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From the Los Angeles Times

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Surge of immigrants from India baffles border officials in Texas

Thousands from India have entered Texas illegally from Mexico in the last year. Most are Sikhs who claim religious persecution at home.

by Richard Marosi and Andrew Becker

February 6, 2011

Reporting from Harlingen, Texas

Thousands of immigrants from India have crossed into the United States illegally at the southern tip of Texas in the last year, part of a mysterious and rapidly growing human-smuggling pipeline that is backing up court dockets, filling detention centers and triggering investigations.

The immigrants, mostly young men from poor villages, say they are fleeing religious and political persecution. More than 1,600 Indians have been caught since the influx began here early last year, while an undetermined number, perhaps thousands, are believed to have sneaked through undetected, according to U.S. border authorities.

Hundreds have been released on their own recognizance or after posting bond. They catch buses or go to local Indian-run motels before flying north for the final leg of their months-long journeys.

"It was long … dangerous, very dangerous," said one young man wearing a turban outside the bus station in the Rio Grande Valley town of Harlingen.

The Indian migration in some ways mirrors the journeys of previous waves of immigrants from far-flung places, such as China and Brazil, who have illegally crossed the U.S. border here. But the suddenness and still-undetermined cause of the Indian migration baffles many border authorities and judges.

The trend has caught the attention of anti-terrorism officials because of the pipeline's efficiency in delivering to America's doorstep large numbers of people from a troubled region. Authorities interview the immigrants, most of whom arrive with no documents, to ensure that people from neighboring Pakistan or Middle Eastern countries are not slipping through.

There is no evidence that terrorists are using the smuggling pipeline, FBI and Department of Homeland Security officials said.

The influx shows signs of accelerating: About 650 Indians were arrested in southern Texas in the last three months of 2010 alone. Indians are now the largest group of immigrants other than Latin Americans being caught at the Southwest border.

The migration is the "most significant" human-smuggling trend being tracked by U.S. authorities, said Kumar Kibble, deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. In 2009, the Border Patrol arrested only 99 Indians along the entire Southwest border.

"It's a dramatic increase," Kibble said. "We do want to monitor these pipelines and shut them down because it is a vulnerability. They could either knowingly or unknowingly smuggle people into the U.S. that pose a national security threat."

Most of the immigrants say they are from the Punjab or Gujarat states. They are largely Sikhs who say they face religious persecution, or members of the Bharatiya Janata Party who say they are targeted for beatings by members of the National Congress Party.

But analysts and human rights monitors say political conditions in India don't explain the migration. There is no evidence of the kind of persecution that would prompt a mass exodus, they say, and Sikhs haven't been targets since the 1980s. The prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh, is a Sikh.

"There is no reason to believe these claims have any truth to them," said Sumit Ganguly, a political science professor and director of the India Studies Program at Indiana University.

Some authorities think the immigrants are simply seeking economic opportunities and are willing to pay $12,000 to $20,000 to groups that smuggle them to staging grounds in northern Mexico. Kibble said smugglers may have shifted to the Southwest after ICE dismantled visa fraud rings that brought Indians to the Northeast.

Many Indians begin their journey by flying from Mumbai to Dubai, then to South American countries such as Ecuador or Venezuela, according to authorities and immigration attorneys. Guatemala has emerged as the key transit hub into Mexico, they said. The roundabout journeys are necessary because Mexico requires visas for Indians.

They sneak across the dangerous Guatemala-Mexico border and take buses or private vehicles to the closest U.S.-Mexico border. Mexican organized crime groups are suspected of being involved either in running the operations or in charging groups tolls to pass through their territory.

The Indians usually wade across the Rio Grande, and then are shuttled from stash houses to transportation rings that take them north. David Aguilar, deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, said he believed a high percentage were caught as soon as they crossed the river.

"We very intensely interview, look at their backgrounds, check them against any watch list," Aguilar said, adding that although India is not considered a "special interest" source country for terrorists, the undocumented immigrants are scrutinized as if it were.

