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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
3/28/2017 11:23:10 AM

AP Exclusive: Colombia 'panic buttons' expose activists

    • Mar 27, 2017, 8:06 PM ET

    The Associated Press
    In this March 23, 2017, photo, Amalfi Rosales, a Colombian journalist whose exposes of corruption forced her to flee, holds a GPS-enabled "panic button" that Colombia's government has issued in Bogota. The pocket-sized device is designed to summon help for human-rights activists or journalists if they are threatened. But it has technical flaws that could let hostile parties disable it, eavesdrop on conversations and track users’ movements, according to an independent security audit conducted for The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Arturo Robles)


    It is supposed to help protect human-rights activists, labor organizers and journalists working in risky environments, but a GPS-enabled "panic button" that Colombia's government has issued to about 400 people could be exposing them to more peril.

    The pocket-sized devices are designed to notify authorities in the event of an attack or attempted kidnapping. But the Associated Press, with an independent security audit , uncovered technical flaws that could let hostile parties disable them, eavesdrop on conversations and track users' movements.

    There is no evidence the vulnerabilities have been exploited, but security experts are alarmed.

    "This is negligent in the extreme," said Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, calling the finding "a tremendous security failure."

    Over the past four years, other "distress alarms" and smartphone apps have been deployed or tested around the world, with mixed results. When effective, they can be crucial lifelines against criminal gangs, paramilitary groups or the hostile security forces of repressive regimes.

    ———

    REASON FOR PANIC

    The panic button, or "boton de apoyo," distributed by Colombia's Office of National Protection is a keychain-style fob. Its Chinese manufacturer markets it under the name EV-07 for tracking children, pets and the elderly. The device operates on a wireless network, has a built-in microphone and receiver and can be mapped remotely with geo-location software. A button marked "SOS" calls for help when pressed.

    But some features could be turned against the user, the security audit done for the AP by the Boston-based security firm Rapid7 found. The AP tested two devices issued in Colombia, while Rapid7 bought buttons directly from the manufacturer.

    The most serious vulnerability lets anyone with the device's phone number remotely disable it and surreptitiously take control. Simple text messages can reset it or activate the microphone remotely, turning it into a listening post, the audit found. Built-in GPS pinpoints the user's location.

    Because the device can be remotely wiped, it can also be reconfigured from afar, said Deral Heiland, the researcher with Rapid7 who performed the audit.

    Obtaining the Colombian device's phone number is not easy, and the government said it alone knows to whom each device is assigned.

    But security experts said there are ways a sophisticated adversary could obtain the numbers, including fake cell tower technology that captures numbers and bribes to cell company or government employees.

    Office of National Protection Director Diego Mora called the flaws identified in the AP audit overblown. He said activists given the device are at such low risk there would be little interest in eavesdropping on them.

    "It's a very, very basic protection measure for people whose risks aren't very complex," said Mora. "Supreme Court judges, ministers, prosecutors, they don't have this device."

    Recipients said the dangers they face should not be underestimated. Some have received death threats, been kidnapped or forced into exile. They complain that the body armor and cellphones assigned with panic buttons are inadequate.

    "What am I going to do with body armor riding the bus?" said Amalfi Rosales, a journalist from the northeastern Guajira region whose exposes of corruption forced her to flee. "How does that protect me?"

    ———

    EASY-TO-FIND INSTRUCTIONS

    Instructions for resetting the Colombia-issued panic button and activating its "silent phone" function were easy to find. They are spelled out in a user manual posted online by the manufacturer, Eview Industrial Ltd.

    A company official, John Chung, acknowledged that Rapid7 notified him of the flaws in December. In keeping with standard industry practice, Rapid7 waited at least two months before publicly disclosing the vulnerabilities to give the manufacturer time to address them.

    Chung told the AP that Eview was working to update the EV-07's webserver software, where Rapid7 found flaws that could allow user and geolocation data to be altered.

    The audit confirmed suspicions that arose after independent Colombian journalist Claudia Julieta Duque reported in August that the devices have built-in microphones. The government had not told recipients, and many stopped using the panic buttons.

    "To me, it's just a device to spy on you," said Rocio Campos, an activist in the Magdalena River refinery city of Barrancabermeja whose brother was disappeared in 1998 and who has been helping prosecutors search for unmarked graves.

    Mora denies that the devices can listen in on users. The device's local provider, cellular carrier Comcel S.A., "made the necessary modifications so that one could not activate the microphone or know the device's location without pressing the button," he said.

    AP's findings contradict that claim.

