Could we finally get some Friday indictments?

Six days before WikiLeaks began releasing Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, Roger Stone had a text message conversation with a friend about WikiLeaks, according to copies of phone records obtained exclusively by NBC News.

“Big news Wednesday,” the Stone pal, radio host Randy Credico, wrote on Oct. 1, 2016, according to the text messages provided by Stone. “Now pretend u don’t know me.”

“U died 5 years ago,” Stone replied.

“Great,” Credico wrote back. “Hillary’s campaign will die this week.”

[...]

[T]wo days later, on Oct. 7, WikiLeaks released its first dump of emails stolen from Podesta, altering the trajectory of the 2016 presidential election.

[...]

[T]ext messages provided by Stone to NBC News show that Credico appeared to be providing regular updates to Stone on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plans in the days before the hacked emails were released. In the texts, Credico told Stone he had insights into Assange's plans through a longtime friend, who was also Assange’s lawyer, according to the text messages.

Reached Wednesday, Credico downplayed the text exchanges. “There's absolutely nothing there that I had any knowledge of anything that Assange was going to do because I didn't,” he told NBC News.

"Where's the smoking gun?" he added.

  NBC

Soooooo...you were just bluffing?

Special counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating whether Stone had any advance knowledge of WikiLeaks' plans to publish Podesta's emails, according to people familiar with the investigation. Nearly a dozen Stone associates have been summoned by Mueller to appear before his Washington grand jury, the sources said.

[...]

The text messages obtained by NBC News appear to show that Stone and Credico exchanged messages about Assange having damaging information about Clinton at least as early as Aug. 27, 2016. The texts show that at 6:07 p.m. that day, Credico wrote to Stone, “Julian Assange has kryptonite on Hillary.”

Stone did not appear to reply to that particular message but the conversations ramped up over the following weeks.

“I think it’s on for tomorrow,” Credico texted Stone on Oct. 3, 2016, according to the messages obtained by NBC News.

Indictments, please.  And let's do Junior while you're at it.

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

UPDATE:



Aren't we all.  Aren't we all.

Analyzing the latest Mueller indictments

The government has now alleged that the social media manipulations by Russian actors constituted a criminal conspiracy. It has alleged as well that the hacking of Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails were crimes conducted by officers of the Russian state. The question remains: Who, if anyone, helped?

[...]

[If]f the hacking indictment was generally expected, nobody seemed to see it coming this week before today’s announcement of an 11:45 am press conference. Special Counsel Robert Mueller moved with his usual combination of patience and strict operational security, and even though Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein briefed President Trump on the coming action before the Leaker in Chief left town, the matter held until Rosenstein disclosed it at a Justice Department press conference.

[...]

If Mueller had been trying to remind the public of what the investigation is really about and what the stakes are in it, if he had been trying to make a public statement in response to the Strzok hearing, he could not have timed this action better.

But, to be clear, Mueller was not trying to make a press statement. We know that not merely because that’s not the way Mueller operates but also because Rosenstein said specifically at his press conference that he had briefed the president on the matter before Trump left town.

[...]

Let’s presume that Mueller did not time this indictment to precede the [Helsinki] summit by way of embarrassing Trump on the international stage. It is enough to note that he also did not hold off on the indictment for a few days by way of sparing Trump embarrassment—and that Rosenstein did not force him to. Indeed, Rosenstein said at his press conference that it is “important for the president to know what information was uncovered because he has to make very important decisions for the country” and therefore “he needs to know what evidence there is of foreign election interference.”

  Lawfare Blog

Except Trump's only concern is his personal relationship with the Russian mobsters and businessmen who are intimately connected to Vladimir Putin.

Put less delicately: Rosenstein has informed the president, and the world, before Trump talks to Putin one-on-one that his own Justice Department is prepared to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, in public, using admissible evidence, that the president of the Russian Federation has been lying to Trump about Russian non-involvement in the 2016 election hacking.

Which is why the Republicans in the House are frantically trying to set up an impeachment of Rosenstein in the hopes of stopping Mueller. Even if they do get rid of Rosenstein, I wouldn't be surprised to find that Mueller already has indictments laid out and waiting for the principals in the Trump campaign and administration, up to and including Trump himself that would immediately be presented to the Grand Jury. If they haven't already been done - if that's possible.

Based on these factual allegations, the indictment includes 11 counts. The first count, citing all of the facts summarized above, charges nine defendants with conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. §§ 1030(a)(2)(C), 1030(a)(5)(A), 1030(c)(2)(B), 1030(c)(4)(B), 371 and 3559(g)(1)).

[...]

The second count charges 11 defendants with aggravated identity theft in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1028A(a)(1) and(2). The indictment describes the offense as “knowingly transfer[ing], possess[ing], and us[ing], without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person during and in relation to” the commission of computer fraud.

