
20 July 2009: See the new report entitled Planning for Jihad - on US Soil from Northeast Intelligence Network Director Doug Hagmann on our mainpage.
The NEIN Blog is a supplemental effort to the Northeast Intelligence Network.

17 July 2009: Almost simultaneous bomb blasts at the JW Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton hotels in central Jakarta on Friday have killed at least 9 people, wounding another 42, according to sources at the scene. This is the second Islamic terrorist attack within the last six years targeting the Marriott. A car bomb detonated by Muslim terrorists killed 12 people in 2003.
By Douglas J. Hagmann, Director
8 July 2009: In an exclusive interview with an intelligence source involved in keeping the infrastructure of the Internet safe from external attacks, the Northeast Intelligence Network learned that “the worst may be yet to come.” According to this cyber security source speaking on the strict condition of anonymity from his Virginia office the cyber attacks began to appear on July 3rd, initially appearing to originate from computers in the Asia Pacific region. They first appeared as “denial of service (DDoS) attacks targeting U.S. and South Korean government Internet servers, and were reported to have “peaked” during the Independence Day holiday weekend.
Not so, according to this high-ranking intelligence official. “I wouldn’t say that we are out of the woods yet, not by a long shot. In fact, our latest assessment shows that this is a sustained attack and we are still being hit,” he added. “These cyber attacks are indeed nasty, launched in a very well organized manner by a formidable enemy. It’s far from being over.”
In addition to key areas of infrastructure, the attacks are also being directed at the White House, the New York Stock Exchange and key command and control computers at the Pentagon. Frankly, we are not entirely certain how many of our systems have been affected or the full scope of the attacks. We are still closing some vulnerabilities, but the attacks are continuing.
At a briefing of South Korea’s lawmakers today by the National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s principal spy agency, the blame for the attacks was placed on North Korea or their sympathizers. Meanwhile in the United States, some computer experts were taken by surprise about the effectiveness of these attacks.
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July 4 cyberattack called 'very minor'
By Shaun Waterman THE WASHINGTON TIMES Thursday, July 16, 2009
A leading authority on cyberwarfare says the Independence Day attack that knocked some U.S. government Web sites offline was so primitive it could be compared to a modern air force using hot-air balloons instead of planes to attack a foe.
"We should have been able to shrug it off," James Lewis, project director of the independent blue-ribbon Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency told The Washington Times. "The physical equivalent of this would have been an attack using hot-air balloons."
A senior Department of Homeland Security official who requested anonymity to speak freely about interagency issues, said the government's response to the attacks was "beautifully choreographed ... everything went well."
The attacks, which began July 4 and continued through most of last week, targeted 47 Web sites in the United States and South Korea, according to data collected by Shadowserver.org, a group that monitors cyberattacks.
"The attack itself was very minor," said Marcus Sachs, director of the Internet Storm Center, a volunteer monitoring group run by Web security specialists.
Mr. Sachs said the attacks were "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attacks, carried out using large networks of computers -- known as "botnets" -- that have been infected with a software virus without the knowledge of their owners.
Upon a broadcast command, or at a predetermined time, these computers begin bombarding their target Web sites with millions of fake requests for information, overloading them and causing real visitors to the site to experience long delays, or sometimes shutting the Web sites down altogether.
Specialists say it is almost impossible to discover the true origin of such attacks, and although some reports have cited anonymous South Korean intelligence officials as blaming North Korea, none of the specialists who spoke to The Times backed that thesis.
"There's not a shred of technical evidence it was North Korea," Mr. Sachs said.
Most of the U.S. sites targeted were only marginally affected, but those of some government agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Secret Service, were temporarily knocked offline.
Continue reading Washington Times article Page 2

5 July 2009: According to the U.S. Department of Justice, it was not quite one year ago, on July 17 2008, when the female Al-Qaida terrorist, Aafia Siddiqui, was arrested due to suspicious behavior in Ghazni, Afghanistan by Afghan National Police (ANP). Siddiqui was arrested as she loitered outside the provincial governor’s compound. A search of her handbag revealed documents on the manufacture of explosives in addition to data on chemical, biological and radiological weapons; descriptions of various landmarks in the United States, including New York City, and other unidentified “substances” which were sealed in glass bottles.
The next day a party composed of two FBI special agents and several U.S. Army personnel arrived at the ANP facility where Aafia Siddiqui was being held unrestrained in a second floor room behind a curtain which was directly adjacent to the room where the American’s were meeting with ANP officials. Within moments of the meeting’s commencement Aafia Siddiqui burst through the curtain and grabbed an M4 assault rifle belonging to one of the U.S. Army officers and fired two rounds before being struck by a round fired by another officer’s 9mm side arm. Aafia Siddiqui was finally in American custody.
Since her arrival in the United States to face charges of attempted murder in this incident, Siddiqui has been defended by lawyers who are challenging the charges on the basis of Siddiqui’s mental competency to stand trial. The defense lawyers cite a psychologist’s expert conclusions that this Al-Qaida terrorist suffers from a “delusional disorder and depression.” It is the opinion of this writer that these defense lawyers and their defense psychological experts are totally incompetent when it comes to evaluating the mental state of a committed Al-Qaida terrorist and there is nothing in their formal education which would have even remotely prepared them to make such psychological evaluations.
It is also important to note that the mental competency aspect of this legal charade followed the failure of initial defense tactics which included the claims that U.S. government had planted physical evidence on her and various other “dirty tricks,” and that she had been in the custody of a “foreign military intelligence authorities” for several years and during that time was subjected to “torture, sexual abuse and beatings.” None of these defensive claims have any merit whatsoever. This woman has been and still is a fully committed female Al-Qaida terrorist directly linked into the family of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (KSM) responsible for the planning and execution of the attacks of September 11, 2001. In fact, her terrorist activities date to the early 1990s when she raised funds for Bosnian jihadi’s in the former-Yugoslavia under the guise of “Islamic charities.”
It is known by the U.S. government that Aafia Siddiqui separated from and divorced her first husband, Mohammed Amjad Khan; also a terrorist directly linked to the Boston, Massachusetts-based Institute of Islamic Research and Teaching, sometime in late 2002 and remarried one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephews, Ammar al-Baluchi (aka Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali), and prior to his capture in April 2003. At the time of his arrest in Karachi, Pakistan in April 2003 al-Baluchi was involved in a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy there and remains one of a dozen high-value Al-Qaida terrorists being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He is the cousin of Ramzi Yousef who was one of the terrorists brought to trial and convicted of the World Trade Center bombing of February 1993. Aafia Siddiqui also has direct ties to another Guantanamo terrorist, Majid Khan, formerly of Baltimore. Maryland and for whom Aafia Siddiqui rented a city post office box.
Now it comes to light that Aafia’s 5-year long disappearance from Karachi coincides with the arrest of Ammar al-Baluchi. It has also been entered as evidence in her trial that she admitted to the FBI that she returned to Karachi to work in that city’s Institute of Technology, that she had traveled to Afghanistan and even lived in Quetta, Pakistan for some period of time. So much for the horse hooey being propagated by the terrorists and their dhimmi allies of Aafia Siddiqui’s capture, torture, sexual abuse and beatings between 2003 and 2008. She was free and continued her terrorist activities until caught outside the governor’s compound in Ghazni, Afghanistan and made one last desperate attempt to kill American soldiers at that time. Aafia Siddiqui should receive the same sentence as her husband and his infamous uncle and his other infamous cousin should receive: life in prison, no parole, no islamic martyrdom. May she rot in an American jail cell until her death.