Data sifted from Facebook wiped after legal threats - 31 March 2010 - New Scientist

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Data sifted from Facebook wiped after legal threats - 31 March 2010 - New Scientist

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Uninvestigated terrorism warning about Detroit suspect called not unusual

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By Karen DeYoung and Michael Leahy
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 28, 2009; A01

When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father in Nigeria reported concern over his son's "radicalization" to the U.S. Embassy there last month, intelligence officials in the United States deemed the information insufficient to pursue. The young man's name was added to the half-million entries in a computer database in McLean and largely forgotten.

The lack of attention was not unusual, according to U.S. intelligence officials, who said that thousands of similar bits of information flow into the National Counterterrorism Center each week from around the world. Only those that indicate a specific threat, or add to an existing body of knowledge about an individual, are passed along for further investigation and possible posting on airline and border watch lists.

"It's got to be something that causes the information to sort of rise out of the noise level, because there is just so much out there," one intelligence official said.

The report entered on Abdulmutallab, 23, after his father's Nov. 19 visit to the embassy was "very, very thin, with minimal information," said a second U.S. official familiar with its contents.

Abdulmutallab's alleged attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound commercial airliner on Christmas Day has put the information in a new light, however. It has unleashed sharp criticism of the watch-list procedures and the explosive-detection systems that apparently allowed him to board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 with materials for a bomb.

On Sunday, the air travel system responded to another alert when a second Nigerian man locked himself in the bathroom on the same Northwest Airlines flight into Detroit. Officials said he was belligerent but genuinely sick and not a threat, according to the Associated Press.

Republican leaders placed responsibility for what they called lapses in preparedness squarely on the Obama administration Sunday, and questioned whether the president appreciates terrorist threats. "I think there's much to investigate here," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on ABC's "This Week."

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) joined GOP critics in asking how the suspect was able to retain a U.S. visa -- issued by the U.S. Embassy in London in 2008 -- after his name appeared in the terrorist database.

"What happened after this man's father called our embassy in Nigeria?" Lieberman asked. "What happened to that information? Was there follow-up to try to determine where this suspect was?"

White House officials struggled to explain the complicated system of centralized terrorist data and watch lists, stressing that they were put in place years ago by the Bush administration. Spokesman Robert Gibbs said President Obama has ordered reviews of the watch-list system and the airport explosives screening.

"The president is very confident that this government is taking the steps that are necessary to take -- to take our fight to those that seek to do us harm," Gibbs said, emphasizing stepped-up military activity against al-Qaeda in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told CNN's "State of the Union" that Abdulmutallab's assertions of al-Qaeda contacts and training in Yemen were being investigated, but that "right now, we have no indication" his actions were "part of anything larger."

A Justice Department official said Abdulmutallab was released Sunday from a Michigan hospital where he was treated for burns suffered in the failed bombing. He was in a federal prison in Milan, Mich., according to the Associated Press. He is scheduled to appear in federal court in Michigan on Jan. 8.

The youngest of 16 children of a prominent Nigerian bank executive, and the son of the second of his father's two wives, Abdulmutallab was raised at the family home in Kaduna, a city

in Nigeria's Muslim-dominated north, relatives there said. He graduated with an engineering degree from City University in London. Later, his father sent him to Dubai to study for an advanced business degree.

In July, relatives said, his father agreed to his request to study Arabic in Yemen. The family became concerned in August when Abdulmutallab called to say he had dropped the course but would remain in Yemen for an undisclosed purpose. Several days later, they said, he sent a text message saying he was severing all ties with his family.

Relatives said that message provoked his father's visits to the U.S. Embassy in Abuja and to the Nigerian intelligence service. U.S. intelligence officials insisted Sunday that the visit did not occur until mid-November.

Abdulmutallab's movements after that are unclear, although a Nigerian official said Sunday that he "sneaked" into the country on the 24th. He paid cash for a ticket on a Dec. 24 KLM flight from Lagos to Amsterdam, connecting to Northwest 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day.

"The e-ticket was purchased from KLM airport office in Accra [Ghana] on 16th December 2009," Harold Demuren, a Nigerian aviation official, told a news conference in Lagos. "His passport was scanned, his U.S. visa was scanned, and the APIS [Advanced Passenger Information System] returned with no objection."

