NATO: 'significant pullback of Russian conventional forces' from Ukraine

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BRUSSELS, Sept. 24 (UPI) -- NATO announced Tuesday that Russian troops have reduced their presence inside Ukraine.

NATO spokesman Lt. Col. Jay Janzen confirmed, "There has been a significant pullback of Russian conventional forces." Janzen declined to give a firm number of Russian forces remaining, but noted that Russian special forces are still operating in Ukraine.

"It is clear that NATO allies need to remain vigilant," Janzen said, despite the reduction.

Russia, which has denied that it has any troops inside Ukraine, has not yet commented on NATO's recent assertion.

Ukraine and Russian-backed rebels agreed on September 19 to establish a 15 kilometer buffer zone to facilitate the withdrawal of foreign fighters, mercenaries and military equipment, with oversight by the OSCE.

2014 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.

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NATO Confident in Afghan Security Following Political Power Sharing

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UNITED NATIONS

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen says he is confident that Afghan forces can take charge of security behind a new government in Kabul that comes as part of a political power-sharing agreement following this year's historic elections. The NATO Secretary General spoke with VOA at the United Nations about Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine.

Rasmussen welcomed the power-sharing arrangement between Afghanistan's new president Ashraf Ghani and its new chief executive Abdullah Abdullah, saying NATO looked forward to the quick signing of agreements to permit the deployment of an alliance-led training mission in January 2015.

That will replace the NATO-led international security force that has been in Afghanistan since 2001. With that change, Rasmussen told VOA that he believed Afghan forces were up to the challenge of Taliban fighters who opposed the new government.

"I'm confident that the Afghan security forces can take full responsibility for security in Afghanistan by the end of this year as planned. They have been in the lead of security operations during the last year, and they have handled also difficult security situations quite professionally," he said.

Rasmussen said NATO had no formal role in the coalition that was striking Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria but was ready to resume its training mission in Iraq if the new government in Baghdad asked.

"We have also decided to strengthen the exchange of intelligence and information to counter the risk and threats from foreign fighters returning to our home countries," he said.

Rasmussen said Russia's invasion of Ukraine was "a blatant breach of international law" that would forever change how NATO approached Moscow.

"After the end of the Cold War we had an historic chance to create something new in Europe: a Europe whole, free, and at peace. And to that end we also need cooperation with Russia. However, today we have to realize that Russia doesn't consider us a partner but an adversary. And we will have to adapt to that," said the NATO Secretary General.

Rasmussen ends his five-year term as NATO chief later this month. He will be replaced by the former Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg.

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NSA scores victory in foiling Khorasan Group's U.S. terror plot

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The U.S. ability to pinpoint with airstrikes the operational hubs of the al Qaeda offshoot Khorasan Group in Syria and penetrate one of its bombing plots shows the importance of the much-maligned National Security Agency, defense analysts said Tuesday.

The Khorasan Group is an especially hard target because, unlike other al Qaeda spinoffs, it stays in the shadows and refrains from pronouncements on social media. Its goal is to design explosives that can defeat airport security and blow up an airliner, killing hundreds of people. Its prime target: the United States.

Intelligence reports indicated that the Khorasan Group was in the final stages of plans to execute major attacks against Western targets and potentially the U.S. homeland, Army Lt. Gen. William Mayville, director of operations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Tuesday at the Pentagon.

SEE ALSO: Obama opens new front on war on terror, but Congress wary

Defense analysts said that signals intelligence or Sigint the result of intercepted communications likely played a major role because developing spies in war-wracked Syria has been difficult at best and often results in unreliable information.

The NSA has weathered a barrage of criticism since last year, when rogue contractor Edward Snowden leaked to the news media reams of top-secret documents about how the Fort Meade, Maryland-based agency vacuums up mountains of phone and Internet data.

But U.S. airstrikes on the shadowy Khorasan Groups operational centers show that America cannot fight a war on terrorism without electronic eavesdropping, analysts said.

SEE ALSO: Fears grow that Obama has paper coalition in Arab world

Presumably, all available intelligence assets are being brought to bear on this mission, including signals intelligence, overhead reconnaissance and human intelligence [Humint], said Steven Aftergood, a national security director at the Federation of American Scientists. In the past, the kind of signals intelligence performed by NSA has been a strength for U.S. war fighters, while human sources have often been unreliable or hard to come by. In all likelihood, the same is true today.

