• US goes on offense against digital piracy

    The U.S. government is cracking down on Internet piracy. This week, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had seized the domain names of five websites that it says were being used to sell counterfeit goods and illegally distribute copyrighted media content. NBC News' Rich Gardella reports.

    By Rich Gardella and Jamie Forzato, NBC News

    Amid growing calls for more government regulation of the Internet, the United States is conducting what it calls "a sustained law enforcement initiative aimed at counterfeiting and piracy" – an effort that already has resulted in arrests and the seizure of 125 websites.

    Ask anybody who uses a computer if they've ever downloaded or streamed media content for free on the Internet, and the answer most likely will be yes. The U.S. government and the American media industry say as much as a quarter of this kind of media traffic violates U.S. copyright law, and both are getting serious in their attempts to turn off the spigot.

    But detractors of the crackdown say that the government shouldn’t side with industry and attempt to restrict what flows across the Internet.

    (A similar debate unfolded this week at the G8 summit in Paris, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy arguing that governments need to impose more rules of the road on the Internet, and tech leaders like Google’s Eric Schmidt and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg warning that could stymie innovation and squelch free expression.)

    The most recent skirmish in the escalating conflict occurred this week, when the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) announced that its Homeland Security Investigations unit had seized the domain names of five websites that it said were being used to sell counterfeit goods or illegally distribute copyrighted materials, including media content.

    "American business is threatened by those who produce counterfeit trademarked goods and pirate copyrighted materials," ICE Director John Morton said Wednesday in a press release announcing the seizures. "From counterfeit pharmaceuticals and electronics to pirated movies, music, and software, IP thieves undermine the U.S. economy and jeopardize public safety. Our efforts through this operation successfully disrupt the ability of criminals to purvey counterfeit goods and copyrighted materials illegally over the Internet."

    The crackdown – dubbed “Operation In Our Sites" – is being spearheaded by ICE’s National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, working in coordination with U.S. attorneys' offices across the country. The initiative has so far seized the domain names of 125 websites since it began last year, ICE says, effectively shutting them down.

    Of the seized website domains, approximately 25 – including two of the five announced this week – were hosting or linking to copyrighted media content illegally, the government says. (The rest have been selling counterfeit goods, everything from shoes and clothing and accessories to DVDs of movies and TV shows to pharmaceutical products.)

    Free downloading or "streaming" media content from Internet websites – including movies, TV shows, sports events and music – is a big and rapidly growing business. While an exact number is difficult to pin down, available data and estimates show that millions of streamings and downloads occur daily. 

    A lot of that traffic is legal – downloading or streaming a full episode of a current television program from an authorized and sponsored service, such as a network's website, for example.

    But the U.S. government and the American media industry claim a significant amount of it is illegal. A lot of the media content streamed and downloaded is copyrighted – owned by the person or entity that created it – and a lot of the services providing access to the material don't have permission from the copyright holder to do so.

    The government and the media industry say U.S. copyright law (specifically, 18 USC 2319), states that distributing such content without permission from the copyright holder is a crime – copyright infringement.  They generally use a simpler name: theft – of intellectual property, or "IP theft" for short.

    It’s been more than a decade since the online music-sharing service Napster made headlines for distributing copyrighted content without permission.  At the service's peak, millions of Napster users traded and downloaded millions of data files containing copyrighted music, free of charge. The music industry, through some of its largest companies, sued over copyright infringements and lost revenue. After losing in federal court, Napster shut itself down in 2001. (Its name and now-legal music service lives on as a part of the electronics retailer Best Buy.)  Despite Napster’s legal troubles, online services providing unauthorized access to copyrighted media content have continued to ply the Internet, though not on such a large scale.

    Study: Nearly a quarter of streams, downloads illegal
    The media industry seeks to quantify IP theft as a problem.  

    It commissioned a study that found that almost one-quarter of all that streaming and downloading is illegal.  In a January report, the Internet intelligence and research company Envisional of Cambridge, England, found that "across all areas of the global internet, 23.76 percent of traffic was estimated to be infringing" on copyrighted material.  

    (The report, "An Estimate of Infringing Use of the Internet," was commissioned by NBCUniversal Media LLC, part owner of msnbc.com. The media industry's powerful lobby, the Motion Picture Association of America, supports its conclusions. Microsoft, another parent company of msnbc.com, also is a leading advocate of stricter enforcement of digital copyright protections.)  

