Sorry I can't help with your questions, but I concur with your hunches about the creation
of Intercept.
Your reference to Intercept being set up "to block the inquiry into or exposure of
special access Intel operations during or prior to 9/11 which would blow up entirely the
official narrative of that epochal event" touches a nerve.
I was a regular reader and commenter at Glenn Greenwald's (GG) "Unclaimed Territory" blog,
which was absorbed into the progressive-liberal lite Salon site. I even had a few brief but
cordial e-mail exchanges with GG, since I diligently sent him (requested) private e-mail
alerts to grammatical and syntactic errors in his prolific posts.
I sympathized with GG's early attempts to deal fairly with aggressive 9/11 Truthers
monopolizing the comments; he personally moderated, and participated in, his comments
threads. At first, GG's stance was "agnostic" towards 9/11 "Truther" theories, but he
reasonably insisted that 9/11-related comments not be allowed to hijack every discussion.
But GG himself was not much of a 9/11 skeptic, and I soured on GG when he proved to be
what I call a "Trutherphobe".
Before long, he became openly censorious and began removing both comments and commenters
who insisted on mentioning 9/11, even if the 9/11 reference was germane to the topic. (Not
me; I knew better than to push his buttons.) Also, GG adopted, or independently reached, what
I call the "Chomsky Bubble" stance-- essentially, a sophisticated rationalization that
amounts to "nothing to see here, move along."
Eventually, despite his efforts to seem nominally open-minded towards 9/11 skeptics, it
became clear that to GG, pursuing 9/11 truth was both a distraction and a nuisance. 9/11
truth is simply not part of GG's agenda.
When GG acquired apparently exclusive stewardship of the Snowden trove, one of my first
thoughts was, "If there's anything in Snowden's documents that contradict or cast doubt upon
the official 9/11 narrative, Glenn will be careful to put it on the bottom of the pile and
keep it there." I still believe this.
It's too late to blithely conclude "In short...", but all this to say that if you're
correct, GG is just the person to put in charge of a modified limited hangout
operation that, in part, suppresses 9/11 inquiry and truth.
"... I have always been flabbergasted about the naivety of the general public in regards to the abilities, capabilities and determination of the so called 'establishment' - aka Plutocracy, when it comes to the choice of means to achieve their psychopathic goals. What is out of reach, or undoable to those that willingly accept the death of millions of innocent people in the ME and the world over? ..."
"... The utter destruction of sovereign Nations that don't fall in line? Organizing coup d'etats like local fundraisers for soup kitchens? Looking at the track record of the American establishment, nothing, absolutely nothing is ever off the table. ..."
"... I'm always wary of talk about limited hangouts. A case can usually be made that such talk is itself intended for the same purpose - to lull the recipient into despair and passivity. ..."
"... And it WAS a secret weapon. It took a long time for this to become obvious. We see the media all along has been completely mediocre, but since it has long given wall-to-wall coverage, it never had to get very good in order to send the daily propaganda message. Come the Internet, everyone sees how sloppy the media's work is. But does this raise the quality of the media lies? It seems not - the opposite in fact, the readers get far smarter than the writers. ..."
"... The greatest trick the Devil pulled was not convincing the world he didn't exist, it was convincing the world that evil was clever, when in fact it's very mediocre. Evil performs badly. It will continue to perform badly. It can be resisted and overcome. This takes time. ..."
Snowden went to established journalists because he wanted the story to get out. He also
wanted them to be cautious and conservative, to redact whatever seemed damaging to operations
or his country.
In my opinion, what the journalists did worked. And Snowden destroyed his own access to
the materials.
My guess - purely a guess - is that Snowden was, and remains, quite satisfied with what
happened and what got published. He never wanted operational FACTS to get out so much as he
wanted the SCALE of what the US was doing to get out. In this matter, I'd call his entire
effort a tremendous success.
Snowden's face and story went around the world and shook things up. Paradigms came
crashing down. In my own personal case, the Snowden material showed me the scale of US
adventurism, and the vast audacity of its criminality. It made it clear, in philosophical
terms rather than evidentiary terms, that 9/11 could easily be an inside job. It took a
change in the paradigms of the scale of corruption to open up that possibility for me. I'm
sure it's done similar things for millions of people. Snowden was one of the few events I can
think of that actually played out in the mainstream before anyone figured out how to shut it
down - and the genie was out of the bottle.
We don't know what we've lost by not having the missing pages released. But I find it hard
to think they could change paradigms any more than has already happened. There's a
diminishing return here. Wikileaks publishes troves of material, but what paradigms get
changed unless it plays in the mainstream? Manning with the video of the mercs shooting the
civilians was the last time this happened, I think.
When it comes to seeing what's behind the curtain - which is precisely what the
information war is about - the words and the details of the stories matter far less than the
way that people's thinking gets changed.
~~
At Christmas I socialized with ordinary people. I learned that they believe the Russians
interfered in the US election, and planted Trump. Bummer, but on the other hand, I could talk
to everyone about the NSA getting my Facebook feed or my phone data, and there's full
agreement, or at least no disagreement.
Snowden went into the culture. Russiagate is still playing out, and we don't yet know who
will be the big loser in the belief system of the culture. I'm still willing to bet it's the
mainstream media.
~~
Putin has said that Snowden didn't reveal anything that Russian intelligence didn't
already know. Russia didn't want to harbor Snowden, but the US State Department forced the
issue by revoking his passport while he was in the air terminal in Russia. The current asylum
granted is for a 3-year period. I see no reason to make any change in this. It will be
reviewed when it expires, and if Snowden is still a stateless political refugee, which seems
very likely, than I imagine it will be renewed. Russia is a nation of laws.
Russia has little to do with Snowden. And even less to do with the US elections. Russia
doesn't want confrontation, between anyone. Russia wants a world of no conflict, and every
action it takes pursues this end. Russia will easily forego a cheap victory in order to gain
a valuable cessation of hostilities. I believe Putin when he says that who won the US
election was of no great importance to Russia - they would deal with whomever was there.
It's always important to understand that Russia is not playing a zero-sum game, nor is she
playing to "win" against any other nation in geopolitics. Russia wins when other nations stop
fighting. The lat thing she wants to do is interfere with the internal order of other
countries. But she is rooting for the orderliness of each country.
Thanks for your nice long comment and its excellent observations. And Happy Holidays since
I haven't wished them on you yet this year!
For me, Snowden's revelations were nothing new as I had already learned about Project Echelon , which by the end
of the 1980s was global girding and mostly intent on industrial espionage as this summary at
the link informs:
"The ECHELON program was created in the late 1960s to monitor the military and diplomatic
communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War, and was
formally established in 1971.[5][6]
"By the end of the 20th century, the system referred to as "ECHELON" had allegedly evolved
beyond its military and diplomatic origins, to also become ' a global system for the
interception of private and commercial communications' (mass surveillance and industrial
espionage)."
Indeed, the extent of Echelon was available to the public--sort of--but there were very
few publications about it, although that changed as the internet grew during the 1990s. So
for me, Snowden's actions becoming headline news was more important than the content of his
revelations as the slumbering public got slapped upside its collective head.
Another historical factoid of interest is FDR's meeting with media CEOs a few days prior
to 7 Dec 1941, of which no transcript exists to my knowledge, although what was said can be
inferred by subsequent actions by all the actors involved--there was no, zero, deviation from
the official government line about the Day of Infamy, which was a prelude to media portrayal
on 911.
Fundamentally, the bottom line is whenever interests between national governments diverge
from those of their public, governments will lie every time--those two sets of policy HRC
admitted she had for public versus private consumption. Although it's too soon to be certain,
it appears that the leadership of Russia and China have learned the difficult lesson that the
best policy is for the national government to be in sync with the interests of its citizenry,
thus the philosophical adoption of Win/Win versus the Outlaw US Empire's Zero Sum game, which
forms the basis for our ongoing Hybrid Third World War.
Pe entities at work that are not under the control of the Russian secret services. Here is a
link to an article on RT.de about US
Special Forces at the Russian Border
All we can do is assume.
@karlof1 #37
My favorite pet peeve is Bernays. Even those who are aware of his deplorable actions,
seldom grasp just how devastating his selling out of the human psyche to corporations and the
NSA/CIA really turned out to be. The man hated the masses and short of calling them 'useless
eaters', he saw them solely as means to corporate profits.
His legacy is a citizen without any other rights than that to "go shopping".
Go
Ask Alice tells us the latest story about how much the surveillance has advanced. The
article is about some content provider with unknown identity. The core message though is
about the NSA/FBI/CIA going after anybody that comments on the internet, provided certain
keywords are triggered. While that has been known since Snowden, the masses suffer from short
term memory loss. Any dissent to the establishment is noted. This proves that there is no
more rule of common law and nothing resembling a democracy by a far shot. A Plutocratic
dictatorship determined to destroy anybody that poses a threat to its existence.
@66
"What would be the most sinister scenario in regards to Snowden and the NSA leak?"
That General Hayden gets his wish and kills Snowden. That's the most sinister.
If you meant, intrigue, double agent or useful idiot sort of thing, well, Snowden had no
intention of running to China and definitely not to Russia.
The Intel Agencies would have loved if he ran straight to Moscow. But it didn't happen. So,we
sort of know he wasn't "used". He was "allowed" because they had it covered when he handed
off the purloined data.
What sort of encrypted communication did he use on that trip to Hong Kong? They knew what
he was doing.
They tried for it to be an out-and-out treason case. Remember that they insisted the Chinese
in Beijing had it all?
They they tried to generate the same with Russia and Putin when he landed in Moscow.
I find him to be a useful tool for everyone who wants something out of his adventure.
People who think he's a hero have their hero. People who want him dead probably have some
contract out on him. And others want him to be returned and prosecuted like Timothy McVeigh
and executed.
Grieved indicated above @57, Snowden was in our culture now. He's an asterisk. Compare him
to Daniel Ellsberg. You cannot. Ellsberg forced the country against the war machine, forced
the NYTimes to grow a set of balls and publish the Papers, and he won against the Deep State
who tried to destroy him. All the while he stood like a man of courage and didn't scurry
around and lateral the papers off. They got published. He faced down the system and won a
huge First Amendment battle.
I chalk up the differences as Snowden is a kid with a keyboard. Assange and Ellsberg are
men. The latter really matter. Snowden is a very light symbol, at best. He embarrassed NSA
and only exists today because of Putin and Russian values.
I guess Vietnam was the great Evil, and surveillance just doesn't match up against what
that charnel house of napalm, carpet bombing, white phosphorus, Agent Orange and Agent Blue,
Phoenix Program assassinations became.
Ellsberg was a true hero. I named my first son after him.
The original 3 TV Networks were started by Intelligence figures. When the Church Committee
documented that all 3 were controlled by the Rockefellers, Senator Nelson Rockefeller was
able to limit the GPO printing of the report to less than 100 copies.
Time Warner was govt & military intelligence controlled since its founding in 1923 by
Henry Luce, a Yale Skull & Bones guy from an intelligence family. His father was a spy in
China pretending to be a missionary.
The German journalist Udo Ulfkotte wrote a book, Bought Journalists, in which he reported
that every significant European journalist functions as a CIA asset.
It became even worse during the Clinton regime when six mega-media companies were
permitted to acquire 90% of the US print, TV, radio, and entertainment media, a concentration
that destroyed diversity and independence. Today the media throughout the Western world
serves as a Propaganda Ministry for Washington. The Western media is Washington's Ministry of
Truth.
At the top it isn't the case that the CIA controls the media; rather that the board of
directors is named by the banksters and mega-rich. Like all the mega-corps, they are
thoroughly controlled by the Usurpers. The CIA has always been their private police force for
intell & enforcement at home and abroad.
To rule a world requires control of military force, of money, information, energy, and the
elimination of private property. Everything else is distraction. Probably the end of net
neutrality is important. The coming global digital money is catastrophic. Agenda 21 is the
global dictatorship, and is already decreasing private property-- among other things.
https://geopolitics.co/2015/04/09/the-true-purpose-of-agenda-21/
I recommend the video within it.
@73 Mark - I cannot understand why Snowden doesn't have another copy to give to
Wikileaks.
This is a crucial point. Edward Snowden chose not to possess the files after he had handed
them off to the journalists. He wiped out his copy when they started to publish them. This
was a deliberate choice, and part of an entire ethical view that Snowden held of the
situation he was in, and the situation he had created.
If you can't understand why he held this view, then you have to ask him, or study his
words. But rest assured that he didn't simply "fail" to have a backup copy in case his
journalists chickened out or sold out their commitment. He was a geek. He wasn't a
journalist. He wanted sensible journalists to handle the lifetime scoop that he was holding.
In my view, he made an incredibly good choice.
Put yourself in his shoes. The path he had already walked just to get those files to those
real-world journalists in Hong Kong was already a thousand times longer than anything that
could possibly lie in front of him. All this talk about assets - like you can keep this kind
of thing going: the man lived a lifetime in a few short years and did the best thing he could
ever have conceived of.
He earned the space to delete the files and sit back for a while and watch things happen.
He said he wanted the public to know, and the public to discuss - if he was wrong, so be it,
but it was for the public to discuss, he always said.
Everything I've written here may not be true. But if it is true, then on the basis of this
narrative of events, no one has any right to ask anything more of Snowden. He was the
messenger who put his body in the circuit to complete the signal. We all gained. He gained
nothing, except satisfaction of mission accomplished.
For me that's where his story ends. Greenwald, Intercept, oligarchs, slavery - these are
all another story, and one that I'm focused on. But I choose to honor Snowden for the bravery
of what he seems to have done, and if true that achievement scored so high that no amount of
falling short can diminish it.
Snowden confirmed the NSA files held by shadow brokers as genuine. How many years after
destroying his copies? Snowden worked in US intelligence, perhaps just as a geek, but I don't
see him destroying the only weapon he has against them.
I haven't read here any discussion of the movie, SNOWDEN, produced by Oliver Stone. I saw
it when it first came out. Is it on Netflix or other outlets yet? As movies go it fell short
of a documentary. That said, it provides yet another potential thin-edge-of-a-wedge thought
for the zombies that live among us.
The neurofeedback treatment that I am up to 132 session of has healed many people like
Edward Snowden (with his reported epilepsy) and I hope he gets such soon in his life; us old
folks are harder to heal. One of neurofeedback earliest successes was a woman with epilepsy
who after being healed went out and got a drivers license.....can't find the source but this
was 30-40 years ago
I consider Snowden to be a true American patriot. The American values that I was taught
are in stark contrast to those exhibited by the God of Mammon cabal in control today. I don't
believe that we are a bad species but sorely misdirected by something that can be "easily"
changed. Look at the progress we have made as a species. Why do we let ourselves be limited
in our development by centuries old conventions about who controls the tools of finance? How
many wars would there be if money was a public utility?
What more revelations of Snowden's archive could possibly make any difference? It is already
basically understood that the NSA, its contractors, and 5 eyes agencies "collect it all"
illegally, with no meaningful oversight, to the degree that social media became their
accomplice and extension, that they abuse this power and the constitution proudly and with
impunity for any purposes and justifications they see fit, and so on, and the vast majority
of citizens cower, or delude themselves with some comforting trust that it won't be used
against them.
It has only proven that nothing will snap the majority ignorance from its coma.
No one with any voice - even those involved seem able to comprehend how vastly and deeply
this will effect the free will of people, culture, and society - for that matter how it
already has progressed to do so.
In the wake of the retroactive telcom immunity (which by definition is an admission of
blatant criminality and conspiracy by and between both government and telcom corporations)
The Snowden revalations couldn't have been more explicit, signifiacnt, or urgent. The people
did nothing. Those minor percentage of us who bother to read and understand what is happening
can chatter and pontificate all we want, because the ignorant majority hasn't the interest or
energy to question the status quo. (they absoloutely have not the attention span to read a
single Greenwald article) So really I can understand why there is no point releaseing the
rest.
Snowden was the one upholding his oath to the constitution, against whose who
systematically violated it, and he is called a traitor.
As far as RussiaGate being some sort of distraction from this - no more than a distraction
from any other meaningful information that SHOULD be on people's minds.
Regrettably, Moon of Alabama has not spotted what all major government intelligence agencies
have known for a couple of years now ... European intel agency report - 'Edward Snowden &
Glenn Greenwald are CIA frauds'
...
[copy of a Veterans Today nonsense piece deleted - b.]
Snowden didn't "destroy" anything. He gave it all to Greenwald in Hong Kong.
That way, nobody could coerce or otherwise intimidate him; as there were no files in his
possesion.
Snowden himself clearly stated this fact.
That he landed in Russia is entirely the fault of the U.S. government (such as it is) by
cancelling Snowden's passport enroute; this becomes ancient history in today's world...
Oh mercy; this is getting just too weird and woo, woo, for this one; later will
be greater...
Posted by: V. Arnold , Dec 27, 2017 4:16:44 AM |
85
Oh mercy; this is getting just too weird and woo, woo, for this one; later will be greater...
Posted by: V. Arnold | Dec 27, 2017 4:16:44 AM |
85 /div
the Snowden('snowed in') saga is yet to be written, or perhaps, like much verity, will NEVER
be written. eluding the intelligence hounds for a couple of weeks while shooting a nice HD
video with a couple of prominent journalists never passed my smell test...
,,,
...and what might seem a minor quibble with Grieved's:
Manning with the video of the mercs shooting the civilians was the last time this
happened, I think
I agree that the Snowden info was the paradym changer that showed to me in unmistakable
imagery,
that my country was an outlaw nation hellbent on economic empire and had shifted from liberty
to total
Control mechanisms.
The Snowden info together with the missing 28 pages from the 911 committee findings sent
me on a
truth mission; reading everything from "CIA Rouges Killed JFK, Russ Baker's book on the
Bush
family, to Fahrenheit 911.
This former Neocon keeps trying to wash himself in the pure waters of the truth but cannot
wash clean his guilt
for once voting for and defending such trash.
So I continue reading sites like MOA and others seeking the truth and speaking out to
those in my life.
I agree that the Snowden info was the paradym changer that showed to me in unmistakable
imagery,
that my country was an outlaw nation hellbent on economic empire and had shifted from liberty
to total
Control mechanisms
Brabantian @ 83, Yes, the huge amount of publicity given Snowden was an obvious tip-off that
he is a hoax. All other whistleblowers get no publicity at all. Plus, everything that Snowden
"disclosed" was already known. Perhaps he's out there to give credibility to lies as yet
untold. Already his "asylum" promotes the fiction of East vs West opposition. It is a play
and we are the audience, stuck in Plato's cave.
'Snowden says he took no secret files to russia', NYSlimes 10/13
He argued that he had helped American national security by prompting a badly needed public
debate about the scope of the intelligence effort. "The secret continuance of these programs
represents a far greater danger than their disclosure," he said. He added that he had been
more concerned that Americans had not been told about the N.S.A.'s reach than he was about
any specific surveillance operation.
" So long as there's broad support amongst a people, it can be argued there's a level
of legitimacy even to the most invasive and morally wrong program, as it was an informed and
willing decision," he said . "However, programs that are implemented in secret, out of
public oversight, lack that legitimacy, and that's a problem. It also represents a dangerous
normalization of 'governing in the dark,' where decisions with enormous public impact occur
without any public input."
Pffffft.
Zo, will congress renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 when they're
back in town?
There's a lot going on in this post and comment thread. I have no strong opinion about the
disputed status/role of either Snowden or Greenwald that are being discussed above, but I do
think it very likely that the Intercept was originally started as what is often referred to
(I believe following the Nixon tapes) as a "limited hangout" operation.
It was intended to "expose" certain truths the CIA/NSA knew were already implied by
earlier revealed and published documents and by this means was to distract the public (as if)
and journalists (all three of them) from probing more deeply into the history, scope, and
current operations of these and related programs. I would not be surprised if it turned out
somehow that the real objective of this was to block the inquiry into or exposure of special
access Intel operations during or prior to 9/11 which would blow up entirely the official
narrative of that epochal event.
But I would like to bring up one fact that bears on the ongoing discussion of Snowden and
Greenwald but has not been mentioned yet (I believe) in this thread. That is the NSA's
reported identification of (I believe) at least two other possible leakers or whistleblowers
simultaneous with or just after Snowden. I recall there being several reports about the
arrest or possible detainment of one possible leaker in particular whose identity has never
(to my knowledge) come to light. Does anybody remember better than I do this intriguing but
often forgot facet of the NSA / Snowden affair?
The existence, identity, and (unknown?) fate of this possible NSA leaker bears on the
questions being asked above about Snowden and Greenwald in obvious ways. If there really was
such a leaker or potential leaker who had at the time not yet been apprehended by the NSA,
then it is at least certainly possible that Snowden's own leaks were co-opted (willingly or
not) by the CIA/NSA to render the revelations of the other not-yet-identified leaker
anticlimactic and redundant. In this way, it is possible that Snowden's leaks, as filtered
through Greenwald, the Guardian, and the Post, were themselves a kind of limited hangout
operation.
Note what they produced: Obama admitted a discussion was needed, Clapper was dutifully
brought before Congress, lied to them, and was not punished at all for it, and some
peripheral laws were tweaked (and then untweaked) to give the impression that something had
been discovered, discussed, and addressed, with the hope that now everybody would stop
thinking too much about the NSA etc. This is exactly what happened, and it's exactly what
limited hangouts are designed to do.
I would be interested in hearing more information from others here about those one or two
other unidentified NSA leakers. What ever happened with that story? Was the identity of both
leakers ever revealed?
As many other here stated, what WAS revealed, to was already known to a large degree. What
WAS revealed, did not stir up the public sentiment beyond a ripple. It is the absence of any
whatsoever consequence to his revelations that does not make sense. For the first part, of
his living here in Hawai'i and subcontractor work for the NSA via Booz Allen Hamilton, reads
like a cheap version of a spy b-picture. Compared to the surrounding circumstances of Daniel
Ellsberg, Snowden's story appeared to be staged - if only to me. The more became known, the
less did people pay attention to Libya and Syria. The distractive value of the unfolding
Snowden whistle blowing was enormous.
I have always been flabbergasted about the naivety of the general public in regards to the
abilities, capabilities and determination of the so called 'establishment' - aka Plutocracy,
when it comes to the choice of means to achieve their psychopathic goals. What is out of
reach, or undoable to those that willingly accept the death of millions of innocent people in
the ME and the world over?
The utter destruction of sovereign Nations that don't fall in line? Organizing coup
d'etats like local fundraisers for soup kitchens? Looking at the track record of the American
establishment, nothing, absolutely nothing is ever off the table.
A staged NSA leak story that turns out to become more inconceivable and more suspicious by
the day. And it matters not. Not more than Assange spending his days in an Ecuadorian exile
until the plot line demands to change.
Therefore, the most sinister scenario includes a wholly staged Snowden storyline, with the
participation of Russia. This is not to say that this is the way it is, but not discounting
the possibility that it could be. On more than one occasion, Russian behavior, be it either
reactionary, or proactive has been inconclusive. A fool who would think that it is all just
theater on the expense of millions of innocent people and humanity as a whole.
No one has ever been able to predict the future in detail. Mankind is left to make sense
of the present and with constant misinformation and distraction, that appears to be
impossible.
Thanks to You and the other knowledgeable commenters.
There is a good case that both Snowjob and Assange are Limited Hangouts. Each has exposed
little beyond that which was already known. Neither offers any criticism of Israel's
occupation of Palestine and the Yinon Plan.
What they have done is to get the worlds' citizenry to understand that domestic
surveillance is a normal condition which should be expected and accepted.
@126 What they have done is to get the worlds' citizenry to understand that domestic
surveillance is a normal condition which should be expected and accepted.
This could also be stated as, "What they have done is to get the worlds' citizenry to
understand that domestic surveillance is a normal condition which should be expected and
guarded against ."
I think the world has changed since Snowden. Within the IT community, the sense of
security and its requirements has been changed. What's missing so far is a discernible
response. Wait a few more short years, until Chinese computing oustrips western encryption by
an order of magnitude, and sooner than that when Russian hardware and software made for the
consumer market is invulnerable to NSA technology. There's no sense trying to protect oneself
from NSA at present because it will only draw attention. But when the Russian kit is on the
market, let's just see who in the west buys it. I predict large sales.
I'm always wary of talk about limited hangouts. A case can usually be made that such talk is
itself intended for the same purpose - to lull the recipient into despair and passivity.
When we say that we've all been gamed by theater, it's another way of saying not to fight
back. But the Devil doesn't get it all his way all the time. And the rulers of the Earth
always have to work through agents, and they are so frigging human that plans often go
slightly, or greatly, awry.
We see more botched conspiracy action than seems credible. So a case can be made that the
carelessness itself is part of the subliminal message that resistance is futile. But is it
really intentional, or is it simply making the best of a bad job? Was Kennedy really gunned
down in daylight as a message to all of us that we'd better not resist, because the power was
total? Or was it just the way the state criminals think, that the way to kill a president is
the same playbook that always worked before, and still they botched the hit with all kinds of
missed shots and clumsy actions? Their secret weapon was media complicity - this allowed a
multitude of sins, and without it we'd have known 50 years ago who killed Kennedy.
And it WAS a secret weapon. It took a long time for this to become obvious. We see the
media all along has been completely mediocre, but since it has long given wall-to-wall
coverage, it never had to get very good in order to send the daily propaganda message. Come
the Internet, everyone sees how sloppy the media's work is. But does this raise the quality
of the media lies? It seems not - the opposite in fact, the readers get far smarter than the
writers.
The greatest trick the Devil pulled was not convincing the world he didn't exist, it was
convincing the world that evil was clever, when in fact it's very mediocre. Evil performs
badly. It will continue to perform badly. It can be resisted and overcome. This takes
time.
I always enjoy the words of fictional Lazarus Long: "Of course the game is rigged. But
don't let that stop you playing. If you don't play, you can't win."
Here is my little experience with the surveillance state: I am a user of the Mathematica
computer program developed and sold by Wolfram Research Inc. They have a web site for users
to exchange information called Wolfram Community. It is mostly about asking and answering
questions about the use of Mathematica or sharing Mathematica tricks. About a year ago a
series of about half a dozen ads for programmers appeared which were clearly link to
expanding the surveillance state. Here is one of them:
I replied by quoting the U.S. Constitution 4th Amendment and saying "Yes it was relevant
to the advertisement."
Within 10 minutes my reply was deleted. I received an email from Wolfram Research saying:
"We work very hard to foster positive environment on Wolfram Community and cannot allow any
discussions outside the Wolfram Community guidelines. This means discussions that stray way
beyond Wolfram Technologies topics."
So what is positive about advertisements on a community forum for the surveillance state
and what is negative about the 4th Amendment? And the advertisements had little direct
relevance to Mathematica. But I suppose they had their reasons.
"... The initiative described in this article reminds me of how the World Bank pushed hard for emerging economies to develop capital markets, for the greater good of America's investment bankers. ..."
"... By Burcu Kilic, an expert on legal, economic and political issues. Originally published at openDemocracy ..."
"... Today, the big tech race is for data extractivism from those yet to be 'connected' in the world – tech companies will use all their power to achieve a global regime in which small nations cannot regulate either data extraction or localisation. ..."
"... One suspects big money will be thrown at this by the leading tech giants. ..."
"... Out of idle curiosity, how could you accurately deduce my country of origin from my name? ..."
December 14, 2017 by Yves Smith Yves here. Notice that Costa
Rica is served up as an example in this article. Way back in 1997, American Express had
designated Costa Rica as one of the countries it identified as sufficiently high income so as
to be a target for a local currency card offered via a franchise agreement with a domestic
institution (often but not always a bank). 20 years later, the Switzerland of Central America
still has limited Internet connectivity, yet is precisely the sort of place that tech titans
like Google would like to dominate.
The initiative described in this article reminds me of how the World Bank pushed hard
for emerging economies to develop capital markets, for the greater good of America's investment
bankers.
By Burcu Kilic, an expert on legal, economic and political issues. Originally published
at
openDemocracy
Today, the big tech race is for data extractivism from those yet to be 'connected' in
the world – tech companies will use all their power to achieve a global regime in which
small nations cannot regulate either data extraction or localisation.
To avoid a 'failure ministerial," some countries see the solution as pushing governments to
open a mandate to start conversations that might lead to a negotiation on binding rules for
e-commerce and a declaration of the gathering as the "digital ministerial". Argentina's MC11
chair, Susana Malcorra, is actively pushing for member states to embrace e-commerce at the WTO,
claiming that it is necessary to " bridge the gap between the
haves and have-nots ".
It is not very clear what kind of gaps Malcorra is trying to bridge. It surely isn't the
"connectivity gap" or "digital divide" that is growing between developed and developing
countries, seriously impeding digital learning and knowledge in developing countries. In fact,
half of humanity is not even connected to the internet, let alone positioned to develop
competitive markets or bargain at a multilateral level. Negotiating binding e-commerce rules at
the WTO would only widen that gap.
Dangerously, the "South Vision" of digital trade in the global trade arena is being shaped
by a recent alliance of governments and well-known tech-sector lobbyists, in a group called
'Friends of E-Commerce for Development' (FED), including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa
Rica, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uruguay, and, most recently, China. FED
claims that e-commerce is a tool to drive growth, narrow the digital divide, and generate
digital solutions for developing and least developed countries.
However, none of the countries in the group (apart from China) is leading or even remotely
ready to be in a position to negotiate and push for binding rules on digital trade that will be
favorable to them, as their economies are still far away from the technology revolution. For
instance, it is perplexing that one of the most fervent defenders of FED's position is Costa
Rica. The country's economy is based on the export of bananas, coffee, tropical
fruits, and low-tech medical instruments, and almost half of its population
is offline . Most of the countries in FED are far from being powerful enough to shift
negotiations in favor of small players.
U.S.-based tech giants and Chinese Alibaba – so-called GAFA-A – dominate, by
far, the future of the digital playing field, including issues such as identification and
digital payments, connectivity, and the next generation of logistics solutions. In fact, there
is a no-holds-barred ongoing race among these tech giants to consolidate their market share in
developing economies, from the race to grow the advertising market to the race to increase
online payments.
An e-commerce agenda that claims unprecedented development for the Global South is a Trojan
horse move. Beginning negotiations on such topics at this stage – before governments are
prepared to understand what is at stake – could lead to devastating results, accelerating
liberalization and the consolidation of the power of tech giants to the detriment of local
industries, consumers, and citizens. Aware of the increased disparities between North and
South, and the data dominance of a tiny group of GAFA-A companies, a group of African nations
issued a statement opposing the digital ambitions of the host for MC11. But the political
landscape is more complex, with China, the EU, and Russia now supporting the idea of a
"digital" mandate .
Repeating the Same Mistakes?
The relationships of most countries with tech companies are as imbalanced as their
relationships with Big Pharma, and there are many parallels to note. Not so long ago, the
countries of the Global South faced Big Pharma power in pharmaceutical markets in a similar
way. Some developing countries had the same enthusiasm when they negotiated intellectual
property rules for the protection of innovation and research and development costs. In reality,
those countries were nothing more than users and consumers of that innovation, not the owners
or creators. The lessons of negotiating trade issues that lie at the core of public interest
issues – in that case, access to medicines – were costly. Human lives and
fundamental rights of those who use online services should not be forgotten when addressing the
increasingly worrying and unequal relationships with tech power.
The threat before our eyes is similarly complex and equally harmful to the way our societies
will be shaped in the coming years. In the past, the Big Pharma race was for patent
exclusivity, to eliminate local generic production and keep drug prices high. Today, the Big
Tech race is for data extractivism from those who have yet to be connected in the world, and
tech companies will use all the power they hold to achieve a global regime in which small
nations cannot regulate either data extraction or data localization.
Big Tech is one of the most concentrated and resourceful industries of all time. The
bargaining power of developing countries is minimal. Developing countries will basically be
granting the right to cultivate small parcels of a land controlled by data lords -- under their
rules, their mandate, and their will -- with practically no public oversight. The stakes are
high. At the core of it is the race to conquer the markets of digital payments and the battle
to become the platform where data flows, splitting the territory as old empires did in the
past. As
the Economist claimed on May 6, 2017: "Conflicts over control of oil have scarred
the world for decades. No one yet worries that wars will be fought over data. But the data
economy has the same potential for confrontation."
If countries from the Global South want to prepare for data wars, they should start thinking
about how to reduce the control of Big Tech over -- how we communicate, shop, and learn the
news -- , again, over our societies. The solution lies not in making rules for data
liberalization, but in devising ways to use the law to reduce Big Tech's power and protect
consumers and citizens. Finding the balance would take some time and we are going to take that
time to find the right balance, we are not ready to lock the future yet.
One suspects big money will be thrown at this by the leading tech giants. To paraphrase
from a comment I made recently regarding a similar topic : "with markets in the developed
world pretty much sewn up by the tripartite tech overlords (google, fb and amazon), the next
3 billion users for their products/services are going to come from developing world". With
this dynamic in mind, and the "constant growth" mantra humming incessantly in the background,
it's easy to see how high stakes a game this is for the tech giants and how no resources will
be spared to stymie any efforts at establishing a regulatory oversight framework that will
protect the digital rights of citizens in the global south.
Multilateral fora like the WTO are de facto enablers for the marauding frontal attacks of
transnational corporations, and it's disheartening to see that some developing nations have
already nailed the digital futures of their citizens to the mast of the tech giants by
joining this alliance. What's more, this signing away of their liberty will be sold to the
citizenry as the best way to usher them into the brightest of all digital futures.
One suspects big money will be thrown at this by the leading tech giants.
Vast sums of money are already being thrown at bringing Africa online, for better
or worse. Thus, the R&D aimed at providing wireless Internet via giant
drones/balloons/satellites by Google, Facebook, etc.
You're African. Possibly South African by your user name, which may explain why you're a
little behind the curve, because the action is already happening, but more to the north --
and particularly in East Africa.
The big corporations -- and the tech giants are competing with the banking/credit card
giants -- have noted how mobile technology leapt over the dearth of last century's telephony
tech, land lines, and in turn enabled the highest adoption rates of cellphone banking in the
world. (Particularly in East Africa, as I say.) The payoffs for big corporations are massive
-- de facto cashless societies where the corporations control the payment systems
–and the politicians are mostly cheap.
In Nigeria, the government has launched a Mastercard-branded national ID card that's also
a payment card, in one swoop handing Mastercard more than 170 million potential customers,
and their personal and biometric data.
In Kenya, the sums transferred by mobile money operator M-Pesa are more than 25 percent of
that country's GDP.
You can see that bringing Africa online is technically a big, decade-long project. But
also that the potential payoffs are vast. Though I also suspect China may come out ahead --
they're investing far more in Africa and in some areas their technology -- drones, for
instance -- is already superior to what the Europeans and the American companies have.
Hoisted from a comment I made here recently: "Here in South Africa and through its Free
Basics programme, facebook is jumping into bed with unsuspecting ISPs (I say unsuspecting
because fb will soon be muscling in on their territory and becoming an ISP itself by
provisioning bandwidth directly from its floating satellites) and circumventing net
neutrality "
I'm also keenly aware of the developments in Kenya re: safaricom and Mpesa and how that
has led to traditional banking via bank accounts being largely leapfrogged for those moving
from being unbanked to active economic citizens requiring money transfer facilities. Given
the huge succes of Mpesa, I wouldn't be surprised if a multinational tech behemoth (chinese
or american) were to make a play for acquiring safaricom and positioning it as a triple-play
ISP, money transfer/banking services and digital content provider (harvesting data about
users habits on an unprecedented scale across multiple areas of their lives), first in Kenya
then expanded throughout east, central and west africa. I must add that your statement about
Nigeria puts Mark Zuckerberg's visit there a few months back into context somewhat, perhaps a
reconnaissance mission of sorts.
Out of idle curiosity, how could you accurately deduce my country of origin from my
name?
As you also write: "with markets in the developed world pretty much sewn up by the
tripartite tech overlords (google, fb and amazon), the next 3 billion users for their
products/services are going to come from developing world."
Absolutely true. This cannot be stressed enough. The tech giants know this and the race is
on.
"... This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust-specifically its pegging competition to "consumer welfare," defined as short-term price effects-is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon's dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. ..."
"... This Note maps out facets of Amazon's dominance. Doing so enables us to make sense of its business strategy, illuminates anticompetitive aspects of Amazon's structure and conduct, and underscores deficiencies in current doctrine. The Note closes by considering two potential regimes for addressing Amazon's power: restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying common carrier obligations and duties. ..."
Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery
and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television
and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space. Although Amazon has clocked
staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy,
the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses
that depend upon it. Elements of the firm's structure and conduct pose anticompetitive concerns -- yet it has escaped antitrust
scrutiny.
This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust-specifically its pegging competition to "consumer welfare," defined
as short-term price effects-is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize
the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon's dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output.
Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business
lines may prove anticompetitive. These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the
economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded.
Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational-even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore
implausible. Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these
platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit
information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.
This Note maps out facets of Amazon's dominance. Doing so enables us to make sense of its business strategy, illuminates anticompetitive
aspects of Amazon's structure and conduct, and underscores deficiencies in current doctrine. The Note closes by considering two
potential regimes for addressing Amazon's power: restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying
common carrier obligations and duties.
Russiagate witch hunt is destroying CIA franchise in Facebook and Twitter, which were used
by many Russians and Eastern Europeans in general.
One telling sign of the national security state is "demonizing enemies of the state" including
using neo-McCarthyism methods, typically for Russiagate.
In the beginning, "Russiagate" was about alleged actions by Russian secret services. Evidence
for these allegations has never emerged, and it seems that the Russiagate conspiracy theorists largely
gave up on this part (they still sometimes write about it as if it was an established fact, but since
the only thing in support of it they can adduce is the canard about the 17 intelligence services, it
probably is not that interesting any more).
Now, they have dropped the mask, and the object of their hatred are openly all Russian people,
as the new Undermensch. If these people and US MSM recognized the reality that they are now
a particularly rabid part of the xenophobic far right in the United States
Notable quotes:
"... Buried in the story's "jump" is the acknowledgement that Milner's "companies sold those holdings several years ago." But such is the anti-Russia madness gripping the Establishment of Washington and New York that any contact with any Russian constitutes a scandal worthy of front-page coverage. On Monday, The Washington Post published a page-one article entitled, "9 in Trump's orbit had contacts with Russians." ..."
"... The anti-Russian madness has reached such extremes that even when you say something that's obviously true – but that RT, the Russian television network, also reported – you are attacked for spreading "Russian propaganda." ..."
"... We saw that when former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile disclosed in her new book that she considered the possibility of replacing Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket after Clinton's public fainting spell and worries about her health. ..."
"... In other words, the go-to excuse for everything these days is to blame the Russians and smear anyone who says anything – no matter how true – if it also was reported on RT. ..."
"... The CIA has an entire bureaucracy dedicated to propaganda and disinformation, with some of those efforts farmed out to newer entities such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). NATO has a special command in Latvia that undertakes "strategic communications." ..."
"... Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world to harass people who criticize the Zionist project. Indeed, since the 1980s, Israel has pioneered many of the tactics of computer spying and sabotage that were adopted and expanded by America's National Security Agency, explaining why the Obama administration teamed up with Israel in a scheme to plant malicious code into Iranian centrifuges to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. ..."
"... And, if you're really concerned about foreign interference in U.S. elections and policies, there's the remarkable influence of Israel and its perceived ability to effect the defeat of almost any politician who deviates from what the Israeli government wants, going back at least to the 1980s when Sen. Chuck Percy and Rep. Paul Findley were among the political casualties after pursuing contacts with the Palestinians. ..."
"... The answer seems to be the widespread hatred for President Trump combined with vested interests in favor of whipping up the New Cold War. That is a goal valued by both the Military-Industrial Complex, which sees trillions of dollars in strategic weapons systems in the future, and the neoconservatives, who view Russia as a threat to their "regime change" agendas for Syria and Iran. ..."
"... After all, if Russia and its independent-minded President Putin can be beaten back and beaten down, then a big obstacle to the neocon/Israeli goal of expanding the Mideast wars will be removed. ..."
"... Right now, the neocons are openly lusting for a "regime change" in Moscow despite the obvious risks that such turmoil in a nuclear-armed country might create, including the possibility that Putin would be succeeded not by some compliant Western client like the late Boris Yeltsin but by an extreme nationalist who might consider launching a nuclear strike to protect the honor of Mother Russia. ..."
"... The likely outcome from the anti-Russian show trials on Capitol Hill is that technology giants will bow to the bipartisan demand for new algorithms and other methods for stigmatizing, marginalizing and eliminating information that challenges the mainstream storylines in the cause of fighting "Russian propaganda." ..."
"... America's Stolen Narrative, ..."
"... witch hunt by congressional Democrats, working with the intelligence agencies and leading media outlets, to legitimize censorship and attack free speech on the Internet. ..."
"... The aim of this campaign is to claim that social conflict within the United States arises not from the scale of social inequality in America, greater than in any other country in the developed world, but rather from the actions of "outside agitators" working in the service of the Kremlin. ..."
"... The McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s sought to suppress left-wing thought and label all forms of dissent as illegitimate and treasonous. Those who led them worked to purge left-wing opinion from Hollywood, the trade unions and the universities. ..."
"... Likewise, the new McCarthyism is aimed at creating a political climate in which left-wing organizations and figures are demonized as agents of the Kremlin who are essentially engaged in treasonous activity deserving of criminal prosecution. ..."
"... Danny there was a time not to long ago, I would have said of how we are 'moving towards' to us becoming a police state, well instead replace that prediction of 'moving towards' to the stark reality to be described as 'that now we are', and there you will have it that we have finally arrived to becoming a full blown 'police state'. ..."
"... Thanks to Mr. Parry for this very fair and complete review of the latest attempts to generate a fake foreign enemy. The tyrant over a democracy must generate fake foreign enemies to pose falsely as a protector, so as to demand domestic power and accuse his opponents of disloyalty, as Aristotle and Plato warned thousands of years ago. ..."
"... The insanity of the entire "Russian hacking" narrative has been revealed over and over, including this past weekend when +/-100 Clinton loyalists published a screed on Medium saying Donna Brazile had been taken in by Russian propaganda. ..."
"... I have come to expect just about anything when it comes to Russia-Gate, but I was taken aback by the Hillary bots' accusation that videos of Hillary stumbling and others showing her apparently having a fit of some kind and also needing to be helped up the steps to someone's house -- which were taken by Americans and shown by Americans and seen by millions of shocked Americans -- were driven by Russia-Gate. ..."
"... Now, since the extremist xenophobic idea that contact with *any* Russians is a scandal has taken hold in the United States, people are probably not too eager to mention these contacts in these atmosphere of extreme xenophobic anti-Russian hatred in today's United States. Furthermore, people who have contact with large numbers of people probably really have difficulties remembering and listing these all. ..."
"... Their contacts are with Russian business and maybe the Russian mob, not the Russian state. There is really not question that Trump and his cronies are crooks, but they are crooks in the US and in all the other countries where they do business, not just Russia. I'm sure Mueller will be able to tie Trump directly to some of the sleeze. But there is no evidence that the Russian government is involved in any of it. "Russia-gate" implies Russian government involvement, not just random Russians. There is no evidence of that and moreover the logic is against. ..."
"... Mr. Cash . I think George Papadopoulis, Trump's young Aide, was an inside mole for neocon pro-Israel interests. Those interests needed to knock the unreliable President Trump out of the way to get the "system" back where it belonged – in their pocket. Papadopoulis, on his own, was rummaging around making Trump/Russian connections that finally ended with the the William (Richard?) Browder (well-known Washington DC neocon)/Natalia Veselnitskaya/Donald Trump, Jr. fiasco. The Trumps knew nothing of those negotiations, and young Trump left when he realized Natalia was only interested in Americans being allowed to adopt Russian children again and had no dirt on Hillary. ..."
"... It was never my impression that Cold War liberals opposed McCarthy or the anti-Communist witch hunt. Where they didn't gleefully join in, they watched quietly from the sidelines while the American left was eviscerated, jailed, driven from public life. Then the liberals stepped in when it was clear things were going a little too far and just as the steam had run out of McCarthy's slander machine. ..."
"... At that point figures like Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy found the path clear for their brand of political stagecraft. They were imperialists to a man, something they proved abundantly when given the chance. Liberals supplanted the left in U.S. life- in the unions, the teaching profession, publishing and every other field where criticism of the Cold War and the enduring prevalence of worker solidarity across international lines threatened the new order. ..."
"... The book concludes that by equating dissent with disloyalty, promoting guilt by association, and personally commanding loyalty programs, ""Truman and his advisors employed all the political and programmatic techniques that in later years were to become associated with the broad phenomenon of McCarthyism."" ..."
"... Formed by Google in June 2015 with Eliot Higgins of the Atlantic Council's Bellingcat as a founding member, the "First Draft" coalition includes all the usual mainstream media "partners" in "regime change" war propaganda: the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, the UK Guardian and Telegraph, BBC News, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab and Kiev-based Stopfake. ..."
"... In the beginning, "Russiagate" was about alleged actions by Russian secret services. Evidence for these allegations has never emerged, and it seems that the Russiagate conspiracy theorists largely gave up on this part (they still sometimes write about it as if it was an established fact, but since the only thing in support of it they can adduce is the canard about the 17 intelligence services, it probably is not that interesting any more) ..."
"... Now, they have dropped the mask, and the object of their hatred are openly all Russian people, anyone who is "Russian linked" by ever having logged in to social networks from Russia or using Cyrillic letters. If these people and their media at least recognized the reality that they are now a particularly rabid part of the xenophobic far right in the United States ..."
"... The interview of Roger Waters on RT is one of the best I have seen in a long while. I wish some other artists get the courage to raise their voices. The link to the Roger Waters interview is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7jcvfbLoIA This Roger Waters interview is worth watching. ..."
"... It would seem that everyone on the US telivision , newspaper and internet news has mastered the art of hand over mouth , gasp and looking horrified every time Russia is mentioned. It looks to me that the US is in the middle of another of it´s mid life crises. Panic reigns supreme every where. If it was not so sad it would be funny. i was born in the 1940s and remember the McCarthy witch hunts and the daily shower of people jumping out of windows as a result of it. ..."
"... In The Fifties (1993), American journalist and historian David Halberstam addressed the noxious effect of McCarthyism: "McCarthy's carnival like four year spree of accusation charges, and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after his own recklessness, carelessness and boozing ended his career in shame." (page 53) ..."
"... Halberstam specifically discussed how readily the so-called "free" press acquiesced to McCarthy's masquerading: "The real scandal in all this was the behavior of the members of the Washington press corps, who, more often than not, knew better. They were delighted to be a part of his traveling road show, chronicling each charge and then moving on to the next town, instead of bothering to stay behind and follow up. They had little interest in reporting how careless McCarthy was or how little it all meant to him." (page 55) ..."
"... Why have they not investigated James Comey? Why has the MSM instead created a Russian Boogeyman? Why was he invited to testify about the Russian connection but never cross examined about his own influence? Why is the clearest reason for election meddling by James Comey not even spoken of by the MSM? This is because the MSM does not want to cover events as they happened but wants to recreate a alternate reality suitable to themselves which serves their interests and convinces us that the MSM has no part at all in downplaying the involvement of themselves in the election but wants to create a foreign enemy to blame. ..."
Special Report: Many American liberals who once denounced McCarthyism as evil are now learning
to love the ugly tactic when it can be used to advance the Russia-gate "scandal" and silence dissent,
reports Robert Parry.
The New York Times has finally detected some modern-day McCarthyism, but not in the anti-Russia
hysteria that the newspaper has fueled for several years amid the smearing of American skeptics as
"useful idiots" and the like. No, the Times editors
are accusing a Long Island Republican of McCarthyism for linking his Democratic rival to "New
York City special interest groups." As the Times laments, "It's the old guilt by association."
Yet, the Times sees no McCarthyism in the frenzy of Russia-bashing and guilt by association for
any American who can be linked even indirectly to any Russian who might have some ill-defined links
to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On Monday, in the same edition that expressed editorial outrage over that Long Island political
ad's McCarthyism, the Times ran two front-page articles under the headline: "A Complex Paper Trail:
Blurring Kremlin's Ties to Key U.S. Businesses."
Buried in the story's "jump" is the acknowledgement that Milner's "companies sold those holdings
several years ago." But such is the anti-Russia madness gripping the Establishment of Washington
and New York that any contact with any Russian constitutes a scandal worthy of front-page coverage.
On Monday, The Washington Post published
a page-one article entitled, "9 in Trump's orbit had contacts with Russians."
The anti-Russian madness has reached such extremes that even when you say something that's obviously
true – but that RT, the Russian television network, also reported – you are attacked for spreading
"Russian propaganda."
We saw that when former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile disclosed in her
new book that she considered the possibility of replacing Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket
after Clinton's public fainting spell and worries about her health.
Though there was a video of Clinton's collapse on Sept. 11, 2016, followed by her departure from
the campaign trail to fight pneumonia – not to mention her earlier scare with blood clots – the
response from a group of 100 Clinton supporters was to question Brazile's patriotism: "It is
particularly troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda,
spread by both the Russians and our opponents about our candidate's health."
In other words, the go-to excuse for everything these days is to blame the Russians and smear
anyone who says anything – no matter how true – if it also was reported on RT.
Pressing the Tech Companies
Just as Sen. Joe McCarthy liked to haul suspected "communists" and "fellow-travelers" before his
committee in the 1950s, the New McCarthyism has its own witch-hunt hearings, such as last week's
Senate grilling of executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google for supposedly allowing Russians
to have input into the Internet's social networks. Executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google hauled
before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism on Oct. 31, 2017.Trying to appease Congress and fend off threats of government regulation, the rich tech companies
displayed their eagerness to eradicate any Russian taint.
Twitter's general counsel Sean J. Edgett
told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism that Twitter adopted an "expansive
approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account."
Edgett said the criteria included "whether the account was created in Russia, whether the user
registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email address, whether the user's
display name contains Cyrillic characters, whether the user frequently Tweets in Russian, and whether
the user has logged in from any Russian IP address, even a single time. We considered an account
to be Russian-linked if it had even one of the relevant criteria."
The trouble with Twitter's methodology was that none of those criteria would connect an account
to the Russian government, let alone Russian intelligence or some Kremlin-controlled "troll farm."
But the criteria could capture individual Russians with no link to the Kremlin as well as people
who weren't Russian at all, including, say, American or European visitors to Russia who logged onto
Twitter through a Moscow hotel.
Also left unsaid is that Russians are not the only national group that uses the Cyrillic alphabet.
It is considered a standard script for writing in Belarus, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbo-Croatia and
Ukraine. So, for instance, a Ukrainian using the Cyrillic alphabet could end up falling into the
category of "Russian-linked" even if he or she hated Putin.
Twitter's attorney also said the company conducted a separate analysis from information provided
by unidentified "third party sources" who pointed toward accounts supposedly controlled by the St.
Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), totaling 2,752 accounts. The IRA is typically described
in the U.S. press as a "troll farm" which employs tech-savvy employees who combat news and opinions
that are hostile to Russia and the Russian government. But exactly how those specific accounts were
traced back to this organization was not made clear.
And, to put that number in some perspective, Twitter claims 330 million active monthly users,
which makes the 2,752 accounts less than 0.001 percent of the total.
The Trouble with 'Trolling'
While the Russia-gate investigation has sought to portray the IRA effort as exotic and somehow
unique to Russia, the strategy is followed by any number of governments, political movements and
corporations – sometimes using enthusiastic volunteers but often employing professionals skilled
at challenging critical information or at least muddying the waters.
Those of us who operate on the Internet are familiar with harassment from "trolls" who may use
access to "comment" sections to inject propaganda and disinformation to sow confusion, to cause disruption,
or to discredit the site by promoting ugly opinions and nutty conspiracy theories.
As annoying as this "trolling" is, it's just a modern version of more traditional strategies used
by powerful entities for generations – hiring public-relations specialists, lobbyists, lawyers and
supposedly impartial "activists" to burnish images, fend off negative news and intimidate nosy investigators.
In this competition, modern Russia is both a late-comer and a piker.
The U.S. government fields legions of publicists, propagandists, paid journalists,
psy-ops specialists , contractors and non-governmental organizations to promote Washington's
positions and undermine rivals through information warfare.
The CIA has an entire bureaucracy dedicated to propaganda and disinformation, with some of
those
efforts farmed out to newer entities such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or paid
for by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). NATO has a special command in Latvia
that undertakes
"strategic communications."
Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world
to harass people who criticize the Zionist project. Indeed, since the 1980s, Israel has pioneered
many of the tactics of computer spying and sabotage that were adopted and expanded by America's National
Security Agency, explaining why the Obama administration teamed up with Israel in a scheme to plant
malicious code into Iranian centrifuges to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.
It's also ironic that the U.S. government touted social media as a great benefit in advancing
so-called "color revolutions" aimed at "regime change" in troublesome countries. For instance, when
the "green revolution" was underway in Iran in 2009 after the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
the Obama administration asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance so the street protesters
could continue using the platform to organize against Ahmadinejad and to distribute their side of
the story to the outside world.
During the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, Facebook, Twitter and Skype won praise as a means of
organizing mass demonstrations to destabilize governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. Back then,
the U.S. government denounced any attempts to throttle these social media platforms and the free
flow of information that they permitted as proof of dictatorship.
Social media also was a favorite of the U.S. government in Ukraine in 2013-14 when the Maidan
protests exploited these platforms to help destabilize and ultimately overthrow the elected government
of Ukraine, the key event that launched the New Cold War with Russia.
Swinging the Social Media Club
The truth is that, in those instances, the U.S. governments and its agencies were eagerly exploiting
the platforms to advance Washington's geopolitical agenda by disseminating American propaganda and
deploying U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations, which
taught
activists how to use social media to advance "regime change" scenarios.
A White Helmets volunteer pointing to the aftermath of a military attack.
While these uprisings were sold to Western audiences as genuine outpourings of public anger –
and there surely was some of that – the protests also benefited from U.S. funding and expertise.
In particular, NED and USAID provided money, equipment and training for anti-government operatives
challenging regimes in U.S. disfavor.
One of the most successful of these propaganda operations occurred in Syria where anti-government
rebels operating in areas controlled by Al Qaeda and its fellow Islamic militants used social media
to get their messaging to Western mainstream journalists who couldn't enter those sectors without
fear of beheading.
Since the rebels' goal of overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad meshed with the objectives of
the U.S. government and its allies in Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Western journalists
uncritically accepted the words and images provided by Al Qaeda's collaborators.
The success of this propaganda was so extraordinary that the White Helmets, a "civil defense"
group that worked in Al Qaeda territory, became the go-to source for dramatic video and even was
awarded the short-documentary
Oscar for an info-mercial produced for Netflix – despite evidence that the White Helmets were
staging some of the scenes for propaganda purposes.
Indeed, one argument for believing that Putin and the Kremlin might have "meddled" in last year's
U.S. election is that they could have felt it was time to give the United States a taste of its own
medicine.
After all, the United States intervened in the 1996 Russian election to ensure the continued rule
of the corrupt and pliable Boris Yeltsin. And there were the U.S.-backed street protests in Moscow
against the 2011 and 2012 elections in which Putin strengthened his political mandate. Those
protests earned the "color" designation the "snow revolution."
