Jamestown Foundation, 4 Dec 09: The head of the Crimean Interior Ministry, Gennadiy Moskal, has drafted new legislation to ban extremist groups in Ukraine. . . . . . The draft legislation is a product of Moskal’s new Crimean position after the Interior Ministry (MVS) and Security Service (SBU) received intelligence about the growth of Islamic terrorist groups in the peninsula. “Unfortunately in Ukraine we are faced with the problem that neither Hizb-ut-Tahrir al Islami (Islamic Liberation Party), al-Takfir wa al-Hijrah (Excommunication and Exile) and other terrorist, fundamentalist and extremist groups are not banned,” Moskal said. . . . .
. . . . In October the Crimean police, who only began to turn their attention to the Islamic fundamentalist threat after Moskal’s appointment, detained members of al-Takfir. Most were former members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir who had defected to the more radical al-Takfir, and had stopped attending official Mosques and proclaimed their unwillingness to recognize the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state. The police reported that al-Takfir, “has started to actively prepare for armed jihad.
They have bought and made weapons, studied literature on the tactics of guerrilla and subversion war in the conditions of Crimean mountain woods. They built a hideaway near the Chystenke village in Simferopol Region and recruited people for conducting radical extremist activities.” The police report added: “Literature and CD’s popularizing Wahhabism, in particular, its extreme wings like Hizb-ut-Tahrir and al-Takfir, were found and confiscated during a search in the house of a group member in the Dubky village. Also, manuals on the technical characteristics of weapons and certain explosives were found”. . . . .
Secrecy News, 4 Dec 09: At a time when U.S. news organizations are shedding jobs at an alarming rate, the People’s Republic of China has been hiring a growing number of reporters from outside of China.
“Since July of this year, Xinhua’s English-language service– China’s official news service for English-language audiences — has hired several experienced Western journalists to serve as overseas correspondents,” according to a new report (pdf) from the DNI Open Source Center (OSC). . . . .
ABC News, 4 Dec 09: For decades, rumors of top-secret “magic” manuals swirled within CIA circles. The long-lost guides were said to have been written by a prominent magician, but many officers dismissed them as myth, believing them too fantastical to be true.
But in 2007, retired CIA officer Robert Wallace unearthed an extraordinary archived file and is now making its contents available to the public for the first time.
The file contained once highly-classified manuals written in the early 1950s by American magician John Mulholland that detailed the secrets of magic that could enhance the art of espionage.
It was thought that every copy of his reports had been destroyed in 1973.
But Wallace obtained surviving copies and, with intelligence historian H. Keith Melton, combined the two manuals — one examining sleight of hand techniques and the other on covert signaling — into one book, recently released by publisher HarperCollins.
Complete with illustrations, “The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception” describes a wide range of Mulholland’s Houdini-like tricks designed to help spies pull off a number of clandestine operations, such as slipping poison into an enemy’s drink or surreptitiously removing documents. . . . .
. . . . “The idea to overlap the tradecraft of espionage and the rich tradecraft of magic is very innovative and certainly established a pattern of activity and relationships that continue to make the country stronger,” said Melton, a specialist in clandestine technology who has written several books on spycraft. “What we learn about is how to use deception, and how deception can be tactically employed to support the work of intelligence officers in the field.”
Peter Earnest, a 36-year veteran of the CIA who now serves as executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, said though he knew that the agency consulted with individuals of varying expertise through the years, until Wallace and Melton’s book, he didn’t know it had worked with John Mulholland, a top American magician at the time. “It has significance. It was very tightly held,” he said. “It’s an interesting piece of agency history.” . . . . .
Infosecurity, 4 Dec 09: The Cameroon ‘.CM’ domain tops the list of the riskiest top-level domains in terms of cybersecurity, according to a report from McAfee.
The malware protection company’s Mapping the Mal Web report identifies the African country as the owner of the TLD most likely to represent a cybersecurity risk to the average web user, it said.
The TLD is very easy to mistype when users meant to surf to a .COM domain instead, and in many cases they may not even realize their typographical error if a scammer uses a website registered with a .CM domain to mimic the original destination and deliver malware.
That said, the generic .COM (commercial) TLD is also one of the destinations most likely to represent a risk from a cybersecurity perspective, ranking second in McAfee’s weighted table, with a weighted risk ratio of 32.2%.
Overall, six TLDs stood out as the most cybersecurity risk-laden. After .COM, China’s .CN, Somoa’s .WS, the generic .INFO, and finally the Philippines’ .APAC stood out as the riskiest, with the Philippines achieving a 13.1% weighted risk ratio. After that, risks fell off significantly, with the .NET domain scoring only a 5.8% weighted risk ratio. . . . .
AP, 4 Dec 09: He compared al-Qaida in Iraq to wolves, urging that the terrorist group be crushed since he believed its members would never reject violence. But the wolves got to the Iraqi counterterrorism officer first.
Ahmed Subhi al-Fahal’s death in a suicide bombing in Tikrit could embolden al-Qaida loyalists to try to make a return to the area around Saddam Hussein’s hometown where he held sway. On Friday, within hours of his killing, dozens of Web sites affiliated with al-Qaida in Iraq were already celebrating the death of their longtime nemesis.
The attack also stood as a reminder that Iraqi security officials who work closely with American forces remain a prime target for insurgents even as overall violence in Iraq fades.
Thursday’s bombing, outside a goldsmith’s store, also killed two of al-Fahal’s bodyguards and two bystanders in Tikrit — which holds symbolic significance for the Sunni-led insurgents because of its connection with Saddam.
Al-Fahal, in his early 30s, was a lieutenant colonel in the Salahuddin provincial police force. But he was mostly known, by al-Qaida and the American military alike, as one of central Iraq’s top counterterror officials, bent on purging insurgents from his turf.
“It is better to kill al-Qaida’s members because it is no use to reform them,” al-Fahal said in a recent interview with Al-Arabiya TV. He was paraphrasing a religious saying that there is no use in trying to reform wolves — instead, they must be killed. . . . .