    The industry claims that all that copyright-infringing media traffic translates not only to lost revenue, but also to lost jobs and wages for media industry workers.

    The Motion Picture Association of America claims illegal streaming and downloading cost American workers 375,000 jobs and $16 billion in earnings every year.

    A public service announcement, originally produced for the City of New York to help protect its film and television business, with support from NBCUniversal, makes that point bluntly.

    Comedian Tom Papa appears on a New York City sidewalk as a vendor hawking illegally downloaded "free movies." As passers-by express interest, Papa gestures to a woman standing beside him carrying audio equipment, who looks a bit forlorn. 

    "These are illegally downloaded movies," Papa says, "and because of that people like her are losing their jobs."

    "Whether you get it off the streets or off the Internet,” Papa concludes, now facing the camera, "digital piracy and product counterfeiting are not victimless crimes." 

    The federal government has adopted that message, releasing the public service announcement to the public through its own media office, and linking it to some of now-shuttered websites whose domains it has seized.

    A warning to surfers
    Visitors to these websites are redirected first to a government warning banner bearing the seals of the Department of Justice, the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center and Homeland Security Investigations. The banner states that the government has seized the domain name, that it is illegal to reproduce or distribute copyrighted material without authorization and that willful offenders risk prosecution for criminal felony violation copyright law. If convicted, the banner warns, even first-time offenders "will face up to five years in federal prison," plus "restitution, forfeiture and fine."  

    William Ross, the unit chief for investigations at the National Intellectual Property Rights Center, said Operation In Our Sites is about enforcing copyright law and protecting the U.S. economy from intellectual property theft, which the government considers a national threat.

    "We try to protect the economic interests of U.S. industries and manufacturers," Ross said. "We're protecting them from other people taking their ideas and selling them."

    In some cases, the government has arrested and charged website operators. In February, it arrested and charged a Texas man who had streamed copyrighted sports events on one seized site, channelsurfing.net, claiming he'd collected $90,000 in online advertising revenue.

    Most of the seized websites appear to be strictly online operations, and their operators were difficult to contact.  But NBC News found one willing to talk: Waleed Gadelkareem, an Egyptian businessman.

    The U.S. government seized his domain – torrent-finder.com, which was based in the U.S. – in November. He says his site was getting 100,000 hits a day and generating revenue from online advertising. 

    But Gadelkareem claims he wasn't doing anything wrong. He said his site was a just a search engine that linked to other sites with such content, just like other big search engines do.

    "It's a dirty game they are playing. and it's totally unfair," said Gadelkareem, interviewed via Skype from his home office in Alexandria, Egypt. "I don't try to sell anything. I'm a search engine. I don't have any database of any copyrighted materials."

    Ross said he could not discuss Gadelkareem's case, an ongoing investigation. But he said every website the government acted against was violating American copyright law. 

    After the government seized his U.S.-based domain, which was run from a server in Texas, Gadelkareem changed its name slightly, to torrent-finder.info, and moved it to a server based in Sweden.  He continues to operate it from Egypt.

    Ross said the U.S. is working with foreign governments to shut down sites if they move out of the U.S. "We keep going after them,” Ross said, “no matter how many times they come back up."

    Proposed legislation in Congress would give the U.S. government the power to shut down copyright-infringing websites in other countries – even if they mainly link to copyright-protected material without permission.

    Businessman says he was wrongly shut down
    Waleed Gadelkareem sees big business behind the government’s efforts.

    "The USA government is trying to shut it down," Gadelkareem said, "for the sake of a group of rich businessmen.  That's what I think. That's (what) everybody thinks."

    His American lawyer, David Snead, who represents and advises online service providers who distribute content on copyright issues, agrees.

    "The government is doing industry's bidding here," Snead said. "I think that it is wrong for prosecutorial resources to be used on behalf of any one industry."

    There is vigorous debate in the various precincts of the Internet about whether the government's crackdown and seizures are appropriate. 

    The media and entertainment industry – including NBCUniversal – has long advocated more government enforcement of intellectual property violations.

    Ross said the motivation for the government's efforts to crack down on unauthorized distribution of media content is simply to enforce copyright law and to protect the U.S. economy and jobs.

    He says the media industry itself takes down far more websites hosting illegal copyrighted content than the government does, using its own mechanisms.

    "They have a lot more resources, a lot more manpower to do those type things than we have within the government,” Ross said. “So what we're doing is a very small percentage."

