The world's youngest terror suspect... ready to blow himself up at the age of 11

(Compiler's note: What is wrong with this picture? A must read)

.... Originally from Peshawar in Pakistan, Abudullah was training to be a suicide bomber and had learned the principles of jihad - holy war - at the religious school in Pakistan where he was taught.

.... When Mr Neely asked the 11-year-old how felt about becoming a suicide bomber he said he knew he 'would end up in pieces.'

He also said he knew the difference between suicide and sacrifice and that he wanted to kill non-Muslims when he grew up 'so they can't come to our homes and kill us.'

It is not yet clear what authorities will do with the boy but it is likely he will be returned back to his religious school.

Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated by Spies

(Compiler's note: Must read)

By SIOBHAN GORMAN

WASHINGTON -- Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

"The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid," said a senior intelligence official. "So have the Russians."

The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn't target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. "There are intrusions, and they are growing," the former official said, referring to electrical systems. "There were a lot last year."

Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said. Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.

Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, "If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on."

Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.

"Over the past several years, we have seen cyberattacks against critical infrastructures abroad, and many of our own infrastructures are as vulnerable as their foreign counterparts, " Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair recently told lawmakers. "A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure."

Officials cautioned that the motivation of the cyberspies wasn't well understood, and they don't see an immediate danger. China, for example, has little incentive to disrupt the U.S. economy because it relies on American consumers and holds U.S. government debt.

But protecting the electrical grid and other infrastructure is a key part of the Obama administration's cybersecurity review, which is to be completed next week. Under the Bush administration, Congress approved $17 billion in secret funds to protect government networks, according to people familiar with the budget. The Obama administration is weighing whether to expand the program to address vulnerabilities in private computer networks, which would cost billions of dollars more. A senior Pentagon official said Tuesday the Pentagon has spent $100 million in the past six months repairing cyber damage.

Overseas examples show the potential havoc. In 2000, a disgruntled employee rigged a computerized control system at a water-treatment plant in Australia, releasing more than 200,000 gallons of sewage into parks, rivers and the grounds of a Hyatt hotel.

Last year, a senior Central Intelligence Agency official, Tom Donohue, told a meeting of utility company representatives in New Orleans that a cyberattack had taken out power equipment in multiple regions outside the U.S. The outage was followed with extortion demands, he said.

The U.S. electrical grid comprises three separate electric networks, covering the East, the West and Texas. Each includes many thousands of miles of transmission lines, power plants and substations. The flow of power is controlled by local utilities or regional transmission organizations. The growing reliance of utilities on Internet-based communication has increased the vulnerability of control systems to spies and hackers, according to government reports.

The sophistication of the U.S. intrusions -- which extend beyond electric to other key infrastructure systems -- suggests that China and Russia are mainly responsible, according to intelligence officials and cybersecurity specialists. While terrorist groups could develop the ability to penetrate U.S. infrastructure, they don't appear to have yet mounted attacks, these officials say.

It is nearly impossible to know whether or not an attack is government-sponsored because of the difficulty in tracking true identities in cyberspace. U.S. officials said investigators have followed electronic trails of stolen data to China and Russia.

Russian and Chinese officials have denied any wrongdoing. "These are pure speculations," said Yevgeniy Khorishko, a spokesman at the Russian Embassy. "Russia has nothing to do with the cyberattacks on the U.S. infrastructure, or on any infrastructure in any other country in the world."

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Wang Baodong, said the Chinese government "resolutely oppose[s] any crime, including hacking, that destroys the Internet or computer network" and has laws barring the practice. China was ready to cooperate with other countries to counter such attacks, he said, and added that "some people overseas with Cold War mentality are indulged in fabricating the sheer lies of the so-called cyberspies in China."

Utilities are reluctant to speak about the dangers. "Much of what we've done, we can't talk about," said Ray Dotter, a spokesman at PJM Interconnection LLC, which coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in 13 states and the District of Columbia. He said the organization has beefed up its security, in conformance with federal standards.

In January 2008, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved new protection measures that required improvements in the security of computer servers and better plans for handling attacks.

Last week, Senate Democrats introduced a proposal that would require all critical infrastructure companies to meet new cybersecurity standards and grant the president emergency powers over control of the grid systems and other infrastructure.

Specialists at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit research institute, said attack programs search for openings in a network, much as a thief tests locks on doors. Once inside, these programs and their human controllers can acquire the same access and powers as a systems administrator.

The White House review of cybersecurity programs is studying ways to shield the electrical grid from such attacks, said James Lewis, who directed a study for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and has met with White House reviewers.

