About that whistleblower complaint against Tulsi Gabbard

The whistle-blower report was based on a telephone intercept provided to the N.S.A. from a foreign intelligence service.

[...]

Because the intelligence report mentioned Mr. Kushner, Ms. Gabbard provided the information to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, according to people briefed on the events.

[...]

The whistle-blower report was drafted last May, while the Trump administration was deliberating about a strike on Iran. At the end of June, the military bombed Iranian nuclear sites on Mr. Trump’s orders.

Mr. Kushner has subsequently helped lead negotiations between the administration and Iran over Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs and its sponsorship of terrorism across the Middle East. He also has business interests in the Middle East and in other parts of the world.

The episode has led to clashes over how to interpret the mention of Mr. Kushner in the discussion and whether Ms. Gabbard was improperly seeking to keep the intelligence from being distributed within the intelligence community.

[...]

The names of Americans, particularly senior U.S. officials, are usually redacted from accounts of intelligence intercepts, a process called masking.

The foreign nationals were discussing Mr. Kushner, but some officials who have read the underlying intelligence or been briefed on its contents downplayed the significance of the references to him.

  NYT

They would, wouldn't they?

The foreign nationals, they said, were commenting on Mr. Kushner’s influence with the Trump administration.

I have no doubt they were.

The intercept also included what officials described as “gossip” or speculation about Mr. Kushner that was not supported by other intelligence. Some senior officials said the information was demonstrably false. While the whistle-blower believed that information should be circulated, the N.S.A.’s general counsel, Ms. Gabbard and the intelligence community’s inspectors general disagreed.

Officials declined to describe the gossip, saying that revealing it would expose the source of the information.

The complaint, the investigation of the complaint and the underlying intelligence all remain classified.

[...]

Some officials who either read or were briefed on the intelligence report said that had Ms. Gabbard not moved to restrict access to the report, it would have been quickly forgotten as one of many that recount foreign officials trying to figure out who has influence with Mr. Trump.

Probably true, but that could depend on what was reported.

A heavily redacted copy of the inspector general’s report was provided to Congress. Ms. Gabbard’s office redacted Mr. Kushner’s name, citing executive privilege.

[...]

Ms. Gabbard had previously pulled back and then restricted access to another N.S.A. intercept. That intelligence report involved an intercept of a call between Nicolás Maduro, then the Venezuelan president, and Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s envoy. Names of U.S. officials recorded in intelligence intercepts are supposed to be masked, and Ms. Gabbard argued the N.S.A. had failed to properly conceal Mr. Grenell’s identity. Mr. Grenell was negotiating with Mr. Maduro on Mr. Trump’s orders.

"I'd like you to claim Venezuela interfered with the 2020 election and is planning to interfere in 2026 and 2028."

How long before the whistleblower is investigated by Bondi?  Probably happening now.

Pure insanity

 

Haspel and O'Brien block intelligence on Russia

This does not inspire confidence in your president.  Nor in your national security officials.

The CIA has made it harder for intelligence about Russia to reach the White House, stoking fears among current and former officials that information is being suppressed to please a president known to erupt in anger whenever he is confronted with bad news about Moscow.

Nine current and former officials said in interviews that CIA Director Gina Haspel has become extremely cautious about which, if any, Russia-related intelligence products make their way to President Donald Trump’s desk.

  Politico

Perhaps that's actually because she has an agreement with Trump so he can say things like "it never reached my desk".

Haspel also has been keeping a close eye on the agency’s fabled “Russia House,” whose analysts she often disagrees with and sometimes accuses of purposefully misleading her.

Last year, three of the people said, Haspel tasked the CIA’s general counsel, Courtney Elwood, with reviewing virtually every product that comes out of Russia House, which is home to analysts and targeters who are experts in Russia and the post-Soviet space, before it “goes downtown” to the White House. One former CIA lawyer called it “unprecedented that a general counsel would be involved to this extent.”

[...]

