FBI efforts to assist Sochi Olympics limited by Russians

[Jefferson23]

* An example of Russian government foolish inflated egos..just dumb, really.

In February 2012, David Rubincam, the FBI’s legal attache in Moscow, escorted a group of Russian security officials to observe security arrangements at Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis.

The delegation from the Federal Security Services, known as the FSB, wondered why the stadium wasn’t brimming with armed troops. It also hadn’t occurred to the Russians that private security firms working for the event’s sponsors had been integrated into the overall counterterrorism effort.

2014 Winter Olympic Games preparation: Russia is getting ready to showcase the resort town of Sochi, host of the next Winter Olympics. Appearances notwithstanding, most of the Olympic venues have been declared ready.

They were surprised “by some things that were really kind of eye-openers,” said Rubincam, who explained to the five senior officers that “we have tons of security in place, but the participants don’t see it. That’s what you want.”

Rubincam hopes the lessons the Russians learned at the Super Bowl will help make the Winter Olympics in Sochi safer. But he’s not sure, and neither are some other current and former U.S. security officials.

in full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-efforts-to-assist-sochi-olympics-limited-by-russians/2014/01/24/7c17c6fe-8370-11e3-8099-9181471f7aaf_story.html

[jakeXT]

1. Still a strange club... the FBI

[Jefferson23]

3. I did not post the OP in a rah rah attempt for the FBI. It is problematic for the Russian

government to act competently...this is not to suggest that we here in the US
have no issues.

[jakeXT]

5. You don't accept help ... something happens and you look like an idiot.

But you also don't want to involve an external party, who might learn your weak spots and somehow that information lands in the wrong hands.

[Jefferson23]

6. In this case they need to expand their learning curve..and we do share information.

I don't think that would compromise them, quite the opposite.

[Savannahmann]

2. Astounding.

I would have thought that the FSB (Renamed KGB) would have really liked learning how to spy on everyone and lie about how the investigation got started. Perhaps the FSB has rules against such things these days.

[jakeXT]

4. Sounds more like the DEA thing

A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. "You'd be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said.

"PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION"

After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as "parallel construction."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805

El Universal, the Mexican newspaper, reported on January 6 that Washington and the Sinaloa Cartel have cooperated for years. Sinaloa lawyer Humberto “Loya-Castro stated that (DEA) agents told him that, in exchange for information about rival drug trafficking organizations, the United States government agreed…not to interfere with his drug trafficking activities and those of the Sinaloa Cartel,” published court documents reveal.

These disclosures should be considered together with those the intrepid journalist Anabel Hernández published in Los Señores del Narco, translated as Narcoland for last fall’s English-language release. Her main argument, as she explained on Democracy Now! last September, is that in Mexico there isn’t “really a war against the drug cartels. What exists in the government of Felipe Calderón was a war between the cartels, and the government took a side of that war, protecting the Sinaloa Cartel.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/17/the-dea-and-the-sinaloa-cartel/

[Savannahmann]

7. Not just the DEA. The FBI also abuses powers and lies.

https://www.aclu.org/national-security/fbi-audit-exposes-widespread-abuse-patriot-act-powers

WASHINGTON – A report released today by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) on the FBI’s use of National Security Letters (NSLs) reveals a systemic, widespread abuse of power. The FBI’s authority to issue NSLs was widely expanded by the USA Patriot Act and it has been increasingly used to collect private information on American citizens without court approval. Today’s audit follows a report released last year that found serious breaches of department regulations and multiple potential violations of the law.

And if a lie is defined as not telling the truth, then this would be another FBI lie.

http://articles.latimes.com/2005/sep/02/science/sci-bullet2

The FBI said Thursday that it had discontinued the use of bullet-lead matching, a forensic technique used for at least 25 years that had been heavily criticized as inaccurate and misleading.

The bureau suspended its use in 2004 after a report by the National Research Council found the technique could be "seriously misleading" and "objectionable."

They got the report in 2004, and waited another year, not informing the attorneys for the defendants that the test was in fact questionable, leaving people in prison, who were convicted using this questionable technique of lead matching, for more than a year. They finally admitted it when a FOI request basically cornered them, and then they ran out and admitted the truth in a press release.

What the hell, it was only another year of prison before people could challenge their convictions, besides they were probably guilty anyway.

Wired article on the FBI Lying with numbers. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-numbers/

Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers.

If they are a cop, Federal, State, County, or City, it doesn't matter to me. I wouldn't trust them if they said night was dark and day was light.