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From the Los Angeles Times

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U.S. immigration authorities boost efforts to hunt war criminals

The U.S. government — Immigration and Customs Enforcement in particular — steps up efforts to find, prosecute and deport people accused of human rights violations who try to hide here.

by Paloma Esquivel, Los Angeles Times

October 23, 2011

When Carlos de Graca Lopes took over as director of Sao Martinho Prison in Cape Verde in 2001, he arrived with a warning for inmates: He had one hand made of velvet and another made of iron. Grab the velvet hand and be rewarded. Grab the iron hand and face the consequences.

Over the next five years, Lopes ruled with his iron hand, according to a government indictment filed against him in Cape Verde. More than 150 times, the indictment alleges, he ordered or executed the beating and torture of prisoners, including spraying them in the face with water so they could not breathe and handcuffing them to an iron bar for weeks.

In 2006, despite a government order that Lopes remain in the island country off Africa's Atlantic coast while under investigation, he was granted a tourist visa to the United States, where he quickly disappeared.

There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of people like Lopes in the U.S., alleged human rights and war crimes violators who managed to emigrate to this country, often with legal authorization. Although federal immigration officials have long sought to find and deport such offenders, efforts to prevent their entry and punish violators has grown in the last few years.

In 2009, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement opened the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center, made up of historians, investigators and legal experts whose job it is to identify and track human rights violators and war criminals around the world.

Their work has led to several high-profile arrests, among them a Moreno Valley martial arts instructor and a Santa Ana maintenance man who are accused of massacring at least 160 men, women and children during the Guatemalan civil war; a Georgia man who was allegedly part of a Serbian paramilitary group that killed thousands during the Bosnian war; and a Chicago-area grocery store worker wanted in Rwanda on charges of genocide and war crimes.

Nearly 10 years ago, Amnesty International issued a report calling the U.S. a haven for torturers and identifying more than 1,000 suspected human rights violators living in the country. At the time, federal officials invested little in resources to track them down, the rights group said. But Homeland Security and Justice Department officials, who for years had focused on deporting Nazi war criminals, were looking to expand their efforts to include alleged offenders from Central America, Bosnia, Rwanda and other countries.

Over the next few years, arrests mounted and the Justice Department launched its own unit with a similar objective to ICE's war crimes center.

"As we began to be successful, we got more resources, more bodies," said ICE Unit Chief Tom Annello. "We went from being just a program that had oversight over this to one that was more proactive and engaged."

The ICE center now has about 28 full-time employees, including attorneys, researchers and analysts. They use declassified U.S. government documents and other data to identify possible culprits. The compiled names, which so far include more than 3,000 people suspected of human rights violations, are then shared with U.S. agents and officials tasked with approving visas.

Vienna Colucci, a senior policy advisor at Amnesty International who worked on the 2002 report, said that the U.S. has made progress but that dealing with the problem through immigration "isn't ideal." Preventing a person from entering the country or deporting them without handing them over to a court, "doesn't help to stop atrocities," she said. "You're sending back somene who is a severe abuser to those countries where they were committing those crimes."

The U.S., she said, needs to be more willing to use criminal prosecution at home.

Over the years, Congress has adopted laws aimed at allowing the prosecution of torture and human rights abuses committed abroad, a move applauded by human rights groups.

But the laws cover only atrocities committed after the laws were adopted, or sometimes only apply to U.S. citizens or members of the military. So far only one person, Chuckie Taylor, the son of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, has been successfully prosecuted. Taylor was convicted in 2009 and sentenced to 97 years in federal prison.

More often, officials said, they settle for lesser charges that can later result in deportation.

"We'll go after them for visa fraud, perjury, jaywalking. We don't care," Annello said.

Even minor charges can require extensive investigation, often including traveling to the alleged violator's home country, interviewing witnesses and gathering documents to present in court.

Special Agent Brian Andersen, who worked on the Lopes case, has traveled to Rwanda, Liberia and elsewhere in Africa to investigate alleged war crimes. Andersen, a onetime social studies teacher who got into law enforcement in the late 1990s, said he's been deeply moved by the work.

