It was the bribery for public contracts that caught my eye, but his vision for a Michigan Defense Corridor.
This investigation was ongoing since 2009, which means there are many more indictments to be unsealed.
Stay tuned because I am quiet sure there is much more to this case in dealing with databases and surveillance.
Former Detroit-Based Technology Company CEO Indicted for Multi-Year Bribery Scheme
The Detroiter, Capital of Defense, Perry Mehta, founder, president and CEO of FutureNet Group, a Detroit-based provider of environmental, construction and technology services to the military and mainstream commercial customers, typifies the sort of business leader envisioned for the Michigan Defense Corridor
The former chief executive officer of FutureNet Group Inc., a Detroit-based information technology company, was indicted yesterday for his role in orchestrating a scheme to bribe an official from the City of Detroit to obtain benefits for FutureNet, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
Parimal D. Mehta, 54, of Northville, Michigan, is charged in an 11-count indictment filed in the Eastern District of Michigan with five counts of honest services mail and wire fraud, one count of federal program bribery, and five counts of unlawfully using interstate facilities to commit bribery under Michigan law.
According to the indictment, from 2009 through August 2016, Mehta made multiple cash payments to Charles L. Dodd, the former Director of Detroit’s Office of Departmental Technology Services, including two cash bribes hand-delivered by Mehta to Dodd in the restrooms of Detroit-area restaurants in 2016. Mehta is also alleged to have employed Dodd’s family members at FutureNet and its subsidiaries. Dodd previously pleaded guilty to bribery on Sept. 27, 2016.
The indictment alleges that Mehta paid these bribes to Dodd in exchange for preferential treatment for his company, FutureNet, which received approximately $7.5 million from Detroit in 2015 and 2016. According to the indictment, Mehta and FutureNet benefitted from Dodd’s influence over the administration of city contracts, expenditures under those contracts, and the hiring and selection of contract personnel. The indictment further alleges that Mehta obtained confidential information about Detroit’s internal budgets for specific technology projects.
The charges and allegations contained in the indictment are merely allegations. The defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
The case is being investigated by the FBI’s Detroit Division. Trial Attorneys Robert J. Heberle and James I. Pearce of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section are prosecuting the case.
Congress has just released the Unclassified Report to Congress Pursuant to Section 241 of the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sactions Act of 2017 Regarding Senior Foreign Political Figures and Oligarchs in the Russian Federation and Russian Parastatal Entities.
From knowing what I know, I took a chance see if this has anything to do with the international investigation of child welfare fraud.
It has only been a few days since 34-year old Anna Kuznetsova replaced scandal-plagued Pavel Astakhov as Russia's children's rights commissioner, but she has already become embroiled in a controversy of her own.
Anna Kuznetsova, Russian Children's Rights Commissioner spouting U.S. adoption propaganda
Kuznetsova, who replaced Astakhov due to the fallout over his tendency to make callous, off-the-wall comments, is under the microscope for her alleged views on reproduction.
In a 2009 interview with Penza Medical Portal, a psychologist working as a "pre-abortion consultant" identified as Anna Kuznetsova discusses abortions and telegony, a widely debunked theory that every sexual partner a woman has ever had can physically and emotionally influence a child she gives birth to.
The theory -- which dates back to ancient Greece and was popular in the Middle Ages -- is often used to persuade women not to have premarital sex.
"Based on the relatively new science of telegony, we can say that the womb's cells have information-wavelength memory," the interviewee is quoted as saying. "So these cells remember everything that happened in them. For instance, if a woman has several partners, there is a significant chance of a baby being born weakened due to the mixing of information. This fact has an especially strong influence on the morals of a future child."
"An abortion, in its turn, is also a serious shock for a wanted baby, because the cells remember the fetus's fear before abortion -- they remember death."
Kuznetsova, a psychologist and mother of six children, told the RBK news portalshe "doesn't remember" saying anything like that, and suggests that the topic was not something she was qualified to discuss.
"You know, it's a story of quite dubious origin," she said. "Besides, it seems like a qualified biologist, at the least a PhD, is speaking [in the interview]. I don't express myself like that," Kuznetsova said.
One 'Positive' Note
Her husband, Aleksei Kuznetsov, a senior priest in Penza Oblast, some 600 kilometers southeast of Moscow, also cast doubt on the interview.
