Homeland Security Science & Technology at the University of the District of Columbia

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

USMobile launches Scrambl3 mobile, Top Secret communication-standard app

Published 2 June 2015

Irvine, California-based USMobile, a developer of private mobile phone services, yesterday launched Scrambl3, a smartphone app that enables users to create their own Private Mobile Network. When Scrambl3 users communicate with each other, Scrambl3 creates a Dark Internet Tunnel between their smartphones. This Tunnel cloaks the calls and texts by making them invisible on the Internet. Scrambl3 App for Android-based phones is available for a 60-day free beta offering from the Google Play Store.

Irvine, California-based USMobile, a developer of private mobile phone services, yesterday launched Scrambl3, a smartphone app that enables users to create their own Private Mobile Network.
“The Dark Internet Tunnel technology employed by USMobile’s Scrambl3 private mobile platform produces an exponential increase in smartphone and tablet privacy compared to existing commercial solutions, providing peace of mind for its users,” said USMobile president Jon Hanour. “Scrambl3 creates trusted connections over untrusted networks.”
When Scrambl3 users communicate with each other, Scrambl3 creates a Dark Internet Tunnel between their smartphones. This Tunnel cloaks the calls and texts by making them invisible on the Internet.
US Mobile says that Scrambl3 offers ultra-secure protection for sensitive voice and text communications for a broad range of users:

Business Executives. Scrambl3 protects publicly traded company insider information; reduces the risk of theft of trade secrets and intellectual property, of particular concern in overseas markets; safeguards customer and personnel information, and communications related to litigation and contract negotiations matters; and demonstrates management and governance best practices approaches to protecting company information.
Government Officials. Scrambl3 protects global leaders, government employees, law enforcement personnel, and elected officials at a Top Secret and below Top Secret level for classified and sensitive official as well as personal communications.
Individuals. Android phone users, from celebrities to anyone who desires protection from surveillance of sensitive personal matters, from health and medical information to finances to relationships, will find peace of mind with Scrambl3.

As of yesterday, the Scrambl3 App for Android-based phones is available for a 60-day free beta offering from the Google Play Store. Following the beta test period, USMobile will offer individual Scrambl3 subscriptions for approximately $10 per month. An app for iPhones is currently under development.
The company says that Scrambl3 users remain anonymous when they sign-up for an account and choose their private Scrambl3 name. New users only need a valid e-mail address and an Android phone to use the technology — no credit card information is required for the public beta. Scrambl3 further extends the level of privacy of its users by preventing “public lookups” and “friend requests,” which are typical of other mobile networks.
Scrambl3 background
USMobile says that in 2011 the company’s staff began meeting with the National Security Agency (NSA) on a new generation of secure mobile architecture. The “Fishbowl” (secure phone) initiative was designed to protect government Top Secret Classified Communication. Scrambl3, developed using the latest NSA standards for that new generation, is the world’s first, and so far theonly, commercial implementation of those standards. The NSA has encouraged commercial development of secure mobile communications in to help American businesses protect their intellectual property (IP) from theft, estimated to result in billions of dollars worth of stolen trade secrets and IP.
Inside USMobile’s Dark Internet Tunnels, calls and texts made with Scrambl3’s Private Mobile Network are private and secure. For additional privacy and security, a user’s private network is not interconnected to standard mobile phone numbers, landlines, or any other segment of the publicly switched telephone network (PSTN) — thus avoiding U.S. government bulk surveillance programs which include PRISM and CALEA. The company stresses that while USMobile collaborated with the NSA on this new secure mobile architecture, USMobile then went on independently to develop its implementation of the architecture and source code; the NSA does not have a back door to USMobile’s Private Mobile Network.
“USMobile’s Scrambl3 has implemented the most salient security features of NSA’s ‘Fishbowl’ (secure phone) initiative secure Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) architecture, and has a number of unique characteristics that put it in a class ahead of existing commercial secure VoIP techniques,” said Dr. Yuliang Zheng. Zheng, a professor of cryptography at the University of North Carolina - Charlotte, conducted an independent analysis of Scrambl3 (see his complete analysis here).
The company says that today’s leading solutions/protocols to secure mobile communications (for example, SRTP and ZRTP) are missing the first step, which is the most critical and differentiating feature of Fishbowl, the creation of a Top Secret grade VPN Dark Internet Tunnel to cloak encrypted communication.
Instead of dialing up using traditional public phone numbers, Scambl3 users call or text using a private Scrambl3 Black Book contact listing available only to them and other users with whom they have privately shared their Scrambl3 name. A Private Mobile Network is only formed after both parties add each other’s Scrambl3 names to their respective Black Books. For more privacy, the contacts in each user’s Black Book will disappear when users log out of the Scrambl3 app on their phones.
Scrambl3’s approach to security
Scrambl3 employs encryption algorithms and Internet protocols, approved for Top Secret Classified Communication, to create encrypted voice, video, and data communication. All encrypted communication is cloaked by placing it within USMobile Dark Internet Tunnels, which are Virtual Private Networks that employ U.S. National Security Agency’s Top Secret Suite B encryption and authentication parameters, part of the NSA’s new generation Fishbowl (secure phone) initiative.
For additional security, no messages, voicemails, or call data are stored on Scrambl3 servers, or any other servers. Encryption is maintained end-to-end, providing uninterrupted security of communication traveling between two communicating parties. Scrambl3 users have several deletion and security options to keep private Scrambl3 messages on their phone, including auto-delete and integration with Samsung Knox, which will encrypt the messages until they are deleted from the phone.
Scrambl3 users can make calls on their Private Mobile Network using both cellular 3G/4G data plans and Wi-Fi.
“In our brave new world, where the details of our lives and businesses are becoming increasingly public through social media, sophisticated marketing techniques and government surveillance, we are seeing a trend toward protecting our privacy,” Hanour said. “We believe privacy is the future, and while people are connecting in positive ways through social networks, we are also seeking privacy solutions to keep our mobile calls and texts confidential.”