However, whatever Russia may or may not have done before last year's U.S. election, the Russia-gate
investigations have always sought to exaggerate the impact of that alleged "meddling" and molded
the narrative to whatever weak evidence was available.
The original storyline was that Putin authorized the "hacking" of Democratic emails as part of
a "disinformation" operation to undermine Hillary Clinton's candidacy and to help elect Donald Trump
– although
no hard evidence has been presented to establish that Putin gave such an order or that Russia
"hacked" the emails. WikiLeaks has repeatedly denied getting the emails from Russia, which also denies
any meddling.
Further, the emails were not "disinformation"; they were both real and, in many cases, newsworthy.
The DNC emails provided evidence that the DNC unethically tilted the playing field in favor of Clinton
and against Sen. Bernie Sanders, a point that Brazile also discovered in reviewing staffing and financing
relationships that Clinton had with the DNC under the prior chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The purloined emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta revealed the contents of Clinton's
paid speeches to Wall Street (information that she was trying to hide from voters) and pay-to-play
features of the Clinton Foundation.
A Manchurian Candidate?
Still, the original narrative was that Putin wanted his Manchurian Candidate (Trump) in the White
House and took the extraordinary risk of infuriating the odds-on favorite (Clinton) by releasing
the emails even though they appeared unlikely to prevent Clinton's victory. So, there was always
that logical gap in the Russia-gate theory.
Since then, however, the U.S. mainstream narrative has shifted, in part, because the evidence
of Russian election "meddling" was so shaky. Under intense congressional pressure to find something,
Facebook reported
$100,000 in allegedly "Russian-linked" ads purchased in 2015-17, but noted that only 44 percent
were bought before the election. So, not only was the "Russian-linked" pebble tiny – compared to
Facebook's annual revenue of $27 billion – but more than half of the pebble was tossed into this
very large lake after Clinton had already lost.
So, the storyline was transformed into some vague Russian scheme to exacerbate social tensions
in the United States by taking different sides of hot-button issues, such as police brutality against
blacks. The New York Times reported that one of these "Russian-linked" pages
featured photos of cute puppies , which the Times speculated must have had some evil purpose
although it was hard to fathom. (Oh, those devious Russians!).
The estimate of how many Americans may have seen one of these "Russian-linked" ads also keeps
growing, now up to as many as 126 million or about one-third of the U.S. population. Of course, the
way the Internet works – with any item possibly going viral – you might as well say the ads could
have reached billions of people.
Whenever I write an article or send out a Tweet, I too could be reaching 126 million or even billions
of people, but the reality is that I'd be lucky if the number were in the thousands. But amid the
Russia-gate frenzy, no exaggeration is too outlandish or too extreme.
Another odd element of Russia-gate is that the intensity of this investigation is disproportionate
to the lack of interest shown toward far better documented cases of actual foreign-government interference
in American elections and policymaking.
For instance, the major U.S. media long ignored the extremely well-documented case of Richard
Nixon colluding with South Vietnamese officials to sabotage President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam
War peace talks to gain an advantage for Nixon in the 1968 election. That important chapter of history
only gained
The
New York Times' seal of approval earlier this year after the Times had dismissed the earlier
volumes of evidence as "rumors."
In the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan's team – especially his campaign director William Casey in
collaboration with Israel and Iran – appeared to have gone behind President Jimmy Carter's back
to undercut Carter's negotiations to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran and essentially
doom Carter's reelection hopes.
There were a couple of dozen witnesses to that scheme who spoke with me and other investigative
journalists – as well as documentary evidence showing that President Reagan did authorize secret
arms shipments to Iran via Israel shortly after the hostages were freed during Reagan's inauguration
on Jan. 20, 1981.
However, since Vice President (later President) George H.W. Bush, who was implicated in the scheme,
was well-liked on both sides of the aisle and because Reagan had become a Republican icon, the October
Surprise case of 1980 was pooh-poohed by the major media and dismissed by a congressional investigation
in the early 1990s. Despite the extraordinary number of witnesses and supporting documents, Wikipedia
listed the scandal as a "conspiracy theory."
Israeli Influence
And, if you're really concerned about foreign interference in U.S. elections and policies,
there's the remarkable influence of Israel and its perceived ability to effect the defeat of almost
any politician who deviates from what the Israeli government wants, going back at least to the 1980s
when
Sen.
Chuck Percy and Rep. Paul Findley were among the political casualties after pursuing contacts
with the Palestinians.
If anyone doubts how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued to pull the strings
of U.S. politicians, just watch one of his record-tying three addresses to joint sessions of Congress
and count how often
Republicans and Democrats jump to their feet in enthusiastic applause. (The only other foreign
leader to get the joint-session honor three times was Great Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill.)
So, what makes Russia-gate different from the other cases? Did Putin conspire with Trump to extend
a bloody war as Nixon did with the South Vietnamese leaders? Did Putin lengthen the captivity of
U.S. hostages to give Trump a political edge? Did Putin manipulate U.S. policy in the Middle East
to entice President George W. Bush to invade Iraq and set the region ablaze, as Israel's Netanyahu
did? Is Putin even now pushing for wider Mideast wars, as Netanyahu is?
Indeed, one point that's never addressed in any serious way is why is the U.S. so angry with Russia
while these other cases, in which U.S. interests were clearly damaged and American democracy compromised,
were treated largely as non-stories.
Why is Russia-gate a big deal while the other cases weren't? Why are opposite rules in play now
– with Democrats, many Republicans and the major news media flogging fragile "links," needling what
little evidence there is, and assuming the worst rather than insisting that only perfect evidence
and perfect witnesses be accepted as in the earlier cases?
The answer seems to be the widespread hatred for President Trump combined with vested interests
in favor of whipping up the New Cold War. That is a goal valued by both the Military-Industrial Complex,
which sees trillions of dollars in strategic weapons systems in the future, and the neoconservatives,
who view Russia as a threat to their "regime change" agendas for Syria and Iran.
After all, if Russia and its independent-minded President Putin can be beaten back and beaten
down, then a big obstacle to the neocon/Israeli goal of expanding the Mideast wars will be removed.
Right now, the neocons are openly lusting for a
"regime change" in Moscow despite the obvious risks that such turmoil in a nuclear-armed country
might create, including the possibility that Putin would be succeeded not by some compliant Western
client like the late Boris Yeltsin but by an extreme nationalist who might consider launching a nuclear
strike to protect the honor of Mother Russia.
The Democrats, the liberals and even many progressives justify their collusion with the neocons
by the need to remove Trump by any means necessary and "stop fascism." But their contempt for Trump
and their exaggeration of the "Hitler" threat that this incompetent buffoon supposedly poses have
blinded them to
the extraordinary risks attendant to their course of action and how they are playing into the
hands of the war-hungry neocons.
A Smokescreen for Repression
There also seems to be little or no concern that the Establishment is using Russia-gate as a smokescreen
for
clamping down on independent media sites on the Internet. Traditional supporters of civil liberties
have looked the other way as the rights of people associated with the Trump campaign have been trampled
and journalists who simply question the State Department's narratives on, say, Syria and Ukraine
are denounced as "Moscow stooges" and "useful idiots."
The likely outcome from the anti-Russian show trials on Capitol Hill is that technology giants
will bow to the bipartisan demand for new algorithms and other methods for stigmatizing, marginalizing
and eliminating information that challenges the mainstream storylines in the cause of fighting "Russian
propaganda."
The warning from powerful senators was crystal clear. "I don't think you get it," Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, D-California,
warned social media executives last week. "You bear this responsibility. You created these platforms,
and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it. Or we will."
As this authoritarian if not totalitarian future looms and as the dangers of nuclear annihilation
from an intentional or unintentional nuclear war with Russia grow, many people who should know better
are caught up in the Russia-gate frenzy.
I used to think that liberals and progressives opposed McCarthyism because they regarded it as
a grave threat to freedom of thought and to genuine democracy, but now it appears that they have
learned to love McCarthyism except, of course, when it rears its ugly head in some Long Island political
ad criticizing New York City.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative,
either in
print here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ).
Joe Tedesky , November 6, 2017 at 3:12 pm
I watched the C-Span 'Russian/2016 Election Investigation Hearings' in horror, as each congressperson
grilled the Hi-Tech executives in a way to suggest that our First Amendment Rights are now on
life support, and our Congress is ready to pull the plug at any moment. I thought, of how this
wasn't the America I was brought up to believe in. So as I have reached the age in life where
nothing should surprise me, I realize now how fragile our Rights are, in this warring nation that
calls itself America.
When it comes to Israel I have two names, Jonathan Pollard & the USS Liberty, and with that,
that is enough said.
Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:33 pm
This week's congressional hearings on "extremist content" on the Internet mark a new stage
in the McCarthyite witch hunt by congressional Democrats, working with the intelligence agencies
and leading media outlets, to legitimize censorship and attack free speech on the Internet.
One after another, congressmen and senators goaded representatives of Google, Twitter and Facebook
to admit that their platforms were used to sow "social divisions" and "extremist" political opinions.
The aim of this campaign is to claim that social conflict within the United States arises
not from the scale of social inequality in America, greater than in any other country in the developed
world, but rather from the actions of "outside agitators" working in the service of the Kremlin.
The hearings revolved around claims that Russia sought to "weaponize" the Internet by harnessing
social anger within the United States. "Russia," said Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, promoted
"discord in the US by inflaming passions on a range of divisive issues." It sought to "mobilize
real Americans to sign online petitions and join rallies and protests."
The McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s sought to suppress left-wing thought and label
all forms of dissent as illegitimate and treasonous. Those who led them worked to purge left-wing
opinion from Hollywood, the trade unions and the universities.
Likewise, the new McCarthyism is aimed at creating a political climate in which left-wing
organizations and figures are demonized as agents of the Kremlin who are essentially engaged in
treasonous activity deserving of criminal prosecution.
Watching this Orwellian tragedy play out in our American society, where our Congress is insisting
that disclaimers and restrictions be placed upon suspicious adbuys and editorial essays, is counterintuitive
to what we Americans were brought up to belief. Why, all my life teachers, and adults, would warn
us students of reading the news to not to believe everything we read as pure fact, but to research
a subject before coming to a conclusion toward your accepting an opinion to wit. And with these
warnings of avoiding us being suckered into a wrong belief, we were told that this was the price
we were required to pay for having a free press society. This freedom of speech was, and has always
been the bedrock of our hopes and wishes for our belief in the American Dream.
Danny there was a time not to long ago, I would have said of how we are 'moving towards'
to us becoming a police state, well instead replace that prediction of 'moving towards' to the
stark reality to be described as 'that now we are', and there you will have it that we have finally
arrived to becoming a full blown 'police state'. Little by little, and especially since 911
one by one our civil liberties were taken away. Here again our freedom of speech is being destroyed,
and with this America is now where Germany had been in the mid-thirties. America's own guilty
conscience is rapidly doing some physiological projections onto their imaginary villain Russia.
All I keep hearing is my dear sweet mother lecturing me on how one lie always leads to another
lie until the truth will finally jump up and bite you in the ass, and think to myself of how wise
my mother had been with her young girl Southside philosophy. May you Rest In Peace Mum.
Martin , November 7, 2017 at 3:21 pm
Yankees chicks are coming home to roost. So many peoples rights and lives had to be extinguished
for Americans to have the illusion of pursuing their happiness, well, what goes around comes around.
Gregory Herr , November 7, 2017 at 8:39 pm
Gee wiz Adam Schiff you make it sound as if signing petitions and rallying to causes and civil
protests are unamerican or something. And Russians on the internet are harnessing social anger!
Pathetic. These jerks who would have us believe they are interested in "saving" democracy or stopping
fascism have sure got it backward.
Geoffrey de Galles , November 8, 2017 at 12:33 pm
Joe, Allow me please, respectfully, to add Mordecai Vanunu -- Israel's own Daniel Ellsberg
-- to your two names.
Erik G , November 6, 2017 at 3:55 pm
Thanks to Mr. Parry for this very fair and complete review of the latest attempts to generate
a fake foreign enemy. The tyrant over a democracy must generate fake foreign enemies to pose falsely
as a protector, so as to demand domestic power and accuse his opponents of disloyalty, as Aristotle
and Plato warned thousands of years ago.
It is especially significant that the zionists are the sole beneficiaries of this scam as well
as the primary sponsors of the DNC, hoping to attack Russia and Iran to support Israeli land thefts
in the Mideast. It is well established that zionists control US mass media, which never examine
the central issue of our times, the corruption of democracy by the zionist/MIC/WallSt influence
upon the US government and mass media. Russia-gate is in fact a coverup for Israel-gate.
Why did we ever believe that the democrat party was a defender of free speech? These bought
and paid for tools of the economic elites are only interested in serving their masters with slavish
devotion. Selfishness and immorality are their stock in trade; betraying the public their real
intention.
Cratylus , November 6, 2017 at 4:11 pm
Great essay.
But one disagreement. I may agree with Trump on very, very few things, among them getting rid
of the horrible TPP, one cornerstone of Hillary's pivot; meeting with Putin in Hamburg; the Lavrov-Tillerson
arranged cease-fire in SE Syria; the termination of the CIA's support for anti-Assad jihadis in
Syria; a second meeting with Putin at the ASEAN conference this week; and in general the idea
of "getting along with Russia" (a biggie) which Russia-gate is slowing to a crawl as designed
by the neocons.
But Trump as an "incompetent buffoon" is a stretch albeit de rigueur on the pages of the NYT,
the programs of NPR and in all "respectable" precincts. Trump won the presidency for god's sake
– something that eluded the 17 other GOP primary candidates, some of them considered very"smart"
and Bernie and Jill, and in the past, Ralph Nader and Ron Paul – and the supposedly "very smart"
Hillary for which we should be eternally grateful. "Incompetent" hardly seems accurate. The respectable
commentariat has continually underestimated Trump. We should heed Putin who marveled at Trump's
seemingly impossible victory.
Bill Cash , November 6, 2017 at 4:13 pm
How do you explain all the connections between Trump acolytes and Russia and their lying about
it. I think they've all lied about their contacts. Why would they do that?I lived through the
real McCarthyism and, so far, this isn't close to what happened then.
Bill , November 6, 2017 at 4:40 pm
Probably because they are corruptly involved. Thing is, the higher priority is to avoid another
decades-long cold war risking nuclear war. Do you remember how many close calls we had in the
last one?
I'm more suspicious of Trump than most here, but even I think we need some priorities. Far
more extensive corruption of a similar variety keeps occurring and no one cares, as Mr. Parry
points out here yet again.
As for McCarthyism, whatever the current severity, the result is unfolding as a new campaign
against dissenting voices on the internet. That's supremely not-okay with me.
Gregory Herr , November 7, 2017 at 8:46 pm
Right. Just because we don't yet have another fulll-fledged HUAC happening doesn't mean severe
perils aren't attached to this new McCarthyism. Censorship of dissent is supremely not-okay with
me as well.
That class of people lie as a matter of course; it's standard procedure. If you exacerbate
it by adding on the anti-Russia hysteria that was spewed out by the Democrats before the ink was
dry on the ballots, what possible reason would they have for being truthful?
The insanity of the entire "Russian hacking" narrative has been revealed over and over,
including this past weekend when +/-100 Clinton loyalists published a screed on Medium saying
Donna Brazile had been taken in by Russian propaganda.
Litchfield , November 6, 2017 at 7:10 pm
I have come to expect just about anything when it comes to Russia-Gate, but I was taken
aback by the Hillary bots' accusation that videos of Hillary stumbling and others showing her
apparently having a fit of some kind and also needing to be helped up the steps to someone's house
-- which were taken by Americans and shown by Americans and seen by millions of shocked Americans
-- were driven by Russia-Gate.
Obviously, Brazile, like millions of voters, saw these films and made appropriate inferences:
that Hillary's basic health and stamina were a question mark. Of course, Hillary also offered
Americans nothing in her campaign rhetoric. She came across as the mother-in-law from hell.
Was it also a Russia-Gate initiative when Hillary hid from her supporters on election night
and let Podesta face the screaming sobbing supporters? Too much spiked vodka or something? Our
political stage in the USA is a madhouse.
Adrian Engler , November 6, 2017 at 6:20 pm
These people probably have "connections" with a relatively large number of people, and only
very small fraction of the people they have contact with are probably Russians. Now, since
the extremist xenophobic idea that contact with *any* Russians is a scandal has taken hold in
the United States, people are probably not too eager to mention these contacts in these atmosphere
of extreme xenophobic anti-Russian hatred in today's United States. Furthermore, people who have
contact with large numbers of people probably really have difficulties remembering and listing
these all.
Today's political atmosphere in the United States probably has a lot in common with the Soviet
Union. There, people got in trouble if they had contacts with people from Western, capitalist
countries – and if they were asked and did not mention these contacts in order to avoid problems,
they could get in trouble even more.
I think it is absolutely clear that no one who takes part in this hateful anti-Russian campaign
can pretend to be liberal or progressive. The kind of society these xenophobes who detest pluralism
and accuse everyone who has opinions outside the mainstream of being a foreign agent is absolutely
abhorrent, in my view.
Leslie F , November 6, 2017 at 6:40 pm
Their contacts are with Russian business and maybe the Russian mob, not the Russian state.
There is really not question that Trump and his cronies are crooks, but they are crooks in the
US and in all the other countries where they do business, not just Russia. I'm sure Mueller will
be able to tie Trump directly to some of the sleeze. But there is no evidence that the Russian
government is involved in any of it. "Russia-gate" implies Russian government involvement, not
just random Russians. There is no evidence of that and moreover the logic is against.
occupy on , November 7, 2017 at 12:47 am
Mr. Cash . I think George Papadopoulis, Trump's young Aide, was an inside mole for neocon
pro-Israel interests. Those interests needed to knock the unreliable President Trump out of the
way to get the "system" back where it belonged – in their pocket. Papadopoulis, on his own, was
rummaging around making Trump/Russian connections that finally ended with the the William (Richard?)
Browder (well-known Washington DC neocon)/Natalia Veselnitskaya/Donald Trump, Jr. fiasco. The
Trumps knew nothing of those negotiations, and young Trump left when he realized Natalia was only
interested in Americans being allowed to adopt Russian children again and had no dirt on Hillary.
In the meantime, Trump Jr. was connected with an evil Russian (Natalia), William Browder was
able to link the neocon-hated Trump Sr with neocon-hated, evil Russians (who currently have a
warrant out for Browder's arrest on a 15 [or 50?] million dollar tax evasion charge), and neocons
have a good chance of claiming victory out of chaos (as is their style and was their intent for
the Middle East [not Washington DC!] in the neocon Project For a New American Century – 1998).
Clinton may have lost power in Washington DC, but Clinton-supporting neocons may not have – thanks
to George Papadopoulis. We shall see. Something tells me the best is yet to come out of the Mueller
Investigations.
Roy G Biv , November 7, 2017 at 2:03 pm
You are seeing it clearly Bill. This site was once a go-to-source for investigative journalism.
Now it is a place for opinion screeds, mostly with head buried in the sand about the blatant Russian
manipulation of the 2016 election. The dominant gang of posters here squash any dissent and dissenting
comments usually get deleted within a day. I don't understand why and how it came to be so, but
the hysterical labeling of Comey/Mueller investigations as McCarthyism by Parry has ruined his
sterling reputation for me.
Stygg , November 7, 2017 at 2:24 pm
If this "Russian manipulation" was as blatant as everyone keeps telling me, how come it's all
based on ridiculous BS instead of evidence? Where's the beef?
anon , November 7, 2017 at 3:22 pm
Unable to substantiate anything you say nor argue against anything said here, you disgrace
yourself. Do you think anyone is fooled by your repeated lie that you are a disaffected former
supporter of this site? And you made the "Stygg" reply above.
Tom Hall , November 6, 2017 at 4:46 pm
It was never my impression that Cold War liberals opposed McCarthy or the anti-Communist
witch hunt. Where they didn't gleefully join in, they watched quietly from the sidelines while
the American left was eviscerated, jailed, driven from public life. Then the liberals stepped
in when it was clear things were going a little too far and just as the steam had run out of McCarthy's
slander machine.
At that point figures like Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy found the
path clear for their brand of political stagecraft. They were imperialists to a man, something
they proved abundantly when given the chance. Liberals supplanted the left in U.S. life- in the
unions, the teaching profession, publishing and every other field where criticism of the Cold
War and the enduring prevalence of worker solidarity across international lines threatened the
new order.
So it's no surprise that liberalism is the rallying point for a new wave of repression. The
dangerous buffoon currently occupying the White House stands as a perfect foil to the phony indignation
of the liberal leadership- Schumer, Pelosi et al.. The jerk was made to order, and they mean to
dump him as their ideological forebears unloaded old Tail Gunner Joe. In fact, Trump is so odious,
the Democrats, their media colleagues and major elements of the national security state believe
that bringing down the bozo can be made to look like a triumph of democracy. Of course, by then
dissent will have been stamped out far more efficiently than Trump and his half-assed cohorts
could have achieved. And it will be done in the name of restoring sanity, honoring the constitution,
and protecting everyone from the Russians. I was born in the fifties, and it looks like I'm going
to die in the fifties.
Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:37 pm
Truman started it. And he used it very well.
THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE AND ORIGINS OF ""McCARTHYISM
By Richard M. Freeland
This book argues that Truman used anti-Communist scare tactics to force Congress to implement
his plans for multilateral free trade and specifically to pass the Marshall Plan. This is a sound
emphasis, but other elements of postwar anti-Communist campaigns are neglected, especially anti-labor
legislation; and Freeland attributes to Truman a ""go-soft"" attitude toward the Soviets, which
is certainly not proven by the fact that he restrained the ultras Forrestal, Kennan, and Byrnes
-- indeed, some of Freeland's own citations confirm Truman's violent anti-Soviet spirit.
The book concludes that by equating dissent with disloyalty, promoting guilt by association,
and personally commanding loyalty programs, ""Truman and his advisors employed all the political
and programmatic techniques that in later years were to become associated with the broad phenomenon
of McCarthyism."" Freeland's revisionism is confined and conservative: he deems the Soviets
most responsible for the Cold War and implies that ""subversion"" was in fact a menace.
You are one of the very few critical journalists today willing to print objective measures
of the truth, while the MSM spins out of control under the guise of "protecting America" (and
their vital sources), while at the same time actually undermining the very principles of a working
democracy they sanctimoniously pretend to defend. It makes me nostalgic for the McCarthy era,
when we could safely satirize the Army-McCarthy Hearings (unless you were a witness!). I offer
the following as a retrospective of a lost era.:
Top-Ten Criteria for being a Putin Stooge, and a Chance at Winning A One Way Lottery Ticket:to
the Gala Gitmo Hotel:
:
(1) Reading Consortium News, Truth Dig, The Real News Network, RT and Al Jeziera
(2) Drinking Starbucks and vodka at the Russian Tea Room with Russian tourists (with an embedded
FSS agent) in NYC.
(3) Meeting suspicious tour guides in Red Square who accept dollars for their historical jokes.
(4) Claiming to catch a cell phone photo of the Putin limousine passing through the Kremlin Tower
gate.
(4) Starting a joint venture with a Russian trading partner who sells grain to feed Putin's stable
of stallions. .
(5) Catching the flu while being sneezed upon in Niagara Falls by a Russian violinist.
(6) Finding the hidden jewels in the Twelfth Chair were nothing but cut glass.
(7) Reading War and Peace on the Brighton Beach ferry.
(8) Playing the iPod version of Rachmaninoff's "Vespers" through ear buds while attending mass
in Dallas, TX..
(9) Water skiing on the Potomac flying a pennant saying "Wasn't Boris Good Enough?"
(10) Having audibly chuckled even once at items (1) – (9). Thanks Bob, Please don't let up!
Lisa , November 6, 2017 at 7:47 pm
Howard,
I chuckled loudly more than once – but luckily, no one heard me! No witnesses! So you are acquainted
with the masterpiece "12 chairs"? Very suspicious.
David G , November 6, 2017 at 8:42 pm
I've heard that's Mel Brooks favorite among his own movies.
David G , November 6, 2017 at 8:48 pm
I always find it exasperating when I have to remind the waiter at the diner to bring Russian
dressing along with the reuben sandwich, but these days I wonder if my loyalty is being tested.
Dave P. , November 6, 2017 at 10:27 pm
David G –
They will change the name of dressing very soon. Remember 2003 when French refused to endorse
the invasion of Iraq. I think they unofficially changed the name of "French Fries" to "Freedom
Fries".
It is just the start. The whole History is being rewritten – in compliance with Zionist Ideology.
Those evil Russkies will be shown as they are!
Clearly, since I've published one book by a Russian, one by a now-deceased US ex-pat living
in Russia, and have our catalog made available in Russia via our international distributor, I
am a traitor to the US. If you add in my staunch resistance to the whole Russiagate narrative
AND the fact I post links to stories in RT America, I'm doomed.
I wish I could think I'm being wholly sarcastic.
Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:38 pm
You are not alone. Many of us live outside the open air prison and feel the same way
Abe , November 6, 2017 at 5:29 pm
Robert Parry has described "the New McCarthyism" having "its own witch-hunt hearings". In fact
"last week's Senate grilling of executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google" was merely an exercise
in political theatre because all three entities already belong to the "First Draft" coalition:
Formed by Google in June 2015 with Eliot Higgins of the Atlantic Council's Bellingcat as
a founding member, the "First Draft" coalition includes all the usual mainstream media "partners"
in "regime change" war propaganda: the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, the UK Guardian and
Telegraph, BBC News, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab and Kiev-based Stopfake.
In a remarkable post-truth declaration, the "First Draft" coalition insists that members will
"work together to tackle common issues, including ways to streamline the verification process".
In the "post-truth" regime of US and NATO hybrid warfare, the deliberate distortion of truth
and facts is called "verification".
The Washington Post / PropOrNot imbroglio, and "First Draft" coalition "partner" organizations'
zeal to "verify" US intelligence-backed fake news claims about Russian hacking of the US presidential
election, reveal the "post-truth" mission of this new Google-backed hybrid war propaganda alliance.
Hysterical demonization of Russia escalated dramatically after Russia thwarted the Israeli-Saudi-US
plan to dismember the Syrian state.
With the rollback of ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorist proxy forces in Syria, and the failure of
Kurdish separatist efforts in Iraq, Israel plans to launch military attacks against southern Lebanon
and Syria.
South Front has presented a cogent and fairly detailed analysis of Israel's upcoming war in
southern Lebanon.
Conspicuously absent from the South Front analysis is any discussion of the Israeli planned
assault on Syria, or possible responses to the conflict from the United States or Russia.
Israeli propaganda preparations for attack are already in high gear. Unfortunately, sober heads
are in perilously short supply in Israel and the U.S., so the prognosis can hardly be optimistic.
"Scenarios for the Third Lebanon War
Over time, IDF's military effectiveness had declined. [ ] In the Second Lebanon War of 2006
due to the overwhelming numerical superiority in men and equipment the IDF managed to occupy key
strong points but failed to inflict a decisive defeat on Hezbollah. The frequency of attacks in
Israeli territory was not reduced; the units of the IDF became bogged down in the fighting in
the settlements and suffered significant losses. There now exists considerable political pressure
to reassert IDF's lost military dominance and, despite the complexity and unpredictability of
the situation we may assume the future conflict will feature only two sides, IDF and Hezbollah.
Based on the bellicose statements of the leadership of the Jewish state, the fighting will be
initiated by Israel.
"The operation will begin with a massive evacuation of residents from the settlements in the
north and centre of Israel. Since Hezbollah has agents within the IDF, it will not be possible
to keep secret the concentration of troops on the border and a mass evacuation of civilians. Hezbollah
units will will be ordered to occupy a prepared defensive position and simultaneously open fire
on places were IDF units are concentrated. The civilian population of southern Lebanon will most
likely be evacuated. IDF will launch massive bombing causing great damage to the social infrastructure
and some damage to Hezbollah's military infrastructure, but without destroying the carefully protected
and camouflaged rocket launchers and launch sites.
"Hezbollah control and communications systems have elements of redundancy. Consequently, regardless
of the use of specialized precision-guided munitions, the command posts and electronic warfare
systems will not be paralysed, maintaining communications including through the use of fibre-optic
communications means. IDF discovered that the movement has such equipment during the 2006 war.
Smaller units will operate independently, working with open communication channels, using the
pre-defined call signs and codes.
"Israeli troops will then cross the border of Lebanon, despite the presence of the UN peacekeeping
mission in southern Lebanon, beginning a ground operation with the involvement of a greater number
of units than in the 2006 war. The IDF troops will occupy commanding heights and begin to prepare
for assaults on settlements and actions in the tunnels. The Israelis do not score a quick victory
as they suffer heavy losses in built-up areas. The need to secure occupied territory with patrols
and checkpoints will cause further losses.
"The fact that Israel itself started the war and caused damage to the civilian infrastructure,
allows the leadership of the movement to use its missile arsenal on Israeli cities. While Israel's
missile defence systems can successfully intercept the launched missiles, there are not enough
of them to blunt the bombardment. The civilian evacuation paralyzes life in the country. As soon
IDF's Iron Dome and other medium-range systems are spent on short-range Hezbollah rockets, the
bombardment of Israel with long-range missiles may commence. Hezbollah's Iranian solid-fuel rockets
do not require much time to prepare for launch and may target the entire territory of Israel,
causing further losses.
"It is difficult to assess the duration of actions of this war. One thing that seems certain
is that Israel shouldn't count on its rapid conclusion, similar to last September's exercises.
Hezbollah units are stronger and more capable than during the 2006 war, despite the fact that
they are fighting in Syria and suffered losses there.
"Conclusions
"The combination of large-scale exercises and bellicose rhetoric is intended to muster Israeli
public support for the aggression against Hezbollah by convincing the public the victory would
be swift and bloodless. Instead of restraint based on a sober assessment of relative capabilities,
Israeli leaders appear to be in a state of blood lust. In contrast, the Hezbollah has thus far
demonstrated restraint and diplomacy.
"Underestimating the adversary is always the first step towards a defeat. Such mistakes are
paid for with soldiers' blood and commanders' careers. The latest IDF exercises suggest Israeli
leaders underestimate the opponent and, more importantly, consider them to be quite dumb. In reality,
Hezbollah units will not cross the border. There is no need to provoke the already too nervous
neighbor and to suffer losses solely to plant a flag and photograph it for their leader. For Hezbollah,
it is easier and safer when the Israeli soldiers come to them. According to the IDF soldiers who
served in Gaza and southern Lebanon, it is easier to operate on the plains of Gaza than the mountainous
terrain of southern Lebanon. This is a problem for armoured vehicles fighting for control of heights,
tunnels, and settlements, where they are exposed to anti-armor weapons.
"While the Israeli establishment is in a state of patriotic frenzy, it would be a good time
for them to turn to the wisdom of their ancestors. After all, as the old Jewish proverb says:
'War is a big swamp, easy to go into but hard to get out'."
Yes, the latest "big fish" outed yesterday as an agent of the Kremlin was the U.S. Secretary
of Commerce (Wilbur Ross) who was discovered to hold stock in a shipping company that does business
with a Russian petrochemical company (Sibur) whose owners include Vladimir Putin's son-in-law
(Kirill Shamalov). Obviously the orders flow directly from Putin to Shamalov to Sibur to the shipping
company to Ross to Trump, all to the detriment of American citizens.
From RT (another tainted source!): "US Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. has a stake in
a shipping firm that receives millions of dollars a year in revenue from a company whose key owners
include Russian President Vladimir Putin's son-in-law and a Russian tycoon sanctioned by the U.S.
Treasury Department as a member of Putin's inner circle," says the International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the main publisher of the Paradise Papers. After the report
was published, some US lawmakers accused Ross of misleading Congress during his confirmation hearings."
Don't go mistaking the "International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for "Consortium
News." These guys are dedicated witch hunters, searching for anyone with six degrees of separation
to Vladimir Putin and his grand plan to thwart the United States and effect regime change within
its borders.
In a clear attempt to weasel out of his traitorous transgression, Ross stated "In a separate
interview with CNBC, that Sibur [which is NOT the company he owned stock in] was not subject to
US sanctions." 'A company not under sanction is just like any other company, period. It was a
normal commercial relationship and one that I had nothing to do with the creation of, and do not
know the shareholders who were apparently sanctioned at some later point in time,' he said." Since
when can we start allowing excuses like that? Not knowing that someone holds stock in a company
that does business with a company in which you own stock may at some later point in time become
sanctioned by the all-wise and all-good American federal government?
I can't wait till they make the first Ben Stiller comedy based on this fiasco twenty years
from now. It will be hilarious slap-stick, maybe titled "Can You Believe these Mother Fockers?"
President Chelea Clinton of our great and noble idiocracy will throw out the first witch on opening
day of the movie.
Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:27 pm
Let's be honest. Most Americans think McCarthy is a retail store. No education. And they think
Russia is the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Trump is in Japan to start war with N. Korea to hide the
blemishes or the canker on his ass. America is rapidly collapsing.
Adrian Engler , November 6, 2017 at 6:34 pm
In the beginning, "Russiagate" was about alleged actions by Russian secret services. Evidence
for these allegations has never emerged, and it seems that the Russiagate conspiracy theorists
largely gave up on this part (they still sometimes write about it as if it was an established
fact, but since the only thing in support of it they can adduce is the canard about the 17 intelligence
services, it probably is not that interesting any more).
Now, they have dropped the mask, and the object of their hatred are openly all Russian
people, anyone who is "Russian linked" by ever having logged in to social networks from Russia
or using Cyrillic letters. If these people and their media at least recognized the reality that
they are now a particularly rabid part of the xenophobic far right in the United States
But when people daily spew hate against anything and anyone "Russia linked" and still don't
recognize that they have gone over to the far right and even claim they are liberal or progressive,
this is completely absurd.
McCarthyism, as terrible as it was, at least originally was motivated by hatred against a certain
political ideology that also had its bad sides. But today's Russiagate peddlers clearly are motivated
by hatred against a certain ethnicity, a certain country, and a certain language. I don't think
there is any way to avoid the conclusion that with their hatred against anyone who is "Russia
linked", they have become right-wing extremists.
Litchfield , November 6, 2017 at 6:46 pm
"Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world
to harass people who criticize the Zionist project."
Yes, very well organized.
In fact virtually every synagogue is a center for organizing people to harass others who are exercising
their First Amendment rights to diseminate information about Israel's occupation of Palestine.
The link below is to a protest and really, personal attack, against a Unitarian minister in Marblehead,
Mass., for daring to screen the film ""The Occupation of the American Mind, Israel's Public Relations
War in the United States." In other words, for daring to provide an dissenting opinion and, simply,
to tell the truth. Ironic is that the protesters' comment actually reinforce the basic message
of the film.
No other views on Israel will be allowed to enter the public for a good airing and discussion
and debate. The truth about the illegal Israeli occupation will be shouted down, and those who
try to provide information to the public on this subject will be vilified as "anti-semites." Kudos
to this minister for screening the film.
The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel's Public Relations War in the United States (2016)
examines pro-Israel Hasbara propaganda efforts within the U.S.
This important documentary, narrated by Roger waters, exposes how the Israeli government, the
U.S. government, and the pro-Israel Lobby join forces to shape American media coverage in Israel's
favor.
Documentary producer Sut Jhally is professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts,
and a leading scholar on advertising, public relations, and political propaganda. He is also the
founder and Executive Director of the Media Education Foundation, a documentary film company that
looks at issues related to U.S. media and public attitudes.
Jhally is the producer and director of dozens of documentaries about U.S. politics and media
culture, including Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli–Palestinian
Conflict.
The Occupation of the American Mind provides a sweeping analysis of Israel's decades-long battle
for the hearts, minds, and tax dollars of the American people – a battle that has only intensified
over the past few years in the face of widening international condemnation of Israel's increasingly
right-wing policies.
Dave P. , November 7, 2017 at 2:45 am
Abe –
The interview of Roger Waters on RT is one of the best I have seen in a long while. I wish
some other artists get the courage to raise their voices. The link to the Roger Waters interview
is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7jcvfbLoIA
This Roger Waters interview is worth watching.
It would seem that everyone on the US telivision , newspaper and internet news has mastered
the art of hand over mouth , gasp and looking horrified every time Russia is mentioned. It looks
to me that the US is in the middle of another of it´s mid life crises. Panic reigns supreme every
where. If it was not so sad it would be funny. i was born in the 1940s and remember the McCarthy
witch hunts and the daily shower of people jumping out of windows as a result of it.
As a Canadian I could not get over, even though I was just a teenager back then, just how a
people in a supposedly advanced country could be so collectively paniced. I think back then it
was just a scam to get rid of unions and any kind of collective action against the owners of the
country, and this time around I think it is just a continuation of that scam, to frighten people
into subservience to the police state. I heard a women on TV today commenting on the Texas masscre,
she said " The devil never sleeps", well in the USA the 1/10 of 1% never sleeps when it comes
to more control, more pwoer and more wealth, in fact I think they are after the very last shekle
still left in the pockets of the bottom 99.9 % of the population. Those evil Russians are just
a ploy in the scam.
Litchfield , November 6, 2017 at 6:58 pm
"The Democrats, the liberals and even many progressives justify their collusion with the neocons
by the need to remove Trump by any means necessary and "stop fascism." But their contempt for
Trump and their exaggeration of the "Hitler" threat that this incompetent buffoon supposedly poses
have blinded them to the extraordinary risks attendant to their course of action and how they
are playing into the hands of the war-hungry neocons."
And they are driving more and more actual and potential Dem Party members away in droves, further
weakening the party and depriving it of its most intelligent members. Any non-senile person knows
that this is all BS and these people are not only turning their backs on the Dem Party but I think
many of them are being driven to the right by their disgust with this circus and the exposure
of the party's critical weaknesses and derangement.
Paolo , November 6, 2017 at 6:59 pm
You correctly write that "the United States intervened in the 1996 Russian election to ensure
the continued rule of the corrupt and pliable Boris Yeltsin". The irony is that a few years later
Yeltsin chose Putin as his successor, and presumably the 'mericans gave him a hand to win his
first term.
How extremely sad it is to see the USA going totally nuts.
Abe , November 6, 2017 at 9:00 pm
In The Fifties (1993), American journalist and historian David Halberstam addressed
the noxious effect of McCarthyism: "McCarthy's carnival like four year spree of accusation charges,
and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after
his own recklessness, carelessness and boozing ended his career in shame." (page 53)
Halberstam specifically discussed how readily the so-called "free" press acquiesced to
McCarthy's masquerading: "The real scandal in all this was the behavior of the members of the
Washington press corps, who, more often than not, knew better. They were delighted to be a part
of his traveling road show, chronicling each charge and then moving on to the next town, instead
of bothering to stay behind and follow up. They had little interest in reporting how careless
McCarthy was or how little it all meant to him." (page 55)
Abe , November 6, 2017 at 9:15 pm
On March 9, 1954, Edward R. Murrow and a news team at CBS produced a half-hour See It Now special
titled "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy".
Murrow interspersed his own comments and clarifications into a damaging series of film clips
from McCarthy's speeches. He ended the broadcast with a warning:
"As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves–as
indeed we are–the defenders of freedom, what's left of it, but we cannot defend freedom abroad
by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and
dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies, and whose fault
is that? Not really his. He didn't create the situation of fear; he merely exploited it, and rather
successfully. Cassius was right: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.'"
CBS reported that of the 12,000 phone calls received within 24 hours of the broadcast, positive
responses to the program outnumbered negative 15 to 1. McCarthy's favorable rating in the Gallup
Poll dropped and was never to rise again.
Gary , November 6, 2017 at 11:34 pm
Sad to see so many hypocrites here espousing freedom from McCarthyism while they continue to
vote for capitalist candidates year in year out. Think about the fact that in 2010 when Citizens
United managed to get the Supreme Court to certify corporations as people the fear among many
was that this would open US company subsidiaries to be infiltrated by foreign money. I guess it
is happening in spades with collusion between Russian money & Trump's organization along with
Facebook, Twitter & many others. How Mr. Parry can maintain that this parallels the 1950s anti-communist
crusade is quite ingenuous. When libertarians, the likes of Bannon, Mercer, Trump et al, with
their "destruction of the administrative state" credo are compared to the US communists of the
50s we know progressives have become about as disoriented as can be.
geeyp , November 7, 2017 at 3:30 am
I guess these "Paradise Papers" were released just yesterday, i.e., Sunday the 5th. Somehow
I didn't get to it.
john wilson , November 7, 2017 at 6:01 am
So it looks like Hillary will be crossing Putin off her Xmas card list this year! I sometimes
wonder if all we posters on here and other similar sites are on a list somewhere and when the
day of reckoning comes, the list will be produced and we will have to account for our treasonous
behaviour? Of course, one man's treason is another man's truth. I suppose in the end it boils
down to the power thing. If you have a perceived enemy you can claim the need for an army. If
you have an army you have power and with that power you can dispose of anyone who disagrees with
you simply by calling them the enemy.
Lisa , November 7, 2017 at 9:38 am
John, your post made me wonder whether I would be on a list of traitors. I've written three
posts, starting yesterday, and tried to explain something about the background of Yuri Milner,
mentioned in the article. After "your comment has been posted, thank you" nothing has appeared
on this thread.
Well, once more: Milner is known to me as a well-educated physicist from Moscow State University,
and the co-founder and financier of The Breakthrough Prize, handing out yearly awards to promising
scientists, with a much larger sum than the humble Nobel Prize. The awarding ceremony is held
in December in Silicon Valley.
john wilson , November 7, 2017 at 12:34 pm
Hi Lisa, I have just looked up Milner on Wiki and he appears to be into everything including
investment in internet companies. He is the co-founder of the "break through prize" that you mention
and seems to have backed face book and twitter in their start up. I don't see why you posts haven't
appeared as anyone can look Milner up on Wiki and elsewhere in great detail. You don't say where
you have tried to post, but I would have thought on this site you would have no trouble whatever.
If you have watched the last episode of 'cross talk' on RT you will see that anyone who as ever
mentioned Russia in a public place is regarded as some kind of traitor. I guess you and me are
due for rendition anytime now!! LOL
Lisa , November 7, 2017 at 1:49 pm
Hi John,
Naturally I had been trying to post on this site. First I tried three times in the comment space
below all other posts, and they never went through. Only when I posted a reply to someone else's
comment, my reply appeared. Maybe some technical problem on the site.
My motive was to show that Milner is doing worthwhile things with his millions, even if he
is an "evil Russian oligarch". The mentioned prize has its own website: breakthroughprize.org.
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) is a board member.
The prize is certainly a "Putin conspiracy", as it has links to Russia. (sarc)
Zachary Smith , November 7, 2017 at 8:05 pm
Maybe some technical problem on the site.
Possibly that's the case. Disappearing-forever posts happen to me from time to time. For at
least a while afterwards I cut/paste what I'm about to attempt to "post" to a WORD file before
hitting the "post comment" button.
In any event, avoid links whenever possible. By cut/pasting the exact title of the piece you're
using as a reference, others can quickly locate it themselves without a link.
K , November 7, 2017 at 9:44 am
I'm a lifelong Democrat. I was a Bernie supporter. But logic dictates my thinking. The Russia
nonsense is cover for Hillary's loss and a convenient hammer with which to attack Trump. Not biting.
Bill Maher is fixated on this. The Rob Reiner crowd is an embarrassment. The whole thing is embarrassing.
The media is inept. Very bizarre times.
Excellent article which should shed light on the misunderstandings manifested to manipulate
and censor Americans. Personally, it's ludicrous to imply that Russia was the primary reason I
could not vote for Hillary. My interest in Twitter peaked when Sidney Blumenthal's name popped
up selling arms in Libya. He was on The Clinton Foundation's Payroll for $120K, while the Obama
Administration specifically told HRC Sidney Blumenthal was not to work for the State Department.
Further research showed Chris Stevens had no knowledge of Sidney Blumenthal selling arms in
Libya. Hillary NEVER even gave Chris Stevens, a candidate with an outstanding background for diplomatic
relations in the Middle East, her email. Chris Stevens possessed a Law Degree in International
Trade, and had previously worked for Senator Lugar (R). Senator Lugar had warned HRC not to co-mingle
State Department business with The Clinton Foundation.
To add salt to the wound Hillary choose to put a third rate security firm in Libya, changing
firms a couple of short weeks before the bombing. I think she anticipated the bombing, remarking
"What difference does it make? " at the congressional hearings.
If you remember Guccifer (that hacker) he said he'd hacked both Hillary and Sidney Blumenthal.
He also said he found Sidney Blumenthal's account more interesting.
That's just one reason why I started surfing the internet. Sidney Blumenthal was a name that
hung in the cobwebs of my memory, and I wanted to know what this scum-job of a journalist was
doing!
Then there was Clinton Cash, BoysonTheTracks, Clinton Chronicles, the outrageous audacity of
the Democrats Superdelegates voting before a single primary ballot had been cast, MSM bias to
Hillary, Kathy Shelton's video "I thought you should know." and maybe around September 2016, wondering
what dirty things Hillary had done with Russia since 1993?
So I guess it's true. In the end after witnessing what has transpired since the election I
would not vote for Hillary because she'd rather risk WWIII, than have the TRUTH come out why she
lost.
After living in Europe much of the last three years we've recently returned to the U.S. I must
say that life here feels very much like I'm living within a strange Absurdist theatre play of
some sort (not that Europe is vastly better). Truth, meaning, rationality, mean absolutely nothing
at this juncture here in the United States. Reality has been turned on its head. The only difference
between our political parties runs along identity politics lines: "do you prefer your drone strikes,
illegal invasions, regime change black-ops, economic warfare and massive government spying 'with'
or 'without' gender specific bathrooms?" MSM refer to this situation as "democracy" while of course
any thinking person knows we are actually living within a totalitarian nightmare. Theatre of the
Absurd as a way of life. I must admit it feels pretty creepy being home again.
I wish it wasn't asking too much, but I suspect it is. If the NYT was reporting it, I'd feel
better about our chances. But the Deep State controls the narrative, and thus controls Pompeo,
Trump's order notwithstanding. I hope I'm wrong.
Dave P. , November 7, 2017 at 4:17 pm
Yes Joe. It is rather painful to watch as you said this Orwellian Tragedy playing out in the
Country which has just about become a police state. For those of us who grew up admiring the Western
Civilization starting with the Greeks and Romans, and then for its institutions enshrining Individual
Rights; and its scientific, literary, and cultural achievements, it is as if it still happening
in some dream, though it has been coming for some time now – more than two decades now at least.
The System was not perfect but I think that it was good as it could get. The system had been in
decline for four decades or so now.
From Robert Parry's article:
"The warning from powerful senators was crystal clear. "I don't think you get it," Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, D-California, warned social media executives last week. "You bear this responsibility.
You created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones who do
something about it. Or we will."
Diane Feinstein's multi-billionaire husband was implicated in those Loan and Savings scandals
of Reagan and G.H.W. Bush Era and in many other financial scandals later on but Law did not touch
him. He has a dual residency in Israel. These are very corrupt people.
Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Perle, Nulad-Kagan clan, Kristol, Gaffney . . . the list goes
on; add Netanyahu to it. In the Hollywood Harvey Weinstein, Rob Reiner. and the rest . . . In
Finance and wall Street characters like Sandy Weiss and the gang. The Media and TV is directly
or indirectly owned and controlled by "The Chosen People". So, where would you put the blame for
all what is going on in this country, and all this chaos, death, and destruction going on in ME
and many countries in Africa.
Any body who points out their role in it or utters a word of criticism of Israel is immediately
called an anti-semite. Just to tell my own connections, my wife youngest sister is married to
person who is Jewish (non-practicing). In all the relatives we have, they are closest to us for
more than thirty five years now. They are those transgender common restroom liberals, but we have
many common views and interests. In life, I have never differentiated people based on their ethnic
or racial backgrounds; you look at the principles they stand for.
As I see it, this era of Russia-Gate and witch hunt is hundred times worse than McCarthy era.
It seems irreversible. There is no one in the political establishment or elsewhere in Media or
academia left for regeneration of the "Body Politic". In fact, what we are witnessing here is
much worse than it was in the Soviet Union. It is complete degeneration of political leadership
in this country. It extends to Media and other institutions as well. People in Soviet Union did
not believe the lies they were told by the government there. And there arose writers like Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn in Soviet Union. What is left here now except are these few websites?
Maedhros , November 7, 2017 at 4:27 pm
If there is evidence, you should be able to provide some so that readers can analyze and discuss
it. Exactly what evidence has been provided that the Russian government manipulated the 2016 election?
CitizenOne , November 7, 2017 at 10:42 pm
Robert Parry You Nailed It!!!
I need to do a little research to see how far back you used the term "New McCarthyism" to describe
the next cold war with Russia. It was about the same time the first allegations of a Trump-Russia
conspiracy was floated by the MSM. I do not pretend to know how much airtime they spent covering
their coverup for all that the MSM did to profit from SuperPacs. They have webed a weave that
conspires to conceive to the tunes of billions of dollars spent to reprieve their intent to deceive
us and distract us away from their investment in Donald Trump which was the real influence in
the public spaces to gain mega profits from extorting the SuperPacs into spending their dollars
to defeat the trumped up candidate they created and boosted. One has to look no further than the
Main Stream Press (MSM) to find the guilty party with motive and opportunity to cash in on a candidacy
which if not for the money motive would not pass any test of journalistic integrity but would
make money for the Media.
The Russian Boogeyman was created shortly after the election and is an obvious attempt to shield
and defend the actions of the MSM which was the real fake news covered in the nightly news leading
up to the election which sought to get money rather than present the facts.
This is an example of how much power and influence the MSM has on us all to be able to upend
a National election and turn around and blame some foreign Devil for the results of an election.
The Russians had little to do with Trumps election. The MSM had everything to do with it. They
cast blame on the Russians and in so doing create a new Cold War which suits the power establishment
and suitably diverts all of our attention away from their machinations to influence the last presidential
election.
Win Win. More Nuclear Weapons and more money for the MIC and more money for all of the corporations
who would profit from a new Cold War.
Profit in times of deceit make more money from those who cheat.
CitizenOne , November 7, 2017 at 11:25 pm
Things not talked about:
1. James Comey and his very real influence on the election has never entered the media space
for an instant. It has gone down the collective memory hole. That silence has been deafening because
he was the person who against DOJ advice reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the
Servergate investigation after it had been closed by the FBI just days before the election.
The silence of the media on the influence on the election by the reopening of James Comey's
Servergate investigation and how the mass media press coverage implicating Hillary Clinton (again)
in supposed crimes (which never resulted in an indictment) influenced the National Election in
ways that have never been examined by the MSM is a nail in the coffin of media impartiality.
Why have they not investigated James Comey? Why has the MSM instead created a Russian Boogeyman?
Why was he invited to testify about the Russian connection but never cross examined about his
own influence? Why is the clearest reason for election meddling by James Comey not even spoken
of by the MSM? This is because the MSM does not want to cover events as they happened but wants
to recreate a alternate reality suitable to themselves which serves their interests and convinces
us that the MSM has no part at all in downplaying the involvement of themselves in the election
but wants to create a foreign enemy to blame.
It serves many interests. The MSM lies to all of us for the benefit of the MIC. It serves to
support White House which will deliver maximum investments in the Defense Industry. It does this
by creating a foreign enemy which they create for us to fear and be afraid of.
It is obvious to everyone with a clear eyed history of how the last election went down and
how the MSM and the government later played upon our fears to grab more cash have cashed in under
the present administration.
It is up to us to elect leaders who will reject this manipulation by the media and who will
not be cowed by the establishment. We have the power enshrined in our Constitution to elect leaders
who will pave the path forward to a better future.
Those future leaders will have to do battle with a media infrastructure that serves the power
structure and conspires to deceive us all.
Clear critical thinking must accompany free speech, however, and irrationality seems to have
beset Americans, too stuck in the mud of identity politics. Can they get out? I have hopes that
a push is coming from the new multipolar world Xi and Putin are advocating, as well as others
(but not the George Soros NWO variety). The big bully American government, actually ruled by oligarchy,
has not been serving its regular folks well, so things are falling apart. Seems like the sex scandals,
political scandals especially of the Democrat brand, money scandals are unraveling to expose underlying
societal sickness in the Disunited States of America.
It is interesting that this purge shakeup in Saudi Arabia is happening in 2017, one hundred
years since the shakeup in Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution. So shake-ups are happening everywhere.
I think a pattern is emerging of major changes in world events. Just yesterday I read that because
"Russia-gate" isn't working well, senators are looking to start a "China-gate", for evidence of
Trump collusion with Chinese oligarchs. Ludicrous. As Seer once said, "The Empire in panic mode".
Patricia, thanks for the info on Sid Blumenthal, HRC and the selling of arms from Libya to
ME jihadists, which seems to exonerate Chris Stevens from those dirty deeds and lays blame squarely
at Blumenthal's and Clinton's doorstep; changes my thinking. And thanks to Robert Parry for continuing
to push back at the participation of MSM and government players in the Orwellian masquerade being
pulled on the sheeple.
Truther , November 8, 2017 at 12:54 pm
Just the facts for those of you who have minds still open. suggest you bookmark it quickly
as the moderator will delete it within the hour.
Entrapment is as old
as civilization. "In criminal law, entrapment is a practice whereby a law enforcement
agent induces a person to commit a criminal offence that the person would have otherwise been
unlikely or unwilling to commit. [1] It "is the conception and
planning of an offence by an officer, and his procurement of its commission by one who would not
have perpetrated it except for the trickery, persuasion or fraud of the officer." [2]
"
Previously I thought that members of Hillary entourage were complete idiots both as for
computer security and generally security wise. Now it looks like Trump entourage have has the
same problem: many of they were idiots.
In "After Snowden" world anybody who wants to communicate with a unknown foreign person via
Facebook of Twitter on issues of any political significance is an idiot. Because chances of hoax,
provocation of in case of Trump team "false flag operation" are nearly 100%. This way you can
implicate anybody in Russian ties: hire a hoaxer and ask him to pretend that he is Russian. To
simp0lify the matter ask him to use Skype to communicate with the target. Send a couple of
incriminating emails. Any of Nigerian spammers can be used for this purpose. They are already
trained. Rinse and repeat.
So how we can be sure that this idiot Papadopoulos was not set up? BTW he ws
born in 1987 -- so he just out of the college (graduated in 2009). What does he know about
foreign policy?He never has been an ambassador to an important country, words in State
Depertment, or servers as a senior fellow in some research institution which study those issues.
(he was "unpaid intern" in Hudson institute" in 2011) What foreign policy advisor role for such a
guy ? He looks like a huckster to me.
Of cause Kieren
McCarth in her joy over the development is unable to contemplate this question.
Notable quotes:
"... Papadopoulos has been assisting Mueller's special inquiry for several months, but word of this cooperation only emerged today when his guilty plea to making false statements to the FBI was unsealed. ..."
"... he used Facebook Messenger and Skype to communicate with a Russian government agent, called "the Professor," who promised to provide damaging information on the Clinton campaign. Emails, no less. ..."
"... the Professor showed interest in defendant PAPADOPOULOS only after learning of his role." ..."
