~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Los Angeles
News of terror plot in the Inland Empire develops, information continues to surface
by Doug Saunders
With loud explosions and bright lights from flashbang grenades, heavily armed federal agents stormed a car near an apartment complex in Chino on Friday and arrested three men in connection with terrorist activities.
The men, from throughout the Inland Empire, had plotted for months to join al-Qaida in Afghanistan and planned to carry out terrorist acts on government facilities and kill members of the armed forces overseas, according to a criminal complaint filed by the FBI.
The trio had hoped to join another man - Sohiel Omar Kabir, 34, of Pomona - who had already traveled to Afghanistan and was arranging contacts with the terrorist organizations. Kabir, an Afghanistan native, served in the U.S. Air Force from 2000 to 2001.
Ralph Deleon, 23, of Ontario and a native of the Philippines; Miguel Alejandro Santana Vidriales, 21, of Upland; and Arifeen David Gojali, 21, of Riverside were arrested Friday in Chino. They appeared Monday in Riverside federal court for a status hearing.
The men had planned to "provide material support to terrorists and (were) making arrangements to join al-Qaida or the Taliban in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers and target U.S. interests overseas," said Bill Lewis, assistant director of the FBI's Los Angeles field office.
David Bowdich, FBI special agent in charge of the counterterrorism division, said the men did not appear to have local targets.
"We'd never allow it to get to that point," Bowdich said in a news conference at FBI Headquarters in Los Angeles on Tuesday. "We were on them for quite a while. The agents and detectives did a tremendous job in this case.
"There is no threat locally based around this case that we're aware of. This was an out of the continental United States threat."
Deleon, Santana and Gojali had purchased plane tickets to fly to Afghanistan and were planning to depart within a few days when they were arrested Friday.
"There was no way they were going to get on that plane," Bowdich said.
Bowdich said the men presented a serious threat.
"I think the main lesson learned is don't underestimate these groups," Bowdich said.
"They took very definitive steps to accomplish their plan, and their mission was definitely detrimental - to harm the safety of our troops overseas and quite frankly coalition forces as well."
Lengthy planning process
The men came to the attention of authorities in January when Santana was returning to the United States after spending time in Mexico, according to the complaint.
As he was crossing the border into San Ysidro, he was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials and asked about items he was bringing into the country.
Santana had a copy of "Inspire," a magazine that aims to find recruits for al-Qaida inside the United States and Europe.
Subsequently, Santana, who converted to Islam in July 2010, unwittingly engaged undercover federal agents online and further confirmed his support of jihad - a holy war waged on behalf of Islam as a religious duty.
According to the FBI's criminal complaint, Santana yearned to become a sniper and claimed he went to Mexico to train. He also claimed he learned to use firearms and practiced using and making explosives.
Santana was friends with Deleon and the pair planned to go
to Afghanistan with a third person, who was actually a confidential federal informant, the complaint says.
Deleon told the unnamed informant in July that the Taliban, a terrorist organization that has been supported by al-Qaida, was "fighting the right cause in their battle against the United States and their allies in Afghanistan."
On Aug. 8, Deleon told the informant about a Skype video conference he had with Kabir.
Kabir, who left the U.S. for Afghanistan in July, said he was living in Kabul near a mosque and that the men from the Inland Empire should visit him. Everything would be taken care of, he said.
Kabir told Santana and Deleon that he had arranged for their travel.
Deleon frequently talked about the radical teachings of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American-born Muslim cleric who became a key figure in al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was killed Sept. 30, 2011, by a missile fired by an American drone aircraft.
Santana told the informant during an Aug. 10 Skype session with Kabir that their cover story for traveling to Afghanistan would be that they were going to work at an orphanage.
On Nov. 5, Deleon and Santana met with the informant and discussed what they should pack for their trip to Afghanistan and what route they were using to go to the war-ravished country.
Gojali, who was friends with Santana and showed an interest in jihad, joined the group Nov. 5. They decided to pack only cold weather clothing, socks and cold medicine for Kabir and an Xbox gaming system, according to the complaint.
On Nov. 7, Deleon told the informant that he spoke to Kabir the previous day and that Kabir said he might be going on a suicide mission. Kabir later explained that he did not go on the suicide mission because he was sick.
The informant on Nov. 13 met with the three Inland Empire men at a Chino apartment to search for online flight information to Afghanistan.
