Archive for category Threat Watch

California Bill Could Create Gun “Poll Tax”

From Guns.com:

An Assembly bill that could hike the cost of gun permits in the state is now headed to California Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk.

McCarty, a Sacramento Democrat, argues his county had a $250,000 shortfall caused by its permitting program.

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NRA Fights New ITAR Regulations

From NRA:

In July, we reported on an ill-advised attempt by the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls of DOS (DDTC) to “clarify” who is a regulated firearms “manufacturer” for purposes of the Arms Export Control Act and its implementing rules, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

As we noted in that report, DDTC’s “guidance” document creates far more confusion than clarity and threatens to chill lawful behavior and put small commercial gunsmiths who cannot afford ITAR’s heavy compliance costs out of business.

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ITAR Changes Affect Gunsmiths

From Guns.com:

On July 22, the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls issued new guidance for firearm manufacturers and gunsmiths to register as exporters under the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and pay an annual $2,250 fee — even if they had no intention of exporting. This included companies and individuals who performed machine work on firearms such as threading barrels, magazine modifications and rechambering.

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Hostage Kayla Mueller Helped Many Survive and Escape ISIS Capture

From ABC News:

Four former hostages who shared cells with Mueller, speaking publicly for the first time about their shared ordeal for ABC News’ “20/20” broadcast, “The Girl Left Behind,” airing Friday, say the Prescott, Arizona, humanitarian aid worker was a courageous 25-year-old who inspired them.

Julia revealed in a “20/20” interview how Mueller — who was frequently raped by al-Baghdadi — passed up a chance at an escape in order to increase the odds for the Yazidi teens, who were able to sneak out of the ISIS kingpin’s house late one night in a flight to freedom.

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Study: Islamists Come From All Walks Of Life, Not Just Loners

From Maclean’s:

A new study based on interviews conducted over social media with foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria raises doubts about the commonly held notion that young men in North America and Europe who are drawn to violent Islamic extremism must be marginalized loners looking for an alternative to their dead-end lives.

Three university researchers who contacted dozens of jihadists from abroad in Iraq and Syria, including some Canadians, say they seemed to be drawn mainly by the religious ideas—“no matter how ill-informed or unorthodox”—behind jihadism. Rather than being isolated individuals who self-radicalized in front of their computer screens, the report says they usually found mentors and, at least in the case of the Canadians, joined the fighting in “clusters.”

In the working paper, they write that the foreign fighters they contacted “run the gamut from troubled youth with personal problems to accomplished young men and women from stable backgrounds.” In the 20 interviews they analyzed, not one of their subjects suggested “directly or indirectly” that being marginalized socially or economically pushed them onto such an extreme path.

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U.S. Embassy Refused Calls For Help In South Sudan

From NBC:

They shot dead a local journalist while forcing the foreigners to watch, raped several foreign women, singled out Americans, beat and robbed people and carried out mock executions, several witnesses told The Associated Press.

For hours throughout the assault, the U.N. peacekeeping force stationed less than a mile away refused to respond to desperate calls for help. Neither did embassies, including the U.S. Embassy.

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Syrian City Freed From ISIS Control

From BBC:

US-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters fought 73 days to drive IS out of Manbij, close to the Turkish border.

Another woman thanked the fighters that had set them free: “You are our children, you are our heroes, you are the blood of our hearts, you are our eyes. Go out, Daesh [Arabic name for IS]!”

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ISIS Says It’s A Religious War

From Breitbart:

The Islamic State terror group has come out publicly to reject Pope Francis’ claims that the war being waged by Islamic terrorists is not religious in nature, assuring the pontiff that their sole motivation is religious and sanctioned by Allah in the Qur’an.

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Terrorists Will Find Their Way Here Warns FBI

From Bloomberg:

Hundreds of terrorists will fan out to infiltrate western Europe and the U.S. to carry out attacks on a wider scale as Islamic State is defeated in Syria, FBI Director James Comey warned.