One administration official explained the reduced Russia-related intelligence flow from CIA to the National Security Council as a matter of “quality over quantity.” Another administration official said that while the CIA is not the only agency that provides intelligence to the NSC, this official’s perception was that the CIA was “certainly” exhibiting an “abundance of caution” about the Russia intelligence it was sending to the NSC, beginning around the time of Trump’s impeachment proceedings. A whistleblower complaint about Trump from a CIA analyst, which Elwood relayed to NSC lawyer John Eisenberg at the time, is what sparked Trump’s impeachment — feeding the mistrust toward Russia-related intelligence inside the White House and among the agency’s top ranks.

[...]

Trump, who has publicly railed against the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in 2016 to bolster his candidacy, has also been working to bring the intelligence community further under his control since his impeachment acquittal in February. He has installed loyalists in top positions like director of national intelligence and the senior-most intelligence post on the NSC staff.

[...]

As recently as last Thursday, the president blasted his own FBI director on Twitter for testifying that Moscow was seeking to “sow divisiveness and discord” and “denigrate Vice President Biden” in a bid to influence the 2020 campaign.

[...]

The head of Russia House, whom officials declined to identify by name because they work undercover, was fired earlier this year, according to four of the current and former officials familiar with the matter, but remains at the agency in another mission center. It’s not clear why he was ousted, but Haspel’s personal dislike of him was clear.

Another Russia House analyst quit earlier this year after Haspel accused him of lying about intelligence — an accusation that happens fairly often, several former officials said. “She calls analysts liars all the time,” said one former CIA official.

[...]

More recently, Haspel “completely dismissed” Russia House analysts who brought her intelligence showing a correlation between Russia and the curious phenomenon of diplomats experiencing brain trauma, according to one current U.S. official with knowledge of the episode.

[...]

“She had a very defensive reaction, reacted very poorly and made some comments about needing to clean out Russia House,” the official said.

“We thought her feeling that Russia House was cliquey or insular was grossly unfair,” said a former senior CIA official. “She had preconceived notions about it, from her own time at the agency.” Haspel joined the CIA in 1985 and spent nearly her entire career working undercover as a clandestine officer, serving as chief of station in Europe and Central Eurasia and focusing at times on Russian operations, according to a CIA-issued timeline.

[...]

Ryan Tully is the fifth person to hold the senior director role, which previously had been held by Fiona Hill and Tim Morrison, both of whom testified in the impeachment inquiry. Joe Wang, who was deputy senior director for Europe and Russia at the NSC under Tully, left for the State Department over the summer. All that turnover “has been hard on [Russia policy],” another administration official said, “because you need someone driving it who has a consistent view — and it doesn’t seem like working on [Russia] has been a top priority.”

Critics of national security adviser Robert O’Brien say he has been prone to highlighting national security information and intelligence “that he knows the president will respond well to,” as one former White House official put it. “O’Brien doesn’t want anyone to touch things Russia-related because of the reaction,” a second former White House official said. “He just doesn’t want to rock the boat with Trump.”

He knows he'll be shitcanned.

Some still fear [...] that Haspel’s negative perception of CIA’s Russia analysts is the result of ongoing political pressure by the Trump administration to frame them as biased and myopic because of a conclusion they drew in 2016 that has enraged the president: that Putin ordered an interference campaign specifically to bolster Trump’s candidacy. That analysis was based at least in part on information from a highly sensitive CIA asset in the Kremlin, and is now at the center of [John] Durham’s probe.

[...]

Trump’s firing of former acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, who made the career-ending decision to allow a deputy to brief lawmakers on Russia’s ongoing election interference, is still top of mind for many in the intelligence community who fear they could land in Trump’s crosshairs if they challenge him in any official setting.

Those fears played out on Thursday night, when Trump went on a Twitter rampage against FBI Director Christopher Wray. Wray had testified during a public congressional hearing about Russia’s ongoing attempts to undermine Biden.

[...]

