Ohio Man Arrested for Attempting to Provide Material Support to ISIL

USDOJ: Aaron Travis Daniels, aka Harun Muhammad, aka Abu Yusef, 20, of Columbus, Ohio, was arrested today for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a designated foreign terrorist organization.

The arrest was announced by Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary B. McCord, U.S. Attorney Benjamin C. Glassman of the Southern District of Ohio, Special Agent in Charge Angela L. Byers of the FBI’s Cincinnati Division and agencies participating in the Southern Ohio Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF).

JTTF agents arrested Daniels as he attempted to leave Columbus with an alleged eventual destination of Libya, for the purpose of joining ISIL. The criminal complaint against him also alleges that Daniels sent $250 in January 2016 to an ISIL operative and had communicated his commitment to violent overseas jihad.

The complaint alleges that Daniels set up email addresses and a social media account using aliases and expressed his interest in violent jihad and traveling overseas in various communications.

The complaint also alleges that Daniels wired money to an intermediary for Abu Isa Al-Amriki, a now-deceased ISIL member, recruiter and external attack planner. Daniels allegedly told an undercover FBI employee that he wanted to travel to Trinidad as the beginning of his trip to Libya, where Daniels said Al-Amriki had suggested he go to support jihad. On Nov. 5, Daniels bought an airline ticket to travel from Columbus to Houston, Texas, and on to Trinidad. The flight was scheduled to leave Columbus today.

JTTF officers arrested Daniels at the airport, before boarding his flight. Daniels appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Terence P. Kemp who ordered him held without bond.

If convicted of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, Daniels faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Congress prescribes the maximum potential sentences and it is provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendant will be determined by a judge. A federal criminal complaint merely contains allegations and the defendant is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law.

The Southern Ohio JTTF is made up of officers and agents from the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Columbus Division of Police, Franklin County Sheriff’s Office, the Ohio State Highway Patrol, the Ohio State University Police Department, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the John Glenn International Airport Police Department, the Westerville Police Department and the Columbus Division of Fire.

Acting Assistant Attorney General McCord and U.S. Attorney Glassman commended the JTTF for its investigation of this case. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica W. Knight of the Southern District of Ohio, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Gibson of the Franklin County Prosecutor’s office, and Trial Attorneys Michael Dittoe and Taryn M. Meeks of the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section.

CIA releasing 11 million classified documents

FROM: THE HILL By Julian Hattem - 10/27/16 10:50 AM EDT


The CIA will publish more than 11 million declassified documents onto the internet, making its library of old files dramatically more accessible to the public, the agency announced this week.

Currently, the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) is only accessible to researchers who travel in person to an office of the National Archives in College Park, Md., severely limiting the public’s access. Once there, users can search through the database’s millions of electronic records that have already been reviewed and approved for public release.

That will change soon.

“CIA does intend to move the documents located on the CREST system to CIA.gov,” agency spokesman Jonathan Liu said in a statement Thursday.

Once they're on the agency’s website, people will be able to search through the 11 million pages just as visitors to the National Archives office in Maryland can currently do.

“This will dramatically increase the ability of the public to access these documents, which currently are available only by going to [the National Archives and Records Administration] in person,” Liu said.

The CIA was unable to provide a specific date when the documents will be posted online, “but we are moving out on the plan to make the transition,” said Liu.

The development was previously reported by the Federation of American Scientists’s project on government secrecy.

NSA contractor who stole documents over two decades charged

CBS NEWS: 

The former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who’s been charged with stealing and keeping highly classified material over the course of two decades put U.S. intelligence officers and operations at risk by possessing their names, according to a court filing Thursday.

In the filing with a Maryland federal court, the Justice Department confirmed for the first time specific details about the type of information Harold Martin took from the NSA.

“As an example, information stolen by the Defendant includes numerous names of intelligence officers of the United States,” the filing said. “These officers operate under cover outside the United States, and putting the secrecy of their identities at risk by removing information about those identities from appropriate, secure storage not only endangers the lives and safety of those officers and the individuals with whom they work, but also risks exposure of American intelligence operations.”

The Justice Department added that if numerous intelligence sources and methods for highly sensitive intelligence operations fell into the wrong hands, they “could be rendered nearly useless.”

Prosecutors estimate that a substantial portion of the 50 terabytes of digital information found in Martin’s possession contains “highly classified information.” Authorities also found thousands of hard-copy documents containing “highly classified information” in his possession.

In the filing Thursday, the Justice Department did not say whether the names of intelligence officers were shared with U.S. adversaries and it’s still unclear whether Martin was selling this information or if he was simply hoarding the information in his home.

Regardless of his intentions, the Justice Department plans to charge Martin under the Espionage Act. He has already been charged with theft of government property and removal and retention of classified materials for stealing half a billion pages of U.S. secrets and records between 1996 and 2016.

Martin, 51, of Glen Burnie, Maryland, made his first public court appearance in a Baltimore federal courtroom on Friday and the judge ruled that he must remain detained because he poses a “serious risk to the public.”

In court documents filed last week, government lawyers said that Martin committed theft that was “breathtaking in its longevity and scale.”

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How to build a UHF SATCOM antenna for under $20 FINAL PART

I received many e-mails about my UHF SATCOM antenna article, some of them asking nicely and some downright obscene. I have many reason whey I didn't finish the article, which run the gamut from starting a new career to getting divorced, but looking back I should have not left you hanging.

That said, if you follow the directions in the post on Radio Reference you'll find out how to build the phase harness for the radiating elements.  It's fairly simple to do and will take you less than a day to build if you have the proper tools and patience.

Use my dimensions but use the phasing instructions on THIS THREAD and you'll succeed. I built a version using a large magnet and made me a mobile SATCOM antenna and it works amazingly well, even without amplification.

I also replaced the reflector at the rear of the first antenna I built with an old parabolic dish from a discarded DISH network antenna and turned it into a permanent UHF SATCOM base antenna and can now listen to UHF SATCOM from anywhere.

Currently I am working on a small handheld version. I will post a how-to article on it as soon as I get it done.

To the many who followed this series of articles and were patiently waiting for the other shoe to drop, thanks for your missives and overwhelming patience. To the other guy who just told me to go fuck myself, fuck you too.

-Steve Douglass


PREVIOUS ARTICLES

NSA in bed with Yahoo - allowed spy software on mail servers.

REUTERS: Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.

Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request.

According to the two former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc."Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States," the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment.

Through a Facebook spokesman, Stamos declined a request for an interview.

The NSA referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment.

The demand to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified directive sent to the company's legal team, according to the three people familiar with the matter.

U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad directive for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.

"I've never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a 'selector,'" said Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues for 20 years before moving to Stanford University this year. A selector refers to a type of search term used to zero in on specific information.

"It would be really difficult for a provider to do that," he added.

Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information.

Reuters was unable to confirm whether the 2015 demand went to other companies, or if any complied.
Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, two major U.S. email service providers, did not respond to requests for comment.

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