The reliability of the grid is ultimately the responsibility of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., an independent standards-setting organization overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The NERC set standards last year requiring companies to designate "critical cyber assets." Companies, for example, must check the backgrounds of employees and install firewalls to separate administrative networks from those that control electricity flow. The group will begin auditing compliance in July.

—Rebecca Smith contributed to this article.

NERC Letter

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation on Tuesday warned its members that not all of them appear to be adhering to cybersecuirty requirements. Read the letter.

Gingrich: Obama's 'Fantasy Foreign Policy' Endangering America

By: Rick Pedraza

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says U.S. President Barack Obama is making some dangerous choices in rejecting the anti-terrorism policies of the Bush administration and backing down from confronting North Korea over its threatening missile program.

In a Politico forum with readers, and in several recent interviews, Gingrich has discerned a weakness in the new administration’s foreign policy that he fears is going to embolden America’s enemies.

Moreover, the effort to treat terrorism as a criminal justice problem – rather than an act of war – will only bog the country down in pursuit of enemy combatants, Gingrich fears.

“Dick Cheney is clearly right in saying that, between the court decisions about terrorists and the administration actions, the United States is running greater risks of getting attacked than we were under President Bush,” Gingrich said.

Pointing to what he described as a “vivid demonstration of weakness in foreign policy” the former House speaker said Obama’s actions, including his proposal for a resumption of nuclear arms limitation talks, reflect “a dangerous fantasy that runs an enormous risk.

“The embarrassing repudiation of the United States appeal to the United Nations Security Council Sunday afternoon is a vivid demonstration of weakness,” Gingrich said in the Politico forum. “This is beginning to resemble the Carter administration’s weakness in foreign policy.”

Sure enough, on Tuesday a North Korean envoy threatened retaliation if the United Nations imposed further sanctions for the missile launch.

North Korea warned the U.N. Security Council that it would take "strong steps" if the 15-nation body took any action in response to Pyongyang's launch of a long-range rocket, Reuters reported.

"If the Security Council, they take any kind of steps whatever, we'll consider this is (an) encroachment on our sovereignty and the next option will be ours," Deputy Ambassador Pak Tok Hun told reporters. "Necessary and strong steps will ... follow that."

In several interviews, Gingrich has suggested that the United States should have shot down the North Korean missile, while making it very clear that any missile launched with a trajectory in the direction of the United States will be met with an overwhelming counter-attack.

North Korea “is a totally irresponsible dictatorship run by a person who is clearly out of touch with reality,” says Gingrich, who suggests the threat of “unconventional forces to stand-off capabilities; to say we’re not going to tolerate a North Korean missile launch, period.”

“I think to say, ‘We are now going to have another meeting of the U.N. to have another paper resolution that has meaningless effect,’ is very dangerous,” Gingrich says. “I have yet to see the United Nations do anything effective with either Iran or North Korea.”

Gingrich also raised a moral question. North Korea is responsible for the deaths of at least several million people because of its totalitarian rule, he said. How much longer should a world power like the United States tolerate such a regime.

“Under Kim Jong-Il this dictatorship has been so bad it has starved the people and the average North Korean today is several inches shorter than a generation ago,” Gingrich pointed out. “If we do nothing they are going to continue building nuclear weapons and missiles. If they are this aggressive when they are weak what do you think they will be like when they are strong?”

The Obama administration is rapidly undermining the U.S. missile defense system while imagining a fantasy world of trust and cooperation, Gingrich says.

“Ronald Reagan believed we had to have a missile defense system to stop any country from breaking free and blackmailing other countries,” Gingrich says, adding the reminder that there were only five nuclear powers at the time: the Soviet Union, China, France, Britain, and the United States.

“Reagan would have been much more skeptical about a plan in an age of North Korean, Iranian and Pakistani nuclear developments. How do you apply his slogan of ‘trust but verify’ in dictatorships you can't trust and can't verify?”

It was left up to Reagan to rebuild the United States after Carter allowed U.S. security policy to wither in the late 1970s.

“There's a fascinating analysis of Jimmy Carter's Notre Dame speech when he spoke at the commencement in 1977. And that was the moment in which Carter's fantasy view of the world became clear, and the beginning, I think, of the end of his — of his administration,” Gingrich said, likening Carter to Obama. “The president's in a world where Hamas is firing missiles every day into Israel, Iran is building nuclear weapons, and the North Koreans today during — basically during his speech fired a missile, and he has some wonderful fantasy idea that we're going to have a great meeting next year.

I just think that it's very dangerous to have a fantasy foreign policy, and it can get you in enormous trouble, just like giving — you know, we don't have a war on terror anymore,” Gingrich said. “We don't have terrorist attacks anymore. So now homeland security has manmade disasters.