"... And then there is extensive evidence -- confirmed by Papadopoulos -- that he acted as a go-between for the Trump campaign and the Russian government, including being supplied with damaging information on the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... There are also emails from other Trump campaign staff -- so far unnamed -- that show explicit efforts to work with Russians in gathering damaging information on the real-estate tycoon's political rival. In other words, efforts to engage a foreign power to swing a US presidential election. ..."
"... For one, using Facebook to carry out highly dubious and potentially illegal activity is not a good idea. This is a social network that periodically changes account settings to keep up the pretense that it's not gathering and selling every snippet of information it can get out of you. Anything you say on Facebook may go straight down a pipe to the NSA and a database searchable by the FBI. It's called Section 702 . ..."
Former Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos -- no, not that one -- has been
turned by ex-FBI director Robert Mueller as part of the latter's investigation into Trump
campaign team members. Mueller is probing allegations of obstruction of justice, money
laundering and other financial crimes, and collusion with Russian government agents seeking to
meddle with last year's US presidential election.
Papadopoulos has been assisting Mueller's special inquiry for several months, but word
of this cooperation only emerged
today when his guilty plea to making false statements to the FBI was unsealed.
Coincidentally, Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort surrendered
himself this morning to Mueller at his nearest FBI office, as requested, to answer
allegations ranging from making false statements to acting as a foreign agent.
Ex-Trump campaign official Rick Gates, also accused of conspiracy and money laundering,
handed himself in today, too. The indictment against the pair is here , and both deny any
wrongdoing.
Among the wealth of details in Papadopoulos' 14-page statement
[PDF] is the fact that he used Facebook Messenger and Skype to communicate with a Russian
government agent, called "the Professor," who promised to provide damaging information on the
Clinton campaign. Emails, no less.
"This isn't like he [the Professor]'s messaging me while I'm in April with Trump,"
Papadopoulos told the FBI. "I wasn't even on the Trump team." Except he was on the team in
April 2016. The Feds noted in their court paperwork: "Defendant PAPADOPOULOS met the Professor
for the first time on or about March 14, 2016, after defendant PAPADOPOULOS had already learned
he would be a foreign policy advisor for the Campaign; the Professor showed interest in
defendant PAPADOPOULOS only after learning of his role."
And then there is extensive evidence -- confirmed by Papadopoulos -- that he acted as a
go-between for the Trump campaign and the Russian government, including being supplied with
damaging information on the Clinton campaign.
There are also emails from other Trump campaign staff -- so far unnamed -- that show
explicit efforts to work with Russians in gathering damaging information on the real-estate
tycoon's political rival. In other words, efforts to engage a foreign power to swing a US
presidential election.
But let's take a quick look at Facebook.
For one, using Facebook to carry out highly dubious and potentially illegal activity is
not a good idea. This is a social network that periodically changes account settings to keep up
the pretense that it's not gathering and selling every snippet of information it can get out of
you. Anything you say on Facebook may go straight down a pipe to the NSA and a database
searchable by the FBI. It's called
Section 702 .
Papadopoulos is obviously not a man well versed in spy craft. Something that becomes more
apparent when it's revealed the day after he was pulled in for questioning, he deleted his
entire Facebook account and started a new one. He also tried changing his phone number to
sidestep the Feds.
You can just imagine Mueller's team at their morning meeting: so how did the Papadopoulos
interview go yesterday? Well, this morning he deleted his Facebook account. Great, now we know
where to look.
... ... ...
Looks like Atlantic honchos are really worrying at the possibility of the release of the JFK
assassination documents. I like the line "One, that the press is "the enemy of the American
people" working in cahoots with the deep state, and, two, by lending credibility to the idea that
the official story of JFK's assassination is indeed suspect."
Notable quotes:
"... The phrase "conspiracy theory" was invented by the CIA to cover up what they were doing. It shouldn't take much smarts to see that LHO was just a patsy. ..."
"... Here's a smarts question for you: did Bush try to launch a rightwing military coup in the USA, yes or no? ..."
"... I don't think there's any doubt that the CIA has and had assets in the media who did and do perpetuate disinformation and distraction. ..."
"... Of course they've tried to hide the fact, but the Church Committee hearings on the plots and assassinations and other criminal behavior by The Agency back in the 1950s and 1960s exposed all sorts of similar schemes. ..."
Trump tweeted Saturday morning,
"I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened."
Trump's announcement came a day after his longtime confidant Roger Stone went on
Infowars , a radio show and website known for spreading conspiracy theories, and
announced that Trump would not block the release of the documents, which are set to be issued
by the National Archives in the coming days. Earlier that day, Politico Magazine had published an in-depth piece saying that Trump would likely
block the release of the files.
Here's the thing that happens, apparently, when a conspiracy theorist becomes president of
the United States: The lines between decision and reaction blur. The American people are
accustomed to public officials spinning their way through public office. No president has been
truly forthcoming with the electorate. Many have misled the American people.
... ... ...
Regardless of the files, though, Trump's attention to them is a window into
how he wants to be seen. In one dashed-off tweet, Trump positions himself as doing something
noble -- advocating for transparency, against the warnings of the intelligence community --
while feeding at least two major conspiracies. One, that the press is "the enemy of the
American people" working in cahoots with the deep state, and, two, by lending credibility to
the idea that the official story of JFK's assassination is indeed suspect.
"The best conspiracy theories have all the trappings of a classic underdog story," wrote Rob
Brotherton in his book, Suspicious Minds . "We want to see top dogs taken down a peg;
we want the downtrodden underdog to triumph. And when it comes to conspiracy theories, unfair
disadvantage is par for the course
The best initial attitude to have is one of skepticism...not only of conspiracy theories
but of denials of conspiracy theories. Until, that is, definitive evidence is revealed. You
are a fool to believe in conspiracy theories without credible evidence You are also a fool
for denying them without evidence. The fact is that we know through credible records
including the CIA's own internal records that they have been involved with many conspiracies
with foreign militias, dictatorships, corporations, thugs, gangsters and assassins. You are a
damn fool not to take an allegation seriously and to blanket dismiss new allegations unless
proven false. In fact, the CIA had (has?) a campaign to discredit any criticism of its
policies as "conspiracy theory". Gaslighting is a common tool they have used against anyone
who dares critiques or questions them.
The phrase "conspiracy theory" was invented by the CIA to cover up what they were doing.
It shouldn't take much smarts to see that LHO was just a patsy.
Here's a smarts question for you: did Bush try to launch a rightwing military coup in the
USA, yes or no?
The files were due to be released on this day after 25 years. In 1992, after the movie JFK
came out, people were intrigued and wanted the files released. The president ordered them
sealed for another 25 years (Oct 2017) and President Trump happens to be President. He will
release the files, if no conspiracy there, we will FINALLY get the transparency we the people
have been asking for. Nothing more, nothing less.
How exactly will the files show there was "no conspiracy there"? Do you expect somehow the
files will erase the numerous eyewitness accounts of shots from in front of the
motorcade?
Not only that, but the Parkland doctors said JFK's wounds ran contrary to what the Warren
Report concluded. And the only doctor who saw both the assassination, the Parkland Hospital
work, and the Bethesda autopsy, Dr. Burkley, was never consulted by the Warren Commission,
and when asked later whether he thought shots may have hit Kennedy from more than one
direction, replied: "I don't care to comment on that."
Bugliosi was intellectually dishonest in his massive tome. He hid inconvenient facts in
order to push his agenda; i.e. that a lone gunman did all of the work alone. Serious scholars
like Newman and DiEugenio have revealed his omissions for all to see.
I can't say for sure how the Clintons did it, but we should recall that Bill met JFK in
1963 and used that opportunity to plant a miniature tracking device. Hillary, using one of
her witch spells, then met Bill earlier than officially recorded, and the two of them
recruited Oswald and Ruby, with the help of Soviet agents using Vince Foster as a temporal
go-between. Foster killed himself over his guilt in the assasination. They were desperate to
get Hillary elected to stop the release of the files, but of course they failed. Now we will
get another reason to lock her up. I have no proof but know this in my heart to be true.
They would have had to recruit Jack Ruby from organized crime --- see Who Was Jack Ruby?
by Scripps-Howard White House correspondent Seth Kantor for more on "the mob's front man when
they moved into Dallas."
Edit: Kantor was previously a reporter in Dallas-Ft. Worth and before that, a veteran of
Guadalcanal --- he played a key role in testifying that Jack Ruby, who he knew well, was at
Parkland Hospital while JFK was in Trauma Room One, which Ruby denied. The circumstances
indicate a strong possibility Ruby planted the so-called "Magic Bullet" on an unattended
stretcher.
The lame stream news media are forever searching for ways to attack Trump. You'd think he
would get some credit for releasing the 3,000 documents. But no, once again he has ulterior
motives.
I remember Walter Cronkite saying that it's difficult for people to come to the conclusion
that one man could have affected history to the extent that Oswald did.
That's a fine thought, but has nothing to do with an actual murder case in which Oswald is
supposed to have killed Patrolman Tippit and then President Kennedy, despite not one single
shred of concrete, credible evidence tying him to either of the weapons supposedly used. In
fact, even worse, the weapon or weapons used don't even consistently show up in the
chain-of-custody by the Dallas police, bullets don't match, wounds are seen by attending
physicians which had to be fired from the front, etc.
"How could Oswald shoot Kennedy in the front from the back?" is one reductio of the Warren
Commission fantasies, which is why they assiduously avoided calling scores of eyewitnesses of
the assassination to testify, and mucked up the autopsy evidence. I mean, their whole "case"
amounted to "Well, Oswald was a communist" (not correct) "who hated Kennedy" (wrong again!)
"and killed a policeman" (this is completely bogus, with key Tippit-killing witness Helen
Markham described by a WC attorney as a "crackpot" among other problems) and "Oswald was at
the Texas School Book Depository" (True, he worked there in a job arranged by Ruth Paine) "so
he must have shot JFK" ---
(Wrong, the eyewitness testimony --- see The Girl on the Stairs: My Search for a Missing
Witness to the Assassination of John F. Kennedy by Barry Ernest, for example -- places him in
the "wrong place" to have shot anyone down in the motorcade from the sixth floor, and that's
just the first major problem, it would take too long to recount them all, as in HUNDREDS OF
PAGES, so that's just a few hints about what faces anyone investigating and/or reading about
the JFK assassination, as well as the murders of Tippit and Oswald, or Jack Ruby's extensive
ties as an organized crime factotum in Dallas and Cuba. Yes, Cuba.
Adrienne Lagrange, being the highly intellectual you try and portray. Why don't you see
that by writing this negative story about President Trump you not only make yourself sound
foolish, but you push neutral people to the President's side. Why do you think former
President Bush came out after 9 years of silence to condemn "conspiracy theorist" days before
President Trump announced the release of the JFK files? President Bush sr WAS involved with
the CIA in Texas during the JFK assasination in 1963. Obviously, he does not want the truth
to come out and so he got out in front of story to discredit what the files will show.
Corruption is common in the U.S Government, President Trump is dismantling this corruption a
little bit at a time. This is only the beginning.
What more do you need? The JFK literature is voluminous, and maybe you need to actually
try to read some of the key source material and critics and go from there.
Try reading Accessories after the Fact by Sylvia Meagher or On the Trail of the
Assassins by Jim Garrison, or Plausible Denial by Mark Lane. If you have the time
to deal with over 1200 pages about the JFK assassination, read Vincent Bugliosi's
Reclaiming History , and THEN read the ferocious debunkings of Bugliosi available
online.
N.B. Some of the most important discussions in Bugliosi's massive tome are in the
Endnotes, especially but not only "What the Parkland Doctors Saw." Conspiracy of
Silence by Parkland M.D. Dr. Charles Crenshaw is another useful text, as is Mafia
Kingfish by John Davis.
Ok: my honest opinion is that you can't summarize anything as complex as the planning,
execution, and subsequent coverup of the JFK assassination (including extensive use of media
assets for DECADES afterward) in anything short of a manuscript of hundreds of pages, and
many of the best work is already available, "just google it" ---but again, you have to be
willing to read those hundreds of pages with some sense of other background facts about the
Cold War and spy agencies.
This is one of the most intricate and far reaching events or set
of interconnected events in modern history --- just take a look at the "tags" on the front
page of kennedysandking.com and you'll see what I mean.
On the only occasion in which I had time in tutorials with Chomsky, I asked him first about
his views on the nexus of players at 544 Camp Street. That question and his answer might not
even make much sense to you without extensive background reading. Sorry, but that's just the
facts.
I truly understand your point regarding the complexity of the issue and I apologize for my
earlier comment.
I'm aware of the massive inconsistencies in the examination of his body, how it was
"handled", "magic bullets", and lots of other stuff I once knew but have forgotten. There's a
LOT of stuff, that's for sure.
I'm also very aware of how certain agencies (especially intel agencies) operate. Their
allegience to the truth is suspect at best.
I guess I was asking for was something like "It was basically an effort by (a list such
as... certain elements in the FBI/CIA/NSA/government... and/or foreign governments... and/or
the Mafia... or Cuba... or it was basically a coup driven by the MIC... (which I think it
was) or whatever combination it may be)." Basically the 100k foot view, a very simplistic
view. And I realize my opinion is not _nearly_ as informed as yours.
But that would certainly open up much noise from people like that moron I blocked earlier.
And certainly no one needs more of that....
I'll check out the links. Thanks.
By the way... I met Jim Marrs twice when I lived in Texas, actually around a campfire. It
was interesting meeting him, and he was a very interesting man regarding the JFK
assassination. I didn't know he passed, apparently quite recently.
I hope these documents get released and I hope they answer a lot of the open questions
still remaining.
JFK was murdered by the CIA.....he wanted to "to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces
and scatter it to the winds"......he fired Allen Dulles. Dulles was one of seven
commissioners of the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of the U.S. President
John F. Kennedy..oh and he had no problem murdering people....
I don't believe a single word from a politician. They are professional liars. It's their
job to lie and spin webs of deception. I watch and judge them by their actions.
I couldn't care less what color orange TrumPutin wears. He declared war on corporate media
and that is good enough for me. I don't support him because of his position on Snowden but I
agree with him on many issues.
JFK was a naive fool. He moved against forces he did not fully understand. I don't blame
him for trying. He was a patriot.
Atantuc reasserting it's superior newsmaking capabilities with click-bait headlines,
unsupported assumptions and trolling. Well done. You fall below tabloid, yellow
journalism.
LOL---americans are little antagonistic children that prefer lies to truth...see comments
below! and are gullible enough to believe anything told them...who needs conspiracy theories
when people are so stupid...everyone in Europe understood that americans were idiots when
they accepted the impossible claim that 1 shooter killed JFK...and now they are more stupid
believing that 1 gambler shot 500 people in las vegas...a nation of dimwits
The American public had to wait TWELVE YEARS to see the Zapruder film of the
assassination, showing the effect of the kill shot from in front of the motorcade. But by the
time Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane had become a best seller a few years after the 26 volumes
of the Warren Commission's hearings and exhibits were published (with no index --- it was
left to United Nations-employed scientist Sylvia Meagher to assemble that, which spurred
critics of the WC fantasies and outright lies to expose the multiple flaws and fallacies in
the first "official investigation," i.e., the first attempted coverup) the credibility of the
Krazy Kid Oswald nonsense was already held in disrepute by informed observers.
The article above can't whitewash the mainstream media's role in the coverup, of course ---
search "Operation Mockingbird" or "Walter Sheridan and the Garrison investigation" or " Jim
Di Eugenio critique of Phil Shenon's JFK books" etc,
Any claims that the Soviets or Cubans did it have been thoroughly debunked. It was an
American domestic coup. If you believe the Warren Commission, I've got Indian treaties to
show you.
No one has presented evidence that there was another shooter. Clint Black, the secret
service agent at the scene adamantly say's no other gunshots from the grassy knoll
area. Simply no proof. As for the Vegas shooting as well.
I disagree with your faith-based following of Bugliosi. I think Dr. Cyril Wecht blows
Bugliosi out of the water, from a forensics standpoint.
https://www.youtube.com/wat...
See the book Reclaiming Parkland for an extended dismantling of Bugliosi's Reclaiming
History, or just search "critical reviews of Bugliosi's JFK assassination book." It's an
embarrassment that Bugliosi wrote such fine books on the Simpson case and on the Supreme
Court's Bush v. Gore decision, but was apparently either blackmailed into writing obvious
lies or somehow convinced himself "no one with sufficient familiarity with the JFK
assassination in the requisite granular detail will ever read my book and expose my silly
attempts to distort the historical record." It took enormous chutzpah on his part to title
the book "Reclaiming History."
Search "Reclaiming History? Or Re-framing Oswald?" at
reclaiminghistory.org , which has links to a series of reviews of Bugliosi, none of which
you will ever see discussed on CNN or any other corporate mass media outlet. Instead, without
bothering to read the book much less deal with hundreds and hundreds of footnotes and
"Endnotes," some of bear on crucial points about the JFK assassination (such as "What the
Parkland Doctors Saw" ---see the Endnotes from 404-408} the corporate media is happy to
perpetuate as best they can the "one lone nut with no ties to the CIA killed two days later
by another lone nut with no relevant ties to the mob" confabulations.
"Reclaiming Parkland" is not one I've read, but I will. I don't think there's any doubt that the CIA has and had assets in the media who did and
do perpetuate disinformation and distraction.
Of course they've tried to hide the fact, but the Church Committee hearings on the plots
and assassinations and other criminal behavior by The Agency back in the 1950s and 1960s
exposed all sorts of similar schemes.
Search "MKUltra" and "Operation Artichoke" or just "The CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald" and you
can run across all sorts of interesting facts. not wild speculation, but facts, some of it
from CIA documents etc. etc.
Newman did his homework. He has combed through the declassified records and published his
findings on Oswald and the CIA, and on what really happened in Vietnam.
In my view the Miami and Chicago plans being aborted make the existence of multiple
shooters in Dallas-- such as Files -- more believable; the conspirators were simply not going
to miss another chance. Interestingly, Files himself says his superior told him the Dallas
plot was supposed to be called off, but they ignored the order.
Did you know that Gerald Posner, who wrote the definitive book concluding that Oswald
acted alone ("Case Closed"), is fully in favor of releasing the remainder of the documents --
in agreement with Pres. Trump's friend Roger Stone, who is a "conspiracy theorist"?
Did you know that the original "conspiracy theorist" -- the late Mark Lane -- was a
leftist and ardent supporter of JFK?
For the educated, this is about transparency, not ignorance.
Posner? Are you posting this as some kind of joke? Posner fabricated, altered, distorted
evidence on practically EVERY key point about the supposed role of Oswald, and totally
ignored all the revelations about Oswald's connections which exposed the role he played as an
intelligence agency asset.
Try reading some "critical reviews" of Case Closed, they are devastating and some are
maliciously funny, as well.
I was being sarcastic. I was pointing out that if a guy like Posner is in favor of
releasing the rest of the documents, it's a non-controversial issue.
I can promise you this; Vincent Buglioti wrote THEE masterpiece. Reclaiming history, The
JFK assassination. 1612 pages, twenty year's of research, and he embarrassed every other JFK
assassination writer' I've read Posner's book. Very well researched. But truthfully, it
cannot compare to Bugliotis " opus"
Get real --- Bugliosi has been thoroughly debunked. One of his favorite tricks is to
partially quote the FBI reports from Sibert and O'Neill out-of-context and ignore
contradictory witness testimony from witnesses (and there were dozens) not called to testify
before the Warren Commission. His book (and yes, I read ALL of it but with the advantage of
having ALSO read the WC report (the 26 volumes in large part, although not the part where
they had dental x-rays from Jack Ruby's mother --- I kid you not --- so much as the
inadvertently revelatory portions) as well as dozens and dozens of other books on the
assassination, so I could immediately spot some of Bugliosi's howlers) is considered
essentially a fraud on the public by informed critics of the JFK assassination.
"Conspiracy theories are a way to stand up, through disbelief, against the powerful. Those
who spread conspiracy theories in earnest are, whether they mean to or not, partaking in an
act of defiance against established institutions as much as they are questioning accepted
truths."
I disagree. Conspiracy theories are a way for the ignorant and stupid to delude themselves
that they are right and everyone who disagrees is wrong. Conspiracy theories provide a way of
feeling smart and shrewd without bothering with all that evidence and logic stuff.
Your comment makes no sense, since there are political assassinations like that of
Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy, for example, which have been both officially and
"unofficially" found to be the result of conspiracies. The House Select Committee on
Assassinations is one "official theory" that posits a conspiracy in the killing of President
Kennedy. You could also search "The Lincoln Conspiracy the book" and read that. In fact, you
don't have any idea at all about any of this, do you? You're just parroting some supposed
sage advice from the usual suspects.
"[L]ending credibility to the idea that the official story (sic) of JFK's assassination is
indeed suspect" is the incontrovertible fact that there are multiple "official stories," and
at least one of them posits the probability of a conspiracy behind JFK's assassination.
Since Oswald cannot even be tied to the supposed murder weapon by a credible
chain-of-evidence, nor placed in the so-called "sniper's nest" at the time shots rang out in
Dealey Plaza, nor be credibly rigged up as the killer of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit, it is
hardly surprising that anyone stuck trying to defend the relentlessly debunked Warren
Commission fantasies about the JFK-Tippit-Oswald murders is up against equally relentless
debunking right up to today.
A fact that the Democratic Party toadies try to push is that Trump does not tell the
truth.
He says things that are at variance with the claims the "press" try to toss at the people,
but that doesn't make them untrue.
The "press" was determined to tell people that the U.S.S. Maine was sunk by Spain, even
though it made no sense for them to be engage in aggressive actions that the New York Journal
claimed would then escalate into overt military action. If they felt that way, they would
have acted militarily from the start. Morons never questioned this and the U.S. easily
entered war with Spain. Even though the explosion on the Maine seems to have been the result
of a carelessly disposed of cigar.
Similarly with R.M.S. Lusitania. Imbeciles wouldn't ask why the Germans would engage in
something like murdering innocent civilians on an ocean liner if they wanted war. Why not
just carry out an invasion or declare war? Only now it's being admitted that Lusitania was
illegally carrying war supplies and ammunition from the U.S. to the Allies, making it a
legitimate target. Indeed, it is not necessarily proved that it actually carried civilian
passengers.
Similarly for the claims the the U.S. spied on the USSY with U-2 spy planes. The same with
the failure of the government and the "press" to admit the suspicious nature of claims of the
"Gulf of Tonkin Incident".
The fact is, Trump and others in the Republican Party have said many things that the
"press" denied, only to have the "press" shown to be lying later.
Hillary Clinton supporters were carrying out acts of violence after the election in
Trump's name to try to undermine him. Germany didn't pay its agreed upon amount for the
maintenance of NATO. Obama did bug Trump's campaign headquarters. Puerto Rico's sorry
condition is the result of massive corruption in its government. There are many women who, as
Trump asserted, will let a man with money and power take liberties. In fact, climate isn't
changing. "Climate" is the massive, interconnected, self regulating system comprised of
things like land, ocean, sky, solar energy, life. Land, ocean, solar energy, life are no
different from fifty years ago. Only the weather is changing, and that is caused by
chemtrails, the program of doping the air with weather modification chemicals from high
flying jets, producing long, non dissipating vapor lanes that stretch from horizon to horizon
and can last for an hour or more. Stop chemtrails and everything will return to normal.
Todd Akin was criticized for saying that, in "legitimate rape" women's bodies will fight
being impregnated. Democratic Party followers insisted Akin was saying rape was legal. He was
referring to rapes that actually occurred, not lies that many women do lodge against rich and
powerful men to get money.
J. Edgar Hoover said that "civil rights" marches and such were tools of the Kremlin to try
to undermine democracy. In their desperate attempt to rescue the claim that the Russians
interfered with the 2016 election, none other than The Atlantic has taken up Hoover's
insistence that such demonstrations were a means used by the USSR to try to destroy
democracy. And the dullards of the Democratic Party's target audience won't realize they are
now agreeing with the Republicans.
Trump and the politicians come from rarefied levels that know facts that government and
the "press" lies to the public about. One fact, that there may be actual sections of
government, or "government", that act independently of any rules and can even roll over the
rest of "government". "Government" is just a sleazy swindle to make the rich richer. No one
controls them! Not even elections! They publish fake "vote tallies", then put who they want
in. Trump speaks of the Deep State of power mongering going on behind the scenes. Hillary
Clinton operated her own shadow government with a system of unregistered servers only one of
which has been acknowledged. It's been suspected for a long time that the "intelligence
network" acted solely on its own recognizance, answerable to no one. Questions Trump raises
can point people to the truth.
"My" research? Look, just GO ONLINE to another website like
JFKfacts.org or kennedysand king.com
, or search "James Di Eugenio on the JFK assassination," I have read around 150 books and
articles and much of the Warren Report (the volumes not the summary) and the House Select
Committee hearings reports, but compared to "serious researchers" I am a dilletante. Besides,
you really NEED to study this either for yourself as a kind of "research project" or if
possible, in a university level course environment.
There are THOUSANDS of really interesting books about aspects of the JFK assassination ---
search "Reclaiming Parkland" by Di Eugenio and go from there, whatever.
Follow the links, and expect it to take many many hours to get the beginning of an
understanding.
Ok, why don't you at least realize it's FAR more complex than any possible "avionics
system," it's something akin to people on Quora asking me to "summarize Hamlet," or
"summarize King Lear." It's just absurd. Besides which, the subject matter is far too
important for anyone to take their views from a few summarized paragraphs, whether about
Hamlet or Lear or the JFK assassination.
So yeah, I did "research" and I think the facts speak for themselves, as you would learn by
delving into the posts at
jfkfacts.org or
kennedysandking.com , or reading Plausible Denial by Mark Lane. The thing is, it's one of
the most complicated interlocking sets of topics in modern history, not something that can be
scrawled on a postcard.
The danger is that intelligence agencies cause Facebook to influence elections.
Notable quotes:
"... Fowler told Rosen that it was "even possible that Facebook is completely responsible" for the youth voter increase. And because
a higher proportion of young people vote Democratic than the general population, the net effect of Facebook's GOTV effort would have
been to help the Dems. ..."
"... In June 2014, Harvard Law scholar Jonathan Zittrain wrote an essay in New Republic ..."
"... But the point isn't that a Republican beat a Democrat. The point is that the very roots of the electoral system -- the news
people see, the events they think happened, the information they digest -- had been destabilized. ..."
"... Chaos Monkeys ..."
"... The information systems that people use to process news have been rerouted through Facebook, and in the process, mostly broken
and hidden from view. It wasn't just liberal bias that kept the media from putting everything together. Much of the hundreds of millions
of dollars that was spent during the election cycle came in the form of "dark ads." ..."
"... Update: After publication, Adam Mosseri, head of News Feed, sent an email describing some of the work that Facebook is doing
in response to the problems during the election. They include new software and processes "to stop the spread of misinformation , click-bait
and other problematic content on Facebook." ..."
"... "The truth is we've learned things since the election, and we take our responsibility to protect the community of people who
use Facebook seriously. As a result, we've launched a company-wide effort to improve the integrity of information on our service," he
wrote. "It's already translated into new products, new protections, and the commitment of thousands of new people to enforce our policies
and standards... We know there is a lot more work to do, but I've never seen this company more engaged on a single challenge since I
joined almost 10 years ago." ..."
And why it was so hard to see it coming In the media world, as in so many other realms, there is a sharp discontinuity in the
timeline: before the 2016 election, and after.
Things we thought we understood -- narratives, data, software, news events -- have had to be reinterpreted in light of Donald
Trump's surprising win as well as the continuing questions about the role that misinformation and disinformation played in his election.
Tech journalists covering Facebook had a duty to cover what was happening before, during, and after the election. Reporters tried
to see past their often liberal political orientations and the unprecedented actions of Donald Trump to see how 2016 was playing
out on the internet. Every component of the chaotic digital campaign has been reported on, here at The Atlantic , and elsewhere:
Facebook's enormous distribution power for political information, rapacious partisanship reinforced by distinct media information
spheres, the increasing scourge of "viral" hoaxes and other kinds of misinformation that could propagate through those networks,
and the Russian information ops agency.
But no one delivered the synthesis that could have tied together all these disparate threads. It's not that this hypothetical
perfect story would have changed the outcome of the election. The real problem -- for all political stripes -- is understanding the
set of conditions that led to Trump's victory. The informational underpinnings of democracy have eroded, and no one has explained
precisely how.
* * *
We've known since at least 2012 that Facebook was a powerful, non-neutral force in electoral politics. In that year, a combined
University of California, San Diego and Facebook research team led by James Fowler published
a study in Nature , which argued that Facebook's "I Voted" button had driven a small but measurable increase in turnout,
primarily among young people.
Rebecca Rosen's 2012 story, "
Did Facebook Give Democrats the Upper Hand? " relied on new research from Fowler, et al., about the presidential election that
year. Again, the conclusion of their work was that Facebook's get-out-the-vote message could have driven a substantial chunk of the
increase in youth voter participation in the 2012 general election. Fowler told Rosen that it was "even possible that Facebook
is completely responsible" for the youth voter increase. And because a higher proportion of young people vote Democratic than the
general population, the net effect of Facebook's GOTV effort would have been to help the Dems.
The potential for Facebook to have an impact on an election was clear for at least half a decade.
The research showed that a small design change by Facebook could have electoral repercussions, especially with America's electoral-college
format in which a few hotly contested states have a disproportionate impact on the national outcome. And the pro-liberal effect it
implied became enshrined as an axiom of how campaign staffers, reporters, and academics viewed social media.
In June 2014, Harvard Law scholar Jonathan Zittrain wrote an essay in New Republic called, "
Facebook
Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out ," in which he called attention to the possibility of Facebook selectively
depressing voter turnout. (He also suggested that Facebook be seen as an "information fiduciary," charged with certain special roles
and responsibilities because it controls so much personal data.)
In late 2014, The Daily Dot
called attention to an
obscure Facebook-produced case study on how strategists defeated a statewide measure in Florida by relentlessly focusing Facebook
ads on Broward and Dade counties, Democratic strongholds. Working with a tiny budget that would have allowed them to send a single
mailer to just 150,000 households, the digital-advertising firm Chong and Koster was able to obtain remarkable results. "Where the
Facebook ads appeared, we did almost 20 percentage points better than where they didn't," testified a leader of the firm. "Within
that area, the people who saw the ads were 17 percent more likely to vote our way than the people who didn't. Within that group,
the people who voted the way we wanted them to, when asked why, often cited the messages they learned from the Facebook ads."
In April 2016, Rob Meyer published "
How Facebook Could Tilt the 2016 Election " after a company meeting in which some employees apparently put the stopping-Trump
question to Mark Zuckerberg. Based on Fowler's research, Meyer reimagined Zittrain's hypothetical as a direct Facebook intervention
to depress turnout among non-college graduates, who leaned Trump as a whole.
Facebook, of course, said it would never do such a thing. "Voting is a core value of democracy and we believe that supporting
civic participation is an important contribution we can make to the community," a spokesperson said. "We as a company are neutral
-- we have not and will not use our products in a way that attempts to influence how people vote."
From the system's perspective, success is correctly predicting what you'll like, comment on, or share.
The same was true even of people inside Facebook. "If you'd come to me in 2012, when the last presidential election was raging
and we were cooking up ever more complicated ways to monetize Facebook data, and told me that Russian agents in the Kremlin's employ
would be buying Facebook ads to subvert American democracy, I'd have asked where your tin-foil hat was," wrote Antonio García Martínez,
who managed ad targeting for Facebook back then. "And yet, now we live in that otherworldly political reality."
Not to excuse us, but this was back on the Old Earth, too, when electoral politics was not the thing that every single
person talked about all the time. There were other important dynamics to Facebook's growing power that needed to be covered.
* * *
Facebook's draw is its ability to give you what you want. Like a page, get more of that page's posts; like a story, get more stories
like that; interact with a person, get more of their updates. The way Facebook determines the ranking of the News Feed is the probability
that you'll like, comment on, or share a story. Shares are worth more than comments, which are both worth more than likes, but in
all cases, the more likely you are to interact with a post, the higher up it will show in your News Feed. Two thousand kinds of data
(or "features" in the industry parlance) get smelted in Facebook's machine-learning system to make those predictions.
What's crucial to understand is that, from the system's perspective, success is correctly predicting what you'll like, comment
on, or share. That's what matters. People call this "engagement." There are other factors, as Slate' s Will Oremus noted in
this rare story about
the News Feed ranking team . But who knows how much weight they actually receive and for how long as the system evolves. For
example, one change that Facebook highlighted to Oremus in early 2016 -- taking into account how long people look at a story, even
if they don't click it -- was subsequently dismissed by
Lars Backstrom, the VP of engineering in charge of
News Feed ranking , as a "noisy" signal that's also "biased in a few ways" making it "hard to use" in a May 2017 technical talk.
Facebook's engineers do not want to introduce noise into the system. Because the News Feed, this machine for generating engagement,
is Facebook's most important technical system. Their success predicting what you'll like is why users spend
an average of more than 50 minutes a day on the site, and why even the former
creator
of the "like" button worries about how well the site captures attention. News Feed works really well.
If every News Feed is different, how can anyone understand what other people are seeing and responding to?
But as far as "
personalized newspapers " go, this one's editorial sensibilities are limited. Most people are far less likely to engage with
viewpoints that they find confusing, annoying, incorrect, or abhorrent. And this is true not just in politics, but the broader culture.
That this could be a problem was apparent to many. Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble, which came out in the summer of 2011,
became the most widely cited distillation of the effects Facebook and other internet platforms could have on public discourse.
Pariser began the book research when he noticed conservative people, whom he'd befriended on the platform despite his left-leaning
politics, had disappeared from his News Feed. "I was still clicking my progressive friends' links more than my conservative friends'
-- and links to the latest Lady Gaga videos more than either," he wrote. "So no conservative links for me."
Through the book, he traces the many potential problems that the "personalization" of media might bring. Most germane to this
discussion, he raised the point that if every one of the billion News Feeds is different, how can anyone understand what other people
are seeing and responding to?
"The most serious political problem posed by filter bubbles is that they make it increasingly difficult to have a public argument.
As the number of different segments and messages increases, it becomes harder and harder for the campaigns to track who's saying
what to whom," Pariser wrote. "How does a [political] campaign know what its opponent is saying if ads are only targeted to white
Jewish men between 28 and 34 who have expressed a fondness for U2 on Facebook and who donated to Barack Obama's campaign?"
This did, indeed, become an enormous problem. When I was editor in chief of Fusion , we set about trying to track the "digital
campaign" with several dedicated people. What we quickly realized was that there was both too much data -- the noisiness of all the
different posts by the various candidates and their associates -- as well as too little. Targeting made tracking the actual messaging
that the campaigns were paying for impossible to track. On Facebook, the campaigns could show ads only to the people they
targeted. We couldn't actually see the messages that were actually reaching people in battleground areas. From the outside, it was
a technical impossibility to know what ads were running on Facebook,
one that the company
had fought to keep intact .
Across the landscape, it began to dawn on people: Damn, Facebook owns us .
Pariser suggests in his book, "one simple solution to this problem would simply be to require campaigns to immediately disclose
all of their online advertising materials and to whom each ad is targeted." Which
could happen in future campaigns .
Imagine if this had happened in 2016. If there were data sets of all the ads that the campaigns and others had run, we'd know
a lot more about what actually happened last year. The Filter Bubble is obviously prescient work, but there was one thing
that Pariser and most other people did not foresee. And that's that Facebook became completely dominant as a media distributor.
* * *
About two years after Pariser published his book, Facebook took over the news-media ecosystem. They've never publicly admitted
it, but in late 2013, they began to serve ads inviting users to "like" media pages. This caused a massive increase in the amount
of traffic that Facebook sent to media companies. At The Atlantic and other publishers across the media landscape, it was
like a tide was carrying us to new traffic records. Without hiring anyone else, without changing strategy or tactics, without publishing
more, suddenly everything was easier.
While traffic to The Atlantic from Facebook.com increased, at the time, most of the new traffic did not look like it was
coming from Facebook within The Atlantic 's analytics. It showed up as "direct/bookmarked" or some variation, depending on
the software. It looked like what I called "dark social" back in 2012. But as BuzzFeed 's Charlie Warzel
pointed
out at the time , and as I came to believe, it was primarily Facebook traffic in disguise. Between August and October of 2013,
BuzzFeed 's "partner network" of hundreds of websites saw a jump in traffic from Facebook of 69 percent.
At The Atlantic, we ran a series of experiments that showed, pretty definitively from our perspective, that most of the
stuff that looked like "dark social" was, in fact, traffic coming from within Facebook's mobile app. Across the landscape, it began
to dawn on people who thought about these kinds of things: Damn, Facebook owns us . They had taken over media distribution.
Why? This is a best guess,
proffered by Robinson Meyer as it was happening : Facebook wanted to crush Twitter, which had drawn a disproportionate share
of media and media-figure attention. Just as Instagram borrowed Snapchat's "Stories" to help crush the site's growth, Facebook decided
it needed to own "news" to take the wind out of the newly IPO'd Twitter.
The first sign that this new system had some kinks came with "
Upworthy -style " headlines. (And you'll never guess what happened next!) Things didn't just go kind of viral, they went
ViralNova , a site which, like Upworthy
itself , Facebook eventually smacked down
. Many of the new sites had, like Upworthy , which was cofounded by Pariser, a progressive bent.
Less noticed was that a right-wing media was developing in opposition to and alongside these left-leaning sites. "By 2014, the
outlines of the Facebook-native hard-right voice and grievance spectrum were there," The New York Times ' media and tech writer
John Herrman told me, "and I tricked myself into thinking they were a reaction/counterpart to the wave of soft progressive/inspirational
content that had just crested. It ended up a Reaction in a much bigger and destabilizing sense."
The other sign of algorithmic trouble was the wild swings that Facebook Video underwent. In the early days, just about any old
video was likely to generate many, many, many views. The numbers were insane in the early days. Just as an example,
a Fortune article noted that BuzzFeed
's video views "grew 80-fold in a year, reaching more than 500 million in April." Suddenly, all kinds of video -- good, bad,
and ugly -- were doing 1-2-3 million views.
As with news, Facebook's video push was a direct
assault on a competitor, YouTube . Videos changed the dynamics of the News Feed for individuals, for media companies, and
for anyone trying to understand what the hell was going on.
Individuals were suddenly inundated with video. Media companies, despite no business model, were forced to crank out video somehow
or risk their pages/brands losing relevance as video posts crowded others out.
And on top of all that, scholars and industry observers were used to looking at what was happening in articles to understand
how information was flowing. Now, by far the most viewed media objects on Facebook, and therefore on the internet, were videos without
transcripts or centralized repositories. In the early days, many successful videos were just "freebooted" (i.e., stolen) videos from
other places or reposts. All of which served to confuse and obfuscate the transport mechanisms for information and ideas on Facebook.
Through this messy, chaotic, dynamic situation, a new media rose up through the Facebook burst to occupy the big filter bubbles.
On the right, Breitbart is the center of a new conservative network. A
study of 1.25 million election news
articles found "a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system,
using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world."
Breitbart , of course, also lent Steve Bannon, its chief, to the Trump campaign, creating another feedback loop between
the candidate and a rabid partisan press. Through 2015, Breitbart went from a medium-sized site with a small Facebook page
of 100,000 likes into a
powerful force
shaping the election with almost 1.5 million likes. In the key metric for Facebook's News Feed, its posts got 886,000 interactions
from Facebook users in January. By July, Breitbart had surpassed The New York Times ' main account in interactions.
By December, it was doing 10 million interactions per month, about 50 percent of Fox News, which had 11.5 million likes on its main
page. Breitbart 's audience was hyper-engaged.
There is no precise equivalent to the Breitbart phenomenon on the left. Rather the big news organizations are classified
as center-left, basically, with fringier left-wing sites showing far smaller followings than Breitbart on the right.
And this new, hyperpartisan media created the perfect conditions for another dynamic that influenced the 2016 election, the rise
of fake news.
In a December 2015 article for BuzzFeed , Joseph Bernstein argued that "
the dark forces of the internet became a counterculture ." He called it "Chanterculture" after the trolls who gathered at the
meme-creating, often-racist 4chan message board. Others ended up calling it the "alt-right." This culture combined a bunch of people
who loved to perpetuate hoaxes with angry Gamergaters with "free-speech" advocates like Milo Yiannopoulos with honest-to-God neo-Nazis
and white supremacists. And these people loved Donald Trump.
"This year Chanterculture found its true hero, who makes it plain that what we're seeing is a genuine movement: the current master
of American resentment, Donald Trump," Bernstein wrote. "Everywhere you look on 'politically incorrect' subforums and random chans,
he looms."
When you combine hyper-partisan media with a group of people who love to clown "normies," you end up with things like
Pizzagate , a patently ridiculous and widely
debunked conspiracy theory that held there was a child-pedophilia ring linked to Hillary Clinton somehow. It was just the most bizarre
thing in the entire world. And many of the figures in Bernstein's story were all over it, including several who the current president
has consorted with on social media.
But Pizzagate was but the most Pynchonian of all the crazy misinformation and hoaxes that spread in the run-up to the election.
BuzzFeed , deeply attuned to the flows of the social web, was all over the story through reporter Craig Silverman. His
best-known analysis happened after the election, when he showed that "in the final three months of the U.S. presidential campaign,
the top-performing fake election-news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets
such as The New York Times , The Washington Post , The Huffington Post , NBC News, and others."
But he also tracked fake news
before the election , as did other outlets such as The Washington Post, including showing that Facebook's "Trending"
algorithm regularly promoted fake news. By September of 2016,
even the Pope himself was talking about fake news, by which we mean actual hoaxes or lies perpetuated by a variety of actors.
The fake news generated a ton of engagement, which meant that it spread far and wide.
What made the election cycle different was that all of these changes to the information ecosystem had made it possible to develop
weird businesses around fake news. Some random website posting aggregated news about the election could not drive a lot of traffic.
But some random website announcing that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump definitely could . The fake news generated a
ton of engagement, which meant that it spread far and wide.
A few days before the election Silverman and fellow BuzzFeed contributor Lawrence Alexander traced 100 pro–Donald Trump
sites to
a town of 45,000 in Macedonia . Some teens there realized they could make money off the election, and just like that, became
a node in the information network that helped Trump beat Clinton.
Whatever weird thing you imagine might happen, something weirder probably did happen. Reporters tried to keep up, but it was too
strange. As Max Read put it in New York Magazine , Facebook is "like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when
it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize." No one can quite wrap their heads around what this thing has become,
or all the things this thing has become.
"Not even President-Pope-Viceroy Zuckerberg himself seemed prepared for the role Facebook has played in global politics this past
year," Read wrote.
And we haven't even gotten to the Russians.
* * *
Russia's disinformation campaigns are well known. During his reporting for
a story in The New York Times Magazine
, Adrian Chen sat across the street from the headquarters of the Internet Research Agency, watching workaday Russian agents/internet
trolls head inside. He heard how the place had "industrialized the art of trolling" from a former employee. "Management was obsessed
with statistics -- page views, number of posts, a blog's place on LiveJournal's traffic charts -- and team leaders compelled hard
work through a system of bonuses and fines," he wrote. Of course they wanted to maximize engagement, too!
There were reports that Russian trolls
were commenting on American news sites . There were many, many reports of Russia's propaganda offensive in Ukraine.
Ukrainian journalists run a website dedicated to cataloging these disinformation attempts called StopFake . It has hundreds of posts reaching back into 2014.
The influence campaign just happened on Facebook without anyone noticing.
A Guardian reporter who looked into
Russian
military doctrine around information war found a handbook that described how it might work. "The deployment of information weapons,
[the book] suggests, 'acts like an invisible radiation' upon its targets: 'The population doesn't even feel it is being acted upon.
So the state doesn't switch on its self-defense mechanisms,'" wrote Peter Pomerantsev.
As more details about the Russian disinformation campaign come to the surface through Facebook's continued digging, it's fair
to say that it's not just the state that did not switch on its self-defense mechanisms. The influence campaign just happened on Facebook
without anyone noticing.
As many people have noted, the 3,000 ads that have been linked to Russia are a drop in the bucket, even if they did reach millions
of people. The real game is simply that Russian operatives created pages that reached people "organically," as the saying goes. Jonathan
Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University,
pulled data on the six publicly known Russia-linked Facebook pages . He found that their posts had been shared 340 million
times . And those were six of 470 pages that Facebook has linked to Russian operatives. You're probably talking billions of shares,
with who knows how many views, and with what kind of specific targeting.
The Russians are good at engagement! Yet, before the U.S. election, even after Hillary Clinton and intelligence agencies
fingered Russian intelligence meddling in the election, even after news reports
suggested that a disinformation campaign was afoot , nothing about the actual operations on Facebook came out.
In the aftermath of these discoveries, three Facebook security researchers, Jen Weedon, William Nuland, and Alex Stamos, released
a white paper called Information
Operations and Facebook . "We have had to expand our security focus from traditional abusive behavior, such as account hacking,
malware, spam, and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic
discourse and deceive people," they wrote.
"These social platforms are all invented by very liberal people. And we figure out how to use it to push conservative values."
One key theme of the paper is that they were used to dealing with economic actors, who responded to costs and incentives. When
it comes to Russian operatives paid to Facebook, those constraints no longer hold. "The area of information operations does provide
a unique challenge," they wrote, "in that those sponsoring such operations are often not constrained by per-unit economic realities
in the same way as spammers and click fraudsters, which increases the complexity of deterrence." They were not expecting that.
Add everything up. The chaos of a billion-person platform that competitively dominated media distribution. The known electoral
efficacy of Facebook. The wild fake news and misinformation rampaging across the internet generally and Facebook specifically. The
Russian info operations. All of these things were known.
And yet no one could quite put it all together: The dominant social network had altered the information and persuasion environment
of the election beyond recognition while taking
a very big chunk
of the estimated $1.4 billion worth of digital advertising purchased during the election. There were hundreds of millions of
dollars of dark ads doing their work. Fake news all over the place. Macedonian teens campaigning for Trump. Ragingly partisan media
infospheres serving up only the news you wanted to hear. Who could believe anything? What room was there for policy positions when
all this stuff was eating up News Feed space? Who the hell knew what was going on?
Hillary Clinton is running arguably the most digital presidential campaign in U.S. history. Donald Trump is running one of
the most analog campaigns in recent memory. The Clinton team is bent on finding more effective ways to identify supporters and
ensure they cast ballots; Trump is, famously and unapologetically, sticking to a 1980s-era focus on courting attention and voters
via television.
Just a week earlier, Trump's campaign had hired Cambridge Analytica. Soon, they'd ramped up to $70 million a month in Facebook
advertising spending. And the next thing you knew, Brad Parscale, Trump's digital director, is
doing the postmortem rounds talking up his win .
"These social platforms are all invented by very liberal people on the west and east coasts," Parscale said. "And we figure out
how to use it to push conservative values. I don't think they thought that would ever happen."
And that was part of the media's problem, too.
* * *
Before Trump's election, the impact of internet technology generally and Facebook specifically was seen as favoring Democrats.
Even a
TechCrunch critique of Rosen's 2012 article about Facebook's electoral power argued, "the
internet inherently advantages
liberals because, on average, their greater psychological embrace of disruption leads to more innovation (after all, nearly every
major digital breakthrough, from online fundraising to the use of big data, was pioneered by Democrats)."
In June 2015, The New York Times ran an article about
Republicans trying to ramp up their digital campaigns that began like this: "The criticism after the 2012 presidential election
was swift and harsh: Democrats were light-years ahead of Republicans when it came to digital strategy and tactics, and Republicans
had serious work to do on the technology front if they ever hoped to win back the White House."
"Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power."
It cited Sasha Issenberg, the most astute reporter on political technology. "The Republicans have a particular challenge," Issenberg
said, "which is, in these areas they don't have many people with either the hard skills or the experience to go out and take on this
type of work."
University of North Carolina journalism professor Daniel Kreiss wrote a whole (good) book, Prototype Politics , showing that Democrats had
an incredible personnel advantage. " Drawing on an innovative data set of the professional careers of 629 staffers working
in technology on presidential campaigns from 2004 to 2012 and data from interviews with more than 60 party and campaign staffers,"
Kriess wrote, "the book details how and explains why the Democrats have invested more in technology, attracted staffers with specialized
expertise to work in electoral politics, and founded an array of firms and organizations to diffuse technological innovations down
ballot and across election cycles."
Which is to say: It's not that no journalists, internet-focused lawyers, or technologists saw Facebook's looming electoral presence
-- it was undeniable -- but all the evidence pointed to the structural change benefitting Democrats. And let's just state the obvious:
Most reporters and professors are probably about as liberal as your standard Silicon Valley technologist, so this conclusion fit
into the comfort zone of those in the field.
By late October, the role that Facebook might be playing in the Trump campaign -- and more broadly -- was emerging. Joshua Green
and Issenberg
reported
a long feature on the data operation then in motion . The Trump campaign was working to suppress "idealistic white liberals,
young women, and African Americans," and they'd be doing it with targeted, "dark" Facebook ads. These ads are only visible to the
buyer, the ad recipients, and Facebook. No one who hasn't been targeted by then can see them. How was anyone supposed to know what
was going on, when the key campaign terrain was literally invisible to outside observers?
Steve Bannon was confident in the operation. "I wouldn't have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn't known they were building
this massive Facebook and data engine," Bannon told them. "Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We
know its power."
The very roots of the electoral system had been destabilized.
Issenberg and Green called it "an odd gambit" which had "no scientific basis." Then again, Trump's whole campaign had seemed like
an odd gambit with no scientific basis. The conventional wisdom was that Trump was going to lose and lose badly. In the days before
the election, The Huffington Post 's data team had Clinton's election probability at 98.3 percent. A member of the team, Ryan
Grim, went after Nate Silver for his more conservative probability of 64.7 percent, accusing him of skewing his data for "punditry"
reasons. Grim ended his post on the topic, "If you want to put your faith in the numbers, you can relax. She's got this."
Narrator: She did not have this.
But the point isn't that a Republican beat a Democrat. The point is that the very roots of the electoral system -- the news
people see, the events they think happened, the information they digest -- had been destabilized.
In the middle of the summer of the election, the former Facebook ad-targeting product manager, Antonio García Martínez, released
an autobiography called Chaos Monkeys . He called
his colleagues "chaos monkeys," messing with industry after industry in their company-creating fervor. "The question for society,"
he wrote, "is whether it can survive these entrepreneurial chaos monkeys intact, and at what human cost." This is the real epitaph
of the election.
The information systems that people use to process news have been rerouted through Facebook, and in the process, mostly broken
and hidden from view. It wasn't just liberal bias that kept the media from putting everything together. Much of the hundreds of millions
of dollars that was spent during the election cycle came in the form of "dark ads."
The truth is that while many reporters knew some things that were going on on Facebook, no one knew everything that
was going on on Facebook, not even Facebook. And so, during the most significant shift in the technology of politics since the television,
the first draft of history is filled with undecipherable whorls and empty pages. Meanwhile, the 2018 midterms loom.
Update: After publication, Adam Mosseri, head of News Feed, sent an email describing some of the work that Facebook is doing
in response to the problems during the election. They include new software and processes "to stop the
spread of misinformation
, click-bait
and other
problematic
content on Facebook."
"The truth is we've learned things since the election, and we take our responsibility to protect the community of people who
use Facebook seriously. As a result, we've launched a company-wide effort to improve the integrity of information on our service,"
he wrote. "It's already translated into new products, new protections, and the commitment of thousands of new people to enforce our
policies and standards... We know there is a lot more work to do, but I've never seen this company more engaged on a single challenge
since I joined almost 10 years ago."
"... "Israeli intelligence has developed a predictive policing system – a computer algorithm – that analyzes social media posts to identify Palestinian "suspects." " ..."
How to fix it? I don't know – maybe the internet . . . that is also a big IF
– since there is so much on the internet which is just trash and lacks any sort of
serious vetting.
The Israeli algorithm criminalizing Palestinians for online dissent Oct 4 2017
"Israeli intelligence has developed a predictive policing system – a computer
algorithm – that analyzes social media posts to identify Palestinian "suspects."
"
The intelligence division
at the Treasury
Department has repeatedly and systematically violated domestic surveillance laws by
snooping on the private financial records of US citizens and companies, according to
government sources.
Over the past year, at least a dozen employees in another
branch of the Treasury Department, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, have
warned officials and Congress that US citizens' and residents' banking and financial
data has been illegally searched and stored. And the breach, some sources said,
extended to other intelligence agencies, such as the National Security Agency, whose
officers used the Treasury's intelligence division as an illegal back door to gain
access to American citizens' financial records. The NSA said that any allegations
that it "is operating outside of its authorities and knowingly violating U.S.
persons' privacy and civil liberties is categorically false."
In response to detailed questions, the Treasury Department at first issued a
one-sentence reply stating that its various branches "operate in a manner consistent
with applicable legal authorities." Several hours after this story published, the
department issued a more forceful
denial
: "The BuzzFeed story is flat out wrong. An unsourced suggestion that an
office within Treasury is engaged in illegal spying on Americans is unfounded and
completely off-base." It added that "OIA and FinCEN share important information and
operate within the bounds of statute."
Still, the Treasury Department's Office of the Inspector General said it has
launched a review of the issue. Rich Delmar, a lawyer in that office, offered no
further comment.
But a senior Treasury official, who is not authorized to speak on the matter so
requested anonymity, did not mince words: "This is domestic spying."
Sources said the spying had been going on under President Barack Obama, but the
Donald Trump appointees who now control how the department conducts intelligence
operations are Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Under Secretary for Terrorism
and Financial Intelligence Sigal Mandelker.
At issue is the collection and dissemination of information from a vast database
of mostly US citizens' banking and financial records that banks turn over to the
government each day. Banks and other financial institutions are required, under the
Bank Secrecy Act
of 1970, to report suspicious transactions and cash transactions over $10,000. The
database is maintained by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or
FinCEN
, a bank regulator charged with
combatting money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes. Under
the law, it has unfettered powers to peruse and retain the data.
In contrast to FinCEN, Treasury's intelligence division, known as the Office of
Intelligence and Analysis, or OIA, is charged with monitoring suspicious financial
activity that occurs outside the US. Under a seminal Reagan-era executive order, a
line runs through the Treasury Department and all other federal agencies separating
law enforcement, which targets domestic crimes, from intelligence agencies, which
focus on foreign threats and can surveil US citizens only in limited ways and by
following stringent guidelines.
FinCEN officials have accused their counterparts at OIA, an intelligence unit, of
violating this separation by illegally collecting and retaining domestic financial
information from the banking database. Some sources have also charged that OIA
analysts have, in a further legal breach, been calling up financial institutions to
make inquiries about individual bank accounts and transactions involving US citizens.
Sources said the banks have complied with the requests because they are under the
impression they are giving the information to FinCEN, which they are required to do.
One source recalled an instance from 2016 in which OIA personnel, inserting
themselves into a domestic money-laundering case, sought information from a Delaware
financial institution. In other cases, according to a second source, FinCEN gave OIA
reports with the names of US citizens and companies blacked out. OIA obtained those
names by calling the banks, then used those names to search the banking database for
more information on those American citizens and firms.