“At some point there’s going to be a terrorist diaspora out of Syria like we’ve never seen before,” Comey said Wednesday in New York. “We saw the future of this threat in Brussels and Paris,” said the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, adding that future attacks will be on “an order of magnitude greater.”

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ISIS Threatens US Base

From Times of Israel:

The Islamic State terror group has issued a specific call to leading activists to target air bases used by the US in Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, an Israeli cyberintelligence company that claimed to have hacked the jihadist organization’s Telegram communication group warned on Wednesday.

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Worker Claims Gadsden Flag Creates Hostile Work Environment

From Spero News:

The complainant (known only as Shelton D.) said that as of the fall of 2013, a coworker frequently wore a cap in the workplace that displayed the famous Gadsden Flag, which depicts a coiled rattlesnake and the motto “Don’t tread on me.” The flag is beloved by patriotic groups, reenactors, the military and others.
According to the complaint, the cap is racially offensive to black Americans because it was designed by Christopher Gadsden, who was described as a “slave trader & owner of slaves.” After management told the complainant that the coworker had been told to refrain from wearing the cap, the coworker continued to work while wearing the cap. The complaint ensued.

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Choosing A Strong Password Is Easier Than You Think

From EFF:

Randomly-generated passphrases offer a major security upgrade over user-chosen passwords. Estimating the difficulty of guessing or cracking a human-chosen password is very difficult. It was the primary topic of my own PhD thesis and remains an active area of research. (One of many difficulties when people choose passwords themselves is that people aren’t very good at making random, unpredictable choices.)

Measuring the security of a randomly-generated passphrase is easy. The most common approach to randomly-generated passphrases (immortalized by XKCD) is to simply choose several words from a list of words, at random. The more words you choose, or the longer the list, the harder it is to crack. Looking at it mathematically, for k words chosen from a list of length n, there are kn possible passphrases of this type. It will take an adversary about kn/2 guesses on average to crack this passphrase. This leaves a big question, though: where do we get a list of words suitable for passphrases, and how do we choose the length of that list?

In general choosing four five-letter words is better than one long word with number substitutions and some weird characters thrown in. It’s easier to remember and vastly harder for a computer to guess.

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Radical Mosques Funded By Saudi Government

From JihadWatch:

Four separate studies since 1999 all found that 80% of U.S. mosques were teaching jihad, Islamic supremacism, and hatred and contempt for Jews and Christians. There are no countervailing studies that challenge these results. In 1998, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi leader, visited 114 mosques in the United States. Then he gave testimony before a State Department Open Forum in January 1999, and asserted that 80% of American mosques taught the “extremist ideology.” Then there was the Center for Religious Freedom’s 2005 study, and the Mapping Sharia Project’s 2008 study. Each independently showed that upwards of 80% of mosques in America were preaching hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity ultimately to impose Islamic rule.

Saudi Arabia was funding Muslim radicalism in mosques and charities at the time the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were gathering in the United States and making contacts with Saudi nationals, according to a declassified intelligence document.

To jihad watchers, the paper confirms their charges that the Saudi government and its wealthy citizens fund extremist teachings in America. To this day, the kingdom is pressing its harsh Wahhabi Sunni Islam on American Muslims as it seeks to spread Islam around the world, they say.

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Homeland Security Stops Reporter, Asks To Search Phone

From Motherboard:

On Thursday, a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter claimed that the Department of Homeland Security demanded access to her mobile phones when she was crossing the border at the Los Angeles airport.

“I wanted to share a troubling experience I had with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in the hopes it may help you protect your private information,” Maria Abi-Habib, a WSJ journalist focused on ISIS and Al Qaeda wrote in a post on Facebook. (Abi-Habib confirmed to Motherboard that the Facebook account was hers, but declined to comment further.)

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Mark Geist On What Happened In Benghazi

From NRA:

Mark “Oz” Geist served 12 years in the United States Marine Corps and was a member of the Annex Security Team that fought the Battle of Benghazi. He answered freedom’s call when Washington wouldn’t even pick up the phone. Mark has the courage to tell the truth about Benghazi and how our politicians’ inexcusable inaction led to the deaths of four Americans, including Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

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