    ———

    A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

    Activists have good reason to be wary of public officials in Colombia, where murder rates for land and labor activists are among the world's highest, and there is a legacy of state-sponsored crime.

    The DAS domestic intelligence agency, which provided bodyguards and armored vehicles to high-risk individuals prior to 2011, was disbanded after being caught spying on judges, journalists and activists.

    Five former DAS officials have been prosecuted for allegedly subjecting Duque and her daughter to psychological torture after she published articles implicating agency officials in the 1999 assassination of Jaime Garzon, a much-loved satirist.

    Tanya O'Carroll of Amnesty International, which has been developing a different kind of "panic button" since 2014 , said the Colombian model is fundamentally flawed.

    "In many cases, the government is the adversary," she said. "How can those people who are the exact adversary be the ones that are best placed to respond?"

    Mora rejected any suggestion that his office, which offers protective services to some 6,500 people, distributed panic buttons with the intent of spying on activists.

    "We're at ease," he said. He was unable to cite an instance of a panic button saving life or helping to extract someone from danger.

    When the "SOS" button is pressed, it notifies a 24/7 operations center at the office's Bogota headquarters. Operators place a call to the user and, if the person is in danger, notify police.

    Campos was not carrying a device in September when two men on a motorcycle tried to topple her motorbike at a stoplight. One pulled a gun, and she sped away to a nearby police post, bending forward to make a smaller target.

    "No one has time to activate any button much less wait to be called and asked, 'What happened?'" she said.

    A Colombian land-rights activist, Astrid Sabogal of Pereira, said she pressed the button last year when she was out of town and men broke into their house and stole documents in the presence of her 11-year-old son. The device did not work. She was later assigned armed protection.

    ———

    BUTTONED UP

    In Mexico, the attorney general's office has issued more than 200 emergency alert devices to journalists and rights activists since 2013. But there have been multiple complaints .

    One is unreliability where cell service is poor. Others are more serious: Cases have been documented of police failing to respond or answering but saying they are unable to help.

    O'Carroll of Amnesty International said trials in 17 nations on three continents — including thePhilippines, El Salvador and Uganda — show it's best to alert trusted parties — friends, family or colleagues. Those people then reach out to trusted authorities.

    Sweden-based Civil Rights Defenders offers a 300-euro stand-alone panic button first deployed in Russia's North Caucasus region in 2013 and now used by more than 70 people in East Africa, Central Asia, the Balkans, Southeast Asia and Venezuela, said Peter Oholm, a protection officer at the nonprofit.

    The organization's Stockholm headquarters always gets notified, and social media is typically leveraged to spread word fast when an activist is in trouble.

    Amnesty's app for Android phones is still in beta testing. It is activated with a hardware trigger — multiple taps of the power button. But there have been too many false alarms.

    Norma Trujillo is a reporter in Veracruz, one of Mexico's most dangerous states for journalists. She was issued a panic button by the attorney general's office two years ago. She does not believe it would help in an emergency, but she has no plans to return the device, believing it puts the onus of protecting her on the state.

    "It raises one's political cost," she said.

    ———

    Follow Frank Bajak on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fbajak

    (abcNEWS)

    "Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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    Luis Miguel
    Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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    RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
    3/28/2017 4:26:25 PM
    AS BATTLE FOR RAQQA PROGRESSES, U.S.-BACKED FORCES IN SYRIA CAPTURE KEY AIRBASE FROM ISIS
    BY

    U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters in Syria seized control of a strategic airbase from the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) near the eastern city of Raqqa on Sunday.

    The coalition, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) is battling to defeat ISIS with the support of U.S.-led coalition aircraft and U.S. Special Forces advisers. The capture of the Tabqa military airport comes amid fears that the Tabqa dam, the largest in Syria, may be on the verge of collapse.

    SDF spokesman Talal Silo told Reuters clashes were ongoing with militants both inside and outside of the airbase but claimed SDF troops controlled as much as “70 percent” of the compound.

    The base, located some 25 miles west of Raqqa, has been in the extremist group’s hands since August 2014 when it wrested control of the area from Syrian government forces. After seizing the base, ISIS fighters paraded Syrian regime soldiers in the desert before executing them.

    It was Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s last stronghold in Raqqa province before ISIS captured the entire territory. The province is now divided between ISIS, Syrian regime and SDF control.