    As the government and industry crack down on supply, what will happen to demand – the computer users who aren't distributing unauthorized media content but are consuming it, who initiate all those unauthorized downloads and streams?

    NBC News recently discussed these issues with six college students at the University of Maryland. 

    "I think it's common, especially among college students,” said one, “because it seems anonymous and it seems like something you can get away with."

    All six students we talked to at the University of Maryland/College Park agreed that hosting or providing access to copyrighted content without the permission of the copyright holder was illegal. 

    They made a distinction between illegal and wrong, however, with only one saying it was wrong.

    "If it violates the law," the student said, "then, yeah, I think it should be enforced."

    But while five of the six thought that consuming copyrighted media content without the permission of the copyright holder was illegal, none thought that was wrong.

    "I just don't think that it's wrong enough for me to stop doing something that's so easy and so available to me," said another, expressing the view of the majority.  "I just don't feel it's wrong."

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  • CIA team searches bin Laden compound

    By Michael Isikoff
    NBC News National Investigative Correspondent

    A CIA forensic team entered into Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbotabad on Friday and spent several hours looking for evidence that had been left behind during the May 2 raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.

    "They did not leave empty-handed," one U.S. official told NBC News.

    The unpublicized search took place about the same time that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Islamabad meeting with Pakistani officials to express mounting concerns about that country's lack of cooperation on counter-terrorism. 

    Access  to the bin Laden compound had been negotiated by CIA Deputy Director Michael M. Morell during a trip to Pakistan last week. The agreement was cited by one Pakistani official as a sign that, at senior levels, both sides are working hard to move past their differences.   

    The CIA team arrived by helicopter about noon in Pakistan and was accompanied by Pakistani ISI officers as they looked for any remaining evidence at the compound, the officials said. In particular, CIA officials were looking for vaults or other items that might be hidden behind walls or inside floors, as well as any possible tunnels that could allow visitors to leave and enter undetected. The search ended about 6 p.m. and the helicopter flew the CIA team from the compound.

    U.S. officials are not overly optimistic that the search will produce major pieces of evidence. Since the May 2 raid, the compound has been under the control of the Pakistani military and the assumption is local authorities would have already searched through and removed any important items that the Navy SEALs had left behind. "The odds are that a lot of good stuff might be left are pretty low," said a U.S. official.

  • Opportunity lost: How US backed off in hunt for Mladic

    By Robert Windrem
    NBC News Investigative Producer for Special Projects

    With the arrest Thursday of Ratko Mladic, the two most-hunted fugitives of the Bosnian civil war have been captured, 16 years after being indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal on genocide charges.

    For years, the U.S. believed Mladic was hiding in Serbia under the protection of hardliners who consider him a hero, and Belgrade's media said Mladic was arrested at the home of relatives in Lazarevo, a village some 60 miles northeast of Belgrade close to the northern Serbian town of Zrenjanin.

    But back in the 1990s, after the indictment, the U.S. had an opportunity to “snatch” both Mladic and former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic but declined.

    At the time, U.S. intelligence officials involved in the discussions told NBC News, the U.S. decided not to go after them even after key allied commando and intelligence units trained for such a mission.  In fact, NBC News learned from the officials that U.S. units trained with British commando units throughout 1997 at a British base in Hereford, England, and that U.S. intelligence assets had great success in tracking the two men on an almost daily basis.

    The first plans were drawn up in March or April 1997, not long after Karadzic himself had passed through U.S. checkpoints unhindered.

    Under the Dayton Accords, the war criminal issue had been left deliberately muddled.  The mandate of the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia and Herzegovina, SFOR, had allowed it to detain war criminals only if its units encountered them in the course of their duties and if they had enough military backup to do the job.  In other words, a suspected war criminal would practically have to turn himself in at the SFOR camp at Tuzla.

    Karadzic's boldness at the checkpoint angered many in NATO.  So planning began for operations that were to target major war criminals particularly Karadzic and Mladic, according to military sources.  The original intention – much debated – was to go after all the higher-profile ones at once ... a big sweep-up operation. (It is unclear if President Bill Clinton originally signed off on this plan or not.  Clearly, authorization for planning and training was given at some level though – not necessarily presidential.)