"This is such an invasion of privacy." -- Treasury Department official
Sources also claimed that OIA has opened a back door to officers from other
intelligence agencies throughout the government, including the the CIA and the
Defense Intelligence Agency. Officials from those agencies have been coming to work
at OIA for short periods of time, sometimes for as little as a week, and thereby
getting unrestricted access to information on US citizens that they otherwise could
not collect without strict oversight.
"This is such an invasion of privacy," said another Treasury Department official,
who, lacking authorization to speak on the matter, asked not to be named. This person
predicted that banks "would lose their minds" if they knew that their customers'
records were being used by government intelligence officers who did not have the
legal authority to do so.
The Defense Intelligence Agency did not respond to a request for comment. CIA
spokesman Dean Boyd said, "Suggestions that the Agency may be improperly collecting
and retaining US persons data through the mechanisms you described are completely
inaccurate."
Sources claimed the unauthorized inspection and possession of Americans' financial
data have been going on for years but only became controversial in 2016, when
officials at FinCEN learned about it and began objecting. Early last year, Treasury's
Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, which oversees OIA, proposed
transferring much of FinCEN's work to OIA.
In a bureaucratic turf war, FinCEN officials objected to the proposal, which would
have shifted numerous employees and a portion of FinCEN's budget to OIA. They
said
the move was illegal without prior approval from Congress.
Amazon, Facebook and Google: The new robber barons?
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 2010. Credit:
/CreativeCommons/SteveJurvetson
Earlier this month Amazon,
announced its
plans to establish a second headquarters in North America. Rather than simply reveal which city would
become its second home, the Seattle-based tech company opted instead to open a bidding war. In an
eight page
document published on its website, Amazon outlined the criteria for prospective suitors, and
invited economic developers to submit proposals advocating for why their city or region should be
the host of the new location.
Its potential arrival comes with the claim that the company will invest more than $5 billion in
construction and generate up to 50,000 "high paying jobs." Mayors and governors, hard at work crafting
their bids, are no doubt salivating at the mere thought of such economic activity. Journalists and
editorial teams in eligible metropolises are also playing their parts, as newspapers have
published a series of articles and editorials
making the case for why
their city should be declared the winner.
Last Tuesday Bloomberg
reported that Boston was the early frontrunner, sending a wave of panic across the continent.
Much to the relief of the other contenders, Amazon quickly discredited the report as misinformation,
announcing in a series of
tweets on
Wednesday that it is "energized by the response from cities across [North America]" and that, contrary
to the rumors, there are currently no front-runners on their "equal playing field."
That Amazon is "energized" should come as no surprise. Most companies would also be energized
by the taxpayer-funded windfall that is likely coming its way. Reporters speculate that the winner
of the sweepstakes!in no small part to the bidding war format!could be forced to cough up hundreds
of millions of dollars in state and local subsidies for the privilege of hosting Amazon's expansion.
Amazon has long been the beneficiary of such subsidies, emerging in recent years as a
formidable opponent
to Walmart as the top recipient of corporate welfare. According to Good Jobs First, a Washington,
D.C. organization dedicated to corporate and government accountability, Amazon has received
more than $1 billion in
local and state subsidies since 2000. With a business plan dedicated to amassing long-term market
share in lieu of short-term profits, Amazon, under the leadership of its founder and chief executive,
Jeff Bezos, operates on razor-thin profit margins in most industries, while actually operating at
a loss in others. As such, these state and local subsidies have played an instrumental role in Amazon's
growth
Advocates of free market enterprise should be irate over the company's crony capitalist practices
and the cities and states that enable it. But more so than simply ruffling the feathers of the libertarian-minded,
Amazon's shameless solicitation for subsidies capped off a series of summer skirmishes in the Democratic
left's emerging war against monopolies.
Earlier this summer when Amazon announced its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods, antitrust
advocates
called upon the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission's Antitrust Division to
block the sale and
update the United States government's legal definition of monopoly. Although the acquisition!which
was
approved in August!only gives Amazon a 1.5 percent market share in the grocery industry, it more
importantly provides the tech giant with access to more than 450 brick-and-mortar Whole Foods locations.
Critics say that these physical locations will
prove invaluable to its long term plan of economic dominance, and that it is but the latest advance
in the company's unprecedented control of the economy's
underlying infrastructure.
Google also found itself in the crosshairs of the left's anti-monopoly faction when, in late June,
the European Union imposed a $2.7 billion
fine against the tech company for anti-competitive search engine manipulation in violation of
its antitrust laws. The Open Markets Program of the New America Foundation subsequently published
a press release applauding the EU's decision. Two months later, the Open Markets Program was
axed . The former program director Barry Lynn
claims that his employers caved to pressure from a corporation that has donated more than $21
million to the New America Foundation. The fallout emboldened
journalists to share their experiences of being silenced by the tech giant, and underscores the
influence Google exerts over
think tanks and
academics
Most recently, Facebook faced criticism after it was
discovered that a Russian company with ties to the Kremlin purchased $100,000 in ads from the
social media company in an effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. Facebook, as a result,
has become the latest subject of interest in Robert Mueller's special investigation into Russian
interference in last fall's election. But regardless of whether the ads influenced the outcome, the
report elicited demands for transparency and oversight in a digital ad marketplace that Facebook,
along with Google,
dominates . By using highly sophisticated algorithms, Facebook and Google receive more than
60 percent of all digital ad revenue, threatening the financial solvency of publishers and creating
a host of economic incentives that
pollute editorial autonomy.
While the Democratic left!in an effort to rejuvenate its
populist soul !has been at the front lines in the war against these
modern-day robber barons, Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute of Local Self-Reliance,
suggests that opposition to corporate consolidation need not be a partisan issue. In a piece published
in The Atlantic , Mitchell traces the bipartisan history of anti-monopoly sentiment in American
politics. She
writes :
If "monopoly" sounds like a word from another era, that's because, until recently, it was.
Throughout the middle of the 20th century, the term was frequently used in newspaper headlines,
campaign speeches, and State of the Union addresses delivered by Republican and Democratic presidents
alike. Breaking up too-powerful companies was a bipartisan goal and on the minds of many voters.
But, starting in the 1970s, the word retreated from the public consciousness. Not coincidentally,
at the same time, the enforcement of anti-monopoly policy grew increasingly toothless.
Although the modern Republican Party stands accused of cozying up with corporate interests, the
history of conservative thought has a rich intellectual tradition of being skeptical!if not hostile!towards
economic consolidation. For conservatives and libertarians wedded to the tenets of free market orthodoxy!or
for Democrats
dependent on campaign contributions from a donor class of Silicon Valley tycoons!redefining the
legal definition of monopoly and rekindling a bipartisan interest in antitrust enforcement are likely
non-starters.
But for conservatives willing to break from the principles of free market fundamentalism, the
papal
encyclicals of the Roman Catholic Church, the
distributist thought of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, the
social
criticism of Christopher Lasch, and the
observations of agrarian
essayist Wendell Berry provide an intellectual framework from which conservatives can critique and
combat concentrated economic power. With a respect for robust and resilient localities and a keen
understanding of the moral dangers posed by an economy perpetuated by consumerism and convenience,
these writers appeal to the moral imaginations of the reader, issuing warnings about the detrimental
effects that economic consolidation has on the person, the family, the community, and society at
large.
The events of this summer underscore the immense political power wielded by our economy's corporate
giants. To those who recognize the dangers posed by our age of consolidation, the skirmishes from
this summer could serve as a rallying cry in a bipartisan war for independence from our corporate
crown.
Daniel Kishi is an editorial assistant at The American Conservative . Follow him on
Twitter at @DanielMKishi
"... In addition to funding Bellingcat and joint ventures with the CIA, Brin's Google is heavily invested in Crowdstrike, an American cybersecurity technology firm based in Irvine, California. ..."
"... Crowdstrike is the main "source" of the "Russians hacked the DNC" story. ..."
"... Allegations of Russian perfidy are routinely issued by private companies with lucrative US Department of Defense (DoD) contracts. The companies claiming to protect the nation against "threats" have the ability to manufacture "threats". ..."
"... US offensive cyber operations have emphasized political coercion and opinion shaping, shifting public perception in NATO countries as well as globally in ways favorable to the US, and to create a sense of unease and distrust among perceived adversaries such as Russia and China. ..."
"... The Snowden revelations made it clear that US offensive cyber capabilities can and have been directed both domestically and internationally. The notion that US and NATO cyber operations are purely defensive is a myth. ..."
"... The perception that a foreign attacker may have infiltrated US networks, is monitoring communications, and perhaps considering even more damaging actions, can have a disorienting effect. ..."
"... In the world of US "hybrid warfare" against Russia, offensive cyber operations work in tandem with NATO propaganda efforts, perhaps best exemplified by the "online investigation" antics of the Atlantic Council's Eliot Higgins and his Bellingcat disinformation site. ..."
Yellow journalism now employs "open source and social media investigation" scams foisted by
Eliot Higgins and the Bellingcat disinformation site.
Bellingcat is allied with the New York Times and the Washington Post, the two principal mainstream
media organs for "regime change" propaganda, via the First Draft Coalition "partner network".
In a triumph of Orwellian Newspeak, this Google-sponsored "post-Truth" Propaganda 3.0 coalition
declares that member organizations will "work together to tackle common issues, including ways
to streamline the verification process".
The New York Times routinely hacks up Bellingcat "reports" and pretends they're "verification"
Malachy Browne, "Senior Story Producer" at the New York Times, cited Bellingcat to embellish
the media "story" about the Khan Shaykhun chemical incident in Idlib Syria.
Before joining the Times, Browne was an editor at "social news and marketing agency" Storyful
and at Reported. ly, the "social reporting" arm of Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media.
Browne generously "supplemented" his "reporting" on the Khan Shaykun incident with "videos
gathered by the journalist Eliot Higgins and the social media news agency Storyful".
Browne encouraged Times readers to participate in the Bellingcat-style "verification" charade:
"Find a computer, get on Google Earth and match what you see in the video to the streets and buildings"
Browne of Storyful and Higgins of Bellingcat are founding members of the Google-funded "First
Draft" coalition.
Browne demonstrates how the NYT and other "First Draft" coalition media outlets use video to
"strengthen" their "storytelling".
In 2016, the NYT video department hired Browne and Andrew Glazer. a senior producer on the
team that launched VICE News, to help "enhance" the "reporting" at the Times.
Browne represents the Times' effort to package its dubious "reporting" using the Storyful marketing
strategy of "building trust, loyalty, and revenue with insight and emotionally driven content"
wedded with Bellingcat style "digital forensics" scams.
In other words, we should expect the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, UK Guardian, and
all the other "First Draft" coalition media "partners" to barrage us more Bellingcat / Atlantic
Council-style Facebook and YouTube video mashups, crazy fun with Google Earth, and Twitter campaigns.
Abe , September 16, 2017 at 7:00 pm
There is no reason to assume that the trollish rants of "Voytenko" are from some outraged flag-waving
"patriot" in Kiev. There are plenty of other "useful idiots" ready, willing and able to make mischief.
For example, about a million Jews emigrated to Israel ("made Aliyah") from the post-Soviet
states during the 1990s. Some 266,300 were Ukrainian Jews. A large number of Ukrainian Jews also
emigrated to the United States during this period. For example, out of an estimated 400 thousand
Russian-speaking Jews in Metro New York, the largest number (thirty-six percent) hail from Ukraine.
Needless to say, many among them are not so well disposed toward the nations of Russia or Ukraine,
and quite capable of all manner of mischief.
A particularly "useful idiot" making mischief the days is Sergey Brin of Google. Brin's parents
were graduates of Moscow State University who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979 when their
son was five years old.
Google, the company that runs the most visited website in the world, the company that owns
YouTube, is very snugly in bed with the US military-industrial-surveillance complex.
In fact, Google was seed funded by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA). The company now enjoys lavish "partnerships" with military contractors like SAIC,
Northrop Grumman and Blackbird.
Google's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make
it universally accessible and useful".
In a 2004 letter prior to their initial public offering, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey
Brin explained their "Don't be evil" culture required objectivity and an absence of bias: "We
believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not
only to the information people pay for you to see."
The corporate giant appears to have replaced the original motto altogether. A carefully reworded
version appears in the Google Code of Conduct: "You can make money without doing evil".
This new gospel allows Google and its "partners" to make money promoting propaganda and engaging
in surveillance, and somehow manage to not "be evil". That's "post-truth" logic for you.
Indeed, a very cozy cross-promotion is happening between Google and Bellingcat.
In November 2014, Google Ideas and Google For Media, partnered the George Soros-funded Organised
Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to host an "Investigathon" in New York City. Google
Ideas promoted Higgins' "War and Pieces: Social Media Investigations" song and dance via their
YouTube page.
Higgins constantly insists that Bellingcat "findings" are "reaffirmed" by accessing imagery
in Google Earth.
Google Earth, originally called EarthViewer 3D, was created by Keyhole, Inc, a Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) funded company acquired by Google in 2004. Google Earth uses satellite images provided
by the company Digital Globe, a supplier of the US Department of Defense (DoD) with deep connections
to both the military and intelligence communities.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is both a combat support agency under the
United States Department of Defense, and an intelligence agency of the United States Intelligence
Community. Robert T. Cardillo, director of the NGA, lavishly praised Digital Globe as "a true
mission partner in every sense of the word". Examination of the Board of Directors of Digital
Globe reveals intimate connections to DoD and CIA
Google has quite the history of malicious behavior. In what became known as the "Wi-Spy" scandal,
it was revealed that Google had been collecting hundreds of gigabytes of payload data, including
personal and sensitive information. First names, email addresses, physical addresses, and a conversation
between two married individuals planning an extra-marital affair were all cited by the FCC. In
a 2012 settlement, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Google will pay $22.5 million for
overriding privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser. Though it was the largest civil penalty
the Federal Trade Commission had ever imposed for violating one of its orders, the penalty as
little more than symbolic for a company that had $2.8 billion in earnings the previous quarter.
Google is a joint venture partner with the CIA In 2009, Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel invested
"under $10 million each" into Recorded Future shortly after the company was founded. The company
developed technology that strips information from web pages, blogs, and Twitter accounts.
In addition to funding Bellingcat and joint ventures with the CIA, Brin's Google is heavily
invested in Crowdstrike, an American cybersecurity technology firm based in Irvine, California.
Crowdstrike is the main "source" of the "Russians hacked the DNC" story.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, is a Senior Fellow
at the Atlantic Council "regime change" think tank. Alperovitz said that Crowdstrike has "high
confidence" it was "Russian hackers". "But we don't have hard evidence," Alperovitch admitted
in a June 16, 2016 Washington Post interview.
Allegations of Russian perfidy are routinely issued by private companies with lucrative
US Department of Defense (DoD) contracts. The companies claiming to protect the nation against
"threats" have the ability to manufacture "threats".
The US and UK possess elite cyber capabilities for both cyberspace espionage and offensive
operations.
Both the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the British Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ) are intelligence agencies with a long history of supporting military operations. US military
cyber operations are the responsibility of US Cyber Command, whose commander is also the head
of the NSA.
US offensive cyber operations have emphasized political coercion and opinion shaping, shifting
public perception in NATO countries as well as globally in ways favorable to the US, and to create
a sense of unease and distrust among perceived adversaries such as Russia and China.
The Snowden revelations made it clear that US offensive cyber capabilities can and have
been directed both domestically and internationally. The notion that US and NATO cyber operations
are purely defensive is a myth.
Recent US domestic cyber operations have been used for coercive effect, creating uncertainty
and concern within the American government and population.
The perception that a foreign attacker may have infiltrated US networks, is monitoring
communications, and perhaps considering even more damaging actions, can have a disorienting effect.
In the world of US "hybrid warfare" against Russia, offensive cyber operations work in
tandem with NATO propaganda efforts, perhaps best exemplified by the "online investigation" antics
of the Atlantic Council's Eliot Higgins and his Bellingcat disinformation site.
Abe , September 16, 2017 at 1:58 pm
Higgins and Bellingcat receives direct funding from the Open Society Foundations (OSF) founded
by business magnate George Soros, and from Google's Digital News Initiatives (DNI).
Google's 2017 DNI Fund Annual Report describes Higgins as "a world–leading expert in news verification".
In their zeal to propagate the story of Higgins as a courageous former "unemployed man" now
busy independently "Codifying social conflict data", Google neglects to mention Higgins' role
as a "research fellow" for the NATO-funded Atlantic Council "regime change" think tank.
Despite their claims of "independent journalism", Eliot Higgins and the team of disinformation
operatives at Bellingcat depend on the Atlantic Council to promote their "online investigations".
The Atlantic Council donors list includes:
– US government and military entities: US State Department, US Air Force, US Army, US Marines.
– The NATO military alliance
– Large corporations and major military contractors: Chevron, Google, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon,
BP, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Northrup Grumman, SAIC, ConocoPhillips, and Dow Chemical
– Foreign governments: United Arab Emirates (UAE; which gives the think tank at least $1 million),
Kingdom of Bahrain, City of London, Ministry of Defense of Finland, Embassy of Latvia, Estonian
Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Defense of Georgia
– Other think tanks and think tankers: Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS),
Nicolas Veron of Bruegel (formerly at PIIE), Anne-Marie Slaughter (head of New America Foundation),
Michele Flournoy (head of Center for a New American Security), Center for Middle East Policy at
Brookings Institution.
Higgins is a Research Associate of the Department of War Studies at King's College, and was
principal co-author of the Atlantic Council "reports" on Ukraine and Syria.
Damon Wilson, Executive Vice President of Programs and Strategy at the Atlantic Council, a
co-author with Higgins of the report, effusively praised Higgins' effort to bolster anti-Russian
propaganda:
Wilson stated, "We make this case using only open source, all unclassified material. And none
of it provided by government sources. And it's thanks to works, the work that's been pioneered
by human rights defenders and our partner Eliot Higgins, uh, we've been able to use social media
forensics and geolocation to back this up." (see Atlantic Council video presentation minutes 35:10-36:30)
However, the Atlantic Council claim that "none" of Higgins' material was provided by government
sources is an obvious lie.
Higgins' primary "pieces of evidence" are a video depicting a Buk missile launcher and a set
of geolocation coordinates that were supplied by the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) and the
Ukrainian Ministry of Interior via the Facebook page of senior-level Ukrainian government official
Arsen Avakov, the Minister of Internal Affairs.
Higgins and the Atlantic Council are working in support of the Pentagon and Western intelligence's
"hybrid war" against Russia.
The laudatory bio of Higgins on the Kings College website specifically acknowledges his service
to the Atlantic Council:
"an award winning investigative journalist and publishes the work of an international alliance
of fellow investigators using freely available online information. He has helped inaugurate open-source
and social media investigations by trawling through vast amounts of data uploaded constantly on
to the web and social media sites. His inquiries have revealed extraordinary findings, including
linking the Buk used to down flight MH17 to Russia, uncovering details about the August 21st 2013
Sarin attacks in Damascus, and evidencing the involvement of the Russian military in the Ukrainian
conflict. Recently he has worked with the Atlantic Council on the report "Hiding in Plain Sight",
which used open source information to detail Russia's military involvement in the crisis in Ukraine."
While it honors Higgins' enthusiastic "trawling", King's College curiously neglects to mention
that Higgins' "findings" on the Syian sarin attacks were thoroughly debunked.
King's College also curiously neglects to mention the fact that Higgins, now listed as a Senior
Fellow at the Atlantic Council's "Future Europe Initiative", was principal co-author of the April
2016 Atlantic Council "report" on Syria.
The report's other key author was John E. Herbst, United States Ambassador to Ukraine from
September 2003 to May 2006 (the period that became known as the Orange Revolution) and Director
of the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.
Other report authors include Frederic C. Hof, who served as Special Adviser on Syrian political
transition to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012. Hof was previously the Special Coordinator
for Regional Affairs in the US Department of State's Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East
Peace, where he advised Special Envoy George Mitchel. Hof had been a Resident Senior Fellow in
the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East since November 2012, and assumed
the position as Director in May 2016.
There is no daylight between the "online investigations" of Higgins and Bellingcat and the
"regime change" efforts of the NATO-backed Atlantic Council.
Thanks to the Atlantic Council, Soros, and Google, it's a pretty well-funded gig for fake "citizen
investigative journalist" Higgins.
"... add Bush. Glenn Greenwald on John Brennan . It is interesting that the empire sues the little people. ..."
"... "It is a perfect illustration of the Obama legacy that a person who was untouchable as CIA chief in 2008 because of his support for Bush's most radical policies is not only Obama's choice for the same position now, but will encounter very little resistance. Within this change one finds one of the most significant aspects of the Obama presidency: his conversion of what were once highly contentious right-wing policies into harmonious dogma of the DC bipartisan consensus. Then again, given how the CIA operates, one could fairly argue that Brennan's eagerness to deceive and his long record of supporting radical and unaccountable powers make him the perfect person to run that agency. It seems clear that this is Obama's calculus." ..."
"... one more quote from your newest link to the NYT: "The job Mr. Brennan once held in Riyadh is, more than the ambassador's, the true locus of American power in the kingdom. Former diplomats recall that the most important discussions always flowed through the CIA station chief." The Saudis bought the CIA From station chief in Riyadh to Director Tenet's chief of staff to Deputy Executive Director of the CIA and finally, under Obama, to Director of the CIA ..."
"... Best background article I've come across on how the Arab Spring pro-democracy uprisings were either suppressed (in the U.S. client oil monarchies like Bahrain) or hijacked for regime change purposes (as in Libya and Syria): http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion... how-the-arab-spring-was-hijacked/ (Feb 2012) ..."
"... The best explanation is that despite the effort to "woo" Assad into the Saudi-Israeli axis (c.2008-2010), Assad refused to cut economic ties with Iran, which was setting up rail lines, air traffic and oil pipeline deals with Assad on very good terms. This led Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, etc. to lobby Obama to support a regime change program: ..."
"... Replace "plan" with "ongoing project". The main point would be that Panetta and Clinton also belong on that "illegal arms transfer" charge sheet. Civil damages for the costs Europe, Turkey, Lebanon etc. bore due to millions of fleeing refugees should also be assessed (let alone damage in Syria, often to priceless historical treasures destroyed by ISIS). ..."
"... Then there's the previous regime and its deliberate lies about non-existent WMDs in Iraq, claims used to start a war of aggression that killed thousand of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Woolsey, Tenet, Powell - they should have their own separate charge sheet. ..."
"... But it wasn't just anti-arms trafficking laws that were broken, was it? Wouldn't a conspiracy to use extremists as a weapon of state amount to a crime against humanity? David Stockman thinks so, but he pins the 'crime' on old, sick McCain. (see: 'Moderate Rebels' Cheerleader McCain is Fall Guy But Neocon Cancer Lives ..."
"... I classify attempts at regime change as terrorism, too, since it's essentially the waging of aggressive war via different means, which is the #1 War Crime also violating domestic law as well ..."
"... What of the US bases being established in N. Syria that were helpfully marked by the Turks? Within the context that the SF force multiplier model has varied success but hasn't worked AFAIK since the Resistance in WW2. What, short of an explicit invasion, is an option for the US+? US-hired mercenaries failed to do the job, and the US as mercenaries for the Arabs are not willing to commit. Maybe if the USIC offered up more "wives" they'd acquire more psychopathic murderers to spread the joy. ..."
"... Trump may have put Pompeo in to present the facade of housecleaning, but who here believes that there is any serious move to curtail the Syrian misadventure? Just a change in the marketing plan. ..."
"... As the Brits came out with blocking the release of 30-yr-old official records on the basis that "personal information" and "national security" would be compromised? More like the criminal activity at 10 Downing St. and the misappropriation of public money for international crime would be brought to light. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4159032/whitehall-refuses-documents-release/ ..."
"... While I do agree with some of the things Trump has done so far, I cannot agree that he makes for a good "leader" of our rapidly devolving nation. As much "good" that Trump has done, he's probably done much worse on other issues and levels. It's really pretty awful all around. ..."
"... That said, when some people say how much they "miss Obama," I want to either pound my head into a brick wall and/or throw up. The damage that Obama and his hench men/women did is incalculable. ..."
"... Not so much with "No drama Obama" the smooth talking viper that we - either unwittingly or wittingly - clutche to our collective bosom. Obama's many many many lies - all told with smooth suave assurance - along with his many sins of omission served as cover for what he was doing. Trump's buffoonery and incessant Twitting at least put his idiocies out on the stage for all to see (of course, the Republicans do use that as cover for their nefarious deeds behind Trump's doofus back). ..."
"... I likened a Trump presidency to sticking the landing of a crashing US empire. ..."
"... Remember this, The prosecution of a Swedish national accused of terrorist activities in Syria has collapsed at the Old Bailey after it became clear Britain's security and intelligence agencies would have been deeply embarrassed had a trial gone ahead, the Guardian can reveal. ..."
"... His lawyers argued that British intelligence agencies were supporting the same Syrian opposition groups as he was, and were party to a secret operation providing weapons and non-lethal help to the groups, including the Free Syrian Army. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/01/trial-swedish-man-accused-terrorism-offences-collapse-bherlin-gildo ..."
"... John McCain was neck deep in supporting Terrorists in Syria he wanted to give them manpads. ..."
"... WASHINGTON (Sputnik) -- Media reported earlier in October that Syrian rebels asked Washington for Stinger missiles to use them against Russia's military jets. "Absolutely Absolutely I would," McCain said when asked whether he would support the delivery of Stinger missiles to the opposition in Syria. ..."
"... The US were into regime change in Syria a long time ago..... Robert Ford was US Ambassador to Syria when the revolt against Syrian president Assad was launched. He not only was a chief architect of regime change in Syria, but actively worked with rebels to aid their overthrow of the Syrian government. ..."
"... Ambassador Ford talked himself blue in the face reassuring us that he was only supporting moderates in Syria. As evidence mounted that the recipients of the largesse doled out by Washington was going to jihadist groups, Ford finally admitted early last year that most of the moderates he backed were fighting alongside ISIS and al-Qaeda. ..."
"... b asked : "When will the FBI investigate Messrs Petraeus, Obama and Brennan? Duh, like never... Most here understand this, I'm sure. The wealthy and the connected puppets never face justice, for their crimes, committed in the service of their owners. ..."
"... NYT never saw a war (rather an attack by the US, NATO, Israel, UK, on any defenseless nation) that it did not support. Wiki uses the word "allegedly" in explaining the CIA and Operation Mockingbird. It just isn't feasible that a secret government agency - gone rogue - with unlimited funding and manpower could write/edit the news for six media owners with similar war-profiteering motives. ..."
"... Seymour Hersh, in his 'Victoria NULAND moment' audio, states categorically BRENNAN conceived and ran the 'Russian Hack' psyop after Seth RICH DNC leaks. ..."
Rasheed Al Jijakli,[the CEO of a check-cashing business who lives in Walnut,] along with three
co-conspirators, allegedly transported day and night vision rifle scopes, laser boresighters used
to adjust sights on firearms for accuracy when firing, flashlights, radios, a bulletproof vest,
and other tactical equipment to Syrian fighters.
...
If Jijakli is found guilty, he could face 50 years in prison . Jijakli's case is being prosecuted
by counterintelligence and Terrorism and Export Crimes Section attorneys. An FBI investigation,
in coordination with other agencies, is ongoing.
CIA director, Mike Pompeo, recommended to President Trump that he shut down a four-year-old
effort to arm and train Syrian rebels
...
Critics in Congress had complained for years about the costs [...] and reports that some of the
CIA-supplied weapons had ended up in the hands of a rebel group tied to Al Qaeda
...
In the summer of 2012, David H. Petraeus , who was then CIA director, first proposed a covert
program of arming and training rebels
...
[ Mr. Obama signed] a presidential finding authorizing the CIA to covertly arm and train small
groups of rebels
-...
John O. Brennan , Mr. Obama's last CIA director, remained a vigorous defender of the program
...
When will the FBI investigate Messrs Petraeus, Obama and Brennan? Where are the counterintelligence
and Terrorism and Export Crimes Section attorneys prosecuting them? Those three men engaged in the
exactly same trade as Mr. Jijakil did, but on a much larger scale. They should be punished on an
equally larger scale.
*Note:
The NYT story is largely a whitewash. It claims that the CIA paid "moderate" FSA rebels stormed
Idleb governate in 2015. In fact al-Qaeda and Ahrar al Sham were leading the assault. It says
that costs of the CIA program was "more than $1 billion over the life of the program" when CIA
documents show that it was over $1 billion
per year and likely much more than $5 billion in total. The story says that the program started
in 2013 while the CIA has been providing arms to the Wahhabi rebels since at least fall 2011.
Posted by b on August 3, 2017 at 05:15 AM |
Permalink
India and Pakistan spends insane amounts of money because Pakistan arms "rebels" both countries
could use that money for many other things. Especially Pakistan which has a tenth the economy
of India. BUT Pakistan is controlled by the military or MIC so arming terrorists is more important
than such things as schools and power supplies etc. Their excuse is India is spending so much
on arms. Which India says is because in large part due to Pakistan. US says well move those 2
million troops to attack China instead. Everyone is happy except the population in those 3 countries
which lack most things except iphones. Which makes US extremely happy.
It would interesting to get to the truth about Brennan. Is he an islamist himself? Did he actually
convert to islam in Saudi Arabia? Lots of stories out there.
Has he been acting as a covert agent against his own country for years?Selling out the entire
west and every christian on the planet. Time to find this out, methinks.
Is treason in the USA
a death penalty issue?. Its certainly what he deserves.
"a four-year-old effort to arm and train Syrian rebels."
A four year effort to arm the f**kers? Doubtful it was an effort to arm them, but training
them to act in the hegemon's interests... like upholders of democracy and humanitarian... headchopping
is just too much of an attraction
"7,000 Syrian refugees and fighters return home from Lebanon"
The 'al-Qaeda linked' fighters are mostly foreigners, paid mercenaries. They have been dumped
in Idlib along with the other terrorists. In the standard reconciliation process, real Syrians
are given the option of returning home if they renounce violence and agree to a political solution.
Fake Syrians are dumped in with the foreigners. The real Syrian fighters who reconcile have to
join the SAA units to fight against ISIS etc.
ISIS fighters were encouraged to bring their families with them (for use as human shields and
to provide settlers for the captured territory). ISIS documents recovered from Mosul indicate
that unmarried foreign mercenaries fighting with them were provided with a wife (how does that
work? do the women volunteer or are they 'volunteered'?), a car and other benefits. These families
and hangers-on would probably be the 'Syrian refugees'.
On a side note, the Kurds have released a video showing the training of special forces belonging
to their allies, the 'Syrian Defense Force' (composed largely of foreigners again). The SDF fighters
fly the FSA flag, ie they are the carefully vetted moderate head chopping rebels beloved of the
likes of McCain.
"It is a perfect illustration of the Obama legacy that a person who was untouchable
as CIA chief in 2008 because of his support for Bush's most radical policies is not only Obama's
choice for the same position now, but will encounter very little resistance. Within this change
one finds one of the most significant aspects of the Obama presidency: his conversion of what
were once highly contentious right-wing policies into harmonious dogma of the DC bipartisan
consensus. Then again, given how the CIA operates, one could fairly argue that Brennan's eagerness
to deceive and his long record of supporting radical and unaccountable powers make him the
perfect person to run that agency. It seems clear that this is Obama's calculus."
My own addition to the Brennan record:
Brennan was station chief for the CIA in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia during the planning period for
9/11. The Saudi rulers do not use the US embassy as their first point of contact with Washington,
they use the CIA Brennan moved back to the US some time in (late?) 1999. The first 9/11 Saudi
hijackers arrived on US shores in January 2000. Brennan was made CIA chief of staff to Director
Tenet in 1999 and Deputy Executive Director of the CIA in March 2001.
The support for the Syrian rebels is only the latest chapter in the decades long relationship
between the spy services of Saudi Arabia and the United States, an alliance that has endured
through the Iran-contra scandal, support for the mujahedeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan
and proxy fights in Africa. Sometimes, as in Syria, the two countries have worked in concert.
In others, Saudi Arabia has simply written checks underwriting American covert activities.
... Although the Saudis have been public about their help arming rebel groups in Syria, the
extent of their partnership with the CIA's covert action campaign and their direct financial
support had not been disclosed. Details were pieced together in interviews with a half-dozen
current and former American officials and sources from several Persian Gulf countries. Most
spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program.
From the moment the CIA operation was started, Saudi money supported it.
...
The roots of the relationship run deep. In the late 1970s, the Saudis organized what was
known as the "Safari Club" -- a coalition of nations including Morocco, Egypt and France -- that
ran covert operations around Africa at a time when Congress had clipped the CIA's wings
over years of abuses.
...
Prince Bandar pledged $1 million per month to help fund the contras, in recognition of the
administration's past support to the Saudis. The contributions continued after Congress cut
off funding to the contras. By the end, the Saudis had contributed $32 million, paid through
a Cayman Islands bank account.
When the Iran-contra scandal broke, and questions arose about the Saudi role, the kingdom
kept its secrets. Prince Bandar refused to cooperate with the investigation led by Lawrence
E. Walsh, the independent counsel.
In a letter, the prince declined to testify, explaining that his country's "confidences
and commitments, like our friendship, are given not just for the moment but the long run."
one more quote from your newest link to the NYT: "The job Mr. Brennan once held in Riyadh
is, more than the ambassador's, the true locus of American power in the kingdom. Former diplomats
recall that the most important discussions always flowed through the CIA station chief." The
Saudis bought the CIA From station chief in Riyadh to Director Tenet's chief of staff to Deputy
Executive Director of the CIA and finally, under Obama, to Director of the CIA
Best background article I've come across on how the Arab Spring pro-democracy uprisings were
either suppressed (in the U.S. client oil monarchies like Bahrain) or hijacked for regime change
purposes (as in Libya and Syria):
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion... how-the-arab-spring-was-hijacked/ (Feb 2012)
In particular:
A fourth trend is that the Arab Spring has become a springboard for playing great-power geopolitics.
Syria, at the center of the region's sectarian fault lines, has emerged as the principal
battleground for such Cold War-style geopolitics. Whereas Russia is intent on keeping its only
military base outside the old Soviet Union in Syria's Mediterranean port of Tartus, the U.S.
seems equally determined to install a pro-Western regime in Damascus.
This goal prompted Washington to set up a London-based television station that began broadcasting
to Syria a year before major protests began there. The U.S. campaign, which includes
assembling a coalition of the willing, has been boosted by major Turkish, Saudi, Qatari and
UAE help, including cross-border flow of arms into Syria and the establishment of two new petrodollar-financed,
jihad-extolling television channels directed at Syria's majority Sunni Arabs.
The best explanation is that despite the effort to "woo" Assad into the Saudi-Israeli axis
(c.2008-2010), Assad refused to cut economic ties with Iran, which was setting up rail lines,
air traffic and oil pipeline deals with Assad on very good terms. This led Hillary Clinton, Leon
Panetta, etc. to lobby Obama to support a regime change program:
Replace "plan" with "ongoing project". The main point would be that Panetta and Clinton
also belong on that "illegal arms transfer" charge sheet. Civil damages for the costs Europe,
Turkey, Lebanon etc. bore due to millions of fleeing refugees should also be assessed (let alone
damage in Syria, often to priceless historical treasures destroyed by ISIS).
Then there's the previous regime and its deliberate lies about non-existent WMDs in Iraq,
claims used to start a war of aggression that killed thousand of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi civilians - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Woolsey, Tenet, Powell - they should have
their own separate charge sheet.
Send the lot to Scheveningen
Prison - for the most notorious war criminals. Pretty luxurious as prisons go, by all accounts.
But it wasn't just anti-arms trafficking laws that were broken, was it? Wouldn't a conspiracy
to use extremists as a weapon of state amount to a crime against humanity? David Stockman thinks
so, but he pins the 'crime' on old, sick McCain. (see:
'Moderate Rebels' Cheerleader McCain is Fall Guy But Neocon Cancer Lives
Within the Outlaw US Empire alone, there're several thousand people deserving of those 5,000 year
sentences, not just the three b singled out. But b does provide a great service for those of us
who refuse to support terrorists and terrorism by not paying federal taxes by providing proof
of that occurring. I classify attempts at regime change as terrorism, too, since it's essentially
the waging of aggressive war via different means, which is the #1 War Crime also violating domestic
law as well. Thanks b!
it's the usa!!!! no one in gov't is held accountable.. obama wants to move on, lol... look forward,
not backward... creating a heaping pile of murder, mayhem and more in other parts of the world,
but never examine any of it, or hold anyone accountable.. it is the amerikkkan way...
What of the US bases being established in N. Syria that were helpfully marked by the Turks?
Within the context that the SF force multiplier model has varied success but hasn't worked AFAIK
since the Resistance in WW2. What, short of an explicit invasion, is an option for the US+? US-hired
mercenaries failed to do the job, and the US as mercenaries for the Arabs are not willing to commit.
Maybe if the USIC offered up more "wives" they'd acquire more psychopathic murderers to spread
the joy.
Trump may have put Pompeo in to present the facade of housecleaning, but who here believes
that there is any serious move to curtail the Syrian misadventure? Just a change in the marketing
plan.
As the Brits came out with blocking the release of 30-yr-old official records on the basis
that "personal information" and "national security" would be compromised? More like the criminal
activity at 10 Downing St. and the misappropriation of public money for international crime would
be brought to light.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4159032/whitehall-refuses-documents-release/
While I do agree with some of the things Trump has done so far, I cannot agree that he makes
for a good "leader" of our rapidly devolving nation. As much "good" that Trump has done, he's
probably done much worse on other issues and levels. It's really pretty awful all around.
That said, when some people say how much they "miss Obama," I want to either pound my head
into a brick wall and/or throw up. The damage that Obama and his hench men/women did is incalculable.
At least with Trump, we can clearly witness his idiocy and grasp the level of at least some
of his damage.
Not so much with "No drama Obama" the smooth talking viper that we - either unwittingly
or wittingly - clutche to our collective bosom. Obama's many many many lies - all told with smooth
suave assurance - along with his many sins of omission served as cover for what he was doing.
Trump's buffoonery and incessant Twitting at least put his idiocies out on the stage for all to
see (of course, the Republicans do use that as cover for their nefarious deeds behind Trump's
doofus back).
Agree with b. NYT is worthless. Limited hangout for sure.
I likened a Trump presidency to sticking the landing of a crashing US empire. He'll
bring it down without going true believer on us, a la Clinton and ilk who were busy scheduling
the apocalypse.
Trump has not been tested yet with a rapidly deteriorating economy which as we all know is
coming. Something is in the air and Trump will have to face it sooner or later. The weight of
the anger of millions will be behind it...will it be too late? Will Trump finally go MAGA in what
he promised: Glas-Steagall, making trade fair for US interests, dialing back NATO...etc. etc.
I fear he can not articulate the issues at hand, like Roosevelt or Hitler. He is too bumbling.
I guess really we can only hope for an avoidance of WW. Will the world even weep for a third world
USA?
Remember this, The prosecution of a Swedish national accused of terrorist activities in Syria
has collapsed at the Old Bailey after it became clear Britain's security and intelligence agencies
would have been deeply embarrassed had a trial gone ahead, the Guardian can reveal.
John McCain was neck deep in supporting Terrorists in Syria he wanted to give them manpads.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) -- Media reported earlier in October that Syrian rebels asked Washington
for Stinger missiles to use them against Russia's military jets. "Absolutely Absolutely I would,"
McCain said when asked whether he would support the delivery of Stinger missiles to the opposition
in Syria.
"We certainly did that in Afghanistan. After the Russians invaded Afghanistan, we provided
them with surface-to-air capability. It'd be nice to give people that we train and equip and send
them to fight the ability to defend themselves. That's one of the fundamental principles of warfare
as I understand it," McCain said.
https://sputniknews.com/us/201510201028835944-us-stingers-missiles-syrian-rebels-mccain/
They will pay sooner or later for their crimes against the Syrians. Add Sarkozy, Cameron and Holland
to the list of criminals hiding under their position.
The US were into regime change in Syria a long time ago..... Robert Ford was US Ambassador
to Syria when the revolt against Syrian president Assad was launched. He not only was a chief
architect of regime change in Syria, but actively worked with rebels to aid their overthrow of
the Syrian government.
Ford assured us that those taking up arms to overthrow the Syrian government were simply moderates
and democrats seeking to change Syria's autocratic system. Anyone pointing out the obviously Islamist
extremist nature of the rebellion and the foreign funding and backing for the jihadists was written
off as an Assad apologist or worse.
Ambassador Ford talked himself blue in the face reassuring us that he was only supporting
moderates in Syria. As evidence mounted that the recipients of the largesse doled out by Washington
was going to jihadist groups, Ford finally admitted early last year that most of the moderates
he backed were fighting alongside ISIS and al-Qaeda. Witness this incredible Twitter exchange
with then-ex Ambassador Ford:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/you-wont-believe-what-former-us-ambassador-robert-s-ford-said-about-al-qaedas-syrian-allies/5504906
Specially Petraeus. A US Army General, and director of the CIA You don't get more 'pillar'
of the State than that! And off he goes doing illegal arms trades, in the billions, see for ex.
Meyssan, as an ex.:
In other countries / times, he'd be shot at dawn as a traitor. But all it shows really is that
the USA does not really have a Gvmt. in the sense of a 'political structure of strong regulatory
importance with 'democratic' participation..' to keep it vague.. It has an elaborate public charade,
a kind of clumsy theatre play, that relies very heavily on the scripted MSM, on ritual, and various
distractions. Plus natch' very vicious control mechanisms at home.. another story.
Meanwhile, off stage, the actors participate and fight and ally in a whole other scene where
'disaster capitalism', 'rapine', 'mafia moves' and the worst impulses in human nature not only
bloom but are institutionalised and deployed world-wide! Covering all this up is getting increasingly
difficult -Trump presidency - one would hope US citizens no not for now.
The other two of course as well, I just find Petraeus emblematic, probably because of all the
BS about his mistress + he once mis-treated classified info or something like that, total irrelevance
spun by the media, which works.
"They will pay sooner or later for their crimes against the Syrians. Add Sarkozy, Cameron
and Holland to the list of criminals hiding under their position."
I humbly disagree, and they sincerely believe they are helping the Syrians (plus other states)
- freedom and democracy against the brutality of Dr. Assad. I believe all these murderers are
sincere doing god works and will all go to heaven. That is one of the reasons why I refuse to
go to heaven even if gods beg me. Fuck it!
My apologies if I offend you or anyone. It's about time we look carefully beside politic and
wealth, what religion does to a human?
b asked : "When will the FBI investigate Messrs Petraeus, Obama and Brennan? Duh, like never...
Most here understand this, I'm sure. The wealthy and the connected puppets never face justice,
for their crimes, committed in the service of their owners.
You can include ALL the POTUS's
and their minions, since the turn of the century. " It's just business, get over it."
6 Look for signs of instigating violent behavior. As children some sociopaths torture defenseless
people and animals. This violence is always instigating, and not defensive violence. They will
create drama out of thin air, or twist what others say. They will often overreact strongly
to minor offenses. If they are challenged or confronted about it, they will point the finger
the other way, counting on the empathic person's empathy and consideration of people to protect
them, as long as they can remain undetected. Their attempt to point the finger the other way,
is both a smokescreen to being detected, and an attempt to confuse the situation.
The link is a pretty good summary. It is easy to find more respectable psychological sources
for the disorder on the internet.
NYT never saw a war (rather an attack by the US, NATO, Israel, UK, on any defenseless nation)
that it did not support. Wiki uses the word "allegedly" in explaining the CIA and Operation Mockingbird.
It just isn't feasible that a secret government agency - gone rogue - with unlimited funding and
manpower could write/edit the news for six media owners with similar war-profiteering motives.
/s
" Here, evolution had hit on the sweetest of solutions. Such perceptions were guaranteed
to produce a faith-dependent species that believed itself to be thoroughly separate from the rest
of the animal kingdom, ...."
Interesting article, but stop reading years ago when struggled to raise a family, make a living
to survive. Debatable Is "sociopath" (Antisocial Personality Disorder) or the genes make humanly
so brutally? Very often hard to fathom the depth of human suffering be it USA, Syria or elsewhere.
Thanks sharing you thought.
What most of the msm and the echo chamber seem to be deliberately missing is all intentional.
The whole Assad must go meme is dead and buried. The western cabal has not acheived their regime
change in Syria. The Russian economy has not sunk to the bottom of the Black sea, the Russians
hacked into my fridge meme has all been debunked and is falling apart. The collusion of all anglo
antlantacist secret agency and governments to destabalize the ME has all come out with an ever
turbulant flow. Iran being the threat of the world ,debunked. Russia invading and hacking the
free world ,debunked.
Hence I expect that the western oligarchs along with their pressitute
and compromised politicians will be bying up alot of bleach. They will be whitewashing for the
next three months all semblance of anything related to their fraudulent existence.
Nurenberg 2, the Hague would be to soft for these vile criminals of humanity. Look how they
had to back track on the Milosevic conviction mind u post death.
Just another day in the office for these criminals of humanity. Gee can't wait until this petro-dollar
ponzi scheme crashes hopefully we can get back o being human again. The emperor has no clothes.
43 The whole Assad must go meme is dead and buried. The western cabal has not acheived their
regime change in Syria. The Russian economy has not sunk to the bottom of the Black sea, the
Russians hacked into my fridge meme has all been debunked and is falling apart. The collusion
of all anglo antlantacist secret agency and governments to destabalize the ME has all come
out with an ever turbulant flow. Iran being the threat of the world ,debunked. Russia invading
and hacking the free world,debunked.
Optimistic. Has Trump been instrumental in these? Perhaps. This would be a good reason for
Zionists to hate him. But how is it that Trump is such a bumbling idiot? Now the Senate has ratfcked
him with recess appointments. And he signed that stupid Russia Sanctions bill.
Seymour Hersh, in his 'Victoria NULAND moment' audio, states categorically BRENNAN conceived
and ran the 'Russian Hack' psyop after Seth RICH DNC leaks.
"... The real power of mass data collection lies in the hand-tailored algorithms capable of sifting, sorting and identifying patterns within the data itself. When enough information is collected over time, governments and corporations can use or abuse those patterns to predict future human behavior. ..."
...We file our taxes. We make phone calls. We send emails. Tax records are used to keep us honest. We agree to broadcast
our location so we can check the weather on our smartphones. Records of our calls, texts and physical movements are filed
away alongside our billing information. Perhaps that data is analyzed more covertly to make sure that we're not terrorists
"" but only in the interest of national security, we're assured.
Our faces and voices are recorded by surveillance cameras and other internet-connected sensors, some of which we now
willingly put inside our homes. Every time we load a news article or page on a social media site, we expose ourselves to
tracking code, allowing hundreds of unknown entities to monitor our shopping and online browsing habits. We agree to cryptic
terms-of-service agreements that obscure the true nature and scope of these transactions.
Biometric information such as fingerprints, retinal scans and DNA helps governments and corporations track people around
the world. In Iraq, United States Army soldiers scan a man's eye to see whether he is a known insurgent. Credit Michael
Kamber for The New York Times
According to a 2015 study from
the Pew Research Center, 91 percent of American adults believe they've lost control over how their personal information
is collected and used. Just how much they've lost, however, is more than they likely suspect.
The real power of mass data collection lies in the hand-tailored algorithms capable of sifting, sorting and identifying
patterns within the data itself. When enough information is collected over time, governments and corporations can use or
abuse those patterns to predict future human behavior. Our data establishes a "pattern of
life " from seemingly harmless digital residue like cellphone tower pings, credit card transactions and web browsing
histories.
The consequences of our being subjected to constant algorithmic scrutiny are often unclear. For instance,
artificial intelligence Silicon
Valley's catchall term for deepthinking and deep-learning algorithms is touted by tech companies as a path to the high-tech
conveniences of the so-called internet of things. This includes digital home assistants, connected appliances and self-driving
cars.
Simultaneously, algorithms are already analyzing social media habits, determining creditworthiness, deciding which job
candidates get called in for an interview and judging whether criminal defendants should be
released on bail
. Other machine-learning systems use automated facial analysis to detect and track emotions, or claim the ability to predict
whether someone will become a criminal based only on their
facial features .
Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers
from around the world.
... ... ...
Such programmatic, machine-driven thinking has become especially dangerous in the hands of governments and the police.
In recent years our military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies have merged in unexpected ways. They harvest
more data than they can possibly manage, and wade through the quantifiable world side by side in vast, usually windowless
buildings called fusion centers
.
Such powerful new relationships have created a foundation for, and have breathed life into, a vast police and surveillance
state. Advanced algorithms have made this possible on an unprecedented level. Relatively minor infractions, or "microcrimes,"
can now be policed aggressively. And with national databases shared among governments and corporations, these minor incidents
can follow you forever, even if the information is incorrect or lacking context.
At the same time, the United States military uses the metadata of countless communications for
drone attacks , using pings emitted from cellphones to track and eliminate targets.
In literature and pop culture, concepts such as "thoughtcrime" and "precrime" have emerged out of dystopian fiction.
They are used to restrict and punish anyone who is flagged by automated systems as a potential criminal or threat, even
if a crime has yet to be committed. But this science fiction trope is quickly becoming reality. Predictive policing algorithms
are already being used to create automated heat maps of future crimes, and like the "manual" policing that came before
them, they overwhelmingly
target
poor and minority neighborhoods .
The world has become like an eerily banal dystopian novel. Things look the same on the surface, but they are not. With
no apparent boundaries on how algorithms can use and abuse the data that's being collected about us, the potential for
it to control our lives is ever-growing.
Our drivers' licenses, our keys, our debit and credit cards are all important parts of our lives. Even our social media
accounts could soon become crucial components of being fully functional members of society. Now that we live in this world,
we must figure out how to maintain our connection with society without surrendering to automated processes that we can
neither see nor control.
This is an article from
World Review: The State
of Democracy , a special section that examines global policy and affairs through the perspectives of thought leaders
and commentators. A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 14, 2017, on Page S3, in The International New
York Times.
While I have not served in Cuba, my experience in a number of similar hostile, high
counterintelligence threat countries suggests that this is more likely a surveillance effort
gone wrong, than the use of an offensive sonic weapon.
We have very little experience anywhere in the world with directed attacks designed to
physically harm to our diplomats. However, the use of intrusive technical collection and
surveillance which sometimes causes harm in its own right, is consistent with past practice
in Cuba and elsewhere.
Why don't I believe this was an attack intended to harm diplomats?
McGovern thinks that it was Brennan boys who hacked into DNC as a part of conspiracy to implicate Russia and to secure Hillary win.
One of the resons was probably that DNC servers were not well protected and there were other hacks, about whihc NSA know. So the sad
state of DNC internet security needed to be swiped under the carpet and that's why CrowdStike was hired.
NSA created 7 million lines of code for penetration and that includes those that were pablished by Wikileaks and designed to imitate
that attackers are coming (and using the language) from: China, North Korea, Iran and Russia.
Also NSA probably intercepts and keeps all Internet communications for a month or two so if it was a hack NSA knows who did it and
what was stolen
But the most unexplainable part was that fact that FBI was denied accessing the evidence. I always think that thye can dictate that
they need to see in such cases, but obviously this was not the case.
Notable quotes:
"... She couldn't pack a school gymnasium while Trumps rallies were packed with 10's of thousands. ..."
Love the rest of the talk, but no way did Hillary win. No way did she get the popular vote.
The woman was calling for war and reinstating the draft on men and women. She couldn't pack a school gymnasium while Trumps
rallies were packed with 10's of thousands.
"Aaron Barlow: The Russian hacking nonsense is a tin foil hat conspiracy right up there with Reptilians
and Aliens."
Notable quotes:
"... Snowden is a patriot. Only an individual that has integrity can do what Snowden did. He saw something that was wrong and blew the whistle on it, it was as simple as that, he knew the consequences very well. ..."
this guy is smart. well informed, super intellectual capacity. He chooses his words very wisely
and well calculated. His interview is brain enlightening.
This right here.. is a fucking man... he gave up allllll the high life gave up allllll the
money. all the BS to give the people what the fuck they needed to hear
Snowden is a patriot. Only an individual that has integrity can do what Snowden did. He
saw something that was wrong and blew the whistle on it, it was as simple as that, he knew the
consequences very well.
She is anti-trump. She is sent from the elite. She don't give a damn about him. 100% she is
untrustworthy. Snowden is a threat to the deep state. Her questions clearly are from the democrats.
The "journalist" who is interviewing Edward is a freedom hating, elitist worshipping mainstream
media harlot.
Those who are ignorant of history are bound to repeat it. The people who founded this country
left Britain due to a corrupt, tyrannical government. The US government is far more corrupt today
then England was in the 1700s.
The 4th amendment has been butchered by the tyrannical, elitist dictators who are running this
broken country. Today, the mainstream media is firmly controlled by a few, highly deranged elitists
who are in league with the rancid, stinking pieces of fecal matter who run the US. The republic
that was created by English "traitors" was supposed to be a sanctuary for freedom and human rights.
The republic they created is dead and gone. It may look the same on the surface, but this country
is much too far gone to ever recover. It never ceases to amaze me just how ignorant of history
and the Constitution the average American is. The citizens are ignorant, bordering on stupid.
The evidence is everywhere, yet millions of weak-minded sheeple cannot see what lies directly
in front of their eyes. The level of cognitive dissonance displayed by the average American is
pitiful, and I will feel no pity when they realize that they were living in a country whose leaders
were following the same game plan as Adolph Hitler... to the letter.
People believe that their political party, the party to which they give their allegiance, is
the "good" party. Republicans and Democrats are one and the same. The two party system is simply
a two headed snake that will lead the US into tyranny. The US is hated around the world because
it has assumed the role of the world's arrogant, renegade cop. A country that was not to be "entangled
in foreign affairs", now has military bases in nearly every corner of the earth. Those who open
their mouths to defend the snakes in power will be taught a great lesson once the elitists' plans
come to fruition. It's difficult to feel sorry for the people who believe the endless lies that
are spoken by those in power.
These fools won't see the truth until their heads lie under the blade of the guillotine. Anyone
who puts security before freedom and privacy deserves to be placed behind concrete walls and barbed
wire, where they will remain "safe" from the fictitious enemies who cause them to pathetically
cower in fear. The destiny of this country is that of Rome. Unfortunately, the masses do not know
or understand the true history of this world. The putrid stench of ignorance covers the majority
of the American populous. Snowden exposed the government's evil secrets, helping preserve freedom
and liberty in the United States. Those who chastise Snowden deserve what is coming: The death
of freedom under the hands of evil tyrants.
Watching Gen. Clapper state, UNDER OATH, that the NSA was not and is not indiscriminately reading,
storing, and intercepting the private communications of every American citizen, made me feel physically
ill.
The fact that he chose to tell a straight-out lie (in light of the information supplied to
us by Edward Snowden, who exposed this illegal and unconstitutional internal spying program) -
watching him choose to speak a brazen lie, spoken in complete disregard for his office, the NSA's
mandate (and its limits), his military career leading to his appointment as head of the NSA, the
Constitutional trust placed in him, and the laws which make a direct lie - under oath - to a Senate
Intelligence Committee (composed of the people WE elected to represent us) a FELONY - mean that
Gen. CLAPPER should be in prison for Perjury.
