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The Tangled Webs We Weave
Foreshadowing: Did the FBI know something about 9/11 on 9/5?
Source:
http://www.iviews.com/scripts/articles/stories/default.cfm?id=12809&category_id=40
FBI Raids Muslim Web Hosting Company
Copyright: http://www.iviews.com
Published Wednesday September 05, 2001
By iviews.com staff report
FBI agents raided a Muslim web hosting business Wednesday, a
Dallas area television station reported.
Witnesses outside the building told iviews.com that the entire
building, which housed the business along with several others,
had been evacuated and surrounded by at least 50 federal agents.
Along with agents from the State Department, U.S. Customs and the
U.S. Secret Service, the FBI began their search at Infocom
Corporation, based in Richardson, Texas earlier this morning.
The company hosts web sites for more than 500 companies,
including several major Muslim American organizations such as the
Council on American Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of
North America, the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Holy
Land Foundation.
The raid comes just one week after Bank One corporation shut down
the bank account for Holy Land Foundation without any
explanation.
The raid also comes just two weeks after two Muslim bashers
openly called upon the FBI in a Wall Street Journal column to
shut down the web sites of IAP and HLF.
Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes wrote in the August 13 issue,
"The time has also come for the US to support Israel in
rolling back the forces of terror".
"The federal authorities should use the tools it already has
in closing down these web sites and organizations," they
wrote.
WFAA reported that the raid could take as long as two to three
days, as agents might seize massive amounts of company records.
Bayan Elashi, the owner of Infocom, told reporters he did not
know why the FBI was there.
“We are just waiting for them (the FBI) to tell us what this
is about,” Elashi said.
Terrorism task force seeking computer data
09/06/2001
By STEVE McGONIGLE / The Dallas Morning News
A federal terrorism task force began searching the office of a Richardson Internet services company on Wednesday in what federal officials said was the largest raid in the North Texas-based operation's six-year history.
Agents of the FBI, Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service and several other federal agencies conducted the early-morning raid at InfoCom Corp., located just south of Arapaho Road at 630 International Parkway.
FBI spokeswoman Lori Bailey said agents were primarily searching for computerized information and could require up to two days to complete their work.
InfoCom's owner, Bayan Elashi, and an attorney for the company said they were not told what agents were looking for, but they said that the business is not involved in terrorism or any other criminal activity.
"We want to cooperate. We have nothing to hide. We are a clean organization," said attorney Mark Enoch, who said he began representing InfoCom after the raid began.
The warrant and supporting materials were sealed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul Stickney of Dallas. Federal agents declined to comment on the motive for the raid.
A news release said the search was one aspect of an ongoing, two-year investigation by the North Texas Joint Terrorism Task Force. More than 80 law officers were involved in various aspects of the operation, Ms. Bailey said.
One of the agencies listed as participating in the investigation of InfoCom is the Office of Foreign Assets Control, an arm of the Treasury Department empowered to freeze or seize the assets of individuals or organizations that have been designated by the government as terrorist.
Federal agents appeared to be copying information from computer hard drives, Mr. Enoch said, and had cut off Internet service to the company's 500 clients.
Mr. Elashi said he suspected his business was targeted because he is Palestinian. He said he stood to lose millions of dollars because of disruptions in service.
InfoCom has close ties to the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which describes itself as the nation's largest Muslim charity.
InfoCom, which was incorporated in Texas in 1992, is a privately held company that describes itself as a seller of computer systems and Internet services to clients in the United States and abroad. Its clients include many of the nation's largest Islamic organizations, as well as businesses in the Middle East.
Dun & Bradstreet stated that as of January, InfoCom reported annual sales of $7 million. Mr. Enoch said the company had nine full-time and five part-time employees.
InfoCom's offices are located directly across from the headquarters of Holy Land Foundation. During the raid, InfoCom employees relocated to the foundation's offices to try to continue their business, Mr. Enoch said.
Mr. Enoch, whose law firm also has represented Holy Land Foundation, said that the raid had no connection to the foundation.
"Holy Land Foundation is not the story of the day. It's InfoCom," he said.