    Tabqa dam remains in ISIS hands, but the city is hemmed in on three sides. The SDF is fighting ISIS in the village of Karama, 10 miles east of Raqqa. The forces remain stationed at Al-Baleikh Bridge, northeast of Raqqa, says Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a monitoring group with a wide network of contacts on the ground in Syria. He says SDF fighters are 12 miles from the edge of Raqqa to the north, and 18 miles to the northwest.


    A Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) female fighter stands with her weapon east of Raqqa city, Syria March 26, 2017. The coalition of Kurdish and Arab militias recaptured a key airbase from ISIS on Sunday.REUTERS/RODI SAID

    The U.S.-led coalition continues with its air campaign against the Islamic State even as it draws criticism for incurring civilian casualties. U.S. President Donald Trump is reportedly seeking to loosen restrictions on the U.S. military's ability to launch airstrikes on ISIS in Syria, but the issues presented by such a decision became clear last week when a strike killed 35 civilians at a school sheltering families in Mansoura village near Raqqa, according to the SOHR. The U.S. military admitted on Saturday that another likely killed 200 civilians in Mosul.

    The anti-Assad Syrian National Coalition said in a statement Sunday that it was “increasingly concerned” with reports of civilian casualties caused by the U.S.-led coalition in its campaign to defeat the extremist group.

    The coalition was also criticized for potentially damaging the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River, but the SDF denies that any of the coalition’s airstrikes have hit the structure.

    “Before the latest strikes by the Americans, the dam was working. Two days ago, the dam was functioning normally,” Nejm Saleh, director of the Syrian government’s General Authority of the Euphrates Dam, told Reuters.The Syrian government claims U.S.-led airstrikes have put the dam out of service, a potentially hazardous development for the region.

    “God forbid...there could be collapses or big failures that could lead to flooding," Saleh said.


    (Newsweek)

    "Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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    Luis Miguel
    Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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    RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
    3/28/2017 4:51:26 PM

    $10 Trillion Missing From Pentagon And No One — Not Even The DoD — Knows Where It Is

    MARCH 27, 2017


    By Claire Bernish

    Over a mere two decades, the Pentagon lost track of a mind-numbing $10 trillion — that’s trillion, with a fat, taxpayer-funded “T” — and no one, not even the Department of Defense, knows where it went or on what it was spent.

    Even though audits of all federal agencies became mandatory in 1996, the Pentagon has apparently made itself an exception, and — fully 20 years later — stands obstinately orotund in never having complied.

    Because, as defense officials insist — summoning their best impudent adolescent — an audit would take too long and, unironically, cost too much.

    “Over the last 20 years, the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when an audit would be completed,” Rafael DeGennaro, director of Audit the Pentagon, told The Guardianrecently. “Meanwhile, Congress has more than doubled the Pentagon’s budget.”

    Worse, President Trump’s newly-proposed budget seeks to toss an additional $54 billion into the evidently bottomless pit that is the U.S. military — more for interventionist policy, more for resource-plundering, more for proxy fighting, and, of course, more for jets and drones to drop more bombs suspiciously often on civilians.

    Maybe.

    Because, without the mandated audit, the DoD could be purchasing damned near anything, at any cost, and use, or give, it — to anyone, for any reason.

    Officials with the Government Accountability Office and Office of the Inspector General havecatalogued egregious financial disparities at the Pentagon for years — yet the Defense Department grouses the cost and energy necessary to perform an audit in compliance with the law makes it untenable.

    Astonishingly, the Pentagon’s own watchdog tacitly approves this technically-illegal workaround — and the legally-gray and, yes, literally, on-the-books-corrupt practices in tandem — to what would incontrovertibly be a most unpleasant audit, indeed.

    Take the following of myriad examples, called “plugging,” for which Pentagon bookkeepers are not only encouraged to conjure figures from thin air, but, in many cases, they would be physically and administratively incapable of performing the job without doing so — without ever having faced consequences for this brazen cooking of books.

    To wit, Reuters reported the results of an investigation into Defense’s magical number-crunching — well over three years ago, on November 18, 2013 — detailing the illicit tasks of 15-year employee, “Linda Woodford [who] spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts.”

    Woodford, who has since retired, and others like her, act as individual pieces in the amassing chewed gum only appearing to plug a damning mishandling of funds pilfered from the American people to fund wars overseas for resources in the name of U.S. defense.

    “Every month until she retired in 2011,” Scot J. Paltrow wrote for Reuters, “she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s – a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

    “And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. ‘A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate,’ Woodford says. ‘We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of it.’”