"Some of our Penza journalists like to embellish their creations and add their thoughts to the article," he wrote on Facebook, speaking about local reports on the 2009 interview. Kuznetsov added that telegony is not a science and neither he, nor his wife "recognize its postulates, because there is a clear position of the church on the matter."
He did, however, find one positive note.
"I am happy that the commentators, without realizing it, promoted the topic of abstinence and morality :)," Kuznetsov wrote.
Tatyana Popadeva, the journalist who conducted the 2009 interview, confirmed that she had interviewed Kuznetsova, and defended her work while noting that people can change their mind or forget things from their past.
"We are not tale-tellers, we don't fantasize, don't embellish, don't invent," she said of journalists in an interview with the local 1PNZ news portal. "However, I want to protect my compatriots Anna and Aleksei Kuznetsov. Human memory is imperfect.... Can you imagine how many books you can read in seven years? How many of them can be scientific? In this time anyone of us could change their mind and worldview by 180 degrees."
Popadeva offered to conduct a new interview with Kuznetsova, noting the importance of her new position guaranteeing a precise account of the conversation. Popadeva concluded by saying: "Lying, it is a great sin for anyone."
The extent to which Kuznetsova's position has changed over the last seven years has been of little importance to many on Russian social media.
"Telegony of womb cells: do not forget, do not forgive!" tweeted financial analyst Slava Rabinovich.
Amid the uproar, Pavel Chikov, a prominent Russian lawyer and rights advocate, alleged a new potentially damaging revelation about Kuznetsova. In a tweet, he claimed that she was a member of a group on VKontakte titled: "HIV/AIDS -- the biggest mystification of the XX century."
The face Rod Rosensteinmakes when
covering up Child Trafficking & Fraud
The Department Justice published its guidance for the U.S. Attorney on human trafficking, November 2017.
The Guidance was put out by Rod Rosenstein.
I went through the entire document.
I found the term "foster care" on four occassions in the two sections on child traffickig, where one instance was in a footnote.
The following is how DOJ looks upon children of "The Poors" (always said with clinched teeth).
Do you know how many U.S. foster kids
were trafficked last year?
Neither does the DOJ, they do not
care about children of "The Poors"
(always said with clinched teeth).
"Many sex trafficking victims come from fatherless and unstable homes, some with a history of foster care, homelessness, and/or physical or sexual abuse. Sex traffickers exploit these vulnerabilities by creating a warped “father-child” relationship with victims and manipulating their need for love and acceptance."
"Bereft of parental attention, many victims find in gangs or sex trafficking organizations the “love,” structure, discipline, and sense of belonging that they crave, which can make gang-controlled victims especially uncooperative with law enforcement."
Allowing this level of propaganda to be promulgated through the U.S. Department of Justice is worthy of criminal prosecution, itself.
This federally funded dogma is professed in universities, through the teaching of parallel constructions to generate even more revenue for CPS, keeping its service providers fiscally solvent.
He did not confer or coordinate guidance for the U.S. Attorneys to do a conjugal collaboration with HHS or any other legislative committees or community based agencies outside the child welfare system, which demonstrates the malifide scienter of the DOJ, upper echelon groupthink.
God forbid there is guidance to go after Medicaid fraud in child welfare, or the NGOs which lay claim to helping children like the Clinton & Gates Foundations, to name a few.
How dare Rod Rosenstein command a national, neigh, an international narrative by berating the worthiness of a child in society with the prejudices of his own standards of moral turpitude.
The only thing omitted for this report was for Rosenstein to allow the contributors of the guidance to call these child victims of sex trafficking "sluts & whores".
"[B]ereft of parental attention" is nothing but a code phrase for measurement of a person's worth in society, based upon their socioeconomic status, or what I like to call forced migration to take over the land.
Children are removed by Child Protective Services for "failure to provide for the necessary needs of the child" more readily understood as poverty, or codified through DOJ activities as economic abuse and neglect.
These children, whether fatherless or homeless, do not just fall into human trafficking, as most times it is a last resort to eat for the day.
What about the children being used as lab rats in foster care?
What about the children who are running away from foster care because of the rapes, tortures, attempted suicides, successful suicides and murders?
What about the youth who are lucky enough to age out of foster care alive, to face a life on the streets with no education, no medical, no housing, no support systems?
The report, below, fails to mention anything about children being trafficked through the U.S. child welfare system, but soon, the entire world media will.
The DOJ and FBI have been covering up child trafficking in the U.S. and its international operations for decades.