Wray and other national security leaders, including Haspel, had specifically sought to avoid Trump’s wrath earlier this year by requesting that the annual Worldwide Threats hearing before Congress be held behind closed doors and out of his sight.

[...]

“No one is willing to challenge” Elwood or Haspel, said the former senior CIA official. He added that Haspel’s changes have “been framed by some as an effort to ‘protect the building’ — well, her job is not to protect the building, it’s to protect the country.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Surprisingly, Trump names a successor to Bolton

So, he's going to have a National Security Adviser. Not for long if the advice contradicts what he himself wants to do.

President Trump on Wednesday selected Robert C. O’Brien, the State Department’s chief hostage negotiator, to become his national security adviser, moving to reconstitute his foreign policy staff even as he faces rising tension with Iran.

[...]

Mr. O’Brien [...] impressed him with his work to extricate Americans detained overseas. But it is not clear how different his advice will be, given that Mr. O’Brien previously worked for Mr. Bolton and has cited his hawkish views.

  NYT

If he wants to keep his job, he'll bend his advice to please His Lardship.

Mr. Trump announced Mr. O’Brien’s selection on Twitter shortly after saying he would also “substantially increase Sanctions” on Iran.

Didn't wait for advice on that.

Mr. Trump, who is in California for a second day of campaign fund-raising, offered no elaboration on how sanctions could be increased, but the move may have been a way of offering a tough response to the attacks in Saudi Arabia without necessarily using military force.

Or actually doing anything.

Mr. O’Brien, a founding partner of the Los Angeles-based law firm Larson O’Brien, will be Mr. Trump’s fourth national security adviser in three years, the most any president has had in a first term. He has written regularly about foreign policy and collected a series of essays into a book, “While America Slept,” published in 2016 during the last presidential campaign with a cover blurb from Mr. Bolton.

In that book, Mr. O’Brien warned of the dangers that major powers like Russia and China pose and argued against “appeasement and retreat” as he excoriated President Barack Obama for what he deemed a weak foreign policy.

Gee, I wonder what he thinks of Trump's Putin-friendly attitude.

[R]ecently, Mr. Trump sent Mr. O’Brien to Sweden for an unusual mission of trying to win the release of the rap star ASAP Rocky, who had been arrested on charges of criminal assault. A Swedish judge released the rapper pending a resolution of the case and a court later found him guilty; he was ordered to pay damages but did not have to spend more time behind bars.

[...]

[O'Brien] was appointed the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs under Mr. Trump and worked to release Americans held abroad. Among those who have been freed are Andrew Brunson, a pastor held by Turkey for two years, and Danny Burch, an oil-company engineer kidnapped in Yemen and rescued in a raid by forces from the United Arab Emirates.

Mr. Trump has often celebrated these releases with meetings in the Oval Office, where Mr. O’Brien praised the president lavishly.

Which is really why Trump picked him, as I'm sure you understand.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Bitcoin subversives

Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable — while also offering discretion. Governments, with a vested interest in controlling how money moves, would, some of bitcoin’s fierce advocates believed, naturally try and thwart the coming techno-libertarian financial order.

  The Intercept

Who wouldn't have expected that? I'm not a techo-libertarian, nor am I a rocket scientist, and I can't imagine they wouldn't try.

It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something. Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target bitcoin users around the world — and wielded at least one mysterious source of information to “help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins,” according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013.

  The Intercept

You can safely bet that anyone or anything that might threaten the system will be on the NSA's radar.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

How Trump buddies take care of problems

Maybe this helps explain why Paul Manafort is willing to be tried by the special prosecutor rather than cooperate.


There are others.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

More on that FISA tweet SNAFU

Up for reauthorization is a part of the [FISA] law that allows the intelligence agencies to vacuum up data on foreigners from internet companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft — without an individualized warrant. The eavesdropping is overseen by a secret court.

[...]

[After Trump's early morning tweet suggesting the FISA bill amendment should not be reauthorized] Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and White House counter terrorism adviser Tom Bossert were involved, and House Speaker Paul Ryan got on the phone with Trump himself, according to multiple government officials familiar with what happened.

