Remembering a Fallen Brother & Hero…. LAPD officer serving in Afghanistan is killed by roadside bomb

 Articles of Interest, FALLEN & INJURED HEROES, Law Enforcement, National security, Terrorism, Cyber Terrorism & Related Crimes, U.S. MARINES & Military  Comments Off
Oct 172012
 

Remembering a Fallen Brother & Hero… LAPD officer serving in Afghanistan is killed by roadside bomb

SWAT team member Robert J. Cottle, a Marine Corps reservist, is the department’s first member to die in post-9/11 combat. He previously had served two tours in Iraq.

 

Los Angeles Times
By Jill Leovy and Joel Rubin
Published: March 26, 2010

 

 

Fallen Marine SgtMaj / LAPD SWAT Officer Robert J. (RJ) Cottle

 

The Los Angeles Police Department on Thursday mourned its first officer to be killed in combat in Afghanistan after a roadside bomb took the life of a highly regarded SWAT team member.

Marine Corps Reserve Sgt. Maj. Robert J. Cottle, 45, and a 19-year-old Marine were killed while traveling in the Marja area of southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province, on the Pakistani border. The region has been the focus of an intense U.S.-led offensive against Taliban forces, said LAPD Capt. John Incontro, who oversees SWAT operations.

 

The funeral service for LAPD Officer Robert J. Cottle, killed March 24 in Afghanistan while on Marine Reserve duty, is held at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles.

 

The Marines’ armored vehicle struck a roadside bomb Wednesday, killing Cottle and Lance Cpl. Rick Centanni and seriously wounding two others, according to police sources and media accounts.

A veteran of two tours in Iraq, Cottle had deployed to Afghanistan in August and was scheduled to return home this summer. He leaves a wife and 8-month-old daughter.

More than two dozen LAPD officers serve as active military reservists. The department recruits many officers from the military, and leaves for military duty are routine. But until now, the LAPD had lost no one to conflict in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Lanky, blue-eyed and brown-haired, Cottle “loved being a police officer,” said LAPD Chief Charlie Beck.

 

LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck hands the flag to Cottle’s widow, Emily, and daughter, Kaila Jane. ( Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times / April 13, 2010 )

 

Cottle became an officer in 1990 and joined the elite SWAT unit six years later, Beck said. He called Cottle “an effective and compassionate” officer and “a great human being.”

He was “almost the absolute stereotype Marine,” said LAPD Capt. Phil Tingirides. “He was one who talked about God and country and he really meant it.”

 

Marines fold the flag draped over Cottle’s casket. ( Al Seib / Los Angeles Times / April 13, 2010 )

 

Cottle grew up in Whittier and San Diego, said his sister Bonnie Roybal, 49, of Whittier. As a child, he was bowlegged and had to wear leg braces for more than two years, but he grew into an avid runner and athlete, she said.

“He was made fun of as a kid, and he ended up proving them wrong,” Roybal said.

A high-energy teenager, his rambunctious exploits and unimpressive grades led him first to military-style camp, then to the Marines at age 18, and finally to the LAPD, she said.

“He didn’t have any pretenses or airs. With Robert, what you saw was what you got,” Roybal said.

That direct gaze and knack for effortless conversation were traits that served him well as a police officer. But he never lost the taste for adrenaline that first brought him to the LAPD.

“My brother has always lived his life on the edge. He was into risk-taking, wanted to live an extraordinary life” — and did, his sister said.

 

Bonnie J. Roybal holds a photo of her brother, Marine Corps Reserve Sgt. Maj. Robert J. Cottle, 45, who was killed in a roadside bombing in the Marja area of southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province, on the Pakistani border. He is the Los Angeles Police Department’s first officer to be killed in combat in Afghanistan. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

 

Cottle’s LAPD assignments took him to the Hollywood Division’s vice squad, the Southeast Division in the early 1990s — one of the most violent locales in the nation at that time — then to a tactical dive team trained to combat terrorist attacks at the Port of Los Angeles.

“He was the kind of guy who, when he spoke, you listened. He only spoke when it was important,” said LAPD Cmdr. Rick Jacobs.

But if Cottle was “the most serious guy when the situation called for it,” he could also be light-hearted, said LAPD Sgt. Steve Weaver, a longtime friend.

He shifted instantly from solemn military bearing to being “the funniest guy in the room,” Weaver said. He made colleagues laugh “just from the inflection of his voice.”

