Latest news with #FBI
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Washington Post reporter arrested on child pornography charges after FBI search and is placed on leave
A Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter was arrested and placed on leave after being charged with possessing child pornography on his work laptop. Thomas Pham LeGro, 48, was arrested Thursday and taken into custody after a search of his District of Columbia home. LeGro made his first appearance Friday in U.S. District Court. The charges reportedly stem from an FBI search at his home Thursday, where agents seized several electronic devices. State Rep Used Biden-themed Username To Distribute Child Porn, Feds Say A review of LeGro's work laptop allegedly revealed a folder that contained 11 videos depicting child sexual abuse material, according to a news release from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro. Read On The Fox News App During the execution of a search warrant, authorities said they found what appeared to be fractured pieces of a hard drive in the hallway outside the room where LeGro's work laptop was found. "The Washington Post understands the severity of these allegations, and the employee has been placed on leave," a Washington Post spokesperson told Fox News Digital in an email Friday. High School Teacher Caught In Undercover Sting Operation After Explicit Chats With 'Teen Girl' Online: Police The George Mason graduate was part of a team of Post reporters awarded a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Senate candidacy of Roy Moore in 2018. 205 Arrested In Fbi Child Sex Operation, Patel And Bondi Announce LeGro, who has been with the publication for more than a decade, served as deputy director of video, overseeing a group of video journalists. He also briefly worked for PBS. Pirro thanked FBI Assistant Director in Charge Steven J. Jensen and Chief Pamela Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department for their ongoing efforts in the investigation. The case, part of the Department of Justice's Project Safe Childhood initiative, is being investigated by the FBI Washington Field Office's Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force, according to the article source: Washington Post reporter arrested on child pornography charges after FBI search and is placed on leave
Forbes
3 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
FBI Warning Issued As 2FA Bypass Attacks Surge — Act Now
The FBI issues Scattered Spider attack warning. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation issues a cybersecurity alert, you would be well advised to pay attention and take action. Whether that's involving malicious SMS messages, AI-powered phishing attacks, or, as I recently reported, the skyrocketing number of ransomware threats. And ransomware is the subject of this latest, critical, warning from the FBI. This time involving the Scattered Spider threat group which has made headlines after taking responsibility for multiple retail sector attacks including that against Marks & Spencer in the U.K. which is estimated to have cost the high street chain at least $600 million. Now the group is targeting the airline industry, the FBI has warned, both directly and through the entire supply chain. Here's what you need to know. FBI Confirms Scattered Spider Attacks Targeting Transportation A June 26 report from ransomware analysts at Halcyon warned that there were 'indications that Scattered Spider is also now targeting the Food, Manufacturing, and Transportation (particularly Aviation) sectors in the US.' This has now been confirmed by the FBI which provided a statement to me by email that said: 'The FBI has recently observed the cybercriminal group Scattered Spider expanding its targeting to include the airline sector.' The statement continued to confirm that the ransomware group is using the same methods during this surge of attacks into new sectors, namely 'social engineering techniques, often impersonating employees or contractors to deceive IT help desks into granting access.' Specifically, Scattered Spider looks to bypass mutli-factor authentication, commonly referred to as MFA or 2FA, by using various methods to get those help desks to 'add unauthorized MFA devices to compromised accounts.' Scattered Spider has been on the FBI radar for a number of years, with a joint cybersecurity advisory alongside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published in 2023 in response to what it described as 'activity by Scattered Spider threat actors against the commercial facilities sectors and subsectors.' The FBI told me that it is currently actively working with aviation and industry partners 'to address this activity and assist victims,' and urged anyone who thinks their organization may have been targeted to contact their local FBI office. In the meantime, beware of anyone asking for unauthorized 2FA devices to be added to accounts and follow established security processes and procedures to the letter, no matter what the person making the request may say.
Al Arabiya
3 hours ago
- Al Arabiya
El Chapo-run Sinaloa cartel hacked phones, cameras to find FBI informants: DOJ
A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official's phone records and use Mexico City's surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency's informants in 2018, the US Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday. The incident was disclosed in a Justice Department Inspector General's audit of the FBI's efforts to mitigate the effects of 'ubiquitous technical surveillance,' a term used to describe the global proliferation of cameras and the thriving trade in vast stores of communications, travel, and location data. The report said that the hacker worked for a cartel run by 'El Chapo,' a reference to the Sinaloa drug cartel run by Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, who was extradited to the United States in 2017. The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the US Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché's phone number 'to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data.' The report said the hacker also 'used Mexico City's camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with.' The report said 'the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.' The report did not identify the alleged hacker, attaché or victims. The US Embassy in Mexico referred questions to the State and Justice departments, who did not immediately return messages seeking comment. The FBI and a lawyer for El Chapo did not immediately return messages seeking comment. The collection of granular location data from people's phones by a wide variety of commercial and official actors, combined with ever-growing coverage of surveillance cameras, has posed a thorny problem for intelligence and law enforcement officials, many of whom rely on confidential informants. The report said that recent technological advances 'have made it easier than ever for less-sophisticated nations and criminal enterprises to identify and exploit vulnerabilities' in the global surveillance economy. It said the FBI had a strategic plan in the works for mitigating those vulnerabilities and made several recommendations, including more training for bureau personnel.