    In addition, NBC NEWS has learned:

    • The NATO commander then, Gen. George Joulwan, approved of using SFOR forces to plan and execute these snatches.
    • Six or seven major players – countries/organizations – were working on these plans, say U.S. officials.
    • The sweep was set to go in June 1997.  Some U.S. Special Operations Forces actually left their bases elsewhere and showed up in Europe ... but Clinton decided against the plan at the last minute. The troops deployed for the operation came home.
    • Other nations – particularly Britain – wanted to go after war criminals. So the British told the U.S. they were going to target war criminals they knew to be living in Prijedor, a Bosnian Serb stronghold and the scene of horrific ethnic cleansing. Clinton did eventually sign off on the U.S. intelligence and other support for the British operation.
    • Prijedor was a trial balloon, to see what the Serb response would be like.

    Deadly shootout, wavering afterward
    The raid in Prijedor took place July 10, 1997, and led to a shootout. British troops served the first secret indictments. Simo Drljaca, the brutal former police chief of Prijedor, was shot dead resisting arrest, according to SFOR, “liquidated,” according to the Serbs, who gave him a state funeral.  Another suspect, Milan Kovacevic, was arrested in the same raid and flown to The Hague.

    The British wanted to do more. One U.S. official claimed Britain was "shoving the plan in our face" because it felt the U.S. was "dragging its feet in agreeing to execute the whole plan."  Planning began for a September operation. Joulwan was pushing it. 

    However, others in the U.S. administration claimed the British plan was too ambitious and the U.S. felt different options provided different advantages.  One Pentagon official says that the U.S. favored more manageable operations as opposed to a large coordinated action, which would be much more difficult to pull off.  Some other U.S. agencies, including the State Department, had lobbied for a big sweep-up.

    A military source, however, believed that the political will for this overall mission was intermittent – especially concerning a  large-scale operation.   Many in the Pentagon believed that for an operation to be effective, an element of surprise was important, and after Prijedor, the Serbs became nervous, fearing more missions. "You'd pretty much have to wait 60-90 days anyway to regain any such element of surprise,” the source said.

    While nothing was approved, U.S. Special Operations Forces nevertheless began training for such "Big Fish" missions. U.S. Navy Seals and the Army Delta Force trained for months in Hereford with the British SAS on very specific targets.  There was also planning and training in Germany, apparently in Grafenwoehr and Stuttgart.

    Tracking the men
    The decision not to go ahead with the mission was not based on a lack of intelligence. 

    Karadzic and Mladic were tracked intensely from the time of the Dayton Accords in 1995 onward, but inside the CIA's Balkan Task Force, there was always uncertainty about whether the U.S. wanted to grab either of them, fearing the implications.

    "The CIA always wanted to know where they were, but pinpointing was the problem," said one official. 

    The U.S. usually knew the general area where they were hiding on a daily basis, but tracking them to a particular village or home wasn’t easy.  On some days, intelligence was better than others, but the U.S. usually knew within a 20-mile radius where they were, said one official.

    Karadzic and Mladic usually moved three times a week, sometimes every day, mostly at night. And they moved independently.

    Often, they could be found operating near Tuzla ... even when U.S. troops were operating there.   One official described the lack of a will to grab them as "very frustrating."   They were also known to operate near Mostar, which is on the Bosnian-Croatian border.  They often surprised the U.S. with their arrogance.

    The primary means of intelligence was electronic eavesdropping, known as "sigint" or "signals intelligence" in the spy trade.

    "Humint [human intelligence] is obviously the best, but it was very hard. We never had good humint.  They operate in small villages and villagers were tight-lipped. They are both too afraid and too loyal to tell us anything valuable," said one source.

    Still the U.S. did have some human sources, and U.S. officials believed Karadzic was probably more vulnerable to a U.S. penetration of his bodyguards since they were non-military men and paid in hard currency. 

    Arsenal of eavesdropping
    The U.S. also knew from intelligence gathering that there were increasing strains between the two men and their cadre.

    Mladic and Karadzic and their people used cell and landline phones to communicate, and U.S. intelligence took advantage of that.  "We had the cell phones covered, we had the land lines covered. They used either, we got it."

    The primary means of intelligence collection was the RC-135 "Rivet Joint" aircraft.  A converted Boeing 707 loaded with antennas to pick up conversations, it flew regular missions out of Mildenhall AB, near London loitered over Bosnia at 35,000 feet for up to 10 hours as it recorded conversations and then flew back to England. There was at least one Serbo-Croatian linguist on board the aircraft to sift through communications, separating important calls from the routine traffic.  Further analysis is done on the ground as well as back in the U.S..