Despite an angry denial from White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders that Trump was in any way confused, his actions left White House and intelligence officials shaking their heads, given that they put at risk a program that the spy agencies rely on to track terrorists, weapons proliferation and foreign adversaries.

[...]

"When the history of President Donald Trump's use of Twitter is written, there will be a stiff competition for his most destructive, most irresponsible tweet, wrote Susan Hennessey, a former lawyer at the National Security Agency. This one, she said, will be a strong contender.

One thing that mystified senior intelligence officials, they said, was that Trump had been briefed on the FISA issue, and they believed he understood it. It was the top legislative priority of the intelligence agencies.

  NBC

They thought he understood. How did they determine that? Did they ask him to, in his own words, explain it to them? Even if he could, the problem would still have been that he watched Fox News the next morning where he was told the law had been used against him.

Fox's Napolitano, a former judge, is the same pundit whose unsupported assertions about surveillance appeared to have led Trump to proclaim last March that he had been wiretapped in Trump Tower. He reportedly was suspended by Fox News over his unsupported claim that a British intelligence agency helped the Obama administration spy on candidate Trump. But he was back on the air Thursday.

[...]

"I don't understand why Donald Trump is in favor of this," Napolitano said. "His woes began with unlawful foreign surveillance and unconstitutional domestic surveillance of him, before he was the president of the United States, and now he wants to institutionalize this."

And immediately, the Trump tweet.

"'House votes on controversial FISA ACT today,'" he wrote on Twitter. "This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?"

On the Hill, lawmakers were stunned. Rep. Peter King, Republican chairman of the Homeland Security Committee's counterterrorism subcommittee, told NBC News that Trump was obviously mistaken.

[...]

The ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, Mark Warner, said on Twitter: " [...] FISA is something the President should have known about long before he turned on Fox this morning."

Apparently, the GOP members thought he did.  What we now know is that Fox News is running the country.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Say it isn't so

The tweet came just 10 hours after the White House issued a statement indicating its support of the renewal efforts and made clear its opposition to an amendment with growing support that would block renewal, raising the prospect that the president simply didn’t understand what the position of his White House had been.

  Weekly Standard

I'd say that's a given, consdering he barely knows what his position is most of the time.

The tweet undercut an effort by some House Republicans hawks to ensure passage of a FISA Act renewal that Republican leadership had long assumed would pass without much of a fight.

[...]

Top Trump national security officials, including CIA Director Mike Pompeo and White House National Security Adviser Tom Bossert, scrambled to clarify the White House position in calls to Capitol Hill.

He's a nightmare for his own party, isn't he?

On Wednesday evening, as it became clearer that passage was uncertain, House Republicans urged the White House to make clear its opposition to the alternative to FISA Act renewal. At 9:12 p.m., the White House issued a statement from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders designed to provide this clarity.

[...]

Proponents of renewal privately expressed frustration with the president, both his lack of discipline and his obvious ignorance of his own alleged policy preferences. House Republican leaders called the White House requesting another statement to clarify the president’s [Thursday morning] tweet.

So, then The Most Notable Loser attempted to fix the problem.

"With that being said," I'm all for the act I was against just a few minutes ago.  And, in fact, I'm the one who directed it to be written.

Democrats are divided on the FISA Act renewal, with Schiff and Dutch Ruppersberger, former ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence panel, supporting the legislation but most rank-and-file Democrats opposed.

Because everybody loves surveilance.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Yeah, but I'm still mad at Ron Wyden for putting his own financial golden egg above the rights and liberties of the people he's supposed to serve, by not telling us what he knew about domestic surveilance, forcing Ed Snowden to have to break laws and become a fugitive in order to do it.

UPDATE 1/12:  What happened between Trump's two tweets.