Los Angeles Times
4 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘Deceit, dishonesty, betrayal': The wrongful conviction that haunted Johnnie Cochran
He was an uncommonly dangerous man, in the FBI's eyes, a combat-toughened killer who had returned from Vietnam to wage war on the Establishment. 'We are going to drive the pigs out of the community,' Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt, the 21-year-old leader of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, told a reporter in 1970. Pratt was stout, compact and level-eyed, with a raspy drawl bespeaking his childhood on the Louisiana bayou. He envisioned a violent end at the hands of police, whom he cast as an occupying army in African American neighborhoods. 'The next time you see me, I might be dead.' When he went on trial in 1972 — on charges he murdered a white schoolteacher, execution-style, during a robbery — he insisted he was being framed. His defense attorney, a young Johnnie Cochran Jr., initially dismissed Pratt's talk as paranoia. But Cochran would later describe the case as 'a twilight zone of deceit, dishonesty, betrayal and official corruption.' Pratt's conviction kept him behind bars for 27 years, and the case haunted Cochran, who believed Pratt was innocent and who had made a mistake at trial that prosecutors skillfully exploited. In the authorities' war against perceived subversives, it would be years before it became clear how brazenly they had cheated. 'It looked on the surface like a really straightforward murder case,' said Stuart Hanlon, now 76, the radical San Francisco defense attorney who took up Pratt's appeal as a law student and pursued it doggedly for decades. The victim was Caroline Olsen, 27, who was with her husband on a Santa Monica tennis court in December 1968 when a pair of gunmen approached demanding money. The men ordered the couple to lie face down, then began opening fire. She was fatally wounded; her husband was struck but survived. The robbers got $18. The investigation stalled, and Pratt was not a suspect until 1970, when Julius 'Julio' Butler, a beautician and former police officer, implicated him. Butler had been a Panther himself, and had resented Pratt's elevation as Los Angeles leader. The state's star witness, Butler testified that Pratt had dropped by his beauty shop and announced he was going on a 'mission' and later pointed to an article about the Santa Monica shooting to confirm it was his doing. Cochran asked Butler if he had ever been a police informant. Butler flatly denied it. Devastatingly for the defense, Olsen's widower pointed to the defendant and said: 'That's the man who murdered my wife.' Cochran argued against the reliability of cross-racial witness identification, particularly under conditions of stress, and put on the stand a witness who had seen Pratt in the Bay Area around the time of the killing. He also put on Pratt, who had been decorated for heroism during two tours in Vietnam with the Army, and who showed what Cochran called a 'soldier's contempt' for whomever shot the helpless Olsen in the back. Cochran thought it was a winnable case, but he introduced an exhibit that backfired terribly. It was a Polaroid, given to him by Pratt's brother, who insisted it had been taken a week after the shooting. It showed Pratt with a beard, which contradicted the widower's initial description of the shooter as 'a clean-shaven black man.' Prosecutors countered with a Polaroid employee who said the film had not even been manufactured until five months after the crime, a blow to the defense's credibility that left jurors doubting Pratt's other claims. It took jurors 10 days to find him guilty of first-degree murder. The sentence was 25 years to life. 'You're wrong. I didn't kill that woman,' Pratt erupted. 'You racist dogs.' Pratt spent the next eight years in solitary confinement. He was shuttled among prisons, and eventually allowed conjugal visits; his wife gave birth to two children. At a series of unsuccessful parole hearings, the panel waited for him to say he was sorry. He insisted he hadn't done it. 'The last person I killed,' he would say, 'was in Vietnam.' There was much the authorities had not shared with Pratt's defense team. They did not reveal that Olsen's widower had previously identified another man as the shooter. (The man had been in jail at the time and could not have done it.) Nor did they reveal the scope of the star witness' work as an informant for law enforcement officials. Based on FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Pratt's lawyers pieced together a picture of Butler's intimate involvement with the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. County district attorney's office in dozens of cases. To FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the Panthers had been the most dangerous group in the country, homegrown terrorists with stockpiles of weapons and alarming Maoist rhetoric. His secret COINTELPRO program was a campaign of spying, wiretaps and sabotage aimed at crushing perceived subversives and thwarting 'the coalition of militant black nationalist groups.' 