U.S. charges Syria helping ISIS advance on Aleppo, Turkish border crossings

Published 2 June 2015

The U.S. embassy in Syria posted a series of tweets on the embassy’s official account charging that the Syrian military is carrying out attacks in and around Aleppo with the aim weakening the moderate rebel forces and helping Islamic State improve its positions around the city.
“Reports indicate that the regime is making air strikes in support of ISIL’s advance on Aleppo, aiding extremists against Syrian population,” a post on the U.S. Embassy Syria Twitter account said late yesterday (Monday) (the U.S. government is using the correct English acronym ISIL for Islamic State, also known as ISIS, which is the transliteration of the organization’s name in Arabic).
In the last few months, the moderate rebel forces have been more effective in their fight against the Syrian military and its Hezbollah allies, capturing areas in north Syria and advancing into the Alawite enclave in the country’s north-west, placing the major Alawite city of Latakia within the rebels’ artillery range.
There are three reasons for the moderate rebels’ recent battlefield successes.

The regional backers of various non-ISIS rebels – Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Jordan – have been coordinating their efforts much more closely, and imposing a greater degree of cooperation on the Syrian militias they support. A new coalition of rebel forces has been created, and an offer has been made to the Islamist Jabhat al-Nusra to join it on condition that it severed its ties to a-Qaeda.
The United States and Turkey have been increasing the quantities and quality of the arms they provide the moderate rebels groups. The most decisive new weapon system in the rebels’ arsenal is the TOW anti-tank missile, 2,000 of which have so far been provided to the rebels, with devastating effects on Syrian military’s tanks and armored personnel carriers. The TOWs given to the rebels are from old military surplus stocks (the TOW was first produced in 1970s), but on the Syrian battlefield the anti-tank weapon has been a game changer.
The Syrian army has been under growing pressures. It no longer has enough fighters: the Alawite community in Syria is small, and after four years of nonstop war there are no more recruits to be drafted into the army; Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’a organization, has also reached the limit of what it is willing to do for Assad – and critics of the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, charge that by sacrificing so many of the organization’s best units in the Syrian war, he has now left the Shi’a community in Lebanon exposed to attacks by the community’s Sunni opponents (in three desperate speeches in the last two weeks, Nasrallah called on all Shi’as in the region to come and fight in support of the Assad regime, a fight which Nasrallah described as a “do or die” war for all Shi’as); and Russia, in late February, has stopped shipping military supplies to the Syria army, and pulled its military technicians out of the country, so that maintenance work on the Syrian air force’s Sukhoi jets is no longer being done.