The informant on Thursday paid for the travel plans for the three to go to Afghanistan by using his debit card and their money. The informant then contacted his handler in the FBI.
Deleon, Santana and Gojali arranged to depart from Mexico with a layover in Istanbul, Turkey, before arriving in Afghanistan to begin their al-Qaida training.
Surprise at fallout
Gojali's attorney John Aquilina said Tuesday he had just received the indictment and hadn't had a chance to review it in its entirety.
"I don't have enough information to make any kind of comment," Aquilina said.
Gojali is being held without bail at the Central Detention Center in San Bernardino.
A bond hearing will be held at 1:30 p.m. Monday in U.S. District Court in Riverside, where Aquilina said he will request bail for Gojali.
Santana and Deleon were remanded to federal custody at the Central Detention Center in San Bernardino.
Neither Deleon's attorney, Randolph Driggs, nor Santana's attorney, Robert Scott, could be reached for comment Tuesday.
Kabir is in custody in Afghanistan and awaiting extradition to the United States.
If convicted, the defendants face a statutory maximum penalty of 15 years in federal prison.
The case, which is a continuing investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Riverside, will be prosecuted by the United States Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.
The federal informant, a convicted pseudoephedrine trafficker, was provided with $250,000 and immigration benefits for his efforts.
Deleon's girlfriend, Kimberly Nguyen, said in an interview Tuesday morning that Deleon could not have done what the federal government has accused him of doing.
"He became a peaceful person when he converted to Islam," she said.
"He stopped drinking and using drugs, and life was precious to him."
http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_22033178/inland-empire-terror-plot-thickens-information-continues-surface
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Washington, DC
New bill would oversee government access to your email
by Perry Chiaramonte
Federal law enforcement agencies soon may have their hands tied when it comes to accessing your email and other personal data if a new bill currently making its way through Congress becomes law.
Laws governing the privacy of your emails were drafted in the mid-1980s, long before AOL and Gmail. But efforts to update those rules have some fearing the government's fingers will be flipping through their digital mail.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has drafted a substitute bill for the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was originally written in 1986 long before things like electronic archiving and cloud storage. The update, which will be under review next Thursday, modernizes rules for police seeking to obtain private email for investigative purposes -- rules that had been surprisingly lax.
“Technology [today] is fundamentally different than anything thought of in the 80s,” said Alan Butler, an advisory counsel member with the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “The standard amount of storage was much smaller when the bill was originally written,” he told FoxNews.com.
'The statute has not undergone a significant revision since it was enacted in 1986 -- light years ago in Internet time.'
The Digital Due Process coalition
Butler and others say that the update is meant to do away with the “180-day rule,” which says law-enforcement agencies need a mere administrative subpoena and not a court-approved warrant to access email messages older than six months. Currently, police agencies can simply say that they think a particular email is relevant to an investigation and force an Internet company to hand it over, without a judge's OK.
More recent emails would require a warrant, and Leahy's bill would make a court-approved warrant mandatory to obtain and view private emails from any time frame. But tech website CNET reported Tuesday that Leahy had tweaked the bill, leading to fears that anyone's email could be accessed with or without a warrant.
"Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct message without a search warrant," wrote CNET's Declan McCullagh.
Officials from the Judiciary Committee flatly refuted such accusations.
“Senator Leahy does not support a broad carve-out for warrantless searches of email,” an aide for the committee told FoxNews.com.
The aide, who asked that her name be withheld, confirmed that talks will continue next Thursday after concerns were raised by certain law-enforcement agencies. While some changes to the bill might be added, revisions would likely not be drastic.
The Digital Due Process coalition, a group of major technology companies and privacy groups including Apple and Microsoft, has pushed for reform of the ECPA.
"The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) was a forward-looking statute when enacted in 1986, the group's website states. "Technology has advanced dramatically since 1986, and ECPA has been outpaced. The statute has not undergone a significant revision since it was enacted in 1986 -- light years ago in Internet time."
Representatives of the coalition did not respond to FoxNews.com phone calls.
“This fight is about level of access,” Butler said. “The oversight will disappear after 180 days, but a whole new problem could occur. A good example is with the recent incident involving General Petraeus.”
"You could start with looking for a particular communication between two people but while doing so, you could find links to other things that you weren't looking for. But the thrust of the act is good overall.”
“The question is whether it will change with any new language drafted next week,” he added.