[...]

The [indictment also] charges the defendants with conspiracy to launder more than $95,000 in cryptocurrency with the intention of promoting unlawful activity in the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1956(h).

[...]

The last count charges two of the GRU officers, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk and Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, with conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371. The object of the conspiracy was to hack into and steal voter information stored on computers used by people and entities administering the 2016 election.

[...]

In October, Kovalev and others targeted state and local election offices in Georgia, Iowa and Florida, seeking to identify their websites’ vulnerabilities. And in November 2016, the conspirators sent more than 100 spearphishing emails to state and local election officials in Florida.

[...]

The indictment alleges a detailed and wide-ranging conspiracy to hack into the computers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and others and to reveal information in order to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The special counsel charges 12 officials of the Russian military intelligence agency (“GRU”) with targeting more than 300 individuals affiliated with the Democratic Party or the campaign and leaking tens of thousands of stolen documents.

[...]

[Starting in March 2016, the GRU] conspirators engaged in “spearphishing,” or sending fraudulent emails with embedded links to GRU-created websites disguised to look like trusted entities, such as Google security notifications, ostensibly asking recipients to change their password but, in reality, tricking the targeted users into revealing their login credentials.

Using these stolen credentials, the hackers logged into the targeted users’ personal and campaign email accounts. Later that month, the hackers began researching the computer networks of the DCCC and DNC to identify technical vulnerabilities and connected devices. In April 2016, the conspirators hacked into the DCCC computer network and installed malware to spy on users and steal information.

[...]

On June 8, 2016—one day before the Trump Tower meeting at which Russian actors met with senior Trump campaign officials promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton—the indictment alleges that the conspirators launched the website DCLeaks.com, which they labeled as being started by “American hacktivists.” That month, according to the indictment, the group began releasing materials it had stolen from individuals tied to the Clinton campaign as well as documents stolen from other operations dating to 2015, including emails from individuals affiliated with the Republican Party.

[...]

In mid-June 2016, when the Democrats publicly acknowledged that they had been hacked, the indictment alleges that the conspirators created the online persona Guccifer 2.0, which they described as a “lone Romanian hacker” to undermine claims of Russian responsibility for the hacks.

And it's about this time that the public started to be inundated with complaints about Russian hacking, without the necessary verification and details to wash away legitimate skepticism. In August, Harry Reid wrote a letter to James Comey insisting he let the public in on the investigation enough to clear up any doubt. Instead, Comey only made public the investigation into Hillary Clinton's & her team's emails and her server. Whether we would have still ended up with Trump as president is just speculation at this point. But it was really a spectacular fucking Comey gave this country, whether that was his intention or not.

And it seems to me that there could just as easily be a charge of conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act leveled against Trump himself for very publicly calling on Russia to steal and release Hillary's emails.

Additionally, the indictment shows a massive, and successful, counterintelligence operation by the U.S. government against the Russian government. U.S. authorities do not rely merely on technical forensics for the conclusion that the hack and release of emails was a Russian operation; the indictment also lays out the departments within the Russian government that were behind it, specific individuals who were involved, which officers did what and when, the slang terms used internally, and the breakdown of responsibilities within the teams—down to identifying the specific officers with hands on keyboards.

And this is how they got John Podesta's email account (let it be a lesson to all of us):

If you get anything from any company you deal with that asks you to change your password, be safe.  Don't do it from the link in the email/text.  If you think you need to change your password, go directly to the website where you have your account, log in with your current information just as you normally would to access your account, and change your password on your profile information there.

hile the indictment does not charge any American with specific criminal conduct, it does describe conduct by Americans that, depending on further factual development, raises potentially serious questions. The most striking example of this occurs in paragraph 43(a): “On or about August 15, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress. The Conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate’s opponent.”

We don't know who this "candidate for the U.S. Congress" is, or whether he/she was subsequently elected. But don't be surprised if there aren't other Congress critters who get nailed in this investigation.

Continue reading the Lawfare Blog article on the Mueller indictments.

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

Cozy Bear, Fancy Bear and the Dutch

A new report has come out in the Dutch news about how the Dutch intel services were the first to detect and report Russian hacking into US systems, including the White House itself.

In the summer of 2014, the Joint Sigint Cyber Unit (JSCU) was launched, a joint unit of AIVD and MIVD, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service. Based in the Dutch city of Zoetermeer, it focuses on, among other things, obtaining intelligence through cyber operations. That same summer, the unit received a tip about a group of Russian hackers based at a university complex in Moscow. An AIVD hacking team, operating under the JSCU flag, subsequently succeeded in penetrating the internal Russian computer network. Not only did the AIVD gain access the computer network, it also hacked the security camera in the corridor.

[...]