A mix of law enforcement and military dedication suffused Cottle’s life. He peppered his speech with Marine lingo, and wore Marine T-shirts with his LAPD friends. But on base, among his military friends, he switched to LAPD gear.

 

U.S. Marines at the funeral for LAPD officer and fellow Marine Robert James “R.J.” Cottle at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on Tuesday. ( Al Seib / Los Angeles Times / April 13, 2010 )

 

Cottle surprised his family by marrying at 43, shifting his focus from constant training and weekend ice hockey games to family.

Fellow SWAT officers recalled a friend who stood out for the intensity he brought to the job, and the care he showed for other officers.

Incontro remembered the night in 2008 when another SWAT officer, Randall Simmons, was killed during a prolonged standoff. After Simmons was rushed to a hospital, Cottle went from one SWAT officer to the next, helping to calm them and keep them focused on the still-unfolding situation, Incontro said.

Cottle was a sergeant major in the Marine Corps Reserve — the top enlisted position — with the 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, based at Camp Pendleton. Among his citations was the Combat Action Ribbon for having been under fire and returning fire.

At Camp Pendleton, his death was announced Thursday during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a $13-million facility to train Marines to detect improvised explosive devices.

 

Detail of the boot in the stirrup of a riderless horse in the funeral. ( Al Seib / Los Angeles Times / April 13, 2010 )

 

With emotion, Brig. Gen. Rex McMillian, deputy commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, praised Cottle as a fine Marine who had shown leadership in a variety of assignments since joining the Marine Corps in 1983.

In addition to his wife, daughter and sister, Cottle is survived by his father, Kenneth Cottle of Villa Park; and mother, Janet Deck of Clearlake Oaks, Calif

 

Times staff writer Tony Perry contributed to this report

Direct Link:  http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/26/local/la-me-officer-killed26-2010mar26

 

Related Photo Journal of Fallen Marine Sgt Major and LAPD SWAT Officer Robert J. (RJ) Cottle:  http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-lapd-funeral-pictures,0,7565607.photogallery

 

 

 

Giving Needed Understanding To Those Who Served: Maricopa County Veteran’s Court!

 Articles of Interest, FALLEN & INJURED HEROES, G.E. Investigations Articles, U.S. MARINES & Military  Comments Off
Oct 042012
 

Giving Needed Understanding To Those Who Served: Maricopa County Veteran’s Court! 

 

 

I hope that this idea to HELP & SUPPORT Our Military Veterans, especially the ones returning from combat continues and grows to help those who served to protect us!

 

The Superior Court of Maricopa County founded its Veterans Court in 2011 in order to address the growing number of veterans involved in the criminal justice system.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are you being watched … by your phone?

 Articles of Interest, Crimes & Criminal Activity (Organized Crime, Narcotics, Predators, Cyber Crime, Cyber Stalking, UnSolved), Firearms, Weapons & Personal Safety, Investigative, Law Enforcement, National security, Terrorism, Cyber Terrorism & Related Crimes, Social Media, Technology & Digital Security  Comments Off
Sep 262012
 

Are you being watched … by your phone?

The TV show Person of Interest says everyone with a mobile phone is a target for snoops. Is that true?

 

Computer World
by Mike Elgan
September 22, 2012

 

 

Computerworld -

“You are being watched.”

Those are the first words uttered in the opening monologue of a really cool TV show called Person of Interest on CBS. The show’s Season 2 premier airs this week on Thursday, Sept. 27, at 9 p.m. or 8 p.m., depending on where you live.

“Person of Interest,” developed by J. J. Abrams and Jonathan Nolan, is about a mysterious billionaire software genius who built an anti-terrorism surveillance supercomputer for the government but left himself a back door for the system to feed him the Social Security numbers of people in New York City who will be involved in a murder, which the supercomputer can predict.

He doesn’t know whether those people will be the victims or the murderers, but he uses the information to try to stop the crimes before they happen. To do this, he hires a former special forces soldier-turned-CIA super-ninja to go out and beat up the bad guys and save the innocent.

The show is about a lot of things. It’s a detective thriller, a bromance, a shoot-em-up action show. It’s about espionage, government snooping and machine consciousness. But mostly, it’s a show about cellphones.

Specifically, Person of Interest highlights the many ways to hack, track, listen in on and use smartphones to monitor people.