Child trafficking is not only about sex.
The child welfare industry is much, much darker and Rod Rosenstein has intentionally refused to do a damn thing about it, except to cover it up.
Remember, the DOJ Human Trafficking Guidance for U.S. Attorneys is below.
More than 1 million children, according to the International Labour Organization, are exploited each year in the commercial sex trade. IndyStar columnist Tim Swarens, through the support of a Society of Professional Journalists fellowship, spent more than a year investigating a lucrative business where children are abused with low risk to buyers or traffickers, despite tougher laws and heightened international awareness of the scourge. Google, Eli Lilly and Co., and Indiana Wesleyan University provided additional support for this project.
This is the first of 10 columns in the EXPLOITED series, which explores the cultural and economic forces that contribute to commercial sexual exploitation.
On the day she met Marcus Thompson, the girl later told the FBI, she had been ready to leap from a bridge to end her life.
She was only 15, pregnant and alone on the streets.
And in this wounded child, Thompson saw a means to make money. He promised that if she left her small Illinois town with him, he would make her a model. Grasping for hope, she climbed into his truck.
But the promise was a lie.
Instead, in the summer of 2015, Thompson and his wife, Robin, forced the girl on a nightmarish six-week trek across the southern United States. Photographed in suggestive poses and marketed online, she was sold out of hotel rooms and truck stops to any man with the money and the desire to buy sex.
The justice system eventually would work well in this case in several respects. The victim was rescued and provided with treatment. The traffickers who exploited her were caught, pleaded guilty and were sent to prison.
But what of the men who paid to rape this child? What consequences did they suffer?
Not a single one was ever charged.
That same breach of justice is the norm in thousands of trafficking cases. About 10,000 children a year suffer the horrors of commercial sexual exploitation in the United States. Each victim on average is forced to have sex more than five times a day.
Yet the buyers who fuel the child sex trade are seldom held accountable. Most just blend back into their families, jobs and neighborhoods. Until the next time.
In the Thompson case, the victim, too young for a driver’s license, told the FBI she was beaten once for attempting to escape and was threatened with being “thrown to the alligators” if she tried to run again. Marcus Thompson, according to federal authorities, raped the girl five times.
Still, the child retained enough independence to say no when a buyer demanded anal sex. But her refusal came at a brutal price. The man who bought her complained to the man who sold her. And she was beaten again.
At a hospital in St. Louis, the abuse finally ended when the girl was identified as a sex-trafficking victim. The Thompsons, based on her descriptions, were arrested.
Marcus Thompson is now serving a life sentence. Robin Thompson, who helped place the online ads and book the hotel rooms, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
At Robin Thompson’s sentencing, Chief U.S. District Judge Michael Reagan described the couple’s crimes as among the worst he had seen in 16 years on the federal bench.
In her victim impact letter, read by Reagan at the sentencing, the girl wrote, “It’s hard to wake up every day and remember the people I had sex with.”
In the past 16 months, I’ve witnessed the worst of human behavior while reporting for this project, one that’s taken me across eight countries on five continents. I’ve talked to 6-year-old trafficking victims, visited a shelter where the oldest survivors were only 11, met a 5-year-old boy living with his parents in a squalid brothel in India and interviewed survivors who were raped by hundreds of men.
Yet the ordeal of that one child from Illinois — beaten for saying no — has haunted me in particular.
It’s stuck in my mind because it exposes a harsh truth: In the sex trade, buyers and sellers view the children they torment as property.
And property cannot say no.
“Despite 20 years of efforts, the sexual exploitation of children in travel and tourism has expanded across the globe and outpaced every attempt to respond at the international and national level... As a result, the risks of child sexual exploitation are increasing.”
— The Global Study on Sexual Exploitation of Children in Travel and Tourism, 2016.
***
This project began with a question: Who buys a 15-year-old child for sex?
The answer: Many otherwise ordinary men. They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse.
“They’re in all walks of life,” a 17-year-old survivor from the Midwest, trafficked when she was 15, said about the more than 150 men who purchased her in a month. “Some could be upstanding people in the community. It was mostly people in their 40s, living in the suburbs, who were coming to get the stuff they were missing.”
The scale of the trade indicates that it’s not a small number of men who pay to have sex with kids. A 2016 study by the Center for Court Innovation found that between 8,900 and 10,500 children, ages 13 to 17, are commercially exploited each year in this country. Several hundred children 12 and younger, a group not included in the study, also suffer commercial sexual abuse.
