According to report from Politico.com, the CIA is allowing agents to do work on the side for the private sector. The new CIA policy will give large companies unprecedented access to the US government’s top intelligence experts.

Some of these active CIA agents did work for a hedge-fund consulting firm in the specialized area of “deception detection”.
Deception detection is a technique used to determine when people are lying based on clues from their conversations.

According to sources at the CIA, the policy is needed to stop the “brain-drain” of intelligence professionals in the agency, who leave for more lucrative jobs in the private sector. Former intelligence agents reportedly can double or triple their government salaries by working for corporations. The policy is intended to let CIA agents earn more money while staying in their government jobs.

So far, the CIA has not provided details as to how many agents have used it; how long the policy has been in place and what types of private sector jobs have been approved by the agency.

Federal employees are typically allowed to take side jobs in the private sector, under tight guidelines, that differ from department to department.

However, close connections between current and former CIA agents and one consulting firm reveal the level to which CIA intelligence techniques are being used by hedge funds and financial corporations.

A Boston consulting firm called Business Intelligence Advisors that specializes in deception detection was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA agents.

Some of Business Intelligence Advisors’ clients include Goldman Sachs and SAC Capital Advisors, according to sources at both companies.

Connections between BIA and the CIA are strong. The BIA name was specifically picked as a play on the CIA.

In fact, there are so many former CIA agents on the BIA payroll at BIA that some people wonder whether BIA is a private-sector extension of the CIA itself.

BIA even uses a disclaimer in some of its corporate materials to clarify that it is not run by the CIA.

Companies can retain BIA for $400,000 to $800,000 per year. BIA’s corporate clients get a variety of business intelligence services like “deception detection”.

BIA employees can teach business managers how to use the CIA’s investigative tools through a program called “Tactical Behavior Assessment.”

Tactical Behavior Assessment lets investigators to detect a person’s lies without hooking them to a polygraph machine. The target never knows that they are being tested for their honesty.

Tactical Behavior Assessment looks for verbal and nonverbal markers that people show when they are lying.

When people lie it causes a mental split in them called “cognitive dissonance,” which causes physical discomfort in them. As a result, when people lie, they tend to show signs of discomfort like squirming, fidgeting and body shifting.

BIA doesn’t just offer TBA training to companies. For a price, BIA employees will do the TBA analysis themselves.

BIA will often use their CIA-trained employees to dissect corporate-earnings conference calls.

Companies rely on these calls to put a good spin on quarterly business activities and future guidance.

BIA uses these question and answer calls to determine if a CEO or CFO is being evasive or lying to investors about the health of their business.

The business intelligence that BIA can gather from these calls is potentially worth millions of dollars to large investment firms that pay for the analysis and reports that BIA produces from these calls.

[ Source: Politico.com ]

Law enforcement officials believe that Solomon Jesus Nasser, from Greenburgh, NY, successfully used a series of online dating scams to steal $140,000 from women.

Nasser would target professional women on internet dating sites like Match.com as well as social networks with fraudulent personal stories about him being a multimillionaire; a CIA agent; a Department of Defense official; a personal friend of President George W. Bush and a high-level military commander.

After gaining their trust with his lies, Nasser managed to convince some of the women to “loan” him close to $140,000, according to prosecutors.

Nasser was arraigned on 1/28/2010 on a five count indictment that includes multiple felonies.

According to Westchester, NY District Attorney Janet DiFiore – “Soon after meeting the women, he would explain to them that he was currently in a dire financial state and that he and his ex-wife were in a contentious battle over child support or he had been sued” and that “either way, the court had frozen all his assets and he did not have money to live day-to-day.”

Nasser allegedly ran his dating scam during a three year period that ran from July 2005 to March 2008.

Nasser used dating sites, including Match.com and Plentyoffish.com to find potential victims for his scam.

According to reports, Nasser scammed over $114,000 from one victim alone. He also scammed as much as $24,764 from a second woman.

Fraud investigators from DiFiore’s department started an investigation into Nasser’s dating scam in April 2010 due to a complaint against him.

New York’s Department of Taxation and Finance assisted in the investigation, and discoverd that Nasser had avoided paying taxes with interest and penalties totaling $17,400.

Nasser has been charged with second and third-degree grand larceny, first-degree scheme to defraud and filing false tax returns, which are all felonies. He has also been charged with fifth-degree criminal tax fraud, a misdemeanor.

Nasser faces five to 15 years in jail for the top charge.

After his arraignment, Nasser was sent to Westchester County jail without bail.

[ Source: LoHud.com ]

Seminole Hard Rock Hotels & Casinos are using SAS Enterprise Miner data-mining software to analyze millions of gambler records from their customer database to target the casino’s marketing efforts.