This allowed them to see exactly who entered the hacking room. Information about these individuals was shared with the US intelligence services. Dutch intelligence services consider Cozy Bear an extension of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, which is firmly controlled by President Putin.

[...]

After a few months, in November 2014, the Dutch watched as the Russian hackers penetrated the computer network of the State Department. After being alerted to this by the Dutch intelligence chiefs, it took the Americans over 24 hours to avert the Russian attack, after a digital clash.

[...]

In the autumn of 2014, the Russians also gained access to the non-classified computer network of the White House. This allowed them to see confidential memos and non-public information about the itinerary of President Obama, and to at least part of President Obama's email correspondence. These hacks, too, were exposed by the Dutch intelligence services, which subsequently notified the Americans.

[...]

In April 2016, Fancy Bear accessed the Washington servers of the Democrats; Cozy Bear had done so as early as the summer of 2015. Once more, the group was caught red-handed by the Dutch, who again alerted their U.S. counterparts.

It is not clear why the hacks at the DNC could continue for so long despite the Dutch warnings.Last year, The New York Times reported that for months, the DNC had not taken the FBI warnings seriously. Eventually, cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, which was investigating the matter on behalf of the Democratic Party, also concluded that Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear were jointly responsible for the hacks.

  NOS

And, of course, there was a huge scandal, and the 2016 election went tits up. I, along with other smarter folk, were not convinced by the reports at the time, because there was so much ambiguous information coming out in panicked tones. None of them indicated that the Dutch had been surveilling these Russian groups for two years already. One of the problems with having any trust in our intelligence and government pronouncements is the secrecy that they are either prevented from revealing because of actual national security (ours or allies) and their propensity to be secretive for the sake of being secretive.

Last Sunday on Dutch television programme College Tour, Rob Bertholee, head of AIVD, said that he had no doubt that the Kremlin was directly responsible for the Russian cyber campaign against U.S. government agencies. Bertholee as well as Pieter Bindt, who was heading MIVD at the time, personally discussed the DNC matter with James Clapper.

[...]

As of now, the AIVD hackers do not seem to have access to Cozy Bear any longer. Sources suggest that the openness of US intelligence sources, who in 2017 praised the help of a Western ally in news stories, may have ruined their operation.

Nice going, guys.

In the television programme College Tour, this month, AIVD director Bertholee stated that he is extra careful when it comes to sharing intelligence with the U.S., now that Donald Trump is President.

Understandable. He offered the Russian ambassador and the Foreign Minister top secret information that an intel ally had US counterparts about an IS threat, and told him where, in effect revealing which ally it was. And he leaked info about where we had submarines to Duterte.  Clueless fool.  We haven't heard any stories of this kind of blunder for months.  They may have quit giving him intel reports.  If they're smart, they did.

The Whole Thing Stinks to High Heaven

In a Washington Post article titled Sessions’s testimony highlights Trump’s deep lack of interest in what Russia did in 2016 that exerpts Trump's past comments and actions, there's the bit about him saying this: "Why wouldn’t Podesta and Hillary Clinton allow the FBI to see the server? They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based."

I have that same question. It seems highly suspect and totally un-FBI-like. Why would the FBI take the word of someone they're investigating and the analysis of a third party rather than confiscate the computers and run their own investigation of them? Believe me, if those computers belonged to you or me, they would have hauled them off to an FBI lab.

At any rate...

The AP’s Julie Pace asked whether [Trump] meant Crowdstrike, the firm that detailed Russia’s involvement in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. “That’s what I heard,” Trump said. “I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian, that’s what I heard.” This is not true.

  WaPo

This is a stupid and yet consistent Trump tactic to get a lie into the public arena: "That's what I heard." From the voices in his head, no doubt. It's a lie he's selling, and it's a lie that he heard it. Two lies in one.

Speaking to NBC’s Lester Holt shortly after the firing of Comey, Trump [...] said that he was worried about lengthening the investigation by firing Comey, but that he had to “do the right thing for the American people.”

Yes, it's obvious. Trump wants only to do what's right for the American people. And, by the way, want to buy a bridge?

When not explaining the firing of Comey to a reporter on national television, though, there’s no indication that Trump’s efforts to “get to the bottom” of the hacking involved any actual interest in the investigation.

At the end of May, Trump offered his most recent opinion on the alleged interference.

Russian officials must be laughing at the U.S. & how a lame excuse for why the Dems lost the election has taken over the Fake News. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2017

They indeed must be laughing at the US. Hysterically and in terror. Just like we are.

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

Stormy This Morning

via GIPHY

Apparently, #PEEOTUS is trending on Twitter.