The researchers found that the average age of victims is 15 and that each child is purchased on average 5.4 times a day. I’ve interviewed victims who were forced to have sex with more than 30 men in a week; more than 100 in a month.
To determine a conservative estimate of the demand, I multiplied the lower number of victims (8,900) identified in the Center for Court Innovation study by the rate of daily exploitation per child (5.4), and then by an average of only one “work” day per week (52). The result: Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.
The number of identified victims in the U.S. is on the rise. The National Human Trafficking Hotline recorded a 35 percent increase in reports in 2016. Most of the cases involved sex trafficking and many of the victims were children.
Brad Myles, CEO of the Polaris Project, which operates the hotline, said the increase largely can be attributed to better identification of trafficking victims and heightened public awareness that the hotline exists. Yet, Myles said, "The vast majority of victims are still not being found."
International numbers are even more staggering. Sex trafficking, according to the United Nations’ International Labour Organization, is a $99 billion-a-year global industry. The exploitation of more than 1 million children accounts for more than 20 percent of those profits.
And there's evidence that the child sex trade is growing. ECPAT International, a research and advocacy organization, concluded in 2016 in a first of its kind global study that more children than ever are at risk of abuse.
Mark Capaldi, ECPAT’s lead researcher, said in an interview at the organization’s Bangkok headquarters that rising global incomes, cheaper air travel and better internet access have fueled the increase in demand. In short, it’s cheaper and easier than ever for adults to exploit children.
Another reason for the growing exploitation: Buyers face little risk. “You’re unlucky if you get caught,” Bjorn Sellstrom, the head of INTERPOL’s Crimes Against Children unit, said in Lyon, France. “It’s fairly free of risk to travel to another country and abuse children.”
It’s a low-risk crime for domestic abusers as well. In 2015, Congress strengthened federal anti-trafficking laws to provide prosecutors with more tools to go after sex buyers. Prosecutions have only modestly increased as a result.
A U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman, in a written response to questions, said the primary objective is to focus “our limited resources on apprehending the traffickers, who pose the most imminent threat to the victims.”
She provided examples of about 30 buyers, including former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle, convicted on federal charges in 2015 and 2016. But she said state and local prosecutors are in a better position than the federal government to hold accountable those who pay to exploit children.
Like the federal government, state and local jurisdictions tend to use sting operations in which undercover officers pose as exploited children to stop buyers. Although such operations net thousands of would-be sex buyers each year, most of the men arrested plead down to lesser crimes.
And it’s rare for police and prosecutors to pursue buyers after they've paid to abuse children. That’s true even in the most nauseating of crimes.
In 2016, police rescued a 12-year-old Texas girl who was held captive in a hotel room in a wealthy suburb of Nashville, Tenn. Authorities said the child, found with bruises and scratches on her face, had been advertised on Backpage.com and sold to sex buyers for a month in the Knoxville, Memphis and Nashville areas.
A 36-year-old Nashville man, Tavarie Williams, was charged with multiple counts of trafficking, kidnapping and rape. He is awaiting trial. But, as in the case of the 15-year-old from Illinois, none of the men who paid to sexually abuse a middle school-age child were ever charged. (A spokeswoman for the Davidson County (Tenn.) District Attorney's Office said authorities were unable to identify any of the buyers, who could have faced felony charges).
"That child will have to fight the stigma of what happened to her for the rest of her life," said Alex Trouteaud, director of policy and research with Demand Abolition, a Massachusetts-based organization that works to reduce demand for commercial sex. "Meanwhile, the buyers will never be held accountable. It's what we call the culture of impunity."
Prosecutors note that they face several obstacles in pursuing charges, including the need to show that a buyer knew or should have known that the person he paid to exploit was underage. Victims — traumatized, frightened, frequently dependent on drugs and alcohol — often don't make strong witnesses. Prosecutors also must weigh whether putting a child on the stand, where defense cross examinations can be rough, will further wound the victim.
It’s tempting to put buyers who exploit children in a box — to say that all of them are pedophiles, a small percentage of the population driven by a deep sickness. But researchers and survivors say that’s not the case.
ECPAT International researchers found that the great majority of men who pay to exploit children are opportunists. They don’t set out specifically to buy sex with a child, but neither do they walk away when faced with the temptation.