    The U.S. also used U-2 spy planes and satellites to eavesdrop and photograph suspected locations.  In addition, the CIA flew Predator drones out of Albania, and covert ground stations were set up in Bosnia and Croatia to help track their communications. 

    All the intercepts were fed into National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., for enhancement and to the CIA for analysis.

    Mladic and Karadzic knew they were being tracked.  At one point in 1996, Mladic ordered his men to write the words, "F*** YOU" in English, in the snow near the town of Brcko, so it could be seen by spy satellites.  The image was shown to Clinton in the White House and he got a good laugh out of it, said one official who was in the room.

    Long-sought war crimes fugitive caught in Serbia

    The bottom line, some officials believed, was that the U.S. was not interested in grabbing Mladic or Karadzic.  The U.S. knew doing so would complicate the Dayton Accords and the Balkan situation in general and could hurt relations with Russia, which protected the Serbs.

    "I never heard from the principals that we have to find them," said one official involved in tracking them. "There was no priority getting the top guys.  The priority was to grab the lower-level guys to satisfy public concerns about war crimes."

    The CIA, however, kept track "in case the policy changed, and in the Clinton administration, foreign policy, especially Bosnia, was subject to the polls. We feared that one day, someone – like the president – would demand to know where these guys were."

    Several members of the Balkan Task Force remembered when Air Force Capt. Scott O'Grady was shot down and a delegation was called to the White House Situation Room to brief the president on where O'Grady might be.  "The president blew up, demanding to know why O'Grady couldn't be found when the U.S. was spending $30 billion on intelligence."

    The CIA was very frustrated by the White House's lack of interest in grabbing war criminals, knowing the level of war crimes alleged to have been committed. "I read the interviews with rape victims and it was one of the worst things imaginable," said one CIA official.

  • CIA to search bin Laden compound

    Pakistan has agreed to let the CIA send a forensic search team into the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALS to search for any al-Qaida materials that might have been left behind.

    By Robert Windrem
    NBC News investigative producer for special projects

    U.S. officials confirm the Washington Post report that Pakistan has agreed to allow the CIA to send a forensics team to examine the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed as Islamabad tries to repair relations with its largest benefactor.

    Under the agreement, the CIA has "permission to use sophisticated equipment in a search for al-Qaeda materials that may have been hidden inside walls or buried at the site," the Post reported.

    The U.S. apparently also will get access to any materials gathered by Pakistani security forces after the May 2 raid in Abbottabad. NBC News has reported that "operational logs" of al-Qaeda were retrieved by the Pakistanis in the days after the assault on the compound. Most, if not all, of the materials seized by the Navy SEALs that morning were grabbed from bin Laden's bedroom office. The SEALS simply didn't have time to conduct a more thorough search.

    There is speculation that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may visit Pakistan this weekend. So, it's not a bad thing for Pakistan to grant this another access in advance of her rumored trip.

  • Assange, Ellsberg: Manning prosecution an assault on journalism

    By Rich Gardella of NBC News and Alex Johnson of msnbc.com

    The government's case against Pfc. Bradley Manning is really about keeping government secrets safe by silencing whistle-blowers across the U.S. government, WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg contended Wednesday.

    Manning, 23, an Army intelligence analyst, is charged with leaking thousands of classified documents and diplomatic cables. It is widely believed he provided the documents to WikiLeaks, which began publishing them last year in cooperation with The New York Times and other news organizations. 

    Assange has never said Manning was the source, but he has made the soldier's treatment in U.S. custody — confined alone in a small cell at a Marine base in Virginia until he was transferred to Leavenworth prison in Kansas last month — a personal crusade, alleging that it was intended to humiliate him and send a message to would-be government whistle-blowers.

    "I don't know whether it (the source) was Bradley Manning or not, but he is only person behind bars on that allegation," Assange said in explaining why he's been so dogged in defending Manning. 

    Joined on a conference call with reporters by Ellsberg, Manning's attorney and representatives of the Bradley Manning Support Network, Assange said the government's treatment of Manning amounted to using a "sledgehammer to crack a nut." 

    The government is trying "to terrorize whistle-blowers into not revealing information to the public," he charged.

    Ellsberg, who triggered a Supreme Court freedom-of-the-press judgment when he leaked the Defense Department's secret history of the Vietnam War to The Times in 1971, called Manning a hero. He said Manning was "accused of being the one person who obeyed his oath to the Constitution" by disclosing government "crimes that could be prosecuted" during the war in Iraq and its aftermath. 