On Sunday, following the Syrian air force’s attacks on the moderate rebel position around Aleppo, Islamic State fighters were able to push back the moderate rebels from some positions north of the city, near the Turkish border. Haaretz reports that the Syrian military’s attacks and Islamic State’s move on the ground had a strategic purpose: to cut the supply lines between Turkey and the moderate rebels, thus preventing Turkey from rushing additional military aid to the rebels.
Leaders of the Levant Front – one of the new alliances of secular and moderate Islamic rebels created as a result of the growing coordination among the regional Sunni powers backing the rebels – said it appears that Islamic State was heading for the Bab al-Salam crossing between Aleppo and the Turkish province of Kilis.
The Jerusalem Post notes that the United States suspended operations in its embassy in Damascus in 2012 but still publishes messages on the embassy Twitter feed.
“With these latest reports, (the Syrian military) is not only avoiding ISIL lines, but, actively seeking to bolster their position,” one of the twits said.
The account said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had long lost legitimacy and “will never be an effective counterterrorism partner.”
Western intelligence agencies say that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, in a complex double game, has, from the beginning of the anti-regime rebellion in 2011, provided funds to and cooperated with Islamist extremists in Syria – first with al-Qaeda-affiliated organizations and, since spring 2014, with ISIS — even as these organizations fight the Syrian military. The regime has had two goals in pursuing this policy. The first is to persuade the West that the anti-regime uprising is inspired and led by Islamist militants, including al-Qaeda and its affiliates and, more recently, Islamic State, in order to weaken, and even stop, Western support for the moderate rebels. The second is to allow the jihadists to gain the upper hand in the internal fighting among anti-regime groups. The regime has believed that if the rebellion is seen to be led by Islamist fundamentalists rather than secular and moderate Syrians, more non-Alawite Syrians would side with the regime against the rebels, even if grudgingly (see Assad bolsters al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria with secret oil deals, prisoner release: Western intelligence,” HSNW, 21 January 2014).

Could better tests have predicted the rare circumstances of the Germanwings crash? Probably not

