Tag Archives: bernardino

Donald Trump Just Repeated One of His Most Vicious Lies

Mother Jones

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At Sunday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump repeated one of the more pernicious lies of his presidential campaign—that the neighbors of the San Bernardino shooters saw bombs scattered at the couple’s home and said nothing. Trump, who had been asked about his plan to ban Muslims from entering the country, was arguing that American Muslims need to change their behavior and start reporting suspicious activity they see to authorities.

But Trump’s story is false. As the Washington Post’s Glen Kessler points out, there’s no evidence that any neighbors saw anything. Nonetheless, Trump has repeated the claim over and over again over the course of his campaign. “One of the problems we have is the people in the community, the Muslim community are not turning over the sickos,” he said in an interview in June, before falsely describing the situation in San Bernardino.

But that broader premise is false too. The FBI says American Muslims regularly provide valuable tips on possible terrorist activity.

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Donald Trump Just Repeated One of His Most Vicious Lies

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The FBI Spent More Than $1 Million to Hack One Potentially Useless Phone

Mother Jones

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It turns out the FBI’s 11-hour solution to its huge public fight with Apple didn’t come cheap.

FBI director James Comey said on Thursday that the agency paid more than $1 million to unnamed private-sector hackers for help in unlocking the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. The FBI first attempted to make Apple write software that would allow law enforcement to unlock the phone quickly, but the company refused and said the request could unconstitutionally expand government authority. The case sparked an uproar over digital privacy as well as a major court battle, which stopped only when the FBI announced it had received the hackers’ help and withdrew its order to Apple.

Comey, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, didn’t give a specific price for the hack, but said it cost the agency more than he would make in the next seven years of his term as director. The FBI director makes at least $181,500 a year by law, putting the cost of the hack at a minimum of $1.27 million, by Comey’s estimate. An FBI press officer could not confirm the accuracy of Comey’s estimate or provide a specific cost.

“It was worth it,” Comey told the audience in Aspen. But it’s not clear how much value the hacking method or the phone actually has. Comey has repeatedly said that the method used to break into the phone would work only on an iPhone 5C running iOS 9, like the San Bernardino phone, and that Apple could discover and fix the security flaw that allowed the hack to work. And on Tuesday, CNN reported that the phone “didn’t contain evidence of contacts with other ISIS supporters or the use of encrypted communications during the period the FBI was concerned about.” The FBI argues the lack of information is valuable evidence in and of itself.

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The FBI Spent More Than $1 Million to Hack One Potentially Useless Phone

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John Oliver Explains Why It’s So Crucial Apple Is Refusing the FBI’s Encryption Demands

Mother Jones

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On Sunday, John Oliver took on the FBI’s continuing demands for Apple to unlock a cellphone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Speaking largely on Apple’s side of the debate, the Last Week Tonight host explained the importance of encryption and broke down what’s at stake in the high-profile battle:

“There is no easy side to be on in this debate,” Oliver said. “Strong encryption has its costs, from protecting terrorists to drug dealers to child pornographers. But I happen to feel that the risks of weakening encryption, even a little bit, even just for the government, are potentially much worse.”

Even Sen. Lindsey Graham, who first came out strongly against Apple for refusing to comply with the FBI’s orders, recently admitted that upon further research, he’s realized the government’s orders could pose an enormous risk to Americans’ security.

“It’s just not so simple,” Graham told Attorney General Loretta Lynch during a hearing on the subject last week. “I thought it was that simple—I was all with you until I actually started getting briefed by people in the intel community and I will say that I’m a person who’s been moved by the arguments that the precedent we set and the damage we may be doing to our own national security.”

As Oliver notes, it’s a “miracle” Graham has finally grasped the concept of nuance.

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John Oliver Explains Why It’s So Crucial Apple Is Refusing the FBI’s Encryption Demands

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San Bernardino Police Chief Says Shooter’s iPhone May Hold "Nothing of Any Value"

Mother Jones

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The police chief of San Bernardino, California, said Friday that the iPhone at the heart of a massive civil liberties and security debate may not actually contain any critical information, despite the FBI’s insistence that the phone may unlock the secrets of how the San Bernarndino shooters carried out their attack.