UPDATE: Touché

More

via GIPHY

'BuzzFeed Runs Unverifiable Trump-Russia Claims' #FakeNews https://t.co/d6daCFZHNh

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017

Intel War on Trump

deep state in movies: CIA assassin garrotes the president
deep state IRL: old memo about presidential piss party winds up on buzzfeed

— Max Read (@max_read) January 11, 2017

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

Another Denial

A Trump lawyer named in the report, Michael Cohen, called ridiculous and false the assertion that a relative of his had a dacha near Putin's. Another assertion in the documents given to the FBI -- that Cohen supposedly met with the Russians in Prague last August -- is also false, he said. “I’ve never been in Prague in my life,” said the lawyer, Michael Cohen.

  ABC

UPDATE:

This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that “the FBI has found no evidence that [Cohen] traveled to the Czech Republic.”

  Glenn Greenwald

Aaaaaand...There It Is

via GIPHY

"Evidence" Leaked

Some documents from July through December, which are apparently the source of the intel regarding Russia hacking the DNC, have been published by Buzzfeed. They also include some fun stuff regarding Trump, that whether true or not, should provide us with a new Tweetstorm.

A dossier, compiled by a person who has claimed to be a former British intelligence official, alleges Russia has compromising information on Trump. The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.
  Buzzfeed

It's like those TV prescription drug commercials. They tell you about it and then spend the last half telling you all the horrible things that could go wrong. No matter, though, because you've stopped listening after you heard it would cure your imagined ailment.

A dossier making explosive — but unverified — allegations that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks.

Of course it has. The Hillary camp just cannot get over the fact that she lost.

The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians.

"Potentially unverifible." And the jury will disregard what was just said. The best part is going to be the public speculation and the responding Inflatable Trump Rooster tweetstorms.  Also: there are no "graphic claims of sexual acts."  There are hints and one case of paid pissing.

CNN reported Tuesday that a two-page synopsis of the report was given to President Barack Obama and Trump.

Is that odd? Well, they can both read the whole thing now.  And so can you.

Now BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.

The document was prepared for political opponents of Trump by a person who is understood to be a former British intelligence agent. It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors. The report misspells the name of one company, “Alpha Group,” throughout. It is Alfa Group.

As errors go, does that really matter?

The report says the settlement of Barvikha, outside Moscow, is “reserved for the residences of the top leadership and their close associates.” It is not reserved for anyone, and it is also populated by the very wealthy.

Okay. It was prepared by a crap (and former) intelligence agent. But, it doesn't matter. It's been published. And if it were aimed at anybody other than Donald Trump, that might make a difference. But since it's about him, it's just more of the same we got during the last months of the campaign, so that even if it's true, it's not going to change anything.

The documents have circulated for months and acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers, and intelligence officials who have seen them.

Months? So how come they didn't get spilled before the election?

The documents are included at this link if you care to read them.

They include the claim that Putin has been "cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years." And that "his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB."

One of his alleged "perverse" acts was to hire the Ritz Carlton presidential suite where he knew Pres and Mrs Obama had stayed on a trip to Russia and hired "a number of" Russian prostitutes to "perform a 'golden showers' show in front of him." Can't wait for the Tweets on that one. This was supposedly in 2013. If it actually happened, it sounds to me like he paid some hookers to pee on the bed where Obama slept. That actually sounds like something he would do. Would he really be too stupid to realize that the Russians bug all the hotels where foreign dignitaries might stay? More likely in 2013 he didn't care.

Another document claims that in St. Petersburg, Trump "paid bribes and engaged in" unspecified "sexual activities" but that the witnesses were "silenced" and evidence was "hard to obtain."  Not suspicious at all.  It's not that I don't think the Inflatable Trump Rooster is capable of paying for "sexual activities" (try not to picture it), but how ridiculous is that vague claim? He did it but we don't have evidence.  It also says he participated in sex parties in St. Petersburg.  Participated as in "watched"?  Same problem regarding witnesses and evidence.  Maybe he did, but there's no evidence.  And who the hell in this country (besides Hillary's supporters who can't believe they lost) gives a shit?  Or even a piss?  The only thing continuing to beat this dead horse does is create a bigger cushion of protection against anything helpful being done about Trump.  Unless you count the entertainment value of reading the Tweetstorms it provokes.

One document says that the Russians offered him "various lucrative real estate" deals but "for reasons unknown" he didn't take them up on any of them. What are we supposed to draw from that?  It claims he - or rather "his team", managed by Paul Manafort - was complicit in receiving intel from the Russians on Hillary Clinton and offering in exchange information on Russian oligarchs in the US.

The complaint about all the "perversions" seems to be that the Russians could blackmail him with the information. Really? Unless he had some little boys in bed with him, I'm pretty sure there's nothing he'd be afraid to admit to. If crude and even illegal behavior of a sexual nature were a problem for Trump, he would not be president.

Still, I'm looking forward to the tweets.

And, oh yes, the documents also include the claim that the Russians were indeed behind the leak of DNC emails to Wikileaks, with the "full knowledge and support of TRUMP and senior members of his campaign team," as well as "agents/facilitators within the Democratic Party structure itself."