"These are, in my opinion, some of the most important cases that I have ever worked or that I will ever work," he said.

Since 2004, ICE has arrested more than 200 people for human rights violations and deported more than 400, ICE spokeswoman Nicole Navas said. The agency is pursuing more than 1,900 cases involving suspects from about 95 countries.

After arriving in the U.S., Lopes went to the one place where he stood a chance of going undetected — Brockton, Mass., a city near Boston that has a Cape Verdean community of about 10,000 people.

The father of seven found an apartment with other migrants and got a job at a temp agency. Immigration agents began tracking him after getting a tip from the FBI in Senegal. About a year after Lopes arrived, authorities found him making frozen pizzas for grocery stores.

Agents didn't tell him what they knew about the charges he faced back home, according to a person familiar with the case. Instead, they took him in for overstaying his visa and waited to see what he would do.

Rather than accept deportation, Lopes submitted an application for asylum, according to court records.

On his application, he wrote, "I have never been formally charged with any crimes," according to a federal indictment. He testified to the same before an immigration judge.

Because of these and other answers he gave, Lopes now faced criminal charges in the U.S. for fraud, misuse of a visa and perjury. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in federal prison.

"In this sentence that I'm imposing on you," wrote U.S. District Court Chief Judge Mark L. Wolf, "it is important to try to send the message that those being investigated and accused of violating human rights should resist the understandable temptation to act illegally to come and stay in the United States."

Lopes, 49, completed his prison term last year and was returned to Cape Verde in September 2010.

He is being detained at a military base while he awaits trial. In a telephone interview, he said he was a lifelong military man who was assigned to direct prisons because of his exemplary record. He said the charges against him were conjured by political opponents.

Lopes said he didn't come to the U.S. to flee justice but because his two youngest sons needed surgery and he was waiting for their mother to bring them to the country. In the U.S., he said, he was sentenced harshly because of crimes he was only accused of in Cape Verde.

He recalled being housed in solitary confinement in an "aluminum box" with no air conditioning before he was transferred from New York to federal prison in Arizona.

"They kept me there for 30 days — it was the worst time of my life," he said. "American justice was not just with me."

When his case is tried in Cape Verde, he said, his name will be cleared.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ice-war-crimes-20111019,0,451828.story

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Malware myopia

As modern society leans more heavily on the Internet, its fragility becomes an ever greater concern.

by Mark Bowden

October 23, 2011

Earlier this month, researchers discovered a cunning strain of malware, dubbed the Lurid Downloader, that has been systematically and silently stealing data from carefully targeted government computers in 61 countries.

The discovery was made by Trend Micro, a Tokyo-based computer security company, which identified the invader as a version of a well-known strain of malware that exploits vulnerabilities in the popular programs Adobe Reader and Microsoft Office. It inserts itself into a computer's core, and then phones home to a remote operator who moves continually from domain to domain on the Internet to avoid detection.

The Lurid Downloader had been at work for more than a year inside sensitive government networks (diplomatic offices, space agencies, research institutions), mostly in Russia and countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. Once in place, the virus can easily hop around inside a network and, under the control of a remote operator, observe users' keystrokes, peruse files and upload any data it wants to keep.

It is just the most recent example of the newest trend in cyberattacks, something those in the field have dubbed "advanced persistent threats," or APTs. They forgo the more familiar blunderbuss methods of mass infection in favor of sniper-like precision, and they have begun bedeviling cyberspace like a cloud of stinging insects. All take advantage of the anarchic nature of the Internet itself, which emerged 30 years ago free of any central governance or oversight. Because of the essential fluidity of Internet Protocol addresses, which locate a computer in cyberspace, such attacks can be launched with little fear that authorities will be able to pinpoint their origin.