“I’ll be honest with you: I think that there is a reasonably good chance that there is nothing of any value on the phone,” Chief Jarrod Burguan said in an interview with NPR. The phone in question is an iPhone 5c used by Syed Farook, one of the two shooters who killed 14 people in a terrorist attack in the Southern California town last December.

A federal judge in Los Angeles ordered Apple last week to write new software that would help the FBI unlock the phone because the Bureau believes it may contain data critical to understanding how Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, planned the attack and with whom they communicated. The FBI was able to retrieve data from the phone that was backed up using Apple’s iCloud service, but Farook stopped using iCloud on October 19, six weeks before the attack itself. But Apple is seeking to throw out the order, arguing in a court filing on Thursday that complying would give the government “a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe.”

While Burguan’s opinion will give those opposed to the court order some ammunition, BuzzFeed tech reporter Hamza Shaban pointed out that the FBI’s opinion is really what counts in this case:

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San Bernardino Police Chief Says Shooter’s iPhone May Hold "Nothing of Any Value"

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The FBI Says Its Fight With Apple Is Just About One Phone. Police and Prosecutors Say Otherwise

Mother Jones

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The war between Apple and the FBI over the iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters, hinges mostly on one major question: Is the court order telling Apple to help the FBI unlock Farook’s iPhone an isolated case, or is it just the start of a new method for the government to guarantee access to anyone’s device?

Apple, which is fighting the order to unlock Farook’s phone, says complying with it would be just the tip of the iceberg. “The order would set a legal precedent that would expand the powers of the government, and we simply don’t know where that would lead us,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in a letter to customers on Sunday. “Should the government be allowed to order us to create other capabilities for surveillance purposes, such as recording conversations or location tracking?” Privacy groups and most tech experts agree with Cook.

But the FBI insists no such thing will happen, saying it is only seeking access to Farook’s phone and no one else’s. “The San Bernardino litigation isn’t about trying to set a precedent or send any kind of message,” FBI Director James Comey wrote in a post responding to Cook on Lawfare, a prominent national security blog, on Sunday. “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That’s it. We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land.”

Yet high-profile supporters of the FBI’s case have said the precedent is what’s important. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a prominent advocate for more law enforcement access to encrypted data, wrote in USA Today last week that “the iPhone precedent in San Bernardino is important for our courts and our ability to protect innocent Americans and enforce the rule of law. While the national security implications of this situation are significant, the outcome of this dispute will also have a drastic effect on criminal cases across the country.”

Comey and other law enforcement officials have repeatedly stressed how widespread they believe their encryption problem is. Both terrorists and criminals increasingly use encryption to communicate, they say, meaning the government’s ability to detect them and stop crimes or attacks is getting dramatically worse. And that problem extends well beyond big terrorism cases like San Bernardino and into everyday police work. “I’d say this problem…is actually overwhelmingly affecting law enforcement,” Comey told Burr’s committee last week, “because it affects cops and prosecutors and sheriffs and detectives trying to make murder cases, car accident cases, kidnapping cases, drug cases. It has an impact on our national security work, but overwhelmingly this is a problem that local law enforcement sees.”

Cyrus Vance Jr., the district attorney for the borough of Manhattan in New York City, often highlights how many cases are supposedly impossible to make because suspects use encryption—and said on Sunday he’d put the Apple precedent to more widespread use, forcing companies to help unlock the phones of suspects in the future. “As the encryption debate zeroes in on the cowardly terrorist acts committed in San Bernardino, we should also remember that Apple’s switch to default device encryption affects virtually all criminal investigations, the overwhelming majority of which are handled by state and local law enforcement,” he said last week in calling for Congress to pass a law mandating backdoors. Burr and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have pledged to introduce such a bill in Congress.

State and local officials around the country back Vance. The Intercept compiled a collection of quotes from local law enforcement officials that run counter to Comey’s claim that the Apple case will provide only one-time access. As Matt Rokus, the deputy chief of the Eau Claire, Wisconsin, police put it, “The Apple case is going to have significant ramifications on us locally.”

