Looking Back at 9/11: State of Airline and Airport Security
Here is what we still don’t know, over seven years after the 9/11 attacks, about airline and airport security on that day:
1. We don’t know if all of the metal screening machines at the airports involved had been tested and were actually working as designed;
2. We don’t know if the security personnel working on those machines and screen passengers were qualified and properly trained to find barred and dangerous items; and
3. We don’t know how the terrorists made it through the checkpoints with their deadly box-cutters, knives and mace.
All that, and more, was unilaterally designated by the aviation industry defendants as confidential, wrongfully exploiting a protective order issued by a federal judge in 2004, designed only to protect trade secret and competitive information. The order was entered in lawsuits filed by families of 9/11 victims against certain airlines, security companies and others responsible for airline and airport security (the “aviation defendants”) on that fateful day. The remaining three families, out of 96 who filed lawsuits, have challenged the defendants’ “confidential trade secrets” designations, claiming that one of their major motivations for filing lawsuits and not going into the no-fault Victims Compensation Fund created by Congress was to ask questions, demand accountability and shed light on the checkpoint failures that allowed 19-for-19 hijackers to board aircrafts with prohibited weapons and hazardous materials. While the families have access to this information within the confines of the litigation, the public does not.
Today, the attorneys for the victims’ families, joined by news organizations, will stand before a federal judge and argue for their latest motion to release a huge stash of documents (a million pages or more) which could finally reveal the truth about the status of airline and airport security leading up to and on that horrible day.
The idea that the airline and airport security regime in existence over eight years ago is a “trade secret” is preposterous. Yet, in producing aviation industry documents and witness testimony to these families, the aviation defendants designated over 99% of the evidence (documents and transcripts) to be trade secrets. None of the machines in operation on 9/11 at any airport in the U.S. are in use today – all have been upgraded by orders of magnitude. All of the personnel now working them on that day were released and/or retrained with much tougher federal standards.
Yes, I represent the attorneys of the 9/11 victims before Congress and the Executive Branch and have assisted them in ensuring the release of government documents pertinent to the issue. But that doesn’t change the point: there is no logical reason to permanently seal industry documents on old, outdated, and replaced airline and airport security procedures or the sworn testimony of nearly 200 witnesses who have testified in these cases.
The procedural rules which govern the confidentiality of “trade secrets” don’t exist to protect businesses from public embarrassment and possible civil liability. Ironically, trade secrets and competitive information are usually intended to be kept secret from other industry members, in this case, the secrets are shared among all of the aviation defendants, but kept secret from everyone else. Civil litigation in the United States is meant to conducted in full view.
UPDATE, March 26: The federal judge told the victims’ attorneys that he favors not publicly disclosing the evidence until a trial occurs. A trial date has not been set.
[via counterterrorism]
Marc Dreier Assets Itemized: Over $400 Million Taken From Investors
The New York Law Journal reports today on a list of Marc Dreier’s assets compiled by Mark Pomerantz, the receiver appointed by the court to “locate, recover and safeguard” whatever Dreier and his firm had left out of the $400 million allegedly taken from investors.
Dreier was the single equity partner in the now-defunct Dreier LLP, a situation that, as the ABA Journal observantly opined, posed some risk for the other 249 lawyers in that firm. One such risk: the single equity partner may be a crook. Dreier is charged with defrauding investors by selling them more than $700 million in bogus real-estate and pension-plan notes.
I had assumed that Dreier intended to use any profits from this scheme solely for the public good, but it appears that he treated himself to a few items as well. According to Pomerantz, who has been combing through documents and interviewing former employees of the firm, Dreier and/or his LLP owned, in addition to the expected attorney trust account and other bank accounts:
• 
more than 300 works of art allegedly worth nearly $39 million;
• a Manhattan apartment bought in 2007 for $10.4 million (but probably now worth a lot less);
• three homes worth in the neighborhood of $15 million;
• a 37-meter yacht worth more than than all the homes put together ($18 million), which has five cabins and is “luxuriously equipped with flat-screen televisions and a wine collection”;
• five cars, including an Aston Martin DB9;
• $1.2 million in “home furnishings”;
• two watches valued at $11,000 (combined, presumably, unless they are nuclear-powered);
• and law firm accounts receivables and work-in-progress from Dreier LLP.