The detainees eventually claim asylum. In January, immigration court calendars at the area's two main detention facilities were full of the common Indian surnames Patel and Singh, and attorneys and judges struggled to keep up. Some attorneys had failed to file the necessary forms; interpreters were not always available. Judge Keith Hunsucker said more immigration judges would soon be assigned to handle the increased workload.

Many detained immigrants clear the first hurdle toward a full asylum hearing by convincing asylum officers they have a "credible fear" of persecution if they return to India. They can then post a bond and move anywhere in the United States as long as they agree to appear for their next court date.

Not all show up, however. "That's why I won't take their cases anymore," said Cathy Potter, a local immigration attorney who helped about 20 Indians get freed on bond last year. "It undermines my credibility. I don't want anything to do with this."

It is not clear how many Indians have been granted asylum or deported; immigration officials did not fulfill requests for that information. Judges and attorneys appear to be toughening up, however. Bond amounts have risen sharply in recent months, and attorneys say asylum claims are increasingly being rejected.

Judge William Peterson raised doubts during a recent hearing when a 27-year-old Punjabi woman said she had been beaten and raped, her sari ripped off by several attackers. The petite woman, her long hair in a ponytail, said she was targeted because her husband was a driver for National Congress Party officials.

"I haven't heard you tell me anything that you did on behalf of the party that would irritate these people," Peterson said at the hearing held by video conference.

"We used to give help to the poor. They did not like that," she said. Peterson rejected her claim for a finding of "credible fear," deeming her story inconsistent with statements she had made to an asylum officer. "They're going to kill me. They're going to rape me," she pleaded, wiping away a tear.

But hundreds of immigrants have persuaded asylum officers and judges to grant credible-fear findings, clearing the way for bond hearings.

Hunsucker, an immigration judge at the Port Isabel Detention Center near Brownsville, set bond amounts ranging from $15,000 to $40,000 for 10 Indians one recent morning.

Most said they had relatives or friends in the U.S. willing to sponsor them, though the judge raised concerns about some. In one case, a young man said his sponsor was his cousin, a woman. But the faxed identification document of the cousin showed a picture of a man with a beard. The bond was set at $15,000.

Once released, the immigrants are transported to the Greyhound bus station in downtown Harlingen. One recent evening, 10 Indians crowded around pay telephones and the bus counter, struggling with limited English skills to arrange travel.

One young man paid for a $204, two-day bus ride to New York City. When the clerk asked his name, he handed over his detention center ID wristband.

A young man wearing a turban asked the clerk for information on the next bus to Indiana. He spoke broken English and later tried to provide details about his journey, but other immigrants nudged him to keep quiet. The trip was worth it, he said, adding, "I'm happy, because it's safe" in the U.S.

Outside, motel operators offered to shuttle the men to their nearby quarters. Shoving matches between motel operators have broken out in recent weeks as they compete to fill their $44-per-night rooms with immigrants.

The Indians are largely unseen in the towns along the Rio Grande Valley, where they disappear into detention centers, stash houses or motel rooms. Some Sikhs have been confronted by locals alarmed by the sight of people wearing turbans, motel workers say.

Federal agents investigating human-smuggling rings have visited at least one motel, America's Best Value Inn in Raymondville, workers said. General Manager Kevin Patel denied any wrongdoing.

He houses about 20 Indians per week, he said, shuttling them to and from the bus station and printing out airline boarding passes. He serves them meals in his motel apartment, often the first Indian food they've had in months, he said.

One recent guest, Bharat Panchal, 37, said he was released from detention in late January after friends posted his $20,000 bond. India had become dangerous, he said, because of political unrest in his home state of Gujarat. He was flying later that day to Los Angeles to live with a friend, he said.

Patel said the sudden appearance of Indian immigrants in southern Texas baffled him.

"When they first showed up, I scratched my head a little bit," Patel said. But he has opened his doors and makes the immigrants feel at home.

"They need a place to stay," he said. "They need food. They speak my language, so of course, as a human being, I can help them out."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-border-indians-20110206,0,5781082,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Cameron Criticizes ‘Multiculturalism' in Britain

LONDON — Faced with growing alarm about Islamic militants who have made Britain one of Europe's most active bases for terrorist plots, Prime Minister David Cameron has mounted an attack on the country's decades-old policy of “multiculturalism,” saying it has encouraged “segregated communities” where Islamic extremism can thrive.