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The FBI Says Its Fight With Apple Is Just About One Phone. Police and Prosecutors Say Otherwise

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Apple-FBI Spat Enters the Twilight Zone

Mother Jones

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What in God’s name is this all about? In its motion filed Friday to force Apple to create a special version of iOS that would allow the FBI to crack the San Bernardino attacker’s iPhone, a footnote revealed that Apple and the FBI had discussed several options for obtaining information on the phone:

The four suggestions that Apple and the FBI discussed (and their deficiencies) were….(3) to attempt an auto-backup of the SUBJECT DEVICE with the related iCloud account (which would not work in this case because neither the owner nor the government knew the password to the iCloud account, and the owner, in an attempt to gain access to some information in the hours after the attack, was able to reset the password remotely, but that had the effect of eliminating the possibility of an auto-backup).

With the iCloud password changed, the iPhone can’t connect to the iCloud account and do a backup. But Apple says it wasn’t Syed Farook who changed the password:

Apple executives said the company had been in regular discussions with the government since early January, and that it proposed four different ways to recover the information the government is interested in without building a backdoor. One of those methods would have involved connecting the iPhone to a known Wi-Fi network and triggering an iCloud backup that might provide the FBI with information stored to the device between the October 19th and the date of the incident.

Apple sent trusted engineers to try that method, the executives said, but they were unable to do it. It was then that they discovered that the Apple ID password associated with the iPhone had been changed. (The FBI claimed earlier Friday that this was done by someone at the San Bernardino Health Department.)

Friday night, however, things took a further turn when the San Bernardino County’s official Twitter account stated, “The County was working cooperatively with the FBI when it reset the iCloud password at the FBI’s request.”

This is pretty bizarre. Why did the FBI say it was Farook in their court filing if they knew it wasn’t? And how did the San Berdoo Health Department change the iCloud password, anyway? You need the old password to do that. But if they know the old password, why can’t they change it back? Very mysterious.

UPDATE: Apparently there are a couple of ways this could have happened. If the Health Department knew Farook’s email account, they might have been able to use the “Forgot my password” option to reset it. Alternately, if the phone was MDM managed, they might have been able to reset the passcode remotely. However, that seems unlikely since they would have had other, better options if they had been using MDM.

Why did the Health Department have the phone, anyway? I’m surprised the police or the FBI didn’t snatch it instantly.

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Apple-FBI Spat Enters the Twilight Zone

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Strike Two For Pair of New York Times Reporters

Mother Jones

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Today, FBI director James Comey said that the San Bernardino shooters never talked openly about violent jihadism on social media: “So far, in this investigation we have found no evidence of posting on social media by either of them at that period in time and thereafter reflecting their commitment to jihad or to martyrdom. I’ve seen some reporting on that, and that’s a garble.”

So where did this notion come from, anyway? The answer is a New York Times story on Sunday headlined “U.S. Visa Process Missed San Bernardino Wife’s Zealotry on Social Media.” It told us that Tashfeen Malik “talked openly” on social media about jihad and that, “Had the authorities found the posts years ago, they might have kept her out of the country.” The story was written by Matt Apuzzo, Michael Schmidt, and Julia Preston.

Do those names sound familiar? They should. The first two were also the authors of July’s epic fail claiming that Hillary Clinton was the target of a criminal probe over the mishandling of classified information in her private email system. In the end, virtually everything about the story turned out to be wrong. Clinton was not a target. The referral was not criminal. The emails in question had not been classified at the time Clinton saw them.

Assuming Comey is telling the truth, that’s two strikes. Schmidt and Apuzzo either have some bad sources somewhere, or else they have one really bad source somewhere. And coincidentally or not, their source(s) have provided them with two dramatic but untrue scoops that make prominent Democrats look either corrupt or incompetent. For the time being, Schmidt and Apuzzo should be considered on probation. That’s at least one big mistake too many.

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Strike Two For Pair of New York Times Reporters

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What Makes a Killer a Terrorist? We Asked the Nation’s Top News Outlets

Mother Jones

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In the aftermath of the recent scourge of mass shootings—from San Bernardino to Colorado Springs to Charleston—as well as attacks aimed at Black Lives Matter protesters, many have asked why the media and public officials have been hesitant to call the suspects “terrorists.”