The presidential decree — a mere 40 words — set off a mad scramble across Washington.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) spent 30 minutes on the phone with the president explaining the differences between domestic and foreign surveillance, as many fellow Republicans reacted in disbelief and befuddlement. White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly also directly intervened with Trump, reiterating the program’s importance before traveling to the Capitol, where he parried questions from confused lawmakers.

[...]

Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted there was no discrepancy between Trump’s two tweets — and said the only confusion was on the part of the media.

“We don’t think there was a conflict at all,” Sanders said. “The president fully supports the 702 and was happy to see that it passed the House today. . . . We don’t see any contradiction or confusion in that.”

  WaPo

Of course you don't, you slithering toad.

“Who saw that coming except for no one?” one White House official said, speaking anonymously to criticize the president. “You just shake your head and laugh a little bit.”

Which is why this shithead is still in office, and the real danger to national security.

Both parties love their right to spy

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The deepest of the deep state agencies is deeply vulnerable

The story of the Shadow Brokers hacking the NSA.

Bottom line from Charlie Pierce:

In brief, these people hacked our hackers, and the problem seems to have been that the NSA was so bent on offensive cyber operations that it neglected to defend its own people and property. So, when the NSA hackers themselves got hacked, apparently by people who simply are better at it than the NSA’s people are, the door to the vault where the family jewels are kept was wide open. Money well-spent again. Now, the agency is convulsed in a hunt for moles and trolls in its own ranks, an exercise that, in the hothouse environment of an intelligence agency, almost is guaranteed to spread suspicion and demolish morale, if history is any guide.

And because, last November, we chose to elect a vulgar talking yam to be president*, even this episode carries with it the distinct sound of a carnival calliope summoning the suckers to the midway.

 Charles P Pierce

P.S.  Shadow Brokers appear to be a group pissed off that Trump didn't do all the things he said he would to restore white supremacy to the States.

P.P.S.  Could this be the work of the "second leaker" referenced in Laura Poitras' documentary about Edward Snowden?

Current and former agency officials say the Shadow Brokers disclosures, which began in August 2016, have been catastrophic for the N.S.A., calling into question its ability to protect potent cyberweapons and its very value to national security. The agency regarded as the world’s leader in breaking into adversaries’ computer networks failed to protect its own.

[...]

Created at huge expense to American taxpayers, those cyberweapons have now been picked up by hackers from North Korea to Russia and shot back at the United States and its allies.

[...]

Tens of thousands of employees at Mondelez International, the maker of Oreo cookies, had their data completely wiped. FedEx reported that an attack on a European subsidiary had halted deliveries and cost $300 million. Hospitals in Pennsylvania, Britain and Indonesia had to turn away patients. The attacks disrupted production at a car plant in France, an oil company in Brazil and a chocolate factory in Tasmania, among thousands of enterprises affected worldwide.

American officials had to explain to close allies — and to business leaders in the United States — how cyberweapons developed at Fort Meade in Maryland came to be used against them. Experts believe more attacks using the stolen N.S.A. tools are all but certain.

[...]

Three employees have been arrested since 2015 for taking classified files, but there is fear that one or more leakers may still be in place. And there is broad agreement that the damage from the Shadow Brokers already far exceeds the harm to American intelligence done by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who fled with four laptops of classified material in 2013.

[...]

Much of the agency’s arsenal is still being replaced, curtailing operations. Morale has plunged, and experienced specialists are leaving the agency for better-paying jobs — including with firms defending computer networks from intrusions that use the N.S.A.’s leaked tools.

“It’s a disaster on multiple levels,” Mr. Williams said. “It’s embarrassing that the people responsible for this have not been brought to justice.”

  NYT

They've been pretty quiet about it. Or maybe most journalists are just focused on the Trump administration debacle.

Some veteran intelligence officials believe a lopsided focus on offensive weapons and hacking tools has, for years, left American cyberdefense dangerously porous.

“We have had a train wreck coming,” said Mike McConnell, the former N.S.A. director and national intelligence director. “We should have ratcheted up the defense parts significantly.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

They Don't Trust Us

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An international group of cryptography experts has forced the U.S. National Security Agency to back down over two data encryption techniques it wanted set as global industry standards, reflecting deep mistrust among close U.S. allies.