So, there's your evidence.  Still zip.

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

UPDATE:  It begins.

via GIPHY

FURTHER UPDATE 1/11: Glenn Greenwald lays out the story of the documents, how they were created and disbersed, why they are either worse than useless - they're unethical and dangerous - or they've laid bare the nature of the attacks on Trump with these sorts of Russia-linked bullshit, and probably both.

YET FURTHER UPDATE:

NBC News: Trump was NOT briefed on the addendum—& NO documents were handed to Trump team, sr. US intel official says https://t.co/asdPgm3Hx1 pic.twitter.com/o5xTIihefZ

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) January 11, 2017

Russia Did It - Part ad Nauseum

[The continuing drumming of the idea that Russia stole the election from Hillary Clinton is] fueled even further by the belief among U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia wanted to help Donald Trump capture the presidency. Yet neither country is a stranger when it comes to directly trying to sway the election of other nations. In fact, the U.S. has a long and stunning history of attempting to influence foreign presidential elections, recent research by political scientist Dov Levin shows.

Levin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie-Mellon University, found that the U.S. attempted to influence the elections of foreign countries as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000. Often covert in their execution, these efforts included everything from CIA operatives running successful presidential campaigns in the Philippines during the 1950s to leaking damaging information on Marxist Sandanistas in order to sway Nicaraguan voters in 1990. All told, the U.S. allegedly targeted the elections of 45 nations across the globe during this period, Levin’s research shows. In the case of some countries, such as Italy and Japan, the U.S. attempted to intervene in four or more separate elections.

Levin’s figures do not include military coups or regime change attempts following the election of a candidate the U.S. opposed, such as when the CIA helped overthrow Mohammad Mosaddeq, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, in 1953. He defines an electoral intervention as “a costly act which is designed to determine the election results [in favor of] one of the two sides.” According to Levin’s research, that includes: peddling misinformation or propaganda; creating campaign material for preferred candidates or parties; providing or withdrawing foreign aid, and; making public announcements that threaten or favor certain candidates. Often, it also includes the U.S. covertly delivering large sums of cash, as was the case in elections in Japan, Lebanon, Italy, and other countries.

  Vocativ

And here's Glenn Greenwald talking about the affair, if you care to have more.

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

The Report - Part Whatever

The US would probably have been better off without that ridiculous report. Or they should have published it under the banner of the new Ministry of Truth.

The New York Times called the document “a damning and surprisingly detailed account of Russia’s efforts to undermine the American electoral system.” The Washington Post wrote that it’s a “remarkably blunt assessment” and “an extraordinary postmortem of a Russian assault on a pillar of American democracy.” According to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. intelligence agencies have supplied the public with “surprisingly detailed findings.”

These assessments by three of America’s most influential newspapers are themselves surprising and remarkable, in light of the fact that the U.S. intelligence community revealed nothing new on Friday, repeating conclusions already publicized by the White House and officials like U.S. National Intelligence Director James Clapper.

[...]

The most remarkable thing about the government’s assessment released on Friday is that more than a quarter of the report is merely an annex dedicated to the colossal significance of the RT (Russia Today) television network.

[...]

Thanks to the C.I.A., F.B.I., and N.S.A., Russia Today can count on continued, likely expanded, Kremlin funding.

[...]

[T]he report [...] stresses that Dmitry Kiselyov, the Kremlin’s so-called “chief propagandist,” has treated Donald Trump sympathetically on his television show, while disparaging the U.S. democratic process. Kiselyov’s broadcasts — which air in Russian, for domestic viewers — are cited as an example of “messaging to Russian audiences” that presumably reveals the Kremlin’s preferences and intentions.

  Kevin Rothrock

I have to laugh every time some prominent idiot says something to this effect. Is that supposed to be an insult? Another country doesn't have America's best interests at heart? Another country promotes its own self interests? Then they're obviously evil.

The U.S. intelligence community says the Kremlin’s influence campaign was “multifaceted,” which is why the report also discusses the role played by Russian “Internet trolls,” focusing on the Internet Research Agency based in St. Petersburg.

[...]

In 2016, the Internet Research Agency’s two biggest feats were getting attacked by Molotov cocktails in October by Ukrainian activists, and being falsely accused by The Washington Post of masterminding the “#TrumpWon” post-debate Twitter hashtag in September.

[...]

The premise of this thinking is that Evgeny Prigozhin, the supposed owner of the factory, is taking cues from Vladimir Putin, given their long personal history and Prigozhin’s close business ties with the Russian state. Prigozhin is infamous, however, for diverting bits of his massive wealth to futile projects to disrupt and infiltrate the Russian opposition. He clearly believes that this kind of work keeps him in the good graces of the Kremlin, but attributing his efforts to direct orders from Putin is a stretch.