With unprecedented assistance from the Arab nations of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, the U.S. conducted airstrikes Monday night against the Islamic State group and the Khorasan Group west of the Syrian city of Aleppo, hitting training camps, an explosives and munitions production facility, a communication building, and command and control facilities, according to a Pentagon statement.

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Ex-NSA Chief: US strategy against ISIS isnt 'adequate to the objective'

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As President Obama reiterated at the United Nations Wednesday that the global community must repel terror groups including the Islamic State, or ISIS foreign policy analysts, including Gen. Michael Hayden, are raising concerns over U.S. strategy against extremists.

Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, told FoxNews.com that American policy against ISIS has recently improved, but cautions there are still questions over implementation.

We are in a better place than we were two weeks ago. We are actually engaged and engaged with some force, said Hayden.

He says the U.S. objective is clear to degrade and destroy ISIS, yet when it comes to the current plan of action, I dont think I know of anyone who thinks the strategy is adequate to the objective.

The U.S. and partner nations continued Wednesday to hit key terrorist targets in Syria and Iraq.

While the current round of airstrikes will hurt ISIS operational capability, critics, including Hayden, point out that to get the final objective to destroy ISIS, you cant do it with what the president has committed and he has spent an awful lot of time explaining what we wont do.

Publicly putting limitations on what will and wont be done by U.S. forces is raising some concern.

No one, even the most hawkish of my friends, no one is looking for American maneuver battalions or brigades . but the president has put an artificial limit on what we can do with the troops that we have there, said Hayden.

He believes by putting the terrorists on the defensive, the U.S. can work to reaffirm security stateside.

We are coming after them [ISIS] with airstrikes, we know it doesnt change the fundamental basic issues on the ground. But we erode, we degrade, and we make sure they spend a lot of time thinking about their own survival rather than making up plans to threaten yours or mine, said Hayden.

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Cry us a river, Lois Lerner

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Former Internal Revenue Service Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner cited the Fifth...

Everyone in Washington has a P.R. machine, or at minimum, an agenda. That's certainly the case with Lois Lerner, the former IRS executive whose division targeted conservative nonprofit applicants with delays and harassment.

Lerner's division of the IRS systematically obstructed and denied status to Tea Party groups while subjecting many of the smallest ones those most vulnerable and least likely to be lawyered up to inappropriate demands for information that was not legally required. In one case, this included the content of the opening prayer recited in meetings, and in others, this IRS Inquisition demanded that leaders of certain groups pledge never to run for office.

Lerner is out of that business now, and on to a new campaign. This campaign, in which she has enlisted friends and former colleagues, aims to tell the side of the story that she has refused to give Congress under oath.

The resulting Politico piece includes this is no joke the revelations that she once baked brownies for colleagues and that she loves dogs. How delightful for her and the dogs! But so what? Lerner cited the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions about her involvement in this scandal. The reason for doing that is that she believes her answers could facilitate a criminal prosecution against her. The mysterious destruction of evidence in this case strongly suggests she is right to worry about that. So does her concerned email inquiry to government IT workers as to whether her instant messages with colleagues could ever be obtained by congressional investigators.

Lerner is willing to testify only in the news media, where the whole truth is not required and irrelevant information can be shared to make her seem less unsympathetic.

But Lerner's complaints about her treatment, her inability to find a job to supplement her pension, and her legal bills fall flat. She and her attorneys complain that the disparaging opinions she once expressed by email about conservatives, later obtained by Congress, should not be used against her. It would be unreasonable, she and her defenders point out, to expect her not to have opinions.

She is correct, America is a free country where all may express their views. But then, that's precisely why Lerner finds herself in so much hot water. Her IRS division used government power to suppress the political opinions of others to make private citizens unfree to express opinions she does not like.

If liberals are so irked that conservatives have freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom to spend their own money on advocacy, there is a proper channel for their frustration. They can weaken or even abolish the First Amendment to the Constitution. Democrats tried this in the U.S. Senate earlier this month, and good for them it is the right of every elected official to take such a political risk, because voters can hold such officials accountable.

