In the biggest crackdown on police corruption in the 102-year history of the FBI, authorities arrested a total of 133 individuals in Puerto Rico Wednesday in a probe of how police provided protection to cocaine dealers.

In all, 89 law enforcement officers and 44 other people were arrested as part of a two-year undercover investigation into 125 drug transactions totaling $500,000, authorities said. The drug deals involved amounts ranging from $500 to $4,500, officials said.

The scope of Operation Guard Shack was also described as unprecedented because 750 FBI personnel were flown to the island to carry out the raids and make arrests, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Puerto Rico is a major shipping point for drugs between the East Coast and such South American countries as Colombia and Peru, said Rosa Emilia Rodriguez-Velez, the U.S. attorney for Puerto Rico.

She described the corruption as limited to a relatively small number of officers "who wanted to make a fast buck...and needed the money."

Via:CNN

Police mounted a major operation to protect pupils at a Merseyside school after they were alerted by the FBI.

Armed police were called to St Aelred's Catholic Technology College in Newton-le-Willows on Friday after reports someone had made threats to kill there.

The United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation raised the alarm after picking up a threat posted on social networking site Facebook.

A 19-year-old man was arrested and later released on bail.

More than 1,000 students, some of them taking their GCSEs, were in the Birley Street school at the time of the alert.

All entrances and exits were sealed while police investigated.

'Leaving this world'

The school said it was the FBI who raised the alarm after internet scanning software picked up a suspicious combination of words.

It picked up a posting showing a picture of a gun being held above a scrawled note, which read "tomorrow - last day of school" and went on to mention bullies and "leaving this world".

Headteacher Edward Marr has now written to parents explaining how the situation came about.

He wrote: "Police officers attended school at 0800 am on Friday morning. They had a photograph from the internet and asked if I could identify a person on it.

"It emerged that a threat had been made against the school which had been picked up by the FBI in America and passed eventually, as the school was identified, to Merseyside Police.

"Staff at the school were able to suggest the identity of the man on the photograph and an arrest was made."

Some parents have criticised police over why their children were allowed into classes while officers were investigating a possible armed threat.

Ch Supt Chris Armitt, from Merseyside Police, denied suggestions that officers could have closed the school as soon as they were aware of the threat.

He said: "We received some information between 1am and 2am, that information was imprecise and what we had to do was clarify what the information meant and what it related to.

"Once we were able to identify that school as potentially being at risk, we took steps quickly to get with the school staff."

He added: "They were able to help us identify the possible threats that we faced and we were then able to deal with that well away from the school premises."

EFF has posted documents shedding light on how law enforcement agencies use social networking sites to gather information in investigations. The records, obtained from the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Justice Criminal Division, are the first in a series of documents that will be released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case that EFF filed with the help of the UC Berkeley Samuelson Clinic.

One of the most interesting files is a 2009 training course that describes how IRS employees may use various Internet tools -- including social networking sites and Google Street View -- to investigate taxpayers.

The IRS should be commended for its detailed training that clearly prohibits employees from using deception or fake social networking accounts to obtain information. Its policies generally limit employees to using publicly available information. The good example set by the IRS is in stark contrast to the U.S. Marshalls and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Neither organization found any documents on social networking sites in response to EFF's request suggesting they do not have any written policies or restrictions upon the use of these websites.

The documents released by the IRS also include excerpts from the Internal Revenue Manual explaining that employees aren't allowed to use government computers to access social networking sites for personal communication, and cautioning them to be careful to avoid any appearance that they're speaking on behalf of the IRS when making personal use of social media.

The Justice Department released a presentation entitled "Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites." The slides, which were prepared by two lawyers from the agency's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, detail several social media companies' data retention practices and responses to law enforcement requests. The presentation notes that Facebook was “often cooperative with emergency requests” while complaining about Twitter’s short data retention policies and refusal to preserve data without legal process. The presentation also touches on use of social media for undercover operations.

Over the next few months, EFF will be getting more documents from several law enforcement and intelligence agencies concerning their use of social networking sites for investigative purposes. We'll post those files here as they arrive.

Keith B. Bolcar, acting chief of the F.B.I.’s Los Angeles bureau, announcing arrests on Wednesday.

In what it is calling Operation Phish Phry, the F.B.I. began arresting 53 people on Wednesday on charges of conducting a vast financial fraud based on phishing — the act of tricking Internet users into revealing their passwords and other information.

The arrests were in Southern California, Nevada and North Carolina, while the authorities in Egypt sought to arrest 47 people whom the F.B.I. said were co-conspirators.

An 86-page indictment, filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles, accuses the defendants of tricking people into giving up their bank account information. The F.B.I. said that this was the largest number of defendants ever charged in a cybercrime case, and that they had stolen at least $2 million from 2007 to last month.

The scams victimized people with accounts at Bank of America and Wells Fargo, two of the nation’s largest banks. The online component of the fraud was perpetrated in Egypt, Keith B. Bolcar, the acting chief of the F.B.I.’s Los Angeles bureau, said. The defendants there sent mass e-mail messages that appeared to be authentic communication from the banks, the F.B.I. said.

The people who clicked on those e-mail messages were sent to fake Web sites made to look identical to the real banking sites, where they were asked to enter personal information like their bank account numbers, passwords, Social Security numbers and drivers’ license numbers.

The co-conspirators in the United States took over from there, transferring funds into their own accounts and remitting some money back to their accomplices in Egypt, according to the indictment.

“It was very well done, it was very organized and everybody got paid,” Mr. Bolcar said.

The F.B.I. said the mastermind of the operation in the United States was Kenneth Joseph Lucas, 25, who had help from John Clarke, a friend, and Nichole Merzi, Mr. Lucas’s former girlfriend. A public defender for Mr. Lucas did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

According to the indictment, the trio would ask other conspirators, some down on their luck, to open accounts and then withdraw money that had been transferred from victims’ accounts. They would then send some money to participants in Egypt.

The investigation began in early 2007, when the banks alerted the F.B.I. to the fraud. Tara Burke, a spokeswoman for Bank of America, would not comment specifically on this case but said the bank “monitors for fraudulent sites and works to shut them down as quickly as possible.”

Each of the 53 defendants named in the indictment is charged with conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Some defendants face other charges.

The case highlights the pernicious problem of phishing, in which online scammers send e-mail messages and build Web sites that look authentic, then make off with sensitive information. Early this week, more than 10,000 addresses and passwords for customer accounts on Hotmail, one of Microsoft’s Web-based e-mail services, appeared online, apparently after being stolen via phishing.

In what appeared to be a separate incident, a list of more than 20,000 addresses and passwords for accounts on Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and AOL were posted to a Web site. The Internet companies said they were working with affected customers to help them recover their accounts.

Chet Wisniewski, senior security adviser at Sophos, a Web security firm, doubted the arrests would have an effect on the number of online banking scams. “I would imagine there are many different groups doing similar things,” he said. “You squash one bug and another one emerges. If there’s an opportunity to make money, someone will be there to collect the bill.”