“I'm somehow not comforted with the thought that 9/11 was a manmade disaster but not a terrorist attack, and I'm not comforted with words instead of serious systematic policies.”

Glimmers of Hope in Great Britain

by David J. Rusin

Because the Islamist project has reached a far more advanced stage in Europe, events there often serve as warnings to America about how not to deal with the challenges that lie ahead. Thus it is quite refreshing to be able to highlight a few positive developments in Britain that the United States should consider emulating.

First, there is growing realization that the UK's old strategy of empowering nonviolent Islamists, assumed to "possess the necessary 'street cred'" to marginalize violent Islamists, has been a disaster. A report by Policy Exchange argues that the government is "underwriting the very Islamist ideology which spawns an illiberal, intolerant, and anti-Western worldview":

"Not only is it failing to achieve its stated objectives; in many places it is actually making the situation worse," they said. "A new generation is being radicalized, sometimes with the very funds that are supposed to be countering radicalization."

[…]

The problem has been caused by the link between violent and nonviolent extremism being "habitually underplayed in official documents produced by central government, local government, and the police."

Second, Britain has launched a new strategy that recognizes the importance of opposing nonviolent Islamism. Among the updated criteria for defining Islamic extremists:

• They advocate a caliphate, a pan-Islamic state encompassing many countries.
• They promote Shari'a law.
• They believe in jihad, or armed resistance, anywhere in the world.

Third, the government has suspended ties with the Muslim Council of Britain — think CAIR with a cockney accent — after one of its senior officials signed a document interpreted as "advocating attacks on the Royal Navy if it tries to stop arms for Hamas being smuggled into Gaza." The government has reinforced the break by pledging to focus its efforts on mosques and smaller groups. Sadiq Khan, the minister for community cohesion, said, "The days of lazy politicians just speaking to one or two powerful community groups or leaders are gone."

America could learn from these changes of direction. While the FBI has cut off CAIR, other Islamist bodies are still welcome in Washington. Moreover, there has been little discernable movement to reach out to smaller organizations representing mainstream Muslims.

Advice for the feds: Contact a few of those Muslims who disowned CAIR publicly this week. They will be some of your best allies in protecting America against the threat of radical Islam, while helping our nation avoid the mistakes that Britain now must correct the hard way.

Pentagon spends $100 million to fix cyber attacks

By LOLITA C. BALDOR

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Pentagon spent more than $100 million in the last six months responding to and repairing damage from cyber attacks and other computer network problems, military leaders said Tuesday.

Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, who heads U.S. Strategic Command, said the military is only beginning to track the costs, which are triggered by constant daily attacks against military networks ranging from the Pentagon to bases around the country.

"The important thing is that we recognize that we are under assault from the least sophisticated—what I would say the bored teenager—all the way up to the sophisticated nation-state, with some pretty criminal elements sandwiched in-between," said Chilton, adding that the motivations include everything from vandalism to espionage. "This is indeed our big challenge, as we think about how to defend it."

According to Army Brig. Gen. John Davis, deputy commander for network operations, the money was spent on manpower, computer technology and contractors hired to clean up after both external probes and internal mistakes. Strategic Command is responsible for protecting and monitoring the military's information grid, as well as coordinating any offensive cyber warfare on behalf of the U.S.

Officials would not say how much of the $100 million cost was due to outside attacks against the system, versus viruses and other problems triggered accidentally by Defense Department employees. And they declined to reveal any details about suspected cyber attacks against the Pentagon by other countries, such as China.

Speaking to reporters from a cyberspace conference in Omaha, Neb., the military leaders said the U.S. needs to invest more money in the military's computer capabilities, rather than pouring millions into repairs.

"You can either pay me now or you can pay me later," said Davis. "It would be nice to spend that money proactively ... rather than fixing things after the fact."

Officials said that while there has been a lot of anecdotal evidence on the spending estimate, they only began tracking it last year and are still not sure they are identifying all the costs related to taking computer networks down after a problem is noticed.

The Pentagon has acknowledged that its vast computer network is scanned or probed by outsiders millions of times each day. Last year a cyber attack forced the Defense Department to take up to 1,500 computers off line. And last fall the Defense Department banned the use of external computer flash drives because of a virus threat officials detected on the Pentagon networks.

The cost updates come as the Obama administration is completing a broad government-wide review of the nation's cybersecurity.

Communities print their own currency to keep cash flowing

By Marisol Bello, USA TODAY

A small but growing number of cash-strapped communities are printing their own money.

Borrowing from a Depression-era idea, they are aiming to help consumers make ends meet and support struggling local businesses.