This is the applicable Constitutional U.S. Code, section 1621: "§ 1621. Perjury generally:
Whoever! (1) having taken an oath before a competent tribunal, officer, or person, in any case
in which a law of the United States authorizes an oath to be administered, that he will testify,
declare, depose, or certify truly, or that any written testimony, declaration, deposition, or
certificate by him subscribed, is true, willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes
any material matter which he does not believe to be true; or (2) in any declaration, certificate,
verification, or statement under penalty of perjury as permitted under section 1746 of title 28,
United States Code, willfully subscribes as true any material matter which he does not believe
to be true; - is guilty of perjury and shall, except as other-wise expressly provided by law,
be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. This section is applicable
whether the statement or subscription is made within or without the United States."
Five years in prison, for lying to Congress about your indiscriminate spying on innocent U.S.
citizens, Gen. Clapper, and then your filthy, despicable use of the U.S. Constitution (and our
rights to privacy within it), as toilet paper when you lied directly to Senator Ron Wyden
@ 61:00 under oath, when he asked "Does the NSA collect ANY type of data - at all - on millions,
or hundreds of millions of Americans?" and you answered, with no hesitation or remorse, "No sir,"
you committed Perjury, by any definition of the above U.S. code.
Attempting to clarify, senator Wyden asked, "It does not?," and you answered, "Not wittingly.
There are cases where they might inadvertently collect, but NOT WITTINGLY."
Could the lie have been any more damning, or abhorrent in a supposed Democracy? Is it any wonder
why people like Gen. Clapper want Snowden - who PROVED that this was a lie, and exposed a completely
illegal and unconstitutional program which Clapper was then in charge of - thrown in prison, and
silenced permanently? Trump speaks of "draining the swamp." He could start with the NSA, and all
of it's illegal activities, and work his way through every Intelligence Agency and the Military/Industrial
Organizations and Corporations which together, represent the greatest threat ever to our liberties
and to the Constitution - which is just hanging by a thread because of people and programs like
this, and work his way down.
But he won't. Why? Because he, like the rest of us, has seen the Zapruder film. It's much easier
- and safer - to kill the messenger. This is what makes Snowden, in today's world, a hero who,
unlike the rest of these cowards and traitors, will be remembered well by history - for whatever
that is worth to the man now. Thank God there are still people willing to sacrifice "their lives,
their fortunes, and their sacred honor" for the purpose of protecting what remains of the tattered
remnants of our Constitutionally-protected freedoms from government, and tyranny.
The US probably still surveys innocent everyday Americans by the millions. Not to prevent terrorism,
but to have political and economic control, as Snowden has said. Watch the movie Snowden. Very
enlightening.
I really liked this interview, and have much love for my fellow American Edward Snowden. He
did the right thing. Whoever posted this video under the title "EDWARD SNOWDEN EXPOSES DONALD
TRUMP" is kind of a dumbass. One tiny opinion is not equivalent to an expose', and this had nothing
to do with Trump. Quit making click bait asshole
have to say .... balls of steal. left his own life behind to let "us" know what its really
like. we were not there he was.. i love my country but dont think U.S.A. is not doing these things.
First time in my 45 years i question things like this...he makes an amazing point....if someone
questions they go to jail. Thats BS. questions make us a better Democracy. A better country...god
bless you Edward i hope it works out for you brother.
SHOCKING - TRUELY SHOCKING HOW UNBELIEVABLE DUMB THIS WOMAN IS. Is she really the best American
journalism could send? I have to critisize Snowden too - for once (excuse me Eddy!): Why did he
agree to meet such a ridiculous dummy? The interview - at least this dumb gooses part . was bodering
on being comical. If Snowden`s intellegence were given the factor 100 - nobody would be able to
give this truely uneducated, superficial and naive woman a number higher than room-temperature.
In Celsius, that is! Hard to watch and difficult to understand why Snowden agreed to meet a completely
shallow elderly Mom!
SHOCKING - TRUELY SHOCKING HOW UNBELIEVABLE DUMB THIS WOMAN IS. Is she really the best American
journalism could send? I have to critisize Snowden too - for once (excuse me Eddy!): Why did he
agree to meet such a ridiculous dummy? The interview - at least this dumb gooses part . was bodering
on being comical. If Snowden`s intellegence were given the factor 100 - nobody would be able to
give this truely uneducated, superficial and naive woman a number higher than room-temperature.
In Celsius, that is! Hard to watch and difficult to understand why Snowden agreed to meet a completely
shallow elderly Mom!
This is a very interesting interview to be sure, and I personally, have great admiration for
this man, as I'm sure much of the world does, and all the more so after watching the movie concerning
his life in which we see how the CIA made his life a living hell for many years if not a decade
or so, and may have even, brought this condition with his seizures and everything, assuming this
movie was an accurate portrayal of his life, but there is precious little here about trump.
I was hoping he had some juicy info he was going to share but that does not seem so. Regardless,
the man should be pardoned and allowed to get on with his life.
Government must know that it can never be all powerful and do whatever it damn will pleases,
at home or abroad either. So for that reason the man is a hero for sure. He says; "we will not
torture you." Wow. Not sure if he's joking there or serious but if he's serious then that is extremely
disturbing indeed. Respectfully. All My Best. Out.
Ray McGovern raise important fact: DNC hide evidence from FBI outsourcing everything to CrowdStrike. This is the most unexplainable
fact in the whole story. One hypotheses that Ray advanced here that there was so many hacks into DNC that they wanted to hide.
Another important point is CIA role in elections, and specifically
John O. Brennan behaviour. Brennan's 25 years with the CIA
included work as a Near East and South Asia analyst and as station chief in Saudi Arabia.
McGovern thing that Brennon actually controlled Obama. And in his opinion Brennan was the main leaker of Trump surveillance information.
Notable quotes:
"... Do really think the Deep State cares about the environment. Trump is our only chance to damage Deep State. McGovern is wrong... DNC were from Seth Rich, inside DNC. Murdered for it. McGovern is wrong... i could go on and on but suffice it to say his confidence is way to high. He is wrong. ..."
I really like Ray... I watch and listen , he seems to use logic, reason and facts in his assessments.. I'm surprised CIA and the
deep state allow him to operate ... stay safe Ray...
McGovern, you idiot. To try to put Trump on Hillary's level is complete stupidity. The war with Russia or nothing was avoided
with a Trump victory. Remember the NATO build up on the Russian border preparing for a Hillary win? Plus, if Hillary won, justice
and law in the USA would be over with forever. The Germans dont know sht about the USA to say their little cute phrase. Trump
is a very calm mannered man and his hands on the nuke button is an issue only to those who watch the fake MSM. And no the NSA
has not released anything either. Wrong on that point too.
The German expression of USA having a choice between cholera and plague is ignorant. McGovern is wrong ....everyone knew HRC
was a criminal. McGovern is wrong... Jill Stein in not trustworthy. A vote for Jill Stein was a vote away from Trump. If Jill
Stein or HRC were elected their would be no environment left to save. Do really think the Deep State cares about the environment.
Trump is our only chance to damage Deep State. McGovern is wrong... DNC were from Seth Rich, inside DNC. Murdered for it. McGovern
is wrong... i could go on and on but suffice it to say his confidence is way to high. He is wrong.
Another month or so and the DHS may offer a color-coding system to help the sheeple understand various levels of confidence.
Green - Moderate Confidence Blue - High Confidence Yellow - Very High Confidence Orange - Extremely High Confidence Red - Based
on Actual Fact
The last category may be one of the signs of the apocalypse.
You wouldn't know it, based on the endless cries for more money coming from the
military
politicians , and
the president , but these are the best of times for the Pentagon. Spending on the Department
of Defense alone is already well in excess of half a trillion dollars a year and counting. Adjusted
for inflation, that means it's
higher
than at the height of President Ronald Reagan's massive buildup of the 1980s and is now nearing
the post-World War II funding peak. And yet that's barely half the story. There are hundreds of billions
of dollars in "defense" spending that aren't even counted in the Pentagon budget.
Under the circumstances, laying all this out in grisly detail!and believe me, when you dive into
the figures, they couldn't be grislier!is the only way to offer a better sense of the true costs
of our wars past, present, and future, and of the funding that is the lifeblood of the national security
state. When you do that, you end up with no less than 10 categories of national security spending
(only one of which is the Pentagon budget). So steel yourself for a tour of our nation's trillion-dollar-plus
"national security" budget. Given the Pentagon's penchant for wasting money and our government's
record of engaging in dangerously misguided wars without end, it's clear that a large portion of
this massive investment of taxpayer dollars isn't making anyone any safer.
1) The Pentagon Budget
The Pentagon's "base" or regular budget contains the costs of the peacetime training, arming,
and operation of the U.S. military and of the massive civilian workforce that supports it!and if
waste is your Eden, then you're in paradise.
The department's budget is awash in waste, as you might expect from the only major federal agency
that has
never passed an audit . For example, last year a
report by the Defense Business Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, found that the Department of
Defense could save $125 billion over five years just by trimming excess bureaucracy. And a new
study by the Pentagon's Inspector General indicates that the department has ignored hundreds
of recommendations that could have saved it more than $33.6 billion.
The Pentagon can't even get an accurate count of the number of private contractors it employs,
but the
figure is certainly in the range of 600,000 or higher, and many of them carry out tasks that
might far better be handled by government employees. Cutting that enormous contractor work force
by just 15 percent, only a start when it comes to eliminating the unnecessary duplication involved
in hiring government employees and private contractors to do the same work, would
save an easy $20 billion annually.
And the items mentioned so far are only the most obvious examples of misguided expenditures at
the Department of Defense. Even larger savings could be realized by scaling back the Pentagon's global
ambitions, which have caused nothing but trouble in the last decade and a half as the U.S. military
has waged devastating and counterproductive wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere across
the Greater Middle East and Africa. An analysis by Ben Friedman of the conservative Cato Institute
estimates that the Pentagon could
reduce its projected spending by one trillion dollars over the next decade if Washington
reined in its interventionist instincts and focused only on America's core interests.
Donald Trump, of course, ran for president as a businessman who would clean house and institute
unprecedented efficiencies in government. Instead, on entering the Oval Office, he's done a superb
job of ignoring chronic problems at the Pentagon,
proposing instead to give that department a hefty raise: $575 billion next year. And yet his
expansive military funding plans look relatively mild compared to the desires of the gung-ho members
of the armed services committees in the
House and
Senate . Democrats and Republicans alike want to hike the Pentagon budget to at least $600 billion
or more. The legislative fight over a final number will play out over the rest of this year. For
now, let's just use Trump's number as a placeholder.
Pentagon Budget: $575 billion
2) The War Budget
The wars of this century, from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond, have largely been paid for through
a special account that lies outside the regular Pentagon budget. This war budget!known in the antiseptic
language of the Pentagon as the "Overseas Contingency Operations" account, or OCO!
peaked at more than $180
billion at the height of the Bush administration's intervention in Iraq.
As troop numbers in that country and Afghanistan have plummeted from
hundreds of thousands to
about 15,000 , the war budget, miraculously enough, hasn't fallen at anywhere near the same pace.
That's because it's not even subject to the modest
caps on the Pentagon's regular
budget imposed by Congress back in 2011, as part of a deal to keep the government open.
In reality, over the past five years, the war budget has become a slush fund that pays for tens
of billions of dollars in Pentagon expenses that have nothing to do with fighting wars. The Trump
administration wants
$64.6 billion for that boondoggle budget in fiscal year 2018. Some in Congress would like to
hike it another
$10 billion . For consistency, we'll again use the Trump number as a baseline.
War Budget: $64.6 Billion
Running Total: $639.6 Billion
3) Nuclear Warheads (and more)
You might think that the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal -- nuclear warheads -- would
be paid for out of the Pentagon budget. And you would, of course, be wrong. The cost of researching,
developing, maintaining, and
"modernizing"
the American arsenal of
6,800 nuclear
warheads falls to an obscure agency located inside the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear
Security Administration, or NNSA. It also works on naval nuclear reactors, pays for the environmental
cleanup of nuclear weapons facilities, and funds the nation's three nuclear weapons laboratories,
at a total annual cost of more than
$20 billion per year.
Department of Energy (nuclear): $20 Billion
Running total: $659.6 billion
4) "Other Defense"
This catchall category encompasses a number of flows of defense-related funding that go to agencies
other than the Pentagon. It totals about
$8 billion per year . In recent years, about
two-thirds of this money has gone to pay for the homeland security activities of the FBI, accounting
for more than half of that agency's annual budget.
"Other Defense": $8 Billion
Running Total: $677.6 billion
The four categories above make up what the White House budget office considers total spending
on "national defense." But I'm sure you won't be shocked to learn that their cumulative $677.6 billion
represents far from the full story. So let's keep right on going.
5) Homeland Security
After the 9/11 attacks, Congress created a mega-agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
It absorbed 22 then-existing entities ,
all involved in internal security and border protection, creating the sprawling cabinet department
that now has 240,000 employees . For
those of you keeping score at home, the agencies and other entities currently
under the umbrella
of DHS include the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Law Enforcement
Training Center, the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, United States Citizenship and Immigration
Services, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, the Transportation Security Agency, the
U.S. Secret Service, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), and the Office of Intelligence
Analysis (the only one of America's 17 intelligence agencies to fit under the department's rubric).
How many of these agencies actually make us safer? That would be a debatable topic, if anyone
were actually interested in such a debate. ICE!America's deportation force!has, for instance, done
far more to
cause suffering than to protect us from criminals or terrorists. On the other hand, it's reassuring
to know that there is an office charged with determining whether there is a nuclear weapon or radioactive
"dirty bomb" in our midst.
While it's hard to outdo the Pentagon, DHS has its own record of
dubious expenditures on items large and small. They range from $1,000 fees for employees to attend
conferences at spas to the purchase of bagpipes for border protection personnel to the payment of
scores of remarkably fat salaries to agency bureaucrats. On the occasion of its tenth anniversary
in 2013, Congressman Jeff Duncan (R-SC)
excoriated the department as "rife with waste," among other things, pointing to a report by the
DHS inspector general that it had misspent over $1 billion.
DHS was supposed to provide a better focus for efforts to protect the United States from internal
threats. Its biggest problem, though, may be that it has become a magnet for increased funding for
haphazard, misplaced, and often simply dangerous initiatives. These would, for instance, include
its program
to supply grants to local law enforcement agencies to help them buy military-grade equipment
to be
deployed
not against terrorists, but against citizens protesting the injustices perpetrated by the very
same agencies being armed by DHS.
The Trump administration has
proposed spending
$50 billion on DHS in FY 2018.
Homeland Security: $50 Billion
Running Total: $717.6 Billion
6) Military Aid
U.S. government-run military aid programs have proliferated rapidly in this century. The United
States now has
scores of arms and training programs serving more than
140 countries
. They cost more than
$18 billion per year , with
about 40
percent of that total located in the State Department's budget. While the Pentagon's share has
already been accounted for, the $7 billion at State!which can ill afford to pay for such programs
with the Trump administration seeking to
gut the rest of its budget!has not.
Military Aid at the State Department: $7 Billion
Running Total: $724.6 Billion
7) Intelligence
The United States government has
16 separate intelligence agencies : the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); the National Security
Agency (NSA); the Defense Intelligence Agency; the FBI; the State Department Bureau of Intelligence
and Research; the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence Analysis; the Drug Enforcement
Administration Office of National Security Intelligence; the Treasury Department Office of Intelligence
and Analysis; the Department of Energy Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; the National
Reconnaissance Office; the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency; Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance,
and Reconnaissance; Army Military Intelligence; the Office of Naval Intelligence; Marine Corps Intelligence;
and Coast Guard Intelligence. Add to these the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI),
which is supposed to coordinate this far-flung intelligence network, and you have a grand total of
17 agencies.
The U.S. will spend more than $70 billion
on intelligence this year, spread across all these agencies. The bulk of this funding is contained
in the Pentagon budget!including the budgets of the CIA and the NSA (believed to be hidden under
obscure line items there). At most, a few billion dollars in additional expenditures on intelligence
fall outside the Pentagon budget and since, given the secrecy involved, that figure can't be determined,
let's not add anything further to our running tally.
Intelligence: $70 Billion (mostly contained inside the Pentagon budget)
Running Total: $724.6 Billion
8) Supporting Veterans
A steady uptick of veterans generated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has dramatically increased
the costs of supporting such vets once they come home, including the war wounded, some of whom will
need medical care for life. For 2018, the Veterans Administration has requested over
$186 billion for its budget, more than
three
times what it was before the 2001 intervention in Afghanistan.
Veterans: $186 billion
Running Total: $910.6 Billion
9) Military Retirement
The trust fund set up to cover pensions for military retirees and their survivors doesn't have
enough money to pay out all the benefits promised to these individuals. As a result, it is supplemented
annually by an appropriation from the general revenues of the government. That supplement has by
now reached roughly
$80 billion per year
Military Retirement: $80 Billion
Running Total: $990.6 Billion
10) Defense Share of Interest on the Debt
It's no secret that the U.S. government regularly runs at a deficit and that the total national
debt is growing. It may be more surprising to learn that the interest on that debt runs at roughly
$500 billion per year . The Project on Government Oversight
calculates the share of the interest on that debt generated by defense-related programs at more
than $100 billion annually.
Defense Share of the Interest on the Debt: $100 billion
Grand Total: $1.09 Trillion
That final annual tally of nearly $1.1 trillion to pay for past wars, fund current wars, and prepare
for possible future conflicts is roughly double the already staggering $575 billion the Trump administration
has proposed as the Pentagon's regular budget for 2018. Most taxpayers have no idea that more than
a trillion dollars a year is going to what's still called "defense," but these days might equally
be called national in security.
So the next time you hear the president, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, or a hawkish lawmaker claim that the U.S. military is practically collapsing from a lack
of funding, don't believe it for a second. Donald Trump may finally have put plutocracy in the Oval
Office, but a militarized version of it has long been ensconced in the Pentagon and the rest of the
national security state. In government terms, make no mistake about it, the Pentagon & Co. are the
one percent.
"... Azerbaijan's Silk Way Airlines transported hundreds of tons of weapons under diplomatic cover to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan Congo ..."
"... A British spy. An Arizona senator. And one inflammatory dossier on Donald Trump. The connection between them is starting to unravel... ..."
"... there are indications that McCain was the one who hired the company which created the infamous Steele dossier. ..."
"... Document hack could imperil subs in Oz, India, other countries ..."
"... The Trump-Russia Dossier (by political treason stabbing the nominee of his own Party; ignoring the words of Reagan) ..."
"... the first part of your post reaffirms my comment in the previous thread about the usa, saudi arabia/gccs and israel being the terrorists that the world would be a lot better place without... " ..."
"... in an exceptional country, there is no accountability... according to obama, you have to move on and not dwell on the past, lol... ..."
"... the mountain of evidence you provide daily, as proof of the corporate empire's malignancy, is therapeutic and empowering, but, until this information reaches the bulk of the U$A's masses we're all just treading water here. ..."
"... The last thing McCain has to worry about is prosecution or even criticism for fomenting war crimes. ..."
"... "The team has carried out painstaking research cataloging serial numbers and tracing the routes. They found crates of ammunition and rockets manufactured in factories in eastern Europe. These were bought by the governments of the US and Saudi Arabia." ..."
"... A British spy. An Arizona senator. And one inflammatory dossier on Donald Trump. The connection between them is starting to unravel... ..."
"... I suspected during the Prez Campaign that Trump had McCain well and truly scoped when he said (of Satan's Mini-Me) "I like my war "heroes" not to get captured." ..."
"... This story says a lot for China & Russia's approach to long-term Strategic Diplomacy. I imagine that they both know all this stuff and a helluva lot more, but they go to all the summits, prattle about Our AmeriKKKan Friends, and then presumably laugh their asses off when the summit is over. Xi & Putin seem to truly believe that the blowback from all this Yankee Duplicity will eventually do as much harm to the American Dream as an Ru/Cn Military Solution. ..."
"... Criminal activity under diplomatic cover should be prosecuted. They can pretend they didn't find out until it was too late. Or they can claim that they were letting it happen in order to track the players. Those excuses have been used for all kinds of cover for nefarious activites like Pakistan's AQ Khan NukeMart to distribute nuclear technology and materials. (See Deception and United States and the Islamc Bomb books) And there's Fast & Furious. In the end the cover comes from the political top of the trash heap. ..."
"... Sounds familiar? Iranian industrialization and westernization happened during the Shah. That is part of above story. Same story in Saudi Arabia . ..."
"... My suspicion is that this "reversal" was also made in the USA as a consequence of the strategy to use Islam as a "green belt" against the Soviet Union. ..."
Azerbaijan's Silk Way Airlines transported hundreds of tons of weapons under diplomatic
cover to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan Congo
the weapons and ammunition are usual from east Europe (Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Ukraine
...)
the contracts are with U.S. companies themselves hired by the CIA and/or Pentagon as well
as with Saudi and Israeli companies
offloading during unusual "fueling stops" allowed to disguise the real addressee of the
loads
With lots of details from obtained emails.
Ten thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition to al-Qaeda and other Takfiris in Syria also
came first from Libya by ship, then on
at least 160 big cargo flights via Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Turkey and during the last years
by
various
ships under U.S. contracts from
mostly east-European
countries.
---
With all the Trump-Russia nonsense flowing around one person's involvement in the creation of
the issue deserves more scrutiny:
The first story is a muti-billion dollar illegal business network that potentially encompasses
not only the CIA, but also several governments, the Clinton Foundation, David Patreus, investors
(many of whom hold government positions) and God knows what else. It's possibly the greatest scam
the world has ever seen.
It would be nice to have a comprehensive list of sponsors of those fake lucrative speeches such
front persons and puppets as Clintons, Saakashvili, Kwaśniewski, ... have been giving. The Business Round Tables that Quigley and Sutton wrote about that live off wars and misery.
There is an amazing amount of detailed information from reliable sources on the U.S. sponsored,
Saudi paid arms deliveries to terrorist in Syria, originating from the eastern parts of the European
Union. I have collected some of the best sources here:
McCain and the Trump-Russia Dossier
The third time is the Charm.I am reminded McCain can do no wrong: His service to his country (it's alleged, by aiding the enemy);
The Keating Five; (I dindu nuttin wrong)
The Trump-Russia Dossier (by political treason stabbing the nominee of his own Party; ignoring
the words of Reagan). McCain, once again, will be excused and forgiven. His actions were due to illness – the most
aggressive cancer of the brain. How is that so?
thanks b.. the first part of your post reaffirms my comment in the previous thread about the usa,
saudi arabia/gccs and israel being the terrorists that the world would be a lot better place without...
"the contracts are with U.S. companies themselves hired by the CIA and/or Pentagon as well as
with Saudi and Israeli companies.."
Thanks b, the mountain of evidence you provide daily, as proof of the corporate empire's malignancy,
is therapeutic and empowering, but, until this information reaches the bulk of the U$A's masses
we're all just treading water here.
@2: The last thing McCain has to worry about is prosecution or even criticism for fomenting war
crimes. The cancer is real and he will be lauded for his courage and lionized if he dies. But
should he survive he will carry on as usual with no apologies and no criticism.
"The team has carried out painstaking research cataloging serial numbers and tracing the routes.
They found crates of ammunition and rockets manufactured in factories in eastern Europe. These
were bought by the governments of the US and Saudi Arabia."
Whether or not the arming and financing of ISIS groups was "accidental" or "deliberate" remains
something of an open question; most likely the actual US policy from c.2011-2012 onwards was to
give support to anyone trying to overthrow Assad's government regardless of affiliation. The architects
of this plan? Clinton & McCain seem to be right at the center of it, with plenty of neocon/neolib
supporters in Congress & the State Department/CIA/Pentagon (Nuland/Morrell/Carter etc.)
Sorry b .... the "Reason" article is complete nonsense. I've covered the details the last two
weeks. The "dodgy dossier" was shared by Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, with the British MI6
and the FBI starting in August 2016. That's why I claim it's not RussiaGate but IC-Gate. A complot
by the Intelligence Community of the UK and US. McCain is just a distraction of the true effort
to dump Trump.
A British spy. An Arizona senator. And one inflammatory dossier on Donald Trump. The
connection between them is starting to unravel...
there are indications that McCain was the one who hired the company which created the
infamous Steele dossier.
there is evidences that he distributed it to the CIA, FBI and to the media.
the issue is now in front of a British court.
Christopher Steele and Sir Andrew Wood worked in a British spy nest in Moscow during the Yeltsin
years of the 90s.
Is RussiaGate Really IC-Gate
Did MI6/CIA Collude with Chris Steele to Entrap Trump?
'Sir' Andrew Wood as spy chief in Moscow
Fusion GPS linked to UAE Sheikh and Rubio Donor
Peter W. Smith Tapped Alt-Right to Access Dark Net for Clinton emails – linked to Charles
C. Johnson – Stephen Bannon - Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker who goes by the alias 'Weev', "exiled"
to the Ukraine
Thanks, b. Love the lede... 350 "diplomatic" flights transporting weapons for ter'rists - Trud
What a slimy little cur John McCain (Satan's Mini-Me) turns out to be. Guess how surprised
I'm not that the little skunk is up to his eyeballs in weapons proliferation & profiteering, not
to mention that old Yankee favourite Gun-barrel "Diplomacy".
I suspected during the Prez Campaign that Trump had McCain well and truly scoped when he said
(of Satan's Mini-Me) "I like my war "heroes" not to get captured."
This story says a lot for China & Russia's approach to long-term Strategic Diplomacy. I imagine
that they both know all this stuff and a helluva lot more, but they go to all the summits, prattle
about Our AmeriKKKan Friends, and then presumably laugh their asses off when the summit is over.
Xi & Putin seem to truly believe that the blowback from all this Yankee Duplicity will eventually
do as much harm to the American Dream as an Ru/Cn Military Solution.
Thanks again for the excellent journalism b even though it reads like the trash on the rags in
the grocery stores they make you look at while you check out.
I just hold out hope that the great unraveling continues and quickens its pace.
Criminal activity under diplomatic cover should be prosecuted. They can pretend they didn't find
out until it was too late. Or they can claim that they were letting it happen in order to track
the players. Those excuses have been used for all kinds of cover for nefarious activites like
Pakistan's AQ Khan NukeMart to distribute nuclear technology and materials. (See Deception and
United States and the Islamc Bomb books) And there's Fast & Furious. In the end the cover comes
from the political top of the trash heap.
The Dem/anti-Trump attempts to get dirt on Trump via Russians doesn't get play in the MSM.
Nor does the content of the emails. They call the tune and the media plays on.
@james 8
[Reported by Independent.co.uk, New York Post and the Guardian.co.uk] McCain admitted he handed
the dossier to Comey."
NYPost: McCain "I gave Russia blackmail dossier on Trump to the FBI"
Senator John McCain passed documents to the FBI director, James Comey, last month alleging
secret contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow and that Russian intelligence had personally
compromising material on the president-elect himself
Yes, there will be no accountability in the U.S. for the exceptional ones. However, the British
courts setting aside "special relationships" may take a different view that McCain has a case
to answer.
The link suggests that the subs involved in the scandal are perhaps OK, and no hack compromised
their worthiness in a possible military conflict. Neither there were any fatal accidents. The
only losses in manpower (but quite a few) are among people engaged in the financial transactions
that delivered them to various fleets.
Although there are possible danger to security, because bribery is used to blackmail involved
in recruitment of spies.
I hope the conspiracy theories are wrong, and that McInsane will soon suffer a well-deserved painful
death.
BTW, I'm a long-time Arizonan, and I'm proud to say I've never voted for this traitor and have
also signed the recall petitions against him.
I apologize for never contributing anything substantial but just emanating verbal support.
I hope this site has some mirrored archives. This is in its entirety a work of contemporary history
(sorry my english's not good enough... mirror this site and give it some dumb ancestor of ours
to read in 20, 50, 100 years, y'know).
I'm a broke lowlife but next time around I'll send some money.
damn I regret every cent I've spent on mainstream newspapers, although the last time I've done
so has been years ago and maybe back then, they weren't so bad, but then again, they probably
were and I just didn't notice.
The dog that didn't bark in the arms shipment story is the absense of Qatar in the list of recipient
countries. It also seems that, whilst most (80%) were shipped through SA/UAE, more arms were shipped
through Jordan (11%) than through Turkey (7%).
Bulgaria may also have been the location of military level training sites for foreigners. An
intriguing report from June 2015 noted that an American was killed along with 2 foreigners (German
and Canadian) in a grenade launcher accident of a PMC training center at Anevo, Bulgaria. The
site was run by an company Algans (or Alguns).
There are links to the infamous US military $500 million training program in which an unknown
number of 'carefully vetted moderate rebels' were trained and all but 5 of them 'defected' to
al Qaeda.
"This story says a lot for China & Russia's approach to long-term Strategic Diplomacy. I imagine
that they both know all this stuff and a helluva lot more" Hoarsewhisperer @13
The docs indicate the Balkans arm supply route took off in 2012. It will have brought in many
billions of USD to the relatively poor east European countries. Before the Gulenist(?) shoot down
of the Russian Su-24, Russia had been trying to get Turkey and Bulgaria interested in South Stream.
I suspect Russia did indeed know the details of the arms shipment, and certainly knew about Turkey's
cut of the ISIS oil sales. I suspect this deal may have been an attempt to wean the two off the
terrorism funding spigot. This failed as the Bulgarian government is totally owned by the US.
Erdogan's ego was manipulated by his Zionist handlers and eventually his stalling killed interest
at theat time. The Russians would know this background too, but the deal had to be tried. If it
had worked, then the Bulgarian arms train would possibly have been stopped and the Turkish border
closed several years ago. This would have greatly cramped the capabilities of ISIS, simplifying
the task of eliminating them. I suspect the Russians also knew it wouldn't pan out but it was
certainly worth a shot whilst they was busily obtaining intelligence on the terrorists, and secretly
negotiating the logistics, overflight access etc for what was to become its base at Hymeim.
The statement was followed by a publication of the Bulgarian Trud newspaper that mentioned
the Arcus arms company as the producer of some arms produced in Bulgaria under Russian licenses,
which were found by journalists in eastern Aleppo.
Craven McCain has been teflon for his entire political career and he was teflon when he wrecked
airplanes in the navy. McCain is just a teflon guy. Untouchable. Probably has "dossiers" on anybody
that can damage him.
But we do know that Islamic Republic is a creature of the British. (Longstanding history between
the worldly priests of Iran and the defunct British Empire. Read up.)
This is huge. An absolute outrage. The first real Trump concession to Putin that undermines
U.S. security directly. https://t.co/h9WR4brHHK -- Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) July 19, 2017
@2 I have no doubt that McCain's medical condition is real. I well remember the news stories in
early June when McCain put up a bizarre performance during testimony by James Comey - asking questions
that simply didn't make any sense whatsoever and leaving everyone utterly gob-smacked regarding
McCain's mental state.
OMG. the Washington Borg's house newspaper has woken up to Trump's surrender to Putin on
Syria.
Trump's breathtaking surrender to Russia
But once again, President Trump, after extended personal contact with Vladimir Putin and
the complete surrender to Russian interests in Syria, acts precisely as though he has been
bought and sold by a strategic rival. The ignoble cutoff of aid to American proxies means that
"Putin won in Syria," as an administration official was quoted by The Post.
Concessions without
reciprocation, made against the better judgment of foreign policy advisers, smack more of payoff
than outreach. If this is what Trump's version of "winning" looks like, what might further
victory entail? The re- creation of the Warsaw Pact? The reversion of Alaska to Russian control?
Although this opinion article was posted a couple of days ago, there been no shitstorm near Trump
about it since suggesting that Trump's one-man distraction/disinformation smokescreen is firing
successfully on all cylinders.
'We're bad day away from Russians asking, 'Why are you still in Syria?' – top US commander
A US special operations commander has admitted that an extended US stay in Syria runs contrary
to international law and that Russia would be entirely justified in questioning its presence
there.
At the Aspen Security Forum on Friday, Special Operations Command chief Army General, Raymond
Thomas was asked whether American forces will remain in Syria, after Islamic State (IS, formerly
ISIS/ISIL) is defeated, possibly, to support the Kurdish forces in the north of the country.
Thomas acknowledged that American forces are fighting in a sovereign Syria, where they will
likely "have no ability to stay" if that presence is questioned "in terms of international
law," Thomas said, replying to the Washington Post journalist's question.
Although I'm sure that the State Department/Pentagon lawyers are looking for a reason to stay.
By the time of Richard Nixon's arrival in office in January 1969, Iran was already America's
single-largest arms purchaser. Whilst this is notable in and of itself, it is vastly overshadowed
by what followed. By late 1972 Nixon leveraged U.S. Middle Eastern regional policy primarily
around the focal point of a militarily strong, pro-American Iran.
Sounds familiar? Iranian industrialization and westernization happened during the Shah. That is part of above
story. Same story in
Saudi Arabia
.
In Saudi Arabia, the 1960s, and especially the 1970s, had been years of explosive development,
liberal experimentation, and openness to the West. A reversal of this trend came about abruptly
in 1979, the year in which the Grand Mosque in Mecca came under attack by religiously motivated
critics of the monarchy, and the Islamic Republic of Iran was established.
My suspicion is that this "reversal" was also made in the USA as a consequence of the strategy
to use Islam as a "green belt" against the Soviet Union.
"... Efforts to break into Apple products by government security researchers started as early as 2006, a year before Apple introduced its first iPhone and continued through the launch of the iPad in 2010 and beyond, The Intercept said. ..."
CIA researchers have worked for nearly a decade to break the security protecting Apple (AAPL.O)
phones and tablets, investigative news site The Intercept reported on Tuesday, citing documents obtained
from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The report cites top-secret U.S. documents that suggest U.S. government researchers had created
a version of XCode, Apple's software application development tool, to create surveillance backdoors
into programs distributed on Apple's App Store.
The Intercept has in the past published a number of reports from documents released by whistleblower
Snowden. The site's editors include Glenn Greenwald, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in reporting
on Snowden's revelations, and by Oscar-winning documentary maker Laura Poitras.
It said the latest documents, which covered a period from 2006 to 2013, stop short of proving
whether U.S. intelligence researchers had succeeded in breaking Apple's encryption coding, which
secures user data and communications.
Efforts to break into Apple products by government security researchers started as early as
2006, a year before Apple introduced its first iPhone and continued through the launch of the iPad
in 2010 and beyond, The Intercept said.
Breeching Apple security was part of a top-secret program by the U.S. government, aided by British
intelligence researchers, to hack "secure communications products, both foreign and domestic" including
Google Android phones, it said.
Silicon Valley technology companies have in recent months sought to restore trust among consumers
around the world that their products have not become tools for widespread government surveillance
of citizens.
Last September, Apple strengthened encryption methods for data stored on iPhones, saying the changes
meant the company no longer had any way to extract customer data on the devices, even if a government
ordered it to with a search warrant. Silicon Valley rival Google Inc (GOOGL.O)
said shortly afterward that it also planned to increase the use of stronger encryption tools.
Both companies said the moves were aimed at protecting the privacy of users of their products
and that this was partly a response to wide scale U.S. government spying on Internet users revealed
by Snowden in 2013.
An Apple spokesman pointed to public statements by Chief Executive Tim Cook on privacy, but declined
to comment further.
"I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country
to create a backdoor in any of our products or services," Cook wrote in a statement on privacy and
security published last year. "We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will."
Leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron have expressed
concern that turning such privacy-enhancing tools into mass market features could prevent governments
from tracking militants planning attacks. The CIA did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
So, secure your systems people. Attackers potentially trying to use these tools still need to
somehow get a shell on your system in order to install this stuff.
Detecting on your system
As far as detecting on your system, that's going to be tough since:
The instructions note to name the script something before uploading/running it
We don't have a copy of any of the scripts they're talking about
But - we do know a couple things..
It runs in the background. A simple 'ps' will show you the processes and you should be able
to spot something unfamiliar running, and kill it
history file gone would indicate that 'something' happened.. not necessarily this though.
if you find evidence of the 'CIA' JQC/KitV root kit on your system which may be tough..
"... Recent hearings by the Senate and House Intelligence Committees reflected the rising tide of Russian-election-hacking hysteria and contributed further to it. Both Democrats and Republicans on the two committees appeared to share the alarmist assumptions about Russian hacking, and the officials who testified did nothing to discourage the politicians. ..."
"... The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a record of spreading false stories about alleged Russian hacking into US infrastructure , such as the tale of a Russian intrusion into the Burlington, Vermont electrical utility in December 2016 that DHS later admitted was untrue. There was another bogus DHS story about Russia hacking into a Springfield, Illinois water pump in November 2011. ..."
"... So, there's a pattern here. Plus, investigators, assessing the notion that Russia hacked into state electoral databases, rejected that suspicion as false months ago. Last September, Assistant Secretary of DHS for Cybersecurity Andy Ozment and state officials explained that the intrusions were not carried out by Russian intelligence but by criminal hackers seeking personal information to sell on the Internet. ..."
"... Illinois is the one state where hackers succeeded in breaking into a voter registration database last summer. The crucial fact about the Illinois hacking, however, was that the hackers extracted personal information on roughly 90,000 registered voters, and that none of the information was expunged or altered. ..."
"... "Any time you more carefully monitor a system you're going to see more bad guys poking and prodding at it," he observed, " because they're always poking and prodding." [Emphasis added] ..."
"... Reagan further revealed that she had learned from the FBI that hackers had gotten a user name and password for their electoral database, and that it was being sold on the "dark web" – an encrypted network used by cyber criminals to buy and sell their wares. In fact, she said, the FBI told her that the probe of Arizona's database was the work of a "known hacker" who had been closely monitored "frequently." ..."
"... The sequence of events indicates that the main person behind the narrative of Russian hacking state election databases from the beginning was former FBI Director James Comey. In testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Sept. 28, Comey suggested that the Russian government was behind efforts to penetrate voter databases, but never said so directly. ..."
"... The media then suddenly found unnamed sources ready to accuse Russia of hacking election data even while admitting that they lacked evidence. The day after Comey's testimony ABC headlined , "Russia Hacking Targeted Nearly Half of States' Voter Registration Systems, Successfully Infiltrating 4." The story itself revealed, however, that it was merely a suspicion held by "knowledgeable" sources. ..."
"... But that claim of a "likely" link between the hackers and Russia was not only speculative but highly suspect. The authors of the DHS-ODNI report claimed the link was "supported by technical indicators from the US intelligence community, DHS, FBI, the private sector and other entities." They cited a list of hundreds of I.P. addresses and other such "indicators" used by hackers they called "Grizzly Steppe" who were supposedly linked to Russian intelligence. ..."
"... But the highly classified NSA report made no reference to any evidence supporting such an attribution. The absence of any hint of signals intelligence supporting its conclusion makes it clear that the NSA report was based on nothing more than the same kind of inconclusive "indicators" that had been used to establish the original narrative of Russians hacking electoral databases. ..."
"... Russian intelligence certainly has an interest in acquiring intelligence related to the likely outcome of American elections, but it would make no sense for Russia's spies to acquire personal voting information about 90,000 registered voters in Illinois. ..."
Cyber-criminal efforts to hack into U.S. government databases are epidemic, but this ugly reality
is now being exploited to foist blame on Russia and fuel the New Cold War hysteria
Recent
hearings by the Senate and House Intelligence Committees reflected the rising tide of Russian-election-hacking
hysteria and contributed further to it. Both Democrats and Republicans on the two committees appeared
to share the alarmist assumptions about Russian hacking, and the officials who testified did nothing
to discourage the politicians.
On June 21, Samuel Liles, acting director of the Intelligence and Analysis Office's Cyber Division
at the Department of Homeland Security, and Jeanette Manfra, acting deputy under secretary for cyber-security
and communications, provided the main story line for the day in testimony before the Senate committee
- that efforts to hack into election databases had been found in 21 states.
Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap also endorsed
the narrative of Russian government responsibility for the intrusions on voter registration databases.
But none of those who testified offered any evidence to support this suspicion nor were they pushed
to do so. And beneath the seemingly unanimous embrace of that narrative lies a very different story.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a record of spreading false stories about alleged
Russian hacking into US infrastructure , such as the tale of a Russian intrusion into the Burlington,
Vermont electrical utility in December 2016 that DHS later admitted was untrue. There was another
bogus DHS story about Russia hacking into a Springfield, Illinois water pump in November 2011.
So, there's a pattern here. Plus, investigators, assessing the notion that Russia hacked into
state electoral databases, rejected that suspicion as false months ago. Last September, Assistant
Secretary of DHS for Cybersecurity Andy Ozment and state officials explained that the intrusions
were not carried out by Russian intelligence but by criminal hackers seeking personal information
to sell on the Internet.
Both Ozment and state officials responsible for the state databases revealed that those databases
have been the object of attempted intrusions for years. The FBI provided information to at least
one state official indicating that the culprits in the hacking of the state's voter registration
database were cyber-criminals.
Illinois is the one state where hackers succeeded in breaking into a voter registration database
last summer. The crucial fact about the Illinois hacking, however, was that the hackers extracted
personal information on roughly 90,000 registered voters, and that none of the information was expunged
or altered.
The Actions of Cybercriminals
That was an obvious clue to the motive behind the hack. Assistant DHS Secretary Ozment testified
before the House Subcommittee on Information Technology on Sept. 28 ( at 01:02.30 of the video )
that the apparent interest of the hackers in copying the data suggested that the hacking was "possibly
for the purpose of selling personal information."
Ozment 's testimony provides the only credible motive for the large number of states found to
have experienced what the intelligence community has called "scanning and probing" of computers to
gain access to their electoral databases: the personal information involved – even e-mail addresses
– is commercially valuable to the cybercriminal underworld.
That same testimony also explains why so many more states reported evidence of attempts to hack
their electoral databases last summer and fall. After hackers had gone after the Illinois and Arizona
databases, Ozment said, DHS had provided assistance to many states in detecting attempts to hack
their voter registration and other databases.
"Any time you more carefully monitor a system you're going to see more bad guys poking and prodding
at it," he observed, " because they're always poking and prodding." [Emphasis added]
State election officials have confirmed Ozment's observation. Ken Menzel, the general counsel
for the Illinois Secretary of State, told this writer, "What's new about what happened last year
is not that someone tried to get into our system but that they finally succeeded in getting in."
Menzel said hackers "have been trying constantly to get into it since 2006."
And it's not just state voter registration databases that cybercriminals are after, according
to Menzel. "Every governmental data base – driver's licenses, health care, you name it – has people
trying to get into it," he said.
Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan told Mother Jones that her I.T. specialists had detected
193,000 distinct attempts to get into the state's website in September 2016 alone and 11,000 appeared
to be trying to "do harm."
Reagan further revealed that she had learned from the FBI that hackers had gotten a user name
and password for their electoral database, and that it was being sold on the "dark web" – an encrypted
network used by cyber criminals to buy and sell their wares. In fact, she said, the FBI told her
that the probe of Arizona's database was the work of a "known hacker" who had been closely monitored
"frequently."
James Comey's Role
The sequence of events indicates that the main person behind the narrative of Russian hacking
state election databases from the beginning was former FBI Director James Comey. In testimony to
the House Judiciary Committee on Sept. 28, Comey suggested that the Russian government was behind
efforts to penetrate voter databases, but never said so directly.
Comey told the committee that FBI Counterintelligence was working to "understand just what mischief
Russia is up to with regard to our elections." Then he referred to "a variety of scanning activities"
and "attempted intrusions" into election-related computers "beyond what we knew about in July and
August," encouraging the inference that it had been done by Russian agents.
The media then suddenly found unnamed sources ready to accuse Russia of hacking election data
even while admitting that they lacked evidence. The day after Comey's testimony ABC headlined , "Russia
Hacking Targeted Nearly Half of States' Voter Registration Systems, Successfully Infiltrating 4."
The story itself revealed, however, that it was merely a suspicion held by "knowledgeable" sources.
Similarly, NBC News headline announced, "Russians Hacked Two US Voter Databases, Officials Say."
But those who actually read the story closely learned that in fact none of the unnamed sources it
cited were actually attributing the hacking to the Russians.
It didn't take long for Democrats to turn the Comey teaser - and these anonymously sourced stories
with misleading headlines about Russian database hacking - into an established fact. A few days later,
the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff declared that there was
"no doubt" Russia was behind the hacks on state electoral databases.
On Oct. 7, DHS and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement
that they were "not in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian government." But only
a few weeks later, DHS participated with FBI in issuing a "Joint Analysis Report" on "Russian malicious
cyber activity" that did not refer directly to scanning and spearphishing aimed of state electoral
databases but attributed all hacks related to the election to "actors likely associated with RIS
[Russian Intelligence Services]."
Suspect Claims
But that claim of a "likely" link between the hackers and Russia was not only speculative but
highly suspect. The authors of the DHS-ODNI report claimed the link was "supported by technical indicators
from the US intelligence community, DHS, FBI, the private sector and other entities." They cited
a list of hundreds of I.P. addresses and other such "indicators" used by hackers they called "Grizzly
Steppe" who were supposedly linked to Russian intelligence.
But as I reported last January, the staff of Dragos Security, whose CEO Rob Lee, had been the
architect of a US government system for defense against cyber attack, pointed out that the vast majority
of those indicators would certainly have produced "false positives."
Then, on Jan. 6 came the "intelligence community assessment" – produced by selected analysts from
CIA, FBI and National Security Agency and devoted almost entirely to the hacking of e-mail of the
Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta. But it included
a statement that "Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple state
or local election boards." Still, no evidence was evinced on this alleged link between the hackers
and Russian intelligence.
Over the following months, the narrative of hacked voter registration databases receded into the
background as the drumbeat of media accounts about contacts between figures associated with the Trump
campaign and Russians built to a crescendo, albeit without any actual evidence of collusion regarding
the e-mail disclosures.
But a June 5 story brought the voter-data story back into the headlines. The story, published
by The Intercept, accepted at face value an NSA report dated May 5, 2017 , that asserted Russia's
military intelligence agency, the GRU, had carried out a spear-phishing attack on a US company providing
election-related software and had sent e-mails with a malware-carrying word document to 122 addresses
believed to be local government organizations.
But the highly classified NSA report made no reference to any evidence supporting such an attribution.
The absence of any hint of signals intelligence supporting its conclusion makes it clear that the
NSA report was based on nothing more than the same kind of inconclusive "indicators" that had been
used to establish the original narrative of Russians hacking electoral databases.
A Checkered History
So, the history of the US government's claim that Russian intelligence hacked into election databases
reveals it to be a clear case of politically motivated analysis by the DHS and the Intelligence Community.
Not only was the claim based on nothing more than inherently inconclusive technical indicators but
no credible motive for Russian intelligence wanting personal information on registered voters was
ever suggested.
Russian intelligence certainly has an interest in acquiring intelligence related to the likely
outcome of American elections, but it would make no sense for Russia's spies to acquire personal
voting information about 90,000 registered voters in Illinois.
When FBI Counterintelligence chief Priestap was asked at the June 21 hearing how Moscow might
use such personal data, his tortured effort at an explanation clearly indicated that he was totally
unprepared to answer the question.
"They took the data to understand what it consisted of," said Priestap, "so they can affect better
understanding and plan accordingly in regards to possibly impacting future election by knowing what
is there and studying it."
In contrast to that befuddled non-explanation, there is highly credible evidence that the FBI
was well aware that the actual hackers in the cases of both Illinois and Arizona were motivated by
the hope of personal gain.
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security
policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war
in Afghanistan. His new book is
Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare . He can be contacted at
[email protected]. Reprinted from
Consortium News with the author's permission.
This previously secret order involved having US intelligence design and implant a series of cyberweapons
into Russia's infrastructure systems, with officials saying they are meant to be activated remotely
to hit the most important networks in Russia and are designed to "
cause them pain and discomfort ."
The US has, of course, repeatedly threatened "retaliatory" cyberattacks against Russia, and promised
to knock out broad parts of their economy in doing so. These appear to be the first specific plans
to have actually infiltrate Russian networks and plant such weapons to do so.
Despite the long-standing nature of the threats, by the end of Obama's last term in office this
was all still in the "planning" phases. It's not totally clear where this effort has gone from there,
but officials say that the intelligence community, once given Obama's permission, did not need further
approval from Trump to continue on with it, and he'd have actually had to issue a countermanding
order, something they say he hasn't.
The details are actually pretty scant on how far along the effort is, but the goal is said to
be for the US to have the ability to retaliate at a moment's notice the next time they have a cyberattack
they intend to blame on Russia.
Unspoken in this lengthy report, which quotes unnamed former Obama Administration officials substantially,
advocating the effort, is that in having reported that such a program exists, they've tipped off
Russia about the threat.
This is, however, reflective of the priority of the former administration, which is to continuing
hyping allegations that Russia got President Trump elected, a priority that's high enough to sacrifice
what was supposed to be a highly secretive cyberattack operation.
"... Lots of people out there (Hello lurkers!) know that the Pork Pie News Networks are either feeding them unadulterated bs or lying by omission so actually make a real effort to find out more – whether they agree with it or not – but are faced with having to wade through rivers of f/ktard commenters. It is dispiriting to say the least. ..."
"... That may well be the idea, particularly those organizations that want to hose a and discredit alternative media sites (sic the JTRIG program and the likes of Brigade 77 and digilogues that have been running for years). If you can hack it, you probably think a) does this make sense? b) who is bono? c) timing, timing, timing.. d) is anything logically missing from the picture/story? e) if so, what conclusions can we draw from that? etc. It's not easy. ..."
"... Once upon a time we had newspaper columnists to do our thinking for us who we would religiously read. Now it is each one for themselves. What a pain in the ass. Fortunately we have the Kremlin Stooge and a bunch of other sites to help! :-) ..."
"... Don't miss the link to TTG's comment on leaks at Sic Semper Tyrannis! ..."
"... Yet again, you do not get this kind of information from the Pork Pie News Networks, the same ones who cosy up to the security services in return for juicy tidbits and also rubbish 'alternative news/websites/blogs'. ..."
"... the notion of compartmentalized operational security and broad state electronic surveillance of the population are mutually exclusive. ..."
He's one of a handful of good commenters there among the nutbags, antisemites, conspiracy theorists
etc. It's one of the things that really bugs me about great (supposedly) alternative news/opinion/blogs.
They always get immediately contaminated by all sorts of narcissistic 'tards who just want to
s/t the bed for everyone else, particularly the flyby trolls. Lots of people out there (Hello
lurkers!) know that the Pork Pie News Networks are either feeding them unadulterated bs or lying
by omission so actually make a real effort to find out more – whether they agree with it or not
– but are faced with having to wade through rivers of f/ktard commenters. It is dispiriting to
say the least.
That may well be the idea, particularly those organizations that want to hose a and discredit
alternative media sites (sic the JTRIG program and the likes of Brigade 77 and digilogues that
have been running for years). If you can hack it, you probably think a) does this make sense?
b) who is bono? c) timing, timing, timing.. d) is anything logically missing from the picture/story?
e) if so, what conclusions can we draw from that? etc. It's not easy.
Once upon a time we had newspaper columnists to do our thinking for us who we would religiously
read. Now it is each one for themselves. What a pain in the ass. Fortunately we have the Kremlin
Stooge and a bunch of other sites to help! :-)
My only thoughts are, wouldn't such info be compartmentalized (standard operating procedure,
innit?), i.e. a 'translator' would not have free and unlimited access, but rather have
access to only very specific highly secret info? If there are that many translators out there,
then compartmentalization would work very well. It is totally counter intuitive, nay stupid
, to allow free range to anyone but the top of the top. More people, more chance of leaks,
accidents or incomptence.
Don't miss the link to TTG's comment on leaks at Sic Semper Tyrannis!
Yet again, you do not get this kind of information from the Pork Pie News Networks, the
same ones who cosy up to the security services in return for juicy tidbits and also rubbish 'alternative
news/websites/blogs'.
Indeed it is; Secret and Top secret information is made available to those who
(1) are cleared
to the appropriate level, and
(2) have the need to know.
It's "and". Not "or". Top Secret information may not be viewed by anyone with a Top Secret
security clearance – only by those who need to know that information to carry out their duties
related to it.
Information may actually specify, "Top Secret – Eyes Only" in which the personnel holding a
Top Secret clearance who may view the material are either listed, or it is restricted only to
the addressee.
I dunno, because that whole Snowden thing revealed a lot of holes in the American security apparatus.
Snowden himself was surprised just how much stuff he was able to access, and he was just a contractor
at the time, not even a permanent employee.
Well, yes, because the notion of compartmentalized operational security and broad state electronic
surveillance of the population are mutually exclusive.
But to the very best of my knowledge Snowden did not reveal any secrets of America's defense
systems, its operational structure, its past military operations or its future plans in that area,
if he knew them. The damaging information he disclosed all related to American spying on foreign
leaders and the American electorate
"... "They have been misled and they are not analyzing the information in its entirety. We have talked about it with former President Obama and with several other officials. No one ever showed me any direct evidence. When we spoke with President Obama about that, you know, you should probably better ask him about it – I think he will tell you that he, too, is confident of it. But when he and I talked I saw that he, too, started having doubts. At any rate, that's how I saw it." ..."
"... As I noted in a Jan. 20 article about Obama's news conference two days earlier, "Did President Barack Obama acknowledge that the extraordinary propaganda campaign to blame Russia for helping Donald Trump become president has a very big hole in it, i.e., that the US intelligence community has no idea how the Democratic emails reached WikiLeaks? For weeks, eloquent obfuscation – expressed with 'high confidence' – has been the name of the game, but inadvertent admissions now are dispelling some of the clouds. ..."
"... "Hackers may be anywhere," Putin said. "There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine such a scenario? In the middle of an internal political fight, it was convenient for them, whatever the reason, to put out that information. And put it out they did. And, doing it, they made a reference to Russia. Can't you imagine it happening? I can. ..."
"... "Let us recall the assassination of President Kennedy. There is a theory that Kennedy's assassination was arranged by the United States special services. If this theory is correct, and one cannot rule it out, so what can be easier in today's context, being able to rely on the entire technical capabilities available to special services than to organize some kind of attacks in the appropriate manner while making a reference to Russia in the process. " ..."
"... The capabilities shown in what WikiLeaks calls the "Vault 7" trove of CIA documents required the creation of hundreds of millions of lines of source code. At $25 per line of code, that amounts to about $2.5 billion for each 100 million code lines. But the Deep State has that kind of money and would probably consider the expenditure a good return on investment for "proving" the Russians hacked into Democratic Party emails. ..."
"... In other words, it is altogether possible that the hacking attributed to Russia was actually one of several "active measures" undertaken by a cabal consisting of the CIA, FBI, NSA and Clapper – the same agencies responsible for the lame, evidence-free report of Jan. 6, that Clapper and Brennan acknowledged last month was not the consensus view of the 17 intelligence agencies. ..."
"... There is also the issue of the forensics. Former FBI Director James Comey displayed considerable discomfort on March 20, explaining to the House Intelligence Committee why the FBI did not insist on getting physical access to the Democratic National Committee's computers in order to do its own proper forensics, but chose to rely on the examination done by the DNC's private contractor, Crowdstrike. ..."