But it's quite another thing for powerful, entrenched and unaccountable bureaucrats to abuse their power and attack others' constitutional rights from deep within the intestines of the government. This is why Lerner now finds herself a pariah, and it's also why she isn't a victim.

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GOP fumes as Lois Lerner talks to press but snubs Congress

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For Congress, Lois Lerner pleaded the Fifth, but for Politico, the embattled ex-IRS director gave a breezy biographical sketch that included her insistence that she had nothing to apologize for and that she did nothing wrong. Now Republicans are fuming.

Her decision to make unsubstantiated claims to a media outlet while claiming Fifth Amendment protections from answering Congress questions is telling, said House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa, who headed up a panel to quiz Ms. Lerner about her agencys delay of nonprofit applications to tea party groups, Politico reported.

She appears to have great confidence that her allies in the Obama Administration will not consider legal action after she resigned and declined to discuss the IRS actions against private citizens, Mr. Issa went on, Politico reported.

Ms. Lerner admitted her division had paid extra attention to applications from groups with tea party in their names at the request of her boss, Politico reported. But she denied that her Democratic leanings influenced her scrutiny of conservative groups though Republicans have released emails showing that perhaps the opposite, in some cases, was true, Politico reported.

Mr. Issa is not the only Republican to criticize Ms. Lerner for speaking to the press, rather than Congress.

House Speaker John Boehners staff posted a blog blasting her claim to Politico that shes not sorry for anything I did, she said, in the article.

Thanks to President Obama and his cadre of cover-up artists, we still dont know what exactly that entailed, Mr. Boehners blog read, Politico reported.

And Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the IRS Oversight subcommittee, said Ms. Lerners interview with Politico was a poke in the eye to the American citizens who were targeted by the IRS, Politico reported.

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Forest Service says media needs photography permit in wilderness areas, alarming First Amendment advocates

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The U.S. Forest Service has tightened restrictions on media coverage in vast swaths of the country's wild lands, requiring reporters to pay for a permit and get permission before shooting a photo or video in federally designated wilderness areas.

Under rules being finalized in November, a reporter who met a biologist, wildlife advocate or whistleblower alleging neglect in any of the nation's 100 million acres of wilderness would first need special approval to shoot photos or videos even on an iPhone.

Permits cost up to $1,500, says Forest Service spokesman Larry Chambers, and reporters who don't get a permit could face fines up to $1,000.

First Amendment advocates say the rules ignore press freedoms and are so vague they'd allow the Forest Service to grant permits only to favored reporters shooting videos for positive stories.

"It's pretty clearly unconstitutional," said Gregg Leslie, legal defense director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Alexandria, Va. "They would have to show an important need to justify these limits, and they just can't."

Liz Close, the Forest Service's acting wilderness director, says the restrictions have been in place on a temporary basis for four years and are meant to preserve the untamed character of the country's wilderness.

Close didn't cite any real-life examples of why the policy is needed or what problems it's addressing. She didn't know whether any media outlets had applied for permits in the last four years.

She said the agency was implementing the Wilderness Act of 1964, which aims to protect wilderness areas from being exploited for commercial gain.

"It's not a problem, it's a responsibility," she said. "We have to follow the statutory requirements."

The Forest Service's previous rules caused a fuss in 2010, when the agency refused to allow an Idaho Public Television crew into a wilderness area to film student conservation workers. The agency ultimately caved to pressure from Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter.

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Bitcoin and dark wallet could be used by terrorists. So what?

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This is a guest post by Jamie Bartlett, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tankDemos. You can follow him on Twitter at@jamiejbartlett

Does the creator of a technology have any moral responsibility for the uses to which it is put? It's an old question. RememberOppenheimer's famous quote, "I am become death; the destroyer of worlds"? Worried about the effect of his creation he determined, in the end, when making the atomic bomb, that it was the job of the scientist to make something if he or she could. Society can then determine what might be done with it.