In interviews and emails seen by Reuters, academic and industry experts from countries including Germany, Japan and Israel worried that the U.S. electronic spy agency was pushing the new techniques not because they were good encryption tools, but because it knew how to break them.

  Reuters

Whatever would give them that idea?

The suspicions stem largely from internal NSA documents disclosed by Snowden that showed the agency had previously plotted to manipulate standards and promote technology it could penetrate. Budget documents, for example, sought funding to “insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems.”

[...]

“I don’t trust the designers,” Israeli delegate Orr Dunkelman, a computer science professor at the University of Haifa, told Reuters, citing Snowden’s papers. “There are quite a lot of people in NSA who think their job is to subvert standards. My job is to secure standards.”

[...]

Some ISO delegates said much of their skepticism stemmed from the 2000s, when NSA experts invented a component for encryption called Dual Elliptic Curve and got it adopted as a global standard.

In 2007, mathematicians in private industry showed that Dual EC could hide a back door, theoretically enabling the NSA to eavesdrop without detection.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

NSA Protection of Data and Secrets: Astounding Incompetence

Post-Snowden Efforts to Secure N.S.A. Data Fell Short, Report Says

DOD Inspector General FOIA response

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Intercepting Leaks

Looks like The Intercept helped get a source arrested. Not good. I expect Glenn Greenwald is working on an article in this regard. Don't know where he'll stand, though. Here's Barton Gellman on the issue.

The Post has reported that the charges are related to the ­Intercept’s story, which describes how Russian military intelligence used hacking techniques against a U.S. voting software supplier and more than 100 local election officials in the days before voters went to the polls. The Intercept called the classified document the “most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light,” saying it indicated that Russian hacking may have gone deeper than previously known.

[...]

According to Rob Graham, who writes for the blog Errata Security, the Intercept’s scanned images of the intelligence report contained tracking dots — small, barely visible yellow dots that show “exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed.” Nearly all modern color printers feature such tracking markers, which are used to identify a printer’s serial number and the date and time a page was printed.

  WaPo

The National Security Agency Is Obviously Not Secure

Beyond Edward Snowden's stolen documents...

Seven cyber exploits purportedly stolen from the US National Security Agency (NSA) have been identified in 'EternalRocks', a new type of malware detected by a Croatian tech security advisor.

Similar to the WannaCry malware which struck hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide this month, EternalRocks apparently draws on NSA-identified network exploits EternalBlue, EternalChampion, EternalRoman, and EternalSynergy.

[...]

The worm utilizes DoublePulsar, Architouch and SMBtouch, a series of tools released in an apparent NSA leak by hacking group ShadowBrokers.

  RT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Can We Believe Them?

Under pressure from the secret court that oversees its practices, the NSA said its “upstream” program would no longer grab communications directly from the U.S. internet backbone “about” specific foreign targets — only communication to and from those targets.

This is a major change, essentially abandoning a bulk surveillance program that captured vast amounts of communications of innocent Americans – and turning instead to a still extensive but more targeted approach.

“This change ends a practice that could result in Americans’ communications being collected without a warrant merely for mentioning a foreign target,” Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement. “For years, I’ve repeatedly raised concerns that this amounted to an end run around the Fourth Amendment. This transparency should be commended. To permanently protect Americans’ rights, I intend to introduce legislation banning this kind of collection in the future.”

  The Intercept

I don't know why I feel skeptical.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Why Reporters Should Be Wary of the Russia-Trump Theories

Reporters should always be nervous when intelligence sources sell them stories. Spooks don't normally need the press. Their usual audiences are other agency heads, and the executive. They can bring about action just by convincing other people within the government to take it.

In the extant case, whether the investigation involved a potential Logan Act violation, or election fraud, or whatever, the CIA, FBI, and NSA had the ability to act both before and after Donald Trump was elected. But they didn't [...] .