"... The firm itself has conflicts of interests in its links to the pro-NATO and anti-Russia think tank, the Atlantic Council, through Dmitri Alperovitch, who is an Atlantic Council senior fellow and the co-founder of Crowdstrike. ..."
"... Given the stakes involved in the Russia-gate investigation – now including a possible impeachment battle over removing the President of the United States – wouldn't it seem logical for the FBI to insist on its own forensics for this fundamental predicate of the case? Or could Comey's hesitancy to demand access to the DNC's computers be explained by a fear that FBI technicians not fully briefed on CIA/NSA/FBI Deep State programs might uncover a lot more than he wanted? ..."
To prove their chops, mainstream media stars can't wait to
go head-to-head with a demonized foreign leader, like Vladimir Putin, and let him have it, even if
their "facts" are wrong, as Megyn Kelly showed
NBC's Megyn Kelly wielded one of Official Washington's most beloved groupthinks to smack Russian
President Vladimir Putin over his denials that he and his government were responsible for hacking
Democratic emails and interfering with the U.S. presidential election.
In her June 2 interview with Putin, Kelly noted that all "17 intelligence agencies" of the US
government concurred in their conclusion of Russian guilt and how could Putin suggest that they all
are "lying." It's an argument that has been used to silence skeptics for months and apparently is
so useful that no one seems to care that it isn't true.
For instance, on May 8, in testimony before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, former Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper conceded publicly that the number of intelligence agencies involved
in the assessment was three, not 17, and that the analysts assigned to the project from CIA, FBI
and NSA had been "handpicked."
On May 23, in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, former CIA Director John Brennan
confirmed Clapper's account about the three agencies involved. "It wasn't a full interagency community
assessment that was coordinated among the 17 agencies," Brennan acknowledged.
But
those public admissions haven't stopped Democrats and the mainstream media from continuing to
repeat the false claim. In
comments on May 31, failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton repeated the canard, with a
flourish, saying: "Seventeen agencies, all in agreement, which I know from my experience as a Senator
and Secretary of State, is hard to get."
A couple of days later, Kelly revived the myth of the consensus among the 17 intelligence agencies
in her interview with the Russian president. But Putin passed up the opportunity to correct her,
replying instead:
"They have been misled and they are not analyzing the information in its entirety. We have
talked about it with former President Obama and with several other officials. No one ever showed
me any direct evidence. When we spoke with President Obama about that, you know, you should probably
better ask him about it – I think he will tell you that he, too, is confident of it. But when he
and I talked I saw that he, too, started having doubts. At any rate, that's how I saw it."
As I noted in a
Jan. 20 article about Obama's news conference two days earlier, "Did President Barack Obama acknowledge
that the extraordinary propaganda campaign to blame Russia for helping Donald Trump become president
has a very big hole in it, i.e., that the US intelligence community has no idea how the Democratic
emails reached WikiLeaks? For weeks, eloquent obfuscation – expressed with 'high confidence' – has
been the name of the game, but inadvertent admissions now are dispelling some of the clouds.
"At President Obama's Jan. 18 press conference, he admitted as much: 'the conclusions of the intelligence
community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting
or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked .'" [Emphasis
added]
Explaining the Technology
More importantly, Putin in his interview with Kelly points out that "today's technology" enables
hacking to be "masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can understand the origin" of the
hack. "And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or any individual that everyone will
think that they are the exact source of that attack. Modern technology is very sophisticated and
subtle and allows this to be done. And when we realize that we will get rid of all the illusions.
"
Later, when Kelly came back to the issue of hacking, Putin expanded on the difficulty in tracing
the source of cyber attacks.
"Hackers may be anywhere," Putin said. "There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States
who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine such a scenario?
In the middle of an internal political fight, it was convenient for them, whatever the reason, to
put out that information. And put it out they did. And, doing it, they made a reference to Russia.
Can't you imagine it happening? I can.
"Let us recall the assassination of President Kennedy. There is a theory that Kennedy's assassination
was arranged by the United States special services. If this theory is correct, and one cannot rule
it out, so what can be easier in today's context, being able to rely on the entire technical capabilities
available to special services than to organize some kind of attacks in the appropriate manner while
making a reference to Russia in the process. "
Kelly: "Let's move on."
However carefully Megyn Kelly and her NBC colleagues peruse The New York Times, they might well
not know WikiLeaks' disclosure on March 31 of original CIA documents showing that the agency had
created a program allowing it to break into computers and servers and make it look like others did
it by leaving telltale signs (like Cyrillic markings, for example).
The capabilities shown in what WikiLeaks calls the
"Vault 7" trove of CIA documents required
the creation of hundreds of millions of lines of source code. At $25 per line of code, that amounts
to about $2.5 billion for each 100 million code lines. But the Deep State has that kind of money
and would probably consider the expenditure a good return on investment for "proving" the Russians
hacked into Democratic Party emails.
In other words, it is altogether possible that the hacking attributed to Russia was actually
one of several "active measures" undertaken by a cabal consisting of the CIA, FBI, NSA and Clapper
– the same agencies responsible for the lame, evidence-free report of Jan. 6, that Clapper and Brennan
acknowledged last month was not the consensus view of the 17 intelligence agencies.
There is also the issue of the forensics. Former FBI Director James Comey displayed considerable
discomfort on March 20, explaining to the House Intelligence Committee why the FBI did not insist
on getting physical access to the Democratic National Committee's computers in order to do its own
proper forensics, but chose to rely on the examination done by the DNC's private contractor, Crowdstrike.
The firm itself has conflicts of interests in its links to the pro-NATO and anti-Russia think
tank, the Atlantic Council, through Dmitri Alperovitch, who is an Atlantic Council
senior fellow and the
co-founder of Crowdstrike.
Strange Oversight
Given the stakes involved in the Russia-gate investigation – now including a possible impeachment
battle over removing the President of the United States – wouldn't it seem logical for the FBI to
insist on its own forensics for this fundamental predicate of the case? Or could Comey's hesitancy
to demand access to the DNC's computers be explained by a fear that FBI technicians not fully briefed
on CIA/NSA/FBI Deep State programs might uncover a lot more than he wanted?
Comey was asked again about this curious oversight on June 8 by Senate Intelligence Committee
Chair Richard Burr:
BURR: "And the FBI, in this case, unlike other cases that you might investigate – did you ever
have access to the actual hardware that was hacked? Or did you have to rely on a third party to provide
you the data that they had collected?"
COMEY: "In the case of the DNC, and, I believe, the DCCC, but I'm sure the DNC, we did not have
access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class
entity, that had done the work. But we didn't get direct access."
BURR: "But no content?"
COMEY: "Correct."
BURR: "Isn't content an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?"
COMEY: "It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks – the people who were my folks at the
time is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand
the intrusion by the spring of 2016."
Burr demurred on asking Comey to explain what amounts to gross misfeasance, if not worse. Perhaps,
NBC could arrange for Megyn Kelly to interview Burr to ask if he has a clue as to what Putin might
have been referring to when he noted, "There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States who
very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia."
Given the congressional intelligence "oversight" committees' obsequiousness and repeated "high
esteem" for the "intelligence community," there seems an even chance that – no doubt because of an
oversight – the CIA/FBI/NSA deep-stage troika failed to brief the Senate "oversight committee" chairman
on WikiLeaks "Vault 7" disclosures – even when WikiLeaks publishes original CIA documents.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour
in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and CIA analyst for a total
of 30 years and now servers on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS). Reprinted with permission from Consortium
News .
"... Targeting telco and ISP systems administrators goes well outside the bounds of "national security."
These people aren't suspected terrorists. They're just people inconveniently placed between the NSA
and its goal of " collecting it all ." ..."
"... The NSA's own documents say that QUANTUMHAND "exploits the computer of a target that uses Facebook."
The man-on-the-side attack impersonates a server , not the site itself. The NSA denies impersonating,
but that's not what The Intercept said or what its own documents state. This animated explanation, using
the NSA's Powerpoint presentation, shows what the attack does -- it tips the TURBINE servers, which
then send the malware payload before the Facebook servers can respond. ..."
"... To the end user, it looks as though Facebook is just running slowly. ..."
"... When the NSA says it doesn't impersonate sites, it truly doesn't. It injects malware by beating
Facebook server response time. It doesn't serve up faux Facebook pages; it simply grabs the files and
data from compromised computers. ..."
"... The exploit is almost wholly divorced from Facebook itself. The social media site is an opportunity
for malware deployment, and the NSA doesn't need to impersonate a site to achieve its aims. This is
the NSA maintaining deniability in the face of damning allegations -- claiming something was said that
actually wasn't and resorting to (ultimately futile) attempts to portray journalists as somehow less
trustworthy than the agency. ..."
"... At this point, the mere fact that the NSA denies doing something is almost enough to convince
me that they are doing it. I'm trying not to be paranoid. They just make it so difficult. ..."
"... considering how much access they seemed to have I think it is entirely possible for them to
do that. And the criminal energy to do it definitely there as well. ..."
"... And there is still the question if Facebook and similar sites might be at least funded, if
not run by intelligence agencies altogether. If that is the case that would put this denial in an entirely
different light. It would read "We don't impersonate companies. We ARE the companies."... ..."
"... Max level sophistry. I wonder if anyone at the NSA even remembers what the truth is, it's been
coated in so many layers of bullshit. ..."
"... As for its "national security directive," it made a mockery of that when it proudly announced
in its documents that "we hunt sys admins." ..."
The recent leaks published at Glenn Greenwald's new home, The Intercept, detailed the NSA's
spread of malware around the world, with a stated goal of sabotaging "millions" of computers.
As was noted then, the NSA hadn't issued a comment. The GCHQ, named as a co-conspirator, had already
commented, delivering the usual spiel about legality, oversight and directives -- a word salad that
has pretty much replaced "no comment" in the intelligence world.
The NSA has now issued a formal statement on the leaks, denying everything -- including something
that wasn't even alleged. In what has become the new "no comment" on the NSA side, the words "appropriate,"
"lawful" and "legitimate" are trotted out, along with the now de rigueur accusations that everything
printed (including, apparently, its own internal documents) is false.
Recent media reports that allege NSA has infected millions of computers around the world with
malware, and that NSA is impersonating U.S. social media or other websites, are inaccurate. NSA
uses its technical capabilities only to support lawful and appropriate foreign intelligence operations,
all of which must be carried out in strict accordance with its authorities. Technical capability
must be understood within the legal, policy, and operational context within which the capability
must be employed.
First off, for the NSA to claim that loading up "millions" of computers with malware is somehow targeted
(and not "indiscriminate") is laughable. As for its "national security directive," it made a mockery
of that when it proudly announced in its documents that "we hunt sys admins."
Targeting telco and ISP systems administrators goes well outside the bounds of "national security."
These people aren't suspected terrorists. They're just people inconveniently placed between the NSA
and its goal of "
collecting it all ."
Last, but not least, the NSA plays semantic games to deny an accusation that was never made, calling
to mind Clapper's denial of a
conveniently horrendous translation of a French article on its spying efforts there.
NSA does not use its technical capabilities to impersonate U.S. company websites.
This "denial" refers to this portion of The Intercept's article.
In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site
as a launching pad to infect a target's computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive... In
one man-on-the-side technique, codenamed QUANTUMHAND, the agency disguises itself as a fake Facebook
server. When a target attempts to log in to the social media site, the NSA transmits malicious
data packets that trick the target's computer into thinking they are being sent from the real
Facebook. By concealing its malware within what looks like an ordinary Facebook page, the NSA
is able to hack into the targeted computer and covertly siphon out data from its hard drive.
The NSA's own documents say that QUANTUMHAND "exploits the computer of a target that uses Facebook."
The man-on-the-side attack impersonates a server , not the site itself.
The NSA denies impersonating, but that's not what The Intercept said or what its own documents
state. This animated explanation, using the NSA's Powerpoint presentation, shows what the attack
does -- it tips the TURBINE servers, which then send the malware payload before the Facebook servers
can respond.
To the end user, it looks as though Facebook is just running slowly.
When the NSA says it doesn't impersonate sites, it truly doesn't. It injects malware by beating
Facebook server response time. It doesn't serve up faux Facebook pages; it simply grabs the files
and data from compromised computers.
The exploit is almost wholly divorced from Facebook itself. The social media site is an opportunity
for malware deployment, and the NSA doesn't need to impersonate a site to achieve its aims. This
is the NSA maintaining deniability in the face of damning allegations -- claiming something was said
that actually wasn't and resorting to (ultimately futile) attempts to portray journalists as somehow
less trustworthy than the agency.
NSA does not use its technical capabilities to impersonate U.S. company websites.
At this point, the mere fact that the NSA denies doing something is almost enough to convince
me that they are doing it. I'm trying not to be paranoid. They just make it so difficult.
Anonymous Coward , 14 Mar 2014 @ 9:48am
Re: Denial = Confirmation?
considering how much access they seemed to have I think it is entirely possible for them
to do that. And the criminal energy to do it definitely there as well.
By now you have to assume the worst when it comes to them, and once the truth comes out it
tends to paint and even worse picture then what you could imagine.
And there is still the question if Facebook and similar sites might be at least funded,
if not run by intelligence agencies altogether. If that is the case that would put this denial
in an entirely different light. It would read "We don't impersonate companies. We ARE the companies."...
I can not stress this poster's sentiment, as well as voiced in the article itself, of the CHILDISH
semantic games the alphabet spooks will play... they WILL (metaphorically speaking) look you straight
in the eye, piss on your leg, and INSIST it is raining; THEN fabricate evidence to 'prove' it
was rain...
In my readings about the evil done in our name, with our money, *supposedly* to 'protect and
serve' us, by the boys in black, you can NOT UNDERESTIMATE the most simplistic, and -to repeat
myself -- CHILDISH ways they will LIE AND DISSEMBLE...
They are scum, they are slime, they are NOT the best and the brightest, they are the worst
and most immoral...
YOU CAN NOT OVERSTATE THEIR MORAL VACUITY...
we do NOT deserve these pieces of shit...
Anonymous Coward , 14 Mar 2014 @ 11:17am
We know that the NSA, with the cooperation of the companies involved, has equipment co-located
at major backbones and POPs to achieve the goals for QUANTUMHAND, QUANTUMINSERT, and etc.
At what point will we start confronting these companies and pressuring them to discontinue
such cooperation? I know it's no easy task, but just as much as the government is reeling from
all the public pressure, so too will these companies if we press their hands. Make it affect their
bottom line.
Anonymous Coward , 14 Mar 2014 @ 1:49pm
is techdirt an hack target?
this page of your site tries to run scripts from
google
amazonaws
twitter
facebook
ajax.googleapis
techdirt
and install cookies from
techdirt
imigur
and request resources from
rp-api
vimeo
and install/use tracking beacons from
facebook connect
google +1
gravitar
nativo
quantcast
redit
repost.us
scorecard research beacon
twitter button.
...and who knows what else would run if all that was allowed to proceed. (I'm not going to
run them to find out the 2nd level stuff)
for all the great reporting techdirt does on spying/tracking/privacy- you need to get you shit
together already with this site; it seams like you're part of the problem. Please explain the
technical facts as to why these same types of hacks couldn't be done to your readers through this
clusterfuck of off site scripts/beacons/cookies/resources your forcing on people to ignorant to
know how to block them.
As for its "national security directive," it made a mockery of that when it proudly
announced in its documents that "we hunt sys admins."
Well, heck, that's easy. Since the computers of the sys admins are just means to an ends, simply
define "target" in a way that excludes anyone whose computers are compromised as a means to an
end.
Anonymous mouse , 14 Mar 2014 @ 1:56pm
I seem to remember some articles about why people who don't use Facebook are suspect. To wit,
Are these possible signs that the NSA and GHCQ planted those stories?
Anonymous Coward , 14 Mar 2014 @ 3:49pm
The fun has yet to really begin
On April 8th, this year, Microsoft will stop installing new security patches from Windows XP,
leaving computers running it totally vulnerable to such hacks. Anybody want to place bets on the
fact that the alphabet soup agencies of our wonderful gummint are going to be first in line to
exploit them? Just think what NSA could do with 300,000,000+ computers to play with!
"... I'm sure the number of American's spied upon is pretty damning and might actually cause some blowback (especially if it's 90-100% of the population as I suspect), which could put its use in jeopardy. ..."
"... the Postal Service has confirmed that it takes a photograph of the outside of every letter and package mailed in the United States and occasionally provides the photos to law enforcement agencies. ..."
"... It's obvious that they somehow accessed nearly all communications of Americans at one point or another. Even if technically they didn't look at much of the data. ..."
Then, yesterday, there was a public Senate Intelligence Committee hearing over the issue of the 702
renewal. While most of the press is focused on the
refusal of those testifying to say whether President Trump had spoken to them about various investigations
concerning Russia, there was something else concerning that was brought up. Coats, despite his earlier
promises and the promises of his office, is now saying that it would be impossible to give a number.
Not surprisingly, for the folks in Congress who have been insisting on getting this number (and
giving it to the public), this... did not sit well. When it was Senator Wyden's turn to question
the panel, he
went off on Coats for going back on his word.
This morning you went back on that promise and you said that even putting together a sampling,
a statistical estimate, would jeopardize national security. I think that is a very, very damaging
position to stake out.
Later in that exchange, there was this exchange (which, if you watch it, involved both men being
fairly testy with each other):
Wyden: Can the government use FISA 702 to collect communications it knows are entirely domestic?
Coats: Not to my knowledge. It would be against the law.
As Marcy Wheeler points out, that exchange may prove to be similar to Wyden's now infamous question
to Coats' predecessor, Clapper, about whether or not the NSA collected information on millions of
Americans (the "not wittingly" response, which was later shown to be completely bogus). Wheeler points
out that for Coats to actually believe that, it would appear that
he doesn't know how 702 is actually used , even though he signed a memo about this very thing.
Wheeler points to the recent FISC opinion reauthorizing 702 data collection that states that if the
Director of the NSA signs a waiver for all of the domestic collections, then the NSA can still collect
a wholly domestic communication under 702. That FISC opinion cites a March 30th memo that Coats would
have signed as the justification for this argument. So for him to now say that it's illegal for the
very thing his own memo from March says is okay... seems like a serious problem.
And Wyden's not the only one upset about this. Since this was a Senate hearing, Rep. Conyers wasn't
there, but he put out a
blistering statement calling Coats' statements "unacceptable."
The intelligence community has-for many months-expressly promised members of both parties
that they would deliver this estimate to us in time to inform our debate on the reauthorization
of Section 702. As late as last August, we had discussed and approved the specific methodologies
that the NSA might use to make good on their promise.
Today, Director Coats announced that the estimate is 'infeasible' and will not be forthcoming.
I find that outcome unacceptable.
Over the course of the last year, we believed we had worked past the excuses we are offered
today. The nation's leading civil liberties organizations see no threat to privacy in this project,
and have said so publicly. The agencies demonstrated to us how they might perform this analysis
without significant diversion of resources. I am deeply disappointed in a return to these old
talking points.
Section 702 is built on trust. It will be more difficult to find that trust as we move forward
with the debate.
As we discussed earlier this week, a bunch of Senators have already been pushing a
permanent renewal of 702 with no changes at all. As the debate heats up on the renewal of Section
702 ahead of its expiration later this year, we're going to need Congress to hold the intelligence
community to its promise to reveal at least some data on how these programs impact Americans'
communications.
Until these Senators start actually holding these guys accountable and not renew their authority
of Section 702, these hearings are just bluster. I like Wyden and what he's doing (it seems single
handedly), but unfortunately it doesn't mean much to the NSA. Withholding the information won't
change any politicians views of it and its 'necessity', so they might as well err on the side
of caution.
I'm sure the number of American's spied upon is pretty damning and might actually
cause some blowback (especially if it's 90-100% of the population as I suspect), which could put
its use in jeopardy.
Plus those who don't use electronic-based forms of communication, but who have friends and
relatives who do, and who mention them in emails and on Facebook.
Also those who pay their grocery bills with a credit or debit card. Purchase history is occasionally
requested by police.
Also people not into ebooks, but who check out books from the library.
Don't forget travel details, for those who cross a border. Or fly. Or pay for gas and meals
with a credit / debit card.
Or who use local transit. My city switched to electronic fare cards a few months ago. Naturally,
it was just revealed that the private travel history of bus riders is being handed to police without
requiring a warrant.
But hey, there's still non-electronic communication like snail mail. That hardly ever gets
opened. Although the Postal Service
has confirmed that it takes a photograph of the outside of every letter and package mailed
in the United States and occasionally provides the photos to law enforcement agencies.
James T , 8 Jun 2017 @ 10:44am
They can't
It's obvious that they somehow accessed nearly all communications of Americans at one
point or another. Even if technically they didn't look at much of the data.
If true then they certainly wouldn't want to say we spied on everyone. That would damage their
position which is that they are being responsible Intelligence agencies.
Anonymous Coward , 8 Jun 2017 @ 12:06pm
Infeasible to justify funding for an office that can't even justify itself
If the office cannot even compute a rough estimate, then it is either uncooperative or supremely
incompetent. In either case, it is infeasible to continue funding such an entity. Funding for
continued operation of the surveillance programs should be stripped until such time as it can
comply with simple oversight requirements.
A former U.S. intelligence contractor tells Circa he walked away with more than 600 million
classified documents on 47 hard drives from the National Security Agency and the CIA, a haul
potentially larger than Edward Snowden's now infamous breach.
And now he is suing former FBI Director James Comey and other government figures, alleging the
bureau has covered up evidence he provided them showing widespread spying on Americans that
violated civil liberties.
The suit, filed late Monday night by Dennis Montgomery, was assigned to the same federal judge
who has already ruled that some of the NSA's collection of data on Americans violates the U.S.
Constitution's Fourth Amendment, setting up an intriguing legal proceeding in the nation's
capital this summer.
Montgomery says the evidence he gave to the FBI chronicle the warrantless collection of phone,
financial and personal data and the unmasking of identities in spy data about millions of
Americans.
... ... ...
Montgomery alleges that more than 20 million American identities were illegally unmasked -
credit reports, emails, phone conversations and Internet traffic, were some of the items the NSA
and CIA collected.
He said he returned the hard drives to the FBI, a fact confirmed in government documents reviewed
by Circa.
"They're doing this domestic surveillance on Americans, running a project on U.S. soil,"
Montgomery alleged. He did not disclose the classified name of the project but said he revealed
all aspects of the project during his interview with the FBI.
"Can you imagine what someone can do with the information they were collecting on Americans, can
you imagine that kind of power."
Officials with the FBI and CIA declined to comment due to current and pending litigation.
... ... ...
The FBI contacts with Montgomery were encouraged by a senior status federal judge, who
encouraged the two sides to meet rather than allow for any of the classified materials to leak,
according to interviews Circa conducted.
Montgomery's lawsuit, which included his lawyer, the well-known conservative activist Larry
Klayman, alleges Montgomery provided extensive evidence to the FBI of illegal spying on Americans
ranging from judges to businessman like the future President Donald Trump.
The suit did not offer specifics of any illegal spying, but it accused the bureau of failing
to take proper actions to rectify Montgomery's concerns.
Montgomery divulged to the FBI a "pattern and practice of conducting illegal, unconstitutional
surveillance against millions of Americans, including prominent Americans such as the chief
justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen, and others
such as Donald J. Trump, as well as Plaintiffs themselves," Montgomery and Klayman alleged in
their suit.
"Plaintiffs were assured that the FBI, under Defendant Comey, would conduct a full
investigation into the grave instances of illegal and unconstitutional activity set forth by
Montgomery. However, the FBI, on Defendant Comey's orders, buried the FBI's investigation because
the FBI itself is involved in an ongoing conspiracy to not only conduct the aforementioned
illegal, unconstitutional surveillance, but to cover it up as well," the suit added.
Klayman and Montgomery also alleged that they have evidence that they themselves have been
improperly spied upon by U.S. intelligence. The suit named numerous other defendants as well,
including current NSA Director Mike Rogers, former CIA Director John Brennan and even former
President Barack Obama.
Looks more and more like psyop operation -- a part of a Neo-McCarthyism propaganda campaign.
Notable quotes:
"... So why even go out of your way to leak these supposedly worthless documents to the press in the first place? Who benefits? ..."
"... Deep state benefits - analysis(?) is leaked which show as you say no proof, but it keeps the anti-russia propaganda going for another month or so - just as the anti-trump deep state and media wants. Sigh. ..."
"... P.S if any of you get a chance try to catch the interview on RT where German journo, who is unfortunately dead, states categorically that CIA and his bosses would instruct him on what to write and how to write it. ..."
"... If Reality Leigh Winner goes to trial and receives serious prison time, then The Intercept was wrong, but until then I'll think she's a Clintonist useful idiot. ..."
"... That would be Udo Ulfkotte. He used to work for FAZ. You have to take into account that he tried to live from writing books after FAZ and conspiracy theories do sell. ..."
"... Greenwald and Poitras are now the only two people with full access to the complete cache of NSA files ... just Glenn and Laura at the for-profit journalism company created by the founder of eBay. ..."
"... CIA Agents Caught Red Handed Trolling Alternative Media Sites http://humansarefree.com/2017/06/cia-agents-caught-red-handed-trolling.html I think we talked about this years ago, in regards to Israeli paid trolls, but we've gone so far into the Panopticon control grid, what difference does it make. ..."
"... I also think, it is possible that Hillary Clinton and Putin had a very personal not so private war after Hillary announced that she would do everything to prevent a realignment of Post Soviet States. And employing Victoria Nuland to achieve just that. ..."
"... ...which of course how psyops works. Because this leak will fuel more of the Trump/Russian conspiracies and hatred in the MSM. ..."
"... Are you from one of those USG "perception management" projects? Well, if you are, American taxpayers should be pissed off if this is all the "best and brightest" can come up with. The USG IC has an annual budget of $65 billion so if this is a black op., they have more than enough money to be able to afford the arrest of the "leaker" and even pay for her to get decently lawyered up. ..."
"... This whole episode smacks of a psy-op to me. If - and this is a big if - the Russians did hack into any voting systems, I'd be more willing to believe it was to collect evidence of malfeasance on the part of our own government than it would have been to manipulate the results themselves. ..."
"... Important to note is that Putin just mentioned in his interview with Megyn Kelly that it doesn't matter who's president of the United States because no matter what, the policy remains the same. That's a pretty direct indictment of the integrity of US elections, so what better time to up the ante with respect to the obvious lies about Russian interference in our elections than right after Putin calls our elections Kabuki theater? ..."
"... Well for one she is not a whistleblower, she is another anti-Trump neocon working for the deep state. She I believe leaked material just to attack Trump and Russia even more with info, as we have seen so many times now past months. She nor we as readers have any idea if there is any truth to the claim to start with. So why leak it? Well obviously, like past months, some groups in our society benefit from this greatly. ..."
"... I haven't trusted The Intercept since they ran their hit piece on Tulsi Gabbard. ..."
"... Ghostship. True enough. But knowing it is still different from effectively dealing with it. The elite/CIA controlled mass media still has a lot of power to persuade people as do the corporations that finance political elections. As well as the people who make money from arms sales. These people who may be loosely referred to as 'deep state' don't want to give up any of that power/money. ..."
"... She follows a neocon agenda (war against afghanistan, war against Syria, hatered against Russia, hatred against foreign policy that Trump have i.e), she works for the deep state, she leak deep state material to smear her "enemies". ..."
"... Who are those who spread this bs to the MSM about Trump and Russia constantly for past months? Where does it come from if not from the deep state groups? ..."
"... Omidyar being behind the Intercept has always been an iffy proposition at best, and it has never sat well that Greenwald is apparently satisfied with such an arrangement. ..."
"... And you just know Mark Ames will have a piece up bashing Omidyar, Greenwald and Scahill. Speaking of Scahill, other than a weekly podcast, what exactly does he do for the Intercept? ..."
"... Greenwald is a self-serving hack and the Intercept functions alongside outlets like DemocracyNow! to provide a Democrat-friendly perspective on the world to people who think they are very "progressive". They will never challenge the fundamental precepts of US imperialism and the oligarchic powers behind it, or truly rock the boat. ..."
"... There's a chance they got played. As noted, the documents don't actual show evidence of actual interference with voting system beyond data gathering. ..."
"... Alternatively, the document was prepared in such a way that it was actually politically harmless but it could snare the leaker who would be triumphantly and publicly "executed". That can improve the discipline in the shop. ..."
"... This is silly nonsense. There is no difference at all between the neocons and the neolibs (the neolords). They come from exactly the same place and believe in exactly the same thing. Specifically, they are atychiphobs; they cannot endure any form of failure. So they always must attach themselves to whatever they perceive as the winning side. And ultimately rule the rest of the losing world. For them that's all there is; Hillary is an example, and most rich individuals also. They would absolutely prefer death to loserdom. So of course they have no concerns at all about the fate of the losers. They are all the same. ..."
"... Sounds like a con job from start to finish. Along the lines of bellingcat, SOHR ect. Just another method of disseminating propaganda. ..."
"... this whole thing is such a circus! and yes, the NSA has access to far more info than these stupid documents allude to, not to mention that the US has got to have some massive access to Russian data. ..."
"... I should add: If Putin were directly responsible for hacking anything, Clinton should kiss Putin's who-cares-what for waiting until AFTER the primaries. She got to be part of the final coin-toss. ..."
"... really, why is this NSA document even considered whistle-blowing? ..."
"... Setting aside the antics of the Intercept, let's consider how preposterous this story is at face value. She's basically a translator for a few Middle Eastern languages. So she's reading email or web sites or listening to phone calls and doing her translating thing. It's not like she's a high-level analyst preparing briefings for the National Intelligence director - she's a damn low-level translator (no offense to NSA translators out there). ..."
"... If Winner DID manage to stumble upon a Top Secret memo on her work network unrelated to her job, then her supervisor would have known it within minutes. Everything anybody does is constantly monitored and logged, right down to the keystroke. SHE would know that. In fact, she would be fired for not reporting this impossible access to top secret information immediately. She would be further punished for even having the document linger on her screen for more than a second or two. There's a reason they put TOP SECRET at the very top of every page. Classified documents also have their own security/surveillance/monitoring mechanisms. The document itself (or the document management system) knows or is told who is allowed to read it or even see that it exists. It would record her access, even if all the other security and monitoring software the agency had failed completely. So you get the idea. Even if she saw this document (unlikely) and did NOT report the inappropriate access, she would eventually be frog-walked out of the building before the end of the day. ..."
"... Top Secret documents (and their networks) do not allow you to print them at all, and certainly not on some random office printer. ..."
"... All modern printers and copy machines have an invisible watermark that identifies the time/date you printed a page and the serial number of the machine. If she copied it somewhere, then they copy can be traced to a certain machine and date/time. She's busted either way if the feds got their hands on it, and SHE KNOWS THAT. ..."
"... Sorry - but unless someone can prove she has an extra chromosome or two, I have to believe this is a charade. She won't go to jail because she's in on it with the NSA and it's not a real Top Secret document anyway. NO intelligence agency will ever verify or deny something you show them is either legitimate or Top Secret, so even that part is wrong. If you call them to ask about a document you have, they will politely put you on hold so they can dispatch some DHS thugs to kick in your door and retrieve said document - without telling you anything either way. ..."
"... I tend to agree with the hint, hint - #RealityWinner is an obvious PsyOp. Her employer probably had a deal for her - agree to be "used", play the part in a little prosecution game we'll have going, make sure you leak to Cook - and don't worry, you'll be well rewarded in the end. ..."
"... The timing of this leak and the choice of media outlet is very convenient for the Establishment Dems/Deep State Russia investigation. Leaking to the Intercept, which has credibility in the alternative media, would be a convenient way to get the story covered in the MSM and leftist media. It certainly helps to distract Berners from the Seth Rich story. Some interns at the Intercept did a sloppy job checking up on their source. ..."
"... thank you for this. i left a comment on that article yesterday about how dumb the technical aspects were and apparently you noticed as well (i also mentioned stuxnet as an example of what an effective and professional attack would actually look like). ..."
"... as i also mentioned: hillary won durham by a WIDE margin (almost 100k votes). seems like any "hacking" worked to her advantage, not trump's. ..."
"... i've been reading douglas valentine's book on the phoenix program and other CIA criminality https://www.amazon.com/CIA-Organized-Crime-Illegal-Operations/dp/0997287012 ..."
"... It looks like a real half-arsed psyops -- here is the "Russia did it" smoking gun we've all been waiting for and it gets sorta rolled out but not trumpeted hysterically. Why the Intercept? Why not the NYtimes or wapo? ..."
"... It's becoming more difficult daily to find something that doesn't stink. I see it as an attempt to further bury the censored NBC interview with Putin where he explained several hard truths, one of which I alluded to yesterday. Compare vid here, http://www.fort-russ.com/2017/06/nbc-edited-out-putins-hard-truths-heres.html with uncensored one here, which includes transcript, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/54688 ..."
Yesterday The Intercept
published a leaked five page NSA analysis about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S.
elections. Its reporting outed the leaker of the NSA documents. That person, R.L. Winner, has now
been arrested and is likely to be jailed for years if not for the rest of her life.
FBI
search (pdf) and
arrest warrant
(pdf) applications unveil irresponsible behavior by the Intercept 's reporters and editors
which neglected all operational security trade-craft that might have prevented the revealing of the
source. It leaves one scratching the head if this was intentional or just sheer incompetence. Either
way - the incident confirms what
skeptics had long determined : The Intercept is not a trustworthy outlet for leaking
state secrets of public interests.
The Intercept was created
to privatize the National
Security Agency documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The documents proved that
the NSA is hacking and copying nearly all electronic communication on this planet, that it was breaking
laws that prohibited spying on U.S. citizen and that it sabotages on a large scale various kinds
of commercial electronic equipment. Snowden gave copies of the NSA documents to a small number of
journalists. One of them was Glenn Greenwald who now works at The Intercept . Only some
5% of the pages Snowden allegedly acquired and gave to reporters have been published. We have no
idea what the unpublished pages would provide.
The Intercept , a subdivision of First Look Media, was founded by Pierre Omidyar, a major
owner of the auctioning site eBay and its PayPal banking division. Omidyar is a billionaire and "philanthropist"
who's (tax avoiding) Omidyar Network foundation
is "investing" for "returns". Its microcredit project for farmers in India, in cooperation with people
from the fascists RSS party,
ended in an epidemic of suicides when the farmers were unable to pay back. The Omidyar Network
also funded (fascist) regime change groups in Ukraine in cooperation with USAID. Omidyar had
cozy relations with the Obama White House. Some of the held back NSA documents likely
implicate Omidyar's PayPal.
The Intercept was funded with some $50 million from Omidyar. It
first hires were Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras - all involved in publishing the
Snowden papers and other leaks. Its first piece was based on documents from the leaked the NSA stack.
It has since published on this or that but not in a regular media way. The Intercept pieces
are usually heavily editorialized and tend to have a mainstream "liberal" to libertarian slant. Some
were highly partisan
anti-Syrian/pro-regime change propaganda . The website
seems to have no regular publishing schedule
at all. Between one and five piece per day get pushed out, only few of them make public waves. Some
of its later prominent hires (Ken Silverstein, Matt Taibbi) soon left and
alleged that the place was run in a chaotic atmosphere and with improper and highly politicized
editing. Despite its rich backing and allegedly high pay for its main journalists (Greenwald is said
to receive between 250k and 1 million per year) the Intercept is
begging for
reader donations .
Yesterday's published story (with bylines of four(!) reporters)
begins :
Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier
and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last
November's presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained
by The Intercept.
The NSA "intelligence report" the Intercept
publishes along the piece does NOT show that "Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack
". The document speaks of "cyber espionage operations " - i.e someone looked and maybe copied
data but did not manipulate anything. Espionage via computer networks is something every nation in
this world (and various private entities) do all the time. It is simply the collection of information.
It is different from a "cyberattack" like
Stuxnet which was intended to
create large damage,
That girl's social media accounts is filled with neocon propaganda and anti-Trump posts. Intercept
is really really stupid for spreading this deepstate pro-war desinformation.
Wikileaks twitter account has good comment on it. It is clear that The Intercept is a way to coopt
hackers and leakers. She possibly would not have been arrested with Democrats in power. The New
York Times and the Intercept have a campaign to leak to US sources so that whistleblowing is not
treason.
I take it that there's not even the slightest or far reaching bit of evidence at all in the leaked
documents that implicates Russia (or the US government) of any mischief.
So why even go out of your way to leak these supposedly worthless documents to the press
in the first place? Who benefits?
Deep state benefits - analysis(?) is leaked which show as you say no proof, but it keeps
the anti-russia propaganda going for another month or so - just as the anti-trump deep state and
media wants. Sigh.
Thanks for this. Even before reading this account, I was inclined to think "fake news" because
the Deep State is such a prolific and relentless generator of propaganda. And also, I think we're
pretty much screwed regardless of who is in power. My only hope is that it all doesn't end up
in mushroom-clouds.
It was obvious that The Intercept became a US Inteligence Industry pawn the minute it started
to denounce Al Assad on 2016. It was too good to be true from the beginning. Snowden should say
something about "his friends" Greenwald and Poitras !! As far as it is descrived in the above
article, the R J Winner affaire could be just another Psy Op by the Langley People
Its interesting how Assange and Wikileaks support this deep-state leaker. Why?
Assange supports all leakers, regardless of what they leak or to whom. Any other stance would
amount to shooting himself in the foot.
On another note, what is extraordinary is to see a Deep State leaker busted by the Deep State.
How batty is that? I mean, she was only trying to help them against "big bad Russia", wasn't she?
So?
Yes the intercept gave them self away when Greenwald wrote a piece denouncing the Syrian government
and the SAA back in 2015. He occasionally has sane and progressive expressions like when he speaks
against the fascist state of Israel. He gave himself away again on the propaganda outlet Democracy
now. He was eluding to the fact of Russian collusion with the recent POTUS elections and the Flyn
fiasco. Here again he gave himself away. He is bought and paid for by the elite like most journo's
in our deluded western countries.
P.S if any of you get a chance try to catch the interview on RT where German journo, who
is unfortunately dead, states categorically that CIA and his bosses would instruct him on what
to write and how to write it.
although a fan of the intercept at first, i soured when they announced they were spying on
their readership. never trust a billionaire. betrayal is the only route to billionaire status.
greenwald and poitras at the oscars turned my stomach. not a word about chelsea manning
or any of the others ... greenwald and poitras were the 'stars'.
now, no matter this winner is a loser or no, they've betrayed another one of the people
who've put them where they are. they're cannibals.
since i stopped reading the intercept i was unaware of their support for al-cia-duh and
the jihadists in syria. that just stinks.
Maybe someone at The Intercept thought this was an attempt by the NSA (not the "deep state, there
isn't one") to burn them, so they toss the document back at the NSA to see what happens.
Why The Intercept? If you read most Clintonist blogs, you'll quickly realise that Greenwald
is up there with Assange and Putin as satanic (Trumpist) agents, so an Internet-aware Clintonist
sending documents to The Intercept or Wikileaks suggests some other purpose than simply leaking
information adverse to Trump.
Most Clintonists have jumped on this NSA "document" as further solid proof of Putin's culpability
which just happened to be "leaked" at about the same time a favourable interview with Putin was
being broadcast on the MSM.
If Reality Leigh Winner goes to trial and receives serious prison time, then The Intercept
was wrong, but until then I'll think she's a Clintonist useful idiot.
Actually Wikileaks/Assange have no idea if this info is even true. Who leaks this? Well obviously
the same propagandists we heard past 6 months that want the world to think Russia and Trump won
the election/the pathetic accusation that Russia somehow ruled the election to Trump. As far as
we know the leaks could not only lack evidence but it could also be pure fake. So no, I dont see
why Wikileaks and Assange would support this. But thats me.
Posted by: falcemartello | Jun 6, 2017 7:51:05 AM | 14
That would be Udo Ulfkotte. He used to work for FAZ. You have to take into account that
he tried to live from writing books after FAZ and conspiracy theories do sell.
Of course everybody the US, Russia, Qatar, companies have a PR greyzone trying to influence
public opinion.
Posted by: Ghostship | Jun 6, 2017 7:55:51 AM | 16
Read the @intercept they even agreed with the NSA to redact the stuff. The solution is obvious
but I don't hear anybody calling for it: Paper ballots. It is simple, works and is fast if you
have a good counting system in place. Lots of countries still use it.
Accepting that leakers could be fake would destroy the business model. But no, if it was fake
they would not go the extra effort to arrest a leaker who will be supplied good lawyers, I suppose.
Greenwald and Poitras are now the only two people with full access to the complete cache
of NSA files ... just Glenn and Laura at the for-profit journalism company created by the founder
of eBay.
Whistleblowing has traditionally served the public interest. In this case, it is about to serve
the interests of a billionaire starting a for-profit media business venture. This is truly unprecedented.
Never before has such a vast trove of public secrets been sold wholesale to a single billionaire
as the foundation of a for-profit company.
and who sold them? not edward snowden ... he gave them away ... to the two 'operators' who
sold them to omidyar.
after death, devastation, and destruction outright ... deceit it the usofa's main growth industry.
and hey, 'progressives' can do it too! and still huff and puff themselves up - among their temporary,
transactional 'friends' anyway - with righteousness indignation.
Thats whats called desinformation or psyops., you already for example seems claim that this
is true facts that have been leaked, but we dont know that. Or do you actually believe the
whole Russia-Trump-hacking-claims we heard past months?
It is a document about what someone in the NSA believes , it is completely meaningless.
Greenwald and Scahill are kind of distancing themselves from the article. The document is just
enough to cause headlines that convince trusting people that Russia hacked the election. Arresting
the leaker makes sure everybody heard about it. Who wrote it by the way
Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Sam Biddle, Ryan Grim
They need 4 people to publish a document and burn a source?
I assume Russia has a cyber capacity in its defense portfolio, like everybody else.
The most likely scenario is Hillary Clinton and Julian Assange having a very personal private
war after the state department leaks. I also think, it is possible that Hillary Clinton and
Putin had a very personal not so private war after Hillary announced that she would do everything
to prevent a realignment of Post Soviet States. And employing Victoria Nuland to achieve just
that.
What do politicians in the US think - that they can attack without anybody trying to hit back?
>>>>> Posted by: somebody | Jun 6, 2017 8:08:44 AM | 19
Posted by: Ghostship | Jun 6, 2017 7:55:51 AM | 16
Read the @intercept they even agreed with the NSA to redact the stuff.
Well that's a big fat F in Black Ops 101 for you.
The Intercept just returns the document to the NSA - end of.
The Intercept asks the NSA to review and redact the document - it keeps going. Returning the
received document rather than a re-typed one might raise questions within the NSA but could be
put down to operator error at The Intercept but re-typed documents would get The Intercept no
further in working out what's actually happening.
I'm not sure if this is what is happening but the whole thing is weird.
Posted by: somebody | Jun 6, 2017 8:11:10 AM | 20
But no, if it was fake they would not go the extra effort to arrest a leaker who will be supplied
good lawyers, I suppose.
Are you from one of those USG "perception management" projects? Well, if you are, American
taxpayers should be pissed off if this is all the "best and brightest" can come up with. The USG
IC has an annual budget of $65 billion so if this is a black op., they have more than enough money
to be able to afford the arrest of the "leaker" and even pay for her to get decently lawyered
up.
But that's not what's really important here. WikiLeaks and Assange say they have no responsibility
for the content they leak, and that no one has evidence that the sources of the DNC leak are
Russian. But these leaks and tweets damage WikiLeaks' credibility. If they're not scrutinizing
their own leaks on the base level of their content, it's not hard to imagine that WikiLeaks
could unwittingly become part of someone else's agenda (like, say, a Russian one). "If you
are a legitimate leaker, why go with WikiLeaks? You go with The Intercept or the New York Times,
like they did with the Panama Papers" says Nicholas Weaver, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley
who studies the organization. "Wikileaks is a pastebin for spooks, and they're happy to be
used that way."
One would think that all parties would be interested in this news. The Dems, of course, want to
make Russian links. But doesn't Trump want to use this to prove his theory that the popular vote
was wrong? Let's not turn this into a game where everyone interprets things based on ideology.
The whole dang point is that someone was trying to infiltrate our voting system. Maybe they failed,
maybe it was just a reconnaissance mission, but it happened. That is news.
Moon is obviously showing extreme bias. Instead of trying to figure out and analyze the implications
he uses this as a way to score points. Points against the Intercept. Points against the Dems,
and so on. How tiring.
This whole episode smacks of a psy-op to me. If - and this is a big if - the Russians did
hack into any voting systems, I'd be more willing to believe it was to collect evidence of malfeasance
on the part of our own government than it would have been to manipulate the results themselves.
Important to note is that Putin just mentioned in his interview with Megyn Kelly that it
doesn't matter who's president of the United States because no matter what, the policy remains
the same. That's a pretty direct indictment of the integrity of US elections, so what better time
to up the ante with respect to the obvious lies about Russian interference in our elections than
right after Putin calls our elections Kabuki theater?
More diversion folks. The real elephant in the room is the U$A electoral system. It's rotten to
it's core. Regardless of ANY information coming from ANY source, the corporate overlords OWN the
voting systems at the national level here in the U$A. SO, we here in the U$A, can believe whoever
we want to, but, our votes, at least at national level, are meaningless.
P.S- Read around folks, but, watch what people do, not what the say.
Well for one she is not a whistleblower, she is another anti-Trump neocon working for the
deep state. She I believe leaked material just to attack Trump and Russia even more with info,
as we have seen so many times now past months. She nor we as readers have any idea if there is
any truth to the claim to start with. So why leak it? Well obviously, like past months, some groups
in our society benefit from this greatly.
The article even says that NO EVIDENCE has been presented: "While the document provides rare window
into the NSA's understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying
"raw" intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to
be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the documentbecause a single
analysis is not necessarily definitive."
she is another anti-Trump neocon working for the deep state
Three points:
1. She is not a neo-con, she's a neo-lib/liberal interventionist/R2P liberal/Clintonist. There
is a big difference between neo-cons and neo-libs/liberal interventionists/R2P liberals/Clintonists.
The neo-cons do it because they can, the latter, who are far more dangerous, do it "for the greater
good" although they rarely ask the people who it's being done for what they think and they have
a far greater degree of "religious"certainty about what they're doing.
To paraphrase Putin in his recent interview, "why would he interfere in American elections as
he gets the same foreign policy crap regardless of which side wins?"
2. The neo-cons lost big time in Iraq and as a result have little real power in Washington
beyond being disruptive.
3. There is no deep state in the United States now because it's totally visible, and since
both the neo-cons and the neo-libs/liberal interventionists/R2P liberals/Clintonists have the
same objective there is no need for secrecy or conspiracies. If anyone needs to revive the "deep
state" it's the Trumpists.
All these conspiracy theories are a waste of time and energy because there is so much real
dangerous crap going on that needs to be attended to first.
Ghostship. True enough. But knowing it is still different from effectively dealing with it.
The elite/CIA controlled mass media still has a lot of power to persuade people as do the corporations
that finance political elections. As well as the people who make money from arms sales. These
people who may be loosely referred to as 'deep state' don't want to give up any of that power/money.
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk
his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?
Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that
matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine
the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy,
or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice,
the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have
to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism
and exposing the country to danger."
Assuming the neocons and neolibs represent different interests is the same as assuming the democrats
and republicans represent different masters. Divide and conquer is the name of the game, and until
we can come together and agree on who the real enemy is, they'll continue eating our lunch with
impunity.
She follows a neocon agenda (war against afghanistan, war against Syria, hatered against
Russia, hatred against foreign policy that Trump have i.e), she works for the deep state, she
leak deep state material to smear her "enemies".
Who are those who spread this bs to the MSM about Trump and Russia constantly for past
months? Where does it come from if not from the deep state groups?
This is easy to tell but difficult to snuff out in the end. Once Hillary and co. started railing
against paid Kremlin-trolls on alt-right and various forum sites, you knew that it was something
that they had been doing for quite sometime and, indeed, had been losing the battle. At that point,
it was best to throw up their hands and concoct the victim-story, even though we TPTB probably
pioneered the tactics (color revolutions, ngos, etc.).
Perhaps there were Kremlin agents on our boards. Perhaps there are some here. But truth, or
a slightly biased truth, still stands in their corner, so I refuse to complain about Russia agents.
The CIA OTOH. They can GTFO.
i used to like greenwald long before his time at the intercept... the intercept smelt funny
right from the beginning.. i haven't followed it, in spite of having enjoyed reading greenwald
when he was more independent..
this whole story stinks to high heaven.. something is weird about the whole thing.. can't put
my finger on it.. seems like more bs basically.. the usa is bonkers at this point..
@8 opereta... i see it similar to you..
@43 uncle scam... some of those folks are still around, but more of them are not..
As you say, appalling tradecraft by both the leaker and the recipient. I would have thought even
a cursory security check before giving her any security clearance would have unearthed her extreme
views on social media.
Some general thoughts on the subject of leaks from the Trump administration -
Excellent article. A warning to heed and I hope it gets out far and wide. Omidyar being behind
the Intercept has always been an iffy proposition at best, and it has never sat well that Greenwald
is apparently satisfied with such an arrangement.
What a circus of distraction that grabs for public attention; its chief element is distraction,--
and its goal is distraction. In the end, Trump will probably go farther to accommodate the deep
state, since what it aims to destroy is any chance for improvement of relations with Russia. This
a PSYOPS extravaganza. The moronic level of political debate is not going to improve with the
introduction of Reality Winner ( whose name sounds a bit silly, in this context).
The confirmed partisans will wolf down such farce without even tasting it. These absurd pratfalls
will stop abruptly when the risk to our survival becomes obvious; but something on the order of
a miracle would need to happen soon, to avert disaster. Trump's base will loudly congratulate
him, whatever concessions he makes to survive politically; and the rationally unmoored Dems will
sign on to any confidence game if it gets the results they are after.
Certainly, a closer observation of the details can help. Thanks to the author of this article,
our host, and those who have commented. The alternative is for life to become a work of fiction.
Outstanding reporting, b. I saw a report on the microlending "phenomenon" in India on PBS a
long time ago. It was heralded then. I'll have to dive into your link to survey the damage. Thx
again.
Hey b, John Kiriakou chimed in saying "@theintercept should be ashamed of itself. Matthew Cole
burns yet another source. It makes your entire organization untrustworthy"
And you just know Mark Ames will have a piece up bashing Omidyar, Greenwald and Scahill.
Speaking of Scahill, other than a weekly podcast, what exactly does he do for the Intercept?
Greenwald is a self-serving hack and the Intercept functions alongside outlets like DemocracyNow!
to provide a Democrat-friendly perspective on the world to people who think they are very "progressive".
They will never challenge the fundamental precepts of US imperialism and the oligarchic powers
behind it, or truly rock the boat.
There's a chance they got played. As noted, the documents don't actual show evidence of actual
interference with voting system beyond data gathering. But now we have a leaker who's social
media bills her as part of the resistance. And in this environment, how are the optics going to
look like prosecuting someone who is being passed off as having leaked evidence of malfeasance?
I think they rushed too quickly to publish.
Nice to see so many finally coming to the realisation that Greenwald, Poitras and the Intercept
are disinfo operatives.... Waiting for the rest of you to begin questioning The Snowjob too.
"From the Russian attempts to redraw international borders by force, to Iran destabilizing
the Middle East, and to the global threat of terrorism, which affects people everywhere. It
seems that the world has become much more dangerous today than ever since the fall of communism,
about a quarter of a century ago,"- he said at a meeting of vice-president.
Actually, it is a good question how Winner got the access to the file. "Top Secret" is actually
a low level of secrecy, without specific restriction who "needs to know" it. Practical problem
for the wanna be leaker is to find "a needle in the haystack". Probably the chain of folders had
self-explanatory names, which is like posting in on the billboard for all and sundry working for
NSA. That in itself can be "leaking with a borrowed hand".
The content does not seem to be secret in the sense of revealing "sources and methods", just
a scrubbed analysis with conclusions. A major part of the mission of intelligence agency to to
careful draw conclusions from the gathered data so they are useful to the decision makers: access
to information allows to engage in disinformation. But what to do with the obsolete analysis,
prepared for the PDM, previous decision maker? Post it on a billboard, if you still like PDM.
Alternatively, the document was prepared in such a way that it was actually politically
harmless but it could snare the leaker who would be triumphantly and publicly "executed". That
can improve the discipline in the shop.
Poor girl. But those Intercept people, why they did not at least re-type the document before
showing it to anyone?
This is silly nonsense. There is no difference at all between the neocons and the neolibs
(the neolords). They come from exactly the same place and believe in exactly the same thing. Specifically,
they are atychiphobs; they cannot endure any form of failure. So they always must attach themselves
to whatever they perceive as the winning side. And ultimately rule the rest of the losing world.
For them that's all there is; Hillary is an example, and most rich individuals also. They would
absolutely prefer death to loserdom. So of course they have no concerns at all about the fate
of the losers. They are all the same.
And speaking of psyops and propaganda, the Deep State (of course there is a deep state (the
neolords) whom common selves cannot comprehend) is now in the business of producing psyoperative
YouTube videos. See if you can spot the subliminal propaganda in this one (hint -- it is not at
all about how Russians perceive Americans):
"How on Earth do these kids ( Winner) manage to get that kind of jobs?"
Exactly! I thought you had to be very special, bright and so on to get this kind of jobs here
we have a 25 year old girl, that is named...Reality Winner and she has social media where she
posts alot of selfies of herself and have a twitter feed like high school student. She seems quite
dorky to me. That she has already been in and out of the air force is even more bizarre. This
is the kind of morons ruling this world.
The Intercept article is as inept as the NSA document! it's mostly a cartoon, and things like
guessing corporate emails are hardly espionage - they are normal ways of figuring out how to contact
people in the professional world, NOT a security threat. Phishing them ought to be illegal, but
clearly the FBI doesn't give a crap until it happens to Clinton's campaign chair. At least it
is SO common that normal people KNOW not to fall for it. what a bunch of drivel! If the NSA had
any actual intelligence that the origin of the emails was Russia, you would think that might be
part of the explanation, but the cartoon only says "probably within"...
Then the Intercept spends pages (and pages) arguing for more $$ for the NSA (!) and to centralize
control of US elections to the federal level where all this 'insecurity' can be properly controlled
by responsible people (like the NSA, or the POTUS).
Topping that off was Amy Goodman showing an interview with a Clinton mouthpiece trumpeting
propaganda that this whole "Russian" scheme is a way to get contact info of registered voters
to aim "fake news" at them....... anybody here who is a registered voter knows that the minute
you sign up you are permanently on the list for daily piles of glossy lies from PACS and nightly
phone surveys about what crafted message would work 'if the election were held today'. Where I
live, the Dems have so much money that they poll the crap out of us during city-level campaigns.
(and after the election they can't be bothered with what their voters care about.)
this whole thing is such a circus! and yes, the NSA has access to far more info than these
stupid documents allude to, not to mention that the US has got to have some massive access to
Russian data.
I should add: If Putin were directly responsible for hacking anything, Clinton should kiss
Putin's who-cares-what for waiting until AFTER the primaries. She got to be part of the final
coin-toss.
really, why is this NSA document even considered whistle-blowing?