Speaking at a security conference in Munich on Saturday, Mr. Cameron condemned what he called the “hands-off tolerance” in Britain and other European nations that had encouraged Muslims and other immigrant groups “to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.”

He said that the policy had allowed Islamic militants leeway to radicalize young Muslims, some of whom went on to “the next level” by becoming terrorists, and that Europe could not defeat terrorism “simply by the actions we take outside our borders,” with military actions like the war in Afghanistan.

“Europe needs to wake up to what is happening in our own countries,” he said. “We have to get to the root of the problem.”

In what aides described as one of the most important speeches in the nine months since he became prime minister, Mr. Cameron said the multiculturalism policy — one espoused by British governments since the 1960s, based on the principle of the right of all groups in Britain to live by their traditional values — had failed to promote a sense of common identity centered on values of human rights, democracy, social integration and equality before the law.

Similar warnings about multiculturalism have been sounded by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. But, if anything, Mr. Cameron went further. He called on European governments to practice “a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism,” and said Britain would no longer give official patronage to Muslim groups that had been “showered with public money despite doing little to combat terrorism.”

Perhaps most controversially, he called for an end to a double standard that he said had tolerated the propagation of radical views among nonwhite groups that would be suppressed if they involved radical groups among whites.

Muslim groups in Britain were quick to condemn the speech, among them the Muslim Council of Great Britain, a major recipient of government money for projects intended to combat extremism. Its assistant secretary general, Faisal Hanjra, said Mr. Cameron had treated Muslims “as part of the problem as opposed to part of the solution.”

A Muslim youth group, the Ramadhan Foundation, accused the prime minister of feeding “hysteria and paranoia.” Mohammed Shafiq, the group's chief executive, said Mr. Cameron's approach would harden the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims, “and we cannot allow that to happen.”

British leaders, particularly from the Conservative Party, which Mr. Cameron leads, have mostly been careful to avoid arguments that might expose them to charges of holding racially tinged views since a notorious speech in 1968 in which Enoch Powell, a leading Conservative, warned of “rivers of blood” if nothing was done to curb Caribbean immigration to Britain.

“We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong,” Mr. Cameron said, speaking of immigrant groups, dominated by Muslims, whose numbers have been estimated in some recent surveys at 2.5 million in Britain's population of 60 million. Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, has said that as many as 2,000 Muslims in Britain are involved in terrorist cells, and that it tracks dozens of potential terrorist plots at any one time.

Mr. Cameron continued: “We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values. So when a white person holds objectionable views — racism, for example — we rightly condemn them. But when equally unacceptable views or practices have come from someone who isn't white, we've been too cautious, frankly even fearful, to stand up to them.”

The prime minister pointed to several steps the government planned that would tackle the rise of extremism. Among these, he said, would be barring “preachers of hate” from visiting Britain to speak in mosques and community centers; stopping Muslim groups that propagate views hostile to values of gender equality, democracy and human rights “from reaching people in publicly funded institutions like universities and prisons”; and cutting off government support for such groups.

The prime minister's speech came at the end of a week in which Britain's role as a base for Islamic terrorists as well as the behind-the-scenes pressure applied by the United States for actions that would deal more effectively with the threat have drawn fresh attention.

On Thursday, the government's official watchdog on antiterrorist issues, Lord Alexander Carlile, issued a final report before retiring in which he said that Britain had become a “safe haven” for terrorists, primarily because of rulings by the European Court of Human Rights, that made it difficult to deport people considered terrorist risks, and other decisions that curbed the application of British antiterrorist laws.

For years, and particularly since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, American officials have been frustrated by what they see as an insufficiently robust crackdown on terrorist groups in Britain, which have been identified in Congressional testimony and elsewhere as a leading threat to American security.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/world/europe/06britain.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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A Struggle to Disarm People Without Gun Rights

By law, Roy Perez should not have had a gun three years ago when he shot his mother 16 times in their home in Baldwin Park, Calif., killing her, and then went next door and killed a woman and her 4-year-old daughter.