Holy Land Foundation, which is also one of InfoCom's clients, has itself been under federal investigation for alleged ties to Hamas and has been outlawed in Israel, where Hamas has been blamed for scores of deaths in terrorist attacks.
No criminal charges have ever been filed against the foundation or any of its employees or associates in the United States.
Mr. Enoch said the foundation provides humanitarian aid in the Middle East and elsewhere.
"We don't want to be associated with terrorism and we're not," he said.
The ties between InfoCom and Holy Land Foundation extend beyond a business relationship. Ghassan Elashi, InfoCom's vice president for sales and marketing, is a co-founder of the foundation and serves as its board chairman. Mr. Elashi was present Wednesday but declined to be interviewed.
His brother, Bayan, the president and chief executive officer of InfoCom, is listed in Internet registry records as technical contact for the Web site of Holy Land Foundation.
The Elashis moved to Richardson and incorporated InfoCom at about the same time Holy Land Foundation also relocated from the Los Angeles area.
The Elashi brothers have family and financial ties to Mousa Abu Marzook. Mr. Marzook's wife, Nadia, is a cousin of the Elashi brothers. In 1993, Mrs. Marzook invested $250,000 in InfoCom and receives a monthly annuity from the company, said Stanley Cohen, a New York attorney for Mr. Marzook.
Israeli officials said that while living in the United States, Mr. Marzook established an extensive fund-raising operation for Hamas. Israel has urged the U.S. government to shut down the network. Mr. Marzook has denied the allegations made by Israeli officials.
Since U.S. law was changed in 1996 to ban fund raising for Hamas, there have been two federal grand jury investigations in New York and Chicago. Two associates of Mr. Marzook were jailed for refusing to testify.
There was also a high-profile investigation into allegations of ties between Hamas, Islamic Jihad and an Islamic think tank in Tampa, Fla., which has produced no indictments after almost six years.
Leaders in the Dallas-area Muslim community said the raid on InfoCom caught them by surprise and caused them some concern about the purpose of the action.
Mohammed Elmougy, local president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he supported the right of the FBI to investigate wrongdoing. But if nothing comes of the investigation, it might raise questions, he said.
"If there is nothing wrong, that would cause us as a community to believe that some of these decisions are very politically motivated by things that are going on in the Middle East," he said. "If there is wrongdoing, we have laws in this country to deal with that. We believe in the law."
Staff writer Jeffrey Weiss contributed to this report.
The following persons were added to the US Deptartment of Commerce's Bureau of Export Administration
(List of Denied Persons) on 9/10/01:
SOURCE: http://www.bxa.doc.gov/DPL/recentchanges.asp
NOTE - only persons added in the wake of the 9/5/01 raid on InfoComm are included here
| ELAFRANGI, FADWA 306 TOWN HOUSE LANE, RICHARDSON, TX, US |
9/10/01 | NEW |
| ELASHI, HAZIM 937 STONE TRAIL DRIVE, PLANO, TX, US |
9/10/01 | NEW |
| ELASHI, BASMAN MEDHAT 1506 WILLOW CREST DRIVE, RICHARDSON, TX, US |
9/10/01 | NEW |
| ELASHI, GHASSAN 304 TOWN HOUSE LANE, RICHARDSON, TX, US |
9/10/01 | NEW |
| ELASHI, BAYAN MEDHAT 1810 AUBURN, RICHARDSON, TX, US |
9/10/01 | NEW |
| ELASHI, SAMMY (IHSAN MEDHAT) 316 CANDLEWOOD PLACE, RICHARDSON, TX, US |
9/10/01 | NEW |
| ELASHI, IHSAN MEDHAT 316 CANDLEWOOD PLACE, RICHARDSON, TX, US |
9/10/01 | NEW |
| TETRABAL CORPORATION, INC 316 CANDLEWOOD PLACE, RICHARDSON, TX, US |
9/10/01 | NEW |
| INFOCOM CORPORATION, INC 630 INTERNATIONAL PARKWAY, SUITE 100, RICHARDSON, TX, US |
9/10/01 | NEW |
The official word on WHY the raid occurred:
http://www.bxa.doc.gov/press/2001/InfoComCorpPutonDeniedList.html
Freedom of the Web:
FBI demands for IP logs from IMCs
In the Fall of 1999, the Independent Media Center in Seattle was formed to cover the imminent protests of the World Trade Organization Conference there. The site was vastly successful in spreading the news of what was actually happening on the streets, while traditional news media substituted editorial clucking for coverage. Soon, IMCs were popping up in most cities across the country. All of them allowed the public at large a way to post news and comments directly to the web without editorial restraint upon their content.