As modern society leans ever more heavily on the Internet for commerce, communications and the management of its vital infrastructures, its fragility becomes an ever greater concern. It was built to share data and to enable connection, with scarcely a thought given to the potential for malice. The only answer to the persistent problem of malware may be to rebuild the Internet from scratch, an undertaking in the planning stages by the Internet Engineering Task Force, an association of volunteer Internet experts supported by the computer industry. A redesigned Internet might "fingerprint" every bit and byte of data so that each packet launched can be traced to its source.

"The Internet has enabled any Mickey Mouse single player to launch something that could be catastrophic," said Rodney Joffe, head of security for Neustar Inc., a company that provides directory services for the Web. "In the real world, you have to have access to plutonium or fleets of fighter jets to wreak widespread havoc. Because of the Internet, any one person can wreak havoc if they have knowledge and a computer."

Sophisticated attacks

Malware has come a long way from the standard Hollywood portrayal of the hacker as an unwashed rebel surviving on junk food in his parents' basement and showing off his skills online. "Botnets" capable of wreaking the kind of havoc Rodney Joffe was referring to, like the one assembled by the Conficker worm starting in 2008, pull computing power from millions of illicitly linked computers. Advanced persistent threats are designed for theft, espionage and sabotage and are the work of nation states or rich criminal gangs. They show a programming sophistication that rivals the best computer security experts in the world.

Here's how Matt Olney, a Maryland-based security expert, defines those behind APTs: "There are people smarter than you, they have more resources than you, and they are coming for you. Good luck with that."

A well-known strain called Poison Ivy has successfully penetrated the networks of the Defense and State departments. Another is the Stuxnet worm, thought to have been designed by Israel or the United States, or both, which set back Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program. Perhaps the most surprising recent victim was RSA, the security arm of EMC Corp., which provides top-level encryption for the public transfer of sensitive data. Earlier this year, hackers stole privileged information and used it to craft fake RSA SecurID tokens, meant to be a key to supposedly secure information anywhere.

Whether posing a giant or a narrowly sculpted threat, malware relies on the ease of operating anonymously on the Internet. The mysterious creators and controllers of the Conficker worm, which infected an estimated 10 million to 12 million computers worldwide in 2008 and 2009, move daily among 50,000 randomly generated Internet domains. Volunteer security experts — known as the Cabal — labored mightily to shut down the botnet, which is no longer growing but remains very much alive.

The Cabal established an unprecedented template for international cooperation and security that must have given malefactors pause. It meant recruiting every national top level domain — the 110 Web addresses denoted by country initials (such as ".ca," for Canada) — to thwart the worm.

The government steps up

The Conficker threat woke up the U.S. government, which had been conspicuously absent from the fight. In the years since, the Pentagon has established a cyber-command at the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and this year formally classified certain kinds of cyberattacks as acts of war. At the new National Cyber-Forensics Training Alliance in Pittsburgh, a privately funded effort affiliated with Carnegie-Mellon University, federal agents working with industry researchers helped bust a Ukrainian cyber-crime ring that used the Conficker botnet to drain $72 million from American bank accounts.

But law enforcement and security experts have their work cut out for them trying to protect systems designed to make data sharing easy, and looking for bad guys who are free to launch their malware from no fixed address.

The Internet was born, after all, in that brief period of inanity before and after what was dubbed the Summer of Love. Openness was the point. Sharing. It sprang out of a utopian spirit: Power to the people! Information should be free! Knowledge is power! No one was in charge. No one was allowed to be in charge. This pleased the anarchic spirit of the times, but it gave those bent on crime, espionage or sabotage a tool to reach nearly any computer anywhere.

"What were they thinking?" asks Paul Vixie, the author of Unix software who now sits on the advisory committee for security for ICANN, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the closest thing there is to a governing body for the Internet. "Were they thinking?"

They were far more worried about protecting the Web from state control than from the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. Such is the nature of most hopeful ventures. So along with the inestimable benefits of the Internet, we must live with the dangers of loosely guarded interconnectivity.