The firewall set up by (or at least 'persuaded' by) the U.S. intelligence to toss out a few
useless Snowden scraps to the peons? Why would the Intercept NOT report report this to their intel
masters? Does anyone here really think 1) the Intercept has NOT been compromised since day one,
2) everybody and and everything at the Intercept is NOT closely monitored by the intel community?
They probably have a department just for the Intercept. So whether the Intercept actually ratted
out Winner is irrelevant - the NSA probably knows what flavor of coffee the mail guy at the Intercept
was holding when he picked up the previously examined mail. The only way any Top Secret document
is making its way to the Intercept is if the NSA or FBI created and mailed the document themselves.
And if the alleged journalist did not report receipt of the document to the FBI, then THEY would
face jail time if the FBI found it during a raid.
How did Winner come about this information?
Setting aside the antics of the Intercept, let's consider how preposterous this story is
at face value. She's basically a translator for a few Middle Eastern languages. So she's reading
email or web sites or listening to phone calls and doing her translating thing. It's not like
she's a high-level analyst preparing briefings for the National Intelligence director - she's
a damn low-level translator (no offense to NSA translators out there).
Why on earth would someone in that position have ANY Top Secret memos on Russian hackers or
the election. Do people really think there is (at her workplace) a network-accessible folder labeled
'Top Secret' that anyone with a Top Secret clearance can browse through? No - that's not how it
works. Does anyone think they have a 'Top Secret' mailing list to distribute memos? Nope. In fact,
can ANYONE give me the least plausible reason why some nobody Arabic-language translator would
ever even be able to SEE a Top Secret memo regarding a subject she has absolutely no involvement
with?
Computers at Intel Agencies
If Winner DID manage to stumble upon a Top Secret memo on her work network unrelated to
her job, then her supervisor would have known it within minutes. Everything anybody does is constantly
monitored and logged, right down to the keystroke. SHE would know that. In fact, she would be
fired for not reporting this impossible access to top secret information immediately. She would
be further punished for even having the document linger on her screen for more than a second or
two. There's a reason they put TOP SECRET at the very top of every page. Classified documents
also have their own security/surveillance/monitoring mechanisms. The document itself (or the document
management system) knows or is told who is allowed to read it or even see that it exists. It would
record her access, even if all the other security and monitoring software the agency had failed
completely. So you get the idea. Even if she saw this document (unlikely) and did NOT report the
inappropriate access, she would eventually be frog-walked out of the building before the end of
the day.
Printing
I won't belabor the point, but everything from all the security, monitoring and logging items
above apply moreso for printing anything. Top Secret documents (and their networks) do not
allow you to print them at all, and certainly not on some random office printer. Presuming
she did the impossible and get a Top Secret document printed out (which would all be logged),
how did she get it out of her controlled-access area and the building itself? Hide it in her purse?
Tell the guard, "I'm taking this folder of top secret stuff home to work on, but it's OK -
I have a top secret clearance..."
All modern printers and copy machines have an invisible watermark that identifies the time/date
you printed a page and the serial number of the machine. If she copied it somewhere, then they
copy can be traced to a certain machine and date/time. She's busted either way if the feds got
their hands on it, and SHE KNOWS THAT.
Impossible Conclusion
Now given all the above and her knowledge of how all that works, does anyone think she's STILL
going to naively print out and mail a hard copy of Top Secret information to a known compromised,
well-monitored news site... because she doesn't like Trump??
Sorry - but unless someone can prove she has an extra chromosome or two, I have to believe
this is a charade. She won't go to jail because she's in on it with the NSA and it's not a real
Top Secret document anyway. NO intelligence agency will ever verify or deny something you show
them is either legitimate or Top Secret, so even that part is wrong. If you call them to ask about
a document you have, they will politely put you on hold so they can dispatch some DHS thugs to
kick in your door and retrieve said document - without telling you anything either way.
Why would she do this then? Well, if she knew she wasn't really going to be tried to go
to prison and the NSA is 'in' on it, then I'm sure there's a large check waiting for her somewhere.
How much do you think it would take to buy out a translator from her crappy .gov job? Plus, she
gets to stick it to Trump and those evil Russians. It's a win-win!
Maybe I'm too cynical nowadays, but this whole thing is preposterous beyond belief. Am I the
only one that thinks this whole thing stinks to high heaven? I'm amazed the bar is so low for
these fabrications.
I tend to agree with the hint, hint - #RealityWinner is an obvious PsyOp. Her employer
probably had a deal for her - agree to be "used", play the part in a little prosecution game we'll
have going, make sure you leak to Cook - and don't worry, you'll be well rewarded in the end.
Why her? the name, of course - sends a nice message. And her youth - get a little sympathy
going. from a gullible public (not any of us though).
The timing of this leak and the choice of media outlet is very convenient for the Establishment
Dems/Deep State Russia investigation. Leaking to the Intercept, which has credibility in the alternative
media, would be a convenient way to get the story covered in the MSM and leftist media. It certainly
helps to distract Berners from the Seth Rich story. Some interns at the Intercept did a sloppy
job checking up on their source.
thank you for this. i left a comment on that article yesterday about how dumb the technical
aspects were and apparently you noticed as well (i also mentioned stuxnet as an example of what
an effective and professional attack would actually look like). the thought that a
macro in a word file (who lets those run by default anyway?) could pivot into some elaborate firmware/hardware
exploit is just dumb. even the article mentions that machines and procedures vary from state to
state and even city to city. seems like a lot of work to put into changing votes for a few thousand
people.
as i also mentioned: hillary won durham by a WIDE margin (almost 100k votes). seems
like any "hacking" worked to her advantage, not trump's.
and he makes a lot of the points you do here regarding the intercept. as much as i respect
greenwald, he and the other top tier hires don't need that site. they've got enough leverage to
start their own site or even just stick to facebook and/or twitter and then "third party" out
to big sites. this would give them exposure without tying them down to one billionaire with his
own agendas and biases.
glenn used to have some oddly toxic opinions (anti-chavez whining and supposed initial support
for the iraq war) and came around. he's not a dummy. i also doubt he has any malevolent intentions
given his charitable work in brazil and what seems like genuine concern for "the law" and privacy
and etc.
the documents were trusted to him and a few others. there was a reason for that. every non-journalist
(and i include many intercept writers in that group) since is just a parasite using him and the
documents as a host. time to swat them away and be truly indie. (not holding my breath).
side note: "reality winner"? wow. when i first saw the headlines i thought she was a former
contestant on "big brother" or something. we'll see how much vocal support she gets from the democrats.
again - not holding breath.
It looks like a real half-arsed psyops -- here is the "Russia did it" smoking gun we've all
been waiting for and it gets sorta rolled out but not trumpeted hysterically. Why the Intercept?
Why not the NYtimes or wapo? Just like the dossier a few months ago, generated some smoke
but in the end its a weak petard. Did Sessions tamp it down?
Anonymous Hippopotamus | Jun 6, 2017 4:38:46 PM |
84
@77 paveway... thanks.. you are preaching to the choir here.. none of the story adds up, but the
intercept is one bs outfit plain and simple..
@78/79 merlin.. thanks.. we see it much the same!
this ''russia did it memo'' is so friggin' boring... the usa has lost it's creative imagination
if it ever had one to begin with... hollywood is over and one with.. give it up hollywash..
@82 I remember reading that some crazy number, like 6 million people have security clearances.
That's a lot of people that signed up to keep quiet. I guess a lot of it relates to basic military
stuff, or controlled technology like aircraft parts or whatever.
She speaks Farsi and Pashto, I bet she's CIA who's been promised a lot of $$$ after she serves
a short prison term. It's my guess that what she provided to The Intercept was given to her after
it was manufactured or "doctored". The info published by The Intercept should be considered as
suspicious.
Marym@93 - Thanks. I hesitated to just say 'Iranian' because that didn't seem quite right, but
'Arabic' is obviously wrong. Hey, I'm American. I couldn't even tell you where Farsiland or Pastonia
are on a map. I think... somewhere by Italy? No, wait...
@95 Sounds right. She won't get the full Chelsea Manning treatment. Just a naive patriotic young
American girl who did the right thing. Obviously she was tricked into using that copier. Couple
of months and she''ll get a job at Fox.
@98 ....which she will turn down for a better offer at CNN.
Remember when Greenwald's Brazilian boyfriend was being held by the authorities and accused of
smuggling information from Snowden? Then he got released. Hmm.
Wonder if there was some sort of agreement to the effect that if Greenwald played ball, possible
prosecution against said boyfriend would be held in abeyance. This is a tactic employed by government
lawyers in some cases when they want something. Like a slow-walking of releases from Snowden's
revelations, for instance. And maybe some other dirty business when wanted by the powers that
be, like this "leak" that the NSA thought something could be true , but with the leak not
containing any proof or any supporting raw intelligence.
Holding a sword over the head of the boyfriend might be just the ticket. And couple that with
speculation that Snowden's documents contained revelations about Greenwald's boss, Pierre Omidyar.
Maybe an offer that Greenwald and company could not refuse.
Speculation on my part, of course. But not the first time that such tactics have been deployed.
Another well-placed, well-timed leak from WaPo. Un-named intelligence official in play again. Is
Russian embassy bugged and all diplomatic correspondence intercepted ? Looks like those guys outdid
STASI. the standard question arises: "cuo bono".
If true, that means that the way information was obtained is iether already known by Russian, or
this channel will be closed really soon. Form the text of the article it looks like the USA is able
to read Russian diplomatic communication. Unless this is yet another disinformation, that means that
the USA obtained the keys used by the embassy for incoding dypolicic communication, or have a modle
who provided this communication by downloading already decoded archive or something like that. Which
actually violates Vienna convention and makes the USA rogue nation not that different from GDR ot the
USSR.
While it is unclear " what Kislyak would have had to gain by falsely characterizing his contacts
with Kushner to Moscow" it is clear who benefit from this revelation. But even if true why to reveal
such an important information for such a minor case. Trump folded. What else "deep state" wants from
him ? Are Hillary friends in State Department and a couple of other intelligence agencies really crazy
about the revenge ?
More questions then answers
Notable quotes:
"... But officials said that it's unclear what Kislyak would have had to gain by falsely characterizing
his contacts with Kushner to Moscow, particularly at a time when the Kremlin still saw the prospect
of dramatically improved relations with Trump. ..."
"... The FBI closely monitors the communications of Russian officials in the United States, and
maintains near-constant surveillance of its diplomatic facilities. The National Security Agency monitors
the communications of Russian officials overseas. ..."
"... 'according to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports'. This isn't any sort of verification.
Another manufactured news media story. ..."
"... The Washington Post should not even believed with there track record. They should identify
there source that is leaking anything they can get there hands. Never about anything else accept fake
news. The jokers on here keep on drinking the koolaid that the WP prints! ..."
"... Always jump to conclusions as always without the facts. They gave up on Trump now they go after
some one else. You fools talk about Watergate and have no proof about any of this except what the Washington
Trash prints! ..."
Jared Kushner and Russia's ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a
secret and secure communications channel between Trump's transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian
diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring,
according to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports.
Ambassador Sergei Kislyak reported to his superiors in Moscow that Kushner, then President-elect
Trump's son-in-law and confidant, made the proposal during a meeting on Dec. 1 or 2 at Trump Tower,
according to intercepts of Russian communications that were reviewed by U.S. officials. Kislyak said
Kushner suggested using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States for the communications.
The meeting also was attended by Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser.
The White House disclosed the fact of the meeting only in March, playing down its significance.
But people familiar with the matter say the FBI now considers the encounter, as well as another meeting
Kushner had with a Russian banker, to be of investigative interest.
Kislyak reportedly was taken aback by the suggestion of allowing an American to use Russian communications
gear at its embassy or consulate - a proposal that would have carried security risks for Moscow as
well as the Trump team.
Neither the meeting nor the communications of Americans involved were under U.S. surveillance,
officials said.
The White House declined to comment. Robert Kelner, a lawyer for Flynn, declined to comment. The
Russian embassy did not respond to requests for comment.
Russia at times feeds false information into communication streams it suspects are monitored as
a way of sowing misinformation and confusion among U.S. analysts. But officials said that it's
unclear what Kislyak would have had to gain by falsely characterizing his contacts with Kushner to
Moscow, particularly at a time when the Kremlin still saw the prospect of dramatically improved relations
with Trump.
Kushner's apparent interest in establishing a secret channel with Moscow, rather than rely on
U.S. government systems, has added to the intrigue surrounding the Trump administration's relationship
with Russia.
To some officials, it also reflects a staggering naivete.
The FBI closely monitors the communications of Russian officials in the United States, and
maintains near-constant surveillance of its diplomatic facilities. The National Security Agency monitors
the communications of Russian officials overseas.
Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that though Russian diplomats have secure
means of communicating with Moscow, Kushner's apparent request for access to such channels was extraordinary.
"How would he trust that the Russians wouldn't leak it on their side?" said one former senior
intelligence official. The FBI would know that a Trump transition official was going in and out of
the embassy, which would cause "a great deal" of concern, he added. The entire idea, he said, "seems
extremely naïve or absolutely crazy."
The discussion of a secret channel adds to a broader pattern of efforts by Trump's closest advisors
to obscure their contacts with Russian counterparts. Trump's first national security adviser, Flynn,
was forced to resign after a series of false statements about his conversations with Kislyak. Attorney
General Jeff Sessions recused himself from matters related to the Russia investigation after it was
revealed that he had failed to disclose his own meetings with Kislyak when asked during congressional
testimony about any contact with Russians.
Kushner's interactions with Russians - including Kislyak and an executive for a Russian bank under
U.S. sanctions - were not acknowledged by the White House until they were exposed in media reports.
It is common for senior advisers of a newly elected president to be in contact with foreign leaders
and officials. But new administrations are generally cautious in their handling of interactions with
Moscow, which U.S. intelligence
... ... ....
In addition to their discussion about setting up the communications channel, Kushner, Flynn and
Kislyak also talked about arranging a meeting between a representative of Trump and a "Russian contact"
in a third country whose name was not identified, according to the anonymous letter.
The Post reported in April that Erik Prince, the former founder of Blackwater private security
firm and an informal adviser to the Trump transition team, met on Jan. 11 - nine days before Trump's
inauguration - in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean with a representative of Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
Tom Lewis · Longs, South Carolina
"Jared Kushner and Russia's ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up
a secret and secure communications channel between Trump's transition team and the Kremlin, using
Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions
from monitoring" .... pretty stiff accusation with this as the news media's source ... 'according
to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports'. This isn't any sort of verification. Another
manufactured news media story.
Paul Schofield · San Diego, California
Everyone knew about this, and it happens with every transition team, and it was done AFTER
Trump won the election, but if it gets the Liberals' panties in a bunch, and CNN more viewers,
the angry Clintonites can scream impeachment for a few hours tonight..... suckers!
Jerry Reich · Arnold, Missouri
The Washington Post should not even believed with there track record. They should identify
there source that is leaking anything they can get there hands. Never about anything else accept
fake news. The jokers on here keep on drinking the koolaid that the WP prints!
Always jump to conclusions as always without the facts. They gave up on Trump now they
go after some one else. You fools talk about Watergate and have no proof about any of this except
what the Washington Trash prints!
Valletti, who is also a Professor of Economics at the Imperial College Business School and the University of Rome Tor Vergata,
discussed the EC's investigation into the Facebook-WhatsApp merger during the panel. Facebook, he said, had "lied" to European regulators
about its ability to absorb WhatsApp's user data, but the larger issue was market definition.
"Would the decision on the merger have changed had the Commission known that information at the time?" asked Valletti, who joined
theEC in 2016. "At the time, the Commission defined the relevant market as non-search advertising. This is a huge market. In that
ocean, even Facebook doesn't have a lot of market power. If instead the market definition had been, for instance, advertising on
social networks, [it's]likely theywould have concluded that Facebook would have been dominant in that particular market, and that
integrating that useful information from [WhatsApp] could have enhanced its market power." Valletti also stressedthe importance of
having individual-level data when discussing issues like competition at the advertising market, and not just looking at market shares.
Pasquale and Taplin, meanwhile, criticized U.S. antitrust authorities, with Taplin saying that digital platforms have "done very
well because they have a certain regulatory capture" and Pasquale remarkingthat "U.S. antitrust policy is rapidly becoming a pro-trust
policy."
As an example of this "pro-trust" policy, Pasquale cited the FTC's lawsuit against online
contact lens retailer 1-800 Contacts
. 1-800 Contacts was sued by the FTC last yearfor having reached agreements with 14 other online contact lens sellers that they
would not advertise to customers who had searched for 1-800 Contacts online."You would imagine that given the power of these [companies],
and given the activity in Europe and many other nations, our enforcers would be extremely concerned about these platforms. They are-they're
concerned about little companies hurting the platforms," he said.
The FTC, added Pasquale, had pursued the 1-800 Contacts case aggressively. "I'm not here to comment on the merits of this case,
but I think that the choice of this enforcement target speaks volumes. What does it say? It says that if small firms arebeing exploited
or hurt by a big digital behemoth, or think [they]are, don't try in any way to coordinate or maintain your independence. What you
should do is all combine and merge and become a giant, say, contacts firm. In the media, they should all combine and merge and maybe
all be bought by Comcast, so that then they can negotiate with Google in a way that they are relatively of the same size and power.
That's the pro-trust message we're getting under current non-enforcement U.S. antitrust policy."
"... Over the last thirty years the power of the Manufacturing and Infrastructure concerns has fallen
dramatically. So now we have a government dominated by Banking and Distribution, think Goldman Sacks
and Walmart. ..."
"... According to former CIA director Richard Helms, when Allen Dulles was tasked in 1946 to "draft
proposals for the shape and organization of what was to become the Central Intelligence Agency," he
recruited an advisory group of six men made up almost exclusively of Wall Street investment bankers
and lawyers. ..."
"... Dulles himself was an attorney at the prominent Wall Street law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell.
Two years later, Dulles became the chairman of a three-man committee which reviewed the young agency's
performance. ..."
"... So we see that from the beginning the CIA was an exclusive Wall Street club. Allen Dulles himself
became the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence in early 1953. ..."
"... The current Democratic Party was handed two golden opportunities and blew both of them. Obama
blew the 2008 financial crisis. And Hillary Clinton blew the 2016 election. ..."
"... Neoliberal Democrats seek to create the same tribablist/identity voting block on the left that
the republicans have on the right. The is why people like sanjait get totally spastic when progressives
criticize the party. ..."
Among the rich I think there were three groups based on where their wealth and interests laid.
Banking/Insurance industry.
Distribution/logistics.
Manufacturing and Infrastructure.
Over the last thirty years the power of the Manufacturing and Infrastructure concerns has
fallen dramatically. So now we have a government dominated by Banking and Distribution, think
Goldman Sacks and Walmart.
"Over the last thirty years the power of the Manufacturing and Infrastructure concerns has fallen
dramatically. So now we have a government dominated by Banking and Distribution, think Goldman
Sacks and Walmart."
This trend does not apply to Military-industrial complex (MIC). MIC probably should be listed
separately. Formally it is a part of manufacturing and infrastructure, but in reality it is closely
aligned with Banking and insurance.
CIA which is the cornerstone of the military industrial complex to a certain extent is an enforcement
arm for financial corporations.
According to former CIA director Richard Helms, when Allen Dulles was tasked in 1946
to "draft proposals for the shape and organization of what was to become the Central Intelligence
Agency," he recruited an advisory group of six men made up almost exclusively of Wall Street
investment bankers and lawyers.
Dulles himself was an attorney at the prominent Wall Street law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell.
Two years later, Dulles became the chairman of a three-man committee which reviewed the young
agency's performance.
The other two members of the committee were also New York lawyers. For nearly a year, the
committee met in the offices of J.H. Whitney, a Wall Street investment firm.
According to Peter Dale Scott, over the next twenty years, all seven deputy directors of
the agency were drawn from the Wall Street financial aristocracy; and six were listed in the
New York social register.
So we see that from the beginning the CIA was an exclusive Wall Street club. Allen Dulles
himself became the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence in early 1953.
The prevalent myth that the CIA exists to provide intelligence information to the president
was the promotional vehicle used to persuade President Harry Truman to sign the 1947 National
Security Act, the legislation which created the CIA.iv
But the rationale about serving the president was never more than a partial and very imperfect
truth...
The current Democratic Party was handed two golden opportunities and blew both of them. Obama
blew the 2008 financial crisis. And Hillary Clinton blew the 2016 election.
If you have a tool and the tool it broken you try to fix it. One doesn't pretend there is nothing
wrong.
The difference between neoliberal democrats and progressives is they differ on what's wrong.
Neoliberal Democrats seek to create the same tribablist/identity voting block on the left
that the republicans have on the right. The is why people like sanjait get totally spastic when
progressives criticize the party.
Progressives seek to create an aggressive party that represents the interests of working class
and petite bourgeoisie. That is why you see progressives get spastic when the corporate democrats
push appeasement policies.
"... I found it an odd mix of straight-talk and naivete. The NSA can't spy on Americans without
a warrant? Go ahead, pull the other one. ..."
"... This caught my eye earlier. Had to come back to it. Especially after reading Mike Whitney's
latest http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/19/seth-rich-craig-murray-and-the-sinister-stewards-of-the-national-security-state/
. In it, he details how seriously Clapper, Brennan et al. take those "laws and procedures." ..."
"... Taking a recent and relevant example, remember the ICA, the "Intelligence Community Assessment"?
Whitney quotes a Fox news article detailing the many ways in which it's production varied sharply from
normal procedures. And of course there was all that "stove-piping" of "intel" that helped make the bogus
case for the 2003 war of aggression against Iraq ..."
"... Glad you liked it. Lily Tomlin applies: "No matter how cynical you get, it's impossible to
keep up." ..."
"... Excellent post, except for the bit, as some other readers have commented, about American intelligence
agencies being law abiding. Europe, and much of the world, crumbled without resistance in the face of
the tech juggernauts because of the PR fetishization of anything that came out of silicon valley. ..."
This piece is absolutely fantastic! Not to nit pick, but I do disagree with the author about
the following passage:
Even if you think our intelligence agencies are evil, they're a lawful evil. They have to
follow laws and procedures, and the people in those agencies take them seriously.
But there are no such protections for non-Americans outside the United States. The NSA would
have to go to court to spy on me; they can spy on you anytime they feel like it.
We know from the Church and Pike committees that this is patently false, and I highly doubt
that this has changed much since then, especially in light of Iran-Contra and the made-up intel
used to justify the Iraq invasion.
I know I probably sound like a broken record as I often cite the Church and Pike reports in
my NC comments, but they're just so little known and so important that I feel compelled to do
so.
I encourage the entire commenteriat to at least skim some of these documents to get a better
understanding of the kinds of sickening things perpetrated by the intel community in the past
and then ask yourself if the veil of secrecy that surrounds them is to keep secrets from the enemy
or to keep the American public from vomiting.
I found it an odd mix of straight-talk and naivete. The NSA can't spy on Americans without
a warrant? Go ahead, pull the other one. Talking about the "collapse of representative government"
as if we've ever had one. All very cute, and very silly.
His suggestions for putting the brakes on are good, but insufficient. My ideas as to how to
go about, "connecting the tech industry to reality. Bringing its benefits to more people, and
bringing the power to make decisions to more people," is here:
Imagine a political party with no national platform-a party where local rank-and-file members
select candidates from among themselves, and dictate the policies those candidates will support.
[2] Imagine a political party whose candidates are transparent; one that guarantees every member
an equal voice in shaping the actual policy proposals-and the votes-of their representatives.
Imagine a political party whose focus is on empowering the rank-and-file members, instead of
the charismatic con-artists we call politicians. Imagine a political party that runs on direct
democracy, from bottom to top: open, transparent and accountable . we'll need an app maybe
two
The app already exists, actually, and it's called Loomio. Podemos uses it, along with a lot
of other people:
I had the same reaction to that passage, at least initially. However what I think the author
might mean by this is that to have the means to combat this evil 2 things are necessary:
o Laws and/or procedures that place limitations on the actions of these agencies – NSA, CIA,
DHS etc.
o and, much much more important, the means to ensure those laws/procedures are *enforced* as
to both statute and intent.
USians have at least the first part even if the second, enforcement, has rotted to the extent
of being no more than a cruel joke. non-USian have neither.
Note that the lack of enforcement thing extends far beyond the IC agencies into anti-trust,
environmental regulation, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc. etc.. Even the ludicrous botch called Dodd-Frank
could work marginally better if there was some attempt to actually enforce it.
That bit about tech workers defying management to protest Trump's travel ban seems demonstrably
untrue, as the companies want that human capital pipeline kept open, and they can simultaneously
wrap themselves in muliti-cultural virtue as they defend their employment practices.
Also, and I know people here will disagree or think it irrelevant, but the "They're not bad
people," thing is wrong; I think people such as Thiel, Kalanick, Zuckerberg, Ellison, add-your-own-candidates,
seem like pretty awful people doing a lot of awful things, whatever their brilliance, business
acumen, and relentlessness.
Finally, while as a union guy I was pleased to see the importance he gave it, the idea of tech
workers unionizing in this country seems like social science fiction, whatever their European
counterparts might hopefully do.
I, too, stumbled / choked when I read those paragraphs. They are provably false in so many
dimensions I hardly know where to begin. It made it hard to read past.
I will try again because so many commenters are so positive. But the author's credibility sinks
when a piece starts with such blindness or misinformation or pandering.
On the one hand, it's probably some pandering, because he knows he is being watched. We all
throw that same bone once in a while. From Vergil, it is called "a sop to Cerberus." On the other
hand, he is correct, too: it is a "lawful evil" because it functions using tax money, which is
money extorted by force with the sanction of law, rather than "chaotic evil," which is money extorted
by force or fraud without that sanction. So in that positive-law-philosophy way of thinking, he
has a point, even if it's a pandering point.
Taking a recent and relevant example, remember the ICA, the "Intelligence Community Assessment"?
Whitney quotes a Fox news article detailing the many ways in which it's production varied sharply
from normal procedures. And of course there was all that "stove-piping" of "intel" that helped
make the bogus case for the 2003 war of aggression against Iraq .
I appreciate the author's point: it would be harder to surveil a particular American than a
European. I'm sure rank & file people by & large respect law and procedure. But don't worry, if
there's a political will to get you, there's a way. Ask Chelsea Manning.
Whitney concludes by quoting an especially apt question posed by Michael Glennon in the May
issue of Harper's: "Who would trust the authors of past episodes of repression as a reliable safeguard
against future repression?"
People who think they're immune to said repression, for one. Or who don't know or believe it
happened/is happening at all. IOW political elites and most Americans, that's who. I think there's
a good chance the soft coup will work, and most Americans would even accept a President-General.
So while I see the author's point, I see it this way. They take laws and procedures seriously
like I take traffic laws seriously. Only their solution is to corrupt law enforcement, not follow
the law.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - President
George W. Bush
Mike Whitney's article you linked to was interesting. George Webb's ongoing YouTube series
is going further still, as he is uncovering numerous anomalies with Seth Rich's death and the
circumstances and "investigation". It turns out that nothing in this story is what it seems (the
"school play" scenario).
Disturbingly, there are similarities and patterns that connect up with numerous other patterns
discussed earlier in this 208-day (so far) odyssey, which started with looking at irregularities
around oil pipelines and drugs shipments, and ended up including numerous additional criminal
enterprises, all with direct links to high-up government staff and political staff from both major
parties, with links among key participants going back over decades in some cases.
To return to your observation–knowing what I know now–personal as well as second-hand, I don't
think it's harder to surveil an american than a european. The compromises of law enforcement,
justice and intelligence and rogue contractors have no international boundaries. The way the compromises
are done vary depending on local methods, and the degree of public awareness may vary, but the
actuality and ease–no different overall.
Eight, nine and ten in this household. I don't use any Google-stuff and have hard-deleted my
Facebook account. At least they told me had, I should ask a friend to check to see if I am still
there ;)
But we all know that a Linux user is worth only 3/5 of a regular user, so we are back to 6.
Writing this from a 2003 vintage Pentium 4 machine running Linux Mint 17.
8. Built this thing myself 5 years ago. It's a quad core on an MSI mobo. Or maybe I only count
as a half, since it's a dual boot with Linux Mint 17.3/Win7 Pro.
A history lesson. The PC brought freedom from the IT department, until networking enslaved
us again. The freedom was temporary, we were originally supposed to be serfs of a timeshare system
connected to a mainframe. France was ahead of the US in that, they had MiniTel. But like everything
French is was efficient but static. In Europe, like in the US, the PC initially liberated, and
then with networking, enslaved. Arpanet was the predecessor of the Internet it was a Cold War
system of survivable networking, for some people. The invention of HTTP and the browser at CERN
democratized the Arpanet. But it also greatly enabled State-sponsored snooping.
We are now moving to cloud storage and Chrome-books which will restore the original vision
of a timeshare system connected to a mainframe, but at a higher technical standard. What was envisioned
in 1968 will be achieved, but later than planned, and in a round about way. We are not the polity
we used to be. In 1968 this would have been viewed by the public with suspicion. But after 50
years later the public will view this as progress.
One thing just as dangerous and limiting as the idealized past of the conservative mindset
is the idealized sense of progress of the the liberal mindset.
SV tech owners (think about) . . . the cool toys they'll spend profits on . . . run by chuckle
heads . . . identify with progressive values . . . they want to help . . . run by a feckless leadership
accountable to no one . . .
Can't send them to Mars quick enough, I say.
." Even if you think our intelligence agencies are evil, they're a lawful evil. They have to
follow laws and procedures, and the people in those agencies take them seriously."
The real kneeslapper was. . . American government (also) run by chuckle heads . . . what happens
when these two groups . . . join forces?
Knock me over with a feather, let us know when that happens. How many Friedman units will we have
to wait?
"And outside of Russia and China, Google is the world's search engine."
How can this be? I don't use it except very rarely; my wife does, but complains about it bitterly,
and so do people here at NC, presumably tech-savvy. My wife is using it out of pure habit; what
about the rest of them?
"Given this scary state of the world, with ecological collapse just over the horizon, and a
population sharpening its pitchforks, "
And unfortunately, that's the likeliest solution. (The family blogging "L" on this keyboard doesn't
work right, so make some allowances.)
Despite my nitpicks above, this is a very important speech and a frightening issue. In particular,
I've long been concerned that so much organizing depends on giant corporations like Faceborg and
Twitter. They have no reason to be our friends, and some important reasons, like this speech,
to be our enemies. Do we have a backup if FB and Google decide to censor the Internet for serious?
Excellent post, except for the bit, as some other readers have commented, about American
intelligence agencies being law abiding. Europe, and much of the world, crumbled without resistance
in the face of the tech juggernauts because of the PR fetishization of anything that came out
of silicon valley.
The laxity of lawmakers and regulators was partly because of their unwillingness to be seen
as standing in the way of "progress". A public drunk on the need to be in with the new, "disruptive"
kids on the block who were "changing the world" would have teamed up with the disruptors to run
rough shod over any oversight mechanisms proposed by regulators. Hence the silicon valley PR machine
always prioritises the general public as the first targets of intellectual capture, because an
intellectually captured public loath to give up the benefits and convenience of "progress and
disruption" is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of tech giants in their global war against regulation.
And the insidious nature of the damage of overreach by these tech giants isn't just limited to
online interactions anymore, but the real world is also now experiencing disruption in the true
sense of the word with gig economy companies reshaping the dynamics of entire markets and squeezing
the most vulnerable members of society to the periphery of said markets, if not pushing them out
entirely. In my own city of cape town south africa, a housing crisis is brewing as locals are
being squeezed out of the housing market because landlords profit more from airbnb listings than
making their properties available for long term rentals. Asset prices are being pushed up as "investors"
compete to snap up available inventory to list on airbnb. And city officials seem more interested
in celebrating cape town's status as "one of the top airbnb destinations" than actually protecting
the interests of their own citizens. Intellectual capture, and the need to be "in with the cool
disruptive kids" is infecting even public sector organizations with severe consequences for the
public at large, but the public is blind to this as they've binged on the "disruption, changing
the world" cool-aid
While individuals might derive value from "this stuff", the tech companies providing the stuff
use said value, allied with massive amounts of PR spin to render regulators impotent in providing
safe guards to stop the techies from morphing from value providers into something akin to encroachers
for profit/power/control (e.g. encroaching upon our right to privacy by selling off our data).
Providing value to the public shouldn't be used as a cloak under which the dagger used to erode
our rights is hidden
In the links today, there is a Guardian story on Tesla workers with the quote: "Everything
feels like the future but us."
I'm reminded of another Guardian article about an ideology underpinning the grievances in Notes
From An Emergency. It's imperative to understand the that the system we find ourselves in is a
belief system – an ideology – and the choices to be made in regards to challenging it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in/
An excerpt:
"Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly
the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because
this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists
favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour
the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people
should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They
often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.
Accelerationism, therefore, goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy,
environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies
that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace
of change in the modern world "
Be sure to catch such quotes as this:
"We all live in an operating system set up by the accelerating triad of war, capitalism and emergent
AI," says Steve Goodman, a British accelerationist
That should remind one of this:
"Musk is persuaded that we're living in a simulation, and he or a fellow true believer has hired
programmers to try to hack it ."
Yes I know, it's ridiculous. And we use them to "protect" us he claims. But about the only
place where "protect" makes any sense in his whole argument is actually Amazon. It is pretty safe
to buy from Amazon (or using Amazon-pay) if you fear a credit card being hacked from on online
purchase. That much has some truth.
But how does using Facebook protect anyone? How does Google protect anyone? Ok Android security
is a different debate, but I really don't understand how issues of "security" etc. applies to
using a Google search as opposed to any other.
The right wing in Britain seems to have come up with an authoritarian solution: "Theresa May
is planning to introduce huge regulations on the way the internet works, allowing the government
to decide what is said online."
Lost me right at the opening by bringing up the popular vote and the bemoaning of a "broken"
system. We are a federal republic of states and I'd prefer to keep it that way. Ensuring that
the executive has the support of the populations of some minimal number of states is a good thing
in my view.
that's when I bailed too. What drek. If a reader has half a mind, they slip and fall on a greasy
doo doo in the first 15 seconds? No way can I stand to wade through the rest of what seems like
a tortured screed (although I did speed read it). Turns out, I may agree in a minor way with some
points, but I'll never know. I have time to waste in the real world, and I can't waste it if I'm
reading somebody's internet screed about Donald Trump. God Good almighty. Enough.
Authors watch your words. They matter! LOL. And always remember - sometimes less is more. Not
NC's finest post evah. And post author's shouldn't refer to people's heads on pikes in their hotel
room as being something they wouldn't object to. I mean really. That's not even junior high school
humor. I give this post a 2.3 on a scale of 1-10. 1 is unbearable. 3 is readable. 10 is genius.
The people who run Silicon Valley identify with progressive values
Nope. There are some true progressives in the industry, yes, but they're few and far between.
Understanding the dominant mindset in Silicon Valley is vital to understanding why there hasn't
been pushback on all this. Sure, they like their neoliberal IdPol as it appeals to their meritocracy
worship (hence the protests against the travel ban), but not with any intersectionality, especially
with regards to women (the red pill/MRA mind virus infects a lot of brains in SV). Socio-economics,
though, it's heavy on the libertarianism, albeit with some support for utopian government concepts
like UBI, plus a futurist outlook out of that Neoliberal_rationality/ cult; Yudkowsky and his LessWrong nonsense
have influence over a lot of players, big and small, in the bay area. So what you get is a bunch
of people deluded into thinking they're hyperlogical while giving themselves a free pass on the
begged question of where their "first principles" emerged out of. It's not just their sci-fi bubble
that needs a poppin', it's their Rothbardian/Randite one as well.
+1,000
"The people who run Silicon Valley identify with progressive values"
True! I've seen some smoking weed while talking machine language and screwing half of humanity
The points you raise are accurate. And even long before those things existed, Silicon Valley
arose as conscious, deliberate high-level government strategy (or beyond-government deep state).
The sources of new technology and funding have been deliberately obscured, at least as far
as the general public debate goes. It has nothing to do with "innovation" and "entrepreneurship".
It is amazing to see all countries around the world hop onto the innovation, let's-imitate-Silicon-Valley
bandwagon, with no awareness that SV was no accident of a few smart/lucky individual entrepreneurs.
NOBODY has to join buttBook, review slimy effing GIGGLE, and especially use MICROSWIFT; ALTERNATIVES
are easy and often more effective and especially annoying to the rich slime.
When Balmer was Billy-Boy's Ceo he actually preached that Linux was a nefarious plot to deprive
clowns like him of their well deserved "emoluments". Fortuneately, all he has to do now is sell
beer and hot dogs, and make sure the cheerleaders keep their clothing on. Good job for him.
Decide NOT to be a lemming; instead be a BOLSHIE and hit 'em hard. YOU and the whole internet
will benefit.
I think some of the naivete of this talk is based on a superficial knowledge of American history.
Things like his remark about the Women's DC March – "America is not used to large demonstrations
" Oh really.
The writer, though intelligent, is apparently unaware of massive demos during the Vietnam War,
the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Iraq war marches, the Bonus March etc etc. Perhaps his ignorance
is a function of age, and perhaps the fact he was not born here, vis a vis his name.
I will reply to an almost tangential little something which Maciej Ceglowski wrote near the
beginning of his piece.
" 65.8 million for Clinton
63.0 million for Trump
This was the second time in sixteen years that the candidate with fewer votes won the American
Presidency. There is a bug in the operating system of our democracy, one of the many ways that
slavery still casts its shadow over American politics."
Really? A bug in the operating system of our democracy? That sounds like something a Clintonite
would say. It sounds like something that many millions of Clintonites DID say, over and over and
over again.
Clinton got more popular votes? She got almost all of them in California. So Mr. Ceglowski
thinks Clinton should be President based on that? That means Mr. Ceglowski wants the entire rest
of America to be California's colonial possession, ruled by a President that California picked.
And don't think we Midwestern Deplorables don't understand exACTly how Ceglowski thinks and what
Ceglowski thinks of us out here in Deploristan.
Some Clinton supporters are smarter than that. Some were not surprised. Michael Moore was not
surprised. He predicted that we Deploristani Midwesterners would make Trump President whether
the digitally beautiful people liked it or not. Did Mr. Ceglowski support Clinton? Did the "tech
workers in short-lived revolt" support Clinton? And did they support NAFTA back in the day? You
thought you would cram Trade Treason Clinton down our throat? Well, we flung Trade Patriot Trump
right back in your face.
By pushing the envelope CIA essentially armed terrorists is effective techniques of avoiding electronic
eavedropping....
Notable quotes:
"... Terrorists now know that using cell phones is dangerous, that transferring money using commercial accounts can be detected, that moving around when a drone is overhead can be fatal, and that communicating by computer is likely to be intercepted and exposed even when encrypted. ..."
"... So they rely on couriers to communicate and move money while also avoiding the use of the vulnerable technologies whenever they can, sometimes using public phones and computers only when they are many miles away from their operational locations, and changing addresses, SIM cards, and telephone numbers frequently to confuse the monitoring. ..."
America's high-tech spies aren't equipped to penetrate low-tech terrorist organizations
Terrorists now know that using cell phones is dangerous, that transferring money using commercial
accounts can be detected, that moving around when a drone is overhead can be fatal, and that communicating
by computer is likely to be intercepted and exposed even when encrypted.
So they rely on couriers to communicate and move money while also avoiding the use of the
vulnerable technologies whenever they can, sometimes using public phones and computers only when
they are many miles away from their operational locations, and changing addresses, SIM cards, and
telephone numbers frequently to confuse the monitoring.
Technical intelligence has another limitation: while it is excellent on picking up bits and pieces
and using sophisticated computers to work through the bulk collection of chatter, it is largely unable
to learn the intentions of terrorist groups and leaders. To do that you need spies, ideally someone
who is placed in the inner circle of an organization and who is therefore privy to decision making.
Since 9/11 U.S. intelligence has had a poor record in recruiting agents to run inside terrorist
organizations-or even less toxic groups that are similarly structured-in places like Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Syria. Information collected relating to the internal workings of al-Qaeda, the Taliban,
dissident Sunni groups in Iraq, and now ISIS has been, to say the least, disappointing. To be fair
this is often because security concerns
limit the ability
of American case officers to operate in areas that are considered too dangerous,
which is generally speaking where the terrorist targets are actually located. Also, hostile groups
frequently run their operations through franchise arrangements where much of the decision making
is both local and funded without large cash transfers from a central organization, making the activity
hard to detect.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National
Interest.
By pushing the envelope CIA essentially armed terrorists is effective techniques of avoiding electronic
eavedropping....
Notable quotes:
"... Terrorists now know that using cell phones is dangerous, that transferring money using commercial accounts can be detected, that moving around when a drone is overhead can be fatal, and that communicating by computer is likely to be intercepted and exposed even when encrypted. ..."
"... So they rely on couriers to communicate and move money while also avoiding the use of the vulnerable technologies whenever they can, sometimes using public phones and computers only when they are many miles away from their operational locations, and changing addresses, SIM cards, and telephone numbers frequently to confuse the monitoring. ..."
America's high-tech spies aren't equipped to penetrate low-tech terrorist organizations
Terrorists now know that using cell phones is dangerous, that transferring money using commercial
accounts can be detected, that moving around when a drone is overhead can be fatal, and that communicating
by computer is likely to be intercepted and exposed even when encrypted.
So they rely on couriers to communicate and move money while also avoiding the use of the
vulnerable technologies whenever they can, sometimes using public phones and computers only when
they are many miles away from their operational locations, and changing addresses, SIM cards, and
telephone numbers frequently to confuse the monitoring.
Technical intelligence has another limitation: while it is excellent on picking up bits and pieces
and using sophisticated computers to work through the bulk collection of chatter, it is largely unable
to learn the intentions of terrorist groups and leaders. To do that you need spies, ideally someone
who is placed in the inner circle of an organization and who is therefore privy to decision making.
Since 9/11 U.S. intelligence has had a poor record in recruiting agents to run inside terrorist
organizations-or even less toxic groups that are similarly structured-in places like Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Syria. Information collected relating to the internal workings of al-Qaeda, the Taliban,
dissident Sunni groups in Iraq, and now ISIS has been, to say the least, disappointing. To be fair
this is often because security concerns
limit the ability
of American case officers to operate in areas that are considered too dangerous,
which is generally speaking where the terrorist targets are actually located. Also, hostile groups
frequently run their operations through franchise arrangements where much of the decision making
is both local and funded without large cash transfers from a central organization, making the activity
hard to detect.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National
Interest.
As one commenter explained below, the encryption of communications change very little if all your
communications are watched. Envelope (metadata) in enough to watch you pretty closely.
What the NSA does not tell the FISA court is that its requests for approvals are a sham. That's
because the NSA relies on vague language in a 35-year-old executive order, known as EO 12333, as
authority to conduct mass surveillance. That's surveillance of everyone - and it does capture the
content of every telephone conversation, as well as every keystroke on every computer and all fiber-optic
data generated everywhere within, coming to and going from the United States.
This is not only profoundly unlawful but also profoundly deceptive. It is unlawful because it
violates the Fourth Amendment. It is deceptive because Congress and the courts and the American people,
perhaps even the president, think that the FISA court has been serving as a buffer for the voracious
appetite of the NSA. In reality, the NSA, while dispatching lawyers to make sophisticated arguments
to the FISA court, has gone behind the court's back by spying on everyone all the time.
In a memo from a now-former NSA director to his agents and vendors, leaked to the public, he advised
capturing all data from everyone all the time. This produces information overload, as there is more
data than can be analyzed; each year, it produces the equivalent of 27 times the contents of the
Library of Congress. Therefore, safety - as well as liberty - is compromised.
The recent mass killings in Boston, San Bernardino and Orlando were all preceded by text messages
and cellphone conversations between the killers and their confederates. The NSA had the digital versions
of those texts and conversations, but it had not analyzed them until after the killings - because
it has and has had too much data to analyze in a critical and timely manner.
So, why did the NSA announce that it is pulling back from its customary uses of Section 702? To
give the false impression to members of Congress that it follows the law. Section 702, the great
subterfuge, expires at the end of this year, and the NSA, which has spied on Donald Trump since before
he was president, fears the debate that will accompany the efforts to renew it - hence its softening
public tone.
Does anyone seriously think that senior NSA officials do NOT personally ENRICH themselves through
stock market manipulation in anticipation of earnings reports, mergers etc. based on illegal NSA
intercepts?
Does anyone think that at least NO NSA officer EVER uses illegally intercepted information
to blackmail others or otherwise to secure a secret advantage in dealing with others?
Does anyone think that Hillary's and the FBI's access to grossly illegal NSA intercepts was
NOT a key factor in the 2016 presidential and Congressional elections?
The backstory is that Trump has the power to fire them all, easily and without much in the
way of red tape. And that he can't be relied upon not to do so.
So, why did the NSA announce that it is pulling back from its customary uses of Section
702? To give the false impression to members of Congress that it follows the law. Section 702,
the great subterfuge, expires at the end of this year, and the NSA, which has spied on Donald
Trump since before he was president, fears the debate that will accompany the efforts to renew
it - hence its softening public tone.
Oh, and Trump can veto any renewal bill. Too bad he won't.
What will happen with this privacy thingy is that people with stuff to hide (legitimate
or not) will get their hands on strong encryption and the hoi polloi just doesn't care enough.
There needs to be a public movement toward encryption, so that everyone uses it. Then using
it won't be prone to the abuse of "probable cause."
What will happen with this privacy thingy is that people with stuff to hide (legitimate or
not) will get their hands on strong encryption and the hoi polloi just doesn't care enough.
There needs to be a public movement toward encryption, so that everyone uses it. Then using it
won't be prone to the abuse of "probable cause."
movement toward encryption
Think of a colleague, a personal enemy, a business partner, a spouse etc. Imagine you have access to their communications logs – a long list of times and other details
of each email, text, USPS letter, phone call, wire transfer etc. to or from the subject, including
the name of every person with whom she communicated, but NOT including the content of the message.
What conclusions could you draw from the following (with HT to Electronic Frontiers Foundation):
(1) Your business partner called a bankruptcy lawyer last Thursday and spoke for 27 minutes.
You do not know what was discussed because the communication was encrypted.
(2) Your spouse made several hours-long phone calls, wired money to a sibling in Brazil on
five occasions in 2 days, and contacted an airline. You do not know any details because the communications
were encrypted.
(3) The senior dean of admissions at Princeton exchanged 17 encrypted emails with an individual
in Saudi Arabia, and two days later received two bank transfers from another individual in Saudi
Arabia to her numbered bank account in Moldova. You do not know the content of the emails, nor
the amount of the wire transfers, because the communications were encrypted.
Very interesting discussion of how the project of mass surveillance of internet traffic started
and what were the major challenges. that's probably where the idea of collecting "envelopes" and correlating
them to create social network. Similar to what was done in civil War.
The idea to prevent corruption of medical establishment to prevent Medicare fraud is very interesting.
Notable quotes:
"... I suspect that it's hopelessly unlikely for honest people to complete the Police Academy; somewhere early on the good cops are weeded out and cannot complete training unless they compromise their integrity. ..."
"... 500 Years of History Shows that Mass Spying Is Always Aimed at Crushing Dissent It's Never to Protect Us From Bad Guys No matter which government conducts mass surveillance, they also do it to crush dissent, and then give a false rationale for why they're doing it. ..."
"... People are so worried about NSA don't be fooled that private companies are doing the same thing. ..."
"... In communism the people learned quick they were being watched. The reaction was not to go to protest. ..."
"... Just not be productive and work the system and not listen to their crap. this is all that was required to bring them down. watching people, arresting does not do shit for their cause ..."
"People who believe in these rights very much are forced into compromising their integrity"
I suspect that it's hopelessly unlikely for honest people to complete the Police Academy; somewhere
early on the good cops are weeded out and cannot complete training unless they compromise their
integrity.
500 Years of History Shows that Mass Spying Is Always Aimed at Crushing Dissent It's Never to Protect Us From Bad Guys No matter which government conducts mass surveillance,
they also do it to crush dissent, and then give a false rationale for why they're doing it.
I am wondering how much damage your spying did to the Foreign Countries, I am wondering how
you changed regimes around the world, how many refugees you helped to create around the world.
Don Kantner, 2 weeks ago
People are so worried about NSA don't be fooled that private companies are doing the same
thing. Plus, the truth is if the NSA wasn't watching any fool with a computer could potentially
cause an worldwide economic crisis.
Bettor in Vegas 1 year ago
In communism the people learned quick they were being watched. The reaction was not to go to
protest.
Just not be productive and work the system and not listen to their crap. this is all that was
required to bring them down. watching people, arresting does not do shit for their cause......
He also exposes the NSA penchant for "swindles", such as preventing the plugging of holes in software
around the world, to preserve their spying access.
Frank Oak
3 weeks ago Big Mike's boat 200 tons coke bust n Hussien on the run as cosmic Camelots crimes
going viral
Nancy M
3 weeks ago The Clinton campaign to divert attention to Russia instead of her myriad of crimes
that were revealed during the election must be stopped and the alt media needs to start talking about
her and Obama's crimes again and demand justice...control the dialogue
John
3 weeks ago It's almost comical to hear that they lie to each other. No wonder why these retards
in the mid-east and every other third world country gets the better of us.
Great interview, thanks RT. I knew most of the material in this interview for years now, but
it's good for it to get out whatever way possible. Hope you continue doing more such great interviews.
jake gittes 1 year ago
RT? Imagine the Russian equivalent? Golly, NSA out of control? Who knew? Who knew that
the NSA mandate *is to exceed their mandate" .
If you were in prison for the last 15 yrs you would know that NSA security in triplicate is
just doing what they've always been doing except that PRISM, restarted in 2007, is just updated
software.
Jim Jimmy 2 years ago
there is one main reason they collect all information and target everyone, even members of
congress and people like Angela merkel. If they have personal information on these powerful people
there comes the chance to blackmail them. "vote this way on this" "consent to this policy". It's
political leverage
New leaked documents released by the Shadow Brokers includes information showing that the
NSA
penetrated Middle Eastern financial networks
, initially with an eye toward being able to
track all financial transactions in the region as an "anti-money laundering" effort.
This involved hacking into the region's SWIFT banking system, and unsurprisingly,, given the
NSA's penchant for mission creep fairly quickly grew this into an effort not only to have access
to the information on financial transactions, but to try to gain access to a long list of banks
"of interest."
The leaks provided information showing that SWIFT bureau in the Middle East, EastNet, made
some very poor security choices, which would've allowed the NSA to easily attack essentially all
of the banks on the network, as soon as they had compromised the first one.
Documents showed at least five of the banks "of interest" had been compromised. It is unclear
from the documents whether the NSA continues to have these banks' systems compromised and is
continued to collect data from them, though at the very least they now have a heads up that it's
going on.
"... "Called a 'non-state intelligence service' today by the 'state non-intelligence agency' which produced Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Iraq, Iran & Pinochet." ..."
Julian Assange has responded to CIA Director Mike Pompeo's accusation
that WikiLeaks is a "non-state intelligence agency" by trolling the
CIA over its own roles in producing "Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Iraq, Iran and
Pinochet."
Called a "non-state intelligence service"
today by the "state non-intelligence agency" which produced
al-Qaeda, ISIS, Iraq, Iran & Pinochet.
Assange tweeted,
"Called a 'non-state intelligence service'
today by the 'state non-intelligence agency' which produced Al-Qaeda,
ISIS, Iraq, Iran & Pinochet."
Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of siding with dictators and being a
"non-state hostile intelligence service,"
at a Center for
Strategic and International Studies event on Thursday. He called
Assange and his associates
"demons"
and said
"he and his
ilk make common cause with dictators."
Assange in turn accused the CIA of producing terrorist groups and
dictators. He said the CIA produced Al-Qaeda, referring to the
agency's role in arming and training mujahideen fighters in
Afghanistan to fight the Soviets during the 1970s, some of whom –
including Osama Bin Laden – later evolved into Al-Qaeda and the
Taliban.
Assange has previously
stated
that the CIA's role in arming the mujahideen led to Al-Qaeda, which
led to 9/11, the Iraq invasion and, later, the formation of ISIS.
The CIA admitted it was
behind
the 1953 coup in Iran which overthrew Prime Minister
Mohammad Mosaddeq and reinstalled the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,
whose 26 year rule led to the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Assange's Pinochet reference alludes to the CIA's
"firm and
continuing
policy
"
to assist in the overthrowing of Chilean President
Salvador Allende in 1973, and its
support
for dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Pompeo's attack on WikiLeaks appears to be in response to an op-ed
Assange
wrote
in the Washington Post on Tuesday which referenced President
Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1961 farewell speech, in which he warned of the
dangers of the influence of the military industrial complex. Assange
said the speech is similar to WikiLeaks' own mission statement.
"We publish truths regarding overreaches and abuses conducted
in secret by the powerful,"
he said, going on to say that
WikiLeaks' motives are the same as those of the New York Times and the
Washington Post.
Pompeo himself has previously appeared to support WikiLeaks'
revelations, while President Donald Trump praised the whistleblowing
site on more than one occasion during the presidential election, even
professing
his love for WikiLeaks in October.
Employees of the Central
Intelligence Agency find themselves in challenging times.
The agency is dealing with the release by WikiLeaks of
top-secret documents, apparently detailing
highly-classified surveillance methods, and a fraught
relationship with President Trump, who has criticized the
intelligence community ever since he campaigned for
president. CBS News senior security contributor Michael
Morell, former deputy director of the CIA, discusses the
state of the agency, and what it means for America's
security.
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Geral Hammonds
3 weeks ago
Jfk wanted to disband the CIA (Military
industrial complex ) and i guess the CIA didn't
like that very much and let Kennedy know how kuch
they didn't like that in the most violent way
possible, :(. And its really strange that the
democrats are pro deep state, pro war, just
advocates for the CIA But then again anything an
anyone that is anti Trump is goo for them, Since
the guy from the apprentice has completely
devistated them as individuals and as a political
party.
At
2:25
, Hillary supporter Mike Morell even
admits that someone in the Obama CIA leaked
info. Reports are that in December, 2016, a
small group of IT contractors gave the info to
WikiLeaks. Obama has other people do the dirty
work for him.
CIA killed journalist Mike Hastings with remote
crashing his car. CIA has surpassed the authority
of the NSA. CIA has no oversight, not even by
President Trump. They are colluding with media to
destroy Trump's presidency via revealing lies
manufactured to bring criminal charges on him.
CIA is out of control, need the entire senior
officers fired, investigated, charged and
imprisoned or executed for treason & espionage &
Title 8. If CIA does this to a president, they
will do it to Americans who interfere with their
criminal activities world-wide.
another MSM whitewash .... a ex CIA talking head
minimising the illegalities of CIA actions and
promoting a big $$$$ spend on an upgrade of CIA
systems.... no doubt the US zombie public will
swallow it hook line and sinker. There is no
future for the US , it will either cause a WW3
scenario or disintegrate in to an internal civil
conflict....
Mike Morell interview reveal it ia an inside job
and many in the CIA is disillusioned,
demoralized, and become Whistle Blowers! There
have been to many scandals and leaks. The entire
US Intelligence INDUSTRY must be dismantled and
then rebuild. \
It is deeply troubling that
sensitive data that can create huge problems is
released. There is too many with security
clearance to look at the data. Security clearance
should only be given for the data relevant to do
their job. The NSA collects all our data, all the
time, and can query/search the database for
something as simple as a phone number, IP
address, bank account or name.