Thus we are now witnessing the extremely unusual development of intelligence sources that normally wouldn't tell a reporter the time of day litigating a matter of supreme importance in the media. What does this mean?

Hypothesize for a moment that the "scandal" here is real, but in a limited sense: Trump's surrogates have not colluded with Russians, but have had “contacts,” and recognize their political liability, and lie about them. Investigators then leak the true details of these contacts, leaving the wild speculations to the media and the Internet. Trump is enough of a pig and a menace that it's easy to imagine doing this and not feeling terribly sorry that your leaks have been over-interpreted.

If that's the case, there are big dangers for the press. If we engage in Times-style gilding of every lily the leakers throw our way, and in doing so build up a fever of expectations for a bombshell reveal, but there turns out to be no conspiracy – Trump will be pre-inoculated against all criticism for the foreseeable future.

The press has to cover this subject. But it can't do it with glibness and excitement, laughing along to SNL routines, before it knows for sure what it's dealing with. Reporters should be scared to their marrow by this story. This is a high-wire act and it is a very long way down. We might want to leave the jokes and the nicknames be, until we get to the other side – wherever that is.

  Matt Taibbi

And perhaps the bigger problem (especially in light of the latest news that the biggest jobs gains in years has happened since Trump took office).

We have to remember that the unpopularity of the press was a key to Trump's election. Journalists helped solve the billionaire's accessibility problem by being a more hated group than the arrogant rich. Trump has people believing he shares a common enemy with them: the news media. When we do badly, he does well.

Trump calls us "enemies of the people" who purvey "fake news." Together with what vile ex-CNN turncoat Lou Dobbs calls the "global corporatists" who own the major media companies, we are said to comprise the "opposition party."

We can't afford to bolster these accusations of establishment bias and overreach by using the techniques of conspiracy theorists to push this Russia story. Unfortunately, that is happening.

.....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Big Brother Is Here - Part 2

RT has an article that breaks down the CIA leaks as to device and the capability for hacking into it.  Included are Apple, Microsoft and Android (specifically Samsung, HTC and Sony) devices.

Read it here.

Excerpts:

These [capabilities] include, but are not limited to: air gap jumping viruses such as ‘Hammer Drill’ that are capable of infecting computers or phones that have never been connected to the internet; hacking tools that focus on removable devices such as USB drives; systems for hiding data, be it in covert disk areas or in images.

[...]

Before any tech experts gloat, WikiLeaks also alleges that the CIA has developed advanced, multi-platform malware attack and control systems that cover Windows and Mac OS X but also mixed source platforms like Solaris and open source platforms like Linux.

  RT

Pretty much everything.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Big Brother Is Here

Maybe it really did start in 1984.

At a time when consumers everywhere are being urged to avail themselves of the “internet of things”, it turns out that the CIA got there first (by a long way). And it is not just we who have the ability to control our appliances – from our computers to our phones to our televisions, even our front-door locks, heating systems and, potentially, our cars – but the thousands beavering away on the government payrolls at Langley, Virginia, and Cheltenham, England.

[...]

[T]he publication of a huge cache of secret data, courtesy of WikiLeaks, will not only confirm your worst fears but suggest that the US and UK intelligence services have already gone much further in their planning than most of us had contemplated in our wildest imaginings.

[...]

[H]owever relaxed you may be about personal privacy, you probably don’t want the security services – friendly or otherwise – logging on to your computer during the night, monitoring your activities via your television or second-guessing your in-car computer.

[...]

And who gave the authority for the sort and scale of electronic intrusion that is now possible?

[...]

I am going to treat the Samsung smart TV in the corner of our sitting room with a new respect. I might try saying “good morning” and “good evening” to it, politely, even try out a few languages. If and when it replies in Mandarin, then it is probably far too late to be worried.

  The Guardian

Anbody who was worried about domestic surveillance and bought a smart TV after the Edward Snowden revelations is not smart enough to stay ahead of the game.