By Norman A. Paradis

Published 2 June 2015

When people do terrible things, it seems reasonable to believe we should have taken steps to identify them beforehand. If we can do that, then surely we can prevent them from doing harm.
The crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 in March, which appears to have been an intentional act, is an example. It shocks us (and understandably so) when a trusted professional harms those who have entrusted their lives to him or her.
So why not identify pilots at risk and take steps to prevent similar events from ever occurring again?
Because it is likely impossible, and maybe even counterproductive.
And that’s not just my opinion. The limits of what can be achieved in predicting an event represent a dilemma we face all the time in biomedical testing.
Let me take you through such an analysis, and show you how futile such programs would likely be in preventing events like the air crash in Europe.
Medical test can be sensitive or specific, but rarely both
Any interview or written survey instrument intended to identify individuals at risk of perpetrating rare and horrific acts is essentially a medical test. And the performance of such tests is described by its sensitivity and specificity. Simply put, sensitivity is the ability of the test to detect the disease, and specificity is the accuracy of its result.
For most tests, you make trade-offs between one or the other: sensitivity versus specificity. For instance, highly sensitive tests generally have many false positives — they call patients sick when the patient does not have the disease. And highly specific tests often have many false negatives — they miss many patients with the disease.
Generally, you can have a sensitive test or a specific test, but you can’t have a sensitive and specific test. Using a simple metaphor, this can be called the “no free lunch law” of medical testing.
This limitation becomes overwhelming when biomedical tests are used in populations with a very low incidence of the disease tested for.
An absurd example can help to understand this. Modern pregnancy tests are very accurate, over 99 percent. However, let’s say you apply a pregnancy test in a population of 10,000 men. You will get a handful of positive tests, 100 percent of which will be false positives.
For this reason, standard blood tests cannot generally be used to screen for very rare diseases without being paired with a second specific confirmatory test.
Turning our attention back to Germanwings Flight 9525, the incidence of an event like this is so uncommon that it is within a rounding error of male pregnancy.
There have been 660 million commercial airline departures since 1959, with only a handful of crashes believed to have been intentional acts by the pilot. Even if we assume there may have been crashes intentionally caused by pilots but not attributed to them, it is still a very rare event. Maybe not the rarest of events (at least one person among the approximately 100 billion people who have ever lived claims to have been both struck by lightning and bitten by a shark), but for our purposes it’s particularly unusual.
So, even if we could develop a test or a screening process to find a pilot who would intentionally crash a plane, and that system was very, very good — both specific and sensitive — virtually all positives would be false positives.
Psycho-social medical tests aren’t very accurate
And there is a hierarchy for test performance that makes all of this more complicated. Tests in which you cut the patient open and examine tissue under a microscope have the best performance, with nearly perfect sensitivity and specificity. Imaging tests, such as CAT scans and MRIs, provide millions of visual data points and also have very good performance. But by the time we get down to measuring the concentration of molecules in blood, problems develop. Such tests should not be used without a thorough understanding of the incidence of the disease.
At the very bottom of the hierarchy of performance are psycho-social survey instruments — tests in which a series of questions are asked with the intention of making psychological diagnosis. Some experts have asserted that once publication bias (the tendency to publish only positive results) is removed, most if not all such instruments will be found to lack any predictive performance whatsoever.
A large systematic review published in the British Medical Journal studied the performance of assessment tools for the prediction of violence in people at risk and found that two people would need to be detained, or somehow otherwise prevented from acting, to prevent one violent act. They concluded “even after thirty years of development, the view that violence, sexual, or criminal risk can be predicted in most cases is not evidence based.”
Prediction can lead to false positive results
Even precisely diagnosing a disease is more difficult than most people realize. There is also a hierarchy when it comes to disease diagnostics. Well-understood and immediately life-threatening illnesses such as advanced cancer or heart disease can often be easily diagnosed. On the other end of the spectrum, nonspecific aches and pains, or diseases in their very early stages, challenge even the best clinicians.
Don’t be misled by the vast psychiatric and psychological literature; the underlying pathophysiology and molecular biology of these disorders are not really understood. It comes as no surprise that our ability to definitively predict their risk is minimal.
So what would happen if we used some interview-based diagnostic instrument to predict the risk that a pilot might intentionally crash a plane? For the purposes of argument, let’s assume that such an event might occur in the range of one in a few hundred million take-offs.
Since we’re dealing with poorly performing diagnostic tools, in the setting of a poorly understood behavioral disease, it is likely that we will get tens of thousands of positive tests. And because we are trying to predict an extraordinarily rare complication of that disease, all, or almost all, positives will be false positives.
Even worse, these false positives may not be benign. There are at least two additional dimensions inherent to this exercise that make it worrisome:

The airlines and regulatory organizations may overreact to the recent crash by revoking the flying credentials of pilots who “fail” such a testing.
Because their job is at risk, pilots will attempt to hide dark thoughts and concerns that are normal to all human beings.

It is possible — even likely — that such a program might cause pilots with symptoms of depression to hide their disease and possibly avoid treatment for a treatable and not altogether uncommon condition — increasing the overall risk to passengers, since diseases like depression may be associated with cognitive and performance impairment when untreated.
False positives can have major consequences
These concepts, by the way, are applicable in settings less rare than plane crashes. They come into play whenever a test — or even a test equivalent – is used to refine our estimation that something exists or may happen. Medical testing is the classic example, but the detection of defective jet turbine blades would be equally valid.
The extreme rarity of a pilot intentionally crashing an airliner, and the poor performance of psychological tests, make it easy to conclude that such “testing” would be futile. It is much more difficult to figure out what to do with things like screening for breast cancer or predicting risk of Alzheimer’s dementia.
But it is also much more important.
The underlying mathematics informs us that one needs to know the performance of the test and the incidence of the outcome of interest. What the math doesn’t teach us is that our response to the result is also very important.
If the use of a test only causes us to non-invasively recheck more frequently or more carefully, that is one thing. It is a whole other thing to respond by cutting open a patient or exposing them to X-rays.
When the consequences of a false-positive test are large, we must be much more careful if we are to avoid harm.
One of my favorite examples is the drug testing of athletes. The organizations responsible act like their programs perform to a high degree of certainty. But unless they are using laboratory tests with performance unavailable to clinical medicine, and the incidence of drug use among athletes is very high, their false-positive rate is likely greater than people realize.
It may be possible to prevent rare events such as this one — “smart” cockpit doors or some such technological solution. But predicting their occurrence by looking more closely at the individuals involved is doomed to fail. It is an extreme version of a problem we all confront daily, mostly without realizing it.
Norman A. Paradis is Professor of Medicine at Dartmouth College. This story is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution/No derivatives.