On Saturday, April 21, 2001, the Seattle IMC was visited by two FBI agents and one Secret Service agent, and presented with a sealed court order written by Assistant US Attorney Stephen C Schroeder and signed by Judge Monica Benton. The court order demanded IP logs of connections to 216.213.32.98, and ordered the IMC staff not to discuss the order with anyone outside the immediate organization in Seattle. Rumors flew that the FBI had actually RAIDED the Seattle IMC and seized all of its logs. IMCs elsewhere began reviewing whether any logs should be kept at all.
A week after the original order, Judge Benton unsealed the order and the Seattle IMC was finally allowed to discuss what had happened. The FBI had not been given useful information, because the IP address requested was defunct and the order was being legally challenged by the Seattle IMC in cooperation with legal talent from other prominent organizations. More of the story can be had here:
Oh, the reason for the court order? Supposedly someone in Canada had stolen travel plans for President Bush and the Secret Service had to get to the bottom of it. Trouble is, they asked about the wrong IP, had no URL for the supposed information, and nothing similar was ever actually published. The closest match was some security document relating to a protest of the FTAA in Quebec that weekend. The FBI's move was widely seen as a return to the old strongarm days of COINTELPRO intimidation.
A similar demand for IP logs was made against the Ohio Valley IMC on May 8, 2001; this time, the post was a threat against the life of Steve Roach, a Cincinnatti police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man named Timothy Thomas. Days of riots followed both the killing, and the decision that Roach would face a maximum sentence of 6 months in prison, if he were to be convicted. The FBI had no apparent connection to the second request, unless they secretly hired Australian "anarchist" Matthew Taylor to fill the IMCs with useless gibberish disguised as disjointed ranting...
Don't say my name!
On July 20, 2000, cryptome.org publisher John Young was telephoned by an FBI agent, James Castano, who asked him to remove a list of members of Japan's Public Security Investigation Agency, the Japanese counterpart to the FBI's Domestic Security Division. The list http://web.elastic.org/~fche/mirrors/cryptome.org/psia-lists.htm names almost all of the members of the PSIA. When Young refused, Castano's supervisor Dave Marzilliano came on the line and advised Young that he would "...be in real trouble" if he published the names of the two FBI agents, as Young had mentioned he would. Of course, having outed more than 600 Japanese security professionals, Young stepped up to the challenge and named the two anyway. The FBI was, again, not amused.
In just a few days, denial of service attacks against cryptome.org were being reported on WIRED magazine's website, and at the time of this writing, the site was no longer being reported in DNS entries for the Verio network on which it was housed. The direct IP addresses
216.167.102.12 (jya.com)
216.167.102.14 (cryptome.org)
were also no longer able to provide access to the site, leading to widespread online speculation that Verio caved to the FBI's request.
BUT WAIT!