Mr. Perez, who pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and was sentenced last year to life in prison, had a history of mental health issues. As a result, even though in 2004 he legally bought the 9-millimeter Glock 26 handgun he used, at the time of the shootings his name was in a statewide law enforcement database as someone whose gun should be taken away, according to the authorities.

The case highlights a serious vulnerability when it comes to keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable and others, not just in California but across the country.

In the wake of the Tucson shootings, much attention has been paid to various categories of people who are legally barred from buying handguns — those who have been “adjudicated as a mental defective,” have felony convictions, have committed domestic violence misdemeanors and so on. The focus has almost entirely been on gaps in the federal background check system that is supposed to deny guns to these prohibited buyers.

There is, however, another major blind spot in the system.

Tens of thousands of gun owners, like Mr. Perez, bought their weapons legally but under the law should no longer have them because of subsequent mental health or criminal issues. In Mr. Perez's case, he had been held involuntarily by the authorities several times for psychiatric evaluation, which in California bars a person from possessing a gun for five years.

Policing these prohibitions is difficult, however, in most states. The authorities usually have to stumble upon the weapon in, say, a traffic stop or some other encounter, and run the person's name through various record checks.

California is unique in the country, gun control advocates say, because of its computerized database, the Armed Prohibited Persons System. It was created, in part, to enable law enforcement officials to handle the issue pre-emptively, actively identifying people who legally bought handguns, or registered assault weapons, but are now prohibited from having them.

The list had 18,374 names on it as of the beginning of this month — 15 to 20 are added a day — swamping law enforcement's ability to keep up. Some police departments admitted that they had not even tried.

The people currently in the database are believed to be in possession of 34,101 handguns and 1,590 assault weapons, said Steven Lindley, acting chief of the firearms bureau in the state's Department of Justice. He estimated that 30 percent to 35 percent of the people on the list were there for mental health reasons.

Despite the enforcement challenges, the state's database offers a window into how extensive the problem is likely to be across the country. Concrete figures on the scope of the issue are difficult to come by because no other state matches gun purchase records after the fact with criminal and mental health files as California does.

“There are 18,000 people on California's list,” said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, who helped law enforcement officials set up the system and is working on a proposal to evaluate its effectiveness. “So we can roughly extrapolate there are 180,000 such people across the country, just based on differences across populations.”

By way of context, Dr. Wintemute said that in 2009 only about 150,000 people were prevented from buying a gun because they failed background checks, out of about 10.8 million who applied.

Only a handful of states, however, even have the ability to keep track of handgun purchases the way California does, by either requiring a license or permit to own one or simply keeping records of such purchases. Even fewer require a license or permit for other types of firearms.

California's system came about through a 2002 law that was even supported by the National Rifle Association, in part because it was billed as a way to protect members of law enforcement. It finally got under way in earnest in 2007. But though gun control advocates consider it a model, it still has serious gaps.

The system relies on records kept by the state on handgun purchases, but the state does not retain records of most rifle and shotgun purchases. There were 255,504 long guns sold in California in 2009 alone, compared with 228,368 handguns, according to state figures.

Perhaps most important, the burden for confiscating weapons falls largely on local jurisdictions, most of which are too short on resources to do much. Some may also have been only dimly aware of how the list works.

Police departments and sheriff's offices that request access to the list of barred owners can log in to a secure account on the state Justice Department's Web site and get monthly updates of who is on the list in their jurisdictions, with newly added names flagged. The Justice Department also trained more than 1,300 law enforcement officers around the state on the system in 2007 and plans another round this year.

It appears, however, that in the case of Mr. Perez, the Baldwin Park police were not checking the list at all in 2008, when the shootings occurred, in part because of confusion over how to access the database.

“Nobody knew where the e-mail was or where it was going,” said Lt. Joseph Cowan, head of detectives for the Baldwin Park Police Department.

Even today, Lieutenant Cowan acknowledged, his department rarely looks at the list, and he initially said he had no idea how many people in the city were on it. (He later checked and discovered there were about 35 people in his 6.6-square-mile district.)

“We try to get on,” he said. “But with staffing levels what they are, it's difficult.”