Characters in the movie routinely “clone” cellphones, listen in remotely via the microphones in phones, track people in real time via the GPS technology in their handsets, “Bluejack” phones, and download contacts and other information wirelessly.

One character has a supercomputer; the other has super-ninja fighting skills. But their most effective superpowers are their mobile phone skills.

How realistic is all this? Let’s have a look.

Mobile phone cloning

Cloning enables a phone to make and receive calls that appear to be coming from another phone.

Cloning used to be a lot easier. And in some countries, such as India, it’s still a widespread problem.

In the old days, you needed only to get a couple of unique identifying numbers from the target phone and then enter them on a secret menu on the clone phone.

These days, it’s very difficult. If you want to get the requisite secret identifying numbers, your best bet is to hack a cellular carrier’s database or use expensive, specialized equipment to snatch the numbers from the airwaves (a technique that also requires physical access to the SIM card).

For the petty crooks who used to clone phones in order to sell phones that could make free calls (billed to the victim), cloning is an industry in decline.

Besides, the “benefits” of cloning are largely available through other means, such as free VoIP calls, and some of the techniques I detail below.

Organizations with extensive hacking resources can, and probably do, clone phones. But the ability to clone one phone via another quickly and wirelessly is not possible as it is depicted in Person of Interest.

Tracking people in real time

Phone apps, such as SpyBubble, Mobile Spy, FlexiSpy, StealthGenie and others work invisibly in the background and handle several types of espionage, including real-time location tracking. After the software is installed on an individual’s phone, you can watch on a map as he roams around town.

But these apps need to be physically installed on a phone. To the best of my knowledge, they can’t be installed remotely, though it’s possible that the user could be tricked into installing software with similar functions. This could be done by spoofing a legitimate app, for example.

However, a spy organization or government agency wouldn’t need to install an app on your phone to track your location. They only need to gain access to the location tracking that your wireless carriers already do.

Carriers already collect this data and sell it to anyone with the money to buy it. And they routinely provide location data to law enforcement agencies that request it.

Listening through phone microphones

In Person of Interest, the stars use other people’s phones as remote microphones for listening in on conversations — not just while they’re on calls, but even when they’re not using their phones.

That form of eavesdropping, like phone cloning, used to be a lot easier. Nowadays, I know of no viable generally available software tools that make it possible to listen through a phone’s microphone when it’s not being used for a call.

That said, all of the standard mobile phone spy tools listed above claim that they offer the ability to listen in on calls as they’re taking place.

Reading text messages remotely

SpyBubble, Mobile Spy and other tools also let you grab text messages, both incoming and outgoing. The messages can also be made available to law enforcement agencies by carriers — and, presumably, they’d also be available to any hacker who can access the carriers’ databases.

Downloading data

Apps like SpyBubble and Mobile Spy also deliver a large number of data types from victims’ smartphones, including complete call and SMS logs, all contacts, all email, all URLs visited on a browser (including search queries, which are displayed in URLs), all photos and videos taken with phones, and more.

If cheesy apps like those can do it, you can be sure that sophisticated hackers, spy agencies, organized crime groups and others can do it, too.

Bluejacking

Bluejacking is the use of Bluetooth wireless technology to either send messages or files to a phone, or connect to it in other ways. The benefit of Bluejacking is that the connection isn’t conveyed through a carrier, so it’s harder to track. And it’s anonymous.

Bluejacking is easy. In fact, you can download Bluejacking software from the Google Play store, or from any number of other sites.

Some software lets you find “hidden” open Bluetooth connections. And you can typically send messages, pictures or even sounds.

Although Bluejacking is primarily used in sophomoric pranks, it can also be used for social engineering, which is one of the things the characters in Person of Interest use it for.

For example, you could send fake error messages to make someone believe his phone is malfunctioning. You could then offer to fix it for him and then install spyware once you have access to the phone.

The technology is easy to use. But a skilled hacker is also skilled at tricking people, and that’s the real reason Bluejacking is such a threat.

The bottom line is that the phone hacking activity depicted on TV is exaggerated. The characters in Person of Interest remotely crack, take over and track phones far more quickly and easily than is possible in real life.

However, everything they do in the show is possible in principle, under the right circumstances. And in fact, nearly all the hacker talk and technical jargon used in Person of Interest is shockingly realistic for network TV, which usually dumbs down such language.

More importantly, I believe the show provides a valuable service by introducing the public to the kinds of things that are possible with a phone — making them aware of the fact that a modern smartphone is, above all, the Mother of All Surveillance Devices.