This turned out to be an oversized atmospheric disturbance in a small ceramic vessel designed to hold scalding water, however. On July 27, 2000 John Young wrote:
JYA and Cryptome are fully loaded and running under their IP addresses, awating hostname switchover. The twin pages: JYA 216.167.120.49/crypto.htm Cryptome 216.167.120.50 Bookmarks using hostnames will not work just yet. There's a brief account of what seems to have caused the outage on the opening page -- from the viewpoint of Digital Nation and Verio. (-ed. note: see below for this account) If port 80 was shut off, it was not at our request. Here is the Drudge-munged URL: http://jya.com/crypto.htmhttp://jya.com/crypto.htm Yes, a back to back embedded link under the visible, correct URL. Those who figured out the mistake typed in the correct URL rather than madly pounding the clicker. The favicon.ico attack did not seem supported by the error logs -- the great bulk of those accrued before the outage. And we never saw them as a bother, but, listen, we have little idea of what goes on in the embedded-code Internet, or the embedded-code world. We have indeed received much advice, consolation and ridicule over this teapot, and appreciate all of it, the ridicule mostso for its apt match of our rogue state. John Young Intelligence Forum (http://www.intelforum.org) is sponsored by Intelligence and National Security, a Frank Cass journal (http://www.frankcass.com/jnls/ins.htm)
The referenced description from the site was:
27 July 2000 -- Beginning Friday night, July 21, until now, Cryptome has been nearly inaccessible. Our ISP, Digital Nation, claims it was due to overloading and that a more powerful server was needed, which was ordered on July 24 and is now purring quietly. Here is a quote from an anonymous person inside the ISP:
"When this issue was originally investigated over the weekend of the 22nd, there were were no indications of a DOS attack. Shutting down Apache brought the machine to almost no load, and an investigation of the web server logs indicated that the machine was being hammered by hits from various news sites. All of the referrer URLs checked out - this site was on international news sites before it showed up here (i.e. www.donga.com) "Netstat output was normal for as long as it was visible after starting the web server, and distribution of client IP addresses for requests in the last 20000 lines of the access log were normal. This, and the referrer information was reported to the technician working with the customer by me. "The 404s ["file not available"] should take up less resources than people actually browsing the site. "The machine is a 300MHz AMD with 32M of RAM - it's not going to handle what's being thrown at it currently. All of the error messages generated are normal for a machine under extremely heavy load. "The Cobalt RAQ 3s weren't built for sites that receive the andover-effect. :)"
We very much appreciate support and advice from an amazing range of generous people who advised and consoled during the outage. Digital Nation and Verio staff have been especially helpful and admirably calm. The new Cobalt server provides an 8-fold increase in processing capacity - now with 256MB RAM. Until hostnames have been transferred JYA and Cryptome are accessible by IP addresses:
JYA 216.167.120.49
Cryptome 216.167.120.50
If files linked in the archive indexes are not accessible by hostnames insert the IP addresses in the URLs.
We thank those who provided mirrors of Cryptome, and others who wish to do so don't need our permission. All the information here is meant to be distributed widely without limitation.
Post Script:
Cryptome was under DOS attack for over 16 hours, beginning last evening (Oct 14 2000), from address 63.92.148.63, now axed. No response from the attacker's ISP, Hardy Net in West Virginia.
"Hardy Telecommunications wouldn't exist without the RUS," says Dwight Welch, general manager of the 2,850-member telephone cooperative in Hardy County, W. Va. "They've funded our every construction project since our inception in 1956. We've always worked very closely with them." - excerpt from http://www.wisc.edu/uwcc/info/farmer/111298M2.html
"Many telephone co-ops have formed wholly-owned subsidiaries to handle the newly licensed side of their industry, which often falls outside of the normal structure of a small telephone company and therefore must be kept separate. Accordingly, Hardy Telecommunications has Hardy Net, and Chibardun has CTC Telcom. Blackfoot Telephone Co-op has four subsidiaries: Clark Fork Telecommunications, Blackfoot Communications, Blackfoot TelCom, and Blackfoot Fiber Systems."
See also http://www.hardynet.com/history1.htm
HERE WE GO AGAIN...
In late 1999, the artist known as Mike Z (Zieper) posted a 6 minute video clip purported to be "a military briefing for a secret army plan to incite a race riot on New Year's Eve" at his web site http://www.crowdedtheater.com. The FBI was not amused.
When phone calls to Mike Z were not successful, the FBI called the US Attorney, who called the ISP and had the site pulled. The ACLU was threatening legal action as of December 1999. Some details about the incident were posted on http://www.artswire.org Volume #8 No. #50.
As of July 2000, the material was still being advertized on MikeZ's site. There was no update on the ACLU suit.