Over the weekend,BBC Click ran an interviewwith two of the developers of the dark wallet, which is an application for the cryptocurrency bitcoin. The idea behind the dark wallet, simply put, is this: bitcoin transactions, although hard to track and monitor, are not entirely anonymous because the block chain keeps a public record of every bitcoin transaction made. Dark wallet obscures who is behind each transaction by using clever stealth addresses and a decentralised mixing system. While not making transactions perfectly anonymous, it's a significant step forward.

Click showed an unverified Islamist blog, which suggested the terrorist group IS (Islamic State, formerly ISIS) has potentially expressed an interest in dark wallet. The blog read dark wallet could "send millions of dollars worth of bitcoin instantly from the United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, Ghana, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, or wherever else, right to the pockets of the Mujahideen". It is, read the blog, "simple, easy, and we ask Allah to hasten its usage for us". Amir Taaki, the chief developer behind the dark wallet, was quizzed by Click about whether he'd be comfortable with ISIS using the technology he'd built. With admirable honesty he replied: "Yeah." Adding, "you can't stop people using technology because of your personal bias. We stand for free and open systems where anybody can participate, no matter who you are".

Many in the (sometimes vocal and aggressive) bitcoin community were unhappyabout how this had been reported, arguing that it was unfair to saddle bitcoin with IS. IS after all, uses plenty of other technologies far more than bitcoin -- so why focus on this?

It's a fair criticism -- Bitcoin, and certainly the complicated dark wallet, is hardly the most useful system of financing for a group like IS given its other means. And as I've written elsewhere, Bitcoin has several invaluable societal benefits: such as transforming the wasteful and expensive system of making international remittance payments. Yet the BBC was correct to cover it. Almost anything IS does is newsworthy at the moment: especially when it comes to technology. That's particularly the case when the creator himself doesn't seem bothered by it.

To understand the reason Taaki was relaxed requires you to understand his ideology. I know something of this because I've spent a fair amount of time with him -- including atCalafouin Spain, where he first started work on the project -- and I wrote about the dark wallet in my bookThe Dark Net.Bitcoin advocates sit on a spectrum of belief, and many of them see the currency as a way of improving financial services. But Taaki, like some within the Bitcoin community is more radical, and could be loosely described as either a cryptoanarchist orcypherpunk. He is not interested in building neutral but effective technology: he sees dark wallet as a political project, a direct way of undermining state power. He believes that powerful encryption systems, like the dark wallet, can guarantee individual liberty in a more reliable way than any manmade law -- and he's hopeful it will help precipitate the collapse of modern national states.

With this radical world view, dark wallet has pitted itself directly against the more mainstream bits of the community. "Many prominent Bitcoin developers are actively in collusion with members of law enforcement and seeking approval from government legislators," read the original dark wallet blurb. "We believe this is not in Bitcoin users' self-interest, and instead serves wealthy business interests that make up the self-titled Bitcoin Foundation." This divide -- between those who see Bitcoin as a political or a financial project -- runs through the heart of the community. In fact Taaki is probably closer to Bitcoin's libertarian origins than all those suited businessmen currently falling over themselves to build bitcoin ATM machines or invest venture capital in the currency.The currency's creator Satoshi Nakamoto's posts on the Cryptography mailing list were littered with his libertarian outlook -- and before that Bitcoin's roots can be traced to the 90s libertarian cypherpunks, and cryptography geniusDavid Chaum.

Taaki knows that people will use the dark wallet to do bad things. He has, I am sure, no desire whatsoever to help IS -- who are the apotheosis of his conception of individual liberty. Yet his overarching ambition is to create tools to secure freedom and defang the state. Some people will suffer in the meantime.

This question will keep coming up. Bitcoin protocols can do a lot more than currency exchange. There are social media platforms based on the same distributed system as Bitcoin, making them hard to close down, and its users very difficult to trace. Especially post-Snowdon, hundreds of people around the world have been working on a dazzling array of software to allow people to stay anonymous online. The direction of travel is towards more decentralisation, more powerful encryption, more distributed systems for anyone who wants it: Jitsi, Jabber, Darkmail, Mailpile, and more. That is good news for anyone who cares about freedom and democracy, especially in the less savoury parts of the world. But I daresay IS will be early adopters -- as will other people looking to stay hidden for nefarious purposes.

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