All mobile phone owners should know that they’re carrying a microphone, a camera, a tracking device and an automatic logging tool that records their electronic interactions with other people, as well as other activities. And they should know that these devices can convey that information without their knowledge.

Are you being watched, tracked and hacked right now? Probably not. But it’s impossible to know for sure. In fact, the only way to be 100% sure that you’re not being spied on by your phone is to get rid of it. In the meantime, watch a few episodes of Person of Interest. It’s a great show, and it could give you a healthy dose of paranoia about what your mobile phone is theoretically capable of.

 

 

Direct Link:  http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231568/Are_you_being_watched_…_by_your_phone_?taxonomyId=75&pageNumber=1

U.S.: We hacked the enemy in Afghanistan

 Articles of Interest, Crimes & Criminal Activity (Organized Crime, Narcotics, Predators, Cyber Crime, Cyber Stalking, UnSolved), National security, Terrorism, Cyber Terrorism & Related Crimes, Social Media, Technology & Digital Security, U.S. MARINES & Military  Comments Off
Aug 282012
 

U.S.: We hacked the enemy in Afghanistan

 

 Marine Corps Times
The Associated Press
Friday Aug 24, 2012

The U.S. military has been launching cyber attacks against its opponents in Afghanistan, a senior officer says, making an unusually explicit acknowledgment of the oft-hidden world of electronic warfare.

Marine Lt. Gen. Richard P. Mills’ comments came last week at a conference in Baltimore during which he explained how U.S. commanders considered cyber weapons an important part of their arsenal.

“I can tell you that as a commander in Afghanistan in the year 2010, I was able to use my cyber operations against my adversary with great impact,” Mills said. “I was able to get inside his nets, infect his command-and-control, and in fact defend myself against his almost constant incursions to get inside my wire, to affect my operations.”

Mills, now a deputy commandant with the Marine Corps, was in charge of international forces in southwestern Afghanistan between 2010 and 2011, according to his official biography. He didn’t go into any further detail as to the nature or scope of his forces’ attacks, but experts said that such a public admission that they were being carried out was itself striking.

“This is news,” said James Lewis, a cyber-security analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. He said that while it was generally known in defense circles that cyber attacks had been carried out by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he had never seen a senior officer take credit for them in such a way.

“It’s not secret,” Lewis said in a telephone interview, but he added: “I haven’t seen as explicit a statement on this as the one” Mills made.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart declined to elaborate on Mills’ comments, saying in an email that “for reasons of security . we do not provide specific information regarding our intentions, plans, capabilities or operations.”

The email said that the Pentagon’s cyber operations were properly authorized and that they took place within the bounds of international law and the “confines of existing policy.”

U.S. defense planners have spent the past few years debating that policy, asking how and under what circumstances the Pentagon would launch a cyber attack against its enemies, but it’s only recently become apparent that a sophisticated program of U.S.-backed cyber attacks is already under way.

A book by The New York Times reporter David Sanger recently recounted how President Barack Obama ordered a wave of electronic incursions aimed at physically sabotaging Iran’s disputed atomic energy program. Subsequent reports have linked the program to a virus dubbed Flame, which prompted a temporary Internet blackout across Iran’s oil industry in April, and another virus called Gauss, which appeared to have been aimed at stealing information from customers of Lebanese banks. An earlier report alleged that U.S. forces in Iraq had hacked into a terrorist group’s computer there to lure its members into an ambush.

Herbert Lin, a cyber expert at the National Research Council, agreed that Mills’ comments were unusual in terms of the fact that they were made publicly. But Lin said that the United States was, little by little, opening up about the fact that its military was launching attacks across the Internet.

“The U.S. military is starting to talk more and more in terms of what it’s doing and how it’s doing it,” he said. “A couple of years ago it was hard to get them to acknowledge that they were doing offense at all — even as a matter of policy, let alone in specific theaters or specific operations.”

Mills’ brief comments about cyber attacks in Afghanistan were delivered to the TechNet Land Forces East conference in Baltimore on Aug. 15, but they did not appear to have attracted much attention at the time. Footage of the speech was only recently posted to the Internet by conference organizers.