    The bigger danger, Ellsberg contended, is that if Manning is convicted, the government would be emboldened to further pursue journalists for reporting leaked material. He and Assange pointed to U.S. prosecutors' decision this week to subpoena Times reporter James Risen to testify at the trial of former CIA operative Jeffrey Sterling, who they allege leaked classified information that Risen used in his 2006 book about Iran's nuclear operations, "State of War."

    The Justice Department has cited the 1917 Espionage Act in prosecuting Sterling and at least four other alleged sources of classified material used in various news reports, raising alarms among First Amendment activists that the Obama administration is pursuing a governmentwide war on whistle-blowers.

    The administration's interpretation of the act is a fundamental threat to investigative journalism and to "any journalist who has a byline above classified material," Ellsberg said.

    Assange added, "The Obama administration's attempts to expand 1917 Espionage Act ... will put a chill across all investigative journalism in the U.S."

    But Assange also leveled scathing criticism at U.S. journalists, essentially saying they were wimping out in the face of unconstitutional federal pressure. 

    Saying U.S. coverage of Manning's case had been "appalling and salacious," Assange said: "Either the mainstream press collapses as an effective organ, and all sources are forced to deal only with WikiLeaks, or the U.S. is a free society that upholds values."

    He added: "From our perspective — from WikiLeaks' perspective — either of these outcomes works."

  • Alaska will miss deadline for Palin emails, but hold on a bit longer...

    By Bill Dedman
    Investigative Reporter, NBC News

    With the state's deadline of May 31 fast approaching for the long-delayed release of 25,000 emails sent between former Gov. Sarah Palin (and her husband) and state officials, the Alaska governor's office on Tuesday sought another delay.

    This delay will be brief, and the records should be ready by June 10, the governor's office said in asking for permission from the state attorney general for a new delay.

    As we have reported, the delays so far have amounted to a couple of weeks longer than the time than Sarah Palin spent as governor of Alaska.

    News organizations requested the emails under the state public records law back in 2008, when the relatively unknown Palin burst onto the national scene, and when it became known that she and her staff were using personal Yahoo accounts to conduct state business outside the usual reach of public records requests. The records to be released include emails that went between Palin or her husband and about 50 top state officials. The state at first quoted prices as high as $15 million for the records, but the price is now down to 3 cents a page.

    The office of the current governor is still going over the emails, deciding which ones should be withheld under exemptions to the public records law.

    When the emails are released, msnbc.com plans to put them online in a public archive, in cooperation with other news organizations, as it did with a batch of Todd Palin emails last year. Those emails showed the vigorous role the "First Dude" played in the operation of state government. Here is that archive.

    The Anchorage Daily News has the details here.

    And here is our previous coverage, with details on the requests, the state's explanation of the delays, and the shifting estimates of the costs.

    The full background on our request, and the delays, is in our previous articles, below:

     

  • We want your story ideas, and better yet, your proof

    By Bill Dedman
    Investigative Reporter, NBC News

    The news reporters at msnbc.com and NBC News want to hear your story ideas, and today brings a good example of how we try to follow up on the best of those.

    Bob Sullivan, ace consumer reporter, has a report today on U.S. taxpayers who are having to wait for their income tax refunds because of a snafu at the IRS. Promise after promise by the IRS has turned out not to be trustworthy. You can read Bob's story here on his Red Tape Chronicles blog at msnbc.com.

    That idea came in from a reader who filled out our brief story-suggestion form — and gave us enough information to pursue the story.

    Often that's the key: detail and documentation.

    A news story idea isn't a rant: The bankers are evil. Well, what exactly are we supposed to do with that? At msnbc.com, the new website, we're in the reporting business, not the commentary business.

    A story idea is an intersection of newsworthiness and opportunity: This particular banker who sits on the Federal Reserve board is doing X, Y and Z, and here are the documents to prove it.

    Newsworthiness can be in the eye of the beholder, but a story needs to have a mix of significance and interest to rise to the top of our to-do list.

    Opportunity means there is enough specific information to allow us a chance to actually go get the story.

    Many other good ideas have come in from readers. Some have hit our webpages already (the whiistleblowing witch grounded by the TSA) and others are in the works.

    We can never get to them all. But we're working on the best of them, and the very best come with details, phone numbers and documents.

    What sort of ideas do we want? We're about investigative reporting on topics that matter: corruption or conflicts of interest, broken systems and lax enforcement, abuses by institutions and individuals with power. Holding accountable those who possess power in the world, whether that's national government, state or local government, nonprofits, or the press itself.