The thousands of leaked documents focus mainly on techniques for hacking and reveal how the CIA cooperated with British intelligence to engineer a way to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices.

The leak, named “Vault 7” by WikiLeaks, will once again raise questions about the inability of US spy agencies to protect secret documents in the digital age.

[...]

The new documents appear to be from the CIA’s 200-strong Center for Cyber Intelligence and show in detail how the agency’s digital specialists engage in hacking. Monday’s leak of about 9,000 secret files, which WikiLeaks said was only the first tranche of documents it had obtained, were all relatively recent, running from 2013 to 2016.

[...]

A programme called Weeping Angel describes how to attack a Samsung F8000 TV set so that it appears to be off but can still be used for monitoring.

[...]

In ‘Fake Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the internet to a covert CIA server.”

  Guardian

Weeping Angel indeed.

[I]t is understood the documents are genuine and a hunt is under way for the leakers or hackers responsible for the leak.

I bet. I wonder if this is the "second leaker" mentioned in the Snowden documentary, or if this is a new person. The ship of state is getting awfully leaky. So I also wonder if the state's habit of busting brilliant teenage hackers and offering them a job with the government as an alternative to prison has been a short-sighted approach.

Asked about the claims regarding vulnerabilities in consumer products, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said: “I’m not going to comment on that. Obviously that’s something that’s not been fully evaluated.”

Are they worried about T-Rump's obsessive TV-viewing?  Hopefully he doesn't have a smart TV.

Asked about Trump’s praise for WikiLeaks during last year’s election, when it published emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign chairman, Spicer told the Guardian: “The president said there’s a difference between Gmail accounts and classified information. The president made that distinction a couple of weeks ago.”

Except Hillary's email account contained classified information. So...where's the difference?

WikiLeaks has been criticised in the past for dumping documents on the internet unredacted and this time the names of officials and other information have been blacked out.

WikiLeaks shared the information in advance with Der Spiegel in Germany and La Repubblica in Italy.

My 85-year-old mother says she's happy to have the government know everything so they can catch the "bad guys". It was no use pointing out to her that the "bad guys" obviously know how to avoid getting caught because the government hasn't been too successful at catching them before they strike unless the government was the one putting them up to it in the first place. She's not alone. I've heard that sentiment in lines at airports every time I've flown anywhere.

Now, I ask you, how could the CIA catch "bad guys" through exploiting the ability to hack your TV? How will they get all the bad guys to buy a Samsung smart TV? And if they don't, what's the point of "Fake Off" mode? Who are they watching?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

But Russia!

The United States is, by far, the world’s most aggressive nation when it comes to cyberspying and cyberwarfare. The National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on foreign cities, politicians, elections and entire countries since it first turned on its receivers in 1952. Just as other countries, including Russia, attempt to do to the United States.

[...]

NSA operations have, for example, recently delved into elections in Mexico, targeting its last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a “surge effort against one of Mexico’s leading presidential candidates, Enrique Peña Nieto, and nine of his close associates.”

[...]

The NSA identified Peña’s cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted.

[...]

Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena’s predecessor, President Felipe Calderon. The NSA, the documents revealed, was able “to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account.”

  Reuters

Yes, but we're allowed to do that. Other countries are not allowed to do it to us.

Peña won that election and is now Mexico’s president.

Not saying we're good at it.

In fact, the United States is the only country ever to launch an actual cyberwar -- when the Obama administration used a cyberattack to destroy thousands of centrifuges, used for nuclear enrichment, in Iran. This was an illegal act of war, according to the Defense Department’s own definition.

[...]

[T]here can never be a useful discussion on the topic if the Obama administration continues to point fingers at other countries without admitting that Washington is engaged heavily in cyberspying and cyberwarfare.

I'm pretty sure they're not interested in useful discussion in the public realm.

This article covers some pretty interesting and little-known facts about the US cyber arsenal if you're interested.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Ludicrous

Until this moment, I did not realize that hackers require government authorization or else they can't hack.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.