Don’t get too excited about that last item, as the value of “work-in-progress from Dreier LLP” has likely declined somewhat.
Nor is the value of the artwork entirely clear which shows an etching of a chair with a hole in it and a bronze sculpture vaguely resembling Ziggy. On the plus side, though, the sculpture appears to depict a person putting up his hands while being robbed, which seems appropriate for something found in Marc Dreier’s office.
[via loweringthebar and newyorklawjournal]
Secret Service Informant Turns into Identity Thief: The Brett Shannon Johnson Story
The United States Secret Service has witnessed yet another informant turned criminal. Convicted of credit card and identity theft, Brett Shannon Johnson is now facing six years and three months imprisonment and paying at least $300,000 in restitution.
Choosing between weekly salaries of $350 from the Secret Service compared to making at least $5,000 per week betraying his duties by commiting tax-refund scams was not a difficult choice for Brett Johnson to make. While working undercover for ten months with the Secret Service and earning his $350 by tipping the Columbia, South Carolina office of the agency to credit card thieves, Johnson was at the same time operating a tax-refund scam under the name of Gollumfun.
Johnson started his ten-month working relationship with the Secret Service when he was captured in 2005 as one of the administrators of an illegal cyber operation web discussion forum called Shadowcrew.com. Instead of facing multiple charges and a significantly longer sentence, he was asked to track down other online carding forums as federal undercover informant. The federal government enlisting captured criminals to help investigations is an action that is not uncommon to law enforcers – the use of criminals as informants have been considered to be a necessity to some investigations.
He started working three months after his arrest on a dubbed “Operation Anglerpish” and was even supplied with an apartment, where his girlfriend stayed with him, plus a daily allowance of $50. While Johnson claimed that he started scheming while under agency supervision, that claim was refuted by the South Carolina division’s special agent in-charge Neal Dolan as two agents were monitored to be with him during office hours. However, Dolan admitted that they were not required to monitor Johnson outside of these hours, in which times the informant used all the data obtained from the agency’s database to assist his illegal operations while not under agency watch.
Even with video surveillance and two agents monitoring him during the six hours a day, six days a week work, Johnson still found enough time to procure all the information he needed for brewing up his new business.
“As time went on, it became more apparent to me that I had a good chance of not getting caught,” said Johnson.
According to a statement from Brett Shannon Johnson, the names and credit card numbers he used for his fraudulent tax-return scam was acquired on the same laptop that he had access to the information inside the office. These actions by Johnson were unnoticed by the agents monitoring him as he threw them off by asking them to monitor audit trails that he asked them to do. Once he was alone, he would research the information he needed for his scam.
“There were two agents with him at all times, and we had a 42-inch plasma (monitor) that projected everything he did on it,” says Neal Dolan. “You’d have to have been asleep not to have seen what he was doing (if he were committing crimes) – and they weren’t. This wasn’t a mafia case where we were going to sit on this guy 24 hours a day. He was told we’d make spot checks on him. But he’s an adult. I told him, if you want to go back to jail then you know what path (to take), and that’s the path he took.”
Johnson’s next step was to purchase several computers and IP addresses in order to not be traced, and file for tax returns using other people’s names and identification. This contributed significantly to the grand total of $2 million dollars he earned over a five-year illegal money-making career. While working as an informant to find illegal activities in cyber crime websites and then reveal them to the government, Johnson managed to put up two of his own illegal websites – CardersMarket and ScandinavianCarding.
Johnson’s case has proved to be fodder for many critics of using convicted offenders as informants and on top of this, paying them a stipend. It has also raised many questions as to the proper monitoring and surveillance allotted to these informants. Dolan reasons out that while these informants may have been given a chance to make up for their crimes, the decision to continue doing so or returning to the path of crime is theirs to make. Johnson himself says that putting him in that situation was like “taking an unrehabilitated crack or heroin addict and placing him in a drug environment, telling him not to use drugs.”
“I would place myself in the top five or 10 for doing what I do. Hopefully, I can find a way to make it benefit people instead of hurting them,” says Johnson. “And yeah, I’m sorry for what I’ve done.”
Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to have any raw statistics of how prevalent these infomants-turned-rogues scenarios are. Most of these cases are under strict confidentiality, thus only a small number of cases reach the media’s attention.