    Here's how to reach us:

  • Think your boss is difficult? Bin Laden was a micromanager, too

    By Robert Windrem
    NBC News investigative producer for special projects

    The writings of Osama bin Laden, much in the news the last couple of days, amount to a single notebook of "10 or so pages" in his handwriting, a senior U.S. intelligence official says.

    Rather than a "journal" or a "diary," the official described it as an "outline" or a "white paper" on al-Qaida's plans. "It set up an agenda for subsequent discussion and correspondence," he added, some of it with his subordinates and some with affiliated groups. In fact, there is other written and digital material that relates to the 10-page notebook.

    The singular impression of analysts, said the official: "He was down in the weeds ... a micromanager."

    The U.S. does not yet know if the material was written in one or more sittings, and the official declined to say how recently it was written.

    Exploitation of the full cache of material is still under way. At the beginning of the process, 10 days ago, the official said the CIA estimated exploitation would take "a few weeks total if we go around the clock" The explotiation is in fact going 24 hours a day, with updates every morning and a number of regular intelligence reports — "dozens" on some days — distributed throughout the day.

    As for additional videos, the official said a lot of them were what we have seen already: unreleased propaganda, outtakes, and news reports that had been recorded. Bin Laden's own messages were recorded at the compound, and it appears that some production and post-production work were done elsewhere by al Shahab, the al-Qaida media arm.

    When asked if the material seized is helping the U.S. identify locations of other al-Qaida leaders, the official declined to comment.

     

     

  • White House couldn't find replacement for Mueller

    By Michael Isikoff
    NBC News National Investigative Correspondent

    President Obama’s decision to seek a two-year extension for FBI director Robert Mueller’s term follows a lengthy White House search for a replacement that yielded no strong candidate to replace him, according to two sources close to the selection process. Mueller's 10-year term was due to expire this summer.

    White House lawyers, working closely with Vice President Joe Biden’s office, spent months scouring the country looking for potential candidates to take the premier law enforcement job in the country.

    But “there was no obvious great candidate,” said one source intimately familiar with the selection process who asked not to be identified.

    Some of the possible candidates the White House search team focused on said they weren’t interested, the sources said. One of these was Merrick B. Garland, a highly regarded U.S. Court of Appeals judge in D.C. and former senior Justice Department official during the Clinton administration. He had been a runner-up for the Supreme Court vacancy filled last year by Elena Kagan. 

    James B. Comey Jr., a widely praised former deputy attorney general in the Bush administration who now has a lucrative position with a large hedge fund, had also indicated he didn't want the position, the sources said.

    At the same time, other officials had made known they wanted to be considered for the post, including at least two Obama administration officials — Transportation Security Administration chief John S. Pistole and National Counterterrorism Center chief Michael E. Leiter — as well as a number of former senior law enforcement officials in previous administrations.

    But in the end, White House officials were not overwhelmed with the choices available to them and decided instead to ask Mueller, a nominee of former President George W. Bush,  to stay on for another two years in a position he has held since just before the September 11 terror attacks.

    Another widely mentioned candidate, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago with a strong background in counterterrorism cases, was thought to be too much of a wild card, the sources said. It’s not clear how seriously Fitzgerald was considered by the White House. But administration officials may also have been concerned that Fitzgerald would spur too much opposition from Republicans, because of his role in the prosecution and conviction of  I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aide,  when he served as special counsel in the CIA leak case.

    “I think there was a feeling that Dick Cheney would call in every chit he had to torpedo” Fitzgerald, said Garrett M. Graff, the author of a new book about the FBI, “The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror,” who has followed the FBI selection process closely.

    The difficulty in filling the position illustrates how sprawling the FBI job has become in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, said Graff. In the past, presidents have mostly turned  to federal judges and prosecutors to fill the position, but the FBI has since evolved into an international agency whose mission of combating terrorism and collecting intelligence has become as important as its traditional law enforcement functions.

    In a White House statement, Obama said Mueller “has set the gold standard for leading the bureau,” adding that “Given the ongoing threats facing the United States, as well as the leadership transitions at other agencies like the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency, I believe continuity and stability at the FBI is critical at this time.”