In a press conference on Wednesday, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Berguan said, “We have no information at this point to indicate that this is terrorist-related, in the traditional sense that people may be thinking. Obviously, at a minimum, we have a domestic terrorist-type situation that occurred here.”

By definition, a terrorist is a person who uses violent acts to achieve political ends. So do major news outlets have protocols on when to use the words “terrorism” and “terrorist”? And does the media use them in a biased way? We reached out to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and NPR to hear how they approach the issue. Here are shortened versions of what they said:

New York Times‘ Standards Editor Phil Corbett:

The Times doesn’t have any “official” definition of terrorism. Unlike the U.S. government, we don’t have some kind of formal process of labeling terrorists, and I don’t think we need one. It’s probably not surprising that “terrorism” and related terms are likely to be used more often for attacks connected to well-known, long-standing, recognized terrorist organizations like ISIS or Al Qaeda—events like the Paris attacks, for instance. But in fact The Times has often used “terrorism” in connection with white supremacist attacks and other cases of domestic extremism, going back to Timothy McVeigh and beyond. A quick check shows that we used it in several stories in the Charleston coverage. The main point is, we try to report the facts accurately and fairly, in language that is clear to our readers. We are not working with predetermined categories or official terms or definitions. (When I’m in doubt, I generally turn to the dictionary).

The Washington Post‘s Executive Editor Marty Baron:

We don’t have a rigid protocol. Given the range of potential circumstances, we make judgments on a case by case basis. We’ve used “terrorism” and “terrorist” for both domestic and international acts of violence. For U.S. incidents, we have used the phrase “domestic terrorist” or “domestic terrorism.”

The Associated Press’ Vice President of Media Relations Paul Colford:

We generally avoid the terms because we prefer to describe more specifically what the individuals in question have done.

NPR’s Standard and Practices Editor Mark Memmott:

In each case, there are talks about the right ways to describe what has happened. That may change in the first few hours or days as more information comes in. “Murder” or “terror” or “hate crime”—all those words start percolating in the back of your mind, but it’s always best to stick to the facts and stick to the action words as information is still coming in before trying to apply labels. Now, there comes a point where it’s clear one way or the other in many of these cases. It became clear pretty quickly in Paris that this was something more than “simple” crimes. You had a lot of eye witness reporting about what was said by the attackers, how they operated, and the coordinated nature of the attacks. The targets were civilians—often an important consideration when deciding whether something is or is not terrorism.

Some of the threshold questions you have to start looking at and trying to answer: Is there evidence that it was a political motive? Is there evidence or indication that one of the motives was to strike terror in some sort of an attempt to force change, either in government or policy?

…Regarding the shooting in Charleston I don’t think newsrooms have settled on that one yet. Did he have political motives or was it a hate crime—a racially motivated crime? We’ll find out when the trial gets going whether he really did think he was going to start a race war.

Part of the media’s job is to lay out the facts. Labels are interesting but they sometimes aren’t helpful and they can get in the way.

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What Makes a Killer a Terrorist? We Asked the Nation’s Top News Outlets

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Hillary Clinton Was Discussing Gun Control Just as the San Bernardino Shooting Happened

Mother Jones

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There was a mass shooting on Wednesday afternoon in San Bernardino, California at Inland Regional Services, a center for people with developmental disabilities. Details are still sparse hours after the attack, with at least one suspect still at-large according to police. Fatalities have been confirmed, though no exact figure released by police so far. Check here for the latest updates.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton responded quickly to the breaking news on Twitter, pushing the need for further gun control in light of the latest in a long string of mass shootings.

Clinton happened to be speaking about the need for gun control at a campaign stop in Florida just as the attack was unfolding, per ABC News’ Liz Kreutz. “90 Americans a day die from gun violence, homicide, suicides, tragic avoidable accidents,” Clinton said, according to Kreutz. “33 thousand Americans a year die. It is time for us to say we are going to have comprehensive background checks, we are gonna close the gun show loopholes.”

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Hillary Clinton Was Discussing Gun Control Just as the San Bernardino Shooting Happened

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