 

Direct Link:   http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2012/08/ap-we-hacked-enemy-afghanistan-cyberwar-082412/

United States Marine Corps creates law enforcement battalions

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Jul 272012
 

Marine Corps creates law enforcement battalions

The Marine Corps has had police battalions off and on since World War II, but they were primarily focused on providing security

Associated Press
 By Julie Watson
July 22, 2012
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. —

The Marine Corps has created its first law enforcement battalions —
a lean, specialized force of military police officers that it hopes can quickly deploy worldwide to help investigate crimes from terrorism to drug trafficking and train fledgling security forces in allied nations.

The Corps activated three such battalions last month. Each is made up of roughly 500 military police officers and dozens of dogs. The Marine Corps has had police battalions off and on since World War II but they were primarily focused on providing security, such as accompanying fuel convoys or guarding generals on visits to dangerous areas, said Maj. Jan Durham, commander of the 1st Law Enforcement Battalion at Camp Pendleton.


Marines in Bravo Company of the 1st Law Enforcement Battalion practice non-lethal crowd control techniques at the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, Calif., Thursday, July 19, 2012. The Marine Corps has created its first police battalion. The specialized force made up of 550 military police officers and 29 dogs will be able to land within three days at any hot spot on the globe to gather evidence and intelligence to take down criminal networks and do other law enforcement work. (AP Photo/Grant Hindsley)

The idea behind the law enforcement battalions is to consolidate the military police and capitalize on their investigative skills and police training, he said. The new additions come as every branch in the military is trying to show its flexibility and resourcefulness amid defense cuts.

Marines have been increasingly taking on the role of a street cop along with their combat duties over the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they have been in charge of training both countries’ security forces.  Those skills now can be used as a permanent part of the Marine Corps, Durham said.

The war on terror has also taught troops the importance of learning how to gather intelligence, secure evidence and assist local authorities in building cases to take down criminal networks. Troops have gotten better at combing raid sites for clues to help them track insurgents.

They also have changed their approach, realizing that marching into towns to show force alienates communities. Instead, they are being taught to fan out with interpreters to strike up conversations with truck drivers, money exchangers, cellphone sellers and others. The rapport building can net valuable information that could even alert troops about potential attacks.

But no group of Marines is better at that kind of work than the Corps’ military police, who graduate from academies just like civilian cops, Durham said. He said the image of military police patrolling base to ticket Marines for speeding or drinking has limited their use in the Corps. He hopes the creation of the battalions will change that, although analysts say only the future will tell whether the move is more than just a rebranding of what already existed within the Corps.

The battalions will be capable of helping control civil disturbances, handling detainees, carrying out forensic work, and using biometrics to identify suspects. Durham said they could assist local authorities in allied countries in securing crime scenes and building cases so criminals end up behind bars and not back out on the streets because of mistakes.

“Over the past 11 years of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, some lessons learned painfully, there has been a growing appreciation and a demand for, on the part of the warfighter, the unique skills and capabilities that MPs bring to the fight,” Durham said. “We do enforce traffic laws and we do write reports and tickets, and that’s good, but we do so much more than that.”

Durham said the Marine Corps plans to show off its new battalions in Miami later this month at a conference put on by the Southern Command and that is expected to be attended by government officials from Central American countries, such as Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Belize.

Defense analyst Loren Thompson said the battalions make sense given the nature of today’s global threats, which include powerful drug cartels and other criminal gangs that often mix with religious and political extremists, who use the profits to buy their weaponry.

“This is a smart idea because the biggest single problem the Marines have in dealing with low-intensity types of threats is that they basically are trained to kill people,” he said. “It’s good for the Marines to have skills that allow them to contain threats without creating casualties.”

Gary Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor and judge who teaches law of war at Georgetown University, said Marines have already been doing this kind of work for years but now that it has been made more formal by the creation of the battalions, it could raise a host of questions, especially on the use of force. The law of war allows for fighters to use deadly force as a first resort, while police officers use it as a last resort.

If Marines are sent in to do law enforcement but are attacked, will they go back to being warfighters? And if so, what are the implications? Solis asked.

“Am I a Marine or a cop? Can I be both?”  he said. “Cops apply human rights law and Marines apply the law of war. Now that it’s blended, it makes it tougher for the young men and women who have to make the decision as to when deadly force is not appropriate.”

Durham said that military police understand that better than any Marine since they are trained in both.

“They are very comfortable with the escalation of force,” he said. “MPs get that. It’s fundamental to what we do.”

Direct Link:  http://www.policeone.com/training/articles/5843519-Marine-Corps-creates-law-enforcement-battalions/
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