    Where a number of disparities could be corrected through hurried communications, a great deal — thousands each month, for each person on the task — required fictitious figures. Murkily deemed, “unsubstantiated change actions” — tersely termed, “plugs” — this artificial fix forcing records into an unnatural alignment is common practice at the Pentagon.

    Beyond bogus books, the Pentagon likely flushed that $10 trillion in taxes down the toilet of inanity that is unchecked purchasing by inept staff who must be devoid of prior experience in the field of defense.

    This tax robbery would eclipse the palatability of blood money — if it weren’t also being wasted on items such as the 7,437 extraneous Humvee front suspensions — purchased in surplus over the inexplicable 14-year supply of 15,000 unnecessary Humvee front suspensions already gathering warehouse-shelf dust.

    And there are three items of note on this particular example, of many:

    One, the U.S. Department of Defense considers inventory surpassing a three-year supply,“excessive.”

    Two, the stupefying additional seven-thousand-something front suspensions arrived, as ordered, during a period of demand reduced by half.

    Three, scores of additional items — mostly unaccounted for in inventory — sit untouched and aging in storage, growing not only incapable of being used, but too dangerous to be properly disposed of safely.

    Worse, contractors greedily sink hands into lucrative contracts — with all the same supply-based waste at every level, from the abject disaster that is the $1 trillion F-35 fighter program, to the $8,123.50 shelled out for Bell Helicopter Textron helicopter gears with a price tag of $445.06, to the DoD settlement with Boeing for overcharges of a whopping $13.7 million.

    The latter included a charge to the Pentagon of $2,286 — spent for an aluminum pin ordinarily costing just $10.

    Considering all the cooking of numbers apparently fueled with burning money stateside, you would think Defense channeled its efforts into becoming a paragon of economic efficiency when the military defends the United States. Overseas. From terrorism. And from terrorists. And terrorist-supporting nations.

    But this is the Pentagon — and a trickle of telling headlines regularly grace the news, each evincing yet another missing shipment of weapons, unknown allocation of funds, or retrieval of various U.S.-made arms and munitions by some terrorist group deemed politically less acceptable than others by officials naming pawns.

    In fact, so many American weapons and supplies lost by the DoD and CIA become the property of actual terrorists — who then use them sadistically against civilians and strategically against our proxies and theirs — it would be negligent not to describe the phenomenon as pattern, whether or not intent exists behind it.

    Since practically the moment of nationalist President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the ceaselessly belligerent of the military-industrial machine have been granted a new head cheerleader with a bullhorn so powerful as to render calls to apply the brakes effectively, if not unpatriotically, moot.

    Sans any optimistic indication thus far lacking from the Trump administration it would reverse course and move toward, rather than against, transparency, the painstaking audit imperative to DoD accountability remains only a theory — while the Pentagon’s $10 trillion sits as the world’s largest elephant in apathetic America’s living room.

    For now, we know generally where our money is going: war. Which aspect of war — compared to the power of your outrage about its callous and reckless execution in your name — matters little.

    Claire Bernish writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.


    (activistpost.com)

    "Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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    Luis Miguel
    Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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    RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
    3/28/2017 5:35:44 PM

    Israel's airstrike on Syria spooks Middle East

    By Nicholas Blanford, The Arab Weekly | March 27, 2017 at 11:48 AM



    An Israeli Air Force fighter jet lands during an air show in 2013. Israel has been attacking suspected Hezbollah arms consignments by air since January 2013. File Photo by Debbie Hill/UPI
    | License Photo

    BEIRUT, March 27 (UPI) -- Israeli warplanes carrying out airstrikes on a shipment of Iranian arms to Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas in Syria managed to evade Syrian air-defense missiles but the incident is a graphic demonstration of how the war has the potential to further inflame the region.

    There are likely to be further Israeli airstrikes against Hezbol­lah in Syria, reflecting deepening Israeli concerns that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and their Lebanese ally are establish­ing a new front on the divided Go­lan Heights from which to fight the Jewish state.

    These developments are increas­ing the chances of a miscalculation that could trigger a war that both sides insist they do not want. As tensions mount amid an unprece­dented cluster of interlocking con­flicts across the hair-trigger region, clashes like the aerial action over Palmyra could easily escalate out of control.

    The Israeli airstrikes climaxed after weeks of verbal threats from all sides, aggravated originally by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trumpvowing to roll back Iran's influence across the Middle East.

    Israel has signaled repeatedly that it would not allow Iran to es­tablish a permanent presence in Syria nor permit Hezbollah to ob­tain game-changing weapons, such as advanced air-defense systems, anti-ship missiles and long-range guided missiles.