A total of 37 police departments and three county sheriff's offices in the state have not even signed up to get access to the database, despite receiving yearly notices, said Mr. Lindley, of the firearms bureau.

After being contacted by a reporter, two police departments — in East Palo Alto and Redwood City — said they had not subscribed to the database but would now do so, professing some confusion about the way the system functioned.

Capt. Chris Cesena of the Redwood City Police Department said he had been under the impression that state officials would call if anyone in Redwood City showed up on the list. Only after the department signed up recently did it discover there were 29 people in the city on the list, including seven for mental health reasons.

Detective Vic Brown, a supervisor in the Los Angeles Police Department gun unit, coordinates operations to disarm the roughly 2,700 city residents on the list.

“We just don't have enough manpower to pursue every one of these cases,” he said. “These cases go on there quicker than we can get to them.”

It is no small task to conduct the necessary background work and knock on someone's door, Detective Brown said. A case that seems relatively low-risk will usually involve four officers. If it is considered more dangerous, it might take eight. The priority, he said, is on people newly added to the system, because they are more likely to be at the address listed.

The state Justice Department's firearms bureau does have a small unit, with 20 agents, that tracks down people on the list. Last year, it investigated 1,717 people and seized 1,224 firearms.

The list is growing far faster, however, than names are being removed. “We're just not a very big bureau,” Mr. Lindley said. “We do the best we can with the personnel that we have.”

The bureau is planning a sweep this spring focused on people on the list for mental health reasons. Last summer, a man from the Fresno area who had recently been released from a mental health facility was found to possess 73 guns, including 17 unregistered assault rifles.

In the case of Mr. Perez, Lieutenant Cowan, of Baldwin Park, said he learned that state agents had been scheduled to visit Mr. Perez to confiscate his weapon — two weeks after the rampage took place.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/us/06guns.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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U.S. and Russia Activate an Arms Control Treaty

MUNICH — The United States and Russia on Saturday exchanged documents that formally activated New Start, a strategic arms control treaty. It was the final step in a protracted negotiation marked by difficult talks with the Russians and even more difficult talks with Republican holdouts in the Senate.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, traded so-called instruments of ratification — paperwork that brings the treaty into force and starts the clock ticking on verification and inspection procedures for the two sides' nuclear arsenals.

Mrs. Clinton, speaking at a security conference here where she and Mr. Lavrov conducted the brief ceremony, said the treaty was an example of “clear-eyed cooperation that is in everybody's interests.”

She said that she and Mr. Lavrov had discussed further arms control initiatives, including a pact to reduce stockpiles of tactical nuclear weapons, as well as one that would scrap long-range warheads stored in warehouses.

And Mrs. Clinton promoted the idea of cooperation in a missile-defense system for Europe, noting that last fall in Lisbon, Portugal, President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia embraced the idea of working with the United States on the technology. Russia had long opposed American missile-defense plans, arguing that they were aimed at weakening its defenses.

New Start cuts the number of deployed strategic warheads to 1,550, and the number of launchers and heavy bombers to 800. Within 45 days, the United States and Russia must share details on the number, location and technical characteristics of their arsenals. Sixty days from now, inspectors will be permitted to investigate the nuclear sites of the other country.

For President Obama, Saturday's ceremony fulfilled one of his signature policies, curbing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But it also illustrated the political hurdles to achieving even a modest arms control treaty.

Mr. Obama signed the treaty in April 2010 with Mr. Medvedev, but it took nearly 8 months for the agreement to be approved by the United States Senate, where Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, held up approval because of concerns about financing for nuclear research.

Its prospects looked grim late last year, with several senators saying they did not want to vote on it during a lame-duck session, and with a slimmer Democratic majority coming into office in January.

But after an intense lobbying campaign by Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the treaty was passed just before Christmas. The Duma, the upper chamber of the Russian Parliament, voted to approve the treaty a month later.

In addition to the ratification of New Start on Saturday, the so-called quartet — a group that deals with the Middle East consisting of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — convened. This meeting was intended to reaffirm support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, even amid the turmoil in Egypt and the Arab world.

The United States was reluctant to hold the meeting, a senior Western diplomat said, but the Europeans, in particular, wanted to make the point that change in the Middle East was a new opportunity for peace and that stagnation between Israel and Palestine was a bad signal.