[...]

By far a more disturbing aspect of the declassified report, however, is that the U.S. intelligence community seems to accept RT’s own self-aggrandizing assessment of its global influence. The assessment even cites an unpublished Nielsen study supposedly claiming that RT rapidly expanded its audience in several American cities.

Also, when reviewing RT’s popularity on YouTube, the report completely ignores critics who say it owes its success to buying and redistributing licensed content about largely apolitical news events.

Although I regularly scan the RT website, I don't watch the RT channel. But it does carry programs by such iconic American TV personalities as Larry King. I wonder - and maybe I'm going out on a limb here - if its increased popularity could be because more Americans are finding its programming entertaining, or - and this is way out there - more Americans are beginning to realize what a load of crap American TV propaganda is.

Go ahead and peek at RT’s YouTube channel right now; the most popular videos are disaster footage — crashing meteorites, “golden voice” homeless men, and earthquakes.

So, maybe they just don't get enough charge from the bazillions of channels of vicarious thrills published by USG corporate "news" and individual YouTubers.

Or, hey, maybe they're becoming more politically aware and would like to know what other countries are saying.  I know that's a stretch, but wouldn't it be awesome?

After so many leaks and rumors, it is a relief finally to have the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment in writing. Now we know what the accusations are, and we have a vague idea about why Washington believes what it does.

Unfortunately, America’s case against the Kremlin suffers from some major flaws that should be acknowledged, even by individuals who argue reasonably that the Russian government likely used hackers to attack and undermine democratic institutions in the U.S.

I don't know why they'd waste precious funding. We do a good job of that ourselves.

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

best part of DNI report: "alleged wall street greed" @JordanFreiman pic.twitter.com/9h3elJ9JdB

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) January 7, 2017

Truth in Journalism

NY Times says the US intelligence report on Russia is "damning and surprisingly detailed," then adds that it contains no actual evidence pic.twitter.com/qpncWboVEV

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 7, 2017

CIA Names Russians

The CIA has identified Russian officials who fed material hacked from the Democratic National Committee and party leaders to WikiLeaks at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin through third parties, according to a new U.S. intelligence report, senior U.S. officials said on Thursday.

  Reuters

So stop clamoring for evidence now.

The intelligence assessment was presented to President Barack Obama on Thursday and will be briefed to Trump on Friday.

That'll make for some fun tweets.

In some cases, one official said, the material followed what was called “a circuitous route” from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, to WikiLeaks in an apparent attempt to make the origins of the material harder to trace, a common practice used by all intelligence agencies, including U.S. ones.

These handoffs, the officials said, enabled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to say the Russian government or state agencies were not the source of the material published on his website.

[...]

Not all 17 intelligence agencies participated in preparing the assessment. An unclassified version of the report is expected to be released on Friday morning, two officials said.

[...]

One such example, the officials said, was that intercepted messages and conversations among senior Russian officials in Putin’s inner circle indicated they were aware of the hacking campaign and celebrated Trump’s election as a victorious end to the campaign.

[...]

"People who knew what this was about were celebrating a victory over the United States,” said one official.

Well, that satisfies me. (Like all those Arabs that Trump saw celebrating the 9/11 attack.) No question they were involved.

Another example of inferential evidence, the officials said, was that as time passed and the early leaks attracted media attention that undermined or eclipsed Clinton’s campaign, the Russians increasingly focused their hacking “almost exclusively” on Democratic rather than Republican targets.

Inferential evidence. How's that work in court?

Has someone checked all the Republican possible targets?

There was also strong resemblance -- including the use of the same computer malware -- the Russians have used against targets in Europe and the marriage of traditional espionage tactics used by Soviet and Russian intelligence such as bribery, blackmail and internet vulnerabilities, which they said Putin has devoted increasing resources and attention to exploiting.

Jesus Fucking Christ. This is the same bullshit over and over and over. It's not any more factually conclusory than it was before.

Where are the names of these Russian officials who supposedly fed the material to Wikileaks? That must be classified information. Presumably, Trump will get it. We'll be watching for the tweets.

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

Russia Did It Flashback

October 2, 2012

[Congressional investigators] looked at problems in regional intelligence-gathering offices known as “fusion centers” that are financed by the Department of Homeland Security and created jointly with state and local law enforcement agencies.

The report found that the centers “forwarded intelligence of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”

[...]

Hundreds of draft reports sat for months, awaiting review by homeland security officials, making much of their information obsolete.

[...]

The investigators also discovered that federal officials cannot account for as much as $1.4 billion in taxpayer money earmarked for fusion centers and that some of the centers listed on paper by the Homeland Security Department do not even exist.

[...]