Airport screeners missed 95% of mock explosives, weapons in tests; TSA acting director removed

Published 2 June 2015

Following reports that screenings failed to detect mock explosives and weapons, carried out by undercover agents in tests, in 95 percent of cases, DHS secretary Jeh Johnson has ordered improved security at airports and reassigned the top Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official to another role.
ABC News, citing a forthcoming report by DHS IG, reported that airport screeners, employed by TSA, did not detect banned weapons in 67 out of 70 tests at dozens of U.S. airports. Johnson, whose department oversees the TSA, was briefed last week on the trials, which were completed recently.
In one test an undercover agent set off an alarm at a checkpoint and was stopped, but TSA screeners at the checkpoint then failed to find a fake explosive device taped to his back when they patted him down.
The Guardian reports that Johnson said the results of the security checks were classified, but he had directed the TSA to revise screening procedures “to address specific vulnerabilities identified” in the undercover operation. He also ordered that all TSA officers and supervisors across the country be retrained and that airports’ screening equipment be tested.
Johnson said there would be more random covert tests.
“The numbers in these reports never look good out of context but they are a critical element in the continual evolution of our aviation security,” he said. “We take these findings very seriously in our continued effort to test, measure and enhance our capabilities and techniques as threats evolve.”
Johnson said that Melvin Carraway, acting administrator of the TSA, was being reassigned to another section of DHS. The TSA acting deputy director, Mark Hatfield, would lead the agency until a replacement was appointed.
President Barack Obama had nominated coast guard Vice Admiral Pete Neffenger to be the next TSA administrator, and Johnson urged the U.S. Senate to confirm his nomination as quickly as possible.