    The decision to retain Mueller also insures that the FBI will not be rudderless or headed by a newcomer during the upcoming tenth anniversary of 9/11 — a date that could be even more tense given al-Qaida's threats to retaliate for the killing of Osama bin Laden. Mueller was scheduled to travel to Pakistan last week but canceled his trip after the news broke about bin Laden's death. A senior bureau official indicated that given the heightened threat environment in the aftermath of the Bin Laden raid, it was not a good time for the FBI director to be out of the country.

    Congress passed a law imposing a 10-year limit on the FBI director's term to prevent a single director from serving effectively for life as head of such a powerful agency, as did the bureau's most famous director, J. Edgar Hoover. For Mueller's term to be extended, Congress must approve Obama's request. But in light of the bipartisan respect for Mueller on Capitol Hill, that is not likely to be a problem.

  • US officials: Pakistan hasn't shared detailed bin Laden logs left behind

    By Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News chief Pentagon correspondent, and Robert Windrem, NBC News investigative producer for special projects

    The U.S. Navy Seals who killed Osama bin Laden recovered a number of the former al-Qaida leader’s journals at the Pakistan compound where he was hiding, but they were forced to leave behind detailed logs of bin Laden and al-Qaida activity that the Pakistanis have not yet shared, senior U.S. officials told NBC News on Wednesday.

    It was not clear how much material was left behind when the Seals evacuated the compound in Abbottabad on May 1, but senior U.S. military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it could have been a substantial amount. 

    Senior U.S. intelligence officials, also speaking on condition of anonymity, described the journals that were retrieved by the Seals as showing that bin Laden was active in planning al-Qaida operations. 

    "It shows he had a clear focus on attacking the United States, and a clear interest in how he might be able to insert operatives into the United States without alerting authorities,” one said. 

    In a previous Open Channel post, another U.S. intelligence official described the journals as showing that bin Laden was “fully engaged to carry out other 9-11 attacks.”

    The second official said the Seals als recovered correspondence between bin Laden and senior al-Qaida officials concerning ideas for attacks.

     The official said the correspondence was both one-way --  directives for the other al-Qaida leaders and affiliates – and two-way -- responses to suggestions made by his subordinates.

     In the correspondence, bin Laden would often discuss places he would like attacked, the best times to attack and even which personnel he thought would be best for particular jobs. 

     "He was always trying to refine his approach," said the official.

    The official also said that bin Laden would correspond through a chain of command, that the messages would be sent via courier to the organization's No. 3, its operations director, most recently Abu Atia, a North African who took over a year ago when longtime bin Laden aide Sheikh Sayed was killed in a drone attack. Atia would then distribute the message using his own courier network, the official said. 

    The official said there was little if any material in the journals in which Bin Laden reflected on his role or his "meaning of life" other than some poetry. 

  • Evidence indicates bin Laden 'fully engaged' in plotting attacks

    Evidence retrieved from Osama bin Laden's compound shows that he was fully engaged in plotting terrorism attacks around the world. NBC's Robert Windrem reports.

    By Robert Windrem, NBC News investigative producer for special projects

    "Every morning, he woke up and tried to come up ideas to attack the homeland that he could communicate with subordinates."

     That's how a U.S. intelligence official described Osama bin Laden's daily life at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan,  based on a continuing review of the materials found on computers, hard drives and thumb drives retrieved by the U.S. assault force.

    "He was not retired or isolated. It was beyond inspiration, beyond direction", said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

    The preliminary read of the data flies in the face of the long-held belief that bin Laden had ceased to be operational leader of the terrorist group, the official acknowledged. 

    "He was fully engaged to carry out other 9-11 attacks," the official added. "He had a reputation as a micromanager but what we found was he was able to balance that micromanagement with a realization that others would have to carry out the operations."

    Beyond threat information, the official said the U.S. had found other information that confirms bin Laden's identity, unspecified video and details of plots around the world and associates.  The official said the U.S. would not release details of the plots because they don't want others to try to replicate them. 

  • Where bin Laden wasn't: in Pakistan, according to Pakistani PM

    By Bill Dedman
    Investigative Reporter, NBC News

    It's worth noting where Pakistan's prime minister, Yusaf Raza Gillani, had said Osama bin Laden definitely was not hiding: in Pakistan.

    "Osama bin Laden is not in Pakistan," Gillani said on CNN in April 2010.

    CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Gillani, "How do you know for sure he's not in Pakistan?"

    "Because our military actions are very successful," Gillani said. "And we have a very successful operation in Malakand and Swat, and now in South Waziristan and elsewhere. If there would have been any chance, he would have been arrested or maybe -- I even don't know whether he is alive or not."