The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount — say, 95 cents for $1 value — and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.

Workers with dwindling wages are paying for groceries, yoga classes and fuel with Detroit Cheers, Ithaca Hours in New York, Plenty in North Carolina or BerkShares in Massachusetts.

Ed Collom, a University of Southern Maine sociologist who has studied local currencies, says they encourage people to buy locally. Merchants, hurting because customers have cut back on spending, benefit as consumers spend the local cash.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: United States | North Carolina | New York | Massachusetts | Indiana | Institute of Certified Public Accountants | Depression-era | Plenty | Berkshires | Bureau of Engraving | University of Southern Maine | Tom Ochsenschlager | Piedmont Biofuels

"We wanted to make new options available," says Jackie Smith of South Bend, Ind., who is working to launch a local currency. "It reinforces the message that having more control of the economy in local hands can help you cushion yourself from the blows of the marketplace."

About a dozen communities have local currencies, says Susan Witt, founder of BerkShares in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts. She expects more to do it.

Under the BerkShares system, a buyer goes to one of 12 banks and pays $95 for $100 worth of BerkShares, which can be spent in 370 local businesses. Since its start in 2006, the system, the largest of its kind in the country, has circulated $2.3 million worth of BerkShares. In Detroit, three business owners are printing $4,500 worth of Detroit Cheers, which they are handing out to customers to spend in one of 12 shops.

During the Depression, local governments, businesses and individuals issued currency, known as scrip, to keep commerce flowing when bank closings led to a cash shortage.

By law, local money may not resemble federal bills or be promoted as legal tender of the United States, says Claudia Dickens of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

"We print the real thing," she says.

The IRS gets its share. When someone pays for goods or services with local money, the income to the business is taxable, says Tom Ochsenschlager of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. "It's not a way to avoid income taxes, or we'd all be paying in Detroit dollars," he says.

Pittsboro, N.C., is reviving the Plenty, a defunct local currency created in 2002. It is being printed in denominations of $1, $5, $20 and $50. A local bank will exchange $9 for $10 worth of Plenty.

"We're a wiped-out small town in America," says Lyle Estill, president of Piedmont Biofuels, which accepts the Plenty. "This will strengthen the local economy. ... The nice thing about the Plenty is that it can't leave here."

Iranian nuke plot vaporized in the city: NY banks unwittingly aided in material transfers, says DA

(Compiler's note: Must read)

BY Melissa Grace

BREAKING: Chinese financier Le Fang Wei indicted in plot to send nuclear materials to Iran.

The Manhattan district attorney's office has smashed a sinister plot to smuggle nuclear weapons materials to Iran through unwitting New York banks, the Daily News has learned.

Officials plan to unseal a 118-count indictment Tuesday accusing a Chinese national of setting up a handful of fake companies to hide that he was selling millions of dollars in potential nuclear materials to Tehran.

"This case will cut off a major source of supply to Iran and it shows how they are going ahead full steam to get a nuclear bomb. Long-range missiles they pretty much have already," a law enforcement source close to the case said.

"We think it is one of the largest suppliers of weapons of mass destruction to Iran."

Experts say Iran, under the leadership of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appears close to amassing enough nuclear material to make an atom bomb. A United Nations embargo bans Iran from acquiring the high-tech metals needed to make a long-range nuclear weapon a reality.

The indictment will outline the financial conspiracy behind 58 different transactions, including shipments of various banned materials from China to Iran between 2006 and late 2008.

Among them:

• 33,000 pounds of a specialized aluminum alloy used almost exclusively in long-range missile production.
• 66,000 pounds of tungsten copper plate, which is used in missile guidance systems.
• 53,900 pounds of maraging steel rods, a superhard metal used in uranium enrichment and to make the casings for nuclear bombs.

The recipient is believed to have been a subsidiary of the Iranian Defense Ministry.

The suspect, who is not believed to be in the U.S., set up four bogus import-export companies that did business with six Iranian shell firms, one source said.

"They took elaborate steps to conceal the identity of the shipper and the recipient," the source said.

The deals went through "several" New York banks, which cooperated when the alleged plot was uncovered.

"The New York banks were completely unaware," the source said.

Authorities first stumbled over the scheme seven months ago in an unrelated probe into Iranian money-laundering through Lloyd's, a British bank.

In January, Lloyd's paid a $350 million fine to settle accusations it "stripped" information from Iranian money transfers to New York banks, hiding where the cash came from.

Officials said they suspected that money was also used to finance Iran's nuke program.

"The important thing is to put sunlight on these deals," the law enforcement source said.