Jeffrey Hook, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Seminole Hard Rock, said, “We know our database is worth more revenue than we’re currently getting. SAS Enterprise Miner’s broad toolset will support our entire data mining process. We can quickly and efficiently produce models that help our marketers reach the right person with the right offer at the right time.”

One of the company’s marketing plans is to invite gamblers who don’t visit their casinos regularly, but who are likely to visit the casino when formally invited.

The Hard Rock estimates that the marketing information obtained from data-mining their customer records will generate enough additional revenue to pay for the SAS software within six months.

[ Source: BusinessWire ]

Currently there are 21 states that require a DNA sample from any person who is arrested for a felony.

The state of Georgia currently requires a DNA sample only from people who are convicted of a felony, not those arrested on felony charges. However, all of that could change soon.

Georgia State Representative Rob Teihet is seeking to expand the state’s DNA database by pushing for a law that would mandate DNA testing for all people who are arrested for a felony.

Some Georgia lawmakers believe that expanding the DNA database would help prevent repeat felony offenses.

It currently takes a crime lab six months to compare and match DNA samples from the database. Georgia already has a backlog of DNA matching cases that need worked by the state’s crime technicians.

Representative Teilhet is currently a candidate for Georgia Attorney General. At a recent news conference he stated that around 130 crimes could have been stopped in 3 states if DNA had been collected after the arrest.

Representative Teilhet plans to introduce the expanded DNA collection legislation this week.

[ Source: WRDW.com ]

A US Justice Department automobile database to fight car theft and fraud is getting closer to reality.

The National Motor Vehicle Title Information System, authorized by Congress 17 years ago, currently contains 77 percent of all automobile title records in the United States. The database currently has over 300 million VINs ( vehicle identification numbers ).

The public database is designed to protect people from purchasing a vehicle that was salvaged in one state and retitled in another state without the identification of “salvage” on the new title.

Some autos that are salvaged in one state could get a clean title in another state.

Over 1 million vehicles are stolen every year in the US and many get new “cloned” titles in other states.

Once all states submit their records to the DOJ and the new database is complete, it is estimated it will save between $4 billion and $11 billion annually in fraud.

State agencie will be able to search the database before issuing a new vehicle title, to make sure the vehicle wasn’t stolen, scrapped or salvaged.

Individuals and car dealers will be able to search used vehicles online for a small fee.

Law enforcement will also have access to the database to search for stolen vehicles.

In addition to state government information, the auto database will pull records from insurance companies, auto recycling companies, junkyards and salvage businesses.

The DOJ database will complement information that can be obtained from commercial auto data vendors like CarFax and Experian Automotive.

Jim Burch, acting director of the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Assistance, said the database will help protect the public from title fraud and stop stolen vehicles from getting retitled as well as make it more difficult for auto thieves to clone or conceal stolen vehicles.

You can visit the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System site at VehicleHistory.gov.

[ Source: DetNews.com ]

The rise of social networks and social media has put millions of people within a few degrees of separation of each other and made it easier for them to post and share volumes of personal data online.

Many people who use social networks like Facebook and MySpace are more than willing to publish any and all personal information about themselves for people to see.

The willingness of people to share this personal information online has created a virtual goldmine of data that can be mined and analyzed by others for a large number of intriguing uses.

Everyone from financial services companies to marketers are collecting this personal data from social networks for their own new and unique uses.

Recently, Roger Thompson, a researcher at AVG, discovered that his credit card company was using data from his Facebook profile. He wrote about a situation where they asked him to confirm information about himself for credit security reasons, and one of the questions they asked him involved the identity of his daughter-in-law. According to Richard Thompson, this personal data had not been provided to his bank by him and is only publicly available on his Facebook profile.

Reportedly, some number-crunching credit card companies and financial firms are working on computer algorithms that analyze a credit applicant’s social network of friends in the belief that people who are a credit risk tend to associate with one another.

These examples and others suggest that companies are aware of the growing levels of personal data on social networks, and are starting to experiment with how it can be analyzed for business intelligence.

According to Dallas Lawrence, head of the social media practice group at Levick Strategic Communications, 2009 saw an explosion in the number of people joining and using social networks and social media sites. As a result, he believes that companies will collect this personal data and combine it with new search technology to analyze the “trillions of data points” that are now available to them.

The industry that is driving much of the interest in social media data mining is advertising and marketing.

Until social networking came along, these data-hungry companies were limited to collecting mostly anonymous information. Social networks filled in the missing piece; identifying who is reading what online and buying what on e-commerce sites.

The next step will be the analysis of your online friends’ data for, example, scoring credit and other data-mining uses that involve the “birds of a feather flock together” idea.

Social network information is fast becoming the subject of court cases.

Just as data mining of social media information is new, so is the legal idea that people might have some rights over their online information, according to attorney Elise Dieterich.