In a 2009 e-mail discovered by the Senate investigators, one department official warned that the fusion centers were collecting information on Americans “without proper vetting,” and were “improperly reporting this information through homeland information reporting channels.”

[...]

Homeland Security has not carved out a clear counterterror mission that does not overlap with those of other agencies.

[...]

Top officials of the Homeland Security Department have known about the problems for years, but hid an internal department report on the program’s flaws from Congress while continuing to tell lawmakers and the public that the fusion centers were highly valuable and that they formed the centerpiece of Homeland Security’s counter-terrorism efforts.

[...]

The fusion centers quickly became a black hole for taxpayer money, the Senate investigators found. The fusion centers were run by state and local officials, but were funded through grants to states from the Federal Emergency Management Agency with little oversight. That made it easy for state and local officials to divert the federal money earmarked for the centers to other things, including sport utility vehicles and dozens of flat-screen televisions for use by state and local agencies.

[...]

In the wake of the January 2011 shootings in Tucson that killed six and wounded others, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona center issued a report filled with inaccurate information about the gunman’s alleged connections to an anti-Semitic and antigovernment group.

[...]

Last November, for example, an Illinois center reported that Russian hackers had broken into the computer system of a local water district in Springfield and sent computer commands that triggered a water pump to burn out. But it turned out that a repair technician had remotely accessed the water district’s computer system while he was on vacation in Russia.

  NYT

Sometimes I wonder how we are not all blown up in a nuclear holocaust already.  Or are we, and this is Hell?

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

Trying to Keep Up

Technical analysis: Malware "Russian hacking" sample provided by US government is common malware. https://t.co/wG4AbS7kNG pic.twitter.com/8bpGxHpI7P

— WikiLeaks Task Force (@WLTaskForce) January 1, 2017

This Isn't Going to Go Away

The Democratic Party is in double-down mode, and all its supporters are going along.

The Washington Post on Friday reported an genuinely alarming event: Russian hackers have penetrated the U.S. power system through an electrical grid in Vermont. The Post headline conveyed the seriousness of the threat.

[...]

The first sentence of the article directly linked this cyber-attack to alleged Russian hacking of the email accounts of the DNC and John Podesta – what is now routinely referred to as “Russian hacking of our election.”

  Glenn Greenwald

Which hasn't even been proven, and seems at this point unlikely.

This is an extremely serious allegation and threat. If true, we're in serious shit. And, if not true, we're still in serious shit, because it means our government is now willing to fuck with our own democracy in the way it fucks with the rest of the world. A real threat of this magnitude could allow our government to claim a state of emergency and lock us down even tighter. In fact, why not refuse to allow Trump (or whoever comes after Trump) to take office when the country is under such a threat? I'm afraid I don't have any confidence that the Democratic Party of today wouldn't stoop to such levels. With their total screw up running Hillary for president and losing, they have become completely unhinged.

[Vermont]’s Democratic Governor, Peter Shumlin, said:

Vermonters and all Americans should be both alarmed and outraged that one of the world’s leading thugs, Vladimir Putin, has been attempting to hack our electric grid, which we rely upon to support our quality-of-life, economy, health, and safety. This episode should highlight the urgent need for our federal government to vigorously pursue and put an end to this sort of Russian meddling.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy issued a statement warning: “This is beyond hackers having electronic joy rides – this is now about trying to access utilities to potentially manipulate the grid and shut it down in the middle of winter. That is a direct threat to Vermont and we do not take it lightly.”

Nor should you take it lightly. But you damned sure ought to have incontrovertible proof of what you're saying. And you don't.

The media reactions, as Alex Pfeiffer documents, were exactly what one would expect: hysterical, alarmist proclamations of Putin’s menacing evil.

What’s the problem here? It did not happen.

There was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid.” The truth was undramatic and banal. Burlington Electric, after receiving a Homeland Security notice sent to all U.S. utility companies about the malware code found in the DNC system, searched all their computers and found the code in a single laptop that was not connected to the electric grid.

Apparently, the Post did not even bother to contact the company before running its wildly sensationalistic claims, so they had to issue their own statement to the Burlington Free Press which debunked the Post’s central claim (emphasis in original): “We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop NOT connected to our organization’s grid systems.”

[...]

[T]here is zero evidence that Russian hackers were responsible even for the implanting of this malware on this single laptop. [...] [A]s Jeffrey Carr has pointed out in the DNC hacking context, assuming that Russian-made malware must have been used by Russians is as irrational as finding a Russian-made Kalishnikov AKM rifle at a crime scene and assuming the killer must be Russian.

A lot of us would absolutely do that, too, though.

All the alarmist tough-guy statements issued by political officials who believed the Post’s claim were based on fiction.

Meaning we could be in deeper shit than we realize. And that's saying a lot.

The Post had to walk back it's first claims when called out on them, but the damage, dare I say, is done.