If the NSA, FBI, or CIA wants email or phone
calls, on Trump or Flynn all they must do is
query their name or phone number or email and
date range. Bingo, they got it! This is going on
24/7. They capture all data flowing through the
major fiber optic lines in the US. Over 5,000
people in the intel community are assigned to do
nothing but mine this data.The NSA, CIA, and FBI
have access to the information realtime, anytime!
All of this is done without a warrant. Hell, who
needs a FISA request? They have everything, and
thousands of intel personnel have access to the
information! You wonder why Jim Comey and others
are freaking out! This is totally illegal. It was
part of an Executive Order issued with the intent
of pursuing drug dealers and know criminals NOT
spying on the American people, but of course they
wouldn't do that, or Would They? Businesses
world-wide has now to spend large sums of money
protecting themselves against CIA criminally
invented malware and viruses. More than 1,5
BILLION phones and computers using Apple or
Android operating system is affected. So far only
1% of Vault 7 released. What if the remaining 99%
contain top-secret information on US neuro
science programs (Mind and Mass Control). No
problem, if this top-secret programs falls into
the hands of Russia or China, since their neuro
science programs is even better, but it would be
a catastrophe if Mr. Kim in North Korea got hold
of it and continued developing it.
Thing is, if Binney was actually a problem for the NSA et. al, the problem
would be quickly eliminated. That he's still around to say what he says means that the NSA at least
doesn't care, or more likely that he's a controlled disinformation mouthpiece.
II was thinking about that today. How is this man still alive, given the
information he was talking about to Carlson?
I hope that the climate continues to warm towards whistleblowers, and more and more honest whistle
blowers come forward to speak up. It''s the way to drain the sulphurous swamp. 9/11 might could surface
and blow that way .
Perhaps Trump should start looking at Snowdon and Assange in completely different light too.
The documents posted by WikiLeaks suggest that the CIA had obtained
information on 14 security flaws
in Apple's iOS operating system for phones and tablets. The
leaked documents also identified at least two dozen flaws in Android, the most popular operating
system for smartphones, which was developed by Alphabet's Google division.
Notable quotes:
"... The spy software described in the latest documents was designed to be injected into a Mac's firmware, a type of software preloaded in the computer's chips. It would then act as a "listening post," broadcasting the user's activities to the CIA whenever the machine was connected to the internet. ..."
"... A similar tool called NightSkies was developed in 2009 to spy on iPhones, the documents said, with the agency figuring out how to install it undetected before a new phone was turned on for the first time. (Apple said that flaw affected only the iPhone 3G and was fixed in all later models.) ..."
"... By rewriting the firmware of a computer or a phone, tools that operate at the chip level can hide their existence and avoid being wiped out by routine software updates. ..."
The
CIA developed tools to spy on Mac computers by injecting software into the chips that control
the computers' fundamental operations, according to the latest
cache of classified government
documents published on Thursday by
WikiLeaks .
Apple said in a statement Thursday evening that its preliminary assessment of the leaked information
indicated that the Mac vulnerabilities described in the disclosure were previously fixed in all Macs
launched after 2013.
However, the documents also indicated that the Central Intelligence Agency was developing a new
version of one tool last year to work with current software.
The leaked documents were the second batch recently released by WikiLeaks, which said it obtained
a hoard of information on the agency's cyberweapons programs from a former government worker or contractor.
The
first group of documents , published March 7, suggested that the CIA had found ways to hack
Apple iPhones and Android smartphones, Microsoft Windows computers, Cisco routers and Samsung smart
televisions.
Since the initial release of the CIA documents, which the agency has not confirmed are authentic,
major technology companies have been
scrambling to assess whether the security holes exploited by the CIA still exist and to patch
them if they do.
All of the surveillance tools that have been disclosed were designed to be installed on individual
phones or computers. But the effects could be much wider. Cisco Systems, for example, warned customers
this week that many of its popular routers, the backbone of computer networks, could be hacked using
the CIA's techniques.
... ... ...
The spy software described in the latest documents was designed to be injected into a Mac's firmware,
a type of software preloaded in the computer's chips. It would then act as a "listening post," broadcasting
the user's activities to the CIA whenever the machine was connected to the internet.
A similar tool called NightSkies was developed in 2009 to spy on iPhones, the documents said,
with the agency figuring out how to install it undetected before a new phone was turned on for the
first time. (Apple said that flaw affected only the iPhone 3G and was fixed in all later models.)
Although most of the tools targeted outdated versions of the Apple devices' software, the CIA's
general approach raises new security concerns for the industry, said Eric Ahlm, who studies cybersecurity
at Gartner, a research firm. By rewriting the firmware of a computer or a phone, tools
that operate at the chip level can hide their existence and avoid being wiped out by routine software
updates.
Under an agreement struck during the Obama administration, intelligence agencies were supposed
to share their knowledge of most security vulnerabilities with tech companies so they could be fixed.
The CIA documents suggest that some key vulnerabilities were kept secret for the government's
use.
The CIA declined to comment Thursday, pointing reporters to
its earlier statement about the leaks, in which it defended its use of "innovative, cutting-edge"
techniques to protect the country from foreign threats and criticized WikiLeaks for sharing information
that could help the country's enemies.
"... Now we have "synthetic" surveillance. You don't even need a court order. Now all incidental communication intercepts can be
unmasked. One can search their huge databases for all the incidental communications of someone of interest, then collect all of the
unmasked incidental communications that involve that person and put them together in one handy dandy report. Viola! You can keep tabs
on them every time they end up being incidentally collected. ..."
"... You ever went to an embassy party? Talked to a drug dealer or mafia guy without being aware of it? Correspond overseas? Your
communications have been "incidentally" collected too. There is so much surveillance out there we have probably all bounced off various
targets over the last several years. ..."
"... This is what police states do. In the past it was considered scandalous for senior U.S. officials to even request the identities
of U.S. officials incidentally monitored by the government (normally they are redacted from intelligence reports). John Bolton's nomination
to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was derailed in 2006 after the NSA confirmed he had made 10 such requests when he was Undersecretary
of State for Arms Control in George W. Bush's first term. The fact that the intercepts of Flynn's conversations with Kislyak appear
to have been widely distributed inside the government is a red flag. ..."
"... Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told me Monday
that he saw the leaks about Flynn's conversations with Kislyak as part of a pattern. ..."
"... The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal
on N.Korea etc? ..."
"... But no matter what Flynn did, it is simply not the role of the deep state to target a man working in one of the political branches
of the government by dishing to reporters about information it has gathered clandestinely. ..."
"... It is the role of elected members of Congress to conduct public investigations of alleged wrongdoing by public officials..
..."
The rank and file of the IC are not involved in this. So let's not tar everyone with the same brush, but Obama revised executive
order 12333 so that communication intercepts incidentally collected dont have to be masked and may be shared freely in the IC.
Now we have "synthetic" surveillance. You don't even need a court order. Now all incidental communication intercepts can
be unmasked. One can search their huge databases for all the incidental communications of someone of interest, then collect all
of the unmasked incidental communications that involve that person and put them together in one handy dandy report. Viola! You
can keep tabs on them every time they end up being incidentally collected.
You ever went to an embassy party? Talked to a drug dealer or mafia guy without being aware of it? Correspond overseas?
Your communications have been "incidentally" collected too. There is so much surveillance out there we have probably all bounced
off various targets over the last several years.
What might your "synthetic" surveillance report look like?
There's way more going on here then first alleged. From Bloomberg, not my choice for news, but There is another component to
this story as well -- as Trump himself just tweeted.
It's very rare that reporters are ever told about government-monitored communications of U.S. citizens, let alone senior U.S.
officials. The last story like this to hit Washington was in 2009 when Jeff Stein, then of CQ, reported on intercepted phone calls
between a senior Aipac lobbyist and Jane Harman, who at the time was a Democratic member of Congress.
Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason.
Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy
reputations from the cloak of anonymity.
This is what police states do. In the past it was considered scandalous for senior U.S. officials to even request the identities
of U.S. officials incidentally monitored by the government (normally they are redacted from intelligence reports). John Bolton's
nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was derailed in 2006 after the NSA confirmed he had made 10 such requests
when he was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control in George W. Bush's first term. The fact that the intercepts of Flynn's conversations
with Kislyak appear to have been widely distributed inside the government is a red flag.
Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told me Monday
that he saw the leaks about Flynn's conversations with Kislyak as part of a pattern. "There does appear to be a well orchestrated
effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration," he said. "From the leaking of phone calls between the president and
foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security
clearances, it looks like a pattern."
@?realDonaldTrump?
The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening
as I deal on N.Korea etc?
President Trump was roundly mocked among liberals for that tweet. But he is, in many ways, correct. These leaks are an enormous
problem. And in a less polarized context, they would be recognized immediately for what they clearly are: an effort to manipulate
public opinion for the sake of achieving a desired political outcome. It's weaponized spin.............
But no matter what Flynn did, it is simply not the role of the deep state to target a man working in one of the political
branches of the government by dishing to reporters about information it has gathered clandestinely.
It is the role of elected members of Congress to conduct public investigations of alleged wrongdoing by public officials..
..... But the answer isn't to counter it with equally irregular acts of sabotage - or with a disinformation campaign waged
by nameless civil servants toiling away in the surveillance state.....
"... In any event, it was "intercepts" leaked from deep in the bowels of the CIA to the Washington Post and then amplified in a 24/7 campaign by the War Channel (CNN) that brought General Flynn down. ..."
"... But here's the thing. They were aiming at Donald J. Trump. And for all of his puffed up bluster about being the savviest negotiator on the planet, the Donald walked right into their trap, as we shall amplify momentarily. ..."
"... But let's first make the essence of the matter absolutely clear. The whole Flynn imbroglio is not about a violation of the Logan Act owing to the fact that the general engaged in diplomacy as a private citizen. ..."
"... It's about re-litigating the 2016 election based on the hideous lie that Trump stole it with the help of Vladimir Putin. In fact, Nancy Pelosi was quick to say just that: ..."
"... 'The American people deserve to know the full extent of Russia's financial, personal and political grip on President Trump and what that means for our national security,' House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a press release. ..."
"... And Senator Graham, the member of the boobsey twins who ran for President in 2016 while getting a GOP primary vote from virtually nobody, made clear that General Flynn's real sin was a potential peace overture to the Russians: ..."
"... We say good riddance to Flynn, of course, because he was a shrill anti-Iranian warmonger. But let's also not be fooled by the clinical term at the heart of the story. That is, "intercepts" mean that the Deep State taps the phone calls of the President's own closest advisors as a matter of course. ..."
"... As one writer for LawNewz noted regarding acting Attorney General Sally Yates' voyeuristic pre-occupation with Flynn's intercepted conversations, Nixon should be rolling in his grave with envy: ..."
"... Yes, that's the same career apparatchik of the permanent government that Obama left behind to continue the 2016 election by other means. And it's working. The Donald is being rapidly emasculated by the powers that be in the Imperial City due to what can only be described as an audacious and self-evident attack on Trump's Presidency by the Deep State. ..."
"... Indeed, the paper details an apparent effort by Yates to misuse her office to launch a full-scale secret investigation of her political opponents, including 'intercepting calls' of her political adversaries. ..."
"... Yet on the basis of the report's absolutely zero evidence and endless surmise, innuendo and "assessments", the Obama White House imposed another round of its silly school-boy sanctions on a handful of Putin's cronies. ..."
"... Of course, Flynn should have been telling the Russian Ambassador that this nonsense would be soon reversed! ..."
"... But here is the ultimate folly. The mainstream media talking heads are harrumphing loudly about the fact that the very day following Flynn's call -- Vladimir Putin announced that he would not retaliate against the new Obama sanctions as expected; and shortly thereafter, the Donald tweeted that Putin had shown admirable wisdom. ..."
"... That's right. Two reasonably adult statesman undertook what might be called the Christmas Truce of 2016. But like its namesake of 1914 on the bloody no man's land of the western front, the War Party has determined that the truce-makers shall not survive. ..."
General Flynn's tenure in the White House was only slightly longer than that of President-elect
William Henry Harrison in 1841. Actually, with just 24 days in the White House, General Flynn's tenure
fell a tad short of old "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too". General Harrison actually lasted 31 days before
getting felled by pneumonia.
And the circumstances were considerably more benign. It seems that General Harrison had a fondness
for the same "firewater" that agitated the native Americans he slaughtered at the famous battle memorialized
in his campaign slogan. In fact, during the campaign a leading Democrat newspaper skewered the old
general, who at 68 was the oldest US President prior to Ronald Reagan, saying:
Give him a barrel of hard [alcoholic] cider, and a pension of two thousand [dollars] a year
and he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin.
That might have been a good idea back then (or even now), but to prove he wasn't infirm, Harrison
gave the longest inaugural address in US history (2 hours) in the midst of seriously inclement weather
wearing neither hat nor coat.
That's how he got pneumonia! Call it foolhardy, but that was nothing compared to that exhibited
by Donald Trump's former national security advisor.
General Flynn got the equivalent of political pneumonia by talking for hours during the transition
to international leaders, including Russia's ambassador to the US, on phone lines which were bugged
by the CIA Or more accurately, making calls which were "intercepted" by the very same NSA/FBI spy
machinery that monitors every single phone call made in America.
Ironically, we learned what Flynn should have known about the Deep State's plenary surveillance
from Edward Snowden. Alas, Flynn and Trump wanted the latter to be hung in the public square as a
"traitor", but if that's the solution to intelligence community leaks, the Donald is now going to
need his own rope factory to deal with the flood of traitorous disclosures directed against him.
In any event, it was "intercepts" leaked from deep in the bowels of the CIA to the Washington
Post and then amplified in a 24/7 campaign by the War Channel (CNN) that brought General Flynn down.
But here's the thing. They were aiming at Donald J. Trump. And for all of his puffed up bluster
about being the savviest negotiator on the planet, the Donald walked right into their trap, as we
shall amplify momentarily.
But let's first make the essence of the matter absolutely clear. The whole Flynn imbroglio
is not about a violation of the Logan Act owing to the fact that the general engaged in diplomacy
as a private citizen.
It's about re-litigating the 2016 election based on the hideous lie that Trump stole it with
the help of Vladimir Putin. In fact, Nancy Pelosi was quick to say just that:
'The American people deserve to know the full extent of Russia's financial, personal and political
grip on President Trump and what that means for our national security,' House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi said in a press release.
Yet, we should rephrase. The re-litigation aspect reaches back to the Republican primaries, too.
The Senate GOP clowns who want a war with practically everybody, John McCain and Lindsey Graham,
are already launching their own investigation from the Senate Armed Services committee.
And Senator Graham, the member of the boobsey twins who ran for President in 2016 while getting
a GOP primary vote from virtually nobody, made clear that General Flynn's real sin was a potential
peace overture to the Russians:
Sen. Lindsey Graham also said he wants an investigation into Flynn's conversations with a Russian
ambassador about sanctions: "I think Congress needs to be informed of what actually Gen. Flynn said
to the Russian ambassador about lifting sanctions," the South Carolina Republican told CNN's Kate
Bolduan on "At This Hour. And I want to know, did Gen. Flynn do this by himself or was he directed
by somebody to do it?"
We say good riddance to Flynn, of course, because he was a shrill anti-Iranian warmonger.
But let's also not be fooled by the clinical term at the heart of the story. That is, "intercepts"
mean that the Deep State taps the phone calls of the President's own closest advisors as a matter
of course.
This is the real scandal as Trump himself has rightly asserted. The very idea that the already
announced #1 national security advisor to a President-elect should be subject to old-fashion "bugging,"
albeit with modern day technology, overwhelmingly trumps the utterly specious Logan Act charge at
the center of the case.
As one writer for LawNewz noted regarding acting Attorney General Sally Yates' voyeuristic
pre-occupation with Flynn's intercepted conversations, Nixon should be rolling in his grave with
envy:
Now, information leaks that Sally Yates knew about surveillance being conducted against
potential members of the Trump administration, and disclosed that information to others. Even
Richard Nixon didn't use the government agencies themselves to do his black bag surveillance operations.
Sally Yates involvement with this surveillance on American political opponents, and possibly the
leaking related thereto, smacks of a return to Hoover-style tactics. As writers at Bloomberg and
The Week both noted, it wreaks of 'police-state' style tactics. But knowing dear Sally as I do,
it comes as no surprise.
Yes, that's the same career apparatchik of the permanent government that Obama left behind
to continue the 2016 election by other means. And it's working. The Donald is being rapidly emasculated
by the powers that be in the Imperial City due to what can only be described as an audacious and
self-evident attack on Trump's Presidency by the Deep State.
Indeed, it seems that the layers of intrigue have gotten so deep and convoluted that the nominal
leadership of the permanent government machinery has lost track of who is spying on whom. Thus, we
have the following curious utterance by none other than the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
Rep. Devin Nunes:
'I expect for the FBI to tell me what is going on, and they better have a good answer,' he told
The Washington Post. 'The big problem I see here is that you have an American citizen who had his
phone calls recorded.'
Well, yes. That makes 324 million of us, Congressman.
But for crying out loud, surely the oh so self-important chairman of the House intelligence committee
knows that everybody is bugged. But when it reaches the point that the spy state is essentially using
its unconstitutional tools to engage in what amounts to "opposition research" with the aim of election
nullification, then the Imperial City has become a clear and present danger to American democracy
and the liberties of the American people.
As Robert Barnes of LawNewz further explained, Sally Yates, former CIA director John Brennan and
a large slice of the Never Trumper intelligence community were systematically engaged in "opposition
research" during the campaign and the transition:
According to published reports, someone was eavesdropping, and recording, the conversations of
Michael Flynn, while Sally Yates was at the Department of Justice. Sally Yates knew about this eavesdropping,
listened in herself (Pellicano-style for those who remember the infamous LA cases), and reported
what she heard to others. For Yates to have such access means she herself must have been involved
in authorizing its disclosure to political appointees, since she herself is such a political appointee.
What justification was there for an Obama appointee to be spying on the conversations of a future
Trump appointee?
Consider this little tidbit in
The Washington Post . The paper, which once broke Watergate, is now propagating the benefits
of Watergate-style surveillance in ways that do make Watergate look like a third-rate effort. (With
the) FBI 'routinely' monitoring conversations of Americans...... Yates listened to 'the intercepted
call,' even though Yates knew there was 'little chance' of any credible case being made for prosecution
under a law 'that has never been used in a prosecution.'
And well it hasn't been. After all, the Logan Act was signed by President John Adams in 1799 in
order to punish one of Thomas Jefferson's supporters for having peace discussions with the French
government in Paris. That is, it amounted to pre-litigating the Presidential campaign of 1800 based
on sheer political motivation.
According to the Washington Post itself, that is exactly what Yates and the Obama holdovers did
day and night during the interregnum:
Indeed, the paper details an apparent effort by Yates to misuse her office to launch a full-scale
secret investigation of her political opponents, including 'intercepting calls' of her political
adversaries.
So all of the feigned outrage emanating from Democrats and the Washington establishment about
Team Trump's trafficking with the Russians is a cover story. Surely anyone even vaguely familiar
with recent history would have known there was absolutely nothing illegal or even untoward about
Flynn's post-Christmas conversations with the Russian Ambassador.
Indeed, we recall from personal experience the thrilling moment on inauguration day in January
1981 when word came of the release of the American hostages in Tehran. Let us assure you, that did
not happen by immaculate diplomatic conception -- nor was it a parting gift to the Gipper by the
outgoing Carter Administration.
To the contrary, it was the fruit of secret negotiations with the Iranian government during the
transition by private American citizens. As the history books would have it because it's true, the
leader of that negotiation, in fact, was Ronald Reagan's national security council director-designate,
Dick Allen.
As the real Washington Post later reported, under the by-line of a real reporter, Bob Woodward:
Reagan campaign aides met in a Washington DC hotel in early October, 1980, with a self-described
'Iranian exile' who offered, on behalf of the Iranian government, to release the hostages to Reagan,
not Carter, in order to ensure Carter's defeat in the November 4, 1980 election.
The American participants were Richard Allen, subsequently Reagan's first national security adviser,
Allen aide Laurence Silberman, and Robert McFarlane, another future national security adviser who
in 1980 was on the staff of Senator John Tower (R-TX).
To this day we have not had occasion to visit our old friend Dick Allen in the US penitentiary
because he's not there; the Logan Act was never invoked in what is surely the most blatant case ever
of citizen diplomacy.
So let's get to the heart of the matter and be done with it. The Obama White House conducted a
sour grapes campaign to delegitimize the election beginning November 9th and it was led by then CIA
Director John Brennan.
That treacherous assault on the core constitutional matter of the election process culminated
in the ridiculous Russian meddling report of the Obama White House in December. The latter, of course,
was issued by serial liar James Clapper, as national intelligence director, and the clueless Democrat
lawyer and bag-man, Jeh Johnson, who had been appointed head of the Homeland Security Department.
Yet on the basis of the report's absolutely zero evidence and endless surmise, innuendo and
"assessments", the Obama White House imposed another round of its silly school-boy sanctions on a
handful of Putin's cronies.
Of course, Flynn should have been telling the Russian Ambassador that this nonsense would
be soon reversed!
But here is the ultimate folly. The mainstream media talking heads are harrumphing loudly
about the fact that the very day following Flynn's call -- Vladimir Putin announced that he would
not retaliate against the new Obama sanctions as expected; and shortly thereafter, the Donald tweeted
that Putin had shown admirable wisdom.
That's right. Two reasonably adult statesman undertook what might be called the Christmas
Truce of 2016. But like its namesake of 1914 on the bloody no man's land of the western front, the
War Party has determined that the truce-makers shall not survive.
We haven't had deep state (successfully) take out a President since JFK. I am sure they will
literally be gunning for Donald Trump! His election screwed up the elite's world order plans ...
poor Soros ... time for him to take a dirt knap!
Be careful Trump! They will try and kill you! The United States government is COMPLETELY corrupt.
Draining the swamp means its either you or they die!
Let us help Trump's presidency to make America (not globalist) great again.
Not only democrats rigged Primary to elect Clinton as presidential candidate last year even
though she has poor judgement (violating government cyber security policy) and is incompetent
(her email server was not secured) when she was the Secretary of State, and was revealed to be
corrupt by Bernie Sanders during the Primary, but also democrats encourage illegal immigration,
discourage work, and "conned" young voters with free college/food/housing/health care/Obama phone.
Democratic government employees/politicians also committed crimes to leak classified information
which caused former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn losing his job and undermined Trump's
presidency.
However middle/working class used their common senses voting against Clinton last November.
Although I am not a republican and didn't vote in primary but I voted for Trump and those Republicans
who supported Trump in last November since I am not impressed with the "integrity" and "judgement"
of democrats, Anti-Trump protesters, Anti-Trump republicans, and those media who endorsed Clinton
during presidential election and they'll work for globalists, the super rich, who moved jobs/investment
overseas for cheap labor/tax and demanded middle/working class to pay tax to support welfare of
illegal aliens and refugees who will become globalist's illegal voters and anti-Trump protesters.
To prevent/detect voter fraud, "voter ID" and "no mailing ballots" must be enforced to reduce
possible "voter frauds on a massive scale" committed by democratic/republic/independent party
operatives. All the sanctuary counties need to be recounted and voided county votes if recount
fails since the only county which was found to count one vote many times is the only "Sanctuary"
county, Wayne county, in recount states (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) last year. The
integrity of voting equipment and voting system need to be tested, protected and audited. There
were no voting equipment stuck to Trump. Yet, many voting equipment were found to switch votes
to Clinton last November. Voter databases need to be kept current. Encourage reporting of "voter
fraud on a massive scale" committed by political party operatives with large reward.
Trump knows whats coming. Rush Limbaugh said "I've known Trump for a long time, he is a winner
and I am sure none of this phases him at all. The media didn't create him, the media can't destroy
him."
Flynn has been there for several years. If he was such a threat why did they not take action
sooner since Soweeto appointed him in 2012? It must be that Soweto Obama is his spy buddy then,
both of them in league with the Russians since Obama has been with Flynn for a much longer time
he had to know if something was up.
The entire Russian spy story is a complete Fake news rouse.
I am wondering what they'll say tomorrow to draw attention awya form the muslim riots in Sweden.
If the news of Muslim riots in Sweden, then Trump will be even more vindicated and the MSM will
look even more stupid and Fake.
The Deep State has accentually lost control of the Intelligence Community via its Agents /
Operatives & Presstitute Media vehicle's to Gas Light the Masses.
So what Criminals at large Obama, Clapper & Lynch have done 17 days prior to former CEO Criminal
Obama leaving office was to Decentralize & weaken the NSA. As a result, Intel gathering was then
regulated to the other 16 Intel Agencies.
Thus, taking Centuries Old Intelligence based on a vey stringent Centralized British Model,
De Centralized it, filling the remaining 16 Intel Agenices with potential Spies and a Shadow Deep
State Mirror Government.
All controlled from two blocks away at Pure Evil Criminal War Criminal Treasonous at large,
former CEO Obama's Compound / Lair.
It's High Treason being conducted "Hidden In Plain View" by the Deep State.
It's the most Bizzare Transition of Power I've ever witnessed. Unprecedented.
Flynn did not tell Pence that Pence's best friend was front and center on the Pizzagate list.
That's what cost Flynn his job...it had fuck all do do with the elections.
The globalist mafia is trying to destroy Trump. There might be the same part of intelligence
community which is still loyal to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Still Flynn discussing sanctions, which could have been a violation of an 18th century
law, the Logan Act, that bars unauthorized citizens from brokering deals with foreign governments
involved in disputes with the United States.
Keith Kellogg links with Oracle my be as asset to Trump team.
As far back as the passage of the Patriot Act after 9/11, civil libertarians worried about
the surveillance state, the Panopticon, the erosion of privacy rights and due process in the name
of national security.
Paranoid fantasies were floated that President George W. Bush was monitoring the library cards
of political dissidents. Civil libertarians hailed NSA contractor Edward Snowden as a hero, or at
least accepted him as a necessary evil, for exposing the extent of Internet surveillance under President
Barack Obama.
Will civil libertarians now speak up for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, whose
career has been destroyed with a barrage of leaked wiretaps? Does anyone care if those leaks were
accurate or legal?
Over the weekend, a few honest observers of the Flynn imbroglio
noted that none of the strategically leaked intercepts of his conversations with Russian Ambassador
Sergey Kislyak proved he actually did anything wrong .
The media fielded accusations that Flynn discussed lifting the Obama administration's sanctions
on Russia – a transgression that would have been a serious violation of pre-inauguration protocol
at best, and a prosecutable offense at worst. Flynn ostensibly sealed his fate by falsely assuring
Vice President Mike Pence he had no such discussions with Kislyak, prompting Pence to issue a robust
defense of Flynn that severely embarrassed Pence in retrospect.
On Tuesday, Eli Lake of
Bloomberg News joined the chorus of skeptics who said the hive of anonymous leakers infesting
the Trump administration never leaked anything that proved Flynn lied to Pence:
He says in his resignation letter that he did not deliberately leave out elements of his conversations
with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak when he recounted them to Vice President Mike Pence. The New York
Times and Washington Post reported that the transcript of the phone call reviewed over the weekend
by the White House could be read different ways. One White House official with knowledge of the
conversations told me that the Russian ambassador raised the sanctions to Flynn and that Flynn
responded that the Trump team would be taking office in a few weeks and would review Russia policy
and sanctions . That's neither illegal nor improper.
Lake also noted that leaks of sensitive national security information, such as the transcripts
of Flynn's phone calls to Kislyak, are extremely rare. In their rush to collect a scalp from
the Trump administration, the media forgot to tell its readers how unusual and alarming the Flynn-quisition
was:
It's very rare that reporters are ever told about government-monitored communications of U.S.
citizens, let alone senior U.S. officials. The last story like this to hit Washington was in 2009
when Jeff Stein, then of CQ, reported on intercepted phone calls between a senior Aipac lobbyist
and Jane Harman, who at the time was a Democratic member of Congress.
Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government
secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored
by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of
anonymity. This is what police states do.
In the past it was considered scandalous for senior U.S. officials to even request the identities
of U.S. officials incidentally monitored by the government (normally they are redacted from intelligence
reports). John Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was derailed in
2006 after the NSA confirmed he had made 10 such requests when he was Undersecretary of State
for Arms Control in George W. Bush's first term. The fact that the intercepts of Flynn's conversations
with Kislyak appear to have been widely distributed inside the government is a red flag.
While President Trump contemplated Flynn's fate on Monday evening, the
Wall Street Journal suggested: "How about asking if the spooks listening to Mr. Flynn
obeyed the law?" Among the questions the WSJ posed was whether intelligence agents secured proper
FISA court orders for the surveillance of Flynn.
That s the sort of question that convulsed the entire political spectrum, from liberals to libertarians,
after the Snowden revelations. Not long ago, both Democrats and Republicans were deeply concerned
about accountability and procedural integrity for the sprawling surveillance apparatus developed
by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Those are among the most serious concerns of the
Information Age, and they should not be cast aside in a mad dash to draw some partisan blood.
There are several theories as to exactly who brought Flynn down and why. Was it an internal White
House power struggle, the work of Obama administration holdovers, or the alligators of the "Deep
State" lunging to take a bite from the president who promised to "drain the swamp?"
The
Washington Free Beacon has sources who say Flynn's resignation is "the culmination of
a secret, months-long campaign by former Obama administration confidantes to handicap President Donald
Trump's national security apparatus and preserve the nuclear deal with Iran."
Flynn has prominently opposed that deal. According to the Free Beacon, this "small task
force of Obama loyalists" are ready to waylay anyone in the Trump administration who threatens the
Iran deal, their efforts coordinated by the sleazy Obama adviser who boasted of his ability to manipulate
the press by feeding them lies, Ben Rhodes.
Some observers are chucking at the folly of Michael Flynn daring to take on the intelligence community,
and paying the price for his reckless impudence. That is not funny – it is terrifying. In
fact, it is the nightmare of the rogue NSA come to life, the horror story that kept privacy advocates
tossing in their sheets for years.
Michael Flynn was appointed by the duly elected President of the United States. He certainly should
not have been insulated from criticism, but if he was brought down by entrenched, unelected agency
officials, it is nearly a coup – especially if, as Eli Lake worried on Twitter, Flynn's resignation
inspires further attacks with even higher-ranking targets:
Lake's article caught the eye of President Trump, who endorsed his point that intelligence and
law enforcement agencies should not interfere in U.S. politics:
Thank you to Eli Lake of The Bloomberg View – "The NSA & FBI should not interfere in our politics and
is" Very serious situation for USA
On the other hand, Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard openly endorsed the Deep State overthrowing
the American electorate and overturning the results of the 2016 election:
Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to
it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state.
Among the many things hideously wrong with this sentiment is that the American people know absolutely
nothing about the leakers who brought Flynn down, and might be lining up their next White House targets
at this very moment. We have no way to evaluate their motives or credibility. We didn't vote for
them, and we will have no opportunity to vote them out of office if we dissent from their agenda.
As mentioned above, we do not know if the material they are leaking is accurate .
Byron York of the Washington Examiner addressed the latter point by calling for full disclosure:
Important that entire transcript of Flynn-Kislyak conversation be released. Leakers have already
cherrypicked. Public needs to see it all.
That is no less important with Flynn's resignation in hand. We still need to know the full story
of his downfall. The American people deserve to know who is assaulting the government they voted
for in 2016. They deserve protection from the next attempt to manipulate our government with cherry
picked leaks.
They also deserve some intellectual consistency from those who have long and loudly worried about
the emergence of a surveillance state, and from conservatives who claim to value the rule of law.
Unknown persons with a mysterious agenda just made strategic use of partial information from a surveillance
program of uncertain legality to take out a presidential adviser.
Whether it's an Obama shadow government staging a Beltway insurrection, or Deep State officials
protecting their turf, this is the nightmare scenario of the post-Snowden era or are we not having
that nightmare anymore, if we take partisan pleasure in the outcome?
Who would have think some kids working on bublesort 2.0 (1980s era search engine
tech) could have bootstrapped themselves to the biggest brand in the world. Until
facebook came along.
They did not get a 1 million dollar loan from their dad
like donald trump did. They might have got some money from big brother. But we
don't talk about that in polite company.
Google's chairman says he is "proud" of the way his company avoids paying
taxes.
"It's called capitalism,"
Eric
Schmidt told Bloomberg
in a Wednesday article. "We are proudly capitalistic.
I'm not confused about this."
Google's effective U.S. tax rate is unclear.
Citizens
for Tax Justice
did not analyze Google in a 2011 study because Google reports
most of its profits as foreign, even though that may not be true.
Who would have think some kids working on bublesort 2.0 (1980s era search engine
tech) could have bootstrapped themselves to the biggest brand in the world. Until
facebook came along.
They did not get a 1 million dollar loan from their dad
like donald trump did. They might have got some money from big brother. But we
don't talk about that in polite company.
Google's chairman says he is "proud" of the way his company avoids paying
taxes.
"It's called capitalism,"
Eric
Schmidt told Bloomberg
in a Wednesday article. "We are proudly capitalistic.
I'm not confused about this."
Google's effective U.S. tax rate is unclear.
Citizens
for Tax Justice
did not analyze Google in a 2011 study because Google reports
most of its profits as foreign, even though that may not be true.
"... President Obama will go down in history as the man who helped entrench history's largest and most powerful surveillance state ..."
"... Obama didn't just fall short of progressive hopes - he went in the opposite direction ..."
"... he broke a campaign promise and voted for a bill expanding government surveillance and granting immunity to telecommunications companies who helped Bush spy on Americans. ..."
"... Upon becoming president, the already vast surveillance powers of the United States have expanded . By 2010, the NSA was collecting 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, and other types of communications. By 2012, XKeyscore - which sweeps up "everything a user typically does on the internet" - was storing as much as forty-one billion records in thirty days. This gargantuan volume of data has the ironic effect of making it harder to detect security threats. ..."
"... The use of secret laws - hidden from public eyes and often related to surveillance activities - shot up under Obama. The administration tried (and failed) to force Apple to insert security flaws in its phones, to give law enforcement a potential "back door" around encryption. ..."
"... But this would not have happened - and the scope of US surveillance would have stayed secret - had it not been for the disclosures by Edward Snowden, whom Obama criticized and refused to pardon in the waning days of his administration, even as he claimed to " welcome " a debate on surveillance. ..."
President Obama will go down in history as the man who helped entrench history's largest and most
powerful surveillance state, providing it with a liberal legitimacy that left it largely immune from
criticism during his two terms. As President Trump takes the reins of that surveillance state's power
in whatever terrifying ways he chooses, we should remember that it was Obama who paved the way for
him.
Obama has often been painted as a disappointing president, one who reached for the stars but ultimately,
whether due to Republican obstructionism or the disappointing realities of governing, fell short.
In the area of state surveillance, however, Obama didn't just fall short of progressive hopes - he
went in the opposite direction.
Obama built his career opposing the Patriot Act and Bush-era secrecy. He made this opposition
a centerpiece of his presidential campaign,
promising "no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security
letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime . . . No more ignoring the law when it
is convenient."
The first sign of his waning commitment came three months after a
glowing
Times op-ed declared him potentially the first civil libertarian president, when
he broke a campaign promise and
voted for a bill expanding
government surveillance and
granting immunity to telecommunications companies who helped Bush spy on Americans.
Upon becoming president, the already vast surveillance powers of the United States have
expanded . By 2010, the NSA was collecting
1.7 billion emails, phone calls, and other types of communications. By 2012, XKeyscore
- which sweeps up "everything a user typically does on the internet" - was storing as much as
forty-one billion records in thirty days. This gargantuan volume of data has the ironic
effect of
making it harder to detect security threats.
The use of
secret laws - hidden from public eyes and often related to surveillance activities -
shot up under Obama.
The administration tried (and failed) to force Apple to
insert
security flaws in its phones, to give law enforcement a potential "back door" around encryption.
It extended controversial Patriot Act provisions year after year. Less than a week before Donald
Trump, a man he has called "unfit" for office, took power, Obama
expanded the NSA's power to share its data with other agencies. Meanwhile, the FBI is
paying Best Buy employees to snoop through your computer.
Where there have been privacy wins on Obama's watch, they have largely been inadvertent. The NSA
collects a
much smaller proportion of Americans' phone records today than it did eleven years ago
because cell phone use has exploded. Furthermore, the USA Freedom Act passed in 2015,
ending bulk collection of US phone records ( only of phone records, it must
be said), something Obama tried to claim as part of his legacy in his farewell speech.
But this would not have happened - and the scope of US surveillance would have stayed secret -
had it not been for the disclosures by Edward Snowden, whom Obama
criticized and refused to pardon in the waning days of his administration, even as he claimed
to "
welcome " a debate on surveillance.
All of this happened under a liberal former constitutional law professor. The question must be
asked: What will follow under Trump?
DHS security honchos want to justify their existence. There is not greater danger to national
security then careerists in position of security professionals. Lying and exaggerating the
treats to get this dollars is is what many security professionals do for living. They are
essentially charlatans.
Notable quotes:
"... In the middle of a major domestic crisis over the U.S. charge that Russia had interfered with the US election, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) triggered a brief national media hysteria by creating and spreading a bogus story of Russian hacking into US power infrastructure. ..."
"... Even more shocking, however, DHS had previously circulated a similar bogus story of Russian hacking of a Springfield, Illinois water pump in November 2011. ..."
"... Beginning in late March 2016, DHS and FBI conducted a series of 12 unclassified briefings for electric power infrastructure companies in eight cities titled, "Ukraine Cyber Attack: implications for US stakeholders." The DHS declared publicly, "These events represent one of the first known physical impacts to critical infrastructure which resulted from cyber-attack." ..."
"... That statement conveniently avoided mentioning that the first cases of such destruction of national infrastructure from cyber-attacks were not against the United States, but were inflicted on Iran by the Obama administration and Israel in 2009 and 2012. ..."
"... Beginning in October 2016, the DHS emerged as one of the two most important players – along with the CIA-in the political drama over the alleged Russian effort to tilt the 2016 election toward Donald Trump. Then on Dec. 29, DHS and FBI distributed a "Joint Analysis Report" to US power utilities across the country with what it claimed were "indicators" of a Russian intelligence effort to penetrate and compromise US computer networks, including networks related to the presidential election, that it called "GRIZZLY STEPPE." ..."
"... according to Robert M. Lee, the founder and CEO of the cyber-security company Dragos, who had developed one of the earliest US government programs for defense against cyber-attacks on US infrastructure systems, the report was certain to mislead the recipients. ..."
"... "Anyone who uses it would think they were being impacted by Russian operations," said Lee. "We ran through the indicators in the report and found that a high percentage were false positives." ..."
"... The Intercept discovered, in fact, that 42 percent of the 876 IP addresses listed in the report as having been used by Russian hackers were exit nodes for the Tor Project, a system that allows bloggers, journalists and others – including some military entities – to keep their Internet communications private. ..."
"... Instead, a DHS official called The Washington Post and passed on word that one of the indicators of Russian hacking of the DNC had been found on the Burlington utility's computer network. The Post failed to follow the most basic rule of journalism, relying on its DHS source instead of checking with the Burlington Electric Department first. The result was the Post's sensational Dec. 30 story under the headline "Russian hackers penetrated US electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, US officials say." ..."
"... DHS official evidently had allowed the Post to infer that the Russians hack had penetrated the grid without actually saying so. The Post story said the Russians "had not actively used the code to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a security matter," but then added, and that "the penetration of the nation's electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability." ..."
"... The electric company quickly issued a firm denial that the computer in question was connected to the power grid. The Post was forced to retract, in effect, its claim that the electricity grid had been hacked by the Russians. But it stuck by its story that the utility had been the victim of a Russian hack for another three days before admitting that no such evidence of a hack existed. ..."
"... Only days later did the DHS reveal those crucial facts to the Post. And the DHS was still defending its joint report to the Post, according to Lee, who got part of the story from Post sources. The DHS official was arguing that it had "led to a discovery," he said. "The second is, 'See, this is encouraging people to run indicators.'" ..."
"... The false Burlington Electric hack scare is reminiscent of an earlier story of Russian hacking of a utility for which the DHS was responsible as well. In November 2011, it reported an "intrusion" into a Springfield, Illinois water district computer that similarly turned out to be a fabrication. ..."
"... The contractor whose name was on the log next to the IP address later told Wired magazine that one phone call to him would have laid the matter to rest. But the DHS, which was the lead in putting the report out, had not bothered to make even that one obvious phone call before opining that it must have been a Russian hack. ..."
The mainstream hysteria over Russia has led to dubious or downright false stories that have
deepened the New Cold War
In the middle of a major domestic crisis over the U.S. charge that Russia had interfered with
the US election, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) triggered a brief national media hysteria
by creating and spreading a bogus story of Russian hacking into US power infrastructure.
DHS had initiated the now-discredited tale of a hacked computer at the Burlington, Vermont Electricity
Department by sending the utility's managers misleading and alarming information, then leaked a story
they certainly knew to be false and continued to put out a misleading line to the media.
Even more shocking, however, DHS had previously circulated a similar bogus story of Russian hacking
of a Springfield, Illinois water pump in November 2011.
The story of how DHS twice circulated false stories of Russian efforts to sabotage US "critical
infrastructure" is a cautionary tale of how senior leaders in a bureaucracy-on-the-make take advantage
of every major political development to advance its own interests, with scant regard for the truth.
The DHS had carried out a major public campaign to focus on an alleged Russian threat to US power
infrastructure in early 2016. The campaign took advantage of a US accusation of a Russian cyber-attack
against the Ukrainian power infrastructure in December 2015 to promote one of the agency's major
functions - guarding against cyber-attacks on America's infrastructure.
Beginning in late March 2016, DHS and FBI conducted a series of 12 unclassified briefings for
electric power infrastructure companies in eight cities titled, "Ukraine Cyber Attack: implications
for US stakeholders." The DHS declared publicly, "These events represent one of the first known physical
impacts to critical infrastructure which resulted from cyber-attack."
That statement conveniently avoided mentioning that the first cases of such destruction of national
infrastructure from cyber-attacks were not against the United States, but were inflicted on Iran
by the Obama administration and Israel in 2009 and 2012.
Beginning in October 2016, the DHS emerged as one of the two most important players – along with
the CIA-in the political drama over the alleged Russian effort to tilt the 2016 election toward Donald
Trump. Then on Dec. 29, DHS and FBI distributed a "Joint Analysis Report" to US power utilities across
the country with what it claimed were "indicators" of a Russian intelligence effort to penetrate
and compromise US computer networks, including networks related to the presidential election, that
it called "GRIZZLY STEPPE."
The report clearly conveyed to the utilities that the "tools and infrastructure" it said had been
used by Russian intelligence agencies to affect the election were a direct threat to them as well.
However, according to Robert M. Lee, the founder and CEO of the cyber-security company Dragos, who
had developed one of the earliest US government programs for defense against cyber-attacks on US
infrastructure systems, the report was certain to mislead the recipients.
"Anyone who uses it would think they were being impacted by Russian operations," said Lee. "We
ran through the indicators in the report and found that a high percentage were false positives."
Lee and his staff found only two of a long list of malware files that could be linked to Russian
hackers without more specific data about timing. Similarly a large proportion of IP addresses listed
could be linked to "GRIZZLY STEPPE" only for certain specific dates, which were not provided.
The Intercept discovered, in fact, that 42 percent of the 876 IP addresses listed in the report
as having been used by Russian hackers were exit nodes for the Tor Project, a system that allows
bloggers, journalists and others – including some military entities – to keep their Internet communications
private.
Lee said the DHS staff that worked on the technical information in the report is highly competent,
but the document was rendered useless when officials classified and deleted some key parts of the
report and added other material that shouldn't have been in it. He believes the DHS issued the report
"for a political purpose," which was to "show that the DHS is protecting you."
Planting the Story, Keeping it Alive
Upon receiving the DHS-FBI report the Burlington Electric Company network security team immediately
ran searches of its computer logs using the lists of IP addresses it had been provided. When one
of IP addresses cited in the report as an indicator of Russian hacking was found on the logs, the
utility immediately called DHS to inform it as it had been instructed to do by DHS.
In fact, the IP address on the Burlington Electric Company's computer was simply the Yahoo e-mail
server, according to Lee, so it could not have been a legitimate indicator of an attempted cyber-intrusion.
That should have been the end of the story. But the utility did not track down the IP address before
reporting it to DHS. It did, however, expect DHS to treat the matter confidentially until it had
thoroughly investigated and resolved the issue.
"DHS wasn't supposed to release the details," said Lee. "Everybody was supposed to keep their
mouth shut."
Instead, a DHS official called The Washington Post and passed on word that one of the indicators
of Russian hacking of the DNC had been found on the Burlington utility's computer network. The Post
failed to follow the most basic rule of journalism, relying on its DHS source instead of checking
with the Burlington Electric Department first. The result was the Post's sensational Dec. 30 story
under the headline "Russian hackers penetrated US electricity grid through a utility in Vermont,
US officials say."
DHS official evidently had allowed the Post to infer that the Russians hack had penetrated the
grid without actually saying so. The Post story said the Russians "had not actively used the code
to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity
in order to discuss a security matter," but then added, and that "the penetration of the nation's
electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability."
The electric company quickly issued a firm denial that the computer in question was connected
to the power grid. The Post was forced to retract, in effect, its claim that the electricity grid
had been hacked by the Russians. But it stuck by its story that the utility had been the victim of
a Russian hack for another three days before admitting that no such evidence of a hack existed.
The day after the story was published, the DHS leadership continued to imply, without saying so
explicitly, that the Burlington utility had been hacked by Russians. Assistant Secretary for Pubic
Affairs J. Todd Breasseale gave CNN a statement that the "indicators" from the malicious software
found on the computer at Burlington Electric were a "match" for those on the DNC computers.
As soon as DHS checked the IP address, however, it knew that it was a Yahoo cloud server and therefore
not an indicator that the same team that allegedly hacked the DNC had gotten into the Burlington
utility's laptop. DHS also learned from the utility that the laptop in question had been infected
by malware called "neutrino," which had never been used in "GRIZZLY STEPPE."
Only days later did the DHS reveal those crucial facts to the Post. And the DHS was still defending
its joint report to the Post, according to Lee, who got part of the story from Post sources. The
DHS official was arguing that it had "led to a discovery," he said. "The second is, 'See, this is
encouraging people to run indicators.'"
Original DHS False Hacking Story
The false Burlington Electric hack scare is reminiscent of an earlier story of Russian hacking
of a utility for which the DHS was responsible as well. In November 2011, it reported an "intrusion"
into a Springfield, Illinois water district computer that similarly turned out to be a fabrication.
Like the Burlington fiasco, the false report was preceded by a DHS claim that US infrastructure
systems were already under attack. In October 2011, acting DHS deputy undersecretary Greg Schaffer
was quoted by The Washington Post as warning that "our adversaries" are "knocking on the doors of
these systems." And Schaffer added, "In some cases, there have been intrusions." He did not specify
when, where or by whom, and no such prior intrusions have ever been documented.
On Nov. 8, 2011, a water pump belonging to the Curran-Gardner township water district near Springfield,
Illinois, burned out after sputtering several times in previous months. The repair team brought in
to fix it found a Russian IP address on its log from five months earlier. That IP address was actually
from a cell phone call from the contractor who had set up the control system for the pump and who
was vacationing in Russia with his family, so his name was in the log by the address.
Without investigating the IP address itself, the utility reported the IP address and the breakdown
of the water pump to the Environmental Protection Agency, which in turn passed it on to the Illinois
Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center, also called a fusion center composed of Illinois State
Police and representatives from the FBI, DHS and other government agencies.
On Nov. 10 – just two days after the initial report to EPA – the fusion center produced a report
titled "Public Water District Cyber Intrusion" suggesting a Russian hacker had stolen the identity
of someone authorized to use the computer and had hacked into the control system causing the water
pump to fail.
The contractor whose name was on the log next to the IP address later told Wired magazine
that one phone call to him would have laid the matter to rest. But the DHS, which was the lead in
putting the report out, had not bothered to make even that one obvious phone call before opining
that it must have been a Russian hack.
The fusion center "intelligence report," circulated by DHS Office of Intelligence and Research,
was picked up by a cyber-security blogger, who called The Washington Post and read the item to a
reporter. Thus the Post published the first sensational story of a Russian hack into a US infrastructure
on Nov. 18, 2011.
After the real story came out, DHS disclaimed responsibility for the report, saying that it was
the fusion center's responsibility. But a Senate subcommittee investigation
revealed in
a report a year later that even after the initial report had been discredited, DHS had not issued
any retraction or correction to the report, nor had it notified the recipients about the truth.
DHS officials responsible for the false report told Senate investigators such reports weren't
intended to be "finished intelligence," implying that the bar for accuracy of the information didn't
have to be very high. They even claimed that report was a "success" because it had done what "what
it's supposed to do – generate interest."
Both the Burlington and Curran-Gardner episodes underline a central reality of the political game
of national security in the New Cold War era: major bureaucratic players like DHS have a huge political
stake in public perceptions of a Russian threat, and whenever the opportunity arises to do so, they
will exploit it.
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security
policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war
in Afghanistan. His new book is
Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare . He can be contacted at
[email protected].
"... William Binney,another NSA whistleblower and hero, stated on his Truthdig interview with Sheer (who talked and repeated himself way too much, not leaving much time for Binney to talk) that Snowden knew from watching what happened to the five of them (among them,Thomas Drake/currently pensionless and an apple store worker ) and that Snowden did it the only way it could be done and did the leak well by gathering so much information up there was no chance of plausible deniability. ..."
"... First they gaslight you. "There is no surveillance. You have no evidence." ..."
"... As soon as there's evidence, they downplay it. "Everyone knew there was surveillance. This is nothing new!" ..."
"... Snowden's leaks were crucial and necessary. State surveillance had been normalized long before him. He only told us it had happened. What happens next is a battle that is still being fought, despite the best efforts of people who weasel about "ambivalence". ..."
"... Exposing the workings of the deep state is necessary if we are to ever reclaim democracy, if in fact we ever had it. ..."
"... Greenwald isn't defending the Russians– he is asking for evidence so we don't have to rely on the intelligence community. ..."
William Binney,another NSA whistleblower and hero, stated
on his Truthdig interview with Sheer (who talked and repeated
himself way too much, not leaving much time for Binney to talk)
that Snowden knew from watching what happened to the five of
them (among them,Thomas Drake/currently pensionless and an apple
store worker ) and that Snowden did it the only way it could
be done and did the leak well by gathering so much information
up there was no chance of plausible deniability.
Your "ambivalence" is one of the favorite tactics of people in
CTR, who start off all their comments with "I love Bernie, but ".
Here's how it works:
1. First they gaslight you. "There is no surveillance. You have
no evidence."
2. As soon as there's evidence, they downplay it. "Everyone knew
there was surveillance. This is nothing new!"
Snowden's leaks were crucial and necessary. State surveillance
had been normalized long before him. He only told us it had
happened. What happens next is a battle that is still being fought,
despite the best efforts of people who weasel about "ambivalence".
SantaFe you said "his career was literally made by a document dump from
guy who increasungly appears to be much more nefarious". Glenn Greenwald's
"career" was made long before Snowden appeared on the scene. That's why
Snowden chose him to release the documents to. He has long been known as a
journalist who speaks truth to power. And what do you mean by this; " He is
quickly losing credibility among many who admired him." ? Yourself? I see no
reason why Greenwald should be losing credibility. Primarily what he is
doing is in this particular instance is questioning the veracity of the
documents being used against Trump and the means by which they are being
"released". That is one of Greenwald's greatest strengths. He plays no
favorites. As far as the WSJ article on Snowden, I assume you are referring
to the now discredited op-ed (not an article) piece by Epstein? This self
serving op-ed was clearly written by Epstein to promote his recent book and
the "points" he made about Snowden have been discredited by many sources.
Agreed: Further, the recent article in the New Yorker, in which
Malcolm Gladwell (who isn't glib, of course) decides that Snowden isn't
classy enough is more of the same.
Santa Fe: Greenwald losing credibility? Sorry. You just lost
credibility, if you ever had any.
Speak for yourself. Greenwald isn't defending the Russians– he is asking
for evidence so we don't have to rely on the intelligence community. And
while Assange appears motivated by animus against Clinton, I have yet to see
anything about Snowden that would make me distrust him more than the press.
What I do see are a lot of centrist liberals acting like Joseph McCarthy.
And even with Assange, wikileaks has been invaluable. The mainstream
press largely gored its most interesting revelations - for instance, the
Clinton camp privately acknowledged that the Saudi government supports ISIS.
We hear much more shooting the messenger stories about dissenters than we
hear stories about the message.
I didn't see anything about this in the US mainstream press, though I
won't swear it didn't appear somewhere. But I have heard much more about
how the wikileaks releases contained little of substance.
"Days before far-right President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in, President Barack Obama has expanded
all intelligence agencies' access to private communications obtained via warrentless spying.
An executive order allows the National Security Agency (NSA) to share data collected via its global
surveillance dragnet with all other U.S. intelligence agencies, without redacting untargeted American
citizens' private information.
Not that Democrats like Pelosi/Schumer/Feinstein care...they're apparently quite happy to give
Trump's people access to all Americans' most private data.
"... The message was accompanied by a parting gift...an apparently complete NSA backdoor kit targeting the Windows operating system. The kit is comprised of 61 malicious Windows executables, only one of which was previously known to antivirus vendors... ..."
"A
mysterious hacking group has been bedeviling the U.S. intelligence community for months, releasing a
tranche of secret National Security Agency hacking tools to the public while offering to sell even more
for the right price. Now with barely a week to go before Donald Trump's inauguration, the self-styled
"Shadow Brokers" on Thursday announced that they were packing it in.
"So long, farewell peoples. TheShadowBrokers is going dark, making exit," the group wrote on its
darknet site...
The message was accompanied by a parting gift...an apparently complete NSA backdoor
kit targeting the Windows operating system. The kit is comprised of 61 malicious Windows executables,
only one of which was previously known to antivirus vendors...
... ... ...
The Shadow Brokers emerged in August with the announcement that they'd stolen the hacking tools used
by a sophisticated computer-intrusion operation known as the Equation Group, and were putting them up
for sale to the highest bidder. It was a remarkable claim, because the Equation Group is generally understood
to be part of the NSA's elite Tailored Access Operations program and is virtually never detected, much
less penetrated.
... ... ...
Released along with the announcement was a huge cache of specialized malware, including dozens of
backdoor programs and 10 exploits, two of them targeting previously unknown security holes in Cisco
routers-a basic building block of the internet. While Cisco and other companies scrambled for a fix,
security experts pored over the Shadow Brokers tranche like it was the Rosetta Stone. "It was the first
time, as threat-intelligence professionals, that we've had access to what appears to be a relatively
complete toolkit of a nation-state attacker," says Jake Williams, founder of Rendition Infosec. "It
was excitement in some circles, dismay in other circles, and panic and a rush to patch if you're running
vulnerable hardware."
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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