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/11/21/e-mail-privacy-debate-over-senate-communications-bill/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Akaska
Staffing declines stall city's community policing plans
by ROSEMARY SHINOHARA
Members of the Anchorage police are trying to do their jobs with 34 fewer sworn officers than were on the payroll in 2009, limiting progress of a plan to increase community policing.
The number of officers peaked at 408 in January of 2009, according to information provided by Chief Mark Mew. That includes recruits in training.
The numbers have been pared down since then through lean city budgets promoted by Mayor Dan Sullivan since he took office four years ago.
In mid-October, the department had 374 officers.
If you discount the recruits until they're fully operational -- which Sullivan says is the best way to look at the statistics -- the number of officers peaked in January of 2010 at 380 and was at 365 at the end of September.
Either way, the declining numbers of officers come at a time when the department's long-term goal is to shift to a more community-based policing approach that calls for adding to the force: assigning officers regularly to the same parts of town and having them participate in community events and neighborhood meetings to learn about and help solve problems.
At current staffing levels, officers are tied up responding to calls to an extent that doesn't allow a lot of proactive policing, Mew said.
To work at its optimal level, the new approach would need 49 more officers, Mew said.
Anchorage Assembly member Paul Honeman, a former police lieutenant and a critic of the Sullivan administration, said the city is not yet headed that direction and needs to be.
"We need to get out of our cars. We need staffing to get out and be proactive in our communities," Honeman said.
Derek Hsieh, president of the police union, said the department is just "getting by" so far during Sullivan's tenure.
"A police department operating at 100 percent all the time is a police department in trouble," Hsieh said. "You cut back on training. I would say we're probably operating near capacity, particularly during the night shifts."
Sullivan said the city is "making good headway" towards community policing, given the resources available.
Most importantly, he said, crime rates are dropping.
A police officer training academy planned next year will allow the force to stay even and maybe get a little ahead, Sullivan said.
What would it take to significantly increase the number of officers?
"I think what it's going to rely on is our administration has to negotiate contracts with all of the employee groups with the recognition that if we really want to increase service, we have to hold the line on expenses," Sullivan said.
He has frequently said that the administration of former Mayor Mark Begich left the city with higher labor costs than it can afford.
The current police contract is up at the end of 2014.
'YOU'RE A MOUNTAIN VIEW PERSON'
In 2010, the city hired a consultant, The Police Executive Research Forum, to advise on how best to organize existing police department staff and how to increase community policing.
Without adding more officers, the consultant said, APD could become more effective by keeping patrol officers on the same assigned beats, with the same sergeant, to build better relationships.
The department has done that, Mew said. A sergeant and his or her officers have the same days off so they're always together.
"You're a Mountain View person. Your people are all about Mountain View. They answer to you and they don't answer to somebody who two days a week is more concerned about Sand Lake," Mew said.
The consultant also recommended holding regular community policing meetings where crime data could be quickly analyzed, goals set and projects launched. It's a model originally developed by the New York Police Department, Mew said, that helps sort out what's important to a specific community like Ocean View or Mountain View, and what it would take to address a particular problem -- a special team or regular beat officers, for example.
That hasn't happened yet, but is the next step, Mew said.
"We can do that with existing staffing. We can do it better when we get to the ... optimum number," he said.
Two other major steps toward community-based policing -- adding a second Community Action Policing Team to address crime and disorder in particular neighborhoods and having patrol officers free to do proactive work about a third of the time -- are held up by lack of staff, Mew said.
The latest study says the appropriate number of officers should be based on workload and policies such as the amount of proactive policing a department wants, not population.
Mew said the Anchorage department would like to have about a third of a patrol officer's time free to do community policing.
"They still answer calls, go to court, etc., but a third of a day is available for proactive work. What are we going to do about homeless people and street drug dealers at 13th and Gamble or 10th and Nelchina? Are we going to do something with the environment? Are we going to do something with the victims? How do we long-term fix the problems?"
Now, about 75 percent of a patrol officer's time is tied up in responding to calls, appearing in court and the like, Mew said.
RETIREMENTS
Sullivan presented two versions of his proposed 2013 operating budget this year. One would have cut 19 vacant positions and 29 filled positions from the police department, wiping out a class of officer recruits who recently completed field training, plus a few more people.
