FBI may ease cyber agents entry

Complex challenges prompt rethink on recruitment

WASHINGTON, April 6, (AP): Aspiring federal agents who can hack a computer with ease but can’t shoot their way out of a paper bag could soon find the FBI to be more welcoming.

In a series of recent speeches, FBI Director James Comey has hinted the bureau may adjust its hiring requirements to attract top-notch cyber recruits, the better to compete with private sector companies who can lure the sharpest technical minds with huge salary offers.

He’s floated the idea of scrapping a requirement that agents who leave the FBI but want to return after two years must re-enroll in the bureau’s storied but arduous Quantico, Virginia, training academy. He’s also lamented, half-jokingly, that otherwise qualified applicants may be discouraged from applying because of a fondness for marijuana.

“We will find people of integrity who are really smart, who know cyber — and can’t do a pushup. Or we’ll find people, maybe they can do a pushup, they’re smart and they can do cyber — but they want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” the FBI director has said.

The rethinking on recruitment comes as the FBI confronts increasingly complex cyber challenges, including crippling state-sponsored attacks, and as it’s racing to develop more sophisticated techniques for combating internet-based threats.

Law enforcement has struggled to break into encrypted cellphones of criminal suspects and the Justice Department sued Apple last year after agents could not access a locked iPhone used by a mass shooter in San Bernardino, California. Though an unidentified third-party vendor ultimately came forward with a tool to open the phone, law enforcement officials remain concerned about electronic terrorism recruitment that occurs through encrypted channels and out of sight of investigators.

Even crimes that investigators have tackled for decades, like child pornography, have grown more complicated as suspects trade images through hidden internet browsers that shield their locations and identities. The Justice Department has been developing ways through bulk hacking to uncover the users’ locations, though defendants have repeatedly — and with some success — challenged the use of that tactic.

“The world’s not coming back. The old school stuff that I did 20, 30 years ago in the State Police and the FBI, all those crimes nowadays have a major cyber component to it,” said Robert Anderson, a retired FBI executive assistant director who oversaw cyber investigations.

Talent

Comey has suggested the FBI may need to build its own university to groom cyber talent and questioned whether every member of a cyber squad actually needs to be a gun-carrying agent.

“Our minds are open to all of these things because we are seeking a talent — talent in a pool that is increasingly small. So, you’re going to see us experiment with a number of different approaches to this,” Comey said last week at a gathering of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

He’s floated different possible solutions, but he’s returned several times to the idea of waiving the requirement that people who want to return to the FBI after two years outside the bureau re-enroll in Quantico.

“Our people leave, go to the private sector, discover it’s a soulless, empty way to live — and then they realize, ‘My life is empty, I need moral content in my work,’” Comey said, light-heartedly and to laughter, in a recent speech

at the University of Texas at Austin.

Also: HAMILTON, Ontario:

A Canadian man accused in a massive hack of Yahoo emails said Wednesday he’ll live with his parents and forgo access to phones and any electronic equipment if he’s allowed out on bail.

Officials allege that Karim Baratov poses an “extremely high flight risk” because of his alleged ties to Russian agents.

But his lawyer Amedeo DiCarlo said that Baratov has never been to Russia and he will not flee if freed on bail. Baratov arrived in court for his bail wearing a black shirt and sweat pants with his legs shackled. His parents provided him with a dress jacket.

“Flight risk is the issue,” DiCarlo told reporters after arriving at the courthouse in a chauffeured Rolls Royce. “We are going to have measures put in place so that is not going to happen.”

Baratov’s parents have agreed to act as their son’s sureties. His father, Akhmet Tokbergenov, has agreed to turn off the internet in the family home if the court requests it.

“Believe me I will create such conditions that even jail will look like paradise to him,” Tokbergenov said in court through a Russian interpreter.

Baratov, 22, said he registered an internet business in 2014 that made about $81,000 ($110,000 Canadian) that year registering websites, renting web spaces and preventing hack attempts on web servers. He said he made less in in 2015 and 2016. He was not asked directly about the allegations against him.

US law enforcement officials call Baratov a “hacker-for-hire” paid by Russian Federal Security Service members. He has Kazakh origins, arriving in Canada in 2007 and becoming a citizen in 2011.

Business raided in visa probe:

Federal authorities on Wednesday raided a Los Angeles-area business suspected of cheating the US government visa program to obtain green cards for wealthy Chinese investors.

Investigators searched the office of the California Investment Immigration Fund in San Gabriel as part of the fraud investigation.

Under a US government program, foreign investors who commit at least half a million dollars to job-creating projects in designated areas can apply to obtain green cards. (AP)

The California fund sought green cards for more than 100 Chinese investors for construction projects that were never built, according to federal court filings.

“As a result of the fraudulent scheme, many foreign nationals were able to improperly obtain US green cards through the EB-5 visa program, even though those foreigners did not in fact truly invest in US businesses, nor were new American jobs created,” FBI Special Agent Gary Chen wrote in the papers.

Chen also wrote that some of the $50 million raised through the scheme was refunded to investors while their immigration applications were pending or used to buy personal homes for Victoria Chan, an attorney, and her father Tat Chan, who ran the fund.

In some instances, the fund fronted the money for people who were not legitimate investors, he wrote. (AP)