Survivors I interviewed reported similar experiences. One of them, exploited when she was 15, said only two men turned and left the motel room when they saw how young she was. Even those two didn’t notify police about the ongoing abuse of a child.
More than 100 other men who paid to have sex with her stayed. “They just didn’t care” about her age, she said.
In a room full of sex buyers, enrolled in a court-ordered program in Seattle, I asked: “Do you ever think about the life stories of the girls and women you purchased?”
The men appeared uncertain about how to answer. Then a former once-a-week buyer, arrested for attempting to purchase sex from a police officer posing as a 15-year-old girl, said, “I don’t want to know how the sausage is made.”
A piece of meat. A commodity to be consumed.
Not a child. Not a life.
Later in this series, we’ll further explore the factors that drive men to buy sex with children. But let’s take time now for a dose of inspiration.
We’ll find it in a sewing room in Mumbai, India, where a group of remarkable women are waiting to greet us.
Priya, her body ravaged by HIV, was barely alive the day Seena Simon, director of Care and Development for the Cincinnati-based Aruna Project, found her on the street in Mumbai’s Grant Road red light district.
Trafficked at age 13, Priya had worked in the brothels for 15 years before she was kicked out because of her illness.
“She shared with me that in one night 15 to 20 men used her. That was her life,” Simon, who’s worked with trafficking victims in Mumbai for the past 15 years, said. “She didn’t have the strength or energy to do that work. So she was not earning any money for the brothel keeper and they didn’t want her.”
Told by doctors that Priya wouldn’t survive, Simon found the still-young woman a bed in a hospice, where she went to die.
Except Priya didn’t die.
►7 ways to help fight human trafficking
Her white blood count began to improve. She began to eat, to regain weight and energy. After three months, Priya left the hospice for an after-care home.
At around that time, Simon had been talking to Ryan Berg, an American from Cincinnati who worked for an NGO with operations in India, about the need to provide jobs in a sheltered work environment for trafficking survivors.
“Employment was the gap,” Simon said. “Once they were trained in some kind of skill, we sent them for work, but they couldn’t cope with the pressure. Finish the deadline, finish the targets — they couldn’t do it. There was an internal conflict and many of them failed. And some I know went back to the red light district.”
From that need, and from Berg and Simon’s shared passion to help trafficking victims, a business plan was born. In the U.S., Berg founded The Aruna Project, a Cincinnati-based nonprofit that stages 5K runs in multiple states. Registration fees and other proceeds from the races are used to pay salaries for trafficking survivors in Mumbai.
In Mumbai, Simon manages production and counsels survivors, who are employed to make athletic bags and headbands distributed to participants in Aruna Project races in the U.S. More upscale bags also are sold online.
In 2015, Aruna hired its first survivor, Priya. Simon said the company pays better than market rate salaries and benefits. It also provides group homes for those survivors who are not yet ready to live on their own.
The fight against human trafficking inspires incredible passion among many people, but that passion is sometimes misdirected. More than a few nonprofits working to combat trafficking are less than effective. And when I first heard about The Aruna Project’s approach, I was skeptical. Can 5K runs in America really make a difference for women living in India?
But then I stepped onto the production floor in Mumbai, and I saw the women’s smiles. It’s always humbling for me as a man to meet a survivor. In the sewing room, IndyStar visuals editor Mykal McEldowney and I were surrounded by 22 survivors, women like Priya who had suffered unspeakable horror.
The women answered our questions through a translator and asked their own questions of us. They laughed and giggled and showed off, with clear pride, the bags and other products they had made. They also told us about their dreams for the future — one wants to become a fashion designer, another a tailor.
And a young woman named Ruby, no more than five feet tall, hopes to become a singer. When we asked if she would sing for us, she smiled and chose a worship song, a hymn of thanksgiving.
As her clear, strong voice filled the room, she sang not about the pain of the past but of hope for the future.
Next: ‘The smile on our face is fake’: Shattering the Lolita fantasy
There is a time to come and a time to go. This is the right time, for me, to leave politics and return to the justice system. Full statement here → pic.twitter.com/7I8AApqvs1
Spartanburg, SC - Rep. Trey Gowdy (SC-04) released the following statement announcing he will leave Congress at the end of this term and return to work in the justice system:
"Words cannot adequately express my gratitude to the people of South Carolina for the privilege of representing them in the House of Representatives. The Upstate of South Carolina has an incredible depth and breadth of assets including numerous women and men capable of representing us. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to serve in the People's House and-prior to Congress-to advocate on behalf of justice in our court systems.