Although there are a couple of bills moving through the US House and Senate that address data accountability, trust and uses by third-party data brokers, people should assume that the personal information they post on social networks can and will be used for reasons they may have never intended.

[ Source: TechNewsWorld ]

AT&T claims they have fixed a problem on their mobile network that placed misdirected Facebook account cookies on the wrong user’s mobile devices.

Mobile users on the AT&T network who experienced the problem reported that when they visited the Facebook social network, they were instantly logged into other people’s Facebook accounts and had to all of the other person’s Facebook account information.

Last weekend, an AP news story reported that a mother and her two daughters in Atlanta, GA all received access to other people’s Facebook accounts when they recently visited the social network from their mobile devices on the AT&T network.

AT&T later confirmed that network server problems caused the Facebook security glitch. AT&T’s investigation revealed that the problem involved “misdirected cookies” that were placed on the wrong user’s mobile device.

AT&T has implemented new security fixes on their mobile network that they claim will stop a repeat of the server problem.

AT&T worked with Facebook to disable user ID information as an option for automatic log-in on the mobile network.

Again, we can only imagine the Verizon ads that could be produced attacking this AT&T security debacle.

[ Source: The Register ]

Responding to privacy concerns from groups regarding the length of time and amount of information that search engines store on users, Microsoft announced that it will remove the IP addresses associated with Bing searches after six months.

User data from Bing searches had previously been saved by Microsoft for 18 months.

Microsoft has agreed to delete cookie IDs and cross-section IDs associated with search engine queries as well.

Microsoft’s decision to remove user search data comes as a result of privacy concerns expressed by the Article 29 Working Party, a European privacy group, regarding the length of time that search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing store people’s search information.

The Article 29 Working Party published privacy guidelines in the past for protecting search users’ personal information.

The group has specifically requested that search engine companies shorten the length of time that they save IP addresses and other search information.

[ Source: eWeek ]

A new data mining system, similar to the ones used by Homeland Security agencies, is being used by the New York State Department of Taxation to catch tax fraud by individuals and businesses.

The use of data mining to catch tax cheats is the brainchild of Bill Comiskey, deputy commissioner fo the Office of Tax Enforcement in New York.

Comiskey has spent most of his professional life investigating financial fraud and he collected a record $3 billion in tax revenue for New York during his first year as deputy tax commissioner ( $2 billion more than the year before he took the job ).

New York’s data mining system will pull personal and financial data on people and businesses from a broad range government and third party sources, including insurance company data, mortgage application data, wholesale invoices to businesses and other public and private records sources.

The department of taxation is even planning to use transaction records from credit card companies in their tax mining system.

This continuous flow of personal and business data will then be compared with reported income on tax filings and analyzed for warning signs of tax fraud.

Nowadays, nearly every bit of personal and business data is being mined by New York tax officials to go after the cash-based “underground economy” in the state.

The new data mining system is said to make New York trendsetter in the use of computer analytics to catch unreported income on tax filings.

Aiding Comiskey’s data mining efforts is the fact that the New York state legislature recently made it a crime to lie to tax fraud investigators.

Criminal tax fraud investigations in New York grew from 581 during the 2006 – 2007 fiscal year to 2078 in the 2008 – 2009 fiscal year.

In addition, staffing at New York State’s Department of Taxation has grown from 2,562 in 2006 to 3,060 currently and the department is hiring 111 new tax auditors.

The new data mining system is actually based on a data analysis tool that is used by IBM to design software that was then customized for the state of New York’s tax mining purposes.

Comiskey wants to see his tax data mining system contain as much personal and business information as possible, which can then by sorted and analyzed to raise red flags on possible tax fraud.

[ Source: Syracuse.com ]

An Indiana state bill that would stop public access to a gun permit database is working its way through the state legislature.

The Indiana bill was introduced after complaints about news reports that used the public database to publicize problems with the process by which gun permits are granted.

Indiana’s House Natural Resources Committee unanimously approved the bill last Thursday.

Indiana State Representative Dave Cheatham (D), chairman of the panel that voted on the bill, said, “Individuals have a right to privacy.”

The author of the bill, Representative Peggy Welch, D-Bloomington, said she was contacted by voters who were worried that their personal privacy could be compromised by similar news reports.

Representative Welch also stated: “It wasn’t just people who owned guns,” she said. “It was people who didn’t own guns and said, ‘I don’t like the idea that somebody can know I don’t have a permit, which may make them think that I don’t have a gun and come and rob me.”

The Indianapolis Star reported on numerous incidents where state police issued gun permits to people with a violent or criminal record.

Although Representative Cheatham said he doesn’t want news reporters to have access to names and addresses of gun permit holders in Indiana, he stated that he totally supports the media putting pressure on government officials if gun permits aren’t issued properly.

[ Source: ChicagoTribune.com ]