Abdulmutallab's name would have bounced back if he appeared on the U.S. "no-fly" or "selectee" watch lists. Although the size of the government's overall terrorist database has expanded since such information began to be systematically collected in 2003, the number of people prohibited from boarding a domestic or U.S.-bound aircraft, or subject to special scrutiny and notification of U.S. law enforcement, has shrunk, from an estimated 30,000 in early 2007 to 18,000 today.

Widespread complaints in the past tended to focus on lists seen as too long, rather than too short. Many came from members of Congress who objected to constituents and spouses being delayed or prevented from boarding flights because information about them or someone with a similar name had been listed.

The White House review will examine protocols for watch-listing individuals, currently based on a "reasonable suspicion" standard, according to the intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

"Do we as a country believe that the bar is too high in light of this one individual who didn't reach it? Do we want to lower the bar? If we do, what are the implications? We are going to have a lot more people on the list."

The existing system was established by the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004. It was designed to close gaps in intelligence-sharing that allowed a number of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers to enter the United States, although the CIA had identified them overseas as terrorism suspects.

The reforms set up the National Counterterrorism Center, which administers a huge database of terrorism information called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE.

Each day, thousands of pieces of intelligence information from around the world -- field assessments, captured documents, news from foreign allies and the media, and reports from worried fathers -- pour into the NCTC computers in McLean. At 11 each night, selected information from TIDE is downloaded into the Terrorist Screening Database, or TSDB, administered by the FBI. Overnight entries are examined each morning by an interagency team drawn from across the government.

Under FBI direction, individuals assessed as significant risks are then "nominated" to specific watch lists, each of which has different criteria. In addition to the "no-fly" and "selectee" lists, the State Department maintains a list of people who should not be granted visas; other lists single out people who cross land borders and domestic fugitives.

In Abdulmutallab's case, a single, non-specific entry in TIDE was not enough to send his information to the TSDB, so he was never considered for a watch list. Among the gaps in the system already being addressed by computer technicians, officials said, is the absence of an "automatic feedback loop" that would have let TIDE know that the random report from Nigeria referred to a man who already had a valid U.S. entry visa, issued more than a year before.

Staff writers Carrie Johnson and Joby Warrick in Washington and Anne E. Kornblut in Kailua, Hawaii, and special correspondent Aminu Abubakar in Kano, Nigeria, contributed to this report.

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Anti-Settlement Group Takes Palestinian Property Claims to Israel's High Court

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 31, 2009

BURQA, West Bank -- It has been nearly a decade since the Jewish settlement of Migron appeared on the hilltop opposite this Palestinian village, beginning with a communications tower and followed by a cluster of homes and a fence around approximately 90 acres of land.

Data tucked onto the hard drive of anti-settlement activist Dror Etkes's computer indicates that the land belongs to the residents of Burqa and nearby Deir Dibwan, and Etkes said he expects that information will one day force the settlers to leave.

The compulsion won't come from Israel's politicians, world public opinion or the Obama administration, Etkes contends, but from Israel's Supreme Court, where local advocacy groups are having increased success challenging settlements with simple property claims.

Etkes, the 42-year-old coordinator of settlement issues for the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, has helped instigate a number of lawsuits through the pioneering use of mapping software to establish where settlements have encroached on private Palestinian land. "You have to create a tsunami that will expose the dimensions" of the problem, he said.

The debate over the status of West Bank settlements has been underway for more than three decades -- with the United States and many other countries regarding them as the improper actions of an occupying power, Israel claiming they are legitimate uses of land it is responsible for administering, and the Palestinians regarding them as an effort to undermine creation of a state of their own. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and about 290,000 Israelis now live in roughly 120 government-sanctioned settlements, as well as several dozen unauthorized ones. Those figures exclude Jewish areas in East Jerusalem.

The enclaves run from small clusters of homes, such as Migron, where some residents feel they are fulfilling a religious call to reclaim the land of Israel, to city-size developments with tens of thousands of residents drawn by cheaper prices and room for growing families.

But even as the international debate has proceeded with no clear resolution -- the dispute between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is the latest in a long series of disagreements between their countries over the issue -- a quiet revolution has taken place among Israeli groups opposed to the settlements.