'Geronimo was targeted by the FBI because he was a natural leader,' Hanlon said. As Hanlon pieced together documents, it became clear that Butler had been helping. Rejecting appeal after appeal, however, courts ruled that Butler had not been an informant — he had been 'a contact and nothing more,' according to one judge — and that Pratt did not deserve a new trial. He was still considered dangerous. 'If he chooses to set up a revolutionary organization upon his release from prison, it would certainly be easy for him to do so,' a prosecutor said at one parole hearing. 'He does have this network out there.' When defense lawyers brought their evidence to then-L.A. County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti in 1993, they presented it as a chance to undo the injustice his predecessors had sanctioned two decades earlier. But Garcetti's review dragged on for years, and the attorneys turned again to the courts. This time, the courts granted a hearing. Because the L.A. County Superior Court bench was recused — the original prosecutor was now an L.A. County judge and a probable witness — the case was transferred to Orange County Superior Court. For Pratt's supporters, this provoked a chill. What hope did they have in a staunchly conservative county? But Judge Everett Dickey surprised them. 'It's clear that this is not a typical case,' Dickey said. 'It cries out for resolution.' This time, Pratt's team was armed with evidence never heard at the original trial. They had the testimony of a retired FBI agent who supported Pratt's claim that he had been in Oakland during the killing. They knew that the D.A.'s office had allowed Butler to plead no contest to four felonies in exchange for probation, around the time he testified against Pratt. And they had an index card, recently discovered by one of Garcetti's investigators in the office files, that listed Butler as a D.A. informant. It was filed under B; it had been there all along. 'It had never been turned over to the defense. How could they have not turned this over?' Garcetti said in a recent interview. 'I couldn't find anyone who would fess up to the fact that, 'Yeah, we had that document in the files.'' Still, Garcetti's prosecutors downplayed the card's importance. Butler was not an informant, they argued vehemently, but merely a 'source.' In late 1996, Cochran finally got a chance to confront Butler. He had waited years. Butler had become an attorney and an official at a prominent Los Angeles church. He insisted he had been merely a 'liaison' between law enforcement and the Panthers. Cochran asked him his definition of informant. He admitted he had told the FBI that Pratt had a submachine gun. He said his definition of an informant was someone who supplied accurate information. 'So under your own definition, you were informing to the FBI?' Cochran asked. 'You could say that,' Butler said. Dickey threw out Pratt's conviction, concluding that Butler had lied and that prosecutors had hidden evidence that could have led to Pratt's acquittal. Pratt was released on bail in June 1997, to the cheers of his supporters. 'The greatest moment of my legal career,' Cochran called it. Pratt flew home to Morgan City, La., 'to see my mama and my homefolks,' he said. 'It wasn't easy getting here.' He said he wanted to hear rain on the tin roof of his childhood home. Pratt's legal ordeal was not over, however. Garcetti appealed, saying he had found no evidence pointing to Pratt's innocence. He did not drop the case until an appeals court sided with Pratt in February 1999. The following year, Pratt won $4.5 million in a false-imprisonment lawsuit against the city of L.A. and the FBI. He bought a farmhouse in Imbaseni, Tanzania, where he enjoyed the companionship of Pete O'Neal, a former Black Panther who had fled the U.S. in 1970. O'Neal found him dead at home in May 2011. Pratt had been hospitalized with high blood pressure, a condition that had plagued him for years, but had torn out his IVs and gone home. He hated confinement. He was 63. 'We always say, 'The system works,' but no, the system only produced the right result because Geronimo and the community and a band of lawyers fought the system. The system doesn't work by itself,' said Mark Rosenbaum, one of the lawyers who helped with Pratt's appeal. 'They took away half of his life. And they couldn't break him.' So, who killed Caroline Olsen? Hanlon believes the killers were other Black Panthers — a pair of heroin addicts known to feed their habit with armed robbery. They died violently in the 1970s, one by gunfire, the other impaled on a fence during a burglary. In a recent interview, Garcetti, one of the defense team's primary antagonists for years, said that his views on the case have evolved. In retrospect, he regrets fighting to keep it alive. 'He was more likely framed than he was the person who actually committed the crime,' Garcetti said. Since leaving office, he said, he has learned more about the U.S. government's tactics against disfavored groups in the 1960s and '70s. 'I have read enough to know the FBI, from the top down, were working to isolate any quote-unquote leader in the Black Panther movement, and it wouldn't shock me to learn that they went after people who really hadn't committed a crime that they were bent on removing from the scene.'