“Our analysis is, because of the events in Egypt, we must react and send a signal the peace process is alive,” the European diplomat said. Another quartet meeting will follow in the next month, he said.

Mrs. Clinton deflected a question about how the turmoil in Egypt and other Arab countries would affect Israel or the peace process. In its eagerness to avoid the issue, the administration lined up with Turkey. Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, said: “It is better not to talk about Israel-Palestine now. It is better to separate these issues.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/world/europe/06start.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Hackers Gained Access to Nasdaq Systems, but Not Trades

Computer hackers have breached the systems of the company that runs the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York but did not penetrate the part of the system that handles trades, Nasdaq said Saturday.

The exchange's operating company, Nasdaq OMX, said in a statement that it had discovered suspicious files on its United States servers, and that it immediately began conducting an investigation in conjunction with outside firms and federal law enforcement agencies.

Government and law enforcement officials with knowledge of the investigation said it was being handled by the F.B.I.'s cybercrimes branch along with the Justice Department. These officials also said it appeared that the trading platform was not breached.

An attack on banks and other pillars the financial system has long been a top fear of government officials because of the potential for harm to the economy.

Nasdaq is one of the country's largest stock exchanges, and many of the nation's most important companies use it to list their shares for trading. If there were evidence that hackers could breach the inner trading systems, it could cause jitters among the companies listed on the exchange and the traders and investors who buy and sell millions of shares each day.

But Nasdaq and market experts said there was an important distinction between the parts of the system that are connected to the Web, and thus more vulnerable, and the architecture for the trading platform, which Nasdaq says operates independently.

The company said it had determined that a Web-based application on its servers called Directors Desk, on which corporations can store and share information, might have been affected. Nasdaq said the suspicious files “were immediately removed and at this point there is no evidence that any Directors Desk customer information was accessed or acquired by hackers.”

“At no point was any of Nasdaq OMX's operated or serviced trading platforms compromised,” the company said.

The company's Web site says Directors Desk has 5,000 users.

A spokesman for the company said it discovered the suspicious files late last year.

The fact that investigators discovered suspicious files suggests that the breach involved the installation of malicious software, or malware, said Ed Stroz, a former FBI agent who is co-president of Stroz Friedberg, a firm that investigates cyberattacks.

In attacks on companies, Mr. Stroz said, hackers often plant malware that acts as a back door, which allows them to deliver other malicious programs to do other tasks, which could include copying sensitive data and delivering it to the intruder.

Malware could have been installed any number of ways, including with an attack through the Web interface of Directors Desk or by infiltrating an executive's computer by tricking him into opening an attachment or clicking on a link to a malicious Web page in an e-mail.

Nasdaq now handles about 19 percent of stock trading in the United States, compared with 27 percent by the larger New York Stock Exchange and its electronic trading arm.

In a statement, the New York Stock Exchange said: “We take any potential threat seriously and we continue working at the highest levels of security and integrity.” The N.Y.S.E. would not say whether there had been any attempts to breach its systems or whether it had been contacted by federal investigators.

News of the breach was originally reported in The Wall Street Journal.

Nasdaq said it had refrained from notifying its customers of the breach at the request of the Justice Department, “in order to facilitate the continuing investigation,” but that when the Journal article appeared it consulted with authorities and decided to send out notice.

The Journal article said the investigation showed some evidence pointing toward Russia. One government official said investigators were specifically looking into that possibility, although the official said, “I don't know what the basis for the belief is.”

The stock exchanges and the trading that takes place on them have become increasingly computerized, potentially making them more vulnerable to manipulation or attack. Like Nasdaq, the N.Y.S.E. has also adopted more electronic trading. And in the last five years or so, other electronic exchanges like Direct Edge and BATS Exchange have arisen, intent on prying trading away from the two bigger markets. Direct Edge and BATS each handle about 10 percent of the market.

A spokesman for the BATS Exchange said it had never had any hacking issue of this kind.

A spokesman for Direct Edge, Rafi Reguer, said it was continually monitoring its systems but was not aware of any serious attempt to penetrate its computers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/business/06nasdaq.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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