Little is known about its precise language, but civil liberties advocates say they fear it could give the government even broader license to open terrorism investigations.

Congressional staff members got a glimpse of some of the details in closed briefings this month, and four Democratic senators told Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey in a letter on Wednesday that they were troubled by what they heard.

The senators said the new guidelines would allow the F.B.I. to open an investigation of an American, conduct surveillance, pry into private records and take other investigative steps “without any basis for suspicion.” The plan “might permit an innocent American to be subjected to such intrusive surveillance based in part on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or on protected First Amendment activities,” the letter said. It was signed by Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

As the end of the Bush administration nears, the White House has been seeking to formalize in law and regulation some of the aggressive counterterrorism steps it has already taken in practice since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Congress overhauled the federal wiretapping law in July, for instance, and President Bush issued an executive order this month ratifying new roles for intelligence agencies. Other pending changes would also authorize greater sharing of intelligence information with the local police, a major push in the last seven years.

The Justice Department is already expecting criticism over the F.B.I. guidelines. In an effort to pre-empt critics, Mr. Mukasey gave a speech last week in Portland, Ore., describing the unfinished plan as an effort to “integrate more completely and harmonize the standards that apply to the F.B.I.’s activities.” Differing standards, he said, have caused confusion for field agents.

Mr. Mukasey emphasized that the F.B.I. would still need a “valid purpose” for an investigation, and that it could not be “simply based on somebody’s race, religion, or exercise of First Amendment rights.”

Rather than expanding government power, he said, “this document clarifies the rules by which the F.B.I. conducts its intelligence mission.”

In 2002, John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, allowed F.B.I. agents to visit public sites like mosques or monitor Web sites in the course of national security investigations. The next year, Mr. Bush issued guidelines allowing officials to use ethnicity or race in “narrow” circumstances to detect a terrorist threat.

The Democratic senators said the draft plan appeared to allow the F.B.I. to go even further in collecting information on Americans connected to “foreign intelligence” without any factual predicate. They also said there appeared to be few constraints on how the information would be shared with other agencies.

Michael German, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union and a former F.B.I. agent, said the plan appeared to open the door still further to the use of data-mining profiles in tracking terrorism.

“This seems to be based on the idea that the government can take a bunch of data and create a profile that can be used to identify future bad guys,” he said. “But that has not been demonstrated to be true anywhere else.”

The Justice Department said Wednesday that in light of requests from members of Congress for more information, Mr. Mukasey would agree not to sign the new guidelines before a Sept. 17 Congressional hearing.

Tags: evesdropping, fbi, spying, wiretapping