The other version, which the mayor recommended and the Anchorage Assembly is working from, would still cut 19 vacant police jobs, but not filled positions. That's being called "Plan B." The Assembly is scheduled to vote on it Nov. 13.
Since most of about 25 recruits have recently hit the streets, the numbers of officers next year will be roughly the same as this year under Plan B, Mew said.
There would be a police training academy in late 2013 to train and hire replacements.
But there's one big unknown: the number of officers who plan to retire between now and the end of next year. There's an incentive for those eligible to leave before Jan. 5, 2014 -- a result of a deal the union negotiated with the city in 2009 when city revenues plunged.
In mid-2009, the police union gave back 3 percent raises for the rest of the year, with provisions to increase salaries in the out years of their contract. To make it acceptable to officers nearing retirement, the city agreed to give them retroactive payments covering the rollback amount if they leave before Jan. 5, 2014.
Forty-four officers are eligible or will be eligible to retire by the end of 2013, according to the chief's office.
The department surveyed officers anonymously last spring, and 18 said they planned to retire by the end of next year; another 24 said they were considering it.
In a normal year, 18 to 20 officers leave the force, Mew said.
WHICH NUMBERS MATTER?
Sullivan makes the point that the most important numbers are crime statistics, not numbers of employees. "And for three straight years, we've seen a reduction in crime," he said.
The FBI's Uniform Crime Report for Anchorage, released in October, showed fewer total crimes were reported in 2011 than in 1981. Serious crimes dropped from 2010 to 2011 except for rapes and burglaries.
"As long as crime statistics are going the right way, which they are, then we're accomplishing what the mission is, which is a safer community," Sullivan said.
"We do want to get more fully into community policing and again, that's strictly a function of resource," he said.
http://www.adn.com/2012/11/03/2681799/staffing-declines-stall-citys.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From the FBI
Making the Ultimate Sacrifice -
Report on Law Enforcement Officer Deaths Released
Tragically, during 2011, 72 law enforcement officers from around the nation were killed in the line of duty, while another 53 officers died in accidents while performing their duties. And 54,774 officers were assaulted in the line of duty…all according to our just-released annual report Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2011 .
Here's a look at some of the data collected for this report:
- While the 72 officers killed in the line of duty came from city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal agencies, the majority (50) were employed by city police departments.
- The average age of the officers feloniously killed was 38, while their average length of service was 12 years. Forty-nine of these officers were slain while on assigned vehicle patrol.
- Most of the 72 officers slain were killed with firearms, and 51 of these officers were wearing body armor at the time of their murders.
- Of the 53 officers who died accidentally, 39 were killed as a result of vehicle-related accidents.
- The rate of officer assaults in 2011 was 10.2 per 100 sworn officers.
Our Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) report is intended to provide law enforcement agencies with detailed descriptions of circumstances leading to officer fatalities. This data can then be incorporated into police training programs to help officers stay safe during similar situations.
The primary goal of our overall LEOKA program is to reduce incidents of law enforcement deaths and assaults. In addition to its annual report, the program also offers an officer safety awareness training course that provides potentially life-saving information to help law enforcement personnel enhance their situational awareness during activities like arrests, traffic stops, foot pursuits, ambushes, and other high-risk encounters that police face on a daily basis.
Beyond services provided by the LEOKA program, the FBI offers other training initiatives geared towards officer safety to our law enforcement partners.
For example:
- Our one-week Law Enforcement Training for Safety and Survival program at the FBI Academy is designed to teach participants basic survival techniques as well as the skills and mindset required to identify and handle critical situations in high-risk environments (i.e., arrests, low light operations, ballistic shield deployment).
- Our National Academy curriculum includes a communications course for law enforcement leaders on how to incorporate measures into their policies that will help ensure the future emotional well-being of officers who have survived shootings (as well as officers who have shot suspects).
In addition to the above training, the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC)—accessed by more than 92,000 agencies—offers a measure of protection for law enforcement as well, particularly through its recently added Violent Persons File. Once fully populated with data from our users, a quick response from an online NCIC query can warn officers on the spot if, during a routine traffic stop or another type of encounter, they come across an individual who has a violent criminal history or who has previously threatened law enforcement.
The release of this latest LEOKA report clearly demonstrates what we already know—despite the dangers of law enforcement, the profession continues to attract brave men and women willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect their fellow citizens.
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/november/report-on-law-enforcement-officer-deaths-released/report-on-law-enforcement-officer-deaths-released 