Limited in the past to political advocacy and efforts to court international opinion, they now have access to a deeply layered database on West Bank land that Etkes assembled over three years. Multiple sets of information can be compared -- official Israeli maps; Palestinian, Jordanian and British records rendered in digital form; hundreds of Global Positioning System images; and aerial photos supplemented by field observations.

The Israeli courts honor the property rights of Palestinians and are beginning to pressure the government to block construction or make plans to remove houses built on private property. Proving landownership in the West Bank is not always easy, though, with a hodgepodge of records and rules that include formal land registrations, conventions that extend property rights to those who traditionally cultivate an area and Israeli government property seizures.

Still, Etkes's data are having an effect. Prodded by litigation, the Israeli government is laying plans now to move the Migron settlers to another part of the West Bank. And building at the settlement of Ofra has been restricted because it is on private land, according to Michael Sfard, the lawyer who has filed most of the lawsuits.

"It's a different universe," Sfard said. "If we had had these tools 40 years ago, I think the landscape would be different." Yesh Din has about 20 cases pending in the courts, and Etkes said "dozens" more are yet to be filed. The change has been noted by the Netanyahu government and others, who say the groups are funded by foreign governments and other outside sources and who have promised more aggressive rebuttals.

But Yesh Din's strategy of relying on the Israeli courts raises some deeper issues, akin to the debates in the United States about the role of the judiciary in molding policy, said Gerald Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University, who tracks the funding and relationships among nongovernmental groups.

"There is already a debate that the court is run by a small group of like-minded people that are outside the political process," Steinberg said. "As a result of this, it will increase." Judges are chosen by a nine-member committee that includes three justices, members of the Israeli bar, cabinet members and members of the parliament.

That debate, Etkes said, is the type of issue he hopes his work will raise. There is little chance, he added, that litigation alone will stop the expansion of settlements. But he said he hopes it will make Israelis confront the degree to which the settlements have encroached on private property and make the government enforce the law.

"We're asking questions about what Israel wants to be when it grows up," said Etkes, a former tour guide who said that he was raised in a religious family that supported the settlements and that he spent summers picking fruit in some of the same communities he is now opposing in court. "You talk about the rule of law and say that is your ethos. The main point is: Who controls the West Bank -- the state or the settlers?"

Enforcement of the rules can be slow, with Israeli authorities saying they prefer even years-long negotiations to risking the kind of violence that flared this month when settlers set fire to Palestinian fields and pelted cars with rocks after the removal of a small outpost.

Across the valley in Migron, training-wheel bikes scattered in driveways speak to a community that is nestled and comfortable, despite the large metal security gate and the guard at the entrance.

Itai Harel was one of the first to move to Migron. He said there was no sense of taking land that belonged to anyone else, only of improving barren hills "where our prophets walked and where the Bible was written." In responding to the litigation, Migron residents contended that their homes were built on land that had been abandoned and was under Israeli state control, and that they were abiding by government policy that supported Jewish settlement in the area.

If the larger area that was fenced in around Migron included private fields -- Harel acknowledged that some wheat and barley fields had been maintained in the area -- then compensation should be discussed, he said.

According to Etkes, all of Migron is in a part of the West Bank where private land registration was completed before the 1967 war and ownership was well established. He has become a familiar figure to the settlers, trolling the West Bank in a dusty four-wheel-drive vehicle looking for signs of new roads or outposts.

"They found a genius strategy: go to the Supreme Court, where everybody thinks like them," Harel said of Etkes and groups such as Yesh Din and Peace Now.

"Why should we leave here? If we leave, it is acknowledging it is occupied land," rather than Israel, said Harel, 35, who is raising four children here.

Across the valley, Mohammed Barakat, the Palestinian village treasurer of Burqa, said the wheat and barley fields mentioned by Harel may well have been his: Those were the crops grown on his 10 acres before the fence went up around the place in 2001. The loss has meant a few thousand dollars a year out of his pocket ever since.

"It's paralyzing," Barakat said of the settlements and the road, built for their use, that encircle Burqa. "It's like living in a refugee camp."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073003809.html

Sites of the Day #2

Asia Matters for America (database)
http://www.asiamattersforamerica.org/index.cfm?event=page.search

American Political Science Association (learned society)
http://www.apsanet.org/

American Sociological Association (learned society)
http://www.asanet.org/

American Anthropological Association (learned society)
http://www.aaanet.org/