    Israel first launched airstrikes against suspected Hezbollah arms consignments in January 2013. Since then there have been at least 19 airstrikes, most of them in the Damascus area and further north in the Qalamoun region where there are a large number of Syrian mili­tary bases, including missile sites.

    Israel's March 16 operation, involving four jet fighters, was its deepest strike inside Syria since 2013. The Israeli jets flew north over Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, Hez­bollah's heartland, before entering Syrian air space and launching sev­eral missiles, reportedly at a con­voy carrying unspecified weapons for Hezbollah.

    The target was in the Palmyra area of northeastern Syria and several reports claimed the convoy originated from the T-4 airbase at Tiyas, west of the oasis town. In response, Syria launched at least four anti-aircraft missiles, believed to be relatively antiquated Russian-built SA-5s.

    Syria claimed one aircraft was shot down and another damaged. Israel insisted all four aircraft re­turned safely.

    Unusually, Israel deployed an Ar­row anti-missile system for the first time in a combat situation to shoot down a Syrian missile that entered Israeli airspace. Fragments of the Arrow missile, which is designed to shoot down ballistic missiles at high altitudes, landed inside Jor­dan.

    This, along with the air raid si­rens and sound of explosions in the night sky above Jerusalem, ap­parently compelled Israel to pub­licly admit for the first time that its aircraft had struck targets inside Syria.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made no secret that there may be more such attacks.

    "When we identify attempts to transfer advanced arms to Hezbol­lah and we have intelligence in­formation and we have the opera­tional plan, we act to prevent it," he said. "That's what happened and that's what will happen."

    The T-4 airbase is not an obvious location for gathering armaments destined for Hezbollah. It lacks underground facilities and is rela­tively distant from the Lebanese border. The main locations in Syria for Hezbollah arms repositories are believed to be in military bases near Adra and Qutayfah north of Damascus.

    In the past, Iranian weapons for Hezbollah have supposedly been flown into Damascus airport or the nearby Mezzeh airbase. However, Israeli airstrikes at facilities at those locations as well as Qutayfah may have spurred Iran to seek to outmaneuver the watchful Israe­lis by using T-4.

    Even so, T-4 is at least 175 miles from the Lebanese border over open terrain, making any arms vul­nerable to Israeli interception.

    In earlier Israeli airstrikes in Syria, Damascus either publicly condemned the attacks or ignored them. However, the question now is whether the decision to launch anti-aircraft missiles at the Israeli jets was a one-off gesture of dis­pleasure or whether it marks a change in policy.

    Bashar Jaafari, Syria's U.N. envoy, said the Palmyra strike "changed the rules of the game" and that Is­rael should "think a million times from now on" before staging more attacks.

    Israel, however, continues to signal its determination to target advanced weapons destined for Hezbollah. Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liebermanwarned after the March 16 clash that the Israe­li Air Force would wipe out Syria's air-defense system if its jets were targeted again.

    With the Assad regime gaining the upper hand in much of Syria against rebel forces and with Iran and Hezbollah eyeing the Golan as a springboard against Israel, the risk of miscalculation is growing.

    Hezbollah and Israel know only too well from experiences dating to the 1990s how easily a minor incident can quickly escalate out of control — such as in July 2006 when a Hezbollah border raid in south Lebanon triggered a massive Israeli response that flared into a highly destructive 34-day war.

    This article originally appeared at The Arab Weekly.

    (UPI)

    "Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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    Luis Miguel
    Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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    RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
    3/28/2017 5:47:11 PM



    U.S. To Send Hundreds of Paratroopers Into Mosul

    Written by

    (ANTIWAR) On Sunday, reports began emerging that the Pentagon was intending to send more combat troops into western Mosul, the latest in a long line of escalations of US military involvement in the battle over Mosul, with an eye toward getting Iraq’s stalled offensive back on track.

    Yesterday, the Military Times finally got the specifics of the deployment, with officials saying that two infantry companies and a route-clearance platoon will be sent to Mosul, paratroopers numbers somewhere around 300 fighters, which will officially be labeled an “advise and assist” operation.

    And a “temporary” deployment. Officials have labeled thousands of the ground troops in Iraq as “temporary” to avoid putting them in the official count of how many US troops are deployed to Iraq, even though in this case, as in so many others, there is no specific deadline for ending the deployment.

    Officially, there are 5,262 US troops in Iraq, and that number won’t change, no matter how many more troops are sent. The real figure is well over 6,000 already, and not well documented, as the “temporary” troops are excluded from any official counts.




    "Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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