Monday, June 1, 2015

Rumor-detection software detects, corrects erroneous claims on Twitter

Published 1 June 2015

A week after the Boston marathon bombing, hackers sent a bogus tweet from the official Twitter handle of the Associated Press. It read: “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.”
Before the AP and White House could correct the record, the stock market responded, dropping more than 140 points in a matter of minutes. Losses mounted into the billions.
The market recovered just as quickly, but analysts said the timeframe could well have been long enough for in-the-know perpetrators to profit through trading.
Rumors and their negative effects can spread rapidly in these hyperconnected times, says Qiaozhu Mei, an associate professor in the University of Michigan School of Information and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
A U-M release reports that this is why he and a team of researchers have developed software to help society identify and correct erroneous claims on Twitter. They introduced the software recently at the International World Wide Web Conference in Florence, Italy. Later this summer, they hope to put it in practice at a website they’re developing called Rumor Lens.
“One post of a rumor in social media can sometimes spread beyond anyone’s control,” said Mei, an expert on text mining and natural language processing. “Our goal is to detect emerging rumors as quickly as possible.”
The team demonstrated what its software is capable of by analyzing two sets of tweets: thirty million sent relating to the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013 and a random sample of 1.2 billion tweets sent during November of the same year.
They gathered the second set from Twitter’s Gardenhose — 10 percent of its real-time stream. The datasets represent both an unpredictable, high-profile event that would likely spawn rumors and a relatively uneventful span of time.
The software successfully detected 110 rumors from the stream of tweets about the Boston Marathon bombing, with an average accuracy of more than 50 percent. Its average accuracy was 33 percent for Twitter Gardenhose data.
Both percentages are significantly higher than the less-than-10-percent accuracy of rumor-detecting through hashtag tracking and trending topics, the researchers point out. Furthermore, their software finds fishy statements a lot faster.
“Our method can detect rumors 3.6 hours earlier than methods that use trending topic detection, and 2.8 hours earlier than methods using hashtags as signals,” said Zhe Zhao, a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
The researchers’ key insight is that before social media users decide whether to believe a piece of information is true, many will ask for more information or express skepticism. So they designed their software to listen in on Twitter traffic for signs that users are “questioning the truth value of information.” Words and phrases the program has an ear for include “unconfirmed,” “Is this true?” and “Really?”
Once it zeroes in on a potential rumor, it looks for more tweets about the topic to gauge how widespread the conversation is. The researchers then rely on humans to fact-check.
The point of the effort isn’t for a computer to determine whether a claim is true or false, but rather to highlight disputed information before it ends up on popular debunking sites like Snopes.com.
“By the time a rumor gets to Snopes, it’s often too late,” Mei said.
The release notes that Rumor Lens — the researchers’ own Web site — is expected to be available in the next couple of months. The team envisions it serving as a Snopes-like online community of social media observers, academics and reporters who have an interest in following and debunking rumors. The algorithms would highlight potential rumors and the people in the community would do the fact-checking. The researchers define a rumor as a controversial statement that can be fact-checked.
The team presented a paper about the research at the World Wide Web Conference. Paul Resnick, a professor in the School of Information, is also a co-author. The work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
— Read more in Zhe Zhao et al., “Enquiring Minds: Early Detection of Rumors in Social Media from Enquiry Posts” (paper presented at the International World Wide Web Conference Committee [IW3C2], 18-22 May 2015, Florence, Italy)

U.S. to increase annual military aid package to Israel from $3 billion to nearly $4 billion

Published 1 June 2015

The U.S. defense aid to Israel will increase after 2017 from the current $3 billion a year to between $3.5 and $4 billion a year, according to both American and Israeli sources. The substantial increase in the military aid package to Israel is the direct result of the negotiations with Iran — and the fact that Sunni states in the region, such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, will themselves see a major quantitative and qualitative increases in U.S. military aid to them, thus risking the erosion of the Israeli military’s “qualitative edge.” Only last year, the administration, in an effort to accommodate congressionally mandated cuts in the defense budget, informed Israel that the only changes to the package would be adjustment for inflation.

The U.S. defense aid to Israel will likely increase after 2017 from the current $3 billion a year to between $3.5 and $4 billion a year, according to both American and Israeli sources. Both side conceded that the increase is related to the emerging nuclear deal between the P5+1 and Iran – and to the fact that Sunni states in the region, such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, will themselves see a major quantitative and qualitative increases in U.S. military aid to them.
U.S. sources told the Guardian that the United States and Israel are in an advanced stage of negotiating the new military aid package, and that the additions to the current being discussed would bring annual payouts to $3.6 billion to $3.7 billion on average.
An Israeli official, saying the final post-2017 package would be between $3.5 billion and $4 billion, added: “[The United States is] trying to douse the fires after our flare-up about the Iran deal.”
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, confirmed that the deal to increase U.S. military aid to Israel is almost done, but said he would keep campaigning against Iran.
“There is no trade-off requiring I agree to this [nuclear] deal with Iran. The deal is bad and we will continue to oppose it,” Netanyahu said.
In Washington, though, the National Security Council (NSC) spokesman, Alistair Baskey, denied that negotiations on an increase defense aid package were being held. “These reports are wholly inaccurate.”
He added: “While we anticipate discussions in the coming period between the U.S. and Israeli governments about how long-term security cooperation between the two countries can be further strengthened, no such detailed discussions at a senior level have occurred recently,” Baskey said.
The Guardian notes that the George W. Bush administration signed a 10-year deal with Israel in 2007, giving Israel $30 billion, most of which must be spent in the United States on American-manufactured military equipment. The Obama administration has added hundreds of millions dollars on top of the $3 billion annual package to support missile defense systems being developed in Israel – and, last summer, earmarked additional $250 million to rush Iron Dome munitions to Israel during the Israel-Hamas war.
Analysts note that the substantial increase in the military aid package to Israel is the direct result of the negotiations with Iran. Only last year, the administration, in an effort to accommodate congressionally mandated cuts in the defense budget, informed Israel that the only changes to the package would be adjustment for inflation.
What complicates the U.S. calculations is the fact that the military gear the United States is planning to give Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to assuage their own worries about Iran, will erode Israel’s “qualitative edge” over the armed forces in the region. The qualitative edge has been the corner-stone of Israel’s military strategy, and successive U.S. administrations have committed themselves to the preservation of this edge either by denying Arab countries certain advanced items – or compensating Israel in the event such items were sold the countries in the region.
When asked whether the expected increase in military aid grants to Israel was linked to U.S. recent dealings with Iran and the Gulf Arab states, the U.S. official said: “Could be.”