Moreover, nobody knows when this malware was put on this laptop, how, or by whom. But whatever else is true, the key claim – “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid” – has now been replaced by the claim that this all shows “risk to U.S. electrical grid.”

Then fix the bloody system. That risk didn't just arise yesterday.  Electronic security has been a big issue ever since the Snowden affair and we still have powerful people, agencies and systems in the dark ages when it comes to internet security.

[This] level of group-think, fear-mongering, coercive peer-pressure, and über-nationalism has not been seen since the halcyon days of 2002 and 2003.

[...]

Indeed, the more unhinged it is, the greater the benefits [for social media] are (see some of the most extreme examples here). That’s how otherwise rational people keep getting tricked into posting and re-tweeting and sharing extremely dubious stories that turn out to be false.

[...]

[A]ny denunciation or accusation toward Trump or Russia, no matter how divorced from reason or devoid of facts, generates instant praise, while any questioning of it prompts instant peer-group denunciation, or worse.

Perfectly mirroring what happened when the Bush administration painted Saddam Hussein as the mastermind behind 9/11. And look where that got us. Look where that has gotten the entire world. And that wasn't even a fight picked with a nation powerful enough to actually rain down a nuclear holocaust.

In this case, the effect is a constant ratcheting up of tensions between two nuclear-armed powers whose nuclear systems are still on hair-trigger alert and capable of catastrophic responses based on misunderstanding and misperception. Democrats and their media allies are rightly alarmed about the potential dangers of Trump’s bellicose posture toward China, but remarkably and recklessly indifferent to the dangers of what they themselves are doing here.

[...]

Since it is so often distorted, permit me to once again to underscore my own view on the broader Russia issue: of course it is possible that Russia is responsible for these hacks, as this is perfectly consistent with (and far more mild than) what both Russia and the U.S. have done repeatedly for decades.

But given the stakes involved, along with the incentives for error and/or deceit, no rational person should be willing to embrace these accusations as Truth unless and until convincing evidence has been publicly presented for review, which most certainly has not yet happened.

If you're still buying the propaganda, please read scroll down in Greenwald's article to the end where he links several articles that counter all this dangerous red-baiting.  Or if you're keeping up with the insanity, you might bookmark and save the page for when you need to calm down your friends and neighbors.

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

Willing Fools

We ought to have learned from the Judith Miller episode [writing about non-existent Iraq WMD in the New York Times]. Not only do governments lie, they won't hesitate to burn news agencies. In a desperate moment, they'll use any sucker they can find to get a point across.

I have no problem believing that Vladimir Putin tried to influence the American election. He's gangster-spook-scum of the lowest order and capable of anything. And Donald Trump, too, was swine enough during the campaign to publicly hope the Russians would disclose Hillary Clinton's emails. So a lot of this is very believable.

But we've been burned before in stories like this, to disastrous effect. Which makes it surprising we're not trying harder to avoid getting fooled again.

  Matt Taibbi @ Rolling Stone

No surprise, really. Anything that will rile us up against a perceived enemy is easy fodder for Americans being robbed and cheated by banksters, politicians and corporations, with no idea how to make it stop.

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

The Russian Hacking Question - Part Whatever, Second Addendum

Because most people who read these blog posts (all of perhaps four?) probably don't read the entire articles cited, I should have put this bit in the previous post citing Jeffrey Carr's article, because it's really the key.

If the White House had unclassified evidence that tied officials in the Russian government to the DNC attack, they would have presented it by now. The fact that they didn’t means either that the evidence doesn’t exist or that it is classified.

If it’s classified, an independent commission should review it because this entire assignment of blame against the Russian government is looking more and more like a domestic political operation run by the White House that relied heavily on questionable intelligence generated by a for-profit cybersecurity firm with a vested interest in selling “attribution-as-a-service”.

  Medium

I'm not so sure an independent commission would clear it, after having seen some of the independent commission reports we've gotten in the past.  And if the Obama administration appoints it, I'm actually quite sure.

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

The Russian Hacking Question - Part Whatever, Addendum

Here's an article by Jeffrey Carr, the cybersecurity consultant mentioned in the previous post, regarding the report that supposedly proves Russian government interference in the US election, and for which the Obama administration has just raised the stakes for another cold war with Russia - and hopefully not an actual war.

The FBI/DHS Joint Analysis Report (JAR) “Grizzly Steppe” was released yesterday as part of the White House’s response to alleged Russian government interference in the 2016 election process. It adds nothing to the call for evidence that the Russian government was responsible for hacking the DNC, the DCCC, the email accounts of Democratic party officials, or for delivering the content of those hacks to Wikileaks.

It merely listed every threat group ever reported on by a commercial cybersecurity company that is suspected of being Russian-made and lumped them under the heading of Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) without providing any supporting evidence that such a connection exists.

  Medium

Continue reading.

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