This is pretty much where Vixie comes down. In an email posted at the height of the Conficker battle, he wrote: "These problems have been here so long that the only way I've been able to function at all is by learning to ignore them. Else I would be in a constant state of panic, unable to think or act constructively. We have been one command away from catastrophe for a long time now.... In a thousand small ways that I'm aware of, and an expected million other ways I'm not aware of, the world has gotten dangerous and fragile and interdependent.... But I've lived with it so long that I have lost the ability to panic about it. One day at a time, I do what I can."

Mark Bowden is the author of "Worm: The First Digital World War."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bowden-malware-20111023,0,3815010,print.story

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From Google News

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Georgia

Restore community policing

Recently, Paine College played host to a meeting dedicated to better understanding how local neighborhoods can become safer places to live. Gathered there were representatives of several neighborhood associations, several county officials, Commissioner Matt Aitken and Capt. Scott Peebles of the sheriff's department.

Community policing is hardly new. It is what most seniors recall as the dominant policing philosophy from the 1940s, '50s and '60s, particularly in urban areas. It was characterized by officers who were assigned to an area for extended periods of time.

The officer knew the people on his beat, and the people who lived and worked there knew him. He knew whom to trust, and the people trusted him. The flow of intelligence and citizens' sense of security was significant. Why did this effective system change?

There are hundreds of books on the changes in policing in the past 40 to 50 years, and the reasons for this change. One reason is the evolution of urban to suburban living. Another of the most important reasons is simple: money. Traditional community policing is expensive and most communities have not been able to afford it.

Over time, police leaders evolved methods and practices that made the best use of money available to cover assigned territory. Officers on foot or a horse and the presence of two officers in one patrol car disappeared.

The U.S. Department of Justice has in the past several years recognized again the value of community policing as populations in urban areas return. They strongly support the re-adoption of this successful philosophy.

Augusta will, next fall, elect a sheriff and several commissioners. If citizens want to do something about crime, they are going to have to do two things: They are going to have to elect a sheriff who will implement community policing; and they are going to have to elect commissioners who have the courage to fund it.

http://chronicle.augusta.com/opinion/letters/2011-10-23/restore-community-policing?v=1319412065

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South Carolina

Harleyville takes pride in community policing

HARLEYVILLE -- The way Neal Dye sees it, big-city cops are finally coming around to the kind of policing his department has done for years.

At age 83, Dye is thought to be the state's oldest police chief. He's also a walking billboard for community policing, for engaging citizens and building trust to combat crime.

Harleyville Police Department

Most days, you'll see Dye walking the streets, popping in shops and restaurants, chatting up customers, razzing clerks and otherwise taking the pulse of his town.

"Everything we do boils down to community policing and knowing who's in your town and who's on your streets," said Dye, who's been chief for 15 years. "If you want to know what's going on, you have to get out and talk to people."

A fractured hip and other ailments sidelined Dye for a spell this year, but he was back at it on a recent day. Passing motorists honked and waved. A few stopped to give him a hug.

It's that kind of interaction and shared purpose, Dye contends, that keeps the peace. Including Dye, the town has four full-time officers and three part-timers, just enough to keep things covered 24-7. But it's that community touch that makes it work. "If you don't have the support of the people, you can have 10 cops for every person and it's still not going to be enough," he said.

This rural Dorchester County community of about 700 people is known for its limestone deposits, which attracted cement plants to the area, and its town-limit signs, which have been swiped for years by Harley-Davidson fans. The town doesn't have a whole lot of crime, but it still deals with shoplifting, traffic issues and the occasional burglary or assault.

Residents said they prize the department's quick response times and down-home touch. "We love our police department," said Dottie Villeponteaux, owner of Just Desserts. "It's kind of like Mayberry here. They're more than police. They're so entwined in everything that goes on in the community."

S.C. Criminal Justice Academy Director Hubert Harrell called Harleyville one of the state's best small police departments, filled with "common-sense guys" with "really good people skills."

Dye chalked up the success to being frugal with his budget, "real picky" about who he hires and having cops who are willing to listen. "My parting words to (officers) when they're going out are: Be Nice."

http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/oct/24/24smallc0psside/

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