U.S. to expand cooperation with Nigeria’s military in fight against Boko Haram

Published 1 June 2015

Nigeria’s new president Muhammadu Buhari was sworn in as the country’s new president on Friday, and the Obama administration accompanied its congratulations to the new president with indications that the United States was prepared to expand military cooperation in the fight against Boko Haram.
Secretary of State John Kerry, who led the American delegation at the inauguration, discussed cooperation against Boko Haram in a short meeting on Friday with Buhari.
“Something we can do quickly is to send advisers,” a senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under the department’s protocol for briefing reporters, told the New York Times. “It could be related to intelligence; it could be something very simple, related to things like logistics.”
“We certainly hope to be able to do more,” the official added.
Friday’s swearing-in of Buhari marked Nigeria’s first transition of power from one political party to another since the end of military rule in 1999.
In his speech, Buhari promised to persevere until “Boko Haram is completely subdued.”
Boko Haram launched its radical Islamist campaign in north-east Nigeria in 2009, but drew the world’s attention only in April 2014 when it abducted nearly 300 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok.
Boko Haram has since pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, although terrorism experts do not believe the Nigerian organization is an integral part of the Islamic State.
The growing concerns about Boko Haram notwithstanding, the United States reduced its military cooperation with Nigeria during the presidency of Goodluck Jonathan, who was defeated by Buhari in the March election.
The Nigerian military under Jonathan was thoroughly corrupt, and proved itself incompetent in fighting Boko Haram – that is, when its soldiers did stand up and fight, which they usually did not. The United States was also growing increasingly frustrated with rampant human rights abuses by the Nigerian military.
The United States did send drones to help search for the abducted girls, but Jonathan complained that the drones constituted an intervention in Nigeria’s internal affairs, and the brief moment of military cooperation between the United States and Nigeria came to an end.
Boko Haram, emboldened by its success against the hollowed-out and demoralized Nigerian army, began to attack targets in neighboring Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. For years, the Jonathan government refused to allow the armies of these neighbors to attack Boko Haram targets on Nigerian soil, insisting that the Nigerian military did not need any help in fighting Boko Haram.
In January, however, the leaders of the three countries, growing increasingly impatient with the brazen attacks by Boko Harms on targets inside their countries, informed Jonathan that they would attack Boko Haram targets inside Nigeria with or without the permission of Nigeria. Jonathan, trailing Buhari in the presidential campaign, agreed – and a combination of Chad air force’s attacks and ground attacks by the armies of Niger and Cameroon began to push Boko Harm back, liberating large swaths of Nigerian territory.
Jonathan tried to take credit for the victories by Nigeria’s neighbors over Boko Haram, but the Nigerian voters were not fooled, and kicked him out of office.
With Buhari, a former general with a reputation as a strict disciplinarian and an anti-corruption crusader, now in power, the United States is set to resume its military ties with Nigeria.

ANNOUNCEMENT

The Criminal Justice Program and the Institute for Public Safety are pleased to announce the Scientific Leadership Awards program at the University of the District of Columbia. The scholarships are funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Scientific Leadership Awards Program, offering undergraduate students generous support for up to four years to pursue their undergraduate degree and gain research experience in homeland security science and technology related areas.