I will not be filing for re-election to Congress nor seeking any other political or elected office; instead I will be returning to the justice system. Whatever skills I may have are better utilized in a courtroom than in Congress, and I enjoy our justice system more than our political system. As I look back on my career, it is the jobs that both seek and reward fairness that are most rewarding.
There is no perfect time to make this announcement, but with filing opening in six weeks, it is important to give the women and men in South Carolina who might be interested in serving ample time to reflect on the decision.
To my wife, Terri, and our two children, Watson and Abigail: thank you for all you sacrificed, missed, or did alone so I could serve as both a prosecutor and a member of the House.
To my parents and my three sisters: thank you for having confidence in me and high expectations for me, even when I did not.
To the women and men I worked with at the South Carolina Court of Appeals, the United States District Court, the U.S. Attorney's Office, the 7th Circuit Solicitor's Office, and in Congress: thank you for the texture, depth and joy you added to life.
To the law enforcement officers and victims of crime: thank you for personifying courage.
To those across South Carolina and our country who, over the past 7 years, have expressed words of encouragement, accountability and even criticism: thank you. All are needed for those in public service.
The book of Ecclesiastes teaches us there is a time and a season for all things. There is a time to start and a time to end. There is a time to come and a time to go. This is the right time, for me, to leave politics and return to the justice system."
Pakistani Man Indicted for Selling 'StealthGenie' Spyware App
A Pakistani man has been indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia for allegedly conspiring to advertise and sell StealthGenie, a spyware application (app) that could monitor calls, texts, videos and other communications on mobile phones without detection. This marks the first-ever criminal case concerning the advertisement and sale of a mobile device spyware app.
Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Dana J. Boente of the Eastern District of Virginia and Assistant Director in Charge Andrew McCabe of the FBI’s Washington Field Office made the announcement.
“Selling spyware is not just reprehensible, it’s a crime,” said Assistant Attorney General Caldwell. “Apps like StealthGenie are expressly designed for use by stalkers and domestic abusers who want to know every detail of a victim’s personal life – all without the victim’s knowledge. The Criminal Division is committed to cracking down on those who seek to profit from technology designed and used to commit brazen invasions of individual privacy.”
“StealthGenie has little use beyond invading a victim’s privacy” said U.S. Attorney Boente. “Advertising and selling spyware technology is a criminal offense, and such conduct will be aggressively pursued by this office and our law enforcement partners.”
“This application allegedly equips potential stalkers and criminals with a means to invade an individual’s confidential communications,” said FBI Assistant Director in Charge McCabe. “They do this not by breaking into their homes or offices, but by physically installing spyware on unwitting victim’s phones and illegally tracking an individual’s every move. As technology continues to evolve, the FBI will investigate and bring to justice those who use illegal means to monitor and track individuals without their knowledge.”
According to allegations in the indictment, Hammad Akbar, 31, of Lahore, Pakistan, is the chief executive officer of InvoCode Pvt Ltd, the company that advertises and sells StealthGenie online. Akbar and his co-conspirators allegedly created the spyware, which could intercept communications to and from mobile phones, including Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, and Blackberry Limited’s Blackberry. StealthGenie was undetectable by most users and was advertised as being untraceable.
Akbar was charged in the indictment with conspiracy, sale of a surreptitious interception device, advertisement of a known interception device and advertising a device as a surreptitious interception device. He was arrested in Los Angeles on Sept. 27, 2014, and is expected to appear before a magistrate judge in the Central District of California later today.
StealthGenie was hosted at a data center in Ashburn, Virginia. On Sept. 26, 2014, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia issued a temporary restraining order authorizing the FBI to temporarily disable the website hosting StealthGenie.
The indictment alleges that StealthGenie’s capabilities included the following: it recorded all incoming/outgoing voice calls; it intercepted calls on the phone to be monitored while they take place; it allowed the purchaser to call the phone and activate it at any time to monitor all surrounding conversations within a 15-foot radius; and it allowed the purchaser to monitor the user’s incoming and outgoing e-mail messages and SMS messages, incoming voicemail messages, address book, calendar, photographs, and videos. All of these functions were enabled without the knowledge of the user of the phone.