USA Today
5 hours ago
- Politics
- USA Today
Congress, stop neglecting the farm bill. Only luck has shielded us from disaster.
From foreign actors smuggling in crop diseases to outbreaks like the bird flu, America has come dangerously close to disaster. Our luck cannot continue. There is nothing more American than agriculture. Yet, it's often an afterthought in national security ‒ and it shouldn't be. FBI agents have recently arrested three Chinese scientists accused of smuggling biological materials into the United States. In the first case, the boyfriend of a University of Michigan researcher is accused of concealing baggies containing a potentially devastating plant fungus in a wad of tissues in his backpack; in the second, a Chinese scientist was arrested entering the United States on suspicion of mailing biological material related to roundworms to a laboratory at the same university. Whether the roundworm material or the version of Fusarium graminearum in the baggies could cause billions of dollars in damage to our farmers and food supply remains unclear ‒ but the fact that these biological materials entered the country through the mail and Detroit's airport should serve as a wake-up call. Risks keep growing in food and agriculture industry From foreign actors smuggling in crop diseases to outbreaks like the latest avian flu, the United States has come dangerously close to disaster ‒ and we've avoided it not because we were prepared, but because we have been lucky. America is among the most food-secure nations in the world, but it's time to treat food and agriculture as critical components of our national security. The cost of not doing so is simply far too high. Today, food and agriculture contribute $1.537 trillion to U.S. gross domestic product, and the sector employs more than 22 million people. Farming is a defining feature of our identity. But while politicians pose in front of barns, tractors and fields for campaign ads, meaningful agricultural security policy sits on the back burner as the risks keep growing. Opinion: Many American farmers agree with spending cuts. But those policies hurt farms most. In 2020, more than 30,000 unsolicited packages of seeds were sent from China to random American households. While the government eventually determined that these shipments were not a deliberate act of biological warfare, the next time they may be. Pathogens, pests and invasive weeds could have easily hidden in these packages, potentially yielding devastating damage to our crops, causing billions of dollars in economic damage. You've heard of bird flu, but what about African Swine Fever? Before avian flu caused egg prices to go up and cows to get sick, African Swine Fever was making a home right outside of our borders. This virus is now on the island of Hispaniola, comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic, fewer than 700 miles from the United States. With millions of U.S. tourists visiting the island each year and hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants fleeing due to criminal activity and insecurity, we have been lucky the virus has not found its way to the United States on the sole of someone's shoe. African Swine Fever spreading in the United States could create losses of up to $50 billion to the U.S. pork industry. There's also plenty of evidence of 'agroterrorism' out there. In China, for example, criminal gangs have been known to spread the virus between farms for economic gain. Opinion: Amid bird flu, farmers culled millions of chickens ‒ but USDA fired workers helping to deal with outbreak The U.S. government needs to pay as much attention to securing food and agriculture as to other national and economic security threats. The U.S. Department of Agriculture works diligently to protect and promote the nation's agriculture from natural and accidental threats, but it operates as a trade agency, not a national security agency. Vital USDA programs for identifying agricultural threats are historically underfunded compared with their public health counterparts. The Farm Bill, which authorizes and prioritizes policies and programs for agriculture, has not been updated since 2018. This means that programs like the National Veterinary Stockpile, which protects the nation's food supply, will continue to operate on a shoestring budget that is less than 1% of its public health counterpart. Congress needs to modernize and approve a Farm Bill designed to protect national and economic security. As a first step, the bill should establish a senior USDA position for national and homeland security. Appointed by the president, this official can be responsible for threats to agricultural security. Further, Congress needs to appropriately fund programs that secure U.S. agriculture. The cost of inaction far outweighs any expenditure. Our government's response to the current avian flu has already cost $1.4 billion alone ‒ response always costs more than prevention. The USDA works tirelessly to protect our food, health, national and economic security, but today it's fighting a wildfire with a watering can. We have managed to evade an economic catastrophe, but our luck cannot continue. Congress must prioritize and invest in agricultural security by updating and passing a Farm Bill. It is in everyone's interest. David Stiefel serves as a director for the Global Biological Policy and Programs team at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Before joining NTI, Stiefel held several senior roles on the National Security Council at the White House and directed the government's biopreparedness review, resulting in the 2022 National Biodefense Strategy. He also led efforts to shape U.S. government plans to strengthen the security and resilience of U.S. food and agriculture.