Akbar and his co-conspirators allegedly programmed StealthGenie to synchronize communications intercepted by the app with the customer’s account so that the customer could review intercepted communications almost immediately from any computer with access to the Internet. To install the app, a purchaser needed to obtain physical control over the phone to be monitored for only a few minutes. The purchaser could then review communications intercepted from the monitored phone without ever again having physical control over the phone. Akbar and others alleged designed SteathGenie to be undetectable to users of the phone.
According to allegations in the indictment, the business plan for the development, sale and advertisement of StealthGenie stated that the target population for the marketing of the app was “[s]pousal cheat: Husband/Wife of (sic) boyfriend/girlfriend suspecting their other half of cheating or any other suspicious behaviour or if they just want to monitor them.” Language and testimonials on the StealthGenie website focused significantly on potential purchasers who did not have any ownership interest in the mobile phone to be monitored, including those suspecting a spouse or romantic partner of infidelity. The indictment alleges that Akbar and his co-conspirators fabricated the testimonials.
An indictment is merely an allegation, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law.
This case is being investigated by the FBI’s Washington Field Office, and prosecuted by Trial Attorneys William A. Hall Jr. and Peter V. Roman of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay V. Prabhu of the Eastern District of Virginia.
FBI Announces Contract Award for Next Generation Identification System
The FBI announced today it has awarded Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions the contract for the design, development, documentation, integration, testing, and deployment of the Next Generation Identification (NGI) System. The contract will consist of a base year and the potential for up to nine option years. The NGI System will expand on the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division’s current Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), which is primarily a fingerprint-based identification system operated and maintained in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The NGI System will provide improvements to current services and new functionality for the criminal justice, national security, and civil communities.
The industry of identification systems is moving beyond dependency on a unimodal (e.g., fingerprint) biometric identifier and is beginning to incorporate multimodal biometrics such as iris and facial imaging. Due to the many issues associated with identity theft, lost and stolen documents, and the ability to spoof standard name-based identity management systems, coupled with the rapid advances in technology and the nation’s focus on combating terrorism, there are increasing needs for new and improved identification services. In line with this trend, the NGI System will advance the integration strategies and indexing of additional, lawfully authorized, biometric data, providing the framework for a future multimodal system which will facilitate biometric fusion identification techniques. This framework will be expandable, scalable, and flexible to accommodate new technologies and emerging biometrics standards, and will be interoperable with existing biometric systems.
It is important to note that the NGI system will not expand the categories of individuals from whom the fingerprints and biometric data may be collected; however it will allow for the collection of additional biometric data from criminals and terrorists. Although fingerprint data will remain the primary means of identification, the collection of additional biometric data will be used for investigative purposes and to assist in the identification process.
“IAFIS has been a fantastic tool in support of criminal justice and the war on terror. Our partners on the Advisory Policy Board (APB) and National Crime Prevention and Privacy Compact Council have defined a need for more modern technology that supports their current mission requirements. NGI will give us bigger, better, faster capabilities and lead us into the future. We have added additional capabilities to our current system, and are working with the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense, and State and the international law enforcement community in making our communities and nation safer. NGI will leverage the biometrics expertise in the north-central West Virginia area,” said Thomas E. Bush, III, Assistant Director of the FBI’s CJIS Division.
Committed to providing the highest quality biometric identification techniques, the FBI has employed a shared management approach with its partners through the CJIS APB and the National Crime Prevention and Privacy Compact Council to define the NGI System requirements and capabilities. These groups include representatives from criminal justice, national security, and civil agencies throughout the nation.
Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions will be developing the foundational framework which includes new technologies, emerging biometric standards, and interoperability with existing biometric systems. Additionally, Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions, along with the FBI, will conduct trade studies to support a multi-biometric framework as the new capabilities are phased in according to schedule throughout the development cycle. The NGI System will enhance fingerprint and latent print processing services, and increase system availability, accuracy, and capacity. The NGI System will provide enhancements to the FBI’s Interstate Photo System by expanding the photo repository and providing photo search capabilities. Improvements will further expand disposition submission capabilities. Furthermore, the IAFIS repository will be enhanced to improve its infrastructure, provide single identity management, and support new biometric modalities such as iris imaging. In addition, a National Palm Print System will be created to provide a centralized national repository for palm print data to allow for comparisons of latent palm prints left at crime scenes against that repository.
A full and open competition was used for the award of the NGI contract. The FBI and Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions will take an incremental approach to the implementation of the NGI System.
